There’s been a great deal of anticipation about the launch of the BBC iPlayer, a desktop application that allows registered users in the U.K. to download and view a range of programming in high quality.
Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, hailed the player as a development as significant as the start of colour television.
The player launched in beta on July 31. We can’t see it as it’s restricted to .uk access.
Despite some grousing about the limited library of video, a DRM sytem that allows for content to be stored for just 30 days, there have been 120,00 downloads of the program in just a week. When the BBC unleases more content, it could be a big winner. Joost had better watch "The Beeb."
London Moves to Mountainview, California
Like most of Britain’s national broadcasters, the BBC has turned to VeriSign’s Kontiki platform to distribute the content. Kontiki platform is a sort of a mix of peer-to-peer and more traditional CDN. VeriSign bought Kontiki last year.
I was at VeriSign HQ last week in Mountainview where I interviewed Jeff Richards, who heads the Kontiki operations.
CDN Shakeout?
As my colleague Om Malik writes in GigaOM, there is a great deal of activity and displacement in the content delivery networks, CDN business right now, with established companies like Akamai facing a slew of new players, who are slashing prices and offering new technologies. It will be interesting to see who emerges from the shake-out.
— Andy Plesser
Grab the embed code or download this video of Jeff Richards.
BBC iPlayer
Kontiki
VeriSign
