I work on iPlayer. The new responsive design website will use the HTML5 + HLS player on iOS. Currently on Android and desktop we are using Flash + HDS/RTMP, but it's possible this will change in the future. The reason we are using Flash at the moment is partly to do with content protection (which involves negotiations with the content rights holder), and partly to do with the fact that there isn't a standard streaming mechanism across the different platforms we need to support. We would likely move to MPEG-DASH, for example, if it's more widely adopted across the platforms.
That's interesting. Do you know why content providers are OK for content to go to iOS without DRM (beyond client certificate checks) but not to Android or the desktop?
Part of this is a legal/rights question, so I won't get into too much details. But when I said content protection I didn't explicitly say DRM :)
You are correct that currently iOS streams are protected by client certs and that is sufficient enough in that ecosystem. On Android and desktop, there is still a need for a sufficient level of content protection, but as I said a big reason we are using Flash on those platforms is the cross-platform support and the engineering efforts at the moment. I can't really comment more on future directions around this area, but needless to say we are constantly evaluating the different emerging streaming technologies out there.
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?
(They know it's a lie, they have to pretend it isn't. There's basically an eternal free-floating culture war in the BBC between the sort of people who think DRM works and the sort of people who think it doesn't. The BBC is a ridiculously non-monolithic entity.)
Flash is less-worse than their original plan ... a fat client application written in C#, because of course that works everywhere.
DRM. The BBC can make it "harder" to intercept the video stream by using Flash, it is the reason most of these types of services are still on flash. This is why HTML5 DRM is going to happen, it will remove Flash from the mix, at the expense of having a binary blob from the content owners that manages the DRM.
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.
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.
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.
I've got no experience with this, but isn't HTML5 video quite hard to do well? I hear a number of problems with YouTube's HTML5 player, whereas the Flash player works extremely well. I imagine that DRM is an issue, but performance and stability is another.
Also, isn't the iPlayer video loaded differently to most online video providers? If I remember correctly, they don't load the full video in the same way that the likes of YouTube does. Is that easily done with HTML5?
They're already happy to send out unencrypted streams to iOS users. But as with too many tech companies, if you're not using Apple you're a second class citizen.
Why? There is proof to the contrary. The Eurovision Song Contest has been streamed via a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol (albeit proprietary) for some years now.
And the BBC is involved with that. So what is different here?
Furthermore, if they were to lose the ridiculous DRM requirements for programs (programmes?) which are already paid for, they could even use the actual Bittorrent protocol itself.