Embed from the BBC
January 10, 2008 by upyourego
The BBC is starting to adopt Flash as their video platform of choice across a number of sites and this is gradually going to increase over the next few months.
Here is a Reverend and the Makers interview from Later with Jools Holland.
Then there’s a music based clip which is pretty cool. Rio Kiley performing Moneymaker.
I can’t find any other embed examples at the moment - there are other services using flash like Nature of Britain and Torchwood and even the iPlayer but they don’t include an embed link.
UPDATE: Here is one from the Electric Proms of Bloc Party.
It isn’t just the BBC though - Channel 4 and E4 have started offering flash clips of shows (not full shows yet though) and with the clips embed links OF EVERYTHING on E4 - although nothing seems to be embeddable on Channel 4.
With the BBC - it’s only a matter of time before everything is flash (at least all video) and you get a link asking if you want to watch in Real or Windows Media as an alternative. Then the audio will follow suit - some audio files are already flash (Glastonbury interviews) - the Radio Player will go the same way soon-ish.
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Why real media & windows, for me flash is a pain (im on linux) so ill probably stay with real streams. with flash being your primary platform, now would be a good time to reconsider your alternatives.
I regularly listen to radio1 stream but find wmv stream to be a horrible quality, realplayer to be awkward to use. Perhaps as the people using the alternative streams will be
audio files & linux users (flash problems), its time for new streams?
Although if the flash stream will finally allow rewind then ill probably end up using that anyway! (not for live shows necessarily, but more for listen again)
I would personally like to see audio streaming move towards mp3 streams in the long term but I do think Flash is a suitable cross platform solution.
It works across windows, mac and linux and works with pretty much every browser and an increasing number of mobile platforms.
Flash for Linux
I think Flash is a better solution than Real and Windows Media but it isn’t just down to what users and the BBC wants - it’s also, to a certain extent down to what the copyright owners will accept (music labels etc) as the BBC and every other broadcaster falls to their whim.