The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the public broadcaster in the UK, and is the largest public broadcaster around the world. It currently has four television channels domestically, along with a range of radio and international television stations. It’s biggest tech milestone is the iPlayer, offering a large amount of programming on radio and television for download and streaming.
The BBC are set to use the upcoming 2012 Olympics in London to test out a new video standard called “Super Hi-Vision”, which is said to be 16 times better in picture quality than HDTV, despite the technology is expected to not come out to consumers for a decade.
Mark Thompson, the BBC’s Director General, has revealed more details of the international version of the BBC iPlayer – the corporation’s streaming video on demand service – at this year’s FT Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London.
The BBC, one of the most recognisable names online, has announced that it will restructure how it offers content online.
Its budget being cut by 25 percent, 200 sites being shut down and at least 360 jobs being cut from the public broadcaster over two years.
Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, has revealed that the broadcaster is currently at work in bringing its popular BBC iPlayer to licence payers while they are abroad and also creating a commercial version for worldwide audiences via BBC Worldwide, the broadcaster’s commercial division.
The BBC is said to be looking into offering a global service to its iPlayer service, currently available to the UK market only, with the help of its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. However, unlike the iPlayer in the UK, you are likely going to be charged to watch one single episode.
Several sources are claiming that both Hulu (owned by News Corp., NBC Universal and now Disney) and YouTube (owned by Google) are talking separate deals with UK broadcasters the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV to allow their shows to be on demand on their respective websites.
The popular BBC iPlayer is now bringing in something that users will be happy to use – and will be painful for the ISPs to carry – you can now download and stream your favourite BBC shows in high definition, allowing the picture quality to be better.
The BBC has said that it had purchased a network of 22,000 infected computers and used it spam its own e-mail accounts on Hotmail and GMail, used the computers for a denial-of-service test and then changed the infected computer’s wallpaper with a message saying that they were infected.
Project Kangaroo, the new joint venture between UK broadcasters ITV and Channel 4, along with BBC Worldwide – the commercial arm of the BBC, has been blocked from launching the site, similar to Hulu (owned by NBC Universal and News Corporation) by the UK Competition Commission.
The BBC has created a version of the iPlayer, with its download functionality, that works on both Linux and Mac computers. After being allowed to watch the programmes that aired on the BBC online, users on both machines will now be able to download the programmes – however, they will still be encoded with DRM, but different than what is found on the Windows version.
Following a similar move made by Yahoo, Google has announced that results of its “Fastest Rising” and top search queries from its Zeitgeist; with results from worldwide, the United States and 34 other countries, including New Zealand, United Kingdom and Australia (and if you’re scared about your privacy, don’t worry, Google says that no personal data was used).
The BBC may consider offering free and open use of the technologies that make up the successful BBC iPlayer in a way to prevent Channel 4 to gain a stake in the profitable commercial arm of the BBC, BBC Worldwide; forming part of a response to a public service broadcasting review by Ofcom, according to The Guardian.
Using the Opera-powered Internet Channel on the Wii, the BBC has announced a version of its popular iPlayer website to the Wii.
It will offer the same content as what you will get on the site, with the 7 day content expiry on content. The BBC promises that additional features will also come in the next few months.
Children in Need in the UK has just finished. It also had a special episode from Doctor Who, my favourite sci-fi show. Scouring over the net, I managed to find it…
NEWS IN BRIEF: BBC Worldwide (the commercial subsidiary for the BBC) and the creators of Gran Turismo; with 40 episodes from the entire series to be put in a dedicated channel for Gran Turismo TV.