Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

Following the news last week that Microsoft and UK-based retailer Tesco announced a commercial agreement (no details of the financial arrangements were published) it is interesting to see that one media company who previously adopted Microsoft Silverlight for its online TV catch-up service has completely replaced the Silverlight-based player for one built using Adobe Flash Player.

ITV, owner of the UK’s largest commercial television channel in terms of audience share and advertising revenue, had been using Silverlight since the launch of the service, but if the ITV forums and other reports are anything to go by, the use of Silverlight had certainly caused frustration for many visitors to the site trying to use ITV Player.

I have no inside knowledge as to what caused ITV to walk away from Microsoft’s technology and instead use Flash Player to stream programmes such as Coronation Street, Emmerdale and X Factor on the ITV Player; it seems though that a combination of the reported technical problems experienced by end-users and the relatively low distribution of the the runtime, which required most visitors to install Silverlight, proved to be too much of a barrier for end-user adoption, especially when compared with the successful use of Flash for BBC iPlayer, 4 on-demand and Five TV’s Demand 5 service.

Note: it looks as if ITV are still in the process of updating their site so expect some minor issues whilst they finish the process.

Last year I posted an entry about the launch of Fiat EcoDrive, an AIR application that can help drivers adjust their driving style so as to improve fuel efficiency, reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions and save money on fuel.

As a follow up to that, earlier this month Serge Jespers and I spent some time with Claudio Annicchiarico, who heads up Fiat’s Digital team in the UK, and also the creative development team at digital agency AKQA who built the application.

We created this video to go behind the scenes on the project, to understand why Fiat wanted to build EcoDrive and then from AKQA’s perspective to understand how they approached the project, the tools and technologies they used and what they learnt from developing the application.

The video is approx 20 minutes in length – if you’d like to hear what Fiat had to say and see a demo of the EcoDrive application then watch the first 7 minutes; if you’re interested in the development team who built the application and how they approached the project then make sure you watch the whole thing!

Do you have a cool Flex or AIR application that we should highlight in a future video – if so, please get in touch.

Alongside the release of Flash Media Server 3.5 this week, we also shipped a Flex-compatible version of the FLVPlayback component.

If you’ve ever looked at the VideoDisplay component in the Flex SDK you’ll know that it’s not exactly feature-packed, so it’s great that we now have an enhanced version – the FLVPlayback component has the following new features:

• Provides skinnable and customisable controls for video playback
• Supports video on demand, live streaming and progressive download
• Compatible with the dynamic streaming and Live DVR features in FMS 3.5

You can download the component from the Adobe website, after logging in with your Adobe ID and accepting the license agreement. Once downloaded and extracted you should add the FLVPlayback_2.5 SWC file to your Flex project (either by adding its location to the project build path or by adding the SWC to the ‘libs’ directory) and then you’re good to go.

The component has been written to be compatible with both Flex and Flash Professional and hence does not extend UIComponent in the Flex framework, so you can’t just use it directly in MXML. Also, you need to be working with Flex SDK 3.2 and (I think) targetting Flash Player 10.

Here’s an example of the code you could use to incorporate the component into your Flex project:

For additional commentry and a complete example project you can use check out Stefan Richter’s post “Using the new FLVPlayback 2.5 component in Flex“.

Video on the Flash Platform just got a whole lot easier for Flex developers with the addition of this new component – while you’re at it, take a look at the new features in FMS 3.5 and download a free development version.

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.