C’mon Ben, do you think the BBC is *really* foolish enough to do this? The librarians who look after the BBC archive would eat their own young before allowing the only copy to be stored in a profoundly lossy digital format.

I’ll bet that most of the iPlayer budget is spent on rights.

The next biggest component by far will be proper programme-segmented lossless digital storage with ability to reformat to anything. And reengineering your entire playout system to be programme rather than slot centric costs… that’s why the BBC’s RadioPlayer was so cheap – it just chopped up the broadcast stream which is why you don’t get decent joins between programmes.

I bet the actual iPlayer software was a tiny proportion of the overall budget.

Ben, have you been to Windmill Lane? It is all on huge great shelves being stored in an outdated digital format already

I doubt very much whether the encoded version that is being pumped to the BBC punter via iPlayer is the only digital copy of material that the BBC is retaining, because, for a start, it isn’t broadcast quality.

That’s a massively foolish longterm strategy. Sure, Windows & PC might well be the dominant platform right now. But who wants to bet their house on it being so in 10 year’s time? 20? Watch a lot of VHS do you? Still able to load your tapes of Jet Set Willy into your Spectrum?

Unless the BBC content is being stored somewhere in a drm-free, lossless, undegrading format, Highfield really just signed his own Public Disservice warrant, and come the next License Fee review, someone may well ask why the iPlayer doesn’t work on the 2012 model iPhone, and decide to slash the budget a bit to teach them a lesson.

* = You can probably compile these for platforms like FreeBSD but they’re primarily used by Linux users.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbc.....res_1.html

(NB I am the Editor of the above blog.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/t.....choice.htm