The Register is reporting today that the BBC Trust has asked to meet with the Open Source Consortium (OSC) to discuss the group’s concerns with the forthcoming iPlayer application (see our previous post for details).

Sources at [Ofcom] told The Register that although its formal role in the process was completed when it delivered its market impact assessment in January, it felt the OSC’s concerns that Mac and Linux users will not have access to iPlayer demanded a hearing.

Before the trust got in touch on Wednesday, OSC CEO Rick Timmis said: “Everything we’ve done in the trust’s direction has fallen on deaf ears. They’ve completely ignored us.”

I’m not sure what the meeting will accomplish, as the BBC seems pretty set on the Windows Media DRM-based iPlayer moving ahead with a launch later this month, but it’s good that they are at least going to talk.

A somewhat related article in The Guardian today suggests that Silverlight (and the open source Moonlight) could be a solution to the cross platform compatability problem:

Many media companies, including the BBC, have been using WMV (Windows Media Video) because Microsoft’s DRM is openly licensed and lets them control how content is used. Videos can, for example, be time-limited. But they have also been attacked because the protected videos don’t run on Macs or Linux boxes. Silverlight could be a solution.

Who knows, maybe the BBC’s iPlayer will be replaced before long with a Silverlight-based alternative.

It was confirmed last week that Bill Gates will once again keynote at CES 2008, and it now appears as though Silverlight will be making an appearance too. Well, as much of an appearance as a technology can make, anyway! iStreamPlanet Co., which provides webcasting services to CES, World Series of Poker, American Express, and other major clients, announced today plans to use Silverlight:

“We are very excited about the benefits the new plug-in has to offer and intend to release a full suite of applications integrated with Microsoft Silverlight by late summer of this year,” said Mio Babic, Founder and CEO of iStreamPlanet Co.

That seems like a very aggressive timeline to me, but I hope they pull it off! Microsoft is apparently working with iStreamPlanet on the integration, so any problems or other issues that crop up will likely be fixed very quickly. And that’s good news for the rest of us who are interested in implementing Silverlight.

You can learn more about iStreamPlanet here, and more about Silverlight here.

I think Microsoft’s television strategy is pretty clear: throw as many ideas and products out there as you can and see what sticks. With MSN TV, Mediaroom, Windows Media Centre, and a number of other products, you’d think Microsoft would be content to improve what they already have. But no, today they announced LiveStation, a P2P live television broadcasting application built using Silverlight.

The project is a joint venture between Microsoft Research and UK-based Skinkers. Don Dodge has more on the technology behind LiveStation:

LiveStation is built on two research technologies, Pastry and SplitStream, from Microsoft’s Cambridge Research Lab. Pastry is a type of P2P system called a ‘distributed hash table,’ which makes it easier for computers to find and store information, and to organize themselves for collaborative tasks. Splitstream is an application built on top of Pastry which allows real-time streams such as live video to be robustly distributed peer-to-peer.

TechCrunch wrote about LiveStation today too:

And while it is certainly an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of Silverlight, its not even close to being productized and launched. For now, consider it little more than a pretty video.

True enough. You can watch that video here. LiveStation is currently in closed beta. I entered my email at the beta site, so hopefully I’ll get an invite soon.

For more on this story, check out TechMeme.

UPDATE: Long Zheng makes the very good point that
LiveStation isn’t really a Microsoft product.

CNN officially launched their new, redesigned website today. The site, which has been in beta for a few weeks, includes many “web 2.0″ features like user generated content, podcasts, and a clean, simple layout. For a great overview of the new site, check out Read/WriteWeb.

Video (and multimedia in general) is a major feature of the new site. In the past CNN has been a major user of Windows Media formats, but that has changed with the redesign. All videos are now encoded to Flash (FLV) meaning you no longer need to have Windows Media Player installed to view them.

In fact, the only feature I can see that still uses Windows Media is the radio stream. The site says Live Video is coming soon, and that may use Windows Media as well. Otherwise, everything is either Flash or MP3/M4V (podcasts).

All video content at CNN.com is free, so they have no need for DRM. Thus, it makes sense to move from Windows Media to Flash, as more users/computers have Flash installed than Windows Media Player.

This seems to be a growing trend - moving video content to Flash. Call it the YouTube effect I guess. I wonder if Silverlight will do anything to stop this? Windows Media and the other codecs that Silverlight support offer much higher quality than Flash.

Time will tell!

StreamingMedia.com posted an interview today with Ben Waggoner, program manager for Microsoft’s codecs division. The interview touches on the differences between Windows Media Video 9 and VC-1, as well as how Silverlight relates to Flash. Here’s what he had to say about Silverlight and codecs:

[Silverlight’s] native A/V capabilities are chiefly Windows Media-based supporting WMV 9/VC-1, WMV 7 and 8 for video, and WMA and MP3 for audio. For streaming support, it uses Windows Media Services in Windows 2003 Server, and really starts to “sing” with the improvements coming in our new Windows Server, code-named “Longhorn”.

I haven’t seen any demos of the Windows Media Services improvements in Longhorn, but I haven’t spent much time looking either. Perhaps it’s time to dig something up - Ben definitely makes it sound intriguing!

Check out the full interview for much more.