Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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.