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BBC Trial of TV Show Download Service
Little Hamster writes "Five thousand households with broadband access has been selected for a trial of the BBC's new interactive Media Player. The trial will run from September to December, and users can 'time shift' and download selected BBC TV shows, radio programmes, regional programming and feature films. After seven days, the content will be automatically deleted from the user's computers. BBC will use this trial to iron out any outstanding rights issues and resolve teething difficulties with the technology ahead of a full launch next year." The BBC Press Office has a release about this as well.
If the BBC essentially runs a public domain service anyway, why are the shows deleted after seven days?
This ceratinly doesn't need to happen on a video recording.
Anyone wanna bet it'll be Windows only.
Guess i'll probably end up sticking to bittorrent.
yes, you don't get a free TiVo with a UK tv license
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
TiVo I believe you can only record shows that were on and watch them later, or am I missing something?
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
I was disappointed at first to see that the BBC is implementing DRM but it's worth bearing in mind that not all the content broadcast by the BBC is owned by them. Much of it comes from independent studios who license it to the BBC. So I remain hopeful that the BBC will offer its own copyrighted material to UK license payers on more permissive terms.
But with that headline, i first thought it was refering to a lawsuit. Trial and Music in the same headline, and it's not a lawsuit?! Expect a letter from the RIAA soon, guys!
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
Although this does raise the question of why the content is deleted at all. Since the license payers have already paid for it to be produced, why can they not do whatever they want with the content?
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Dr. Who fans will note that their house now looks a lot smaller on the outside than it really is on the inside.
sigs, as if you care.
I've had a decent idea for legal TV distribution online in my journal for a while now. Most of the posts I see so far about this BBC service are negative. Finally a media outlet is trying to embrace technology instead of calling their lawyers every 5 minutes, and all people can do is complain. Downloadable shows will probably never be free without the show including some form of DRM or advertising... get used to it. I'd much rather have DRM or ads than no downloadable shows at all.
If you don't want the DRM or ads, get a Tivo or TV capture card and skip the commercials or edit them out.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
[rant]Well, maybe they should have been worrying about that for the last bloody decade then, instead of spending all their time & money trying to legislate the whole bloody concept out of existance!![/rant]
*ahem*
Yay, BBC! It's times like this I don't object to paying my license fee!
So.. it has come to this
I often read Americans saying they had to turn on subtitles to understand parts of The Office. As an English person I've always wanted to know which parts/characters Americans find hard to understand. Or is it just the slang terms used?
From an English person's point of view, the accents are fairly standard mid-England/London accents. But then, having driven round rural Georgia, I know we are two countries divided by a common language.
The issue of Linux is that it simply won't be supported. Isn't that obvious?
"The Benny Hill Show" started on the BBC in 1955, but transferred to ITV in 1969. The ones that are seen in the US are entirely from the ITV run, and with many of the ruder bits cut out.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Where have you been?
The UK TV licence fee is regularly moaned about on Slashdot!
For info:
In the UK you need to have a licence for each address which has a TV receiver (you can have dozens of sets in the same house and one licence if you want*)
FWIW I'm happy to pay it for TV free from adverts disrupting the shows and with greater freedom to express ideas without worrying about business withdrawing advertising revenue. And don't worry about the 'tax' aspects meaning state direction - the Beeb regularly clashes with the government of the day - as both main parties seem to complain about it, it must be reasonably neutral. (BTW I have no connection with the BBC)
Others may dislike the licence on philosophical / political / dogmatic grounds (esp if they like watching the commercial channels more) - I accept that I have to subsidise, through higher prices, the advertising 'industry' and through them the other channels.
* actually there are some restrictions (eg multiple independent occupancy of a house split into flats) but the principle holds for most cases
"the BBC is supported by advertising and (are you sitting down?) a yearly television tax."
Nope, just a yearly TV tax, no advertising.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
More information:
One guy who doesn't own a TV, but gets harassed by the TV Licensing Agency (which is actually a private company contracted by the BBC, to the tune of a quarter billion pounds a year): http://www.marmalade.net/lime/
Information about BBC revenue and expenditures, TVLA, etc: http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/international/bbc.htm l
Please help metamoderate.
They still don't get it. DRM will still be unnacceptable.
It is MY computer and it should only delete something when I tell it to. No one else. It should not police me. It should not tell me what to do, I should tell it what to do. If I break the law using my computer, then I should be held responsible, but I should NOT be limited if I choose to use the computer in a fashion that some short sited company didn't plan on.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Well, my local NPR radio station here in California is offering the radio SHARK as a premium you get for donating money. (The radio SHARK is a tuner which receives radio programs and records them to a computer; as far as I can tell from their website, there is no DRM).
Don't know if the station had some heavy discussion about DRM, or even thought about it, but it would appear that not everyone in the content production and distribution business are as worried about pushing DRM as we assume.
They moan about a fee of £100 for a year for a load of channels free of advertising. Sky costs about half that much for a month of advert-ridden shit. I know which is better value.
BBC will use this trial to iron out any outstanding rights issues
So remember, kids, even if you come up with a totally trivial means of defeating their DRM, don't release it until AFTER they have irreversably committed to this!