Slashdot Mirror
BBC Download Plans Approved
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that following approval from the BBC Trust (an independent oversight body) they are now allowed to release their 'iPlayer', enabling the download and viewing of BBC owned content such as Doctor Who. Unfortunately the Trust also mandated the use of DRM to enforce a 30 day playable period, and exempted classical music performances from being made available. There will now be a 2 month consultation period. According to one of the trustees, the Trust 'could still change its mind if there was a public outcry and it was backed up by evidence.'"
NBC is entirely a private enterprise that (in theory) compensates the public for use of its airspace adequatly via the licences for it's broadcast spectrum (read the in theory before you flame me). As such they have something of a leg to stand on when they claim private ownership and the attractions of DRM for their crap... er ... shows.
Anyway, the BBC is (at least on paper) a public enterprise oned (in heory) by the British Public and paid for via the TV Tax. Much like the Voice of America is a service funded by the American Public. As such shouldn't the content produced by the Beeb be freely available (at least to the Brits, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish) for them to do with as they please? Didn't they pay to have it made and as such "own" it?
Or is this one of those cases where the drive to resell said content (say on BBC-America or via deals with other channels, or on DVD) that was supposed to "offset costs" now driving availability?
The imposition of DRM is pointless, at least if the goal is to limit redistribution of the content. The BBC are already digitally broadcasting all of their content, classical or otherwise, from all of their broadcasting stations in clear. (Crystal Palace is even broadcasting 20Mbit/sec H.264 streams as part of the current HD trials; indeed, my understanding is that the BBC will continue to broadcast in clear when the service goes into full production.)
Presumably OFCOM want to force the BBC to use DRM (they even specified that it should be Windows DRM) in order to buoy the position of Microsoft and/or commercial broadcasters?
In any case, I guess my MythTV server will continue to be useful for some time yet.
The BBC should be providing licence fee payers like myself with unrestricted digital content. If we end up building up massive libraries of free classical music, then so much the better! It is their job to educate, inform and entertain licence fee payers, not sell us CDs. They should not be concerned with "negative market impacts" - they should be providing the public service that we Brits are paying for.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
It's quite simple - if you are British and you pay a license fee then make your views known. The feedback survey is quite short, and each section is optional. If you feel that timelimited DRM files are bullshit, especially from a license-fee funded public organisation then make your views known now!
The British slashdot readership must be large enough to make a difference here.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Thats why I love the BBC and I am happy pay my license fee. If the Beeb was a normal TV station, they would just take the lazy option of windows only. Name me another tv station who would do this ? Value for money.
This is something that's always irked me about objections to the BBC's funding scheme, emanating from the likes of ITV and Sky - the BBC was there first! These companies entered the market with the full knowledge that they were competing against a publicly funded body. It would be like me building a road somewhere, and then complaining that all the other roads in the country get public money.
The DRM is there because everyone who can recieve the over-the-air clear MPEG signal is supposedly paying a licence fee.
Yes, I agree, and I think it also shows how little the BBC Trust understands the classical music market (and probably how little the BMI understands too). With the greatest respect to the musicians who recorded the the BBC free to download performances, these are not the finest examples of these pieces recorded, nor are they distributed in the most lossless format - lossless is essential for classical music.
Serious classical fans will look for and purchase the finest performances, possibly several of them - and often pay through the nose for them too (since there's little choice other than, maybe, a rare flac torrent).
The advantage of the BBC programme is that it introduced many pieces of music to a new audience, who then likely would become fans and subsequently pay to see live performances and cds of the finest recordings.
It's a shocking waste of a missed opportunity.
I think that's not the BBC's problem. The commercial rivals must take care of themselves - by, for example, providing higher quality content or different content. Is Ofcom asserting that there's a limit to the amount of classical music and TV shows which the economy can support? That having more choice will lead inevitably to commercial loss for these competitors? Perhaps the BBC should stop producing classical music and high quality TV programs altogether lest they damage the market share of commercial competitors? Perhaps we should limit access to the Public Domain too, since it can't be easily monopolised.
It wants the corporation to scale back plans to let downloaded "catch-up" episodes remain on users' hard drives for 13 weeks, suggesting that 30 days is enough.
Assuming (as devil's advocate) that their DRM is adequate, why limit the time that the content works? If somebody records one of these shows on their VCR, they are allowed to watch it again and again forever. Why limit a user's fair use rights for no better reason than "because it's technically possible"?
The trust also asked the BBC to explore ways of introducing parental controls to its on-demand services, as it is worried at the "heightened risk of children being exposed to post-watershed material".
TV doesn't require electronic "parental controls", so why should downloaded shows?
"There is a potential negative market impact if the BBC allows listeners to build an extensive library of classical music that will serve as a close substitute for commercially available downloads or CDs," it said.
I'm afraid they're several years too late on that point. It seems the BBC Trust hasn't been paying attention to recent events. Here are some facts to brighten your day: