Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - iplayer

The future is inching its way onto our set-top boxes

2013-02-11T16:41:00+00:00

I have from time to time lamented the tardiness of media producers in getting content in-front of my eyeballs. It's not a case of being tight with money, although giving Murdoch £30/month for a glut of programming I'll never watch is *too much* for me. I'll happily pay for the stuff I want to watch as long as I can watch it now on whatever device I happen to have to hand. Until it's made that easy for consumers the pirates will keep winning by default.

There was an interesting quote from the boss of Netflix in a recent interview: "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us". Netflix is moving from being just a content distribution company to a producer of content. And if they can create content as good as their new remake of House of Cards hopefully the days of production companies being tied to restrictive bundle contracts are numbered.

The fact that shows can be disconnected from the broadcast schedules also offers other compelling opportunities. The BBC recently aired a number of comedy sketch show pilots which we only caught on iPlayer. Indeed they are now going to start trialling iPlayer net first runs of new shows over the next 12 months. No longer does the success of a show have to hope that it was picked up by enough of the 11500 viewers that happened to catch a random scheduled slot. Each and every viewing can be accounted for and counted even if the show is a slow burner like Firefly which was cruelly cancelled before it built up it's cult following.

So the balls now in HBOs court. How exactly to I pay you so I can watch the next season of Game of Thrones when it comes out?

Fliss' 32 Inch TV

2011-08-08T14:56:00+01:00

The weekend was both incredibly efficient and lazy in equal measures. We headed into town bright and early at 9:00 in a bid to miss the rather nasty traffic Cambridge inflicts on it's driving population. I would have cycled were it not I was picking up our new Smart TV for the library. It's an LG LV550T which replaces the ageing CRT with something a lot slimmer and fits nicely on the new shelves in the library. After some faffing with connectors and convincing it that it really was connected to the internet first impressions are pretty good. It's full 1080p with a built in HD tuner so we can finally receive BBC HD. Comparing the two BBC One channels you can certainly see the difference the high definition brings. It's still not enough to warrant upgrading my main TV though which I expect to keep until it finally dies.

The Smart TV stuff is pretty impressive. Aside from having built-in iPlayer (and ITV/4oD) it also offers a slew of "apps" including the ubiquitous YouTube. As a bonus it's DNLA enabled so it can stream stuff directly from our media server. Sadly it doesn't seem to be able to cope with all the audio codecs the PS3 can. About the only wrinkle was convincing it it was on the 'net. Despite having been given an IP address it was convinced it could access the "Gateway". It was still able to access the media server and download a firmware update through the ether so I suspected it was just some needless self-test the wizard went through. Once I plugged it in via a spare broadband router I had lying round it worked fine. I suspect it was trying to do something UPnPish to prove it was on a home network.

More iPlayer updates for the PS3

2009-09-07T16:27:00+01:00

There is more information about the new iPlayer support for the PS3 on the BBC Internet Blog. While I don't get a shiny iPlayer logo on my XMB (due to owning the Japanese version) I don't really miss much as it was just a link to the iPlayer web-page. However according to the BBC blog one of the drivers for improved performance has been the 3.0 firmware release which has hardware accelerated some aspects Flash video playback. Certainly from the stuff I watched yesterday it seems a lot smoother than before. The BBC have also re-worked the layout of the iPlayer applet which now renders a lot better on the PS3 display.

Now if only Channel 4's On Demand service worked on the PS3....

Guilty Pleasures

2008-09-14T17:58:00+01:00

I've finally started taking advantage of all the memory I put in this machine to indulge a guilty pleasure. Seeing as I'm only testing the next Ubuntu in my virtual machine I can install Flash on it so I can watch iPlayer. Although I'm obviously critical of the fact it locks people into the closed Flash platform to use it. The web-based solution is slick, easy to use and quite obviously the future of TV. I just caught up with the film of the last show Humph did before he died. It was filmed at the Lowry which reminded me of where I saw him last live. There is also a nice recording of one of his Jazz performances currently showing which I'm enjoying now.

The weekend has involved a touch of garden related activity including a very overdue grass cutting and the acquiring of many potted herbs and flowers. We also have a lovey baby maple tree which is now shading the Wizard which has been wondering where it would sit every since I fetched it from Manchester. We are enjoying whats left of the nice weather while we can. I hope it lasts the week, it's quite nice for cycling in the morning.

Life without Broadband

2008-06-03T17:39:00+01:00

Since the move down we have been without broadband. In fact without a fixed line we are subject to the whims of the mobile phone networks. Hopefully (landlords assent and trees permitting) I'll be able to get super-fast broadband through my works test network in Cambridge. However we have managed in the meantime with other alternatives.

I currently have the T-Mobile's "Unlimited"^* Web'n'Walk package which adds about ï¿½7.50 a month to my monthly contract. I predominately used it for phone browsing using the rather excellent Opera Mini. However it is possible to connect to my phone over a PAN. Once paired you can simply hop on an off at will. On the Mac it's a pretty easy drop down menu "Join Alex's K800i Network" and only slightly more involved from my Linux box. Once connected to the PAN and running a normal dhcp client you get assigned an RFC1918 10.0.0.0 address which I assume it NATed somewhere in the mobile network.

The network filters some ports (typically the ones used by IM clients) but normal web browsing works fine as does ssh which I use to access my email host. In the house we get a 3G signal so we can stream stuff from the BBC's Listen Again service. Measuring a download on my machine I maxed out at around 20kb/s which is perfectly good for audio streams and can handle low res YouTube if you pause it and give it a bit of time to buffer up. I suspect however iPlayer will prove too much for it.

* The only real downside is the persistent use of the word unlimited for a service that quite blatantly is. Since I reset my data counters a few days ago we have already clocked up around 113Mb of data downstream so I can see us hitting the 1Gb "Fair Use" limit if we are not careful. The next price point is 3Gb which doesn't seem much better. Having said that I have yet to get a warning so it could be T-Mobile aren't yet enforcing these limits.

Bright Lights, Big City

2008-03-14T12:18:00+00:00

We headed down to London last night to meet up with some of Fliss' old friends for a few drinks and a meal. As we wondered past the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus I saw the adverts flashing up on the multi-media advertising for the BBC's iPlayer, now available for the iPhone. The background information on the blog makes interesting reading, no WMV or Flash for the iPhone, but a nice standards compliant H.264 video stream. It has not gone unnoticed that the iPhone isn't the only thing that can play such a stream although some hoops do have to be jumped through. All I need now is a little Gnome App that fetches streams from the BBC so I don't have to tell my main browser to lie about itself all the time, assuming that the BBC doesn't decide that Linux users are about as likely to pirate the shows as their polo-neck wearing, iPhone carrying cousins.

UPDATE 13/3/08: And the hole is plugged. For now...

UPDATE 14/3/08: Didn't take long

About bloody time

2007-10-12T15:52:00+01:00

Moans about the iPlayer aside one of the other aspects of the BBC's latest media push was to make more of their radio programs available as podcasts. The new page lists many more programs than the anaemic list they had during the long trail period. Thankfully they have set up Friday night comedy as one feed so you don't have to keep switching subscriptions when the Now Show and News Quiz swap around.

Reminder on the iPlayer

2007-03-05T15:59:00+00:00

I was reminded of this today when reading Dave Woodhouse's blog. There now exists a petition on the Number 10 website. Also the consultation is still running which you really should fill in if you want to be able to access your BBC content on-line in the future. Dave's own response also makes interesting reading.