
Introducing the new BBC iPlayer - smethod
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Introducing-the-new-BBC-iPlayer
======
sentenza
> Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only

Yes, well. It's not like the publically financed television stations of EUrope
have FUCKING MORAL OBLIGATION to help the free movement of people throughout
Europe by making the programs that connect them with their home country and
that they paid for available to them. And the BBC is _by far_ not the worst
offender here.

I mean, even YLE, which should be happy that anybody outside of Finland wants
to participate in the madness that is the Finnish language, blocks me based on
my IP!

Of course, I am well aware that I am a German citizen and thus not paying into
the BBC financing. This is of course an insourmountable obstacle, today in
2014.

It's not like there was any possible way to track which countries the
programmes are watched from and then install some transfer payment systems
between the publically financed broadcasters of the different countries.

Admittedly, our public broadcasters here in Germany have an annual budget of
only 7.5 Billion Euros, so this is impossible to finance.

Man, I'm frustrated about this. Why is the media world so broken? Who runs a
television station and then makes a significant effort to _keep_ people from
watching it, even though them doing so has no or negligible impact on their
budget?

~~~
richardwhiuk
Some of the time this will be an obligation based on content rights - e.g. the
BBC only have bought the rights to show Premier League highlights or the
Olympics in the UK, where as in the US NBC or ESPN might have bought those
rights.

Other times, this will be due to the British government not wanting to be seen
to be undercutting commercial providers in other countries (there's enough
pressure on the government in how the BBC is run from commercial providers in
the UK).

What's more frustrating is when the BBC produces content (e.g. via BBC
Worldwide or BBC Foreign Service) which isn't available in the UK. Fortunately
that's fairly rare.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
I suspect it might go further than not be seen to want to undercut commercial
providers (though in the case of this government that's absolutely true), I
suspect that it might be illegal for them to do so - state subsidies and all.

------
bananas
I'd like to see them put some more effort on content delivery for their TV
partners. I have a Bravia EX and half the time the iPlayer streams don't work
i.e. you get sound and no video. Then occasionally we get shot down for a
couple of weeks at a time with content region warnings suggesting we're not in
the UK.

Having spoken to Sony and my ISP, they're both suggesting that the
administrative side of iPlayer is a mess. The former tell them that the BBC
regularly breaks their codecs and metadata streams and the latter suggest that
the BBC rarely update their geographical IP databases.

Not a great experience.

It's bad when you have to hit the proxy torrent sites to view content you
already paid for with your TV license...

~~~
petepete
It's not just Sony. We have two LG TVs, one that's ~4 years old and one from
last year. Funnily enough, the older one almost always works perfectly, the
new one (a _far_ more powerful/responsive TV, with a much newer version of the
iPlayer software) barely works at all. We've complained to LG and were
informed that 'a new version will be released shortly'.

------
Theodores
I wish they made more of the programme information with links. Imagine
clicking on the presenter's name and getting a list of other programmes they
had done. This would be a great way to find things to watch. The same could
apply with production companies and so on. This would bring in some IMDB style
functionality they could build on to sell downloads of programmes currently
not available. They could even start to sell movies.

~~~
jebus989
I doubt the latter idea would be compatible with the arcane terms of being a
"public service broadcaster".

------
zizzer
I only recently discovered that there's another player lurking over at
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/](http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/) that has the schedule
overlaid onto the live stream with the ability to easily switch back to an
earlier show and a channel selection overlay in fullscreen.

I'm hoping this is going to be incorporated into the new iPlayer when watching
live, because it seems mad to have this functionality missing depending on
which part of the site you're watching live from.

Also, I'm hoping the keyboard controls will be improved. It'd be nice for the
spacebar to function as pause/play and the left right arrows to skip in much
smaller increments so they're actually useful.

The skipping increment being too large also affects my Humax HDR-1000S, where
you can only jump in 1 minute blocks, which is far too big to be useful when
seeking to the start of something. 10 seconds would be far better.

edit: The site's just offered me a go on the trial and it looks like most of
the things I wanted have actually been implemented. Excellent stuff!

------
peterclary
To announce a big new release and announce vaguely that subtitle support for
iOS and Android downloads is still "coming soon" is a massive kick in the
teeth. At this point they should at least be able to give us an ETA.

What is it that makes it harder to support subtitles in downloads rather than
streaming? I suppose I can see that with streaming you can serve up subtitled
or non-subtitled streams according to user preference, but iOS has native
support for subtitles in video.

Is this some kind of crappy contractual/rights-holder thing, where "mobile
devices" have to be negotiated separately?

~~~
hellweaver666
Do iOS/Android natively support subtitles on video streams? If so, there's
really no excuse for it.

~~~
jasomill
I believe the answer for iOS is both yes and no: it natively supports text
subtitles, but not DVD/Blu-ray-style bitmap subtitles.

------
BenjaminN
I HATE IT when you have too many search inputs on a page, that don't give you
the same results:
[http://cl.ly/image/3K111v1N1K1y](http://cl.ly/image/3K111v1N1K1y)

------
evgen
Still requires Flash. BBC continues its long tradition of epic fail.

~~~
pathy
What would you it rather use? HTML5? Silverlight?

What is wrong with using an establish platform like Flash? iPlayer works, and
works well. I happy to see BBC continuing to improve.

I don't see anything close to resembling epic fail with iPlayer.

~~~
antimagic
Well, for one, Flash is a vector for viruses - why should I expose my computer
to a much greater attack surface just to watch video. Secondly, Flash is often
less effcient than the native implementation - on my Mac the fan ramps up
frequently when running Flash apps, but rarely when running HTML5 / Javascript
apps. Then there's the fact that Flash takes up space on my flash drive, which
I would much rather keep for something useful.

That's just a few reasons off the top of my head. When you consider the fact
that they support iPhones / iPads, they are already streaming h264, so why
_not_ do it in HTML5?

~~~
pathy
Fair points. Flash is moderately inefficient and a vector for viruses. But it
runs on practically all computers out there and works on older computers that
doesn't have HTMl5 supported browsers. Hopefully this segment is shrinking but
it still exists.

We don't know how their development cycle looks or their backend. There is
probably a reason they chose not to do HTMl5 at this moment. It will probably
come in due time. Worth noting is that Youtube mostly remains on Flash, though
they do have HTML5 beta.

HTML5 is still quite a new technology while Flash is well established, despite
its flaws.

~~~
melling
Well, there are probably between 1.5-2 billion mobile devices that don't run
Flash, and we'll probably see another billion over the next two years. I don't
bother to install Flash on my desktop, I just use Chrome when I need it.

~~~
pathy
Luckily BBC only have to care about British citizens. I don't know how they do
mobile streaming but it clearly works on at least some mobile devices. Native
app for that? I only really use iPlayer from a computer.

> I don't bother to install Flash on my desktop, I just use Chrome when I need
> it.

Most people don't know, care or understand what flash is. They want something
that works and don't really care if it isn't as secure as something else or
use slightly more resources. HN is not really representative for the public at
large.

------
xedarius
The iPlayer is pretty great and has gone from strength to strength.

Things for me that I'd like to see (as I can see some of the devs on here)

1\. Content - I see no reason why the BBC doesn't put all of it's content on
the iPlayer.

2\. Timelimit - Abandon the 7 day window time limit, it simply doesn't fit
with our modern lives, Netflix has proved that.

3\. Ability to log in using my TV Licence as an ID, that way I could stream
content from another country (on holiday for example, or a business trip).

Great work though guys, thank you.

~~~
johneth
They're moving it up from 7 days to 30 days at some point soon.

------
cschmidt
I'm still hoping that the BBC will take my money and let me have the iPlayer
in the US. My wife is British, and would absolutely love to be able to watch
all the BBC content. Let me pay a TV license fee [1], or whatever. Just take
my money.

[1] For US folks:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom)

~~~
Sniperfish
This has always been my position, and seems common in the ex pat community. I
would pay the equivalent license fee just to get access online via iPlayer in
a heartbeat.

Some of the issues were touched on by QI creator John Lloyd, when they were
trying to get QI licensed for the US(only source I found was dead link
referenced by wiki). There are so many differences in licensing around the
movie clips and songs used in episodes between countries that what the Beeb
can play under fair use in the UK would be prohibitively expensive elsewhere.

------
DanBC
I find it weird that iPlayer will let me stream over 3g but refuses to allow
me to download over 3g. (On iOS).

The radio iPlayer is a bit frustrating if you wanto listen to specific
programmes rather than just streaming a station.

EG: searchin for "milton jones" doesn't reurn anything, but "thank you milton"
does.

Having said that, the BBC is amazing and I buy a licence despite not legally
needing to. The "in our time" archive is brilliant.

------
jamesmoss
I'm really hoping this redesign is why the Xbox One iPlayer app is delayed.

~~~
JamesBaxter
It's interesting that the iPlayer team are so open about some things but so
quiet about others. I don't expect ETAs I'm just interested to know the
differences between PS4 and Xbox One app development.

------
samwillis
Is anyone seeing the new design yet? I am not here...

~~~
superbignerd
It's a phased launch. Even though it's a responsive design website, we are
launching it by routing mobile and tablet traffic to it first, to make sure
everything works properly. There will be an opt-in mechanism on the existing
desktop site later today.

------
zeristor
Am I the only one wants to access the BBC from my Apple TV?

~~~
peterclary
Indeed not.

However I don't feel that particular pain point because I can currently access
iPlayer directly from my Sony smart TV, my Sony Blu-Ray player and my Virgin
Media Tivo box. I can also use AirPlay to send from my iPad.

Sadly, apart from the iPad, seeking is real pain. Want to pop back to re-watch
something in the last minute? Bad luck - you're skipped back about 20 minutes.

------
clouds
Will it be better than Popcorn Time?

[http://time.com/18867/popcorn-time-is-so-good-at-movie-
pirac...](http://time.com/18867/popcorn-time-is-so-good-at-movie-piracy-its-
scary/)

