This should be a fascinating look at how streaming services evolved and the outsized impact they've had on our culture. Instead it is mostly a series of re-written press-releases and recycled analysis from other people.

Sadly, the book never dives in to the pre-history of streaming. There's a brief mention of RealPlayer - but nothing about the early experiments of livestreaming gigs and TV over the Internet. Similarly, it ignores how Big Brother created a generation of people who wanted to stream on their phones. Early pioneers like JenniCam are written out of history. The book is relentlessly focussed on American streamers, with only a brief foray into the UK, Africa, and other markets. There's nothing about Project Kangaroo and how it squandered an early opportunity for streaming dominance.

Steaming only started with Netflix, according to this book. Despite iPlayer launching at roughly the same time, it doesn't make an appearance until halfway though the book. It's also missing some of the interesting aspects of how Netflix built its algorithm, and the privacy impacts of it.

The analysis itself mostly quotes from reports from Enders and other firms like that. It doesn't seem like there was any original research done, and there aren't any new interviews done for the book. Instead it is just a surface-level analysis mixed in with clichéd prose about boiling frogs. It's also fairly uncritical - several sections are just press-releases from big streaming services with little discussion about whether they're accurate. It almost turns into a corporate biography / hagiography rather than a serious look at streaming.

There's very little about the production side. For example, how Netflix squashes cinematograph and how its lack of permanent props storage restricts accurate set-dressing to tent-pole shows.

Although this is a preview copy, the prose feels half-baked.

Overall, the iPlayer is a very high-quality product, providing access to both linear TV and a whole range of content in its extensive catalogue.

That's the sort of thing I'd expect from a student essay rather than a serious book.

Unlike Warez - The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy by Martin Paul Eve, there's almost nothing about piracy and how that drives the behaviour of consumers, producers, and distributors. There's a bit of discussion of Napster, but hardly anything about the more modern cultural impact.

It is maddeningly contradictory. In a couple of pages it goes from:

Consequently, we are closer than we have ever been to having something like global TV. Close, but not actually there.

To:

because of the amount of work available to view, there is no mono-culture anymore.

Which is it?

The book concludes by saying:

With that in mind, the ultimate winner of the streaming wars is the consumer. It is us.

Is it though? There's almost nothing about shows cancelled before they got going. Nothing about whether American cultural hegemony suffocates local media development. It briefly touches on the constant price rises, but never investigates whether it changes behaviours or if they drive customers away. There's not a single interview with viewers - and no attempt to understand whether they feel positive about the way streaming has changed the world.

There's a fascinating story to be told, but this isn't it.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy, the book is available to pre-order now.

That's a situation which continues over a decade later. If you watch iPlayer on your laptop, you're stuck with 720p quality. If you want 1080p and above, you need a specially certified device.

Well, that's what everyone thought!

A few weeks ago, I found this curious forum post which said

Yes, iPlayer 1080p is possible, not as simple as just using one of these webUI tools but its certainly possible with youtube-dl and a good look around.. audio_eng_1=128000-video=12000000.m3u8

There wasn't much information about it that I could find. And then I stumbled onto this GitHub issue for youtube-dl.

With a bit of faffing around, I was able to patch my YouTube downloader (/usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/bbc.py) with this code:

for fmt in formats:
   if '-video=5070000.m3u8' in fmt.get('url', ''):
      formats = [
         {'url': fmt['url'].replace('-video=5070000.m3u8', '-video=12000000.m3u8'),
          'height': 1080, 'vbr': 12000,
          'abr': fmt.get('abr'),
          'protocol': fmt.get('protocol'),
          'preference': fmt.get('preference'),
          'format_id': fmt.get('format_id', 'hack') + '-really12M',
          }, fmt]

(To be clear, this is a horrible hack. It changes the iPlayer download function so it only downloads 1080p. It also doesn't rename the file properly once reconstructed, so you'll have to do that yourself. This is a quick hack - not for production!)

And, with that, I was able to download iPlayer in 1080p.

Sadly there's no surround sound - AAC stereo only.

Learning from history

Back in 2008 (!) I was blogging about the BBC's ridiculous decision to restrict iPlayer streaming to iPhones. And in 2012 I blogged about how the BBC's insistence on using Flash had misfired. The BBC (and, to be fair, the video rights-holders) are desperately trying to avoid their content being shown at high quality on "unsanctioned" devices.

I get that they don't want to lose revenue. But anyone with a USB stick can record HD off air. 4K rips of every movie appear on the Internet 5 minutes after they're released. Trying to restrict who can view your content is a losing battle. It only takes one person to figure it out, and then the genie is out of the bottle.

What's the technical overhead of trying to manage this complicated infrastructure they've created? What is the tangible loss if someone watches a 4K stream from their browser rather than the app?

At some point, surely, media companies will have to realise that making easy access to their content is more powerful than blocking off every creative use. Right?

Bah. I'm off to count the pixels on the latest episode of Doctor Who.

The Amazon 4K Fire Stick is a pretty cool bit of kit. It's an Android device which can push 4K HDR video with surround sound to your TV. But, like any technology, it's buggy. Here's the bug report I've tried to send to Amazon and the BBC. They haven't answered - so I'm publishing it here as well.

BBC iPlayer supplies 4K video - but the app doesn't switch to 4K mode, it stays at 1080p.

Amazon debug

To turn on the Fire stick's debug mode - and get access to X-Ray - follow these instructions.

This lets you see the bandwidth being used, HDCP information, and audio/video information. Here's a 4K presentation via Amazon's own video player. In the top left is the HDMI output information and bandwidth stats. On the right is the video codec data.

iPlayer

Within iPlayer you can opt-in to the beta programme, this gives you access to 4K content. But let's take a look at the debug information. 4K video is being streamed at 25fps. But if we look in the top left corner, the app hasn't switched out of 1080p @ 60fps.

The end result is a juddering rescaled mess.

So, if you or a friend works for either Amazon or the BBC, please ask them to take a look, eh?

I watched the episode live at home on my Panasonic TX-L37ET5B.

After the broadcast, I wanted to watch it again. That's where the problems started.

First, a quick lesson on how 3D TV broadcasts work. Generally speaking, most 3D TV is Half-Side-By-Side. That means the left and right image are horizontally compressed and combined into a single image.

The TV automatically detects that the image is split-screen and then turns the image into 3D. It displays the left image so it can only be seen by the left eye, and the right by the right. If we apply that to the above image, we get this 3D effect.

So far, so good! The BBC have the 3D version of Day of the Doctor on iPlayer - and my TV has an iPlayer app. The only problem is that the iPlayer app on the Panasonic doesn't trigger the TV's automatic 3D detection. Even when I force the TV to 3D mode, it persists in showing the original picture. I've no idea if this is a fault with Panasonic's coding, or with the BBC's.

Well, my phone can access the iPlayer - and it can output its screen over HDMI. How well would it work? The answer, not well!

Here's a screenshot from my Android phone from the same scene.

You'll notice two things with it. Firstly the image quality is dreadful. The image resolution is 832*468 and the bitrate appears to be very poor.

Secondly, there's a bloody great BBC logo in the top left! The BBC have known for ages that Digital Onscreen Graphics (DOGs) are annoying for their viewers - but still they persist!

The problem with this on 3D content becomes readily apparent. The DOG is stretched and appears to flicker in and out to the viewer.

In addition, all iPlayer audio content is only in stereo - not the lovely surround sound of the original broadcast.

So, I can have iPlayer through the TV which won't display in 3D, I can have it through my phone in low quality with a ridiculous DOG, or I can find a kindly soul on the Internet offering Doctor Who in 1080p 3D with surround sound via a dodgy download.

I bet they don't have these problems on Inspector Spacetime!

We argued loudly, passionately, deployed logic and reason, and provided specific technical details.

Naturally, we were ignored.

Sure, Flash was only on a few high end devices now, but the BBC were confident that Flash would be soon be available on all Android devices and our perceived problems would evaporate.

Naturally, reality decided to ignore their wishful thinking.

Two years and one week after the BBC announced its Flash for Android strategy, Adobe announced it was killing Flash for Android.

High end Android devices like the Nexus - and any device running Android 4.1 would be incapable of running Flash. So there was no way to use iPlayer.

BBC iPlayer

@BBCiPlayer

For those asking about Nexus 7 / Jelly Bean 4.1 - we are testing the app and will be releasing an update soon. Thanks for your patience.

---

This failure is exactly what happens when you choose vendor driven proprietary "solutions" rather than established and open standards.

This embarrassing turn of events is exactly what happens when you refuse to listen to the geeks making logical arguments.

This monumental cock-up over the Olympics is exactly what happens when you refuse to engage with reality and let prejudice drive your decision making process.

Here are the facts:

• Most Android devices cannot use the Flash based iPlayer app.
• Mobile Flash is now dead for future phones and tablets.
• Android devices can play exactly the same files as those served to the iPhone via iPlayer.

So why not just serve up the iPhone's MP4 files to any device which can play them? The BBC refuse to answer that simple question.

Want to know something funny? I was blogging about how to deliver iPlayer's iPhone streams to other models of mobile in March 2008!

Plus ça change.

We can only guess what shenanigans were involved with the BBC's original decision to bet the Android farm on Flash.

Perhaps now our BBC will pay more attention to the geeks who care so much about it.

I was having a bit of trouble installing it on my XNAS - running Xebian Linux, so I've written this as an aide-mémoire. I hope you find it useful.

Install Ruby and Ruby Gems

apt-get install ruby rubygems

Download and install the latest version of Rake

wget http://rubygems.org/downloads/rake-0.8.7.gem
gem install rake

Download and install the latest version of Mocha

wget http://rubygems.org/downloads/mocha-0.9.8.gem
gem install mocha-0.9.8.gem

Download and install the latest version of iplayer-dl

wget http://rubygems.org/downloads/iplayer-dl-0.1.19.gem
gem install iplayer-dl-0.1.19.gem </pre>

Done!

To download a show,

iplayer-dl [pid]

To find the pid, visit an iPlayer page like http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s0vs1/Doctor_Who_Confidential_Series_5_All_about_the_Girl/ The pid is the weird string of letters and numbers before the episode name. So, in this case, to download the video, you just type

iplayer-dl b00s0vs1

If you want to download several files using only one command, you would type

iplayer-dl b00s0vs1 b123abc bdef456