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BBC Offers iPhone Version of iPlayer, Accessible to Linux Users Too
smallfries writes "After a long battle with Linux users in the UK, the BBC was forced into releasing a flash version of the iPlayer streaming service to fulfill their obligations to license-fee payers. After claiming that development of Linux and Mac versions of the iPlayer would take two years, Auntie Beeb has rushed to support the iPhone. iPhone users 'can be trusted' because their platform is locked down ... so the beeb opened a non-DRM hole in the iPlayer to support them. This was guarded by the extreme security of User Agent strings! Long story short, Linux and Mac users have made their own non-DRM, non-Microsoft platform from firebug and wget. UK users can now watch (and keep) their favorite BBC shows."
And how long will this stay?
c++;
in other news, Apple rewards the BBC by suing over their use of the 'i' prefix, on which iApple has an iMonopoly
Worst BBC News Stories
I have a Nolia E65. Can I have an iPlayer for my phone? What makes the iPhone more special than my E65 which can do more out of the box, is smaller and cheaper and isn't crippled?
Can we please stop hearing about the iPhone?
-- Cheers!
...as there are only about 400 Linux users in the UK, this hole won't get abused much.
There's numerous other devices that would have benefited from a DRM-free iPlayer stream - why'd the iPhone deserve this special treatment?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
If it goes like the iplayer's amazing development time, it will be here till we all retire or DRM is finally out of style. BBC, taking time to do IT wrong.
No calls now, I'm
Meant to include this link in my original post: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=12&x_article=1464
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The BBC is much more than a (relatively reputable IMO) news organization -- they've produced some of the best fiction and non-fiction to ever hit the boob tube.
I was wondering about "long story shut". Forgot what the topic was at that point.
I understand why Apple doesn't support Flash on the iPhone: Because Flash sucks. And I say that even knowing that you love it.
Yeah, it is a great software platform for your Webkinz and your ability to deliver those super-fancy web advertisements that everyone likes. It's also a cool platform for those awesome games, like the one where if you shoot a duck you'll be a winner of a fabulous prize. And the one where you have to choose the right urinal.
For me, believe it or not, I'm not into lousy web games. I don't like three (or more) animated ads on a web page. And I don't like my CPU chugging at 100% just because a crap web site wants to deliver a singing, dancing Flash-based ad to me.
So Apple: Good for you. I agree - Flash is merely a battery killer; a misused web technology that is much more often used for junk than for quality content. On a small-screen platform it would be unbearable. Adobe needs to address these issues before Flash gets ported to the iPhone.
I turned off Flash long ago - I'm surprised more people haven't done so.
The link in TFA was dead, so here's the Google Cache
cache:www.triffid.org/blog/2008/03/download-drm-free-video-from-bbc.html
FYI - It seems like the bookmarklet isn't complete in the cache
Unfortunately, I get "Sorry, this programme is only available to download in the UK (why?)"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
the BBC hasn't been a reputable news source to any honest observer for years now. Here's another sample of journalistic malfeasance by BBC news: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=12
Of course, the general attitudes and biases of the News org tends to generally filter out to the rest of the organization as well.
Feel free to peruse some of the articles here; http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ or here; http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=26019_Outrage-_BBC_Employs_Hamas_Terrorist&only or here; http://michellemalkin.com/category/bbc/
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Seriously, was there no other source for this news than one which has the headline:
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It was worth a good laugh at least ;)
It's actually easier to do in konq than firefox, put the user agent string in ~/.kde/share/config/kio_httprc against bbc.co.uk and it asks you what to do with the file when you click play.
I'm off to download a weeks worth of In The Night Garden....
As a UK TV license payer I find it entirely unacceptable that the BBC is using our money to further Apple's profits over other companies by releasing only for their mobile handset. We do not pay the BBC to further Apple and Microsoft's profits, whilst I applaud their attempts at getting the content accessible for Linux users it's a half-assed measure at best.
Whilst the iPhone is popular in the US, it's not that popular here in the UK and as such there is not even the excuse that it's got a large majority of the market segment.
The BBC seems too easily influenced by large corporations and frankly, something needs to be done about it because they are accountable to us - the British citizens that pay the license equally and as such we should be treated equally in how we can access our content. If this is not to be the case, we should have the choice of using our TVs but not watching the BBC and hence opt out of the TV license.
For us licence paying Linux users in the UK this is a big deal, you insensitive clod.
Stupid flounders!
the number of UK Linux users, according to their own logs, exceeds some 50,000 to the one web page. Your statement that Linux is only in the 4-600 total number of UK users of Linux is flat out wrong and was promoted by the BBC to get out of legal requirements to provide players for Linux. Even BBC late last year admitted that their low Linux count was completely false.
BBC who is embracing digital rights management and a strong push by Labour to literally block people from the internet for life if they don't comply with this system. This makes the British government and BBC by far the most viciously anti open-source in general and pro police state surveillance of the Internet to say nothing of their constant video taping of all of London. Gives me the creeps and BBC is becoming less and less of a journalistic source of information and more of a mouth piece for the government. I dare say we can all ultimately live without BBC quite well.
the BBC hasn't been a reputable news source to any honest observer for years now ... Of course, the general attitudes and biases of the News org tends to generally filter out to the rest of the organization as well.
A biased comment from a person complaining of a perceived bias in another. LOL.
I do wish all you bias whiners would get a grip and move on to something more productive. It's gotten old and uninteresting, and less funny than a Slashdot meme. Moreover, it suggests that you put whatever critical thinking skill you have in the services of evangelising a knee-jerk political rant, rather than taking the information provided to you in a newspaper, a radio or television broadcast and putting it real use.
As far as news organisations go, I'd put the BBC near the top of the list (where most others in the developed and undeveloped world would put it). For me, it stands right beside papers like The New York Times. Hell, I'd even include NPR and The Wall Street Journal on the same list without batting an eye. I also read the editorials and letters, especially from people whose opinions differ from mine. I'd like to think that it's the issues themselves that are most important, and understanding different perspectives on them is an integral part of making sense of them.
Bias? Maybe. Maybe not. All humans have them, and we're all human. In the end, it's up to the individual to decide what the appropriate action (or in your case, reaction) should be. Here's a tip: there has never been a "story" told, or could be told, in its entirety. Cut some slack to someone trying to present a part of it, especially someone of the caliber of the BBC.
If anyone wants a rough idea of the reliability of that site, they only need to compare its page on the BBC to the one on Fox: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=15. Can't say I was surprised
Flash is a great platform; parent is wrong (as are most respondents so far)
---Flash Video
Flash Video is a wrapper, not a codec. H.264 is in many ways superior to H.263 (Flash7+) or VP6 (Flash8+) However, Flash Player 9+ natively supports H.264, so whether H.264 is the right codec isn't really the issue here; you can certainly only distribute H.264 if you like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLV
Flash Video is highly standard; in addition to Flash itself, a significant number of other players can play it.
--- Flash Player
Certainly Flash is used to make a lot of junk, but that's true of everything on the internet; it's full of junk. And the more powerful the technology it is, the more junk will be made with it. I certainly think it's better to use HTML when it will suffice, but it simply cannot do what Flash can.
Obviously Flash can make both awesome and terrible games.
Since you "turned off Flash long ago" perhaps you've failed to realize that in 2002 they upgraded the underlying Actionscript to be a largely legitimate programming language, which they improved again in 2004 and again in 2006; Actionscript 3 is a strongly typed fully object oriented language that lets you make powerful clientside applications that run in a well protected sandbox. In short, it's everything Java applets in 1997 were supposed to be by 2007. (Except that Sun didn't manage it well and Microsoft actively tried to kill it by shipping a dysfunctional JVM.) You can make any general purpose application in Flash. It obviously runs more slowly than native local code (and even moreso if you animate the heck out of everything) but it requires no installation, is strongly sandboxed and runs safely on any platform.
Macromedia was very slow in releasing Flash Player 8 for Linux; so slow they never did. But Adobe released Flash Player 9 rapidly and has committed to keeping up.
There are two OSS Flash Players that I'm aware of. These certainly haven't kept up with Adobe's development, but the sibling poster's suggestion that it's illegal to make a competing player just isn't true.
And other than very "basic" HTML, Flash Player is the most standard thing on the web. It has a higher adoption rate than IE, which has a higher adoption rate than any other browser. It's more standard than any implementation family of HTML, because IE's HTML isn't like everybody else's. The same is true, but moreso, for Javascript. It is certainly higher than any other video playing capability.
--- The Flash and Flex development environments
Certainly the Flash development environment isn't ideally suited to the needs of a serious programmer, which is why many people were using their own code editors and only using Flash as a compiler. Adobe recognized this need and released Flex - which creates Flash swfs but creates them using a much saner and more programmer oriented strongly OOP experience.
You can make powerful, beautiful apps quickly - which can certainly include arbitrarily complex server interaction.
Of course I'm biased; that's what we do all the day. And we're always hiring good programmers.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
"You need a TV Licence to use any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, digital box, DVD or video recorder, PC, laptop or mobile phone to watch or record television programmes as they're being shown on TV. " - http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/index.jsp
The BBC oringinally planned to make its old content available to the whole world for free. Why not? It's already paid for. But then the media tycoons who salivate over the superior product of the public broadcaster (the sort of content which they refuse to pay to create) put huge pressure on Tony Blair's government to restrict the impact of the public broadcasting model on commercial broadcasters. The BBC was far too successful. It made far too much money. Besides, these media tycoons couldn't own it. That was the worst part. So Rupert Murdoch and others made it clear they would trash-talk the Labour Party in their newspapers if the BBC wasn't limited in who it would deliver free, superior content to. It's part of a much larger story. But that's essentially it. The people of the world have been prevented from seeing these great old shows because the few media tycoons who control commercial broadcasting in English-speaking world don't like competition with superior product based on a public model. At least we know which model works best....the public one.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Anybody using other phones in the UK have paid (in a compulsory fashion mind you) the BBC license fee.
The BBC can't you say "we will support the cool phone, the rest be damned", specially when this phone is not even the market leader!
Somebody in the BBC needs to be called to task. The role of the BBC should be to ensure *all* license payers can access their services, this is best achieved by using open standards.
The BBC playing to the fiddle of MS, Apple or any other company in detriment of the people that actually pays their wages is completely unacceptable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's BBC's download service (obviously DRM-ridden) and there's the BBC streaming TV service (can't really see why shouldn't be open).
This "hole" is talking about the latter.
On the plus side, we now have BBC playback in XBMC, which is amazingly cool...
um, I know you're trolling, but of course the number of iPhone users will vastly exceed the number of Linux users in their web statistics...
That's the point of the article!
I know it's short on details, but as I understand it, Linux (or other) users will be able to pull DRM-free content by telling their browser to identify itself as an iPhone.
So the real irony might be that if enough people want the content free of DRM, their web logs may eventually show a huge number of 'iPhone users'.
Surely Linux users have enough tin foil to protect their basements from the detector van's spy rays.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7293988.stm
So, according to bbc news, they have stopped it working.
It works fine still on the iPod..
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Helping to defeat DRM... wow, Mr. iPhone, is there anything you can't do?!