It’s fascinating to read that the BBC have now decided to adopt open standards in the delivery of their audio and video content. Why? Because they’ve now “matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions.” This will allow them to deliver content across a wider range of devices and improve the quality of the content delivery.

What formats have they decided to adopt? AAC and H.264, i.e. the ones that Apple has been using since day 1 of iTunes (AAC) and October 2005’s introduction of video content on the iTunes Store (H.264), reminding me of my original thoughts on the BBC not using Flash.

Still, it’s good to see them moving in the right direction, even if it needs to be spun.

The BBC’s Anthony Rose sells it more convincingly, although I don’t consider H.264 to be the ‘new kid on the block’, given that it has been in iTunes for nearly three years. At present the BBC’s content providers are using Quicktime to encode H.264 content but will move to MainConcept’s transcoder shortly.