The BBC decided to shut down the RSS feeds for the iplayer without any kind of warning on Thursday. The excuse is the end of a larger hosting contract for those legacy sites, and the users are promised some day in the future an API, called Nitro, to access the same kind of info. However, the head of platform API, Jon Billings, makes it clear that the reason was to break third party players: In particular, the BBC does not sanction XBMC, get_iplayer or similar clients, and the iPlayer RSS feeds were never designed or intended to support them. Nitro will almost certainly not support their ways of working.
The Nitro API portal seems to be only for BBC corporate partners only, according to the comments on that blog post, so it will indeed be worthless to third parties like kodi or get-iplayer developers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:26PM
Just boycott their dumb asses. No hits means no income for them. After posting net losses for a couple of quarters, they'll come around.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:29PM
This is crown-funded content, from the license and tax revenues of the UK, not property of a "BBC". They insist on operating like an ordinary commercial enterprise, dictating the terms on which this content is consumed.
If they wish to pursue a future on the same terms as Sky, they should be deprived of their crown charter, and see if they can go it alone.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:32PM
right on the money, you can't both have your pie and eat it
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:35PM
The BBC don't actually own copyright on all of the content they make available and this is the bogus argument they use to restrict access to content they do own the copyright in. The --pid function of get_iplayer still works for now, if they break it I'll toss out the TV (a device that's only ever powered when guests are around) and have no reason to pay my licence fee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @07:19PM
Here in Denmark they solved *that* problem by changing the license fee from "anyone who owns a TV" to "anyone who owns a TV or has an internet connection (including mobile) over 256 kbit".
That way, they can keep making TV for people for a generation that is now over the age of 60, while getting paid by everyone.
(Not trying to imply that only people over 60 watch TV, only that the danish state TV is catering to that group. Such as reruns of stuff my grandmother used to watch 30 years ago).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @08:55PM
In Finland you used to have to pay a fee if you had a TV. Since not all people did, they decided to collectively punish all citizens by making it a tax you have to pay regardless of owning a tv.
And then they send (among the decent stuff) for example sports, like formula 1 and ice hockey. Shit like this belongs onto commercial channels.
In almost related news we had a dog tax but since so many people weren't paying it they dropped the whole thing. And we have a temporary vehicle tax since 1958... Finland is a funky country.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mojo chan on Monday November 03 2014, @01:20PM
I have a TV but don't need to pay the license fee because I don't watch anything live. I just use iPlayer, Netflix and Bittorrent to cover everything I want.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:51PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday November 03 2014, @10:28PM
If the BBC buys content and sells content then the cost to license-payers should be about the same. The major difference should be that the quality and/or variety of content should increase in proportion to the volume of content traded. This hasn't happened. Instead, the BBC has expanded to ridiculous levels. It runs 10 national radio stations [bbc.co.uk], 46 regional radio stations [bbc.co.uk], the BBC World Service (in 28 languages) and, at one point, made a serious proposal to run eight television stations. (It is currently running five 24 hour television stations [bbc.co.uk] in addition to subsidiaries, joint ventures, children's television, minority language television and political television.)
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(Score: 2) by khakipuce on Monday November 03 2014, @01:30PM
You and other Murdoch share holders and fan boys, along with assorted rabid right wing loons would love that. In the mean time the vast majority of UK license payers know that they get incredible programming and excellent value for money from the Beeb. Sky cannot provide for £40 per month anything like the original programming that the Beeb produces for £12 per month. Hell, even things like Netflix cost £7 per month and show NO original content
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday November 03 2014, @05:24PM
You and other Murdoch share holders and fan boys, along with assorted rabid right wing loons would love that.
Nonsense. I hold no such position. I'm just tired of Auntie selling herself to these Spivs for a cheap night.
Murdoch? The man is lower than groundwater.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday November 04 2014, @04:28PM
List of original programs distributed by Netflix [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:35PM
BBC? Yeah, governments are worried about net losses...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @11:31PM
Not a realistic solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:28PM
The BBC used to be a gift to the world and boon to England's reputation. Now it's just a slap in the face and a "fuck you world".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:11PM
That's what happens when hollywood-style MBAs get put in charge of a public service. It is infection of the mind that thinks government services are interchangeable with businesses.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 02 2014, @06:52PM
I think it has less to do with the MBA part and more to do with the fact that the people who conceived and authorized the changes have last names ending in -berg, -stein, -wein, -blum, or -krantz.
Now that's Hollywood in a nutshell.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday November 02 2014, @07:56PM
Careful. When you want to know who rules a people, find out whom they are forbidden to criticize.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Open4D on Monday November 03 2014, @04:55PM
Obviously no-one is forbidden to criticize any particular Jew, but if you want to start suggesting there's a Jewish conspiracy you'd better provide some evidence/argument/anything. Is "Jon Billings" a good Jewish name?
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday November 04 2014, @01:50AM
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday November 04 2014, @06:31PM
But 100,000 anecdotes begin to form basis for evidence.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085642/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1 [imdb.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday November 05 2014, @04:35PM
Okay, so if we were talking about a pro-Israel bias in Hollywood then this quote may be relevant. But we're actually talking about the BBC locking down the content that they distribute.
I would say that #112457 has been a highly succesful troll post.
(Score: 2, Troll) by jasassin on Sunday November 02 2014, @08:57PM
Wow. I'd mod ya up. Truth might hurt, but fuckin-a. Wow. Just plain right on wow.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 1) by Lagg on Monday November 03 2014, @01:11AM
It's a little unfortunate that the PC asshattery that started to infect slashdot might do the same here. Ethanol might post like an idiot sometimes but he's technically right. Try not seeing the post as "teh jews!" and more "pricks that love to reinforce the greedy jew stereotype". Again, not PC. But that's what it comes down to. Greedy people with their own agenda and greedy people can come from any country of origin or religion. While part of the problem might be MBA infestation it's not completely it. At least MBA mindsets can be attributed to stupidity. What I've been seeing as of late from the BBC can only be called malice. Especially this.
and no, I don't encourage ethanol's nonsense. But frankly he makes better points than many posts do so if you don't like it one-up his ass or mod up good posts instead of being shallow and instantly -1 Troll-ing him.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:33PM
Reminds me of PBS... on our side of the pond they act the same way, its all .gov and donation money and they are NOT happy unless you watch their videos the way they tell your to. Its kind of weird.
Its like the scientific publishing scam, where they collect taxes from the public then keep the results secret and licensed.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Monday November 03 2014, @01:25PM
It's due to licencing agreements. Like the BBC, PBS probably doesn't make everything that goes into its programming. Music, archive footage, outsourced production and the like. In order to get it at reasonable commercial rates they have to agree to control distribution of their material. If they just threw up a .torrent the rights holders would either demand much more money (because of the wider audience and world-wide distribution) or just refuse outright.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 03 2014, @01:39PM
I disagree. If you have a sat dish with a FTA decoder you can watch any of that stuff for free, unencoded, in the western hemisphere, and the greater "UK" area is a rounding error in the eastern hemisphere if you somehow got a feed on the other side of the planet. Its on AMC-21 and its in full HD which my crappy local affiliate doesn't broadcast (they have one HD feed and like ten multiplexed crapchannels, but you can get full HD off FTA). Completely unencoded, and legal, and "official". Lots of schools get PBS feeds this way because the affiliates or the affiliates signals or the affiliates multiplexing, sucks.
They also stream live channel feeds on the net internationally and have crappy international apps AFAIK or more accurately, last time I checked.
The only thing they're concerned about is controlling HOW you watch it, for no logical reason, not WHO watches.
The death of FTA is an interesting side topic, there's not much left anymore on Ku FTA other than PBS and the propaganda channels.
(Score: 4, Informative) by isostatic on Sunday November 02 2014, @09:04PM
It was a legitimate shutdown, the old sites were hosted by Atos (formerly Siemens) on an old platform (basically just perl from what I recall) after the disastrous outsourcing of BBC Technology 10 years ago by the terrible John Varney, technology in the BBC has been a bit of a mess. The incompetent Ashley Highfield (of the windows-based p2p original iplayer, which Brandon Butterworth, head of BBC R&D, soon kicked into the long grass with a 3 man-month project called BBC Redux [bbc.co.uk]
The new platform [bbc.co.uk] is Forge (although that apparently only has a short life), PHP or Java based, so any iplayer RSS feeds are probably on the old platform. This was supposed to close last July, then September, and has recently turned off.
So anything that hasn't specifically been made for the new platform won't work. Jon Billings' comment basically says "we're not spending money or making design decisions on making things like xbmc work, and don't get your hopes up for an easy workaround". I imagine there's a lot of pressure from the rights people too (The license fee would be 30% higher if the BBC couldn't sell its programs abroad)
Disclaimer: I work for the BBC, although nothing to do with online or the iplayer, who are both vastly over staffed compared with other areas. I have had an old site shut down this month by this move, but these aren't official comments from the BBC, are based on things in the public domain, and the opinions of the terrible way the BBC was run in the Thompson era, and continues to be run in many departments, is just mine and most of my colleagues. We do what we can though.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday November 02 2014, @10:29PM
I understand that most of the BBC's early dynamic HTML was in Perl because that was a sensible choice at the time. From this, the BBC gained a large number of Perl programmers and Perl became a logical choice for the BBC iPlayer back-end. From this, get_iplayer (written in Perl) was unofficially tolerated because the Perl developers were using it for testing. However, many of the senior developers became dis-illusioned by the BBC's management. For example, I understand that management didn't understand the reason for having a third failover site. Therefore, the BBC iPlayer had failover except when it was switching between sites. Before contracts were established with third-party CDNs, failover was occurring every 12 hours or more frequently.
This process required about 30 minutes of cache priming. During this manual process, it was not possible to rollback. This left the BBC iPlayer particularly vulnerable to failure for at least one hour per day. From this, I was expecting a hard, sustained outage to occur due to hardware failure or administrator error. Instead, I reported that outage occurred [soylentnews.org] due to cache failure during the broadcast of concurrent sports events [soylentnews.org]. This may or may not have been exacerbated outsourcing and server/storage virtualization.
I'm not under contract or NDA here but don't ask about my sources.
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(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday November 03 2014, @01:40AM
Thank you for some more background on the situation.
All that was required was a Blog post that "on X of this month we are turning off Y. If you feel this will affect you please email iplayer-dev@bbc.co.uk". I feel sure the open source community would have been responsive.
As the "turn off" also broke a number of consumer devices (TV's and media centres), I detect a rearguard action is in progress...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday November 03 2014, @10:46AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by elf on Monday November 03 2014, @01:37PM
The BBC gets to fulfil its charter by providing the iPlayer and the freely broadcast advert free service to all in the UK, stopping 3rd party iplayer plugins is not preventing anyone in the UK from watching it. Secondly, how is it a market distortion? The content is free and it is still free. In a perfect competition work it would still be free. They certainly don't have a monopoly, there are plenty of other services that offer similar types of content on demand and those services have never allowed you to watch their content in third party players.
I don't understand why every one is getting so angry. In the UK you don't need a TV license if you don't watch "Live" tv. That means that all the on demand content on iplayer is providing doesn't require you to have paid any money, you don't really have any right to complain.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cafebabe on Monday November 03 2014, @11:32PM
Last month, there was a large proportion of geeks using the PVR function of get_iplayer via cron and then watching it on the device of their choice. Some people even had VPN subscriptions so they could get a valid IP address for the content restriction. This month, people are reduced to clicking around a website and maybe watching it online in a webpage via Flash. Technically, it is still free but it is hugely inconvenient.
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(Score: 2) by elf on Tuesday November 04 2014, @02:20PM
with the iplayer you can download content on most devices and watch it in your own time, for those that use a VPN its always a luck game (all content providers try to stop this). The iplayer is available on almost all devices I know.
Just because its free it doesn't mean you can do what you want with it, we all would love it to be but that's not how life generally work.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday November 05 2014, @10:25AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by halcyon1234 on Monday November 03 2014, @02:33PM
Three man-months... projects done and redone over and over. Jesus, what is the COST associated with that?
I know content "owners" are scared shitless of Teh Intenets stealing their precious bits and all, but seriously-- at what point will it not be easier and cheaper to just say "Hey, we'll pay you double the license fee for unlimited distribution. Okay, dev team-- just do whatever The Pirate Bay is doing. Name everything "Show - SxxExx - Episode Title [format]". Slap a static HTML page with our logo and a search bar. Open RSS feed for everything posted. Fuck the fancy interface and authentication and all that. We can get this up in one weekend with about 24 man-hours. We'll dump some more budget into servers and bandwidth. Fucking done."
TCO would be orders of magnitude smaller than three (four? five?) massive redesigns. The content owners would get their money. The public would get a simple interface that Just Fucking Works, and access to all the content in whatever way they want.
Fucking copyright and corporate bullshit, man
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday November 03 2014, @03:49PM
You clearly have no idea
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday November 03 2014, @11:52PM
If you broadcast content to 60 million people over UHF, satellite *and* Internet streaming, don't get prissy when one person shares it beyond their immediate friends. We all (should) know that the content is licensed for a fixed period in one region only. However, we all (probably) know that content is available outside of those license conditions. https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4674&cid=112605 [soylentnews.org] is a pragmatic suggestion to make the content available from a legitimate source in the most straightforward manner while acknowledging why it won't happen.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Tuesday November 04 2014, @01:20AM
I was referring to the idea you could just throw a few hard drives in a PC over the weekend and be done, and the amazingly fast speed that r&d manager to end run highfield's p2p "solution" was just bureaucracy.
http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof13/Bird-Redux.pdf [uknof.org.uk] for some interesting issues that cropped up with zfs at the time.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday November 04 2014, @02:17AM
So:-
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(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday November 04 2014, @08:14PM
I believe it's changed somewhat now, but putting together a system than can record and transcode more than a terabyte a day, and serve it up to millions of people, keep it available reliably, is not something that you can put in overnight.
(Score: 1) by Wrong Turn Ahead on Sunday November 02 2014, @11:43PM
I used to really like the BBC programs. Then I switched to Linux for my desktops and found out just how much of a second-class citizen I was and that most services outright hated me regardless of payment. For a while, I thought it was my fault for choosing an alternate operating system and I worked hard to find hacks and workarounds. Now I just don't give two shits about the BBC (and many others). The top commenter has it right - ignore them and move on...
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday November 03 2014, @04:34PM
Its not a surprise why nobody wants to pay for content, when companies make even free content difficult to use.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh