BBC Backpedals On Linux Audience Figures

6031769 writes "After recently claiming that only 400 to 600 Linux users visit the BBC website, the BBC's Ashley Highfield has now admitted that they got their numbers wrong. The new estimate is between 36,600 and 97,600 according to his blog post. He stops short of describing how Auntie arrives at these two widely different sets of numbers and how their initial estimate is two orders of magnitude out."

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[calebt3]

Ubuntu has done a pretty good job implementing the 32-bit flash in their 64-bit OS. Install the 'flashplugin-nonfree package'.

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[PuercoPop]

I can play _most_ of the flash, it hangs sometimes on firefox and most of the times in konqueror...

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[calebt3]

Ever hear of Gnash? [gnu.org]

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[Isauq]

Interestingly, the most recent version of flash I installed on my distro has solved a number of long-standing problems with flash in Linux (Including the one where the right-click menu crashes your browser). If they could reduce the 100% CPU time that Flash seems to so desperately need in Linux, it would actually not be all that bad (though they're not out of the unstable woods yet by any means).

Re:Did Micro$oft have anything to do with it?

[Tim C]

The BBC stats on Linux userbase is flawed for the same reason. Linux users don't return when the content is incompatible.

In the article originally posted about this a little while ago (that these new figures are correcting), it was made perfectly clear that the figures were for the whole of the bbc.co.uk domain not just the new streaming media stuff. Of course Linux users return to the BBC site - it's one of the most popular sites in the UK. The Windows-only section is a new, so-far tiny addition.

This is nothing like non-iPod owners using or not using iTMS (although I own an ageing iRiver and still use iTMS from time to time...). The vast majority of the content on the bbc.co.uk domain works just fine with Linux, as it's plain old HTML web pages.

Re:BBC is hopelessly biased...

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC is not state run or state owned. If you think the BBC is biased in favour of the Labour government you aught to read some of the recent history between the two. Sure the BBC has a bias but it is one all of its own and compared to the other companies you mention it as close to impartial as makes no difference.

Re:Different sets of numbers?

[JasterBobaMereel]

The British use metric more than 'merkins, we have it as a standard (except for a few exceptions, hey we're British...)

In what other country can you buy a litre of petrol, drive a mile down the road at 30mph, under a 1.3m high bridge to buy a pint?

Re:Running BBC on Linux

[jimicus]

The bit you're missing is iPlayer, which allows you to view more or less anything the BBC has put out over the course of the last (week? month? Some time period).

The streaming media is straight unencrypted WMV or RealAudio, which is why you can play it.

iPlayer is a VB wrapper around Windows Media Player and requires the DRM functionality offered by WMP.

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, flash has been freezing up my konqueror sessions too. I've found that you can "killall nspluginviewer" to keep on working in Konqueror.

-Fig (dedicated Konqueror user)

Re:Sounds like good news to for the Linux communit

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, given the Linux-unfriendly nature of the BBC's site, how many Linux users either don't visit it purely because of the Linux-unfriendly nature of the site, or set their user-agent to look like Windows?

I keep seeing this posted, with no explanation. What exactly is "Linux-unfriendly" about any of the BBC websites or non-iPlayer content? The one and only problem I have ever had is that the Real based video doesn't work in Firefox on Ubuntu: this is a bug with the Real Player plugin, not the BBC web site. (The audio streams (I.e. Radio1) work fine, by the way).

As far as I can tell, the BBC website is fine in almost any browser you would ever care to use. It even works nicely in ABrowse on Syllable, which is Webcore based and quite possibly the definition of "minority"!

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[Molt]

Look at Flex Builder [adobe.com]. Built on the same technologies as Flash, but with the focus on application-style GUIs rather than animations.

Used the Windows-based freely available Flex 2 SDK (Not the Builder) to write an in-house media viewer here and was rather pleased by it, all told.

Not that I'd expect this to run on Gnash though as Gnash is based on a version of Flash (SWF 7) which wouldn't support all these cool toys.

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[Seq]

Add any non-intel Linux machine (PowerPC in particular) to the unsupported list

Re:Are other Linux estimates wrong?

[Bill Dimm]

They probably incorrectly labeled all Linux Firefox users as Windows Users ... Firefox has a global 25% share (probably in excess of 90% linux browser share)

For the Linux count to be off by a factor of 100 due to not counting Firefox, Firefox would need 99% market share among Linux users. A quick and dirty analysis of a very small sample of the logs from MagPortal.com [magportal.com] gives the breakdown (unique IP addresses with "linux" in the user-agent string [case insensitive]):
FireFox: 53%
Gecko (FireFox + Seamonkey + Minefield + etc.): 72%
Konqueror: 11%
Opera: 2%

Those numbers could easily be off by a fair amount, and I haven't excluded things like Wget or Java from the total count when computing percentages, but I would be surprised if Konqueror would come out below 1% of Linux users on a better sample.

Good interview with Ashley Highfield

[psr]

Linked from TFA is a BBC produced podcast interview [bbc.co.uk] (available in Ogg Vorbis format, CC Attr-NC-SA) with Ashley Highfield which is extremely enlightening.

Rather than the very lightweight interviews I've read with him lately (I don't care if he has an iPod!), this is pretty in depth, and Mr Highfield comes across as having quite a lot of clue. It's well worth listening to.

To make a few of the points from the interview:

• It sounds like there's going to be up to four different iPlayers:
  1. The windows one (currently in Beta)
  2. One for virgin media set-top boxes (Virgin has a monopoly on Cable TV in the UK). (coming around Christmas)
  3. The flash based streaming one (coming after Christmas)
  4. One for Macs, which is based on Adobe AIR, and allows downloading (not announced, and they won't until they know that it works
• It seems that there isn't a plan to allow downloading for Linux, because as Mr Highfield (correctly) says, open source and DRM are incompatible. DRM can never work on Linux (not that it works anywhere else), and so while they're thinking about providing the iPlayer on Linux, it will only be in a future beyond DRM.
• There's also some interesting stuff about how much it would cost for the BBC to buy all of the rights for their programming (lots) and how the Beethoven experience experiment changed the landscape

All in all, a very interesting listen.