BBC's Open Player Claims Not Followed Through

ruphus13 writes "BBC's iPlayer was originally built on Microsoft's DRM-protected technology, and has never really been liked by folks like the FSF. The BBC is trying to play nice, though, recently claiming, 'the BBC has always been a strong advocate and driver of open industry standards. Without these standards, TV and radio broadcasting would simply not function. I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web.' This article argues that actions speak louder than words, and this is where the BBC falls short. 'The fact that both AAC and H.264 are encumbered with patent licenses that make their distribution under free licenses problematic flies in the face of this definition. It's good to see a major organization like the BBC switching from closely held secretive codecs to more widespread and documented ones. But it would be even better to see them throw their considerable weight behind some truly open formats.'"

Comments

Someone doesn't know what they're talking about

[rmdir -r *]

Considering they bankrolled the development of a brand new, completely open codec, a reference implementation of which is released under the MIT license.

And considering that they only froze the format this year, the fact that they haven't rolled it out to consumers is not exactly surprising- these things need baking time

Seriously, I think they've proven their commitment to patent-unencumbered formats...

This is mildly offtopic but still apropos...

[FlyingSquidStudios]

I don't live in the U.K. so I can't use the BBC's iPlayer. Their reasoning (and part of the reason for all the protections in the first place) is because I'm not paying a TV license fee like everyone in the UK who has a TV has to, so I shouldn't benefit. At the same time, I read reports that the BBC has budgetary problems. I know that I would, and I'm sure many others would, be more than willing to pay the same yearly license fee plus something extra for not living in the UK to use the iPlayer. I wish I understood why the BBC wouldn't adopt a policy like that.

Patent free for the BBC

[Roger W Moore]

The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?

This is the British Broadcasting Corporation so yes they are both completely patent free because there are no software patents allowed in the UK. It may be a problem for those in the US but why should the BBC worry about that?

Re:Stop Complaining

[willy_me]

A bit different for the BBC. I am not from the UK, but I believe that tax dollars pay for much of what is produced by the BBC. So actually you are not free to choose not to pay for it because the government is taxing you.

This is the entire reason for putting the content up on the web for free in the first place. The BBC is not trying to maximize their profit - they realize that UK citizens have already paid for the content. (Note that those outside the UK are not allowed to see it.) Being government run, they have a different mandate. This is why people are mad about the DRM - paying for something and then not getting it sucks.

who cares?

[timmarhy]

how about you pick the best codec for the job, no one gives a crap about how open software is if it doesn't do the job as well. i'm not trying to troll here i'm just pointing out the blinding obvious truth. it's the reason MS is still dominating the market and the linux desktop is still 3 years away (same as it was 10 years ago)

frankly h.264 is a brillant piece of work and i can't really begrude it's creators for patenting it and making a buck. it's VERY low cost and it's getting wide adoption because of the very reasonable terms it's licensed under.

Re:who cares?

[ideonode]

The BBC has a duty to provide access to all

And it does. If there are those who have ideological issues with the means of distribution, exactly why should the BBC have to cater to their every whim? If I'm part of an obscure religion that demands that all broadcasts are in flipbook format, should the BBC cater to me as well?

I appreciate the noble ideological position at play here. However, the BBC also have a responsibility to ensure that the monies they are collecting are spent well - spending lots of money on producing codecs for niche reasons when perfectly acceptable (and free to the end-user) alternatives are available, is to me, not a good use of funds. (Neither is spending millions on Jonathan Fucking Ross, but that's a rant for another day).

Re:who cares?

[FireFury03]

And it does.

No, it doesn't - it provides access to people who purchased a product from one specific vendor - namely Windows from Microsoft.

Saying "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver" is fine, but "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver manufactured by Sony" (for example) is not.

Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne

[IBBoard]

Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes, but as a Brit I'll quite happily say "give me the license fee system for the next thousand years instead of having to watch the drivel that is generally on the commercial channels and is interspersed with adverts".

The BBC has by far the best quality TV of all the channels I receive (and I'm not just on terrestrial or Free-to-air any more) and I get to watch shows uninterrupted. That's worth more than the other channels combined, especially when watching something like a sporting event or a film.

Re:Stop Complaining

[IBBoard]

It's not tax pounds (which would be taken out of your pay) but a license fee that you have to pay if you own any equipment that is capable of receiving a TV signal (e.g. TV, computer, certain mobile devices, etc) or IIRC a radio signal. If you don't have either of those then you don't need a TV license and you don't need to pay anything. If you do have one then it's £12 per month (~£140 per year), which IMO is a bargain for quality TV without adverts, especially when people are willing to pay £30+ per month for the drivel on satellite/cable complete with large ad breaks.

It is true that they have a mandate to be open to anyone with a license, though. Other than buying equipment, there isn't supposed to be any restriction on who can access the content and so operating systems etc aren't supposed to stop people accessing things.

Whining

[abigsmurf]

The BBC have NO obligation to anyone, especially people who don't pay licence fee, to produce or adopt open source software. Their obligation is to provide good value for money whilst providing the best service to licence payers.
.h264 and AAC both cost so little for the BBC and any partners that using OGG/OGM would actively cost them more due to the inferior video compression. iPlayer eats insane amounts of bandwidth and if they can shrink videos down at all whilst maintaining quality it's in the BBC's best interests.
That's not even taking into account the number of consumer devices that have hardware .h264 decoding compared to Theora. Would cost HW manufacturers a lot to add support for a format that's barely used.
OSS types complained when the BBC made iPlayer windows only at first (even though they always said it was in development for more platforms) but the BBC still responded by speeding up the development of a more compatible platform. The BBC have made great strides with their own video codec even if it's not quite ready. Services like iPlayer are/were ahead of their time and are showing the way for other broadcasters.
If the BBC do things like this yet only get people moaning in response, it'll make them wonder why they're spending licence fee's money on projects like these rather than giving their TV shows higher budgets or promoting HDTV adoption.

Re:Whining

[Caetel]

If Sony had a ~95% marketshare within the UK, and it would require a significant amount of money and effort to transmit signals which are viewable to the 10 other TV manufacturers, would it still make sense?
IIRC, the online iPlayer works with Flash (Mac & Linux) and the iPhone/iPod Touch anyway, which accounts for 99.9% of people anyway.

Re:Another Jedi mind trick you attempt

[Tim C]

Here you go, the BBC's Royal Charter under which it operates.

Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne

[Alioth]

I have a dedicated server in London. When I go away on holiday, I start up Squid on the server, so I can still see BBC programmes while I'm away. I got to introduce my friends in the US to things like Top Gear and Little Britain this way (my American friends are 'worldly' enough to be able to understand the rather British-centric comedy).

I suspect the BBC iPlayer detects open proxies, however, if you own the machine, you can make sure they can't connect back to detect a proxy.

Re:Which is which? I am confused...

[Smauler]

The BBC is not a company. It's primary goal is not to pay dividends to shareholders, it is to provide the best service to those who fund it, and nothing more. It is not commercial. The BBC has innovated a lot in the past, and if they did decide to go Ogg Vorbis and Theora, people would just go download the codecs. It's not a big deal.

The BBC was also instumental in the development of Dirac. From the FAQ at their Website:

Is the BBC going to stream video using Dirac?
A good question. Now we have version 1.0 of Schro, the BBC is exploring opportunities to adopt Dirac for operational use. We have real-time decoding, integration with players, a bytestream spec and a choice of transport stream formats.

Re:Which is which? I am confused...

[Draek]

This is why I can't stand the FSF. Sure guys, it would be nice if everything was open and free, but that is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

I am reminded of an old saying: "Believing in something won't ensure it'll happen, but not believing in it does ensure it won't". Or something to that effect.

Stop expecting some big company to go exclusively with Ogg Vorbis and Theora, two codecs which have not been patent-tested in the courts

Even if we dismiss Xiph's efforts towards ensuring Ogg formats are patent-free, it's still better to have something that *could* be free of patents than something we know for a fact isn't. Specially if they want to say they're pushing for free formats, as is the case here.

Re:Which is which? I am confused...

[mrchaotica]

Not to mention that Theora and Vorbis are only used by a very tiny sliver of the population.

Actually, Vorbis is used for a lot of game audio. So it's out there; it's just not very visible. And that's not just Free Software games made by "zealots," either: that list includes lots of A-list titles like the Unreal Tournament series, Rock Band, World of Warcraft, GTA: San Andreas, etc.

The reason Vorbis hasn't taken off for music is the same as for every other format: it's not MP3. Even AAC and WMA have only achieved a modicum of success, and that's only because Apple and Microsoft have been pushing them hard as vehicles for their DRM, forcing them to be the only formats you can legally download stuff in, etc.