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Flashy New iPlayer
By jpenston | December 13, 2007 |
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I have certainly been distracted over the last couple of weeks by a mountain of work. This is no bad thing considering that I have two kids, a wife with expensive tastes and Christmas is coming, but it has meant that I have been more than a little quiet on the blog.
While catching up, I learned that yesterday, the BBC sneaked out a streaming version of the iPlayer, based on Adobe Flash and Akamai’s CDN. I say sneaked, but they could have been standing behind me with a megaphone shouting “Streaming iPlayer is here” and I would still have missed it.
Anyway, a day late, I checked it out and I also re-read some of my earlier comments on the service, reflecting on a point made by The Guardian there there are only a “few thousand regular users” at present.
The lack of streaming was a huge hole in the initial version because it meant the user got no instant gratification from using the service - you had to wait for the programme to download for a while. Imagine waiting 20 minutes for the channel to change when you hit the Sky remote? No, me neither.
So now that streaming has been addressed, I would expect to see usage ramp very quickly. Perhaps not on Christmas Day (which has to be the day to soft-launch a product), but with boredom and family feuds setting in after the festivities have passed and a seasonal catalogue of programmes to catch up on, we may see some results very quickly.
The use of Akamai is highly significant - it will be costing the corporation real money to deliver the traffic now which may yet break the business case for free access to catchup content. But, it also makes it a lot harder to block the traffic as it no longer falls into the “bad” P2P bucket… I don’t know if traffic shapers will be able to distinguish one BBC Akamai bit from a non-BBC Akamai bit.
2007 saw the Beeb take a beating for the iPlayer most of which was down to the use of the Kontiki’s Kservice and Windows-only DRM. The new service addresses both in one go so 2008 may yet see the iPlayer emerge as the bandwidth hog we all thought it would be. Where does this leave the Kontiki? Up a certain creek, without a vital instrument in my view…
Topics: iPlayer |