...of it finishing on TV, and for some content it's typically one to two hours later.
We know the audience wants content instantly after it finishes, and in fact we're doing a lot of work to make those times faster.
How many versions of each programme do you produce?
We
create about 14 different formats, ranging from about 160Kbps
for some mobile, over-the-air streaming, through to 1,500Kbps for our
highest iPlayer SD quality stream, in H.264 played out as Flash. We
also create 3Mbps [for standard definition] on Virgin Media, and now
for our HD content we create 3.2Mbps HD. So it's about 14 or 15
flavours.
We typically make a 3GP format, which is really H.264. We make VP6, H.264, MPEG-2 and we make Windows Media Video. Then we deliver those in various ways. In fact, there are probably three aspects: the actual content encode itself, the transport mechanism and how it gets from our servers to the consumer — and then how it's played out.
Our Flash player can play the H.264 or VP6 files, and the mobile formats might play out often in RealPlayer on a mobile device. Then our Windows Media content we make available in a DRM format, typically where you can download or side-load to portable media players or Windows Media Center or Windows Media Extender devices.
One of the nice advantages of the internet is that you can get people to install the latest software quite quickly. Whereas once you've got a box in someone's house, you need to be compatible with it, and so we make content in a format compatible with Virgin boxes that span several years in the market.
Why did you choose Adobe Air for the new iPlayer Desktop app?
We had to be on Mac, PC
and Linux, so we spent a lot of time analysing solutions that we could
use, including what I call 'speed dating' companies that offer
solutions in this area. But ultimately we chose Adobe Air
for two key reasons: number one, it had a system that allowed our
seven-day or 30-day playback to be enabled and controlled on PC, Mac
and Linux. That's a requirement of a DRM, not that we want to use DRM,
but we're forced to because we make content available for download.
It's part of our rights framework.
The second reason we chose
Adobe Air is because it provides a flexible scripting system. It also
meant we could use the skill sets we've got in house with our Flash
developers, so we could share the same resources across our Flash
player and our download manager.
Is there a concern about relying on one company for this?
I
don't think that's an issue. I think Adobe's a reasonably-sized company;
they're keen to make sure it works and works reliably. We've had really
good feedback on the iPlayer Desktop, we had it in Labs
for a while. Like all new platforms, one of the problems you've got is
our existing platform had several years of development and actually
worked very reliably on one platform and wasn't available on others.
We're now bringing out a new technology and clearly it's going to have bugs initially. I think we did remarkably well on a reliable product, but our servers on day one had an unexpected load on them, so we had some people saying the downloads were taking longer than on the existing one. But I think we've fixed that, and they should be at least as fast if not faster than the existing one.
