Slashdot Mirror
BBC "Not In Bed With Bill Gates"
whoever57 writes "The BBC's head of technology denied rumors that a secret deal with Microsoft was behind the XP-only launch of the BBC's iPlayer. According to Ashley Highfield, the reason that the player only supports Windows XP is that only a small number of Linux visitors have come to the BBC's website. Why he would expect a large number of Linux-based visitors to the site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear. He also thinks that 'Launching a software service to every platform simultaneously would have been launch suicide,' despite the example of many major sites that support Linux (even if this is through the closed-source flash player)."
Why is 'a small number of linux users' a reason for going with this? What is wrong with using a format that is available everywhere (including portable players!) as a matter of course?
400-600 people on Linux use bbc.co.uk (in the UK)? I don't think so...
Someone needs to recheck their server logs.
So management knows more about tech than the techs do?
Launching with a java or flash player would have been suicide?
Is the man a complete and utter idiot?
What can be done to force him getting fored for being incompetent so we can try and find someone that is not stupid?
These are questions that all of us want answered.
"You don't decide how big to build the bridge by counting the number of people swimming the river."
Cuz once the bridge is up, hundreds more who couldn't swim the distance will want to cross.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
The Beeb did it because it was the cheapest, easiest, but not best, option.
That said, it was a really stupid move and managed to get everybody from the smallest Linux hacker to the UK government commenting in public about the policy.
Creating an open "player" for all platforms would have taken more resources at first, but from that point on all future platforms would be supported by the people who use the platform.
Sadly, the Beeb needs closed source to implement the no-save and timed delete features forced on them by others.
Bollocks... the licence money I pay FUNDS the BBC, which they are using to pay MS to produce a locked-in player that deliberately stops my using it as I do not use MS products.
This sounds like racketeering, to me.
This is 2007, they don't need a "player", that's already out there in a huge fashion, all they needed was to pick an open format, then let folks use whichever player they want. This was an artificial decision based on a "problem" that doesn't exist and that didn't need to happen.
Executive summary: "Management ineptitude with statistics, not conspiracy, behind stupid BBC move."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The really *scary* thing about this is that the BBC's HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY is still trotting out the bullshit line that this is about Linux users. It is not and never was. It's about a body that is publicly funded from MY F****NG TAXES, with a statutory duty to serve the whole UK population, choosing to use proprietary and encumbered technology. If he's too stupid to understand that he should resign.
It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux. It is not about Linux.
It's about ensuring that there is a free, open and competitive market in producing players. What annoys me is not that there is no Linux player, but that NOBODY CAN CREATE ONE from the specifications (since there aren't any).
With idiots like this in charge at the Beeb, there's no hope.
They're also required to account for their spending and for keeping costs down. If they proposed a completely open player and it was a significant amount of money more than the Microsoft one then they would have to justify why they went with the costly option.
Granted I've not worked in a non-profit organisation, but even so, I think that justifying a larger spend on something that affects less than 0.004% of visitors is going to be a very tough sell for anyone.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
He is throwing numbers out doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. Linux visitors to the BBC site has to be a hell of a lot higher than that. 400 to 600 hundred linux users? I got more than that when I was was working for a local Virginia newspaper! We had over 100,000 visits per day, linux users were running steady at about 2%. The problem with linux users was you never knew which browser they were going to use, opera, firefox, konqueror even EI running under wine.
Generally you shouldn't pick your technology (programming language, toolkit, etc.) and then pick your audience based on what it supports. Instead, you should write out a list of requirements, and then pick the technology that satisfies all those needs. In this case, if one of the requirements was: "Must be available to all fee-paying persons with computer access (i.e.: must be platform agnostic)" then an OS-specific technology would never have been chosen in the first place.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that this is a result of mis-management (e.g. not thinking very hard about requirements) rather than corruption (e.g. collusion with software companies), but in any case I question their planning process.
(And to those who may respond that "must support DRM" was one of the requirements in the initial design, and could only be satisfied using Windows-only software, I would then say that placing content protection above equal treatment of fee-paying users was, again, a poor design decision for an organization like the BBC.)
I guess it went something like this. And it hurts the Linux & Mac fanboys, but it is the shape of the world: BBC: "We want to get our stuff out to people. People mock us, but we actually do a pretty good job most of the time, content-wise and technology-wise. We want our subscribers to have access to our content." Verisign: "We can help you with that." BBC: "OK, please help us, but at minimal cost to our subscribers, because we have to fight for every pound." Verisign: "Here's the solution with the DRM you require, and the distributed platform you need to minimize your costs." BBC: "That works for us. We'll go for it. It's a shame it's Windows only, but we're realists." And that's it. In the real world, it's Windows. Second step would be a Mac iPlayer. In context, Linux is a luxury item. Beeb got it right. (And I'm a Linux user, but I'm not a blind Linux user)
That would be a fair argument, except that a large proportion of contents is produced by the BBC at the expense of licence payers, who should be able to access the information they are paying for regardless of operating system. In essence, one could argue that as a licence payer it's our content.
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
How can the core code behind the iPlayer be cross platform when it based on the windows only Kontiki P2P software and for playing windows DRM? What have New Media guidelines got to do with an *application* that plays windows media and upload/downloads files using a windows only p2p sharing system? Do you think we are discussing the streaming system the BBC came up with to placate the BBC trust and get them off their case for 6 months?
There are no excuses for the use of Microsoft only technology in this. If they couldn't persuade a maker of a show to allow it to be on iPlayer sans DRM then the show should be not be available on iPlayer. Simple as that. Everyone except the BBC sees the fixed-platform nature of the iPlayer to be a violation of the BBC's charter. And it is very suspicious that we were promised a cross-platform iPlayer which suddenly got taken away at the same time the BBC clearly started to have much closer ties with Microsoft.
The government should scrap the charter and force the BBC to go commercial. The BBC is behaving like a commercial organisation these days anyway so it might as well do it properly.
Let me put it in a way that your little mind can grasp: If it cost 1 million to implement iPlayer for each platform, then it would cost:
And, companies often do not do what 6% of their shareholders. I think you have forgotten that shareholders vote on many things and it is majority rule. If a vote is 49%/51%, then the 49% lose and the policy of the other 51% gets implemented.
What makes you think you and your choice of operating system is more important and deserves a bigger share of the money and resources than the other 95% of the population? What makes you think you are worth 19,400 times than 95% of the rest of the population?
Do you see the depths of your selfishness yet?
More importantly, if you had RTFA, you would have seen where they decided to support the majority of their visitors first and then add support for the rest later.
Now, stop being a self-centered asshole.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I'm sure Bill Gates' wife will be happy to hear this news. :P
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011