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Why the BBC's iPlayer is a Multi-Million Pound Disaster

Posted by Zonk on from the interweb-kersplosion dept.

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.'"

32 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. That's heavy... by avronius · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why would someone choose this device over any other?

    1. Re:That's heavy... by James_Duncan8181 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, the idea was that it would be DRMed and thus in some ways easier to negotiate (even though Freeview is clear text). Since they sold their excellent tech division, let Siemens gut it, then hired half the Windows Media team, it has become some hellish app that is so portable it doesn't even work on Vista but still has all the DRM goodness you might want. Oh, and there is now no Mac or Linux clients as 'no DRM extends across all platforms', even though they previously had a relationship with Real, who have DRM that does.

      Also, I have noticed that the BBC online management is now prepared to lie more - witness them claiming that news.bbc.co.uk has 'about 600' GNU/Linux users. Umm, yeah.

      Nice to see the freedom of information, public service ethos die...

      --
      "To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
    2. Re:That's heavy... by avronius · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That spoils the joke then, doesn't it?

    3. Re:That's heavy... by JonTurner · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why, indeed?

      It looks as though the BBC is the latest of a very long line of companies to learn an important lesson -- you cannot strong-arm a mob. And that's what the Internet is, it's a mob. And like a mob, it can change direction unpredictably and almost instantly if the self-interests of the individual members is satisfied. (think of how Napster changed the music industry... after 100 years of stagnation, it hit them like a heart attack.) However, you cannot force your standards on a marketplace. Sony has proven this time and time again (nobody, NO-BOD-E, wants to re-encode all their music in Sony's crappy proprietary format) and until the other companies learn from these mistakes, money will be pissed away time and again.

      In other words, if the BBC wants to play, they've got to come up with a BETTER way of presenting video, not just a DIFFERENT way and certainly not a more restrictive PROPRIETARY method.

    4. Re:That's heavy... by darthflo · · Score: 2

      Call me NO-BOD-E, but back when hard drive mp3 players still had limited space (20 Gig in this case), I did willingly and voluntary transcode a big part of my mp3 collection to Sony's atrac3+ even though my mp3 player would've supported mp3. I chose to do so to increase it's battery lifetime and storage capacity (when expressed in a number of minutes of music; not bytes) and of course, kept the original files.
      While I usually tend not to like proprietary formats, in this case the hardware's potential could be used to a larger extent than if I had chosen to go the somewhat proprietary (mp3) or totally open (ogg, which my player doesn't even support) path.

    5. Re:That's heavy... by Zunt · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    6. Re:That's heavy... by Smauler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are missing the point here. The BBC is not a company. The BBC has a guaranteed source of income - the license fee. This is not affected if it puts stuff online, goes and hides in the corner with regards to the internet, or whatever it decides to do outside of certain parameters. The BBC Mandate is here. If the BBC decided to sit in the corner and ignore the internet, it could.

      What I would be much more pissed off about is the fact that all British people watching television pay directly to the BBC, by law, and some (ie those who run Linux, Macs etc) are excluded from some services because of this DRM. People have _already_ paid for the content with their license fees (nearly $300 a year), that is the problem. The BBC is giving preferential treatment to those who have bought a particular American company's operating system, despite those who fund it all paying the same.

    7. Re:That's heavy... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The BBC mandate you quote is a heavily abridged version of the BBC Charter. This has a number of requirements, including one stating that the BBC must attempt to get educational and cultural material to as many people as possible in the UK. I would argue that sitting in the corner and ignoring the Internet does not meet this requirement.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    8. Re:That's heavy... by thebagel · · Score: 2, Funny

      You, sir, are now deemed Captain of the Failboat. Way to miss the joke.

  2. BBC iPlayer Links... by Virgil+Tibbs · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. Irellevent negative spin by Marcus+Green · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

    1. Re:Irellevent negative spin by Andrew+Kismet · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Irellevent negative spin by Marcus+Green · · Score: 2, Informative

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

    3. Re:Irellevent negative spin by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Irellevent negative spin by Scrameustache · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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. And they had no problem reintegrating to their collection the bits that were recorded by individuals on these very expensive tapes.
      And now they're doing everything they can to make sure that we can't save the content that they don't bother to archive safely!

      Copying saves content. That was the lesson to learn, and they are selling out rather than applying it.
      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    5. Re:Irellevent negative spin by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Warnings? by Zelos · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. if only by oliverthered · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  6. What would make it acceptable to me... by Cheesey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:What would make it acceptable to me... by LingNoi · · Score: 2, Informative

      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).

  7. Value for money? by chrb · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Value for money? by Serious+Callers+Only · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  8. It beggars belief... by DrXym · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ... how they could screw this up so bad.

    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.

  9. there is no such thing as "open DRM" ... by erlehmann · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... 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.

  10. Meanwhile over on ITV.com by Rogerborg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  11. No mention of associated licensing costs by BristolCream · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  12. ~$260 MILLION?? by lobosrul · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:~$260 MILLION?? by laird · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.).

      --
      Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
  13. Re:Fucking whiners. by LingNoi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seriously Slashdot, FUCK OFF already. The very fact that this system exists is worthwhile.
    Based on what? People will keep using bit torrent and ignore this piece of crap.

    Meanwhile 4.5m pounds that could have been spent on digitising important historical footage has been wasted on executive lunches and meetings.

    Think you can develop something better? THEN FUCKING DO IT.
    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.
  14. A daring and radical proposal by Budenny · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  15. executive perks by pbhj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    AC >>> "Hey, the executive who agreed the deal may be working for the BBC today, but he won't be next year!"

    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 ... allegedly.

  16. Re:Fucking whiners. by tyroneking · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!