Quote:
Originally Posted by peterjcat
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.
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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.