Thoughts, ideas, tips, musings, and pontifications (not necessarily in that order) by Ben Forta ...
NOTE: This is my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own.
The BBC has been using Microsoft technologies for widgets that are used by "hundreds of thousands of users". And they have just publicly stated that they have dumped the Microsoft solution for an Adobe AIR one. paidContent has posted details, too.
Wow. This is huge, not just for AIR/Adobe, but for the BBC itself - what better way to make sure as many licence fee payers as pos. can access the BBC's richer services. For those not in the UK - the BBC has had a (widely lowly regarded) Windows-only 'catch up TV' service called iPlayer. I wonder how that's going to be brought to Linux and Mac users, eh :-)
JD, sorry, yes, I wasn't clear that an online version on iPlayer was released a few months ago, and that that one does work on all 3 major O/S. The post was specifically about the offline P2P version.
Using AIR means that the content will be available to mac and linux users.
iPlayer content is not available to viewers from outside the UK, they use geo-blocking to detect your location. It's not a technical issue, just the distribution rights that are written up when programmes are made.
This is huge, not just for AIR/Adobe, but for the BBC itself - what better way to make sure as many licence fee payers as pos. can access the BBC's richer services.
For those not in the UK - the BBC has had a (widely lowly regarded) Windows-only 'catch up TV' service called iPlayer. I wonder how that's going to be brought to Linux and Mac users, eh :-)
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2008/06/bbc_mlb.html
jd/adobe
The post was specifically about the offline P2P version.
iPlayer content is not available to viewers from outside the UK, they use geo-blocking to detect your location. It's not a technical issue, just the distribution rights that are written up when programmes are made.
It will also provide Adobe with great user-based feedback on the runtime so they can improve where necessary.