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.'"

Comments

BBC iPlayer Links...

[Virgil Tibbs]

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.

Irellevent negative spin

[Marcus Green]

"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.

Re:Irellevent negative spin

[Andrew Kismet]

Who could've said back then just how 'culturally significant' they would be? It was just another episode at the time, nothing era-defining. Another episode that was sitting on a big, expensive, broadcast-quality tape that they needed for other shows.

Re:Irellevent negative spin

[Marcus Green]

"The Beatles are culturally significant?"
There were not seen as such at the time.

Re:Irellevent negative spin

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

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.

There is some truth to this. Even in the USA, similar practices were followed. NBC saw no value in keeping copies of "The Tonight Show". I don't know the numbers, but a large amount of Johnny Carson's early years as host are gone forever because NBC reused the tapes.

However, it's worth noting that this was not an isolated practice and the BBC is well worth criticizing for its poor judgment at the time. They also routinely wiped audio tapes of BBC radio performances that were recorded uniquely for the BBC. In the 1960s the BBC had limits on how many records it could play on the air, so to get more music on the air, popular artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on would appear on BBC programs like Top Gear and record special versions of their songs for radio broadcast. This also provided an opportunity for the artists to record cover versions of songs they liked, many of which were never recorded for release by these bands. The Beatles easily recorded over 30 songs for BBC radio that they never recorded anywhere else. Audio tape was fairly cheap at the time, certainly a lot cheaper than video tape, yet the BBC still wiped it. It wasn't until around 1966 that they finally saw some value in keeping tapes of these special recordings. It was only through the work of fans who taped shows on primitive recorders and collectors of BBC radio transcription discs that many performances were preserved (albeit in poor sound quality) that would otherwise have been lost forever. Even into the 1970s, the BBC was routinely still wiping video tapes and several Dr. Who episodes exist only because some fan with access to primitive video recording equipment was able to make a copy of the show at the time it was broadcast. Let's not cut the BBC too much slack as they have shown consistently poor judgment over the years about what to keep and what to get rid of.

Re:Irellevent negative spin

[TheRaven64]

It wasn't just that tape was expensive (it was cheap compared to the total cost of producing a program). The BBC had no central archives back then. Everything had to be stored by the department responsible for creating it. This is directly relevant to the article, since the iPlayer was part of an effort to digitise both distribution and archiving of material. The fact that the BBC destroyed a lot of (what is now seen as) culturally significant content before they had proper archives is, in part, motivation for this modernisation. They want to avoid this kind of loss in the future, and that means digital archives so they can replicate them losslessly.

Re:That's heavy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's not a device. It's a piece of software.

Value for money?

[chrb]

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.

there is no such thing as "open DRM" ...

[erlehmann]

... 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.

Re:That's heavy...

[Zunt]

Err... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/02/highfield_bbc_linux_website_users_bafflement/...?

Re:What would make it acceptable to me...

[LingNoi]

What are you talking about? You don't need to pay for a TV license if you have only a PC. Only if you can receive TV signals through a device (which includes pc TV cards).

Re:~$260 MILLION??

[laird]

I'd have to think that the vast majority of the cost is in digitizing and cataloguing all of the content. Imagine paying armies of people to go through vaults of aging films and tapes, often unlabeled. First you have to physically handle it all, so that you can play and digitize it. And playing it is harder than it sounds - a lot of old material is recorded in formats that can't be played by anything manufactured in decades, so you have to track down a compatible wire recorder, 8mm film setup, etc., and figure out how to get a high quality recording of the original. And since some originals are in bad shape, they can only be played once. Then you have to pay people to watch it all to build an index so that you could find stuff. The idea of doing this on the scale of the BBC archives is stunning!

Compared to that, the cost of putting it online is minimal. I can believe a few $million, to implement a video content management system, transcode everything into online formats, load everything into the CMS, build a web front-end, and actually run the whole thing (hosting, bandwidth, etc.).