BBC "Not In Bed With Bill Gates" 335
whoever57 writes "The BBC's head of technology denied rumors that a secret deal with Microsoft was behind the XP-only launch of the BBC's iPlayer. According to Ashley Highfield, the reason that the player only supports Windows XP is that only a small number of Linux visitors have come to the BBC's website. Why he would expect a large number of Linux-based visitors to the site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear. He also thinks that 'Launching a software service to every platform simultaneously would have been launch suicide,' despite the example of many major sites that support Linux (even if this is through the closed-source flash player)."
Lame reason. (Score:4, Insightful)
Definitely a screwup somewhere (Score:3, Insightful)
400-600 people on Linux use bbc.co.uk (in the UK)? I don't think so...
Someone needs to recheck their server logs.
Perfect example (Score:1, Insightful)
Launching with a java or flash player would have been suicide?
Is the man a complete and utter idiot?
What can be done to force him getting fored for being incompetent so we can try and find someone that is not stupid?
These are questions that all of us want answered.
Chicken and egg (Score:2, Insightful)
A wise designer once told me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cuz once the bridge is up, hundreds more who couldn't swim the distance will want to cross.
Why not design for open in the first place? (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, it was a really stupid move and managed to get everybody from the smallest Linux hacker to the UK government commenting in public about the policy.
Creating an open "player" for all platforms would have taken more resources at first, but from that point on all future platforms would be supported by the people who use the platform.
Sadly, the Beeb needs closed source to implement the no-save and timed delete features forced on them by others.
Love the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Definitely a screwup somewhere (Score:1, Insightful)
They subsequently began spoofing their User agent reply.
Re:Of course it was (Score:2, Insightful)
This sounds like racketeering, to me.
why a player? (Score:1, Insightful)
The more amusing of two evils (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lame reason. (Score:4, Insightful)
Making the videos only work in Windows specific media players is more effort than using a common freely available codec.
At an extreme, having a single page with links to the videos in mpeg format would have taken one person a day to set up.
They may have their reasons, but technically the simplest solution is often... the simplest one.
What a moron (Score:1, Insightful)
It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux.
It's about ensuring that there is a free, open and competitive market in producing players. What annoys me is not that there is no Linux player, but that NOBODY CAN CREATE ONE from the specifications (since there aren't any).
With idiots like this in charge at the Beeb, there's no hope.
Re:BBC's charter (Score:5, Insightful)
They're also required to account for their spending and for keeping costs down. If they proposed a completely open player and it was a significant amount of money more than the Microsoft one then they would have to justify why they went with the costly option.
Granted I've not worked in a non-profit organisation, but even so, I think that justifying a larger spend on something that affects less than 0.004% of visitors is going to be a very tough sell for anyone.
Re:Stats not about iPlayer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Based on Kontiki so no Linux version (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally you shouldn't pick your technology (programming language, toolkit, etc.) and then pick your audience based on what it supports. Instead, you should write out a list of requirements, and then pick the technology that satisfies all those needs. In this case, if one of the requirements was: "Must be available to all fee-paying persons with computer access (i.e.: must be platform agnostic)" then an OS-specific technology would never have been chosen in the first place.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that this is a result of mis-management (e.g. not thinking very hard about requirements) rather than corruption (e.g. collusion with software companies), but in any case I question their planning process.
(And to those who may respond that "must support DRM" was one of the requirements in the initial design, and could only be satisfied using Windows-only software, I would then say that placing content protection above equal treatment of fee-paying users was, again, a poor design decision for an organization like the BBC.)
Re:Lame reason. (Score:3, Insightful)
The demographic on
BY THE WAY I'm aware that this is due to a proprietary and closed source player, hence the issue. It's not like you can't:
A) Get your news elsewhere
-or
B) READ, instead of watch video.
Re:Based on Kontiki so no Linux version (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:oh god, not this again... (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be a fair argument, except that a large proportion of contents is produced by the BBC at the expense of licence payers, who should be able to access the information they are paying for regardless of operating system. In essence, one could argue that as a licence payer it's our content.
Re:Lame reason. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What a moron (Score:2, Insightful)
I look forward to you campaigning to get the BBC to broadcast all its DAB channels on analog radio, as they're not fufilling their statutory duty to serve the whole UK population blah blah blah...
The fact is that you CHOOSE to use a minority platform. That means you're not going to be first in the queue when it comes to getting new services from the BBC. You'll get them eventually, unless the marginal cost of providing them is too high - just as there's people in the UK who can't get digital TV (and won't get it for years).
Re:oh god, not this again... (Score:1, Insightful)
There are no excuses for the use of Microsoft only technology in this. If they couldn't persuade a maker of a show to allow it to be on iPlayer sans DRM then the show should be not be available on iPlayer. Simple as that. Everyone except the BBC sees the fixed-platform nature of the iPlayer to be a violation of the BBC's charter. And it is very suspicious that we were promised a cross-platform iPlayer which suddenly got taken away at the same time the BBC clearly started to have much closer ties with Microsoft.
The government should scrap the charter and force the BBC to go commercial. The BBC is behaving like a commercial organisation these days anyway so it might as well do it properly.
Re:Submitter is either confused or an out right li (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me put it in a way that your little mind can grasp: If it cost 1 million to implement iPlayer for each platform, then it would cost:
And, companies often do not do what 6% of their shareholders. I think you have forgotten that shareholders vote on many things and it is majority rule. If a vote is 49%/51%, then the 49% lose and the policy of the other 51% gets implemented.
What makes you think you and your choice of operating system is more important and deserves a bigger share of the money and resources than the other 95% of the population? What makes you think you are worth 19,400 times than 95% of the rest of the population?
Do you see the depths of your selfishness yet?
More importantly, if you had RTFA, you would have seen where they decided to support the majority of their visitors first and then add support for the rest later.
Now, stop being a self-centered asshole.
Re:Lame reason. (Score:2, Insightful)
except that the BBC is legally mandated to worry about more than just "the bottom line". Hence why people are making such a big deal out of this, whereas when some US-based TV stations do it it's just regarded as "common corporate stupidity".
Re:Lame reason. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are both right and wrong. If *I* develop a web page, I purchase and use tools that are platform and browser agnostic. Then again, I work for a company I co-own. So for me, it would be more difficult to make a platform or browser specific video feed/system or website (well, perhaps not website... IE is still a nightmare to code any decent site to, since how it handles things varies per version and occassionally per update).
If I work for Company A, I'm stuck using the tools my IT Department licensed for our company (most decent sized companies will mandate certain tools or software - among other things, it helps ensure license compliance for every package used). If Company A's Idiot Technology Department (face it, many IT guys in a big company's IT departments are technological idiots who base purchasing decisions off the latest and greatest ad or brochure; with no understanding of the underlying technology or later implications based on their choice - and many of the good ones - because there are plenty of good ones - are limited to what their meddling upper management decides for them*), then I am stuck with using tools that may be geared for a _______ only solution.
Thus, without knowing more about the BBC's internal decisions when they purchased whatever video handling/processing tools, web tools, etc; speculation is a moot point - and their answers, as lame as they are (considering making a cross platform video delivery system is easy in principle) could entirely (or mostly) be to downplay the fact that they do not have an infrastructure set up to make a cross platform system due to the software/server/etc choices they made earlier.
The bigger the company (or less cash they have, or smaller IT/deployment team they have) the less likely they will be spending money switching the stuff they already bought with new stuff [it costs more money (since they are buying a 2nd package to do the "same" thing as the first), or even if it's open source they choose for round two, it's more money in deployment, training and support learning].
And of course, (wrongly) Open Source solutions scare most large companies who don't understand the (lack of) implications running Open Source software has (feeling they will have a lack of control/ownership over the finished product).
In a perfect (IT) world, where every IT manager knows what they are doing (or is unhindered by upper management forcing decisions on them), and corporate buying decisions are done keeping in mind that the web is supposed to be open access, you are correct. We just dont yet live in that perfect world.
-Robert
.
* At CompUSA, some idiot in upper management decided to use Siebel for their entire sales and service management system. The IT gang got stuck dealing with the consequences of a decision they became stuck with - meaning almost a decade after roll-out, the system still doesnt work properly, quickly or with all the features that were intended - and of course it limits all development to Windows, through IE or Excel or Access (etc). No Firefox, no MySQL/Oracle/whatever.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:2, Insightful)