[pathy]

What would you it rather use? HTML5? Silverlight?

What is wrong with using an establish platform like Flash? iPlayer works, and works well. I happy to see BBC continuing to improve.

I don't see anything close to resembling epic fail with iPlayer.

[antimagic]

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?

[davidgerard]

Because they have to pretend DRM works.

(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.

[samwillis]

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.

[pathy]

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.

[melling]

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.

[pathy]

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.

[EnderMB]

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?

[lmm]

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.

[cabalamat]

> What would you it rather use?

BitTorrent

[pathy]

I was more looking for a realistic alternative choice for BBC.

BitTorrent isn't.

[sentenza]

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.