The BBC's much-maligned iPlayer online video player will be getting a companion streaming version later this year. Through a partnership announced this afternoon with Adobe, the BBC will begin offering streamed versions of its television programming via an online version of the iPlayer delivered in Flash format.
The BBC already uses Adobe's Premiere Pro and Production Premium as its desktop creative suite, so it will now be employing and end-to-end Adobe-powered solution for the creation and delivery of its online video content. I spoke to Mark Randall, the Chief Strategist for Adobe's Dynamic Media Organization, who told me that the company was excited to be partnering the world's largest content producer (the BBC creates over 14 terabytes of digital content per week), and that he thought this would be an excellent showcase of Adobe's end-to-end capabilities for digital media producers.
The choice of Adobe's Flash technology makes sense. According to Adobe, Flash is deployed on over 99% of Internet-connected computers and the latest version of the Flash player supports the H.264 codec. Further, the 1.0 release of AIR should also incorporate Flash's HD video capabilities, so should the BBC wish to bring Flash video to the offline version of their iPlayer, Adobe's runtime will support 1080p. I was told that the BBC will be evaluating the possibility of using Adobe's Media Player in the future.
iPlayer allows residents of the UK to watch the past 7 days of BBC television programming on their computers and store it for up to 30 days. For more analysis, check out the post at our network blog Last100.
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That's a really interesting development, not one that's much of a surprise really as it makes sense to use Flash due to it's cross platform support. It will still leave video content out in the cold for those without Flash player video support such as mobile users (Flash Lite 3 for mobile does support video but it's not distributed widely yet, and of course the iPhone does not support Flash at all).
I'm wondering whether the BBC will make the video content available using the H.264 codec and limit it to Flash Player 9? Despite the potential of limiting some users stuck on old versions of Flash there is the benefit that the video format could be streamed to users who don't have Flash Player such as most mobile device users.
Posted by: Rick Curran | October 16, 2007 2:10 AMThe BBC is really doing a good job being updated with the last technologies and setting trends, not only with television but also with radio programmes: http://www.designvsart.com/blog/2007/09/20/40-years-old-bbc-radio-1-more-updated-than-ever/
Posted by: Alexis Brion | October 16, 2007 6:53 AM