Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Why did they choose Flash?! It won't play on iPhones, and many other mobile platforms. BBC iPlayer doesn't use flash, YouTube too, as does TVCatchup among many other streaming services, all of which work on most mobile platforms including the iPhone.

To exclude the iPhone market seems bonkers, and even with mobile platforms that do support Flash, very few support the version of Flash that can play streaming media, and even less that can play it with any reasonable level of performance.

Bonkers.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

iPlayer does use Flash, as does YouTube

They have to make specific streams available for non-Flash devices

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Exactly... so why not VM at this very late stage in the online tv game. Strange

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Sky don't allow their Player to be used on any Mobile device

They do however have a specific Mobile TV service - but for the iPhone that's Sky Sports and News only

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Apple to exclude flash from the iphone/pod/pad is even more bonkers ;)

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

That's a whole other argument touched on above. Regardless, iplayer and many others work fine multi platform.

As for Sky skipping all mobile platforms... No loss there. I tuned out after VM lost their channels and haven't missed them.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

What I was trying to point out is that there are likely rights issues that both Sky and Virgin have to deal with, as the content on their players is third party, whereas the BBC have the rights over most of what is on iPlayer, and Youtube don't really care.

As Flash has DRM, then it's likely that was chosen to order to protect the rights of the content owners

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

It's not a whole other argument though - it's the flip-side of the same argument. Who exactly is bonkers here? Virgin, YouTube, the BBC and countless others, for building their online content delivery platforms around Flash, deviating from it only where necessary, or Apple, for deciding their mobile products were too good to have Flash on them?

I don't think Virgin is mad for choosing Flash. I think Apple is mad for barring it. The only thing left open to question here is why Virgin has not produced a version of its player for devices that don't support Flash - and there could be any number of commercial reasons why.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Reasons I was hoping to be answered in this thread. I had asked VM direct, they hopefully will give their reason.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

it comes to down to rights issues and why you want to watch it on iphoine??? it barely 4inch screen i really dnt get why people want ot watch from there phones

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Don't believe the Apple hype, HTML5 is still in its infancy and the standard isn't even finalised. The browser companies are still fighting over which HTML5 container to use.

There is also a issue with mobile rights, most of these streaming sites are only licensed to be used on a PC. See the recent problems Boxee ran into when they started offering Hulu on their box.

Also the VM player is still in beta, once out of beta I would imagine there will be a iPhone app version.

Try it sometime, I watch a lt of stuff on mine, I am a shift worker (or was will be joining the 9-5 crowd from Monday) and used tow catch stuff on my night shift on my breaks. Even when in bed I can stream any video stored on my PC to my iPhone. It may be small if it was 8 feet away but when only a few inches away it is good enough for most stuff, although I do leave all the big shows for the big TV.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Theoretically it's now out of beta

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

It may or may not be rights, in answer to your question about why would people watch it on an iPhone. I can think of one answer. Travelling. Try carting even a portable TV on the bus and watching it.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Maybe you have poor near vision or are spoiled with massive TV. I sit 10 feet from my 32" WS TV. We hold our phones approx 2ft from our faces. Guess what, the screens are the same relative size. Relatively speaking, an iPhone 4's retina display is higher res at that distance.

To not want to have the ability to watch any VM on demand content away from home, without lugging around a large screen device... that's what I don't get.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

I suppose the only answer to your question is another question... why something else? When it comes down to formats, they are pretty much set in stone standards, so something that is compatible with X number of things will always be incompatible with Y other things

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Size isn't everything. ;) Holding something 2ft from your face is not the same as watching something that's 10ft away, regardless of relative size. The viewing angle is almost certainly different (i.e. you're more likely to be looking down rather than ahead), which can result in neck strain or discomfort for many people over prolonged periods. Similarly, focusing your eyes on something 2ft away means more exertion for your eye muscles, especially as almost everything else in your field of view is further away, forcing your eyes to work harder to re-focus should you glance away from the screen even for a moment.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Without getting too much into the politics of it all: the installed base of mobile devices that can play Flash video is tiny compared to the number that can play other kinds of video but not Flash. This may well change in the future, but for now it would seem that to insist on Flash is to severely limit your potential audience.

Flash is (arguably) useful for its DRM capabilities, but the same thing can be achieved by using mobile apps instead of webpages -- Hulu Plus and Netflix seem happy enough to provide streaming to mobile devices through apps, and I haven't heard of their streams being compromised. And Flash can of course contain the same video and audio codecs that are common to all devices (notably H.264), so there's no need to encode separate streams for each platform -- it's just a question of packaging the streams in suitable containers, which is relatively straightforward.

Obviously a lot of content isn't licensed for mobile devices, but where it is, a relatively platform-neutral approach is surely the way to go -- rather than one that ignores what, for whatever reason, is right now by far the largest audience.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Actually, even when devices can use the same codec and container, there is still a need to produce multiple streams. This is because when you have two devices, both using the same codec and container, they may not have the same display resolution. So, what do you do? Encode a video at the lowest resolution, and hope it doesn't look too bad on the higher res screen, or encode it at the highest resolution. This, of course is assuming that the device with the lower res screen is capable of shrinking the video. That's totally ignoring the fact that any device that does that is going to drain a lot of battery power, and users aren't going to carry on using a service that kills their device batteries.

The BBC do use different streams for different resolutions, and indeed, have a huge render farm devoted to producing them.

As for why virgin use flash, do they have a dedicated mobile service yet? If they don't, it makes more sense for them to use flash simply because 98% of computers have Flash Player installed, or are capable of having it installed

It's also worth remembering that we are currently on the third major version of iPlayer. Version 1 (which the BBC seem to be trying the forget) used Windows Media files and DRM, but did not support mobile devices. Version 2 used Flash, and did not initially support any mobile devices. Then the BBC introduced the iPhone version and mobile support after V2 had been in use a couple of months. V3 (the Web 2.0 enabled version we have now) has always supported mobile clients.

As for writing your own Apps, well, the difficulty there (for the iPhone at least) is that Apple tend not to allow apps that duplicate the functionality of the iPhone's inbuilt software, and that includes DRM. And Apple aren't going to let anyone use their DRM. As the BBC have apparently found it.

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

For apple to exclude Flash is even more bonkers, think about that

Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash?
 

Yes, that's very true -- there is a question about what resolutions to support in addition to what codecs/containers to support. My point was only that supporting a number of containers shouldn't require additional rendering above what is already needed for multiple resolutions.

It's hard to call it a "dedicated" mobile service but they are offering a separate mobile webpage that's only accessible from certain handsets (with a free hour per day for Virgin Mobile customers!). Totally understand using Flash for computers but as the mobile service ramps up for real I'd hope it would be available on the kind of phones people actually have :)

Apple's App Store policy is certainly capricious and hard to predict, and I agree that they're not going to license their DRM to anyone else, but I think that scenario is a pretty broad interpretation of the "no duplicate functionality" guideline. The dedicated apps written by Hulu and Netflix seem to be secure enough for their rightsholders and had no trouble getting approval, so at least there's a precedent there.

---------- Post added at 15:03 ---------- Previous post was at 14:58 ----------

It wasn't bonkers; whatever you might think of it, it was a calculated decision, and while it's too early to say that it's worked (Flash alternatives aren't always available), it hasn't failed yet either (Flash alternatives are often available, and people are still buying Apple gadgets as fast as they can make 'em).