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BBC Chooses Microsoft DRM Platform
bazorg writes "The BBC has chosen Microsoft's DRM technology to limit the viewing of content downloaded from their website. These downloads would allow viewers to catch up on shows that were broadcast on the previous 7 days; they would be compatible only with Windows Media Player and a new product called 'iPlayer'. This iPlayer is not yet available for platforms other than MS Windows, which caused the Open Source Consortium (OSC) to file a complaint to national and EU authorities. 'The BBC aims to make its content as widely available as possible and has always taken a platform agnostic approach to its internet services. It is not possible to put an exact timeframe on when BBC iPlayer will be available for Mac users. However, we are working to ensure this happens as soon as possible and the BBC Trust will be monitoring progress on a six monthly basis.'"
Windows and OS X!
What do you mean "What about all the others?" There are others? Er, when you say "Future platforms" you mean the next version of Windows, right?
We might need to go back to the drawing board on this one...
Don't worry, someone will be able to hack a player for Linux/Mac faster than BBC's official one.
-- tinyhack.com
is I have to pay for this junk through my "BBC Tax" even though I won't be able to use it. Here in the UK a TV license is compulsory if you have a TV that can receive a signal EVEN if you pay for a subscription service through someone like Sky or Virgin Media.
Despite the several hundred requests the BBC has received for a Linux iPlayer (so said one insider), the BBC is not planning to make iPlayer available for licence-fee payers who use Linux.
Personally, I don't know of any off-the-shelf-and-easy-to-implement open source DRM solution the BBC could have gone for, and given the choice between using Microsoft DRM and getting an iPlayer out the door now or building something in house that could take years I can see why the BBC made the decision they did.
I'm from the UK, love the BBC, not overly keen on Microsoft. The BBC's promise to keep things under review and aim to get something for other platforms out in ~2 years is good enough for me.
Plus, I haven't heard of any rivals (ITV/Sky/Virgin) promising a non-Microsoft implementation and as far as I know the Channel4 on demand software (http://www.channel4.com/4od/index.html) doesn't even work on Vista let alone non-MS platforms.
With the resources that the BBC has available, the technological opportunities now available and the mandate that they have to serve the British public, I am consistently amazed that they continue to align themselves with multinational, license charging companies.
Shame on you BBC.
Seriously, what are they trying to "protect"
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
The BBC was working on a new open source / royalty free video Codec Dirac. I hope they did not drop the effort (looking at the projects websites makes me think there is still live to the project).
http://dirac.sourceforge.net/
http://schrodinger.sourceforge.net/
Don't use DRM. As a licence payer, UK tax-payer and voter I want my state broadcaster to, well, broadcast the media, not spend my money on restricting who can see it, and probably inconveniencing the people they WANT to see it in the process.
I thought leaving it out was considered the solution to DRM.
(IANAL)
This is in no way acceptable.
The BBC's insistence to use DRM (Digital RESTRICTIONS Management -- it does sod-all for my rights) goes against their charter.
When the BBC first began, you had no choice but to build your own radio set. There was never any question that some essential part might be kept locked away out of the reach of the General Public for the specific purpose of preventing just any random person from constructing a receiver.
For the BBC to insist that their programmes only be received on one particular make of receiver (however it may be rebadged), and that an essential part (the Source Code for the decryption) be specifically denied to home constructors and experimenters, is nothing short of outrageous.
This country is becoming more and more like the former GDR every day.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It doesn't and never will. DRM and openness are fundamentally incompatible. You can't have an "open source DRM" system, because it would expose the fundamental flaw of DRM -- that it's trying to keep something from you that you already have. [1]
I think what's really galling people is that the BBC is using DRM at all.
[1] It might be possible to build an "open source" DRM system, if you were only talking about 'open' software, and it was just a wrapper around some sort of hardware system that actually held the keys. But that's why I said "openness" and DRM are incompatible -- in a truly open computer platform there's absolutely no way to enforce DRM against a savvy user that doesn't want it enforced on them. The only way DRM works is if you have a 'black box' somewhere, either in software or hardware.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Places to register complaints: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/points_ of_view/index.shtml
Maybe report the BBC to Watchdog for dodgy business practices ;-):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/watchdo g/index.shtml
Ooooh! I know! They're trying to stop people stealing the copy of Micro Live!, where the BBC was hacked on live TV by the Cheshire Catalyst!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You can't expose the keys, but any DRM system that's based on a secret implementation rather than cryptography is going to be cracked.
Even ones based on cryptography are going to be cracked, since there's no way to make a cryptographically secure DRM system. The end user has to have both the ciphertext and the key, in order to use the content at all -- therefore they can get the plaintext. It's often not exactly trivial, because the keys can be obscured, but there's no mathematical security there. It's always just a "secret implementation." Remove the secrecy and you break the system, period.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Have we already forgotten that the BBC hates DRM?
First, they cut down on spectacular comedy series they have been doing, and instead turned to crappy NBC imitation shows with subjects like forensic detectives, thrillers, crapola and crap.
now going microsoft drm way. beh.
apparently whomever is directing the channel now has no wits.
Read radical news here
The BBC has been offering video downloads on their website for quite a while now and it is still not available for other platforms. Trying to communicate with the BBC about ETA etc. is virtually impossible. I live in the UK, where open source is not very popular, and often considered not to be reliable enough for business or education environments. Here, ICT education in secondary schools means learning MS Office applications. Many city councils and universities have partnership agreements with MS. Even learning how to make web pages seems not possible with MS Word if you follow the governement agencies' guidelines. So the BBC's decision use with MS' DRM is very much in-line with everything else in this country.
-- Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva.
As long as content providers continue to dance around DRM distribution bittorrent sites will thrive.
nuff said
This just makes me sad. This is video that is paid for by British citizens. Publicly funded content. And still, the PHBs feel the need to lock it to specific devices, limit the number of views, and keep track of who watched what when.
:reads summary: :looks at BBC news feed on bookmark toolbar: :right-click, delete:
BBC can fuck right off. Shame too, since their news tends to be pretty good, but I refuse to support behavior like that. I've gotten to like Reuters better of late anyway.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I'm wondering if there's mileage in an anti-trust suit against the Beeb for this...
Smegma.
I recall the discussions about a GPLed DRM system also, and my recollection was that it was widely criticized for being impossible to achieve without a hardware module, or binary blob. At some point, you need the black box that does the magic and hides the keys from the user. Even if you pile on layers and layers of encryption onto the key (which is basically what AACS does), somewhere you have to decrypt the content in order to let the user view it. If you have a system that's open, where the code that's being executed at any given moment can be analyzed, then you're never going to be able to avoid letting the user get their hands on the key. (Or even more easily, just letting them get their hands on the decrypted content.)
Just to follow on your example, in such a system, the plugin would probably have to be a closed-source binary blob, or else you could just modify it to intercept and spit out the decryption key as it was being received from the provider. (I'm not trying to personally attack you -- what you created there was as good a DRM system as most of the real ones on the market, but it's running into the fundamental limitation of DRM.) It's all smoke and mirrors.
Anyway, after doing a little Googling, I think the "open source DRM" thing a while back was related to someone on the Gstreamer project discussing adding support for DRMed formats -- but it's still not clear how they'd accomplish that. Some people have pointed towards Sun's drm-opera project as one possible avenue, but AFAIK that's nothing but vaporware, and it too was widely criticized as being impossible when Jonathan Schwartz announced it. According to this article there have been two past attempts to create "open source DRM": one was OpenIPMP in 2002, another was Media-S, more recently.
OpenIPMP has a SourceForge project page, although the latest update was a year ago. Apparently there's some code that can be downloaded, but aside from that they are cagey on how it works, and heavy on buzzwords. Nothing about it makes me suspect that they have really discovered anything huge (and a DRM system that didn't rely on obscurity would be pretty huge). If anyone is familiar with the project and wants to comment, I'm genuinely curious.
Media-S apparently evolved out of an effort to make a "Secure OGG" format. They at least have an FAQ. Basically, they're going for the straightforward 'binary blob' route:
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As a Linux user, I just lost a lot of respect for the BBC.
[alk]