Puffbox

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.)

It isn’t as easy as it looks. The Economist’s Project Red Stripe has closed without ever actually delivering anything, despite six staffers and a six-figure budget. Robert Andrews has the story. The team blog finds several euphemistic ways to say it bombed.

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.

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.

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.

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.