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BBC's iPlayer's Prospects Looking Bleak

Posted by kdawson on from the kick-their-dog-while-you're-at-it dept.

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."

1 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bit of a rock & a hard place thing here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.'