The long awaited BBC iPlayer, from the UK public broadcaster may already be partially launched, with downloads already available, and streaming video to come shortly, but the service, even after four years of waiting and hard work, is still in a state of flux.
And much of that flux was made clear when legal web site Groklaw interviewed Ashley Highfield last week, the future media director of the BBC, and he opened up on a number of issues ‘ Linux and Mac access, DRM, the recent deal with Adobe, and finally the prospect of dropping DRM altogether.
The deal with Adobe was announced on October 15th, and there has been very little discussion about just what it might mean. Ostensibly it is a way of streaming TV programming using the BBC iPlayer, to a Flash Video client. That will give it the advantage of bringing Adobe Flash Video to multiple architectures, since it sits as happily on Linux or the Mac as it does on the PC. It has also begun rolling out on cellular handsets.
Already the BBC uses Adobe Premiere as the editing suite behind its service, and by adopting Flash Video, the BBC will be able to have a better dialog with its customers and viewers, and potentially include having the potential for using User Generated Video at some stage. Given that the BBC already has a relationship with YouTube, and that YouTube stores a lot of video as Flash Video, this makes sense.
Highfield also gave away huge clues about the future business model for the BBC talking about DRM free delivery, but at the same time talking about the difficulties and cost of getting rights holders to allow more than just a snippet of their videos to be used on the iPlayer service at all. What we think he is referring to is not really a DRM free world (although he may be), but one where streaming is used more and more often supported by advertising, and where DRM is entirely invisible ‘ more or less the world that Adobe has recently outlined on its own Media Player, just out.
The Adobe Media Player offers a variety of advertising, banner, pre and post roll, and inserted video, and overlay adverts, and these adverts are prevented from being deleted by a sophisticated DRM system, based in part on Intertrust DRM licenses. Highfield specifically referred to a new open source DRM, and Groklaw speculated that this must be Sun’s DReaM or something like it, but we think that because the Adobe Media Player is given away, and is free to anyone to use, he may well have been referring to the bundled DRM which will come with the Adobe Media Player. At present the service uses Windows Media DRM, and it would have been natural to move to using the new Microsoft Silverlight video format, but Highfield says this is not going to happen and that alongside Windows DRM there will soon be this open source alternative.
Given that during October the BBC Trust gave the BBC permission to show streams with advertising in to viewers that stream BBC video from out side the UK, this only seems logical.
We have been suggesting for four years that the shift to online delivery of video could make a huge difference to the BBC, which to date is paid for entirely by an annual public levy of around $270 per household across the 24 million or so TV homes in the UK, reaping over $5 billion in annual income. The advertising model would work well for web viewers outside the UK, which do not pay that license fee.
The BBC has already added advertising to its news programming, and other programs are likely to follow.
Highfield also said that despite figures of some £130 million ($268 million) being bandied about as the cost of the iPlayer, the BBC has, in fact spent just £4.5 million ($9 million) as part of that £130 million, five-year transition from being a tape based organization to being a linear digital company,
including converting programming to digital, rights negotiations, and storage of digital content.
Highfield also said that problems with the P2P download architecture would be alleviated by giving individual users control over when their ‘uplink’ facility was on, and how much bandwidth it was allocated.