
IPlayer Performance tricks behind the scenes - danw
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/12/iplayer_day_performance_tricks.html
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gaius
Look, BBC, you haven't done anything clever here. The British taxpayer OWNS
you. We own every programme in your archive, we're already paid for them.
Rather than wasting time and money on this you should have made your entire
catalogue available for download in an open format like MPEG. A proprietary,
DRM-laden format on public property is an outrage.

~~~
handelaar
The actual link, which this comment doesn't have any relevance to _at all_ ,
describes (in rather too shallow detail for my taste) what the iPlayer's built
with and how they scale the front end.

The link's about code and development and deployment: Hacker News stuff. Your
comment is about none of those things.

Ranting that "you haven't done anything clever" because you don't like their
streaming format? Please, I beg you, take it back to Slashdot.

~~~
gaius
No, it is completely relevant. The BBC should not have spent taxpayer's money
on any of this. Everything they needed to make the archive available for
download in MPEG is freely available. Expending vast resources to solve a non-
existant problem in an overly complicated manner is the exact opposite of the
hacker/startup ethos.

Not only that but this is the BBC publishing an article on how great the BBC
is. That alone should set the alarm bells ringing.

~~~
danw
It isn't relevant that they didn't use MPEG. What they build was a great
platform to browse what content is available that can handle the enormous
amount of traffic they receive. That wouldn't change if they offered the video
in a different format.

~~~
gaius
Of course it would! Streaming their at all was a very poor technical decision.
The very obvious technical and economic solution would be self-contained files
shared over BitTorrent. This was and is a pointless waste on the scale of
pets.com. The difference being it's not just sucker VCs money, it's every
taxpayer's.

