Amsterdam, IBC - The BBC is to allow third parties the ability to run the technology behind the BBC iPlayer on their own websites. The mechanics of the arrangement whereby broadcasters might share or licence the SDK or even with BBC Research and Innovation engineers has yet to be worked out.
Erik Huggers, the BBC’s director of future media and technology told IBC 2009 conference delegates: “OpeniPlayer is not a concept of aggregation, but federation. Rather than aim for moving all content onto one single site under a single search box and domain, this is about making sure each and every broadcaster around the world has the ability to run its own on-demand capability and to ensure that traffic between broadcasters can occur seamlessly.”
“iPlayer is not something you can stick on a DVD, install and run,” he said. “It’s an end to end system that brings a lot of different systems together. The concept of opening up our investment and technology infrastructure, knowledge of metadata, back end systems, user experience and design is front and centre for us in helping other broadcasters achieve their goal in continuing to have a direct relationship with users rather than being disintermediated by third party aggregators."
OpeniPlayer is the project formerly known internally to the BBC as Marquee and is intended to encourage a write once, publish anywhere specification for iPlayer.
“There are currently 23 versions of iPlayer we port to devices like TV platforms, games consoles and mobile phones. They all using different codecs and different file formats, because they are think their codec is going to make a difference. The additional cost of formatting is starting to become problematic and something the industry should rise to the occasion and solve. How can it be that as broadcasters we are in a position where the tuner decides how we broadcast the show?”
Huggers said the OpeniPlayer initiative was a response to requests from broadcasters since the iPlayer launched in 2007.
“We’ve had plenty of discussions with broadcasters domestically and internationally and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. They understand that it’s not a trivial task to build a service like that and maintain it so there is genuine interest to explore it.”
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