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Saturday, 12 September 2009 |
 The BBC is to allow third parties the ability to run the technology behind the BBC iPlayer on their own websites., writes Adrian Pennington, though the logistics have yet to be fully ironed out.
Erik Huggers, the BBC's director of future media and technology told IBC delegates: "OpeniPlayer is not a concept of aggregation, but federation. Rather than aim for moving all content onto one single site under a single search box and domain, this is about making sure each and every broadcaster around the world has the ability to run its own on-demand capability and to ensure that traffic between broadcasters can occur seamlessly."
The mechanics of the arrangement whereby broadcasters might share or licence the SDK or even with BBC Research and Innovation engineers has yet to be worked out.
"iPlayer is not something you can stick on a DVD, install and run," he said. "It's an end to end system that brings a lot of different systems together. The concept of opening up our investment and technology infrastructure, knowledge of metadata, back end systems, user experience and design is front and centre for us in helping other broadcasters achieve their goal in continuing to have a direct relationship with users rather than being disintermediated by third party aggregators."
OpeniPlayer is the project formerly known internally to the BBC as Marquee and is intended to encourage a write once, publish anywhere specification for iPlayer.
"There are currently 23 versions of iPlayer we port to devices like TV platforms, games consoles and mobile phones. They all using different codecs and different file formats, because they are think their codec is going to make a difference. The additional cost of formatting is starting to become problematic and something the industry should rise to the occasion and solve. How can it be that as broadcasters we are in a position where the tuner decides how we broadcast the show?"
Huggers said the OpeniPlayer initiaitve was a response to requests from broadcasters since the iPlayer lauched in 2007.
"We've had plenty of discussions with broadcasters domestically and internationally and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. They understand that it's not a trivial task to build a service like that and maintain it so there is genuine interest to explore it."
The concept has yet to be put before regulatory body, the BBC Trust, and is subject to its approval.
Asked how the new innovation would sit with comments by James Murdoch at the Edinburgh Television Festival, that the BBC's involvement makes it difficult for commercial interests to compete, Huggers said he believed the opposite was true. "What we are seeing is that the BBC's interest is in delivering against its public performance requirements to inform, educate and entertain. The investments are going to be made available to public and private companies so that they don't have to reinvent the iPlayer or look at how to deliver free-to-air."
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David Crawford admits to having IBC in his blood, writes George Jarrett. Having chaired the conference committee for three years - he previously headed the papers committee for eight years - he has ended his tenure in order to write a book on mobile TV. 