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BBC Threatened Over iPlayer Format
greengrass sends us to coverage in The Register of the Open Source Consortium's threatened anti-trust challenge against the BBC over its use of Windows Media format in its on-demand service, iPlayer. From the article: "The OSC will raise a formal complaint with UK broadcast and telecoms watchdog Ofcom next week, and has vowed to take its accusations to the European Competition Commission if domestic regulators do not act. The OSC compared the situation to the European Commission's prosecution of Microsoft over its bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows."
Freeview is broadcast using DVB-T, an international standard. You can get receivers from a number of different companies from about £30 up (or hard disk based recorders for a bit more), it's built into many high-end TVs, and there are several different available receivers to watch and record it on a PC. Sure, you can't watch it on a normal TV without extra hardware, but it's cheap, probably due to having actual competition.
.m4a files of the stuff already available as MP3 but with added chapter markings and images. I don't see any technical reason why other players couldn't convert them to a format they support, though I'm not sure how many actually have the correct features...
The iPlayer, on the other hand, requires you to watch the programs on one piece of software running on one operating system produced and sold (and not cheaply) by a single company. Sure, it's currently, the most common operating system, but the two things are not comparable.
I'm not sure what the "enhanced podcasts" are. I think they're
It is after all, a proprietary format, wholly owned and controlled by one company, which is why Creative and MS Mp3 players can't play the content.
The "Enhanced Podcast" appears to be an MPEG-4 container with an AAC "track" and a still image "track."
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.