Why are iPlayer viewers exempt from the TV licence?

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

There was a chap from TV Licensing on BBC Breakfast this morning, reminding Britain’s small business owners that they owed his employers £142.50 if they wanted to watch live TV on their computers at work.

“How you can possibly enforce that?” asked the BBC man, somewhere in between the 96 daily reminders of how you can watch BBC News online. “We can and we will,” was the gist of the not particularly convincing reply. Still, it’s nice to see that, just as small businesses are putting the worst of the recession flames out, TV Licensing wants to open another can of petrol.

But why pick on small businesses? During his convoluted explanation of what you can and can’t do, the enforcer explained that you don’t need to buy a licence to watch BBC programmes on iPlayer after they are broadcast.

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Why BT’s not the biggest broadband choker

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

The BBC is getting positively hot under the collar about BT’s “iPlayer throttling”. It’s nice to see the big broadcasters finally paying attention to the hidden chokes applied to our broadband connections, although readers of the Smash Your Broadband Limits feature on the cover of this month’s PC Pro would already have been well aware that BT Option 1 customers were restricted to only 896Kbits/sec for streaming video.

BT Option 1 isn’t the worst service when it comes to strangling connections, however. Not by a long chalk. Take BT-owned PlusNet example. Its “Unlimited” account offers a maximum bandwidth of only 256Kbits/sec from download sites during peak hours (6pm-11pm) while peer-to-peer traffic is granted a paltry maximum of 128Kbits/sec from 6pm-10pm. Try downloading a 1.5GB HD show from iPlayer during peak hours on that connection and it will probably arrive a couple of hours after you’ve gone to bed.

Other ISPs pull similar ruses (you can find out what your ISP is up to in this month’s mag). Perhaps now the BBC has taken an interest, we’ll get a frank and open debate about the murky practice of traffic shaping.

BBC iPlayer: bad, good, then bad again?

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

You may remember that we at PC Pro were none too impressed with the BBC iPlayer when it was first released. Our preview of the beta software lamented the way the iPlayer was raggedly ripped in two (a website for selecting shows, a separate desktop app for viewing them), the appalling user interface and the limited selection of shows. “It’s produced a bug-ridden, slow and ultimately disappointing product… and worst of all, the Beeb’s done it with your money,” the preview concluded.

Since the dark days of November 2007, I’m pleased to say the iPlayer has improved almost beyond recognition. The website interface is now much cleaner and finding the particular episode of a series that you want to watch is no longer a case of randomly clicking on identical boxes and hoping for the best. Shows can now be streamed in either standard or “high-quality” versions if you can’t be bothered to wait for the download (although downloads still offers much greater picture quality), and devices such as media players, games consoles and phones are now well supported with dedicated downloads.   

If the truth be told, the BBC has turned what was looking like a multi-million lame duck into one of the most popular internet services this country has ever seen – and deserves credit for doing so.

Which makes it all the more galling that the next evolution of the iPlayer looks set to undo much of the good work.

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How to watch the BBC iPlayer on the Xbox 360

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Ever since the BBC announced that its iPlayer works perfectly happily with a couple of Media Center Extenders (NetGear’s EVA8000 and the Linksys DMA2200), I’ve been determined to get the service working on my Xbox 360. After all, if the iPlayer works on third-party MCE devices, why the hell shouldn’t it work on Microsoft’s own?

The BBC’s Where To Get iPlayer page suggests getting the service to run on any MCE (or Home Media Hub as the Beeb calls them) should be a piece of cake. Simply download the programmes as normal on your PC, open Windows Media Center and add the iPlayer downloads folder to your Media Center library, then jump on to your MCE device and simply play back the relevant files from the comfort of your TV. Robert is your dad’s brother.

Except it doesn’t work on the Xbox 360. Well, at least not my Xbox 360, nor those of a couple of colleagues I’ve spoken to. Although judging by numerous internet forums, it seems to work flawlessly for some people. When I click on downloaded programmes using the Xbox 360’s MCE, however, I’m presented with a blue screen displaying the message:

“Video Error. Files needed to display video are not installed or not working correctly.”

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The multi-touch election night

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

“I’m Wolf Blitzer, and you’re in the THE SITUATION ROOM!!!” Duh-duh-du-du-duhhhhhhhhhh.

Poor old Dimbleby over on the Beeb didn’t stand a chance. He was doddery and indecisive, while the hapless Jeremy Vine stumbled around his CGI results room like a bad weatherman, eyeing the monitors as he fumbled to touch areas of a screen that clearly was there but had been made to look like it wasn’t there, if that makes any sense to you. No? Me neither.

Over on ITV, Alastair Stewart tried his best, but in between every sensible guest he was forced to put questions to the insufferable “comedian” Jon Culshaw, whose Obama impersonation was indeed true comedy, being suspiciously similar to his Bush impression and his McCain impression, both of which sounded like his Gordon Brown, all of which sounded like Jon Culshaw.

But CNN was there to rescue us all from election night Hell. Despite the most brilliantly inappropriate name on TV, Wolf Blitzer proved a slick and knowledgable host, helped by a team of thinly disguised body-builders whose parents never quite grasped the concept of first names. (more…)

Is HD TV finally worth paying for?

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I remember when we first started talking about HD. Back then it was this mythical beast that would tear apart video as we know it with its millions of pixels, and leave us all cursing standard definition for being as fuzzy and vague as Colin Jackson’s “expert” Olympic analysis.

Then it arrived and we loved it. The first time I ran a 1080p video on my 40in TV, my non-techie housemate grabbed the controller and kept replaying the same HD movie trailer for what seemed like an hour, so enamoured was he with the detail. Those of us with a PlayStation3 or Blu-ray player can enjoy the delights of HD by renting movies, but TV has been much slower out of the blocks.

Put simply, even a drum-beating HD lover like myself can admit the line-up of HD channels just hasn’t been worth paying for. Cable customers with Virgin’s V+ box can watch several free channels like BBC HD (and enjoy the excellent Olympic coverage, Jackson aside), but Sky HD is the big gun we all pinned our hopes on. And it’s expensive. Very expensive. (more…)

Technology the real Olympics winner

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Opposite me, David Bayon is picking away at his salad while watching the gymnastics (he’d like me to write that he was watching something manly, but we all know the truth). Jon Bray was watching the long jump. And to follow a whim, I fired up the table tennis highlights. We have, somehow, slipped with barely a murmur into on-demand internet TV, and it’s fantastic.

Even the resolution is high enough to impress. Bayon (now switching his attention to athletics) has just exclaimed “you can see her heart beating” as he watched one of the 400m runners stand ready for the race.

It takes something like the Olympics to show us how far technology has come. The BBC iPlayer has been around in one form or other for the last two years, and we’ve become used to it. But do you remember how you last watched the Olympics? If you’re anything like me, it was mainly via a highlights programme on terrestrial TV. I’d have been lucky to see two minutes of table tennis. If I wanted to, I could watch 50 minutes’ worth, or fast forward to precisely the match I was interested in.

Now we’re all casually firing up our browsers, streaming live or pre-recorded events direct to our display. Makes you wonder how far things will have improved by London 2012.

Why did the newsreader get to grill Gates?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Opportunities to interview Bill Gates don’t come along that often (Lord knows, we’ve tried). Even the BBC, with its undoubted worldwide clout, has only managed to pin down the Microsoft chairman for a decent interview twice in the past decade.

The first time was in 1999, when a poorly-briefed (and I’m not refering to his infamous pants) Jeremy Paxman interviewed Gates. Paxman lobbed in his trademark terse questions, but lacked the knowledge to disect Gates’s answers with even a hint of the ferociousness he reserves for polticians.

As this Slashdot reviewer said of the Paxman interview: “He challenged Gates on various issues, even mentioning Linus Torvalds, but unfortunately Jeremy isn’t a technology expert, so the topic of open standards and protocols wasn’t raised, and when Gates’ asserted that the field was wide open for anyone to do what he and Microsoft have done, Jeremy didn’t know enough to point out that when someone begins to look like they might challenge Microsoft’s position, they get driven out of business or acquired.”

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Anyone for Monopoly?

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Watching the Cup Final on Saturday – first, for five excruciating minutes on BBC, then the rest on Sky – I had a bit of an argument with some friends. The beer may have contributed slightly, but I also felt strongly about the matter: that forcing the breakup of a monopoly is not always good for consumers.

The Premiership was the case in point, but the Cup Final gave me my ammunition: the BBC/Sky choice was just that – a choice, as both were doing their best to win over viewers to the same spectacle simultaneously.

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