The BBC has bowed down to demand from international broadcasters in announcing plans to share the iPlayer technology platform.
BBC’s director of future media and technology Erik Huggers announced the plan at the IBC 2009 conference in Amsterdam. “It is not a concept of aggregation, but federation. It is about making sure each of the broadcasters around the world can continue to have a direct relationship with their users,” he said.
The BBC has offered the iPlayer platform to rival UK broadcasters for nearly 10 months but none have jumped on board.
Huggers explained that the proposals, which still needs the backing of the BBC Trust, came out of the BBC’s wider partnership agenda to allow its technologies to be used by third parties.
In opening up the iPlayer the BBC can also work on developing the catch-up TV service for a variety of devices.
“We have this demand on us that we must make our content available universally. As a result with now have to port the iPlayer into 23 different flavors. They all using different codecs, different file formats, because they are think their codec is going to make a difference,” he said.