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

BBC's charter

[Rob T Firefly]

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

Re:Lame reason.

[twicepending]

From the Article "We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK and, as far as our server logs can make out, 5 per cent of those [use Macs] and around 400 to 600 are Linux users"

Now I imagine that relates to visitors to the rather useless BBC front page, using the same info as used to compile the blog post at http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/2.php> which claims that only 0.41& of BBC visitors use Linux.

I'm a regular visitor to various bits of the BBC web site and I regularly come across other Linux users and just about the one thing we have in common is that we very rarely visit the front page - like most experienced computer users we go straight to sub-site we want.

Re:Of course it was

[teh kurisu]

If MS and the BBC were in cahoots, don't you think there would be a Vista version? Microsoft doesn't want you buying XP any more.