So I endured an hour of Ashley Highfield lecturing me on 'new business models' for the internet early this week. I'm taking his advice and planning to introduce my own flat rate tax on households viewing this blog, plus a small army of enforcers to go around and peer in people's windows to check if they're looking at it. The BBC knows how to spend money, not make it, and please don't make me laughby referring to BBC Worldwide, its commercial arm. If it actually had to bid on the open market for access to programme rights, rather than get the on a plate, would it be half as successful?
Anyway, I wanted to check our the Iplayer they are keen to trumpet as a massive success, 2 months from catching up user preference and introducing Flash Video support. As you might guess from Flash very easy to start up a show, nice quality full screen. However, the programme discovery interface officially sucks. After six months of development. It's not rocket science to allow your users to search across more than one parameter. Okay, so I can list last night's shows, but not by channel too? I can only view one alphabetical letter at a time? If there are two episodes of the same show, they turn up randomly on the same browse page and I need to rollover to see which is which. The entire interface and UX seems an afterthought.
The other thing that nags me about this whole Iplayer thing is the economics. So the Beeb has responded to poor demand for the Peer-2-Peer powered download client. So that means it's hub and spoke delivery of Flash video content. Even a discount rates, just how much is it costing them per user per show? A 60 minute programme at 500Kb/s is 1.8GB at my reckoning. Even if this costs as little as 2-3, it shows the medium is not economic for large scale audience distribution of mainstream programming, from an ad-funded perspective. Niche markets with targeted audiences and high yield advertisers/sponsors yes, but Eastenders.
The BBC can go down this route because it sets its own agenda which, according to Highfield, is to encourage people to buy devices. Very odd, and not anything I recall from the BBC's charter. It's another boost to Flash video as the user's choice viewing method, but I don't think it offers any commercial lessons about internet television broadcasting.
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