Slashdot Mirror
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."
If they really want a cross-platform solution that doesn't rely on the goodwill of browser makers to support the standards, they ought to simply implement the site using Flash. Flash is a fine technology that is portable to any device that has a Flash player, so even devices without a CSS-supporting browser (e.g. cellphones) can view the content.
I think that media companies are going to fight until the bitter end to supress Linux users because so much of their DRM technology just doesn't work. Microsoft will play ball with DRM Media companies, Linux users are much more likely to fight.
I have a theory that even if Linux users outnumbered Windows users, Game companies and Media companies would continue to do whatever they could to make Games and Media incompatible making the majority of people criminals so that they could stay in control of their content no matter what.
Despite all the trolling that everyone says how horrible Linux is because companies produce broken hardware that don't support it, plays musical chairs with chip sets, Linux is turning into one of the greatest OSes the world has ever seen. Lets make sure 2008 is not the last year of Linux. Lets make sure Linux does not go quietly into the night,
I assume that they calculate their viditor @ by looking at unique Ip+ useragent string combos that indicate the OS. Therefore, they probably have a record of both going back for at least several months. I would think that they would use statistical methods to determine a more accurate value for traffic that accounted for the slashdot effect. Like this example: 832 926 781 12324 49807 18266 5377 1216 1082 1109 988 ... the middle spikes would indicate an abnormal amount of traffic. they would be outliers and probably wouldn't be useful for determining an accurate value for Linux users visiting the site.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I have a stripped down install of Ubuntu Gutsy. With mplayer and firefox/mozilla mplayer plugin, I am listening to BBC streams right now. What, exactly, is the problem?
> some smart phones
I'm curious...which smart phones, exactly, do flash *video*?
Max.
It's interesting in the interview how Highfield denys that he and the BBC is in league with the devil (his words not mine). How then do you explain press releases like "BBC and Microsoft sign memorandum of understanding as BBC seeks new strategic partnerships to underpin creative future" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/09_september/28/microsoft.shtml?
The BBC was actually developing its own codec called DIRAC for the iPlayer project but its demise coincided with the hiring of former senior Microsoft executives to Future Media and Technology team (e.g. Erik Huggers, the MS director responsible for Windows Media Player in Europe).
This is a classic corporate 'coup d'état' by the Monopolist. A coup that has resulted in ~£100m (~$200m) of taxpayers money going to finance a media product that deliberately excludes large numbers of the UK public and is, as it happens, horribly broken.
All this is at a time that the BBC is shedding 12% of it workforce, cutting back of its world-renowned R&D efforts and selling off its landmark buildings in west London.
As the Free Software Foundation put it, the BBC now stands for "Bill's Corrupted Corporation".
They probably incorrectly labeled all Linux Firefox users as Windows Users
and correctly measured
Lynx, Konqueror, Epiphany
as Linux users.
the users of these browsers are probably comparable to the huge gap in figures.
Firefox has a global 25% share (probably in excess of 90% linux browser share)
(10s of thousands of Linux Firefox users compared to couple hundred on less popular Linux Web Browsers.
Dont forget when first installed Firefox contains a BBC Rss feed which may exaggerate the popularity of BBC to Firefox users
"He got it wrong, he was man enough to admit that he got it wrong."
All he actually says is that someone gave him some statistics which supported his argument and he used them. Apparently other statistics are orders of magnitude different. His actual response (which is a scientifically-sensible one) is to ask why the statistics are so different. Where did he admit he got it wrong?
+5 Insightful? Let's hope it wasn't based on that sentence.