BBC mulls dropping Flash as iPlayer meets iPhone
273488
iDontbelieveit! The BBC is considering ditching Adobe's Flash system for its iPlayer streams to improve the video quality of the on-demand service, it said on Tuesday.â¦
77905
An Opera developer jumps the gun and tells a blogger the company is prepping a version of its browser for Apple's iPhone. Is it true? Opera says no, but the debacle underlines the anticipation surrounding the inevitable iPhone browser war to come.
766021
What do you mean you're busy? The official launch, or "marketing launch", of the BBC's iPlayer is happening on Christmas Day.â¦
333259
Is Apple fine-tuning an enhanced iPod with roughly 50% more storage and a color screen to display photos? The Internet sites that follow Apple&#39;s coming product
509270
(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ and the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) said they plan to explore cutting edge ways that the BBC can deliver content. The announcement, made Thursday, follows one earlier this year from the BBC when the broadcaster said it is working on launching services that allow it toÂ deliver content to usersÂ whenever they want it and on a variety of devices. The BBC stressed that the partnership with Microsoft is nonexclusive. The broadcaster has a long-standing relationship with RealNetworks, which includes the launch late last year of BBC World News as part of the RealNetworks SuperPass streaming video service in the U.S. The BBC has other streaming media offerings through RealNetworks around the world. As part of the Microsoft announcement, the BBC said it wants to work with many companies in the content distribution area so that viewers don't have to visit the main BBC Web site to find content. Some of the types of services the companies may collaborate on include search, site navigation, and distribution. The BBC said it considers Microsoft to be a gateway to audiences that the BBC wishes to reach, through services such as MSN, Windows Live, the Xbox and Windows Media Center. The BBC and Microsoft also discussed new strategies from the BBC, including its plans for an online archive, a new Web site and new ways to distribute online content. As part of its announcement earlier this year, the BBC launched a trial Web site where visitors could find information about the one million programs stored in the BBC's archive. The broadcaster also said it was investigating better ways to label content in order to improve search and that it planned to launch a streaming media service.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
245476
PERSPECTIVE Regardless of whether or not you bought into the flash and hype that accompanied the iPhone's launch, Apple's newest device is important not for what features it brings, but for what it makes obsolete. The death knell has been rung for the mobile Web.
453495
Microsoft&#39;s recently released Media Player 10 is being hailed by some reviewers as the first real challenge to Apple&#39;s dominance in the online music space.
334629
When you think of interactive multimedia on the Web, you probably think of Flash. But Flash creates accessiblity problems, especially for those with disabilities. A solution is to use JavaScript, which avoids many of the issues inherent in Flash. By Lisha Sterling. 0516
739506
Adobe Systems's Flash video, the format that made Web video a hit, is coming to a version of Flash for mobile phones.
611761
At Macworld San Francisco in January, Apple plans to introduce a new device called "iTV" (not the final name) that lets users stream video from their PC to their television, similar in function to what the Airport Express did with audio.
310597
For better or worse The BBC will press ahead with its Windows-only on-demand service when it launches the iPlayer on July 27, the broadcaster announced today.â¦
385054
Auntie's IE hegemony broken for download client The BBC has finally made the download version of its iPlayer on-demand TV service compatible with Firefox, after six months as an Internet Explorer-only product.â¦
366393
Apple makes it easy to (legally) download films. But it faces stiff competition
760327
An online petition calls on the BBC to halt the launch of its iPlayer to a Windows-only audience.
524261
A Macromedia executive says wireless carriers are demanding specific menus, buttons and functions. Could Flash be the answer?
753701
(InfoWorld) - Opera Software's plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction. At present, Web developers have no consistent way to deliver media-rich content to the unlimited variety of platforms and browsers used by surfers worldwide. Using client- and server-side scripting, Web developers can divine which browser and operating system a user is running, but that's of little help. Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and the rest all require plug-ins, also known as Browser Helper Objects, to present content that's richer than W3C standards demand. Media player plug-ins, with Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime leading the category, are not consistently implemented across platforms. Each has its own style for wiring into browsers, its own terribly annoying traits, and its own set of proprietary formats that the others can't play, and yet each wants to take control of in-browser media playback when it's installed. And while all of these players have the ability to mix text, video, audio, scripting, and GUI interaction, these features are hardly ever used. Media players are used to play video and audio, and user interaction and scripting are handled in the browser with decidedly mixed results. Only Adobe Flash Player touches all the bases: vector graphics, scalable text, animation, audio, video, and scripting, and it rolls all of these types into a single document that's played by one widely accepted plug-in. Flash Player is smooth and responsive enough to handle interactive games, and encoding video for Flash allows developers to embed a unique GUI into the video. Windows Media, RealPlayer, and QuickTime don't hit that "one for all" sweet spot. But Flash is still a plug-in, large and highly demanding of computer resources, and while its platform coverage is broader than others, it's far from ubiquitous. Flash Player's girth leaves it notably absent from mobile devices, and that's where a common solution for rich, interactive multimedia documents is most needed. Flash Player is well distributed, but the superlative Opera platform-native full browser solution is everywhere: Windows, Solaris, QNX, OS X, OS/2, Linux (SPARC, PowerPC, and x86), FreeBSD, and BeOS, as well as the three most popular feature/smartphone platforms, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, and UIQ. Opera offers consumer electronics vendors a browser for embedded and set-top use as well. Opera is ubiquitous, but even it can't control what happens when a user clicks a link to a media file. Opera Software has decided to attack this issue head-on, promising to implement Flash-like rich, scripted multimedia document functionality directly in its browsers. That's a bold and potentially market-changing move. If Web developers can count on one browser consistently implementing rich multimedia playback, they might steer users toward that browser rather than pointing them to various required plug-ins. Of course, that's precisely what Opera Software is hoping for; Opera is commercial software, and hooking sites on its built-in Flash-like player would drive sales. But that's par for the course: Flash Player, like Apple, Microsoft, and Real plug-ins, is distributed free of charge to pull sites, users, and content creators into tools and premium services, and in Microsoft's case, to Windows. With Adobe open-sourcing its ActionScript JavaScript interpreter, and various open source projects aiming to clone or rival the functionality of Flash Player, Opera Software won't be the only game in town on desktops. But Opera has a shot at locking up the mobile market, freeing users from the proprietary, format-locked players that wireless operators burn into mobile phone firmware and hook to their browsers. One place where Adobe, Opera Software, and open source multimedia players can't go is the one place they're needed most: Apple's iPhone. Apple's decision to keep iPhone closed to third-party applications, despite its OS X underpinnings, means that iPhone is all about writing Web sites that target the Safari browser and play files encoded for QuickTime media formats. Apple's decision to lock developers inside Safari might be more tolerable if Apple were to broaden Safari along the lines that Opera Software intends for its browser. With Safari extending its reach to Windows, embedding Flash-like functionality in Safari would open the door to a great many possibilities for the sort of rich, interactive on-line (and off-line â Flash is competent for a limited range of desktop applications) content that would otherwise require the use of native code. In time, inclusive, cross-platform Flash or Flash-like rich multimedia document player technology will spread to cover all popular desktop, mobile, and consumer electronics platforms. It will happen because mobile and consumer electronics are green fields for a one-for-all rich multimedia document technology. It's a matter of who gets there first and who snags the greatest mind share. Vendors that decide to stay proprietary, who don't start developing or partnering toward the goal of a cross-platform Flash-style player, will find themselves behind the pack among users who want to take their video, audio, games, and lightweight applications on the road without being limited to a vendor or wireless operator's chosen player.
239617
By Anonymous  BBC Music Interactive is to unveil a 'music discovery' service as part of the BBC's plans to boost its online presence for the 'web 2.0' age. This will apply to supporting sites for its entire musical and programming output.