BBC Opting for Open Source

Erik Huggers, Director BBC FM&T wrote this on the BBC blog today:

I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions.

The advantage for the audience will be a noticeable improvement in audio and video quality. Furthermore, it should become easier for the media to simply work across a broader range of devices. While it's not a magic bullet, it certainly is a significant step in the right direction. The first service to make content available using these open standards based codecs will be iPlayer.

As Erik notes, he was heavily involved in driving Microsoft services previously, so this is an interesting personal shift as well as a new direction for the BBC.

The BBC is already a heavy user of open source in its system stacks, so in some ways its just carrying on an existing trajectory. Also, it will be very interesting for open source multimedia overall. It is very rare to have a large not-for-profit with the technical skills of the BBC, so it is probably one of the few very large new media organisations on the planet that can afford (both technically and contractually) the commercial risks of open source operation.

The other issue is, though the open standards are open, there is a lot of disagreement, and details to be ironed out (Dave & I chaired the Open Source MPEG forum at IBC 2 years ago, the panel - comprised of all the contributors - was not what one could call united) but a user of this size - with its skill from R&D through to running one of the planet's largest internet multimedia content houses - will play a core part of driving open source / standards we suspect.

Exciting times..... a lot of people will be watching very closely to see what they can make work.