BBC : We Need Quicktime Support
Being a regular visitor of the BBC News website I find like many Mac users it is a great place to keep up to date with the latest Technological developments. With Leopard, iMacs and the iPhone the Technology section has been a flurry of Apple related articles some making reference to Apple’s obvious increasing market share.
I visited the the Technology page this morning and was greeted with two clearly Apple related articles. I read the first article and spotted I could ‘watch’ the second. I clicked the ‘watch’ button and was greeted with Microsoft Media Player or Real Player. Now before you all jump to the comment box I do realise I can get both plugins for OSX, but in how good would Quicktime or Flash support be !
In an age where you can visit most other video sites and not require additional software it would be great to see the BBC following suit ?
Rival news sites such as ITN actively promote the use of web video, currently their front page has a range of video feeds that are all Mac friendly without the need of additional software.
It would be great if people could submit their experiences of other news websites around the world and their use of web video ……Any comments ?
5 Comments
You can download Flip4Mac which is a great application but I agree that a native Mac friendly video format would be better. This is especially so for new Mac users etc.
With the likes of YouTube etc it is a surprise that the BBC have not already move to FLV.
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The New York Times website also works perfectly on OSX Tiger !
http://video.on.nytimes.com/
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flip4mac works wonderfully for me.
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Flip4Mac does not work with the BBC site, at least not the current release version of Flip4Mac. The beta version (which I have not tried) might.
There are many, many Internet sites that Flip4Mac (release version) does not work with.
A reminder that YouTube is moving to H.264 for Apple TV and iPhone compatibility, therefore it would not be clever for the BBC to move to FLV a format which YouTube is moving away from.
Some people have accused the BBC of having sold their soul to Microsoft (they did a technology deal a while ago), as evidenced by their video streaming being WMP (or Real Player) and their widely despised iPlayer is WMP based, and the fact that the head of New Technology at the BBC is an ex-Microsoft employee. I don’t feel that is true (although I also despise the iPlayer) since the BBC Radio stations are streamed on the Internet in Real Player format (and as mentioned they also offer Real for Video streams). The BBC also use hundreds of Final Cut Pro systems (Mac only), and the BBC Motion Gallery offers QuickTime format files.
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[...] of these plugins hasn’t been great to date. We covered this issue a few months ago (here) and I am not calling for Quicktime support on the BBC site (although how good would that be) but [...]