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)."
Never mind. The title creates an image that I'm not going to be able to get out of my head anytime soon.
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"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.
It should be clarified that he was talking about the root bbc.co.uk site NOT the iPlayer site, so it is clearer why the would expect Linux users to visit the site.
Because if they had, it would have been perfectly clear that by "the BBC website" he meant bbc.co.uk, as that's actually part of the referenced quote. Given that the site is one of the most popular in the UK, and is used by people from all walks of life, I'd say that their OS usage stats stand fair chance of being representative of reality...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
When will people stop whining about iPlayer being XP only? There's no secret Microsoft alliance, and no great conspiracy.
The main reason why iPlayer uses Windows DRM is because the companies who produce content for the BBC didn't want their shows streamed without some kind of rights management, because, god forbid, it should end up on bit torrent. The cause of this is most likely ignorance on their part, because, as we all know, DRM stops piracy, saves lives, cures cancar and ends world famine.
The core code behind iPlayer is completely cross-browser, having worked on some of it, I know that it conforms to BBC New Media guidelines, which specifically state that all HTML, JavaScript, etc must be compatible with all major browsers (we even tested major elements of it in Firefox, and quite a few of the developers worked on Mac/Linux boxes)
There has always been a plan for a Mac/Linux version of iPlayer, but the current DRM requirements being imposed on the iPlayer Core team make it somewhat difficult for them to actually get working on it
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.
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.
You have this in reverse.
Making the videos only work in Windows specific media players is more effort than using a common freely available codec.
At an extreme, having a single page with links to the videos in mpeg format would have taken one person a day to set up.
They may have their reasons, but technically the simplest solution is often... the simplest one.
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.)
An incovenient truth: There really is only about thousand linux users.
However they are a very vocal minority and because it's somewhat cool to be a linux guy
some people claim that they run linux when infact they don't.
I personally run Windows Vista Home Basic but I pretend to be a linux expert on various internet forums.
Linux's "popularity" is really just a scam to fool newbies into thinking that people actually run linux.
Then the newbies try actually installing linux and fail miserably,
you must really be a kernel hacker to install it.
Frustrated newbies then ask questions on the various forums and on irc and everybody answers to them in complete gibberish. We all get a good laugh that way (expect the noobs, they try the bogus solutions and fail once again).
This