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)."

Comments

A wise designer once told me...

[JetScootr]

"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.

Why not design for open in the first place?

[Nomen Publicus]

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.

Re:BBC's charter

[Mr_Silver]

The interesting bit here is the Beeb isn't really a commercial organization. They're a public entity which is strictly required [wikipedia.org] to keep itself free of commercial and political influence.

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.