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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.
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
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.
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 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 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?