About Time
It is with joy I report that the BBC have started transcoding iPlayer content for the iPhone/iPod Touch. What this means is that whenever I am hooked up through a WiFi hotspot, I can get hold of any of the BBC’s programmes which are stored on the iPlayer.
There are also some other interesting points raised. Firstly, the ’security’ mechanism behind this is that the BBC does some user-agent checking. Basically, anything which can pretend it is an iPhone (Or Touch) can get the iPhone video stream. It was possible to rip the Flash video stream the BBC was using before, but it was fairly low quality. However, the H.264 stream given to the iPhone is higher quality, hence higher quality rips which are ready to go on an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV.
It has also caused some consternation amongst Mac users who are up in arms about the BBC ’supporting’ the iPhone before the main bulk of OS X. To them I say “learn about video formats”. The reason we don’t yet have a proper Mac client is because the content available on Windows is protected by Microsoft’s DRM, which strangely enough doesn’t work on a Mac. Transcoding the WMV content to H.264 (Or more likely source to H.264) is the first step in getting that content onto a Mac with some form of DRM. H.264 is very easily given a QuickTime wrapper which can contain some OS X, iPod, Apple TV compatible DRM.
I reckon this may be leading towards BBC iPlayer programmes becoming available through either the BBC’s own client application or an iTunes/Apple TV plugin, which will then mean that any content you grab on iPlayer will be available on your iPod/iPhone or your Apple TV, ready for viewing anywhere much as rented movies are in the states (And will be in the UK).
I for one am all in favour of waking up and having a few minutes of TV ready to watch whilst sitting bored between workshops. Since Apple haven’t seen fit to give us Season Passes to the TV series in iTunes yet, perhaps the BBC are the people to give us that?
Tags: Apple, Apple TV, BBC, compatibility, DRM, H.264, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, OS X, QuickTime, streaming, video, WMV