BBC takes on the big

The BBC has often been at the head of innovation when it comes to television broadcasting. The adoption of an effective and intelligent online policy was not difficult for the BBC. Rather than seeing the internet as a home for piracy, they see it as an effective way of maximising their public service utility. BBC.co.uk, the most popular website in the UK, streams many radio and television programs via real media and offers a good service for UK license payers. However, the BBC is looking to advance it's ability to stream content over the internet by abandoning the real codec and moving to it's own in house solution, called Dirac.

The Open Source project is royalty free, and has a lot of potential not just at the BBC, but worldwide. Using a royalty free codec is crucial to broadcasters, who are unable to offer a free service (as per the BBC public service remit) on a large scale using royalty based codecs (ala real). The Dirac codec is playable on Windows, Linux and Mac. It's also coded in such away that it can be "bolted on" to other program packages.

The codec is able to encode (in real time) standard TV signals - 720 x 576 pixels - into a quarter sized 20fps video, which is sufficient for effective video streaming. Code optimization and more work over the next year will improve on this further. If the codec is successful, due to it's open source nature it could have wide spread adoption and act as good competition for existing commercial bodies in the market, like Microsoft. The Dirac codec serves as an integral part of the BBC's pledge to get its archive online and available to the public. Asides from streaming of its servers, the BBC had considered using a p2p style network to share files, saving it bandwidth.

UK license payers currently pay ~ Â£120 a year for a television license, which allows them to watch all BBC services.

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