Last week, the BBC made their iPlayer content available for the iPhone, and by doing so they unwittingly made all their content available to download DRM-free as an MP4 stream.
The process is simple; change your browser's user agent to replicate an iPhone, then you will be able to view and download the mpeg 4 videos.
Download MP4 iPlayer videos in 2 steps
In this example I am going to use wget to download the files via the command line.
1. First you need to lookup the URL for the MP4 stream. The easiest way to do this is to use a web tool that extracts program information from an iPlayer URL (e.g. Eastenders). Paste the iPlayer URL you want to download into the search box on that page and submit, then right-click download the MP4 video and copy the url.
2. Now fire up a terminal and run wget, replacing the URL with the URL you copied from the first step:
wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3" http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/b0094z1j
An alternative method is to use this ruby script, which takes an iPlayer URL directly and does everything for you.
BBC Reaction
So far the BBC haven't said a lot about this revelation. Currently, their official line is as follows:
The BBC iPlayer on iPhone and iPod Touch is currently in beta, which enables the BBC to pick up on these issues and find a solution that ensures the content is delivered to users in a secure way before the service is rolled out
According to their technology blog, they will be posting a fuller response in the next few days. My hope is that they don't do a u-turn on the MP4 format. If any staff from the BBC Media team read this post, here is my message to you:
Dropping the DRM from your mp4 streams for the iPhone is a fantastic step forward, so please embrace it!
Using an open standard will allow license paying users of any platform to enjoy the content they have a right to view, with minimal additional development costs to yourselves.
There is no DRM when people save shows on Sky+ or their video / dvd recorders (or even straight to their computer via a DTV tuner), so why cripple the iPlayer service with it?
At the very least you could make your in-house productions available on MP4 to all, whilst you get the third party producers on board.