The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is set to launch a UK first, giving its online viewers the ability to rewind live television. Through its iPlayer platform, viewers will be able to restart a program from the beginning and immediately catch up on what they have missed. Furthermore, they will also be able to go back two hours to ensure they have access to as much programming as possible.
Previously, viewers would have to wait up to 24 hours - and sometimes even longer - for their favorite programs to appear on catch-up. It is hoped that the new service will help alleviate the frustrations of missing the start of a show online.
Explaining how the technology works, Henry Webster - an executive product manager in media services at BBC Future Media - said that it is similar to the delivery of text rich web pages.
"The technology that allows us to offer this new functionality is part of a wider strategic move to embrace HTTP chunked streaming for delivering our online video," he explained.
"Instead of using a point-to-point streaming protocol such as RTMP as we have done in the past, this method breaks up the H.264 video into chunks and delivers them as HTTP packets in much the same way as we deliver our text rich web pages today."
He added: "We already use Content Delivery Networks to help us with video delivery, but a move to HTTP streaming means that instead of relying on their capacity to stream video from specialist video servers, we are now able to use their cheaper and more abundant HTTP serving capacity."
The BBC is especially keen to introduce the technology quickly ahead of broadcasting the Wimbledon tennis championships and the London 2012 Olympics, which start on July 27th.
Around 22 percent of people viewing iPlayer through their PC in April were watching programs as they were being broadcast, according to the Corporation's own research. The new service will only be available through the PC at first, but the BBC hopes to expand it onto mobiles, tablets and even internet televisions by the end of this year.
