BBC Backpedals On Linux Audience Figures

6031769 writes "After recently claiming that only 400 to 600 Linux users visit the BBC website, the BBC's Ashley Highfield has now admitted that they got their numbers wrong. The new estimate is between 36,600 and 97,600 according to his blog post. He stops short of describing how Auntie arrives at these two widely different sets of numbers and how their initial estimate is two orders of magnitude out."

Comments

Re:Nothing is solved, though

[calebt3]

Ever hear of Gnash?

Re:Did Micro$oft have anything to do with it?

[Tim C]

The BBC stats on Linux userbase is flawed for the same reason. Linux users don't return when the content is incompatible.

In the article originally posted about this a little while ago (that these new figures are correcting), it was made perfectly clear that the figures were for the whole of the bbc.co.uk domain not just the new streaming media stuff. Of course Linux users return to the BBC site - it's one of the most popular sites in the UK. The Windows-only section is a new, so-far tiny addition.

This is nothing like non-iPod owners using or not using iTMS (although I own an ageing iRiver and still use iTMS from time to time...). The vast majority of the content on the bbc.co.uk domain works just fine with Linux, as it's plain old HTML web pages.

Re:BBC is hopelessly biased...

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC is not state run or state owned. If you think the BBC is biased in favour of the Labour government you aught to read some of the recent history between the two. Sure the BBC has a bias but it is one all of its own and compared to the other companies you mention it as close to impartial as makes no difference.

Re:Different sets of numbers?

[JasterBobaMereel]

The British use metric more than 'merkins, we have it as a standard (except for a few exceptions, hey we're British...)

In what other country can you buy a litre of petrol, drive a mile down the road at 30mph, under a 1.3m high bridge to buy a pint?

Good interview with Ashley Highfield

[psr]

Linked from TFA is a BBC produced podcast interview (available in Ogg Vorbis format, CC Attr-NC-SA) with Ashley Highfield which is extremely enlightening.

Rather than the very lightweight interviews I've read with him lately (I don't care if he has an iPod!), this is pretty in depth, and Mr Highfield comes across as having quite a lot of clue. It's well worth listening to.

To make a few of the points from the interview:

• It sounds like there's going to be up to four different iPlayers:
  1. The windows one (currently in Beta)
  2. One for virgin media set-top boxes (Virgin has a monopoly on Cable TV in the UK). (coming around Christmas)
  3. The flash based streaming one (coming after Christmas)
  4. One for Macs, which is based on Adobe AIR, and allows downloading (not announced, and they won't until they know that it works
• It seems that there isn't a plan to allow downloading for Linux, because as Mr Highfield (correctly) says, open source and DRM are incompatible. DRM can never work on Linux (not that it works anywhere else), and so while they're thinking about providing the iPlayer on Linux, it will only be in a future beyond DRM.
• There's also some interesting stuff about how much it would cost for the BBC to buy all of the rights for their programming (lots) and how the Beethoven experience experiment changed the landscape

All in all, a very interesting listen.