Playing with iPlayer

By Ian, on August 1st, 2007

Somehow, I’m on the beta programme for the BBC iPlayer. I can’t for the life of me remember applying for this, but that’s becoming fairly irrelevant to the truth nowadays. Sadly, there aren’t any invites and so-forth I can offer to readers — this is the BBC, remember. They do things differently there.

It’s reasonably stable, though annoyingly, it works better on my work PC than the one I’ve got at home. I’ve got five episodes of Dr Who to watch at work and nothing at home — which seems to be the wrong way round. I suspect I need to tweak the security settings on Norton Firewall — it tends to have zero tolerance of new applications.

Video quality is fine — it’s a windows media file encoded to around the same quality as your television, so much better than YouTube. The system involves a fair amount of rigmarole, though. Titles are advertised on the website for the player (IE7 and a plug-in required); you download them into your ‘library’ (a further download) and then watch them in a player application (included with the library), basically a skin for Windows Media player. There’s no streaming — the high quality of the video means that a 30-minute programme might take up 200MB of hard drive space.

The library available is pretty good — I haven’t explored it all by any means, but it includes material from all the digital channels as well as the terrestrial ones. There are probably more than a couple of thousand programmes already available for download. And they’re not just the last week’s offerings, it seems. One of my Dr Who episodes is from the first of the new seasons with Christopher Ecclestone. But it’s a tad random at the same time — I’ll put that down to the beta test wanting to include a little bit of everything.

There’s the much-vexed issue of DRM. The files are protected through Windows Media, are made available on the website for four weeks, and then are only watchable for four weeks after that. This is clearly not great from a consumer’s perspective, especially one that pays the license fee for this stuff to get produced in the first place. On the other hand, (a) the corporation has to raise money from other sources, like DVDs, as well as the license fee; (b) their IP should be protected anyway. I’d hope that the option to re-download — or, better, to simply re-authenticate –material once it has expired will exist. But I won’t know the answer to that for another four weeks.