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BBC Trust Will Hear iPlayer Openness Complaints
AnotherDaveB writes with a Register story reporting that the BBC Trust has asked to meet with open source advocates to discuss their complaints over the corporation's Windows-only on-demand broadband TV service, iPlayer. The development came less than 48 hours after a meeting between the Open Source Consortium and regulators at Ofcom on Tuesday. Officials agreed to press the Trust, the BBC's governing body, to meet the OSC. The consortium received an invitation on Wednesday afternoon.
My girlfriend is constantly making these and I've noticed that the best way to adress them is to accuse her of using windows.
what options do they have?
They don't know, because it appears they didn't even bother to try and find out before rushing into a deal with Microsoft that ties them into Windows Media.
It's not paranoia, it's commercial sensitivity.
The BBC does not work in isolation. It works in partnership with other broadcasters around the world. And in making its content freely available to licence payers in the UK it has to make sure that it doesn't abuse the rights of its partners by giving away content to those outside the UK, where the rights may be shared with or even wholely owned by those partners.
Take two productions as examples.
The newest Doctor Who stories are co-developments with CBC, a Canadian broadcaster. I imagine that the BBC owns the broadcast rights in the UK, the CBC owns the broadcast rights in Canada and the broadcast rights elsewhere have been split or sold under an agreed formula.
To make Doctor Who freely available to everybody everywhere would be to the detriment of not only the CBC but to those third parties who buy the broadcast rights everywhere else.
Similarly, with Band of Brothers, which was a co-production with HBO, the BBC probably owns the UK rights, HBO the US ones and the rights elsewhere split, etc.
To expect the BBC to release all its content to everyone would be unrealistic, not least of all because securing the worldwide internet rights for all of the productions concerned would be impossible, strategically as well as commercially.
Faced with that reality, what choice does the BBC have if its going to make this content avaiable online in Britain and Britain only other than some from of rights management?
I'm all for the BBC coming up with a cross-platform solution but I don't think it's fair to hit it with the unfair charge of using DRM for DRM's sake when it's bending over backwards to make more content available to their customers (licence payers), on it's own initiative, without stepping on anybody else's toes in the process.
They're trying to be good guys here. Why blast them with both barrels over pipe dreams?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Here's an idea that could make them them money and make us happier:
Why don't they use a flash based video player like NBC, ABC, etc.
If they detect that you are from the UK they show you the videos WITHOUT ADs. If you are outside the UK they show you the videos WITH ADs based on your country of origin.
Everyone gets to watch their content and they makes more money though AD revenue. A win-win in my book.