Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

Following a recent operation on my back to correct a slipped disc I’ve had to spend a considerable amount of time laying down; this in turn lead me to really use some of the TV catch-up and on demand services offered by the UK broadcasters on my laptop as I didn’t have convenient access to the TV.

Impressed at quite how much content I could watch over the internet, I then started to seriously explore options for getting internet-delivered content through our main 42″ Toshiba LCD screen; the thought of being able to explore a back-catalogue of programmes that are automatically stored by the broadcaster, rather than relying upon me to setup recordings using Sky+ was particularly appealing.

So, off I went (with a slightly improved back)… and I have to say the whole process was actually far easier than I’d imagined; I bought a new Mac Mini with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, connected it to the TV using DVI->HDMI and audio cables, added it to the wireless network and then installed Flash Player and Adobe AIR. Done, nothing else required.

Adding Flash Player enabled me to watch streamed content from all the BBC channels via iPlayer, from Channel 4’s On Demand service 4OD and from Demand Five, Five’s catch-up service – all of which combined gave me a choice from 1000s of hours worth of TV.

With the addition of Adobe AIR I was able to use the BBC’s service to download and store programmes for an extended period of time (30 days rather than the 7 for the streaming service) – I’m hoping that in the medium term the BBC might enhance this offering further to automatically download series that I like so that they’re ready for instant playback, but I guess I’ll have to wait for that

If that wasn’t enough I was also able to watch paid-for TV programmes and select from both new-release and classic films from BlinkBox, a UK-based service that streams content using the Flash Platform.

In terms of free programming, the BBC service undoubtedly offered the best quality with regular streams at 1500kbps and HD streams at 3500kbps – both looked really good even scaled up to 1920 x 1080 and were certainly indistinguishable from the quality offered by over-the-air or satellite TV. In fact, if you’ve ever questioned Flash Player performance on a Mac, take a look at full-screen streamed HD content playing back on a low-spec Mac Mini – it is really impressive. Only Channel 4’s service left me disappointed in terms of quality, the video really isn’t encoded at high enough a bit-rate to watch on a large TV without obvious distortion, but maybe there are commercial reasons for this decision.

I’ve been running this setup for about a week now and am still really impressed by how the experiment has gone, so impressed in fact that I’ve come to several conclusions:

• other than for watching breaking news I have no need for broadcast TV
• internet-connected TVs are the future and the future is not that far off
• multi-screen services really do need discrete user interfaces – one size fits all does not work

Each of these conclusions raised a number of interesting thoughts… firstly, I’m amazed that the recent Digital Britain report didn’t propose a radical redefinition of the BBC license fee. Right now, a household requires a TV license only to watch broadcast TV in the UK, not to own a television – using this setup and switching to an alternative source of ‘live’ news I’d technically no longer require a TV license. My aim is not to evade paying for a TV license, but rather to suggest that the ‘value’ is in the content that I’m consuming, not the distribution method. It feels to me like a re-think will be required as to how the UK population are asked to pay for the (generally) great output that the BBC produces.

The main factors I see that will significantly affect consumer take up of “next generation TV services” are provision of high-speed broadband (I am fortunate to get 7.2Mbps out of the quoted 8Mbps on my phone line) and cost of the hardware required to access and playback content. For the tech-savvy, purchasing a Mac Mini (or if you must, a low-cost Windows Media Center-equipped PC) and connecting it up is all well and good, but really this needs to be “plug and play” or built in to the TV itself – hopefully the work that Adobe is doing with set-top box and TV manufacturers as part of the Open Screen Project will help to make watching Flash-delivered video content just that simple and projects such as the proposed BBC “Canvas” platform will make low-cost, wide-scale distribution of network-equipped set-top boxes possible.

Finally, whilst I’m happy to persevere with using a wireless keyboard and mouse to navigate web pages to access content, we are going to need specific UX expertise for TV-based interfaces, just as we will for mobile – again, I think Adobe can help by providing frameworks (Flex) and tooling that provides consistency in the process for creating, developing and testing user interfaces, but a one-size-fits-all approach design isn’t going to cut it. My wife still isn’t completely sold on my new “toy” because it is harder to use than the Sky+ PVR…

There are no doubt exciting times ahead for designers and developers who’ll see the range of content, services and devices continue to expand, but equally there are going to challenges for those who provide infrastructure to support this vision and those who need to charge for content.

So, if you’ve got some spare cash and want to get Flash on your TV today then this is a great setup; wait a bit longer and hopefully it will come as standard right out of the box

For anyone involved or interested in distribution of media content over the Internet, understanding how the BBC’s iPlayer service has evolved, why certain decisions were made and what future directions are being explored makes for fascinating reading.

The European Broadcasting Union recently published an article entitled the “Evolution of the BBC iPlayer” which is based on a series of phone interviews with Anthony Rose, the Controller of the Vision & Media Group at the BBC. The interview covers a wide range of topics relating to the BBC iPlayer and it is great to see the BBC being so open about the technology, business decisions and supporting infrastructure that contribute to running a service which has delivered nearly 300 million content play-requests.

Some highlights from the interview are below, but I’d recommend that you download and read the interview and keep an eye on the BBC iPlayer blog where additional detail about the service is often published by the iPlayer team.

On Future BBC iPlayer developments: “Anthony Rose: The user will be able to download automatically a programme during the night. If you leave your computer on and if, for example, you watched Dr Who last week and the week before, it is likely that you will want to watch Dr Who next week. For ISPs, peak bandwidth is very expensive, but it is cheap during the night. We know that our top 20 programmes account for about 70 percent of all our bandwidth. In this way, most of our programmes could be delivered during the off-peak hours, downloaded and stored on the user’s local hard drive. Thus, peak bandwidth usage could be significantly reduced. This is really a mixed economy where the difference between streaming and downloading is getting blurred.”

On the decision to use the H.264 codec and playback performance: “AR: We have now found that H.264 does not use more CPU power for the configuration we have chosen, compared to the On2 VP6 codec. Rather, the contrary is true in full screen mode and, because we use hardware acceleration, it uses less CPU power. The answer is that, if you are not careful, H.264 is unplayable on low-end machines, but if you choose carefully, H.264 could be a pretty good user proposition.”

On using Digital Rights Management (DRM): “AR: For downloading, we have to DRM our files for two reasons. First, the rights holders expect that the content will be available in the UK only. Second, content must only be available for a limited amount of time, so it can be commercially exploited, as is the case with BBC Worldwide’s licensing of the Top Gear programme. Broadcasters in the USA who pay BBC Worldwide millions of pounds for broadcast rights would probably pay less if there was no DRM, as the content would be available elsewhere. This is the main reason why the rights holders demand DRM. In addition, it is a requirement of the BBC Trust (the BBC governing body) that files are only available for 30 days after download and seven days after being broadcast. So these are the reasons why we have to apply DRM to downloads.”

“AR: We have done a lot of due diligence and we have investigated all the
viable DRM solutions. We have met with companies that develop them and we looked at the technologies themselves and evaluated them. The reality is that, until quite recently, Microsoft was the only viable one. It is free, secure and approved by Hollywood labels and approved by rights holders. It is easy to put on servers and clients. The problem is, however, that it is Windows only.”

“AR: The good news however is that other companies like Adobe are developing cross-platform DRM products. Adobe AIR now has DRM available for the PC, Mac and Linux. We hope to have a crossplatform solution by the end of this year based on Adobe AIR and Adobe DRM.”

The beta version of the BBC iPlayer desktop application, using Adobe AIR and our DRM technology launched last week and has once again shown how the BBC are leading the way here – ITV, Channel 4, Sky and other broadcasters really need to learn from the BBC’s experiences and make their content available on platforms other than Windows.

On the same day as Adobe announced that the final release of AIR 1.5 for Linux is available for download, the BBC have launched iPlayer desktop for Mac, Windows and Linux users, built on Adobe AIR.

BBC iPlayer desktop allows those in the UK to download their favourite BBC programmes and watch them when they are offline. The new desktop edition compliments the existing streaming service, which is available in the browser using Flash Player.

The application was built using the Flex 3 framework, runs on top of AIR 1.5 and makes use of the Flash Media Rights Management Server (FMRMS) to DRM-protect content which is downloaded to the user’s desktop.

The BBC iPlayer really demonstrates the power of the Flash Platform, enabling users to enjoy high quality video content on the web and on the desktop, across all major browsers and operating systems – congratulations to the BBC for launching so quickly after we delivered AIR 1.5 for Mac, Windows and Linux users.

If you’re in the UK you can download BBC iPlayer desktop here (note: you MUST be signed up as an iPlayer Labs user before the download option on iPlayer content will appear on the website).

For those outside the UK, there are some screen shots of the application below… I’m looking forward to playing with this some more tonight