On 21-Oct-2009, at 08:42, David Tomlinson wrote:
Sorry for the duplicate post.
Kieran Kunhya wrote:
> What is so important about the content/metadata ingest and delivery
> system that is the iPlayer that it needs to be licenced as opposed
to > being developed in-house at a broadcaster?
Standardisation, as Mo indicated, why reinvent the wheel, have
several variations on a theme, or have several clients on the users
desktop.
Is this the same as the STB project (i.e was Open iPlayer also
specifying the STB) ?
That’s Canvas. This is Marquee. Project Big Top and Project Ringmaster
have yet to be disclosed and are top secret.
I’m not sure it’s about standardisation per se when it comes to
iPlayer, we have plenty of standards in existence for the delivery of
video to desktops, and most of them work quite well if you ignore the
DRM red herring (indeed, several of the platforms which iPlayer serves
receive unencumbered MPEG containers). I think it’s more a case of
“we’ve developed this, it serves no useful purpose to keep it to
ourselves”. I don’t have figures, but I have a feeling the AIR-based
iPlayer desktop client is faring only marginally better than the
Kontiki client did; I can think of quite a few reasons for why this
would be the case, but the bottom line is all that many are seeing—
that is, streaming over the web is the way forward and downloads are
dead. I’m not convinced of this by _any_ means, but it makes life
easier when it comes to the licensing argument.
It seems to me that with a separate business unit, commercial tie-
ups, DRM the BBC is/was in danger of acting like a private company,
while leaveraging it's public service position, in a way that was
not in the public interest. This is a problem with BBC external
revenue generation.
This was the big danger with approving Marquee as it stood: the BBC
being an aggregator was a little *too* attractive to consumers. The
commenters on the various news stories are tending to view it purely
from this perspective, missing the point that such a move would
effectively prevent anybody else from competing in that space, and—
crucially—that knocking back Marquee doesn’t prevent anybody else from
doing it. There’s no (public) evidence, beyond the existence of
Kangaroo, that other broadcasters are actually all that interested in
a one-stop aggregation portal (I’d be tempted to say “more fool them”—
right now, they need all the help they can get).
Is it not in the public interest for the BBC to make the iPlayer
technology available, to other public service broadcasters, or even
all broadcasters, or just make H264/ACC, MPEG2, content directly
available in several resolutions (avoiding the Flash wrapper).
I’d contend that it is. My argument is broadly that, thanks to the
unique way the BBC is funded, it has a responsibility both to the
public which it serves and to those producing output, and that runs to
telling rights-holders (be they internal units or external production
companies) when they’re making demands which (a) run counter to the
public interest and (b) logically and demonstrably achieve the
opposite of the desired outcome. This was the heart of the debate over
the Freeview HD “DRM” proposal.
With traditional broadcasting, the model the BBC has worked to for
decades, the BBC didn’t _care_ what equipment everybody had in
particular. Certainly, some thresholds would come into play
occasionally (for example, when starting to broadcast in colour, in
stereo, adding Ceefax, etc), but the programming itself was governed
by international standards and regional variations of them. In
fundamental terms, delivering content via the Internet isn’t
conceptually much different unless you want it to be.
Why not make iPlayer Free Software (GPL v2), allowing others to
contribute to it's enhancement, and allow it free deployment on any
hardware meeting the requirements. This could work equally well for
the backend, which I suspect already uses some open source software.
I suspect there are some tricky licensing issues with respect to
patents (e.g., the MPEG stuff), and I’d hazard a guess that there’s a
fair bit of stuff which is quite BBC-specific and wouldn’t really be
worth anybody’s while in making generic unless _somebody_ was paying
for it. There’s perhaps an argument here that such things should be
considered part of the overall development and paid for by the license-
fee payer, and that other things should have their budgets cut… but
that applies to anything. Politically, it’s tricky.
Probably the biggest reason, though, is one which has hit many
organisations considering making something open source, and that’s
that it airs dirty laundry—you can get away with a particularly
horrible dirty hack if you don’t think anybody outside of your team is
really ever going to see it. It may seem silly, but it’s embarrassing
to the developers (and you could argue whether such things should
exist or not until you’re blue in the face, it doesn’t change the
reality of it).
Perhaps one day we’ll see an open source EMP. Who knows? It’d
certainly raise the bar where Flash media players are concerned.
M.
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mo mcroberts
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