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

h.264 and patent licencing

[sustik]

h.264 patent licencing applies to devices (and even that is low cost):

http://www.dspr.com/www/technology/technology.htm#H.264 Licensing Fees

Re:h.264 and patent licencing

[LingNoi]

There are no software patents in the UK which is where the BBC operates and cares about.

You're quite welcome to produce a free software implementation of h.264 and run it in England without any problems.

Re:h.264 and patent licencing

[jimicus]

There are no software patents in the UK which is where the BBC operates and cares about.

You're quite welcome to produce a free software implementation of h.264 and run it in England without any problems.

Not strictly true.

Patents on software have been granted by the UK patent office and while there is some doubt as to how legally enforceable these would be, to my knowledge (IANAL) there has not yet been a test case.

Every couple of years there is an attempt to extend EU law to include allowing software patents - though it hasn't yet succeeded. Whether or not existing patents (which may or may not be enforceable) would magically become valid as a result of this law is again unknown.

What about Dirac?

[siDDis]

Which is developed by BBC, a cutting edge video standard on the level with H.264 and is free as in speech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)

Wasn't it supposed to be used in Beijing Olympics?

Re:What about Dirac?

[iangoldby]

From TFA:

Some people may ask: why are you not using your own Dirac codec? I am fully committed to the development and success of Dirac, but for now those efforts are focused on high-end broadcast applications. This autumn, we intend to show the world what can be achieved with these technologies.

Open, or Untested?

[GaryPatterson]

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

Have any free formats ever been taken to court and won, proving their status as truly free? Or are they 'under the radar' at the moment, not worth testing in court because they've not reached critical mass yet?

I ask because I actually don't know. I'd like to see truly free formats, but I'm not sure if they are, or if people just think they are.

Re:Open, or Untested?

[jonwil]

Whilst its impossible (given the broken nature of patent law) to declare OGG Vorbis 100% free, when OGG Vorbis support was added to WinAmp, the legal team at AOL Time Warner did a through due diligence to look for anything that could be an issue for the format. If the legal team of one of the largest media companies on the planet says the format is free, thats about as good as its ever going to get.

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

[seanalltogether]

You're reading 2 different quotes there, point and counter-point, something that should have been clear if you happened to click the links instead of being trigger happy about grabbing first post :P

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...

technical limitations?

[fyoder]

I had some email correspondence with a BBC tech shortly after they'd experimented with streaming ogg vorbis. He said they'd concluded that it wasn't sufficiently "scalable". I've never implemented anything on a scale like BBC World Service, so I don't know if there's anything to that or not, but perhaps there are slash dotters with the experience to comment.

When a lot of people complained about CBC pimping for Microsoft they set up streaming ogg vorbis for Toronto, but they haven't expanded it beyond that. I suppose they figured that was enough of a bone to throw us.

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.

Re:This is mildly offtopic but still apropos...

[Spad]

It's not so much that you don't pay the license fee but that the various 3rd parties who produce programming for the BBC don't want their foreign market profits affected by allowing people outside the UK to view their shows on the BBC website, rather than on their 'local' TV stations.

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:Patent free for the BBC

[Teun]

Exactly, there is no problem to worry about.

As the BBC must have a competent legal department I really wonder what the real reason for their reluctance to use certain codex is.

Personally I'm even more pissed off the Dutch public broadcasters have elected to use some Microsoft product called Silverlight in addition to the existing .wmv streams.

And that with taxpayers money!

Re:Patent free for the BBC

[jeevesbond]

[...] there are no software patents allowed in the UK.

That's what I was thinking, but upon checking found that a recent High Court decision might allow software patents after all. There's certainly a lot of confusion over the subject and an apparent disparity between the UK Patent Office and the European Patent Office. See the IPKat blog:

[...] the UK-IPO has highlighted Mr Justice Patten's decision of today [...] to overturn the UK-IPO's decision to refuse an application by Symbian, on the grounds that it consisted solely of a computer program.

The judge drew attention to the split between the attitudes of the UK-IPO and the EPO, since the EPO has already allowed the patent to be granted.

The blog post mostly echos the press release from the UK Patent Office, who plan to appeal due to the judge failing to apply the Aerotel/Macrossan test.

So it does seem that, medium to long-term, the BBC might have made a big mistake.

As for software patents in general, I believe the only way to truly be rid of the scourge is to get the US to declare software as unpatentable. The US government, and the lobbyists from its companies have tremendous power and influence around the world, and they are pushing hard for software patentability. Even though it's obviously a bad idea, and most software developers are strongly opposed to it, more countries seem to be considering it. No real sources for this last paragraph as it's only my opinion, take it or leave it. :)

Re:It's the ads that kill the BBC clips

[stevelup]

There are no ads whatsoever on BBC iPlayer or any other page on bbc.co.uk.

I have no idea what you are talking about?

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:It's the ads that kill the BBC clips

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Are you, by any chance, british? My understanding is that BBC doesn't run ads for domestic users, since they already pay for it; but does for international freeloaders. I can't say, of course, I'm an international freeloader with adblock.

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

[Spad]

The BBC is *not* government run. They are publically funded, but the government has no direct control over their output.

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

[ledow]

Although I agree in part with you, there are a number of problems with what you say.

".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."
"The BBC have made great strides with their own video codec even if it's not quite ready."

These two statements show the problem nicely. The BBC actually funds its own video codec specifically for archiving its video archives (which, eventually, it hopes to allow access to directly on the Internet - there's a quote somewhere if you look for it). This codec is already very good, completely free (and patent-free which is much more important for the BBC) and the cost to "finish it off" (which at this point is minor bug-fixing and bundling into a nice WMP-codec DLL / mplayer plugin etc.) is negligible to anything that they could buy - no matter how cheap. They could do it tomorrow.

However, all they ever seem to do is cut back on Dirac and spend on other technologies. If Dirac's a failure then, to paraphrase yourself, they "have an obligation to the license payer" to cut it. If it's not, they really should be using it in place of a pay-for patented codec. It was designed with this sort of thing in mind and, if memory serves, was designed so that multiple "quality levels" could be easily made from the same streams to allow streaming over a very slow connection and professional-quality distribution/archival. Hell, have Dirac in all downloads for the iPlayer software and use something else for the Flash streams. It would still save money. And there's an precedent...

"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."

Yes. Then they add the Wii to it, but only in the codec it's compatible with, which takes up 4x the bandwidth of the normal iPlayer streams. Thus, this argument is dead on it's feet. They actually put out an entirely seperate encoded file just for Wii (the most popular games console ever?) on every single video they have, sucking up 4x the bandwidth each time they are used. They also realise that real-time Flash-based streaming is dependent on peak hours and thus puts a massive dent into their bandwidth bill to cope with that peak-time, non-peer-to-peer surge. The other day they put the entire movie of Chicken Run on BBC iPlayer Flash streams and I had it playing in the background.

But they can't write a Linux frontend (even if closed source) for already-existing code to solve this problem (and thus relegate real-time Flash streaming to a second-class method of delivery) or solve the "DRM problem" on Linux. Hell, speak to Nintendo and get iPlayer software bundled with the next Wii update - the more Wii use, more Wii's plugged into the TV all the time, the more bandwidth shared and the closer world Wii domination is.

"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."

Hardware-decoding is neither here nor there - modern PC's can brute force their way through any iPlayer stream without even breaking a sweat. Even consoles can handle the streams properly - my 600MHz Thinkpad on Linux without video acceleration laughs at the Flash streams and can play full-screen video of that type (800x600 DivX's, DVD's etc. don't worry it at all, even streamed over wireless). There aren't many (any?) HD streams available on iPlayer or broadband connections capable of making this an bottleneck.

However, what you say has an element of truth in that they would have to make a way to play those streams available to the non-techy public. Like, say, an iPlayer app. Hmmm...

"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

Re:Whining

[TheRaven64]

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.

No. The BBC have exactly one obligation - to uphold their charter. Please read their charter. It makes no distinction between license payers and non-payers. It only talks about providing services to people in the UK. You don't need a license fee to listen to BBC Radio, but they still have obligations to radio listeners.

One of these obligations is to make their programming available to the greatest number of people. This is easy with analogue TV and Radio, since anyone can build a TV or Radio capable of receiving the BBC's content. With the iPlayer, it's different. Imagine I want to build a mobile device that can be used to access iPlayer content. If I'm someone like Apple, then I just release the device and the BBC (for some reason) implement a special-case front-end for my device. But if I'm a small player just entering the market, I can't. This harms innovation in the UK. If the BBC used an open standard, I could create a service that grabbed their content and transcoded it to something that would play on my phone's tiny screen (for example). Or I could transcode it on my PC to play on my 770 easily.

It is not the BBC's job to favour one or more manufacturers in the market. Imagine if they had decided in the '60s that they would only allow Sony TVs to receive colour TV signals. Would you consider this to be acceptable?

Re:These are not the droids you're looking for

[Teun]

Yes that's how simple it is, the Government collects the licence and passes it on to the broadcaster who is free to spend it within the limits of the regulations.

And it's a very foolish or brave legislator who'd try to tamper with these regulations.

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

[clare-ents]

All you need is a UK machine you can ssh to.

ssh -D 3128 host.co.uk

then set up a socks proxy at localhost:3128, and you can stream as much as you like. Fortunately there's a thriving UK internet industry so a shell account / virtual server / dedicated server / beowulf cluster shouldn't be too hard to find.

Re:Another Jedi mind trick you attempt

[Tim C]

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

Re:And conversely

[jimicus]

I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.

It's a lot more complex than that.

The other half wants you to buy it on DVD but is only prepared to make the DVD available if there's sufficient commercial demand.

Furthermore, I'm given to understand that even a television programme produced entirely inhouse can be an absolute nightmare for licensing. Incidental music is licensed for use in the original broadcast and has to be relicensed or edited out if the programme is released on DVD, repeated or somehow rebroadcast (eg. through iPlayer). Similarly, actors, writers and journalists often retain some of the rights over their work and will want more money if the BBC wants the rights to release the show on DVD or repeat the show indefinitely. Not, therefore, something you write into the initial broadcast license unless you're pretty sure it's something that will be worth releasing on DVD.

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

[value_added]

my American friends are 'worldly' enough to be able to understand the rather British-centric comedy

I've always understood the difference between American and British humour to be that British humour makes you laugh. No worldliness required.

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...

[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.