| BBC1 & BBC2 Live Streams Currently Testing30th September 2005 Update: Please see the article about the BBC1 and BBC2 live streams launching in 2008 on our sister website internetstreams.co.uk for an up-to-date article about the BBC's TV channels launching online.
The BBC is currently testing live internet streams of BBC1 and BBC2 using the H.264/AVC and Windows VC-1 video codecs. The H.264/AVC video codec (AVC stands for Advanced Video Coding), also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, is the new MPEG-4 video codec that will become eventually replace the current MPEG-2 video codec. Sky will be using this codec for its HDTV channels which will be launched next year, and the DVB-H mobile TV system, which is currently trialing in Oxford uses this video codec also. The BBC1 and BBC2 streams are not available to the public. The BBC Director of Television, Jana Bennett, announced at the recent Edinburgh TV festival that either BBC1 or BBC2 will be available live via the internet from next year, but it seems they're testing both anyway. When they're released next year, the streams will only be available via multicasting. Unicasting is the method currently used to distribute live streams, but it requires huge amounts of internet bandwidth when there are a lot of users, which is why the BBC Radio Player bit rates are so low at present. Multicasting solves the bandwidth problem for broadcasters completely, because they only have to send one stream of each service to each ISP, instead of the tens of thousands of streams they send out in parallel at the moment. Current BBC Multicast StreamsThe BBC already uses multicasting to distribute streams all of its radio stations that are available on its DAB multiplex apart from the Asian Network. A stream of BBC News 24 is also provided. The web page from which you access the streams is available on the BBC Broadband website, although it is relatively hidden away. To try out the BBC multicast streams you need to be with one of the following ISPs:
In progress:
and follow the instructions on here. The radio stations are currently using the Real Audio codec at a bit rate of 130 kbps, and I'm informed that the audio quality is good (unfortunately my ISP is not on the list, so I can't try them). If your ISP isn't on the list but you'd like to try the streams out then contact your ISP to request them to support multicasting. Radio stations at 128 kbps AAC in futureThe best thing in the future for radio listeners is that they are looking at using 128 kbps AAC for the radio stations. AAC is an excellent audio codec, and at 128 kbps it provides very nearly CD-quality. Therefore, once the radio stations use 128kbps AAC these multicast streams will be the highest quality source of broadcast radio stations in the UK -- even higher quality than FM, and obviously far higher than DAB! The Future of BBC BroadbandOfcom recently announced that the number of broadband connections overtook the number of dial-up internet connections, and broadband speeds are rapidly increasing. For example, there's now a number of 8 Mbps broadband connection offers at reasonable prices, and this week even saw the launch of a 24 Mbps service from Be, and Bulldog are set to follow soon. These 24 Mbps broadband services are using the new ADSL2+ specification, and clearly people will migrate towards these higher connection speeds over time. And as more and more people have higher broadband connection speeds then the BBC will be more likely to provide higher bit rates for their services -- there's no point in providing higher bit rates until people's connection speeds can handle them. In future I don't see any reason for the BBC not to use even higher AAC bit rates for its radio stations, because multicasting allows them to distribute their streams at extremely low cost, Indeed, I don't even see any reason not to use, say, 256kbps AAC now, even though 128kbps AAC does provide very good audio quality. And why stop at 256kbps? When the broadcasters can distribute their streams almost for free they could use lossless audio codecs with a bit rate of around 600 to 800 kbps, and as their name suggests, these audio codecs don't degrade the audio quality at all, because the decoder produces a perfect bit-for-bit reconstruction of the signal that goes into the encoder. More significantly, though, is that the bit rates for the TV channels will be able to increase, because currently most people only use 512 kbps broadband and I'd imagine only a small percentage currently have 2 Mbps or higher connection speeds. As the number with 2 Mbps or higher connection speeds grows then the more likely they will provide higher bit rates for their TV channels, and by the time they start using a bit rate of 2 Mbps with the H.264/AVC codec this will match or beat the picture quality we currently get on the BBC TV channels on the digital TV platforms. The BBC will also be able to provide HDTV via broadband as soon as they decide to launch it on satellite, which will probably be before they launch it on Freeview due to lack of bandwidth. Ultimately, broadband should be allow the TV channels to use the 1080p HDTV format, which provides the best of both worlds between the 1080i and 720p HD formats that we're likely to see on the digital TV platforms. It is doubtful that Freeview will ever be able to carry TV channels using the 1080p format because there just won't be enough bandwidth. I've been told that a reasonable target date for 1080p via broadband might be the London Olympics in 2012. There's also the possibility that even newer and better video and audio codecs emerge in future, and one of the main advantages of the internet is that new codecs can simply be downloaded over the net. It is this combination of very cheap distribution for the broadcasters along with the ability to adopt state-of-the-art codecs pretty much as soon as they're available that is going to transform the quality of internet multimedia streams from the low bit rate and low quality unicast streams we have today to the very high quality streams in a few years' time.
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