August 1st, 2007
The debacle of the BBC's iPlayer
Tim Anderson has a writeup of his experience with the BBCs new iPlayer and it isn’t pretty. If you aren’t familiar with the iPlayer, it’s a desktop player that the BBC rolled out to allow users to watch BBC programming up to 7 days after the air date. All in all, a great initiative that should be applauded. Unfortunately it has some issues. First and foremost, it’s only available on Windows XP (no Vista) using IE. The application uses a combination of a desktop client with a Kontiki ActiveX plugin that only works inside of IE. The lack of Vista support is strange enough but there was a big backlash because of there being no Mac or Linux support. From what I can tell the reason they went in this direction was because of DRM, something that still looms large on the rich media landscape.
But on to Tim’s experience. Tim notes that this is in beta, but he has a couple of good observations that I think indicate just how far we need to go but also why rich internet applications are going to help the software industry by leaps and bounds in the experience category. The first is the install experience:
Here’s where it starts to go wrong. I realise this is billed as a beta, but it is a high profile one and deserves careful attention to usability. The download option I’d clicked was just a tease, because at this point I’d not yet installed the player software. So instead of sweet classical music I got a dialog asking me to download and install iPlayer. That seemed to go OK, but then I found myself being asked to log in. I thought I’d already done so, but iPlayer requires a second log-in, being your BBC membership, for which I had not even registered. I guess this will be easier when the beta is finished.
Any good rich internet application should be silly simple to install. That’s why I’m a big fan of Adobe AIR, it’s why I’m a big fan of browser based apps leveraging rich media, and it’s also why I think things like XBAPs (XAML Browser Application), which are basically full applications running inside the browser, are important. Multiple installs in multiple areas just aren’t going to cut it because there are too many great apps out there to assume your users wll jump through hoops.
The second quote was on playback:
Sigh. So I poked about a bit, cleared the DRM folder in documents and settings\all users\DRM (be sure to back up your licenses if you try this, if you have any DRM Windows Media content that you value, and if WMP will let you), deleted the Proms from the iPlayer library, and downloaded it again. That seems to be how it works - to get a new license, you have to re-download the whole thing. Mad.
Playback has to be easy and that’s one thing rich internet applications technologies have gotten right - they made video easy. We still have a ways to go with DRM in some places, but it’s more important to make the video easy to access. I’m not sure why the BBC couldn’t have waited a bit and rolled this out as a Silverlight application if DRM was really that important or even waited to do it as an Adobe Media Player channel which would have allowed download and DRM. I don’t see why the Kontiki part was so key. This could have been a great RIA built on any number of technologies but they seem to have dropped the ball and it’s a shame.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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