BBC to use WMA9 at 128 kbps for iMP Radio Downloads

4th June 2004

The BBC's new interactive media player (iMP) will use 128 kbps Windows Media Audio 9 (WMA9) for radio downloads. WMA9 is one of the new high quality audio codecs available and has performance very similar to the AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) codec at a bit rate of 128 kbps.

WMA9 at 128 kbps is used on some of the new music download services such as www.mycokemusic.com.

The BBC iMP will use digital rights management (DRM) to protect the copyright, and will allow people that have downloaded a file to burn it to CD if the file fits on a CD.

The iMP is planned to provide access to the huge BBC archives (so long as any rights issues can be resolved) for both TV and radio shows, as well as storing the previous week's TV and radio shows just like the BBC Radio Player does currently, although with the iMP you can download them instead of streaming them to your PC. The iMP will also supposedly stream live shows, which I assume will be handled by multicasting the shows to the various ISPs, who then forward the streams to their customers, to save the BBC an enormous amount of bandwidth.

The iMP will use peer-to-peer network technology as used by the internet MP3 download networks like Kazaa. The reason the BBC are using a peer-to-peer network is to save on the enormous bandwidth requirements that would be required if everybody had to download the content from the BBC site. Instead, the iMP will search for the requested content in other iMP users' designated folders on their PCs, and download from these other users once it's found the content, thus drastically reducing the amount of bandwidth the BBC requires for the service at their end.

This move by the BBC should be applauded, and goes some way towards making up for the way they've implemented their DAB multiplex. I for one will change to listening via WMA9 live over the net like a flash as long as they make the most of the capabilities of this codec.