Slashdot Mirror
Why the BBC's iPlayer is a Multi-Million Pound Disaster
AnotherDaveB writes "As part of 'Beeb Week', The Register discusses the 'multi-million pound failure' that is the iPlayer. 'When the iPlayer was commissioned in 2003, it was just one baffling part of an ambitious £130m effort to digitise the Corporation's broadcasting and archive infrastructure. It's an often lamented fact that the BBC wiped hundreds of 1960s episodes of its era-defining music show Top of the Pops, including early Beatles performances, and many other popular programmes ... The iPlayer was envisaged as the flagship internet 'delivery platform'. It would dole out this national treasure to us in a controlled manner, it was promised, and fire a revolution in how Big TV works online. For better or worse it's finally set to be delivered with accompanying marketing blitz this Christmas - more than four years after it was first announced.'"
Why would someone choose this device over any other?
About BBC iPlayer and Ashely Highfield:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/ashley_highfield/
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071118205358171
http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2007/10/iplayer_drm_and_1.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2007/11/linux_figures_1.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2007/11/groklaw_interview.html
http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2007/08/defective_by_de.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Highfield
This may help you to understand the issues.
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
"It's an often lamented fact that the BBC wiped hundreds of 1960s episodes of its era-defining music show Top of the Pops, including early Beatles performances, and many other popular programmes."
At a time when video tape was very expensive and it made sense to re-use the tape rather than loading a huge amount onto the cost of each apparently ephemeral program. This "lamented fact" seems to be utterly irrelevent to the main "story" that the Register is reporting, but it does add a nice up front negative spin to everything.
using the internet.
They should have just enabled the cable companies to have one demand access to all the BBC stuff within the cable/freeview environment. It would then use the cable fibre bandwidth and had no need to develop DRM etc.
They would have avoided the DRM/OS fiasco completely.
the iPlayer's Kontiki P2P system is distributing programming on the BBC's behalf - via their bandwidth
I hope they're going to put very clear warnings that the iPlayer uses your bandwidth (and CPU time and memory) even when you're not watching video, or there are going to be a lot of complaints from people who exceed their bandwidth limits.
If only they had spent those 4 years getting Dream working so that they weren't tied to Windows.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I really liked some of the BBC programs that were broadcast here in Germany in the 70th and 80th.
I would gladly pay for them, If I could get them in some way, but the whole internet distribution seems to be planned UK only, at least it was that way when I investigated a few weeks back.
You can get a TV licence discount if you have a black and white TV, or if you are registered blind.
How about a discount for everyone who is either unable or unwilling to receive the iPlayer service?
Since they have deliberately locked the service away from a percentage of the viewers, it seems only fair to offer a discount to those people. (I wonder how many WinXP users would also decide that a discount was preferable to access to the iPlayer service?)
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Maybe it would have worked better if they hadn't made it so heavy. I think something that is several million pounds might have problems with cracking the tubes that the internets are made out of.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
The article lambasts the BBC for spending £4.5m on the iPlayer. While it seems a lot, it should be viewed in the context of other media distribution systems: it will be accessible to 10 million homes with broadband in the UK. Given the popularity of BBC content, I'd expect at least 50% to use it at least weekly. Which would work out to an initial cost per home of £1, or about 35p per user, which seems more reasonable. Remember that YouTube sold for $1.65 billion, and it owns no content.
I really don't understand what the hell possessed them to lash together Windows Media Player, IE, ActiveX and some proprietary P2P downloader. It doesn't even work on Windows properly. Just using a different version of Windows, IE or WMP from the ones requires will break the software.
They could have produced something akin to Azureus 3 - a channel listings and downloader application written in Java that more or less ran anywhere. They could wrap a native control for video playback on Windows and let other systems launch with default system player for the content. Let users decide how long they want to keep content and which player / device to use to watch it on. If the BBC were paranoid about the massive market for bootleg episodes of Eastenders, they could even watermark the content to the user who exported it and prosecute them as appropriate. It means users can do what they like with data for their own personal use and the BBC is not burdened with DRM issues or supporting issues with all the versions of WMP, IE & Windows in existence.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071021231933899
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2007/11/09/iplayer-open-rights-group-on-groklaw/
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071108235140236
http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/77/55/
http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/78/55/
http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/content/view/79/55/
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
... and there won't ever be.
consider this: in traditional crypto Andy wants to send Bobby a message. Evey wants to decipher it, therefore she needs some kind of key. now in DRM, Bobby and Evey are the same person. BUSTED.
yeah, it's copypasta, i know. but it had to be said.
A load of early filmstock and programs from the bbc in the fifties and sixties was destroyed when the bbc's storage vaults flooded.
I can't seem to find a web reference, but David Attenborough discusses it, and some of the resultant problems in his autobiography 'life on air'.
I can watch swathes of (DRMd) content running in Windows Media Player inside my browser, with nothing further to install. Total cost to ITV - the DRM key. Time to market: 0 days.
Still, I'm sure a lot of consultants got some very nice expenses-lunches out of designing the iPlayer.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
... been spent on digitising all the rotting archive footage that is just sitting in a warehouse down south.
While the article covers off the development and infrastructure costs for iPlayer (stated at 4.5 million), it makes no mention of video royalty fees, which I understand to be around 7.8 million mark.
Can someone explain how this program cost them roughly 260 million USD? Seems like one of the biggest wastes of money in history. All of their recent programming was already digitizes, how else could it have been broadcast on freeview? All they needed were a few "geeks" to re-encode them to a higher compression tech (xvid or x264). Here's how you can make your money back. Sell your back catalog to people not in the UK. I really like a lot of programs on BBC (& ITV and a few Channel 4 shows). I'd gladly pay $1/hour for older programs and $2/hour for anything less than one year old. Heres the catch though. I demand something thats at least nearly DVD quality (720x576 2mbs x264 would be nice), and I demand to be able to play it on any device of my choosing, so no DRM. Or (wink wink nudge nudge) DRM that is easy to strip.
In the case of Reality TV shows they would be doing everyone a favour by recording over them
Meanwhile 4.5m pounds that could have been spent on digitising important historical footage has been wasted on executive lunches and meetings.OK. First cancel the iPlayer and raise more funds to Digitise the remaining old footage. At the same time we should be looking at backing up that data at a separate site.
When we have digitised all that footage which is rotting away right now then we can think about wasting money on crap like the iPlayer to make it available, but since the copyrights would have expired they might as well just put it on youtube or bittorrent it.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
As you know, all media in the world and much shopping right now are funded on the BBC model. This model is that you shall be legally obliged to subscribe to one service, in order to be allowed to buy other competing services. In the UK, if you want to watch any TV you are obliged by law to subscribe to the BBC, or you will go to jail without passing GO.
This is the standard practice in many areas of life, doubtless in imitation of this great British innovation.
It is the norm in the US, I hear, for you to be obliged to pay for the New York Times, whether you read it or not, because that is a condition for being able to read Newsweek or the LA Times. And quite right too. One can only legally read novels in Australia if one can prove paid ownership of the complete works of John Barth. This is just as well, since otherwise no-one would buy them. Not to mention the general practice of supermarket management. If you have not visited Belgium recently, you may not be aware that if you are caught in a supermarket without your Delhaize loyalty card you will simply be thrown in jail. I could go on. In France, for example, a man can drive whatever car he pleases, as long as he has a Peugeot in his drive. Not his garage, his drive. And not financed - owned outright.
So I fully realize that what I am going to propose is a wild revolutionary and radical idea, and fellow slashdotters, I am delighted for you my dear friends to be the first ones to hear it suggested. I do not think anything like this has ever been suggested before on the subject, and while I am aware of the revolutionary implications for the way in which we buy goods in general, we must start small, and start carefully, where the need is most obvious, and that is why I confine the present suggestion to the way we fund the BBC.
What we need to do is very simple. We need to make this fee voluntary. We need to stop making everyone subscribe to the BBC, and instead let them subscribe if they want to watch it, and not if they do not.
Now before everyone bursts into howls of anger, or tells me I have taken leave of my senses, which I agree is quite a natural reaction to a proposal to treat the BBC so differently from all other goods and services in the Western World, let me point out that it might solve a couple of the problems the iPlayer reveals.
The BBC would no longer be drowning in a flood of money, and it would have some slight incentive to offer services which its voluntary subscribers wanted. It might even focus its efforts on giving them what they want, instead of what it chooses to give those who have been forced to pay, and now will take whatever they are given.
Yes, it is shocking and radical, and it could lead to a shakeup of the whole of Western Society. But, we are only talking about one broadcaster in one small country. I think fellow slashdotters you may agree when you think about it, that this is an experiment worth trying.
I think this is the question that anyone distributing TV over the internet should be asking themselves. I don't want to watch shows on my PC, I want to sit on my sofa and watch them on my tv. Given the choice of using a legal but DRM'd content delivery system, or using an illegal system that let's me actually watch tv on my tv, then I'm going to choose the later option every time. Honestly, why would I want to watch TV sat at a computer when I have a big tv and comfy sofa? Do the people who came up with that idea even have a clue about how people consume entertainment? I will continue as I have been, downloading anything that looks good via P2P and watching them on my tv when I want to, probably watching an entire season in 1-2 sittings rather than weekly. This is how I consume entertainment, adapt to me or be ignored by me.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
Anyone else remember this?
TWAT! Give us back our FUCKING money and then we'll FUCK OFF. This is a PUBLIC broadcaster. It should all be open source - free access for all and no it isn't better than nothing since it IS nothing, inaccessible, useless, nothing.
Sack the wanker from Microsoft!
Even now large quantities of broadcasted material isn't kept, mainly because of the resources required to do so. Across the BBC hundreds of hours of radio are broadcast each day. Keeping all of that in a meaningful archive, that's easily accessible, backed up, etc wouldn't pass a 'public value test'. The problem is that it's very difficult to determine what's culturally significant. For example I present a music show on BBC Local Radio. Some of the bands who've played sessions on my show could go on to be huge megastars. But I don't know which ones. Probably not those I expect. Deciding what's kept is often down to individual programme producers, and frankly they're busy enough working on the next show. I know I am.
AC >>> "Hey, the executive who agreed the deal may be working for the BBC today, but he won't be next year!"
... allegedly.
I think you're being overly optimistic. The executive may be working for the BBC today but he's also looking after his mate from Oxford who owns the production company he just booked for next season and hearing a pitch from his own^H^H^H wife's company for a lucrative deal
The most beneficial use of BBC content online is for those who don't have the BBC on their TV sets.
...& that's exactly what they don't allow.
So you live in the UK, you pay your license fee, you watch BBC daily - do you really find that much value in watching something that was on last week?
Sure, you missed your favourite show - don't you have a Video recorder?
Infinitely more beneficial for the viewer, is the ability to watch the BBC from overseas
So not only do I have to go out & buy a windows PC, I have to move back to the UK.
hmm, sounds like a life of hell, just so I can watch 6 flavours of hospital drama & celebrity chefs.
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
Screw the Beatles. They lost Dr. Who. That's just wrong. Gahhh, gotta run; the Daleks are attacking my basement...
They have certainly failed miserably with this project; but I think it is worth noting that they are not the only ones. We just don't hear about the way private companies fail because their management is a bunch of narrowminded wankers, not until they go bankrupt at least.
The BBC isn't a private company, but a public service. Their income comes mainly from the license fee - this is a good thing, really, because it enables them to broadcast programs that are not necessarily commercially viable, like educational programmes. The real problem with BBC is not that they have mismanaged a SW project in a world where almost big SW project is ever handled optimally; the real problem is that they have for far too many years tried to compete with the commercial channels, so that now mainly send the same crappy soaps and reality shows as everybody else. They are, as a public service channel, in a unique position that would have allowed them to experiment and be innovative, but the leadership lacked vision and courage - and that is the real shame.
a) NI and so on aren't deliberately made to exclude you
b) if something isn't covered by your pivate insurance, the NHS will take it on as and when able
Dear critics of the BBC - please note that for the majority of UK citizens any criticism of the BBC is worse than treason. They can lie about government dossiers, make sarcastic comments about people criticising their creative use of footage of the Queen walking in/out of doors, spend huge amounts of the BBC tax on uninspired floppy haired chat show hosts, send four or five news crews to the same news event (and have each of them deliberately insert their particular news programme's tag line into everything they say so the footage cannot be reused), make lots of reality TV shows that actually star celebrities (so, by definition, there's nothing real there...) and never tell us anything of real interest or knowledge ... but NEVER criticise them in public on any UK street or office.
The government could fall (pref at the hands of the BBC), life could end, but suggest that the BBC is wasting money! Never!
0 days to market? Ignoring all the player side stuff, how long do you think it took the BBC to build the system that can ingest multiple channels of real-time video data, encode it to a distributable format, flag it with metadata, etcetera.
Building a player is only a minority of the work in a content publishing scheme of this scale.
My video compression blog
People will always have a problem with the BBC because it has no choice, ie, if you get SKY (i hate the money grabbing Rupert murdoch running the world with more than hen needs) you still pay the BBC, the same with the NHS, if you go with BUPA you still pay the NHS. I think the BBC do a great thing, some of the best films and TV shows have come from them and while still running for the people will allways bring the best service in the world, thats why its known around the world. as everything will oneday be seen from the web like SKY ect the BBC needs to keep its head above water. it cant keep just making the same TV is dose today ie 1 2 3 4. im not sure if people know this but the BBC offers a HD TV channel, this is the same case as the iPlayer, i dont have SKY and i really dont want to have to give my money to MR Rupert Murdoch just to see the BBC's HD channel. but then again i use mac and dont want to pay £250 to use Windows just to see the iPlayer (iPlayer the word even sound Mac). the BBC can and should provide the service to all, whatever computer is used or way of getting TV channels. its not the BBC's problem if big companies ie SKY or MICROSOFT feed loads of money into a system to compeat with what the BBC offers and the BBC can still piss allover the Money making providers, but for the future to get one foot on the door it needs to make a mark on the internet and satellite to ensure it has some way of being future safe!
Anybody remotrly familiar with IT issues knows that Linux is pretty much mainstream now.
600 users in a country of millions (discounting any foreign visitors) was clearly and idiotic estimation.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.