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It's been in the pipeline for years, but next month will finally see the first phase of the BBC's grand plan to put up to a million hours of digitised archive footage on the web.
What the BBC has in store for Britons who pay a licence fee is a more ambitious and sophisticated version of TVNZ's new OnDemand service, which was launched last month and gives access to free streaming video feeds of archived programmes and temporary downloads of local TV series for a fee.
The most interesting part of TVNZ's venture at this early stage is the "Classic" section, which showcases old footage from the Film Unit and from TVNZ's own archives. There are episodes of Radio With Pictures and Kaleidoscope, news reports and decades-old TV interviews.
If the TVNZ project is big in scale, think of the task facing the BBC. According to its director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield, the aim is "one day enabling any viewer to access any BBC programme ever broadcast via their television".
That's a staggering goal, but the BBC is already furiously digitising its back catalogue and attempting to secure the necessary licensing deals and permissions from third-party production companies and individuals.
It has been trialling an interactive media player called iPlayer, which has allowed those involved in the trial to catch up on radio and TV programmes they've missed for up to seven days after they have been broadcast. The iPlayer system uses peer-to-peer distribution technology to speed up downloading. Seven days after broadcast, downloaded files expire. The BBC, like TVNZ, is using Microsoft's digital rights management software to protect the content from being kept indefinitely by users. That hasn't pleased some early users, who expect the content, already been funded by TV licence payers, to be delivered without any DRM protection. "Please get real and think beyond west London, and come up with a sensible policy that reaches out to the rest of the planet who's first (and possibly only) experience of the BBC's multimedia output will be on a non Microsoft-based mobile phone," wrote one trial member on the BBC iPlayer website.
The new pilot of the digital archive service will likely involve the same media player and method of distribution used with iPlayer and take in 20,000 participants; 1000 hours of programming from the archive will initially be made available. There are some gems in there, too, like a rarely seen interview with Martin Luther King originally shown in April 1968, the day the civil rights leader was assassinated.
There's a 1956 episode of the nature TV series Zoo Quest in which David Attenborough captures the first footage of the Komodo dragon, and the Lennon Tapes, recorded just days before the singer was gunned down in New York.
For us, the big question is whether the archive will be available to the rest of the world. The BBC has made encouraging noises that it will allow access outside Britain, but there will be a paid model, either through advertising or pay-per-download fees. If emerging web TV services such as Joost are anything to go by, the BBC may follow the advertising path, using advertisers who want to reach a global audience.
The iPlayer has initially been built for Windows-based PCs, but in a move driven by the overseeing BBC Trust, it will be re-engineered for Mac users, something that may prove difficult, given the BBC's support of the Windows DRM system. Apple does not licence its own Fairplay DRM system to other content owners, so the BBC would have to either go through Apple's iTunes service to reach Mac owners or strike an unprecedented deal with Apple,
The BBC has also indicated that it is keen to bring the iPlayer to cable TV services via a personal video recorder and could use it to inject new life into the Freeview digital TV platform.
One thing is for sure, the BBC's web TV plans are world leading, and broadcasters everywhere are watching closely to see how they go.
Google's Powerpoint Rival
Web giant Google is to supplement its Google Apps suite of office tools with Presently, an alternative to Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation-making software. Presently would allow presentations to be made and shared over the web, building on the community and collaborative aspect of many of Google's applications.
Google's existing application suite, Docs & Spreadsheet, is free and can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. The Apps let users save files locally to their computers or upload them to the web, where they can be worked on with other users.
Adobe In A New Light
Software maker Adobe, which powers popular websites such as YouTube with its Flash video player, is now looking to crack Microsoft's dominance in the media player market with its new rival Adobe Media Player. A beta version of the new player will be available in the next few months, with a commercial release coming at the end of the year. Microsoft has hit back with Silverlight, a multimedia plug-in for websites that could emerge as a rival to Flash.
