I work on iPlayer. The new responsive design website will use the HTML5 + HLS player on iOS. Currently on Android and desktop we are using Flash + HDS/RTMP, but it's possible this will change in the future. The reason we are using Flash at the moment is partly to do with content protection (which involves negotiations with the content rights holder), and partly to do with the fact that there isn't a standard streaming mechanism across the different platforms we need to support. We would likely move to MPEG-DASH, for example, if it's more widely adopted across the platforms.
That's interesting. Do you know why content providers are OK for content to go to iOS without DRM (beyond client certificate checks) but not to Android or the desktop?
Part of this is a legal/rights question, so I won't get into too much details. But when I said content protection I didn't explicitly say DRM :)
You are correct that currently iOS streams are protected by client certs and that is sufficient enough in that ecosystem. On Android and desktop, there is still a need for a sufficient level of content protection, but as I said a big reason we are using Flash on those platforms is the cross-platform support and the engineering efforts at the moment. I can't really comment more on future directions around this area, but needless to say we are constantly evaluating the different emerging streaming technologies out there.
