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BBC iPlayer
The BBC are wanting to greatly push the development of their iPlayer application with which one plays their online streaming content. I can't help but wonder if some of this effort is a poor use of resources. They have already pushed it far enough that, while I can watch Amazon and Netflix via our Wii, it is too old for iPlayer.
It is hard to get personalization and intelligent suggestions correct. Using my locality is not much use in my case: on Friday I was listening to local radio for a county several hours' drive away. One mistake that sites like Netflix make is to use my viewing history which unfortunately includes much that was actually on others' behalf. In practice, how I want to use the BBC's iPlayer site is far enough from what they try to guide me into that I largely navigate it by external search engines.
I watch via content downloaded through get_iplayer which largely allows me to avoid using the BBC's website directly: I may instead script things as I like. Without that option I would certainly be watching less BBC content.
I should add that I am happy to indulge the BBC's need for digital rights management: for example, I would be fine if they offered an API that required authentication via television license number and postcode then steganographically encoded the session key into streamed content so the BBC could track me down if I shared it online or were downloading implausibly much from myriad IPs.
If the BBC were to offer an API and simple no-nonsense apps for end users then this would allow the external community to provide a range of advanced configurable clients that meet users' actual needs in navigating and viewing the BBC's content. One thing I wonder is: given a sane and stable API am I wrong to expect that before long individual viewers would be able to find a cheap or opensource client at least as suitable for them as what the BBC would have provided had they continued trying to own that app market?
As a computer programmer myself such access, as is presently imperfectly obtained via Perl scripts scraping BBC webpages and suchlike, offers the best personalization: I can write code that navigates the BBC's content exactly as I want. As it is, I don't bother putting much effort into such because I have no faith that the content will remain usefully accessible at all.
It is hard to get personalization and intelligent suggestions correct. Using my locality is not much use in my case: on Friday I was listening to local radio for a county several hours' drive away. One mistake that sites like Netflix make is to use my viewing history which unfortunately includes much that was actually on others' behalf. In practice, how I want to use the BBC's iPlayer site is far enough from what they try to guide me into that I largely navigate it by external search engines.
I watch via content downloaded through get_iplayer which largely allows me to avoid using the BBC's website directly: I may instead script things as I like. Without that option I would certainly be watching less BBC content.
I should add that I am happy to indulge the BBC's need for digital rights management: for example, I would be fine if they offered an API that required authentication via television license number and postcode then steganographically encoded the session key into streamed content so the BBC could track me down if I shared it online or were downloading implausibly much from myriad IPs.
If the BBC were to offer an API and simple no-nonsense apps for end users then this would allow the external community to provide a range of advanced configurable clients that meet users' actual needs in navigating and viewing the BBC's content. One thing I wonder is: given a sane and stable API am I wrong to expect that before long individual viewers would be able to find a cheap or opensource client at least as suitable for them as what the BBC would have provided had they continued trying to own that app market?
As a computer programmer myself such access, as is presently imperfectly obtained via Perl scripts scraping BBC webpages and suchlike, offers the best personalization: I can write code that navigates the BBC's content exactly as I want. As it is, I don't bother putting much effort into such because I have no faith that the content will remain usefully accessible at all.