iPlayer Day: A year under the hood
As part of "iPlayer Day", I was asked to pull something together on the complexity of iPlayer behind the scenes. Inevitably, as is always the case on iPlayer, we are in semi-constant ship mode, so it will have to stay short.
A year ago, the iPlayer architecture was not too complicated.
Systems on the right are audience-facing, e.g. the bbc.co.uk webs servers for browsing programme pages, the Embedded Media Player (EMP) streaming Flash client, CDNs for streaming media. Back then, life was fairly simple, as we had only TV on two distribution platforms-Flash streaming and P2P download.
A year later, the picture is just a little bit busier ...
This reflects an explosion in supported devices (gaming consoles, mobile phones, portable media players), the all important integration of radio, new download services (OMA/CMLA for Nokia N96, Adobe AIR for Mac/Linux - coming very soon) and TV iPlayer (available on Virgin).
More detail will follow in the New Year.
Alex Nunes is Product Manager, Systems, Media/Reporting Services,
FM&T Online Media Group, BBC Future Media & Technology
© MMX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~14~RS~)
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For me the event of the year was when iPlayer became available via the Virgin V+ box.
With one single box I have recording facilities and access to iPlayer. Bliss!
Keep up the good work!
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It's quite an achievement to get everything working but...
How have you tried to make the system as reliable and efficient as possible?
(resiliant, optimised, fine tuned etc)
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