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BBC's iPlayer's Prospects Looking Bleak
An anonymous reader writes "The future of iPlayer, the BBC's new online on-demand system for delivering content, is continuing to look bleaker. With ISPs threatening to throttle the content delivered through the iPlayer, consumers petitioning the UK government and the BBC to drop the DRM and Microsoft-only technology, and threatened legal action from the OSC, the last thing the BBC wanted to see today was street protests at their office and at the BBC Media Complex accompanied by a report issued by DefectiveByDesign about their association with Microsoft."
There's no DRM solution that works for Linux, Windows and Mac. Or at least no solution that has been proven?
The annoying thing is the DRM just enforces an expiry time, it doesn't stop people without a TV licence (mandatory in UK) from viewing such content.
The uproar from the public is that this new offering goes against what the BBC stands for at it's very core. By choosing a closed, proprietary format they've narrowed the scope of who can take advantage of this offering. The linked article goes into some nice detail
Here it is: http://defectivebydesign.org/blog/BBCcorrupted
The article goes as far as to suggest the BBC has been corrupted by Microsoft. I'm not sure it goes that far, but I think the BBC had all good intentions but failed on the delivery. I hope they won't abandon the effort but simply update it to ensure it's available cross-platform, DRM free using FOSS etc...
Would be a great showcase for FOSS if they did.
Cheers.
Mark
While I recognize their desire to protect their content, I wonder what the hell made them choose this pig's dinner of a solution.
They would be better off to deliver watermarked content in an open format such as H264 that plays just about anywhere. They could require users to register their TV licence in order to get the service, after which they can use it from any OS or browser within reasonable restrictions. Basically people should be able to do what they like with the content, short of sharing it. If they share it, use the watermark to look-up their address and send the heavies round.
I'm not either. Both the consumer and whoever they are downloading from paid for their connection and paid for an expected speed. It would appear to me that if either of the ISPs did anything to not deliver that expected speed then the consumer if getting hosed.
I don't care about them stopping it from being faster, that isn't the point. When I have a 3 meg download speed and the BBC has a three meg upload, any actions outside built in limitations(and not manipulated by the ISP) of the hardware or software being used that restricts it to a slower speed is ripping me off as well as ripping the BBC off.
Doesn't consumer protection laws already cover companies selling stuff and then not delivering on purpose?. It seems to me this should already be illegal. Maybe we need to make some accusations of the limiting and then look at what recourse the laws provide. I bet it is enough that it would be more then what each customer pays in a month. If every customer complained and file for action, It wold turn around.
Many, eh? I bet you wouldn't be able to find a handful? Why would the average Brit care whether or not the BBC can make a little bit more money when they've already got their hands in everyone's pockets.
This is PUBLIC television we're talking about here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't need real-time streaming for a lot of my cable video. I'd be satisfied to initiate the download, eat dinner, then go back and enjoy the desired program without interruption, and at a higher resolution or less of a compression ratio. That option seldom seems offered, although it would be so much faster than Netflix US Mail delivery.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The problem with the iPlayer fiasco is nepotism. Erik Huggers is Group Controller at BBC Future Media & Technology. Erik was previously Senior Director at Microsoft Corporation and before that a Director of Business Development at Microsoft Corporation. Also the UK government in the form of the Labour Party is in thick with Microsoft for all kinds of projects including the Health Service.
Having worked on some of these kinds of projects it is all nepotism. Erik gets a nice job at the BBC, someone from the BBC goes to Microsoft, an ex Labour Minister gets a job on one of Microsoft's Partner companies.
I reckon the BBC will abandon the Linux iPlayer the second it can.
The DRM stuff is a load of guff too. People as far as North Africa can pick up the BBC for free by sticking up a 130 cm satellite dish and aiming it at 28.2 degrees south as the Astra 2 satellite. Wonderful, crisp, digital downloads in realtime.
"However, my sympathy for the BBC on this issue is tempered by the information that one of the senior execs in charge of making the decisions is an ex-Microsoft Windows Media Player guy, which does tend to suggest scope for conflict of interest on his part."
My sympathy for them is tempered by that, and by a couple of other things...
- for a while they used to provide replays of radio programmes etc. in Ogg, but they stopped that and went to Windows or Real only a long time ago. Obviously somebody there had a clue, but was (eventually) shut down. This is more of a bad sign than if they had never done it at all.
- while claiming they were 'intending to provide a non-Windows solution', this was only expected to happen in 'about 24 months' and they were only going to review progress on that project 'every 6 months or so'. That sounds to me very much like 'yeah, yeah, we'll get to it one day. Maybe.'