6. Jon Billings - BBC
30TH OCTOBER 2014 - 17:19
We're sorry that the demise of the RSS feeds has caused you any inconvenience. To be clear, the demise of those feeds and the opening of Nitro are not directly linked - they're driven by different factors.
The iPlayer RSS feeds were a legacy part of older versions of the iPlayer website which we’ve finally had to shut down with the end of a larger hosting contract for those legacy sites. Meanwhile, the timeline for opening up Nitro is really just a balance of resources to prepare the developer portal for open access and finish some technical work to ready Nitro for it, while developing the capabilities needed by our many BBC Online products. (Like iPlayer)
We would of course have preferred to have introduced Nitro before we had to shut down the RSS feeds, but other work (like making content available for 30 days) took priority and we’re left with this gap of a few months.
I think I should also caveat that Nitro is not going to be a like-for-like replacement for the RSS feeds - it has a different style and structure, and it is a managed API, meaning that each consumer (public developer or BBC app) has its own rate limit so that we can manage usage and capacity. We can't guarantee that it'll be easy or even possible for things like RSS readers to use, and you'll have to check that the apps that you build against it are consistent with the service & data licenses granted.
In particular, the BBC does not sanction XBMC, get_iplayer or similar clients, and the iPlayer RSS feeds were never designed or intended to support them. Nitro will almost certainly not support their ways of working. We realise this comes as unwelcome news to users of these clients. The iPlayer team continues to work hard to maximise access to iPlayer across a wide range of platforms and devices.
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Originally Posted by garyblas
