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

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.'"

Warnings?

[Zelos]

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.

Re:That's heavy...

[James_Duncan8181]

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...

Re:That's heavy...

[avronius]

That spoils the joke then, doesn't it?

What would make it acceptable to me...

[Cheesey]

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?)

Re:That's heavy...

[JonTurner]

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.

Re:Irellevent negative spin

[Scrameustache]

"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.

Re:That's heavy...

[Smauler]

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 [bbc.co.uk] 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.

Re:That's heavy...

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Fucking whiners.

[tyroneking]

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!