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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.'"
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.
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.
Given the limitations, you'd be better off buying a DVR (really quite cheap nowadays) and just recording shows on that - at least they don't disappear after some arbitrary time limit, you can move them to your computer, and your bandwidth isn't chewed up by the P2P application. I'm disappointed the BBC has used our money to pay for such a pointless service, and on top of that it's paying a known monopolist for the privilege of serving only a proportion of the population.
They could have used this opportunity to drive the transition from TV to Internet broadcasting, but instead they're trying to make the Internet into Television. There are already many avenues for selling their content online, and they should be focussing on that, rather than trying to broadcast over the internet.
PS Re the histrionics in the article - you shouldn't expect better of a rag like the register, it's very close to the tabloids in style - not news but entertainment.