Fostering the spirit of symmetric multiprocessing
|
|
|
BBC wastes money on its duff network
LICENCE PAYER'S MONEY is being lost in a sea of pixelated mush thanks to the BBC investing in old technology to stream the World Cup matches.
Thanks to outdated unicast technology BBC's Iplayer is, like the England team, labouring to deliver the goods as tens of thousands tune in to watch games. The problems are set to get worse as the Beeb gets set to show live England matches.
As the world plus dog wonders how to silence the swarm of Vuvuzelas, the solution is glaringly obvious, just watch it over Iplayer. The appalling sound quality in this case actually results in the constant din being drowned out. Perhaps the BBC was trying to reproduce a realistic experience as viewers, like goalkeepers, have a hard time tracking the Jabulani football through the mush of compressed video.
Then there's the issue of frame rate. When handfuls of frames aren't dropped, the rate is just about acceptable, but only when there little happening. Once something remotely interesting occurs, such as Xabi Alonso's thunderous shot that almost split the crossbar in half, the visual feast becomes an oil painting.
Wading through the visual vomit isn't the most annoying aspect of being assaulted by Iplayer. No, that is left to the horrendous synchronisation problems that all but eliminate any element of surprise, excitement and enjoyment if you are unfortunate enough to be in close vicinity to others watching the game.
Here at The INQUIRER, we decided to take a short break from necking pints and watch Spain play against Switzerland. While Torres and Co were trying to breach the Swiss defence, we decided to play another game, comparing the time on the BBC's match clock. Between three machines spaced five metres apart, connected on a 100Mbps Internet connection, the difference was up to 45 seconds, meaning that one lucky chap after hearing the final whistle stepped outside to have a fag, came back and heard the final whistle again. Just imagine what will happen when England ends up in a penalty shoot-out.
The problem stems from the use of unicast, a data packet transmission method that sends unique data to each and every viewer, regardless of whether they are on the same network. This inefficient model has been usurped, in theory, by multicast. Multicast would allow broadcasters to send once to a network and let the local network deal with the distribution rather than send the same data repeatedly to the same place.
Thanks to the forward thinking and near limitless funding of the BBC it has stuck with old, inefficient technology that not only costs more to operate but results in a terrible experience for viewers.
The synchronisation problem is so severe that viewers would be better off doing some ad-hoc multicasting of their own, by having one machine resend the stream to others on the same network. For legal and sanity reasons that's impossible but that just goes to show how poor the performance is of BBC's system.
BBC's network will come under increasing strain as it starts to show live England games at the World Cup. This should provide the wake-up call for the broadcaster to stop wasting licence payer's cash on a system that simply cannot hack it.
Just use Beeb's incompetence as an excuse to skive off down the pub to watch our lads make a hash of it. µ
Share this:
Share
Or just go to argos and collect one at lunchtime, along with a crappy aerial ;-)
www.yamgo.com
I think that's the UK site that lets you watch live uk tv on your pc/mobile. Need uk ip.
This has nothing to do with the BBC, numbnutz, this has everything to do with there being no multicast infrastructure operating across ISPs in the UK.
In a closed environment such as the patientline system used in hospitals the whole thing runs on multicast because it is easy to implement. Not so easy across ISPs, even though most if it runs on the same edge hardware (xDSL).
So you need to apologise for
a) Failing to understand what the real issue is.
b) Demonstrating just how little you understand technology, which for a tech reporter has gotta hurt.
c) Blaming the BBC for problems with iPlayer that have nothing to do with the BBC, and everything to do with the UK ISPs.
d) Spreading your ignorance across this fine drunken publication.
It's not just the ISPs and backbone infrastructure - the only way I could get BBC multicast to work was with a linux system set up as an ADSL router - none of the commercial ADSL routers I had to hand could be persuaded to pass multicast traffic.
And, to be fair, the BBC is already multicasting its programming in an efficient and standards-compliant way by terrestrial and satellite broadcast...
While 'All The Internet Routers And Switches In The World' (TM) are being updated - or (more likely) replaced - to be compatible with multicast, couldn't the ISPs themselves do a fiddle?
The ISPs' servers could themselves subscribe to all the popular World Cup feeds and then simply redirect the users subscription requests to their own local re-feed. It would effectively be a form of interim-multicasting while we wait the next 5 years for 'The Entire Fricken Internet-Thingy' (TM) to be updated.
why not instead criticise the ISPs that complain about the bandwidth that iPlayer consumes, yet they are the very problem to finding a solution since they are blocking multicast.
The BBC are providing the solution, mutlicast, but what ISPs bother to support it? Precious few!
Epic fail criticising the BBC here, but then you should know that by now.
You don't seem to know the difference between watch on demand and stream what the BBC are currently showing.
What your talking about here has nothing to do with Iplayer.
Seriously where does The Inquirer get its reporting staff!
Nice try at sounding like you know what you're talking about... Pity it's an epic fail.
1) Nothing new about multicast
2) BBC can send multicast
3) Your ISP is probably blocking multicast
When you have "friends" watching the match, try being friendly and watching round the same screen. That was the rest of us can have some bandwidth!
Football's boring anyway.
...why not sign up for it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/tv/home.shtml
(Assuming your ISP's on the list)
It's not just web streaming that's got problems.
ITV's Freeview signal is so badly compressed that at times the game looks like it's being recreated using lego blocks.
I can understand the desire to roll out HD over Freeview but OFCOM needs to be stepping in if it ends up making the SD signal unwatchable.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=bbc+multicast+trial&meta= They've already tried this ages ago. Don't know whether it was dropped due to technical or rights issues, but this was waaay before iplayer. Obviously it can't be done as easy as you think!
Couldnt agree with you more, english TV is shit, we have to put up with rubbish like eastenders and corination street, where as america get such awesomness like "The Shield" and "Burn Notice"
Here here!!!
I can remember logging into an experimental BBC multicast of Live Broadcast BBC1 years ago, admittedly it was snooker but the quality was excellent even from North America.
(... 45 seconds delay ...)
Now it is!
The BBC already has infrastructure for providing video content over multicast. Unfortunately, your ISP doesn't. Only the über-geeky ones like A&AISP and Bogons seem to provide it. BT, Virgin, TalkTalk, etc do not offer it. The finger of blame should be pointing at them.
this is great news for me - i hate football and 6 months ago i told the bbc to shove their licence where the sun dont shine
uk tv is utter crap and th licence fee is legalised extortion. the sooner people realise and vote with their feet, the better