Unter dem Titel "Felxible TV" soll den britischen Zuschauern über ein Zeitfenster von jeweils einer Woche vor und nach der Ausstrahlung über klassische Kanäle die Möglichkeit geboten werden, die betreffende Sendung über einen BitTorrent-Client namens iPlayer auf die heimische Festplatte zu speichern. Die Kosten für dieses Distributionssystem liegen aufgrund der Nutzung von Peer-to-Peer-Netzwerken nahe Null: Da sie nur eine vollständige Kopie jeder Sendung stellen müssen, die weitere Verbreitung jedoch über die Leitungen der britischen Zuschauer geschieht, sind weder große Speicherkapazitäten noch hohe Verbindungsgeschwindigkeiten von Nöten. Im Zweifelsfall könnte die Verbreitung der Sendungen sogar von ein-fachen Bürorechnern der BBC erfolgen. Zur Verfügung gestellt werden die Sendungen jeweils sieben Tage vor und nach dem Sendetermin, eine Beschränkung erfolgt über die IP auf Teilnehmer aus Großbritannien.
Kommentare (3)
Dec 08, 2008
Martin Storbeck sagt:
BBC iPlayer The indepenent: BBC introduces flexible TV with online trial ind...Nov 16, 2008
Martin Storbeck sagt:
Zu DRM im iPlayer: The BBC appears to have inadvertently removed the controver...Zu DRM im iPlayer:
The BBC appears to have inadvertently
removed the controversial DRM from its iPlayer video-on-demand service. Now, all BBC programmes are broadcast across the country in digital form without DRM, literally diffused at the speed of light in all directions without any restrictions, but the Beeb somehow believes that there's a new risk of piracy created by letting those same digital files out on the net.
Dec 08, 2008
Martin Storbeck sagt:
Mark Pesce: F*ck Big Media - Part 2: Transmission Errors One of the biggest med...Mark Pesce: F*ck Big Media
- Part 2: Transmission Errors
One of the biggest media organizations around - the BBC - is getting in front of this trend with something they're calling "Flexible TV". It's a PC-based application which gives residents of the UK access to the BBC programming schedule, within a two week window: a week before the present moment, and a week after. Viewers make their selections from the program schedule, and the programs are downloaded to the users' hard disks. The BBC is testing Flexible TV with a thousand users, but expect it to be rolled out across the UK by the end of the year.
(...) The BBC doesn't have the bandwidth to netcast its programming to all 66 million of its viewers. Fortunately it doesn't that kind of capability, because the BBC has cleverly designed the Flexible TV application to act as a node in a Peer-to-Peer network. Anyone using Flexible TV has access to the programs which have been downloaded by any other Flexible TV client, and can get those programs directly from them. All BBC need do is provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and they handle the work themselves. More than this, because of the P2P technology used by the BBC (more on this in a moment) a Flexible TV user can get a little bit of the program from any number of other peers; rather than going through the process of downloading an entire program from one other peer, the Flexible TV client can ask a hundred other clients for small sections of the program, and download these hundred sections simultaneously. Not only does this decrease the amount of traffic that any clients has to handle, it also means that it produces a virtuous cycle: the more popular a program is, the more copies of it will exist in the network of peers, and therefore the more easily a peer can download it.