The BBC have announced their plans to take the iPlayer concept cross platform using the power of Adobe AIR. The blog post by Erik Huggers (director of Future Media and Technology) outlines the future vision for the iPlayer to conform to the corporations platform neutrality aspirations.
Primary drivers for this move are cross platform desktop application that works on Apple OS X, Windows and Linux. The ability to locally save programmes for viewing later or even offline, gives the license fee access to more programmes when they want on a range of devices.
Due to BBC trust and rights holder obligations the streams will naturally be protected with DRM. But considering it wasn’t long ago that they were using the dreaded Real Player on their website for video content this is a welcome step forward. I’m a big fan of the iPlayer and admire the plan for taking the BBC’s content to as many devices and platforms as possible. There are comments made on the BBC blog post about Adobe and AIR not being true to the ‘platform neutrality’ vision of the BBC. However you have to consider how Adobe has embraced the open source movement in many aspects of it’s Flash platform. They have spent many years building up the technology platforms that allow multimedia and RIA technology to reach as many people as possible and the Flash player is continuing to be a massive success. This decision is a lot better that say the BBC spending lots of license fee payer’s (UK) money on developing a competing platform from the ground up, or even going down the Microsoft WPF or Silverlight route which is less of a known quantity at the moment especially with reliability across multiple platforms.
The branding, design and UX of the iPlayer is solid and functional so should transition well between devices, web and the desktop. I just hope that the BBC do a better job of this AIR project than their previous beta outings reviewed here on RefreshingApps.com. It’s my understanding that these were early prototypes to test the water with early adopters of BBC technology rather than the mainstream.
The one place where the BBC has struggled to fully engage with RIA platforms has been there commitment to accessibility, and it’s no secret that Adobe AIR, Flex and Flash all have some issues with assistive technologies. But work is ongoing in this area so hopefully the partnership with the BBC will be fruitfull.
This is the kind of project that will really kick Adobe AIR into the mainstream. This is great news for us as developers and users of the platform and I’m really envious of the people who will be working on this project. We’ll be here to give you a full review when the covers come off and it get’s released into the wild.
