BBC past and future

The BBC web site may be a bit boring on the interface front, but it's easy to use and it has content from sixty years of broadcasting. It doesn't just rest on the past either. Where PBS in America seems to be falling behind the crusty old beeb is doing stuff like developing new episodes of Dr Who in Flash, and even developing its own streaming codec.

Their radio shows stretch from live broadcast through to repeats of forty, fifty, even sixty year old shows. You can listen to the news or to the fifty year old Goon Show (think surrealism with laughs). These shows are transmitted in what a purist might consider very lo-fi but it is sufficient to play back on a PC or an iPod. My ears are pretty old so I even find music quality acceptable from rock (Coldplay and REM concerts recently) to classical. 44 kilobits per second is poor even for mid range MP3 (128kbps) but for most of this stuff it is enough. If you really must have 5.1 surround sound high definition you will need to wait a while, they seem to be experimenting with it but not outside Europe. Me, I'd rather have the range of shows that fits in with the multiplication model favoured here and in Europe not to mention meaning that I don't need to upgrade yet again.

The overall cultural philosophy is still quite Reithian in that the content is there for you to be taught, entertained and informed. More modern technology is represented, for example a complete Dr Who adventure done in Flash plus real actors. As yet interactivity is not a major feature though it is increasing. Back with that Reithian approach this tends to be educational like French lessons for schools but there is also the rather more subversive open source streaming project.

The BBC has always done a lot of its own research. Well now it is extending that to a co-operative community model where volunteers can help as programmers, testers and documentation writers. Look up dirac in the BBC site and you will find yourself at Sourceforge the major open source site. dirac is a video streaming codec that the BBC started and has now released to open source development. A streaming codec allows video images to be broken up at the provider end, transmitted, then reconstructed so, for example, a browser plug-in can let you watch video. In essence it is the plumbing underneath the pictures.

One reason they are doing this is that at present they use proprietary technologies like Real Networks player for radio and video replay. This is usually hidden in their own radio player extension to the browser which is excitingly called Radio Player. This is relatively easy to implement but it makes them dependent on proprietary systems which could become a problem for a public service broadcast provider – think cost, embedded adverts and data collection from clients amongst other things. With dirac they can be independent of that.
So, from the past they are letting us hear a lot of old programs (are you listening TVNZ) while they are encouraging enthusiastic volunteers to help them produce technology for at least one Internet future. It shows how much an old style organisation can use, even create, modern mediation technology to revitalize itself and its services. All this and they get to annoy the British government on a regular basis!