BBC Internet Blog - Details

The kerfuffle around the BBC's move into mobile apps continues with New Media Age's story BBC defends move into mobile apps. In the piece David Newell of the Newspaper Publishers Association criticised the:

'BBC Trust's "current attitude and inaction... when they know that the BBC will be launching such apps in direct competition with commercial operators' paid-for or ad-funded apps for their online services."'

'"Following some initial concerns they raised, we invited the NPA to write to us explaining their concerns...We've received their letter and will look forward to discussing it with them."'

'...May I point out that the online service licence was written before the launch of the Apple app store. How it can cover services and markets unknown when it was written is a topic we look forward to discussing with the Trust when we manage to find a slot in their very crowded diaries.'

Ben Goldacre, he of Bad Science fame, has been petitioning the BBC to change the linking policy for academic material:

'I'm trying ...to persuade the BBC to give meaningful weblinks in their online science and health articles, at the moment they link to journal homepages, and university homepages, which are absurdly uninformative and unhelpful.'

There's more on this at the Online Journalism blog.

The latest happening in the iPlayer-XBMC-open source-fallout is the withdrawl of get_iplayer:

'The events of the past two weeks (here, here, here and here) have clarified the BBC's stance on allowing interoperability with open-source iPlayer clients. I have therefore decided to withdraw get_iplayer with immediate effect...

'The BBC iPlayer is built on many open-source products and yet, in this case, they have failed to let open-source clients access the very same service. The BBC have clearly not followed the spirit of open-source here.'

Going against the tide of comments ("Well that's a bummer") on blogs and Twitter is thephazer:

'Licence fee payers no longer liable or subsidising insurance for the theft of material by get_iPlayer's users.'

And finally, as they say, the excellent R&D blog has some new posts that might interest you: Ambisonics and Periphony [part 1] (on three-dimensional sound) and A Touch Less Remote: Part 1 of 6 (on multi-touch devices).

Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog. The picture shows the switchboard at Television Centre as it was in 1960.

There's a Q&A today in Media Guardian with Erik Huggers about the implications for BBC Online of the BBC's Strategy Review:

The internet has emerged from a silo called "new media" to become a genuine third platform alongside TV and radio, and we can't continue on a track of aimless expansion... It's true that we had started some of this work, which is why we've closed or mothballed some sites already, but this formalises the next steps in line with a broader BBC strategy and sets out a clear and stronger ambition in this area.

Econsultancy has a useful summary of "What The BBC's Strategic Review Actually Says About Online". Alfred Hermida has created a word cloud of the Strategy Review document.

BBC News have launched a season called Superpower today. Peter Horrock's blog post has full details:

We also aim to also reflect what is being said on the web about the season and about world events. Blogworld will highlight the best of blogosphere in multiple languages, while the BBC News website has partnered with the non-profit network of citizen journalists Global Voices to give different perspectives on the news.

And away from all this hurly burly Cole Henley has a complimentary tweet about BBC iD.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, BBC Online

A number of our users have expressed concern about BBC iPlayer's recent content protection enhancements. It's a complex area so I asked our techical team for an explanation of what has happened. Here it is:

We make iPlayer content available in a variety of media formats (WMV, H.264, 3GP, MPEG, etc) many of which are open source, or at least not tied to a particular company's products.

In order to respect the rights agreements that allow us to make the content available in the first place, we use a range of content protection techniques and technologies:

- for downloads, we use digital rights management systems (Windows Media, Adobe, and OMA)

- for streaming, we use systems like SSL, RTMP, RTSP, HTTP

Many of these content delivery methods are open-source.

We also implement a range of technologies that attempt to check that our content is being played out in iPlayer, and not in an unauthorised 3rd-party application. This is because we need to be as certain as we can be that our content rights restrictions are being respected.

This is the key to the concerns being expressed at the moment: before we allow a device to access our content we need to check that it is iPlayer and not an application which might break our rules - for example, by storing programmes beyond the 30 day limit, or playing them outside the UK.

We know that a number of applications have been making unauthorised use of some media types and we have tightened security accordingly - this was done for several of the formats and content delivery types, not just for Flash. The result was that some applications that 'deep link' to our content may no longer work.

It's important to note that this has nothing to do with Flash, and it's nothing to do with support for open-source. In fact we continue to make our content available as H.264 or SSL, both of them open standards that have nothing to do with Flash or with Adobe. It's simply that the first people to be affected by this change happened to be linking to our Flash streams, which now have similar protection levels to our open-source streams.

The discussion around this issue suggests that two different uses of the term "open source" are being conflated:

a) we continue to make our content available in a range of open-source formats

b) unfortunately one of the applications that stopped working was XBMC, an open-source media player.

But the two "open sources" are quite different to each other - we have no particular attachment to Flash over open-source formats. In fact most of iPlayer is built on open-source products. However, we do need to protect our content from applications that threaten to make unauthorised use of it, even if those applications are themselves open source.

To answer Mo's comment, of course the BBC does not want people to download content illegally. That's precisely why we have built rights related constraints into BBC iPlayer. If an application becomes broken, people will be able to find alternatives which are legal and that we support. BBC iPlayer is already available on many, many devices and platforms which are legal and supported and in the coming year we will be adding as many new ones as we can.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, BBC Online