iPlayer: great when it works

I may be prepared to forgive the BBC for all the iPlayer’s usability headaches (of which there are many). As mentioned earlier, I downloaded the Top Gear polar special – and at the end of the day, it all worked. I was able to watch the show in full screen on my uncommonly large widescreen PC monitor. The picture maybe lacked a bit of sharpness, but it was perfectly watchable throughout, and the audio was nigh-on faultless.

And incidentally, the show itself was magnificent. Almost no mention of cars; instead, it was what journalists frequently refer to as ‘Boy’s Own stuff’, without necessarily knowing what Boy’s Own was. Three ordinary blokes attempting to reach the North Pole – one using conventional means, the other two in a 4×4. Who gets there first? Beautifully shot, perfectly paced, wonderfully edited. Drama, adrenaline, and the sort of scenery which just makes you gasp. Clarkson & co are in cracking form, too. Award-winning stuff, if there’s any justice.

(Some technical data for those who care about such things: 387MB for an hour’s telly, a bit rate of 860Kbps. Picture in a rather unusual 7:4 ratio, at 672×384 pixels – that’s fractionally narrower than the normal 16:9 widescreen. Encoded using Windows Media 9 for both audio and video. The DRM gives you a week to watch it; no ‘collaborative play’, no burning, no synchronising. In other words, it’s your PC or nothing.)

Now ITV News goes user-generated

ITV News has just launched a ‘citizen journalism’ segment called Uploaded, promising to feature the best video contributions from viewers in its big three ITV bulletins. ‘The plan is to seed a topic to debate at 7.30am each morning by email to all those signed up to the Uploaded website,’ says Media Guardian. ‘Uploaded already has about 100 people signed up as a foundation group. The initiative aims to develop a select group of about 10 international citizen correspondents from flashpoints such as Zimbabwe, Iraq and Gaza.’ It’s the usual array of submission methods – MMS, email, web upload.

There’s a video clip explaining the project, but be warned – ITV doesn’t make it easy. To start with, you’ll need to be using IE, and may have to download a ‘security patch’ (?). Then, before each clip, you’ll probably have to sit through a 30-second commercial. For perhaps a minute of actual content? From someone who may or may not have any valuable insight? In rubbish video quality, and worse audio? Forget it.

BBC iPlayer: beta or no beta, it has to be better

I’m back at my desk after last week’s flood-inspired shenanigans, and hence at my WinXP desktop machine. So it’s time to have a play with the BBC’s iPlayer. And on first impressions, it has a l-o-n-g way to go.

First off, of course, I had to abandon the browser I personally prefer (Firefox) to use the browser the BBC’s DRM software forces me to use (IE). I had to enter my beta invite credentials three or four times; I then had to register another new username and password; I then had to download the 4MB client application. The black-n-pink ‘library’ application is on my screen, and it’s time to start downloading some stuff. Er, sort of – have to go back into (standalone) IE again first. Pretty quickly, my head is spinning.

The timing of all this couldn’t be better, since my TV currently prefers to make fizzing noises, rather than pictures and audio. So let’s download the Top Gear special I missed last week. I click ‘download’, and – finally! – we’re making progress. Or are we? The show appears in the library application’s download queue… but there’s no obvious sign of activity. We’re sitting at 0% and 0MB for a very long time, despite the fact I can see my PC is downloading plenty of data. Just as I’m about to give up, the application starts to tell me I’m getting data in. Very, very slowly. This is agonising.

Despite lengthy testing last year, this still feels like a product in its very early stages. I’d almost certainly have given up if I didn’t feel professionally compelled to give it a go.

The Beeb has made a serious marketing mistake by calling this the ‘iPlayer’ – as it forces you to make comparisons with iTunes. And so far, even though I don’t really even like iTunes, there’s only one winner. Crucially, iTunes has an integrated browser, so everything happens in one place. And when you go to download something, you can see things progressing. At the moment, my iPlayer library may or may not have crashed – it’s hard to tell, looking at it. Not even an animated ‘eggtimer’ to show it’s still alive. iTunes has the same DRM issues; the same downloading of large files; and let’s not even mention podcasts/subscription, which iPlayer should surely include, but doesn’t. Yet iTunes does it all (and more!) with ease.

This matters. The BBC is spending licence fee money, and the stakes are higher. Never mind the whole XP-plus-Windows-Media thing. This service has to be so good and so easy that my mother (or indeed anyone aged up to 75) should be able to use it. At the moment, it just isn’t. Not by a long way.

FCO's video propaganda makes YouTube debut

It’s all happening in King Charles Street, suddenly. I see there’s a new YouTube channel being operated by the Foreign Office, under the banner of its i-uk website promoting the UK to interested foreigners. Popping up in this video channel is a bit of footage from SoSFA David Miliband’s trip last week to Pakistan.
But you’ll immediately see it’s something rather different to previous Miliband YouTube intrusions. If it looks like a TV news report with no voiceover, that’s because that’s precisely what it is.
For years now, the FCO has funded something called British Satellite News – a daily satellite TV feed of unvoiced news reports, for broadcasters to use within their own programming. It makes no secret of its mission to provide ‘coverage of worldwide topical events and stories from a British perspective’ – and yes, inevitably that means a relentless series of fluffy ‘good news’ stories, with the occasional piece on foreign policy. The FCO says ‘it has a particular but not exclusive focus on the Islamic and Arab world’, which is a change since the days I worked there, although hardly surprising.
This has been around as professional source material for over a decade. A lot of it is available for ‘preview’ in Windows Media format (although only 320×240 resolution) – and whilst they don’t offer a way to download clips for desktop remixing, a Google search will reveal numerous methods. The only surprise is that it’s taken this long to hit YouTube.
Update: Actually, I’ve just come across a BritishSatelliteNews channel on YouTube, which has only been operating for three weeks. These clips, though, come with voiceover. I suppose it’s not strictly being run by the FCO, but by its contracted supplier.

BBC iPlayer: old kit only

I was delighted to receive a beta invite to the BBC’s new iPlayer application last night. I logged in with the details supplied, to find a really quite slick ajax-based web interface, and a wealth of BBC content within. Hot pink isn’t really a colour I’d associate with the Beeb, but it works well against the black-and-charcoal background.

Having not had a functional TV since last Friday lunchtime, it was a good chance to see a few things I’d missed. Er, no: not on Vista, not on Firefox. I’ll try it all again later, when I find a slightly older PC.

Actually, I’m finding a growing number of reasons to dislike Vista. If I get brave in the next week or two, I may finally stick Ubuntu alongside it on my laptop. The new visual effects in this October’s Ubuntu release are really quite mouthwatering.

FCO staff stir as Miliband posts holiday snaps on Flickr

Actually, no sooner do I publish that last item about David Miliband than I notice some more and rather interesting new online activity at FCO.
Clearly taking the Mayo-Steinberg doctrine to heart, there’s now a Flickr user called ‘fcowebsite’, with a grand total of three images, all from SoSFA’s jaunt over to Afghanistan in the last couple of days. They’ve used a Flickr badge to illustrate the ‘Newsfile’ page about the trip. Using an existing community rather than building your own? Well done, I say – although it must surely be in breach of Flickr’s community guidelines, which state quite clearly:

If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account.

More digg/delicious buttons here too – and yes, once again, it’s only been dugg/tagged by Liam King and ladyclaire. Both of whom seem to be very recent recruits to del.icio.us. Hmm… I note ladyclaire’s use of the word ‘our’ with reference to the ‘Have Your Say’ pages I mentioned earlier, which makes me think she’s actually FCO too. Nothing wrong with doing this, of course, but still…
Incidentally, if Liam or Claire wants to add a Facebook button to the FCO pages – and given the user numbers and demographics, it’s probably a better place to be doing any stirring – the necessary code is on the Facebook site.

Foreign sec Miliband kick-starts Diplomacy 2.0

No sign of David Miliband returning to blogging, but he’s starting to make some ‘2.0’ noises at the Foreign Office. His Chatham House speech last week called for an evolution in foreign policy, based on ‘new thinking and new solutions. This thinking can begin in the Foreign Office, but it needs to draw on the widest base of ideas. The new diplomacy is public as well as private, mass as well as elite, real-time as well as deliberative. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do our business.’

It’s backed up by a new section on the FCO website, inviting readers to Have Your Say on the three key questions he says he’s facing as the new Foreign Sec: setting the FCO’s priorities, cross-government coordination, and ‘how the FCO can engage beyond Whitehall’. So far, the first has attracted the majority of the 20-odd moderated comments, despite (realistically) being the least likely to be directly influenced by such input.

But it’s the other two which point directly to the Miliband mentality, as exhibited in previous roles. And tellingly, the pages in question feature Digg, delicious and Reddit buttons. Possibly a first for a major Whitehall department’s corporate site? So far, they haven’t been very effective: a single tagging on delicious (from someone who could be a Labour stooge, judging by her other bookmarks?), and just a single digg (from someone who very much looks like an FCO plant). Personally I wouldn’t be bothered with these, as I’ve never heard of them being especially effective; mind you, at least they show you’re 2.0-savvy. ‘Share on Facebook’ maybe, but that would be all.

The full speech is posted in chunks on YouTube by the event organisers, Avaaz.org – ‘a civic organization that promotes progressive political action on issues such as the climate change and religious conflicts’, co-founded by MoveOn.org.

BBC downbeat on video podcasts

Worth noting a couple of posts from the BBC’s Mark Barlex in the last few days on their Editors Blog. Mark is ‘on demand editor of BBC TV News’, and has announced that the various ‘vodcast’ trials of recent months are being stopped at the end of July ‘as planned’. He continues:

Those services will disappear while the BBC assesses the project. Some may come back later in the year while others may not. We need to be sure that products offer real value for the audience before we launch them back onto the market.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but the language used here seems to suggest that the podcasts haven’t been big successes. (I don’t recall any corresponding period of reflection for the audio podcast trial.) I’m not entirely surprised, to be honest. We have better ‘on demand TV’ channels for this sort of thing than download to PC or iPod. And I never downloaded any of them, not even once, not even out of curiosity.

One definite casualty is StoryFIX, the experimental five-minute blast of news stories from the preceding week. I never actually downloaded it myself, but caught it numerous times on News 24. Sometimes it was inspired, and genuinely entertaining / informative. (Probably not too educational, though.) More recently, it’s been a bit of a mess – a bit like splicing together all the noisiest moments from the week’s news bulletins. Or maybe I’m too old.

Actually, the age thing is really concerning me. I was genuinely shaken by my discovery that the same record had been No1 for 10 weeks, making it one of the most important singles in pop history – and I’d never even heard it. And when I did finally hear it, I thought it was shoddy rubbish.