BBC's iPlayer's Prospects Looking Bleak 369
An anonymous reader writes "The future of iPlayer, the BBC's new online on-demand system for delivering content, is continuing to look bleaker. With ISPs threatening to throttle the content delivered through the iPlayer, consumers petitioning the UK government and the BBC to drop the DRM and Microsoft-only technology, and threatened legal action from the OSC, the last thing the BBC wanted to see today was street protests at their office and at the BBC Media Complex accompanied by a report issued by DefectiveByDesign about their association with Microsoft."
Huh? (Score:1, Interesting)
Feel free to blast me for being ignorant of the situation, but I couldn't find any decent info on why this situation warrants protests and such hype. If it pushes OSS, I'm all for it, it just seems a little over the top. The only bad thing I could find was it's delivery system, which would push the net neutrality debate...
DRM is the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The annoying thing is the DRM just enforces an expiry time, it doesn't stop people without a TV licence (mandatory in UK) from viewing such content.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here it is: http://defectivebydesign.org/blog/BBCcorrupted [defectivebydesign.org]
The article goes as far as to suggest the BBC has been corrupted by Microsoft. I'm not sure it goes that far, but I think the BBC had all good intentions but failed on the delivery. I hope they won't abandon the effort but simply update it to ensure it's available cross-platform, DRM free using FOSS etc...
Would be a great showcase for FOSS if they did.
Cheers.
No Difference (Score:1, Interesting)
I can't even get the bloody thing to work (Score:5, Interesting)
While I recognize their desire to protect their content, I wonder what the hell made them choose this pig's dinner of a solution.
They would be better off to deliver watermarked content in an open format such as H264 that plays just about anywhere. They could require users to register their TV licence in order to get the service, after which they can use it from any OS or browser within reasonable restrictions. Basically people should be able to do what they like with the content, short of sharing it. If they share it, use the watermark to look-up their address and send the heavies round.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't care about them stopping it from being faster, that isn't the point. When I have a 3 meg download speed and the BBC has a three meg upload, any actions outside built in limitations(and not manipulated by the ISP) of the hardware or software being used that restricts it to a slower speed is ripping me off as well as ripping the BBC off.
Doesn't consumer protection laws already cover companies selling stuff and then not delivering on purpose?. It seems to me this should already be illegal. Maybe we need to make some accusations of the limiting and then look at what recourse the laws provide. I bet it is enough that it would be more then what each customer pays in a month. If every customer complained and file for action, It wold turn around.
The BBC's Core (Score:1, Interesting)
From The Sunday Times
August 12, 2007
Confessions of a BBC liberal
The BBC has finally come clean about its bias, says a former editor, who wrote Yes, Minister
Antony Jay
In the past four weeks there have been two remarkable changes in the public attitude to the BBC. The first and most newsworthy one was precipitated by the faked trailer of the Queen walking out of a photographic portrait session with Annie Leibovitz.
It was especially damaging because the licence fee is based on a public belief that the BBC offers a degree of integrity and impartiality which its commercial competitors cannot achieve.
But in the longer term I believe that the second change is even more significant. It started with the BBC's own report on impartiality that effectively admitted to an institutional "liberal" bias among programme makers. Previously these accusations had been dismissed as a right-wing rant, but since the report was published even the BBC's allies seem to accept it.
It has been on parade again these past few weeks on the Radio 4 programme The Crime of Our Lives. It included (of course) the ritual demoni-sation of Margaret Thatcher (uninterested in crime . . . surprisingly did not take a closer interest), a swipe at Conservative magistrates and their friends in the golf club and occasional quotes from Douglas Hurd to preserve the illusion of impartiality, but the whole tenor of the programme was liberal/ progressive/ reformist.
The series even included a strong suggestion that Thatcher's economic policies were the cause of rising crime. So presumably she shouldn't have done what she did?
There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy.
This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC staff. Can you imagine a BBC staff member slanting a programme towards the case for a stricter penal policy?
The growing general agreement that the culture of the BBC (and not just the BBC) is the culture of the chattering classes provokes a question that has puzzled me for 40 years. The question itself is simple - much simpler than the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of this social group?
They are that minority often characterised (or caricatured) by sandals and macrobiotic diets, but in a less extreme form are found in The Guardian, Channel 4, the Church of England, academia, showbusiness and BBC news and current affairs. They constitute our metropolitan liberal media consensus, although the word "liberal" would have Adam Smith rotating in his grave. Let's call it "media liberalism".
It is of particular interest to me because for nine years, between 1955 and 1964, I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Harold Macmil-lan's premiership and I do not think that my former colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters.
But we were not just anti-Macmil-lan; we were antiindustry, anti-capital-ism, antiadvertising, antiselling, antiprofit, antipatriotism, antimonarchy, antiempire, antipolice, antiarmed forces, antibomb, antiauthority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place - you name it, we were anti it.
Although I was a card-carrying media liberal for the best part of nine years, there was nothing in my past to predispose me towards membership. I spent my early years in a country where every citizen had to carry identification papers. All the newspapers were censored, as were all letters abroad; general elections had been abolished: it was a one-party state. Yes, that was Britain - Britain fr
Re:There is no uproar (Score:3, Interesting)
This is PUBLIC television we're talking about here.
What Would Satisfy Me (Score:5, Interesting)
Its Nepotism, Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Having worked on some of these kinds of projects it is all nepotism. Erik gets a nice job at the BBC, someone from the BBC goes to Microsoft, an ex Labour Minister gets a job on one of Microsoft's Partner companies.
I reckon the BBC will abandon the Linux iPlayer the second it can.
The DRM stuff is a load of guff too. People as far as North Africa can pick up the BBC for free by sticking up a 130 cm satellite dish and aiming it at 28.2 degrees south as the Astra 2 satellite. Wonderful, crisp, digital downloads in realtime.
Re:Bit of a rock & a hard place thing here... (Score:5, Interesting)
My sympathy for them is tempered by that, and by a couple of other things...
- for a while they used to provide replays of radio programmes etc. in Ogg, but they stopped that and went to Windows or Real only a long time ago. Obviously somebody there had a clue, but was (eventually) shut down. This is more of a bad sign than if they had never done it at all.
- while claiming they were 'intending to provide a non-Windows solution', this was only expected to happen in 'about 24 months' and they were only going to review progress on that project 'every 6 months or so'. That sounds to me very much like 'yeah, yeah, we'll get to it one day. Maybe.'