On 13/02/2024 18:48, David Woodhouse wrote:
On Tue, 2024-02-13 at 18:13 +0000, Jonathan Larmour wrote:
This BBC News article has appeared today:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68283165
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The BBC's iPlayer streaming service is to end downloads for users who
watch on desktop or laptop computers.
Programmes will still be available to download on tablets and phones via
the mobile iPlayer app.
Currently viewers on PCs and Macs can save programmes via the iPlayer
Downloads app, but that will be closed.
The changes were "due to the low number of people using it and the cost
required to keep it going" the BBC said.
"This does not affect downloads on the BBC iPlayer mobile or tablet apps
and viewers can continue to stream programmes on BBC iPlayer on their
PCs and Macs," a spokesperson added.
The BBC has published a timeline of the planned changes:
2 February - new downloads of the BBC iPlayer Downloads app end
11 March - downloading programmes from the web will end. Users will
still be able to watch any existing downloads until 8 April
8 April - the BBC iPlayer Downloads app will be closed
My understanding is that get_iplayer works by scraping the BBC iplayer
web frontend for the download information. So does this mean that the
BBC will finally close the last available method for letting get_iplayer
work?
Hm? My reading of that is just that they're just going to stop building
the native applications for Windows and MacOS, which they believe were
the only way to download programmes on those platforms.
The web site will still work for streaming (and scraping), won't it?
So unless they use a different CDN for the PC/Mac downloads, and that's
the *only* CDN that get_iplayer knows how to use, I'm not sure we care?
Reading what happens on 11th March more closely, I suppose it depends on
whether GiP uses the download information from the iPlayer site, or the
streaming information. If the former, at best it will need updating to
use the latter instead, supposing that is possible, whereas if it
already uses the latter nothing will change. Does anyone here happen to
know which type of data GiP scrapes?
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