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posted by janrinok on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the unpopular-and-expensive-file-format dept.

El Reg reports

The broadcaster flagged the demise of Windows Media last year, when it also announced Audio Factory, a streaming tool delivering audio in the AAC codec over http. Audio Factory aims to standardise Auntie's [the BBC's oft-use nickname in the UK] audio delivery practices and infrastructure.

[...]writes senior product [sic] manager Jim Simmons, [...] "we cannot afford to support every service on all the existing legacy formats", [...] "We are now retiring Windows Media. This already had low listener numbers and is not being supported by the wider industry."

How low? Between two and five per cent of listeners. The BBC tried to hang on to Windows Media for those who rely on it, but used the logic below to turn it off:

"Continuing to serve Windows Media is too expensive at a time when the BBC is facing significant cuts in its funding. It requires special infrastructure to serve it and the industry is moving away from providing it as an option.

We have explored the potential to set up an authentication process to provide downloads to these devices, in a way that would meet our rightsholder agreements, but this would also be complicated and expensive."

[...]The broadcaster is also ceasing SHOUTcast streams that use the AAC codec, replacing them with an MP3 version of the services.

As Roy Schestowitz has pointed out repeatedly at TechRights, there has been an incestuous revolving door thing going on between the Beeb and Microsoft, so this is a noteworthy step.

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  • (Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:43PM (#144262)

    that's all.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by frojack on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:58PM

      by frojack (1554) on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:58PM (#144271) Journal

      that's all.

      No point in posting corrections to direct quotations from the linked site. The Register doesn't read SoylentNews, and being British and all, they only grudgingly accept corrections to their use of the English language.

      Further, "percent" is not at all universally accepted: http://grammarist.com/spelling/percent-per-cent/ [grammarist.com]

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Friday February 13 2015, @11:25AM

        by Jaruzel (812) on Friday February 13 2015, @11:25AM (#144561) Homepage Journal

        Please don't hold up The Register as a poster child for good English. Over the past few years it has proactively mutated into the shill-enabled-tabloid-headline-automatic-lie-machine that it is today. I used to comment a lot over there, but these days I can't even bring myself to visit it. None of what they post anymore is proper tech news. I'm all for a bit a humour in articles, but not when it's done at a cost of substance, or even y'know, the facts.

        --
        This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:54PM

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:54PM (#144268) Journal

    Roy Schestowitz keeps a list of the BBC-related articles [techrights.org] going back the last few years. That would be more thorough, probably, than a Google search, or at least it would give more relevant results.

    But yeah given the infiltration of BBC staff by "former" M$ staff, this is a big step moving to more standard formats. It would be an even bigger step for them to move to open standards.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday February 12 2015, @07:10PM

      by frojack (1554) on Thursday February 12 2015, @07:10PM (#144274) Journal

      It would be an even bigger step for them to move to open standards.

      Maybe they are using open standards. From Wiki:

      The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on 6 December 1991 as ISO CD 11172.[56][57] In most countries, patents cannot be filed after prior art has been made public, and patents expire 20 years after the initial filing date, which can be up to 12 months later for filings in other countries. As a result, patents required to implement MP3 expired in most countries by December 2012, 21 years after the publication of ISO CD 11172.

      Without a deep dive into the exact encoding involved, its hard to prove they are using the later versions of mp3 that are still patent encumbered.

      I don't understand why they didn't use AAC, which, while still encumbered by patents [wikipedia.org], is usually considered lighter weight.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:40PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:40PM (#144350)

        Read the summary once more.

        Audio Factory, a streaming tool delivering audio in the AAC codec over http

        -- gewg_

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:53PM (#144358)

          So what does this mean?

          The broadcaster is also ceasing SHOUTcast streams that use the AAC codec, replacing them with an MP3 version of the services.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday February 12 2015, @10:12PM

          by frojack (1554) on Thursday February 12 2015, @10:12PM (#144363) Journal

          Read the summary once more.

          Audio Factory, a streaming tool delivering audio in the AAC codec over http

          I was going by this line from TFS:

          [...]The broadcaster is also ceasing SHOUTcast streams that use the AAC codec, replacing them with an MP3 version of the services.

          So what exactly was your interpretation of that last line? Was it meant to be part of the quote?

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @10:59PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @10:59PM (#144380)

            that last line? Was it meant to be part of the quote?

            That's what I intended. [soylentnews.org]

            My reading of the item was that there is something proprietary about the encoding/DRM/wrapper of the SHOUTcast streams and only that subspecies is getting the thumbs down.

            -- gewg_

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @04:41PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @04:41PM (#144659)

        patents required to implement MP3 expired in most countries by December 2012,

        Ah, that is what the Maya calendar was all about!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @11:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @11:40PM (#144402)

      I was thinking about going that route. [googleusercontent.com]
      Kudos to you for the direct link.

      The search link was OK in my submission, [soylentnews.org] but it got munged in the process of making it to the front page.
      There's supposed to be an ampersand before num. [google.com]

      The reasoning for the Flamebait mod you got would be interesting to read.

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @07:56AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @07:56AM (#144520)

        It was probably due to linking directly to Techrights [soylentnews.org]. Roy Schestowitz's site contains information that M$ and others do not want anyone to know. One of the results is that it has been under more or less constant DDOS [fossforce.com] from a Windoze botnet for several months, a botnet started attacking his wife's site first before shifting focus to Techrights. He also holds RMS in high esteem and uses the f-word at a time both RMS and the GPL have been under a big campaign of disparagement. So it could be either of those two.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @07:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @07:59PM (#144296)

    To all of you who have not heard of this wonderful tool yet, allow me to suggest you research get-iplayer. This is a fantastic command line tool which allows one to download radio and video content from the BBC iPlayer by emmulating an iPhone (max 1280x720 res for videos) without disclosing your identity. It is available by adding jon-hedgerows/get-iplayer to your software sources in linux. For those of you outside the UK, (Auntie doesn't like you foreign johnnys raiding her pantry,) if you can spoof a UK IP address you can take her for all she's got!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @11:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @11:28PM (#144399)

      Thanks man, works great with the VPN provider I use.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @08:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @08:00PM (#144297)

    No, the pet name for the BBC is "Beeb". "Auntie" was used a lot in the 1950s and 1960s, but hardly at all since then. Even "Beeb" isn't used that much these days.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 12 2015, @10:24PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday February 12 2015, @10:24PM (#144366) Journal

      No, the pet name for the BBC is "Beeb". "Auntie" was used a lot in the 1950s and 1960s, but hardly at all since then. Even "Beeb" isn't used that much these days.

      I guess the new pet name for the BBC starts with C? :-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 14 2015, @01:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 14 2015, @01:03PM (#144937)

      It has been used by the BBC themselves in a program title as late as 2001, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auntie%27s_Bloomers [wikipedia.org] for one example. Perhaps it is incorrect to say it is "oft-used", but it is also incorrect to say it has hardly been used at all since the 1960s.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Thursday February 12 2015, @08:16PM

    by mmcmonster (401) on Thursday February 12 2015, @08:16PM (#144302)

    So they won't use Windows Media because it's not an industrial standard and few people are using it. Fair enough.

    So they considered using an authentication process so that the rightsholder agreements wouldn't be violated. Fair enough.

    So they're no longer creating SHOUTcast streams due to the few people using it. Fair enough... But they're replacing it with mp3 stream? What about the rightsholder agreements? (Not that I am concerned. BBC is paid for by tax in the UK. If I could pay them direct with a tax in the U.S., I would as well.)

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:15PM

      by frojack (1554) on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:15PM (#144331) Journal

      I read that as they were simply dropping AAC Shoutcast streams, and standardizing on mp3 shoutcast streams.

      I assume they paid the license fee years ago for mp3.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:24PM

    by cockroach (2266) on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:24PM (#144337)

    Does anyone have a URL for this? I've been a regular BBC 6music listener for a couple of years until last week or so when the stream suddenly stopped working. Currently I'm listening via a third-party site since I seem to be unable to figure out how to access the new stream...