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December 2007 Archives

December 15, 2007

Ephemeral Democracy

For the next few days you'll be able to see below an embedded video showing BBC Parliament coverage of one of Thursday's debates in the House of Commons.


It's good news that the BBC let us embed their programmes rather than force us to traipse off to iPlayer, even if you do currently have to hack the embed code up yourself.

This embedability ticks off BBC Web Principle Number 13:

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes.

However, come next week the video will no longer work (I hope it breaks gracefully) since the BBC removes programmes from the Web 7 days after broadcast - even debates from the House of Commons, where there are zero rights issues.

This breaks BBC Web Principle Number 8, which states:

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

This is a shame, but I suppose justifies the Principle's implicit order of importance, since being able to embed something from the BBC is moot if said something then gets deleted by the BBC after a few days. This is the Web. Stuff should persist.

Ah well, it's progress nonetheless. As is the quietly-revolutionary-if-about-5-years-late bbc.co.uk/programmes, offering a permanent page for every episode of every BBC programme, and which now also embeds iPlayer media for as long as its available after broadcast. (Thanks Tom!)


Goodbye DRM from iPlayer?

Interestingly (!!?), the BBC appears to have dropped DRM from the new Flash streaming version of iPlayer.

I've got Flash v8 running on my Mac in Firefox, and iPlayer videos play aok, full screen mode apart.

I'm pretty sure that iPlayer would demand I install the new Flash v9.3 player if the BBC had turned on the DRM feature overhead which ships as part of Adobe's new Flash Streaming Server v3.

Or am I wrong?


About December 2007

This page contains all entries posted to Tomski.com - Tom Loosemore's Blog in December 2007. They are listed from oldest to newest.

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