Slashdot Mirror
BBC Trust to Meet With OSC Over iPlayer
Virgil Tibbs writes "With the Launch of the BBC's iPlayer imminent, the BBC trust has agreed to hear the Open Source Consortium's concerns regarding the BBC iPlayer's tie in with Microsoft's software.
The move by the BBC to use Windows Media DRM & their apparent lack of commitment towards other platforms has caused outrage in many circles and prompted several online petitions."
I noticed this story was eerily similar to Thursday's article entitled 'BBC Trust Will Hear iPlayer Openness Complaints'.
I even e-mailed CowboyNeal about this problem and he ignored me! Well! I know someone who's always selecting the 'hate-cowboy-neal' option on all the polls from now on!
Does anyone recall any online petition that actually caused change?
Even more outrage can be found here.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
I bet they're scared now!
The BBC said they are going to look at other platforms later. They are just making downloads available to the vast majority of the people who paid for it first, this is normal.
This is like 4oD and SKY Anytime which currently only work with Windows XP (not even Vista). I'm sure they will be updatiung their software for at least Vista and Mac soon enough. It not like they said NO is it!
Interesting that this occurred shortly after one of the top bods in BBC new media is off to OFCOM shortly...
_ wtf.shtml
http://www.tomski.com/2007/06/from_bbc_to_psp_via
Of course the attitude is actually "Nah, sod 'em, it's our BBC and we'll decide who gets our content, windows media FTW!" in fact, every time the BBC does interactive programming involving home computer users it always seems to be badly cobbled together windows only solutions, maybe they have a team dedicated to turning out such crap.
Being English, and having to buy a TV licence*, I think what the BBC are doing with licence payers money borders on being illegal. You cannot take money from people then bar them from the purpose of that licence - this is definitely MS driven with the BBC in cahoots with them (remember, the BBC is a very similar monopoly like MS and allowed to be by the Politicians 'in hand').
Nick
* Not having a TV licence in the UK is very serious - you will be hounded incessantly and even get visits by the BBC licence people late at night (MIBS). The onslaught of not having a TV licence is very similar to deliberate tax evasion, but worse.
I imagine petitions that represent a consumer base for the target audience are the most effective. Generally, though, I think that online petitions trying to affect policy change are ineffective, because unless you have a large percentage of the population, you can assume that more than half the people disagree with the petition. Or at least don't care about it. It's nearly impossible to get enough people to affect change in the US. If a policy petition got 100 million signatures from valid addresses in the US, then maybe it would sway someone's opinion. Otherwise, forget about it.
In other words, consumer-based petitions where there are no antagonists seem most likely to succeed, since there is no hidden factor.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Didn't Cowboyneal mean to post this on slashdot.co.uk?
>There is no excuse for watching TV without a licence - it's a criminal offence
If this was China we'd have a billion jokes and attacks.
This is mind numbing.
Then again, I always say people should have to pass a test before they reproduce.
the problem is once you use Windows DRM you can only ever use windows to decode it. MSFT doesn't allow any form of their DRM to be decrypted on non-MSFT platforms. MSFT has disconntinued windows media player for the mac and the "replacement" flip for wmv is legally barred form decoding windows DRM files.
Once you go MSFT you can never leave.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Do you work for Sky or something? It would at least explain why you're spouting total rubbish.
A typical hour of BBC programming might have one or two 30 second trailers for upcoming programmes in it, and these trailers will be shown in the intervals between programmes: they certainly won't ever interrupt them.
There is no way that you can ever claim that there is a 24 minute programme followed by 6 minutes of ads, followed by another 24 minute programme and then another 6 minutes of ads.
Your claim that "[the BBC's] 'TV' hour is still 48 minutes" is complete and utter rubbish.
Either you're lying through your teeth or your completely clueless. Either way, I wish you'd stop making such ridiculous comments because they add nothing to the debate.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Did anyone else see this and wonder why Orson Scott Card would meet with the BBC about the iplayer?
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
Is that alternate computing platforms have finally started to gain enough clout that those choosing Microsoft only solutions will have to think twice about ignoring non-windows platforms.
3 or 4 years ago choosing a windows only solution would not cause you any pain. Increasingly, for popular internet multimedia sites, choosing a Windows only solution is more likely to cause you pain.
I consider this a good thing.
And don't tell me that it's an "update" because they both source the same Register story.
Merely for informative purpose, I thought I'd mention that Finland has a similar system of nationwide compulsory TV license whose profits only go to the state-owned channels (privately-owned channels don't get a penny out of it), supported by an increasingly sizable brigade of TV permit inspectors. People who flatly don't own a TV are immediately regarded as worthy of an impromptu inspector visit and of endless phone calls to inquire why the heck they haven't been a good Finn and paid their license like everyone else. They essentially keep track of who has paid and who hasn't by comparing payment data with the civil registry data (changes of address notifications to the civil registry are compulsory in Finland).
The whole things often reaches ridiculous extents: they also keep track of cable TV subscribers and compare that to civil registry data and they get a lot of false positives because of cable-Internet subscribers. Yet, for a number of years, it simply wouldn't get into their head that customers of cable company can do business with them for non-TV related purposes; I obviously had a TV I wasn't paying a license for since I was doing business with the cable company! If I changed address and still only did business with the cable for Internet service, they'd notice a new resident at address X who hasn't paid a license and yet does business with the cable company, so one of their minions would call and sermon me about breaking the Law and, again, it simply wouldn't get into their head that the cable company offers services other than TV.
Machiavelli would sheepishly point out that all it takes for a criminal to go unnoticed in Finland is to pay their TV license, regardless of whether they have a TV or not.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
An online petition! That should have them quaking in their boots in no time!
The papers this morning were full of the revelation in a BBC documentary that the Queen had had a hissy fit and stormed out of a photo-shoot with the photographer Annie Leibowitz. As the Times reported:
The Queen offered a rare, public display of displeasure when she sat for Leibovitz, who is famed for her Vanity Fair photographs of stars such as a pregnant Demi Moore in the nude. A camera crew was invited to film the encounter for a fly-on-the-wall BBC One series, A Year with the Queen, made by the production company behind Wife Swap. The portrait was to commemorate the Queen's spring visit to the United States.
Leibovitz selected the white drawing room at Buckingham Palace. The Queen arrived in white fur stole, gold-embroidered evening dress, Order of the Garter robes and diamond tiara, as requested. But Leibovitz, a perfectionist who once persuaded Whoopi Goldberg to pose in a bath of milk, had a change of heart. 'I think it will look better without the crown,' the film shows her informing the Queen. 'Less dressy. The garter robe is so...extraordinary.' 'Less dressy?' the Queen says in response to this display of lese-majeste. 'What do you think this is?' The Queen is then shown walking angrily from the drawing room. 'I'm not changing anything,' she fumes at a flunky. 'I've had enough of dressing like this, thank you very much.'
In the context of royal etiquette and the character of the Queen herself, this was quite sensational. The Queen has never been known to storm out of any engagement. Ever. But now we learn that that this did not happen. She did not storm out of the photoshoot at all. The footage was actually filmed as the Queen made her way into the sitting - and she made her irritated comments to her lady-in-waiting before the shoot had even started. The BBC had falsified the sequence of events* -- at least in the video trailer it made available to the press-- to make a better story.
It has now issued a grovelling apology, saying that
the actual sequence of events was misrepresented.
The BBC's trustees have asked the Director General Mark Thompson to explain what the hell went on here. Small wonder.The significance of this can scarcely be exaggerated. The BBC has a world-wide reputation for integrity and truth-telling. Suddenly it is revealed to be deliberately manipulating its images to dupe the public. At a stroke, the trust it engenders has been shattered. And over the Queen, of all people!
If it transposes a picture sequence like this to sex up a story about the Queen by transmitting an outright falsehood, just think what it is doing in the Middle East.
*Update: The BBC has blamed the production company that made the trailer for editing it in this misleading way. However, the Queen is said to be blaming the BBC, as well she might. The BBC was the publisher of this trailer and was responsible for it. Judging from reports of his press conference, the programme controller, Peter Fincham, was obviously thrilled that the BBC was showing the Queen in a bad light. The Times reports today that although Buckingham Palace told him shortly after that press conference that these events did not happen in this way, it was well into the following day before the BBC admitted the error. That's why the BBC's Director-General, Mark Thompson, has rightly told his his staff that
recent problems including 'the incorrect and misleading edit of Her Majesty the Queen in the BBC One seasonal launch tape' defied 'our values and threaten the precious relationship of trust between the BBC and our audiences'.
well, this didnt exactly cause change - it kept things as they are... People put up a petition to stop software patents in the UK and it worked.... take a look at this
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
You were most likely modded down because that's one painful damn truth. I'll probably be modded down for not toeing the line. Then somebody might explain how there's a monopoly, dammit, and there just isn't any choice, even though that's not what it means, and some other bullshit. Meanwhile the hardcore FOSSies will work themselves into a lathering frenzy, lashing fiercely at their genitals as they try to get their FSF-approved loads on the biscuit early.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The issue has nothing to do with FOSS. It's because the BBC is supposed to making their broadcasts available to everyone (a side effect of being a government monopoly). As such, tying the DRM to a single platform is discriminatory. OSS has nothing to do with it.
Anybody can manufacture a device to pick up terrestrial broadcasts. But only Microsoft can make the software required to view internet broadcasts? That's an issue that deserves to be corrected.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
And as Microsoft have no real obligation to keep supporting older versions of their operating system with the DRM mechanism that this service uses, so a service that people will come to rely on will be forced into endless upgrades if they wish to keep using it. If the BBC insists on using Microsoft software to deliver the service, thats fine. So long as they provide the means for the service to be used with other platforms as they do now with the radio and TV programs they already stream from the BBC website.
As it stands. Only those with Windows will be able to use the proposed service, but with multi platform services, there is no suggestion of cutting windows users off. Thus choice is offered. Linux, Windows, OSX, some later to be designed set top box with an internet connection built in perhaps. Its all good.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
MATE! We gotta stage a coup and get you in as Director General of the BBC!
A letter writing campaign was started yesterday, read about it here: http://blog.paladine.org.uk/?p=14