Anyway, that’s all a slight distraction from the fact that blogging “expert” and media commentator Iain Dale didn’t appear to notice that there’s a significant difference between providing streaming (internet broadcasting) and providing a permanent copy of a programme. His apparent lack of understanding of the way TV programmes are sold under licence is also quite funny. And his attempt to cover his blushes.

While the streaming of shows on iPlayer is of the same quality as the news feeds, if you download the programme the quality is far higher, really very good indeed, and in some circumstances (I think for documentaries, rather than dramas) you can keep them for up to a month.

Personally I find the iPlayer a bit clunky, and no substitute for a bit of forward planning and using the series-link facility on a decent PVR, but as an emergency last resort it passes muster.

I appreciate that it’s all on demand, but if there’s a program I want to watch and can’t sit down at the appropriate time, I go and download one of the subsequent rips which turn up on torrent sites, which for an hour long program clock in usually at around 700meg and are excellent quality, which I think until the series is released on DVD is also perfectly legal. I’m betting the quality of the shows sold on iTunes is just as bad as the music sold on there. Why you’d pay £1.80 or whatever it is when you could wait until the DVD came out is beyond me personally.

I think storage is a bit of a moot point, if we assume that they store about 300 programs a day, and thus around 2000 programs a week, even if they were all 1 hour long the total space needed would be roughly 700megs per program for acceptable viewing quality and thus about a terabyte to two terabytes of data a week. I believe, though I’m not totally certain, this would cost less than £2k if you bought it for your own home, so certainly shouldn’t be a squeeze on the purse for the BBC.

But the issue for me is the balance of when the BBC should draw the line, the service is a great idea but to me 7 days is too short, and I think even a month would be too short. For me I’d say nearer to half a year would be sufficient as that gives people plenty of time to miss entire series’ of stuff only to get told by their friends how good it was and still be able to watch it. The quality wouldn’t be that of a DVD and there would be no extras, as well as there still being a time limit. With P2P solutions I don’t see why this isn’t possible and potentially cost effective.

As for the BBC having a commercial side and taking that in to consideration, if this is their reason they should just say so…any well formed explanation along these lines can’t really be refuted even by the Iain Dales of the world. Hiding behind costs and bandwidth when there are options they could explore just makes them look more greedy than they deserve to be I’d wager. But like I said in my post, I’m not sold on the idea that mass and free file sharing actually hurts commercial operations. But that’s another discussion on a different subject.

hohoho - as if they’ve ever worried about that!
(indeed the Register article suggests that they certainly don’t care about the ISP’s)

Lee, a far more thoughtful contribution than Iain managed. A couple of points. While not a technical type myself, I’m told that storing data so that it is available for streaming is going to be quite a bit more expensive than just storing the data. Also, there’s an interesting article in The Register this week about the impact of the BBC iPlayer and the amount of bandwidth it uses even with the seven day limit.

Also, someone form the BBC has pointed out at Iain’s that there is another consideration; the impact of BBC services on commercial operators. All in all, it seems that there are lots of good reasons why the Beeb limit iPlayer streaming.

Take Sky; I help to fund them through advertising, contributing to getting their programmes made in the first place, then I must pay again through subscription to actually watch them. Then I am expected to pay a third time if they ever make anything half-decent that I may want to own, be it a DVD or download.

Fortunately they only produce shite, but if they ever made something worth watching I would feel well peeved.

Meanwhile the BBC continues to write its own suicide note, or at least that of the licence fee.