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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."
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
Well, there's no law saying stuff has to be cross-platform, but (almost) all Brits pay a TV tax, and this covers the online content as well. So, people object to paying a tax and then being told "Oh, you don't use Windows, so this online content is useless to you."
Plus, last I checked, Realplayer was cross-platform and supported rights restrictions, along with flash. Of course they can and have all been cracked, but so has Windows' rights restriction system. And, yes, as a practical matter, people want this DRM-free; the current content on TV can be tape (Tivo, etc.) recorded and watched whenever, so having the computerized version have additional restrictions placed on it is a step backwards, removes far use rights, and is something noone but the big media is interested in.
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 BBC receives its funding from people in the UK paying an annual license fee mandatory for anyone with a TV. It's programming is funded by the people, for the people, so I think you can see the problem people are having when access to that content through a new channel places proprietary restrictions on access to said content. So yes, the whole furor is that this is NOT just a private TV company, it's a public institution.
You could probably make a case for the BBC restricting access to their content to licence-payers only (although I wouldn't), but instead they've gone with a completely inappropriate restriction of "Microsoft-users only".
The current iPlayer implementation really stinks - it stinks of pushy salesmen and weak-minded decision takers. It flies in the face of many decades of the BBC standing on principles and doing The Right Thing(TM), resisting commercial pressure. Now they've gone to the opposite extreme and the outrage is perfectly justified.
HTH
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.
If that is the case, why should taxpayers have to pay for DRM-infested media that was sponsored by their tax money?
The problem is why should UK taxpayers pay for people in other countries to have free media that they didn't pay for?Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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."