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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
If you live in the UK and own a television you have to pay a special tax, some part of which goes to the BBC. So most people DO pay for BBC programs and have the right to actually watch them on a non-windows computer.
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.
The difference is that UK citizens are required to pay a licence fee to receive BBC content. It is so difficult for ordinary citizens to get out of paying the licence fee that it is in effect a universal tax. If the BBC then decides to release an MS-only product I (as a UK citizen) am in effect being taxed by the Government to support MS. Regardless of my views on MS, the BBC, etc, this is pretty unacceptable. This is like the BBC releasing content that only works on Sony (for example) televisions.
A few years ago, the BBC seemed to be keen on the idea of releasing content in Ogg/Theora. Then they wanted to help develop and use the Dirac codec. And now they want to use a DRM-encumbered Microsoft codec.
This is an interesting situation because of the BBC's role as a "state-owned but independent corporation". I skimmed the Wikipedia article and it appears that the BBC is a for-profit corporation, but the fact that it's state-owned leads me to believe that its funded by taxpayers. If that is the case, why should taxpayers have to pay for DRM-infested media that was sponsored by their tax money?
If you want a current example from the _very same market_ in the UK (TV watchers) then glance your eye over Sky vs Virgin.
The number one non-over-the-air channel, Sky One, is owned by the same people who own the satellite broadcast system. (In the UK TV service to households with reasonable disposable income is, or was, split into cable vs satellite. Over the air is probably more common but not really in the same market. Outside London there are no real alternatives yet.)
Sky have denied the Sky One (and a few other not very interesting channels) license to Virgin. This has resulted in a massive exodus from cable. As a TV watching friend of mine pointed out "it's not worth the grief from the missus - and the kids would yell at me too". My choice would have been emigration without kids or wife, but he chose to switch to Satellite/Sky instead.
What does this have to do with internet TV, which has no presence yet to be missed? Well, the BBC has a tendency to plug new services endlessly on their channels. There is no one in the UK who doesn't hear or see something from the BBC every single week. Computer penetration is also very high, it's a small island so broadband is readily available too (cable and DSL, the latter from a number of ISPs). Even the people who won't see TV adverts listen to Radio 4 (available over the internet for free - give it a go! - especially the comedy) giving them a direct and unique line to highly educated and very powerful people.
So, a large number of people who have already shown that TV is important enough to make them pick up the phone, will get bombarded with adverts for a new service that they can probably access. Until they get home and try to get to it and see:
The BBC can't give you access to the iPlayer because unlike every reputable ISP yours is trying to charge you extra and we said we wouldn't be part of it. Here is a list of ISPs, that you probably can switch to with a single phone call, that are doing the right thing.
Even if the ISP blocks the error page the cost of handling the phone calls to customer support *alone* will probably make the whole thing impossible to maintain for very long.
Now, it won't come to this. A backroom deal will be cut and the whole thing will go away - precisely because the ISPs have no possible way to win.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
But it is not free as in beer. You pay the TV license fee to watch BBC programing in the UK. Its already been paid for by the users that are being denied access to the programming.
Evil people are out to get you.
this is so completely wrong. The ISPs are selling people bandwidth that actually isn't there. You might have dozens of people running off a pipe a few 10s of megs wide but each person is being charged for the bandwidth of a 5-10 megs. this is referred to as the contention ratio of the channel. However, when people go to actually use the bandwidth they were sold, the ISPs recoil in horror and demand that they be paid to upgrade their networks to a capacity that they are already charging people for. Mutherfuckers
prepare the survey weasels.
All funding for the BBC comes from the UK tv licence and the sales of programming and other commercial activity (e.g. selling Dr. Who and publishing magazines such as the Radio Times)
The BBC is controlled by the BBC Trust (formally the BBC governors) and according to its charter is "free from both political and commercial influence and answers only to its viewers and listeners"
The BBC added free to air distribution of its programming over satellite in order to provide maximum access to its services to its viewers. One of the side effects of this is that the BBC channels can be received with standard DVB-S equipment across most of western Europe.
This is the reason that people are angry with the iplayer situation. It artificially restricts the service to Windows users and prevents full access by all of the licence paying population of the UK. This is completely the opposite of the satellite case where reception is open to others extremely outside the borders of the UK to ensure that UK licence payers have access to the service (note it is possible to receive this as far away as Bulgaria and beyond, so we are not talking about a small over-spread here!
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. G.B Shaw
Thing is, only UKians as you put it, pay for the BBC. And we have to. No choice in the matter, if you want a TV in this country you have to pay "licence fee". That fee funds the BBC. They make some cash from overseas sales, syndication etc. but about 95% of their budget comes from the fee paying public. Because we have no choice in the matter, it's not like, say, Sky, who people can choose to receive or not. As such, it puts the onus on them to allow all UK licence payers a way to access the programming they've paid for. The web was made for this kinda thing. If only they'd use their own codec (they've been making one for years), a fairly simple DRM system (sadly a legal necessity given the distribution deals they have overseas) and then release it for all major OS's and whatnot, we'd be just dandy (except the ISP's who can quite frankly go fuck 'emselves. I pay for 4MB access. Not 4MB access for-half-an-hour-till-i've-used-up-the-bandwidth or 4MB access as-long-as-it's-with-the-ISP's-content). But no, they code a terribly shitty system, that locks into a really oppressive OS that only some people can/want to use. No wonder people are pissed.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
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.
Parent post is generally true: as I understand it, the BBC is required by their partners to make at least some token
gesture towards restricting the redistribution of material which doesn't totally belong to it.
To also respond to the grandparent: the big thing here is that the BBC is not a company in the same sense that (say)
US cable networks are. As Douglas Adams used to observe "The BBC's not in the same business as the other TV stations" (or words to that effect): their customers are not corporate advertisers. The BBC is funded by the UK TV licencing fee, & has therefore already been paid for by every Windows, Mac, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. user in the UK with a TV licence, so it clearly is unfair for the Beeb to release iPlayer access to their programmes only to Windows users. (In the interests of full disclosure, btw, I'm a British ex-pat who only uses OS X & (GNU/)Linux).
I do feel some measure of sympathy for the BBC about this, though. As has been noted elsewhere, it should be considered admirable that the BBC are trying to make as much of their programming available online as is feasible without charging. Unfortunately, the only way they can think of at the moment to reconcile that ideal with the legal realities of their programme-producing partnerships & so on is to present them with some sort of anti-duplication measure, hence the DRM. 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.
On balance, I think that the pressure the BBC is feeling reflects the fact that it's pushing the boundaries on making their content freely available online, which is a forward-thinking policy in general, & should be applauded. The woes listed in the summary are largely due to some short-term lack of wisdom in the means currently being used to attain those goals.
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.
In case it wasn't covered on the news channels you watch, roughly one million people (around 2% of the UK population) took to the streets of London to protest against the invasion of Iraq before it happened.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I download the BBC programming that I want to watch with Azureus an hour after it airs in the UK and watch it shortly after using VLC on my PC. Sometimes I'll burn a DVD and watch it on my TV. The quality is excellent.
Alternatively I can catch the programming 6 months to a year later on BBC America or the SciFi Channel with commercials and reduced resolution.
Whatever they do on their web site is a non-issue, although I'm a bit annoyed that I have to use a UK based proxy server to access some of the program guides.
From The Sunday Times
August 12, 2007
Yes, this is obviously all true because newspapers never lie and the Rupert Murdoch owned Times, couldn't possibly be bias against the BBC; a competitor to the Rupert Murdoch owned Sky TV.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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."
If there's a survey on this, I'd just like to say that I'm in the UK and I DO NOT want DRM
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.
...except that the iPlayer content is funded by the British “TV tax”. Free (gratis)? Hardly.
If I lived in the UK and was forced to pay for a TV license (instated by the BBC), I would expect to have equal access to the programming for which I payed, regardless of my operating system and browser of choice. I choose freedom by using free software, so I would be ineligible to make use of a service for which I've already paid.
Government agencies forcing people to do business with monopolistic corporations? Yeah, that's definitely protest-worthy.
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
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However the tone of your post seems to indicate that what the Beeb says is gospel truth as opposed to the Times?
I love the Beeb, I think it's an amazing institution and I believe that Murdoch is a baby-feasting spawn of Satan and a genuine threat to Democracy, BUT part of our open society is being able to provide a counterpoint which the Times is doing - just because they are owned by the aforementioned hellspawn please don't accuse them of lying. Don't accept everything the BBC says as perfect truth either.
The BBC does do a very good job - probably the best in the World (IMHO) of balanced reporting, certainly when compared to bile like Fox news (gak, "news" is certainly a misnomer there...) but there is also an obvious liberal bias. This may reflect that Britain is a reasonably liberal society.
Remember - "Question everything including what I am telling you now."
As pointed out by another poster, The Sunday Times is owned by Murdoch who has no qualms at all about forcing a very strong right-wing bias on all his publications. His orifices generally delight in lampooning the BBC (and any other institution that competes with Murdoch) whenever possible and factual accuracy is deemed optional in these cases. I'd ignore any such article from his publications, especially one written from an "insider perspective" that is 40 years old!
Anyway, the whole idea of a pervasive "liberal bias" in the BBC is nonsense - even if you think such a thing exists, so what? Given how poorly the Tories do in the polls even after years of Labour disillusionment and given how left-wing the UK is in comparison to the US, perhaps such a bias would just reflect the bias of the British people?
One thing is clear, in the real world this ground-breaking project was never going to get off the ground without some form of DRM to stop casual copying, for two simple reasons - many of the BBC's shows are supplied by independent producers, and the BBC itself has an interest in the post-broadcast DVD market. Neither would want to allow their exploitation of the product to be killed by multiple high quality copies al over the Internet. Yes I know this happens already, but it's not on a massive scale yet, and it would be naive to think that profit-seeking companies would want to sign up to a scheme that would only increase it.
Except, oddly enough, that people do tune in. From looking at ratings charts, a large measure of the British public is tuning into BBC's channels to be entertained or informed at some point in the day or night. Does this mean that watching means automatic agreement, or a universal consensus of values? No, but it does mean that the Beeb, and hence the people who work for it, must be doing something right. You can't seriously believe that only fellow "elitists" are the ones watching the the BBC posts ratings of 9 or 10 million viewers? This kind of errant lobbing of "elitism" simply doesn't wash then.
This is not say that any institution doesn't have faults, and I have read some persuasive arguments about various problems with BBC News and its entertainment programming, many of which I agree with. But that does not mean, as you build up using straw men arguments, that the Beeb is some multi-headed, unwatched giant, unaccountable, and this is especially absurd, irrelevant to the British viewing public.
But more people in the *UK* voted for Labour than for Conservative. The UK parliament is not just decided on who has most votes in England.