The director of BBC Future Media and Technology Erik Huggers has announced that they will move away from proprietary software into open standards.

The advantage for the audience will be a noticeable improvement in audio and video quality. Furthermore, it should become easier for the media to simply work across a broader range of devices. While it’s not a magic bullet, it certainly is a significant step in the right direction. The first service to make content available using these open standards based codecs will be iPlayer. Anthony Rose will have more details of introducing H.264 to the iPlayer later today. It is our intention for other AV services across bbc.co.uk to follow quickly.