Trying to use the BBC's new iPlayer

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

I'm very pleased that the BBC have made a version of their catch-up service, iPlayer, that isn't tied to Windows and Internet Explorer.

There are a few good things, programmes are addressable at the episode/programme level, not just the series. That's a great thing, and as I've said before, the BBC's new Programme Support is a fantastic step forward for Tv metadata.

The quality is fairly good, but variable. It's obviously worse than television, and quite a bit worse than recordings people distribute amongst themselves using BitTorrent or Usenet. HIGNFY S34E09 was pretty watchable, full-screen on a 21 inch monitor, from across the room. Last week's Film 2007 was unwatchably blocky, for me. The BBC (and their Trust, and the rightsholders) should recognise that that is what they are competing with, and if the normal distribution mechanisms are worse, we'll get good, shiny, socially acceptable alternatives built by the crazy people.

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Not so link-friendly

I wanted to link to iPlayer for the programmes I had tried with this, to demonstrate the variable quality. But you know what, they're gone or going very soon! Even so, from this page on the World Wide Web, I'm not sure I really want to link to UK-only resources. That they essentially break in a week is so much worse. I've linked to Programme Support, which has the iPlayer in when it can, but my point is going to be pretty hard to verify in about 12 hours.

Unusable in my living room

This is basically the deal-breaker for me. There was a glitch in the recording of HIGNFY I borrowed from a friend. I thought I'd take the opportunity to really use iPlayer, and switched to the streamed version.

I was irritated by several little things:

• the Flash full-screen player did not suspend my screen saver, so I had to get up off the sofa every few minutes to jiggle the mouse. If I was going to keep using it, I imagine I'd just make the screen-saver/suspend delay much longer. That's an environmental hit, especially if many people do it.
• I couldn't use the Apple Remote to control anything in the iPlayer. I imagine I could fiddle about to do that, but I'm not going to do that for the half-dozen places I'll end up watching video online. It's basically presumptive to think I'll jump through special hoops for different pieces of content. That's why I started building a unified player in Feed My Tv, so we can have a pleasant, united interface to video that I can use from my sofa or control from any Web browser.
• the 'full-screen' mode includes a bar showing how far through the programme you are. I prefer to not know, very often, when watching drama programmes, as it defuses the tension.
• after just 5 minutes of watching, with more than ten minutes to go, the picture was replaced by unreadably small text saying that the stream had cocked-up. Again, I had to get back up off the sofa just to read it. We then went back to the borrowed recording, which was glitch-free through to the end.

'Streaming only'

This is the most annoying portion. By sending me all the bits to watch the show, with an added performance guarantee that I can start watching soon, they've solved a harder problem than just letting me download their content. I'm quite convinced we'll see people capture the stream in the next couple of weeks, and produce a shiny interface to doing that sometime next year.

That's fine, in my view, and mimics fairly clearly what happens when the BBC send content into my home over Freeview. Unencrypted bits fly through the flat and I can either sit there and consume immediately, or catch them and play them back later on. Some people see that as 'nicking' the content, which I'll address later this week.

The real downside to streaming is because it is a harder problem, the temptation is to clobber the quality to make it affordable and easier to get done in time. When I found Film 2007 to be unwatchable on iPlayer, it took less than nine minutes to get an alternative, much higher quality recording from a friend. Vint Cerf made an excellent point at this year's Edinburgh Television Festival, we're too focussed on this special case of fetching as quickly as we watch, but there are lots of interesting cases on both sides, both slower and faster than real-time.

With downloaded content, we can provide better quality video, using fewer server resources. We can have our machines do all the waiting up front. What happened with the glitch in my recording need not. We can verify that downloaded content is complete, and hasn't been fiddled with on the way over before we begin watching it. We're quite close to having the technology to sit down, turn on and enjoy, sure in the knowledge that we can trust what we're watching is the genuine article. Let's build that.