Do You Know the BBC iPlayer?

Posted on April 29th, 2009 Comments Off

Video on the web is on the uptake. You may have used the iPlayer, but do you know about the iPlayer? Within the UK, traffic to video websites has risen 40.7%. The BBC iPlayer being a major part of that increase, second to only YouTube. The iPlayer’s threefold growth comes from a major marketing campaign, pushed over the winter holidays, to promote the player across the BBC sites and television. How did the iPlayer get here?

iPlayer traffic increases

Wired Magazine has an article about how the iPlayer got to this level of stature and it definitely wasn’t a walk in the park. I’ll paraphrase. Ashley Highfield was the man hired in 2004 to head the department to build the iPlayer. It wasn’t easy. In fact, “There were a lot of people in the BBC who wanted it to fail,” Highfield says. “The more successful I was meant that more money could potentially be taken away from other departments.”

During development the iPlayer was heavily delayed. A major thorn in its side was the BBC Trust, a governing body that would determine the iPlayer’s “public value.” This was around mid-2007; the iPlayer was already two years behind schedule. With UK residents signing up for broadband access in droves, the iPlayer had to act quickly.

Here steps in Anthony Rose. Ironically the BBC and associated organizations sued Rose in the past for his work with Kazaa, file-sharing software used for pirating music and videos. Rose’s mantra was clear: “It has to appeal to Mrs. Smith, aged 65, who just wants to watch EastEnders, as well as the ‘Twitterati.’”

The BBC has been at the forefront of each major media revolution from radio to television, from early web development to what ‘being’ digital means today. The BBC with all its bureaucracy is a cornerstone in the market to platform innovative technologies, and Anthony Rose knew this.

When the iPlayer released a trial release back in the summer of 2007, it was anchored to Windows XP users only, enticing a major uproar from users. Strangely, this not only denied Mac and Linux users, but Vista users as well. Anthony Rose changed all that. Quickly, a deal with Adobe brought flash video to the iPlayer, making the iPlayer accessible to everyone.

For Rose, accessibility is the main issue. With accessibility to mobiles, such as the iPhone, and gaming platforms like the Nintendo Wii and Xbox, Adobe’s extensive platform allowed the iPlayer to develop a desktop application using Adobe Air. The BBC hoped this would pick up user adoption, and it definitely is working.

It doesn’t stop there. Not only is the iPlayer bridging the gap of technology accessibility, Rose’s mantra also includes those with physical disabilities. To quote, “The BBC is committed to making its broadcast and online services as accessible as possible and this includes people with visual, hearing, cognitive or motor impairments.” The iPlayer now gives the ability for deaf people to watch shows with subtitles, and/or sign language. If fact, blind users have functionality built into the player to access player controls. Such features can be seen as more important than the most recent HD quality content update.

Rose keeps his team acting like a startup. He has them monitoring blogs, forums, twitter, and the like to monitor criticism. If something needs to be fixed, the team is on top of it. When complaints arose about issues with subtitling performance, users were awarded with a major update to subtitles during the winter holidays. iPlayer listens to its users, and because of that, it performs very well.

The iPlayer performs so well, even graduates are dropping their televisions in the bin, catching up on their favorite programming using iPlayer. Yet in a strange turn of events, accessibility has an ironic twist. As much as we want to get away from television, Adobe has announced their “Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home” to utilize television. What exactly could this mean for the iPlayer?

Yet, the internet offers what broadcasting television can’t do. Video on the web can be so much more than displaying reformatted television. Taking the cookie cutter methodology of television to the internet walls up innovation. One could stipulate that seven days to view content on the iPlayer is in affect a silo, creating complications. Rose mentions building communities around Facebook. Want to share that link with your Facebook friends? Oops, it’s been eight days.

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