BBC goes flash
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
A while back now I blogged about how frustrating it was that the BBC insisted on using Windows Media and, gasp! Real Media for its streaming news programmes on the BBC News website.
A few months after the Flash conversion of the iPlayer, and it seems the BBC is getting with the game - more and more of the news clips being embedded on the site are Flash, and it does seem that DRM'd formats are being phased out, which is definitely a good thing. I've watched a heck of a lot more video on the BBC in the past week or so.
Short Flash clips are a lot more useful to me than longer, DRM'd bulletins. Check out this fantastic post from Justn Webb about the wooing of superdelegates in the US - the first video simply makes the piece.
The Beeb still doesn't allow for embedding of its player - the share button allows you to email a link but won't let you grab the player and put it on your own site, which seems like a slightly strange restriction. MAybe that's a feature for another year?
5 comments:
The player's also georestricted, so certain content (e.g. sport clips) is only made available to UK-based IP addresses.
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There's really no point in embedding seeing nearly all content (except for news) is only allowed to be viewed by UK IP's
Actually all news and sport clips aren't restricted to UK by default - it depends on what box the journalist ticked when creating the feature in the BBC News & Sport CPS.
As for embedding - all BBC News & Sport clips can be embedded - as can the iPlayer videos you just need to look in the source code.
I've embedded loads of BBC News & Sports clips on my blog.
I've been thinking about this too, the flash is cool but it would be really great if we could embed it on our own sites. Nevermind.