Sam's World Of No

Obviously, the makers of BBC iPlayer were initially distraught when I suggested, a couple of months ago, that their terrible product was re-defining the low bar when it came to beta software. The availability of programs was poor, the website was strange and required a seemingly-endless stream of passwords and identity checks, and the iPlayer software (read: DRM-enforcement SS Unit) was 6.64 megabytes of pure fail.

Clearly, the gauntlet was thrown down. I can visualise the events now as I had been there. And as if they had actually happened. First, the iPlayer team was excited about the blog post. Finally, they thought, the internet is taking notice of our betamax*-level technology. Then they read the post, remaking at the quick wit and the ever-thoughtful user comments, and were beside themselves. For nights, they lay sleepless. After a few days, they picked themselves out of their pit of despair and came up with a stunning idea, a spark of originality which would change the internet.

Hold on, cos this is complicated: They realised that what they should do, rather than making people download software that looks like it came from Astalavista and didn’t work, is stream the content straight from the website. That’s right. I couldn’t believe it either. As Steve would say, this is man-on-the-moon level invention. I can’t believe nobody ever thought of this before.

In all seriousness, the product that iPlayer has become is better and is actually worthy of being released to the real world. And of course it’s right that they released something early and waited for feedback, rather than keeping the product in development for years without working out what people want. And yes, they have responded quickly to the fact that they had produced a pup.

But you just think that they should have guessed that streaming online was the only way forward from the outset. It’s not like the path hadn’t been paved already. But, dear iPlayer engineer, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. “Well done”. Now get back to work - start by taking those stupid red boxes off the BBC News Homepage.

* And yes: I know that in some ways, Betamax was superior technology. But it still got sent to Failsville, which is where it sat, waiting to be joined by the initial iPlayer platform.

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It seems like almost every week there’s a story on the BBC news site about social networking being used by identity thieves to glean personal details.

Perhaps “every week” is a bit of an exaggeration (those are the only links I could find in one Google search. On its first page), but it really does feel like the media are all too delighted to jump on these tales of impending doom, hand-delivered to them by whichever security/censorship firm has issued a press-release.

This is not news; it’s pummelling the same story at people over and over again. I thought we moved away from Victorian schooling models and rote learning. Enough already.

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Google and the like have lulled us into a false sense of security about the word ‘Beta’. It’s hardly worth listing examples so I’ll just remind you of one: Gmail is still in beta, three and a half years later. Everyone I know uses gmail. It’s like saying that television is still in beta.

But of course, ‘beta’ is very much part of Web 2.0 marketing and, on the other hand, pragmatism. Release early, learn quickly, and realise that users are - generally - the best judge of products. They’re certainly the best barometer of their success.

Unfortunately, when it comes to BBC iPlayer, beta means what it meant 10 years ago - ‘not finished. At all’. And to call it a public beta is ludicrous. You need support for an operating system other than XP? Go fish. How about you prefer not to use IE to access stuff? Go fish. How about you don’t really feel the love for Windows Media Player? Go fish. Or maybe you think that the days of broadcasting rights, where the money is in the advertising/product placement etc, rather than the content of the show, are over and that DRM is little more than a throwback to the now-antiquated idea that the money is in the copyright?

Yeh. Fishing time for you. ‘Public beta’ my foot.

I presume, although I cannot say as I have no information either way, that my biggest annoyance with iPlayer also stems from this ridiculous corporate obsession with DRM. This is when programmes, some weeks, are not available for no apparent reason. Pretty much all I want to watch is Later with Jools, Have I Got News For you, and Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Everything else is on at a convenient time so I watch them live. These three programmes, however, I had got into the habit of missing (even if I was around and near to a TV) on the basis that I could download them on iPlayer, as I had been doing for several weeks.

Therein lies the rub. These programmes and - judging from the message boards, others - are not always available. With no explanation, stuff just isn’t there. First I thought that maybe the search facility was broken, so I trawled through the annoying navigation to confirm that these shows were, indeed, not there.

No wonder iPlayer doesn’t allow you (as far as I can tell) to subscribe to a programme and have it download automatically every week. This would instantly break when, with no explanation, programmes disappeared.

So please, dear BBC, ditch your obsession with DRM and please tell us why stuff is disappearing. This will mean that you can keep people happy and move onto non-Microsoft products. Oh and dear reader, take a look at a different view of this subject. Tell me that programmes dissapearing isn’t a consequence of DRM and its underlying reasoning, and I’ll blame something else - next in line on the blame train is the stupid iPlayer interface, and in particular the context menu. Seriously guys, that menu belongs on a serial generator. I half expect to have homemade metal thrashing out of my speakers every time I open it.

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It was widely reported today that the population of the UK is projected to 65m by 2016, an increase of 4.4 million from the current level. 2.3m of this is categorised ‘natural increase’, whereas 2.1m is attributed to the expected rate of migration. Let’s leave for a second that migration is a natural part of the population rate. Let’s also leave aside the fact that every news outlet’s concentration on migration was spurred by the National Statistics Office’s emphasis on the point. And let’s also, foolishly, leave aside the fact that there is a reason that people are trying to come into the UK. It isn’t the weather.

Let’s leave all of those things aside and look at pretty pictures. Now, in my view, this is primarily a story about statistics. So the Telegraph’s choice of the National Statistics Office’s own graph on the subject seems reasonable. But there are, obviously, wider ramifications. Find a property obviously had a specific slant on the effect, talking about the need for more housing, and they too have chosen a picture of lots of people in the street. Seems reasonable.

Politics.co.uk agrees, choosing a picture of a busy street in their coverage, with the caption, “Concerns raised over how the increase in population growth will effect public services”. Of course, the usual slant on the whole migration issue is the perceived effect it will have on infrastructure, so in some ways the BBC’s choice of image, which furthers the theme of this particular problem, is understandable. Their article features a stock picture of a busy commuter train; it was on the front page of the site for most of the day.

I think the underlying and specific message that choosing this headline image for the story is clear - our public transport system is at breaking point, and all these immigrants are going to just make it worse. Does anybody else feel that perhaps the person sourcing that image had a rough time on the tube this morning?

In my view, the BBC has in this instance crossed the line between telling the news and shaping the news.

The BBC are a credit to the national and international media, and are trying hard to push boundaries with their online presence. They are deeply postmodern in that you can read introspective blogs, such as The Editors, and after the Hutton report they are allegedly committed to being answerable and being open about the way they work. They are better than most, for sure, and they are leaders in this area where other, commercial, entities are allowed to sit on their hands. Oh, and they have a reputation for simply sucking at their choice of pictures for articles.

My academic background is in history. 20 years ago, the idea that historians, as well as journalists, would not adopt an objective and abstracted view of their material was ridiculous; it was their job to be impartial. Nowadays, we mostly accept that all façades of objectivity are conceited and create inaccurate reporting of the facts, so we admit our own subjective influences, and for many historians, these are often the more interesting parts of the stories we tell. Recognising your own subjectivity, however, is a very different thing to becoming objective - and acknowledging that you have influences that are individual and uncontrollable does not mean that you are forgiven for when your reporting is slanted and biased.

This bias isn’t limited to choice of vocabulary or choice of subject matter - choice of image is just a powerful a tool for shaping the theme of your story, and this is a story that has a serious emphasis on the migration issue. In fact, little else is mentioned. Both government ministers and right-wing pressure groups are allowed to give their point of view, as are some of the people from the other side of the debate. The image, though, takes it a step further. It makes us all think back to our morning commute - the busy roads, the packed trains and the smelly buses. It says in a message clearer than words and stronger than bold text that immigrants are going to make your life worse.

Apparently.

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My television habits are distinctly modern; I very rarely sit down at the tv praying that it will entertain me. Homer Simpson’s “Come on television, give me some of that sweet sweet pap” I am not. Like a lot of people, I now download the shows I like, either in the “illegal but who cares because it still makes us money” Bittorrent sense, or via dedicated sites such as Mr Twig for South Park. A lot of BBC programmes are available on the iPlayer, another great idea crippled by executives who fall in love with acronyms like DRM and the other usual suspects, and I know that Channel 4 have some stuff available online too.

So for me, my PC is my TV. One of my secret pleasures however, and I don’t think I’m alone in this either, used to be the stupid quiz programmes they had on late night channels. Hilarious questions, desperate presenters trying and failing to “make it” in TV, terrible effects and shoddy production - it was a winning combination. But its legality was always a bit suspect, but at that time in the morning after a couple of pints, who cares.

Strangely, they were not the biggest culprit in the recent “television self-destructing” fiasco. Nor were they the most amusing - the story of Blue Peter, the ever lovable children’s programme, faking a poll to name a cat was just awesome. It’s the story of the whole thing; frankly, it’s the story of the year.

But it’s over, we’ve had our fun and Jeremy Paxman had the chance to give one of the most memorable MacTaggart lectures of all time. Heads have rolled where necessary and television had the wake-up call it needed. Unfortunately, it’s still news, because a lot of media outlets have missed a crucial point of Paxman’s speech - that television is, by its very nature, not real. The people you see aren’t living in a box in your living room. Most of it isn’t live. Supposedly ad-hoc dialogue is scripted, stuff is filmed in a different order from which it is shown, and generally the editing process is necessarily subjective in order to meet the aesthetic necessity, time concerns and narrative effectiveness.

Top Gear is a fine example. It’s of the very few programmes I make an effort to watch at the time of original broadcast, and at the start of the new series last Sunday, after a summer off the air whilst all this “fake” commotion had started up, they opened with a joke about how the whole thing was real. By way of a punchline, Richard Hammond, noted for being short, stood on a box that was out of shot, making him look taller than the gargantuan Clarkson.

I cringed. Top Gear is one of the most heavily faked and edited programs in current production.

Now of course it is all real; the races are real, the timing is real, the interviews are real. But the bits where they are in a car talking to you, and then they come over voice over doing part of a conversation, or an introduction to a comment that they will then make “live”, are all deceit to make an effective narrative. This is good; it works well at creating a cohesive story for the viewer.

Top Gear’s news section is filmed like it’s at the pub and the banter is flowing randomly, but of course it’s all scripted. Or at least, the topics are discussed in a pre-determined order. This helps with crucial issues like the right background pictures, or graphics of the news item they are discussing, appearing on the screen in the background.

The filming of the large events is not real at all - the shots of the cars driving are done after the time, especially in the races. There are chase cars and planes that you never see; these are a normal part of filming. In the Bugatti Veyron vs Cessna race, May even had an instructor in the plane with him as he hadn’t passed his flying tests; this is never mentioned.

I know all of this because Top Gear make their production notes available. Imagine if all of these small deceits were removed - the program would be just awful. It wouldn’t fit together; it wouldn’t entertain. So we have to accept some lies, because it is what makes television believable.

So maybe we shouldn’t have too much heavy editing on news programmes, but we really shouldn’t care if the judge’s “houses” on X-Factor aren’t their own. Frankly, the people that need this much explaining to them should stick to children’s television, and the fact that this story got onto the BBC News front page for most of today is just depressing. Television has had its wakeup call. It heard the alarm, it didn’t hit snooze, it didn’t fall back asleep. It had a shower, it went to work. Now can’t we just let it enjoy a hard-earned beer at the end of a long day?

That is all. I’m going to now enjoy my own hard-earned beer.

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