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.
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
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.
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