Anger over BBC radio streaming changes

[Christopher Woods]

On 2015-02-23 13:45, C E Macfarlane wrote:
>>     > The BBC should never have adopted any proprietary format in
>>     the first place.
>>
>>     Back when they first started streaming stuff online, the only
>>     available
>>     products were proprietary. [snip]
>
> When you're in the position of a major official government 
> organisation as
> well as a public corporation set up by Royal Charter, such as is the 
> BBC, if
> you can't do something properly with the tools around at the time, 
> you don't
> do it at all.  You don't waste millions or billions of public money 
> which
> pays for your very existence on something you can't support 
> indefinitely
> into the future.  You don't encourage manufacturers to make, and the 
> public,
> whose 'taxes' are paying your wages, to buy, kit in the belief that, 
> if it's
> supported by the BBC, it must be safe to spend money on it, and then 
> pull
> the plug on that kit not long after.

This train of thought doesn't address a key issue: the BBC had full 
control over development of the PAL broadcast standard, and was able to 
develop and refine it prior to using it commercially. New Media (i.e., 
internetty stuff) is the Wild West again, whoever has the most market 
inertia becomes the de facto leader and you have multiple concurrent 
'standards' all of which can be superceded or made obsolete by the Next 
Big Thing.

The Beeb works hard to keep stuff supported - I agree the public 
announcements, and discussions with developers, probably could have been 
coordinated better, but all these Internet radios which no longer work 
are not due to the BBC not coding firmware updates for them, that 
responsibility falls to that of the manufacturer to provide 
functionality according to the agreed specification for the format. If 
they built their equipment to a price point or functional level which 
didn't accommodate for Unknown Future Developments, that's their fault.

I can almost hear all the people who bought first generation black & 
white TV sets complaining that the BBC made their unit obsolete by 
beginning to broadcast in colour (but again, because the BBC essentially 
had complete control over the standard and the entire broadcast chain, 
they were able to guarantee a level of backwards compatibility so they 
wouldn't alienate early adopters).

They're still trying to avoid alienating early adopters, but we all 
have to accept that sadly in this day and age we're ALL early adopters. 
If you plotted pace of technical innovation in fields of digital codecs, 
streaming technology, high speed bandwidth, processing power, the 
capabilities of integrated devices like Smart TVs, you would see a curve 
which is rising almost exponentially.

Contrast that with the heady days of PAL 625 line, where it was 
basically a plateau for fifty years (save for some very clever 
innovation that built on the standard in terms of NICAM audio, stereo 
sound, use of blanking fields for subtitles etc).

Smart phones and tablets are driving take-up in newer formats and they 
are just so much more capable of handling and working with more 
computationally complex (and efficient) codecs delivered over more 
cost-effective networks.


And to clarify: the BBC provides a facility to access its systems to 
*third party developers*, who then code their apps. Whilst there's 
significant development expertise internally at the BBC, it doesn't 
(couldn't! wouldn't want to!) code every single Internet Radio or Smart 
TV widget. If these third party devs are lazy (or the companies like 
Samsung, LG etc. don't wish to continue paying for development as 
technology changes) those apps rot until they don't work any more.

Manufacturers also spec devices with underpowered chips - my mum's 
Samsung "Smart TV" is testament to this, only the iPlayer app plays 
smoothly, the itv Player drops frames and skips like there's no 
tomorrow. If these ARM processors can only barely provide the 
interactive experience needed for the interface and basic H.264 / MPEG 
hardware video decoding on a bare-bones Linux (or VxWorks!) environment, 
there's never going to be enough spare processing power to permit for 
new developments like HLS, HDS or DASH (which WILL be adopted by every 
broadcaster in due course, almost undoubtedly).

Seems appropriate at this point to hark back to the DVB-T spec, the 
development of which the BBC also has a big hand in, and remains rock 
solid and stable. DVB-T2 was initially developed by BBC R&D and now sees 
widescale, painfree adoption by industry.

The BBC works immensely hard to maintain support for the widest range 
of devices as is feasible - they only just stopped support for the Wii 
player two weeks ago! They were already supporting 650 devices in 2012, 
that's undoubtedly increased a huge amount since.

There's a list of BBC iPlayer Certified devices on the iPlayer site:
http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/information/

Some manufacturers seemingly do a single version of the 'iPlayer app' 
for a particular model of TV then never update it even when updates are 
required.


> No, they're complaining at the almost incessant changes in these 
> services
> that render kit obsolete before it has reached its natural 
> end-of-life.

Whilst I am against it, it's undeniable that electronics companies have 
pushed for shorter lifespans. My colleague has just this minute told me 
a story about how his Freeview set top box (with iPlayer!) displayed a 
message recently warning him that functionality would stop. Lo and 
behold, it did, on the day it said - because of the move to HLS delivery 
for iPlayer TV.

It's economics - companies have realised can't afford to support every 
single device they've ever made, particularly with the market 
contraction unless they're as big as Apple (...and even they don't!). 
Companies should really manufacture fewer devices with more capabilities 
and processing power, then sell and support them for longer. It won't 
happen though, these days kit only seems to have an expected lifetime of 
several years.

Your other points - age of device, speed of access using the 'Smart' 
interface, etc - reinforce my points. I'm not happy about it, but it's 
how it is. I pay a monthly Murdoch tax for Sky TV and I can't even watch 
ANY of that because my device is rooted (and they have decided that 
apparently that makes me A. Criminal and so deny me access on my 
expensive flagship smartphone). If you read the Sky Customer Forums, 
they drop support for older devices (and in some cases, their OWN SET 
TOP BOXES!) as soon as it becomes financially unattractive.


> This year's track record alone is sufficient demonstration that, ever 
> since
> the inception of iPlayer, the BBC have broken their customer's 
> equipment
> time and time again by changing the way iPlayer works, often, as at 
> the end
> of October, in an arbitrary fashion with little or no advance warning 
> and
> little or no overlap of functionality to allow people time to obtain
> firmware updates for their equipment, which latter supposes that
> manufacturers in the limited UK market might even feel obliged to try 
> to
> support the endlessly moving iPlayer goalposts by providing such 
> updates,
> whereas, understandably enough, they might not.


The BBC has not broken anything. They *have* changed the way they 
provide access to their content, moving to a much more efficient and 
technologically current method of data delivery. They've had to move 
with the times, even whilst bending over backwards to try and satisfy 
that 0.5% of people who use a BizarroBox v1.0 from 2010 which the 
manufacturer abandoned shortly after shipping the last consignment to 
their retail distributor.

It's never denied access to those who wish to watch or 'broken' their 
devices, they can always watch using a computer, smartphone or tablet - 
the areas by market share which have the highest adoption rates. If 
people are looking for someone to blame, they should harass their 
product's manufacturer for their negligence and poor after-sales 
support.

The fact is, manufacturers have all sold us lemons by advertising these 
whizz-bang devices which actually are crippled out the box with no real 
prospect of ever being able to update the software yourself due to their 
locked down, proprietary OSes and platforms. And they'll do it again and 
again with this year's latest product -- it's classic capitalism!

tl;dr: stop complaining. Nobody is owed anything. Your Smart TV or 
internet radio may not be working properly any more, but in reality 
you're already in a very, very small minority. Go complain to the 
manufacturer, it's their fault they didn't design their product well 
enough to survive one revolution of a technology lifecycle.

Nobody is entitled to the iPlayer's content, it's not funded 
(currently...!) by the TV License, it's an amazing value-added extra the 
BBC is having to fund whilst the TV licence has remained frozen since 
the last Charter Renewal (in real terms, a significant reduction, even 
before the top slicing for Local TV funding, having to now fund the 
World Service and loads of other big projects).

If you really want to listen to the streams on a radio in your living 
room, buy a Pi+, install Kodi (if you're feeling lazy) or just run it 
through a web interface - bingo! A software upgradeable, incredibly 
powerful, eminently affordable, future-proofed, get_iplayer capable and 
100% self-supported with a great user community. You'll save a chunk of 
cash over buying a block of plastic with a speaker in it, too.

I'm far more concerned about the minority of the minority who relied 
upon these now-defunct modes of access due to special access 
requirements (blind/partially sighted being a big one). The iPlayer web 
site I think needs some improvement in that area, and I'm not sure about 
the accessibility of the various smartphone/tablet Radio apps. However 
the BBC inevitably has blind members of staff who I am sure will have 
been VERY vocal about problems.

Chris