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?
"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.
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.
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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.)