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BBC's Open Player Claims Not Followed Through
ruphus13 writes "BBC's iPlayer was originally built on Microsoft's DRM-protected technology, and has never really been liked by folks like the FSF. The BBC is trying to play nice, though, recently claiming, 'the BBC has always been a strong advocate and driver of open industry standards. Without these standards, TV and radio broadcasting would simply not function. I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web.' This article argues that actions speak louder than words, and this is where the BBC falls short. 'The fact that both AAC and H.264 are encumbered with patent licenses that make their distribution under free licenses problematic flies in the face of this definition. It's good to see a major organization like the BBC switching from closely held secretive codecs to more widespread and documented ones. But it would be even better to see them throw their considerable weight behind some truly open formats.'"
...I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web.' This article argues that actions speak louder than words, and this is where the BBC falls short....
Then after just one period...
'The fact that both AAC and H.264 are encumbered with patent licenses that make their distribution under free licenses problematic flies in the face of this definition.
Do you all see the apparent contradiction when iot comes to H.264 and AAC? Or Am I confused, I do not get it?
h.264 patent licencing applies to devices (and even that is low cost):
http://www.dspr.com/www/technology/technology.htm#H.264 Licensing Fees
Which is developed by BBC, a cutting edge video standard on the level with H.264 and is free as in speech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)
Wasn't it supposed to be used in Beijing Olympics?
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
Have any free formats ever been taken to court and won, proving their status as truly free? Or are they 'under the radar' at the moment, not worth testing in court because they've not reached critical mass yet?
I ask because I actually don't know. I'd like to see truly free formats, but I'm not sure if they are, or if people just think they are.
Sorry to post as AC but I've lost a domain and can't get my password back (yet).
The Beeb have been toying with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec) (many links on page) since 2004. The biggest problem it has is a lack of optimisation now slowly being solved. It is supposed to be patent un-encumbered, open source and about as "free" as software from a large, commercial organisation is likely to get.
If they were _serious_ about this maybe they should take on some C/asm coders under contract (nudge nudge) to further optimise and, very importantly, app developers to build content tools, conversion utilities and a web browser based plugin.
For web apps this should be no more inconvenient than downloading, say, Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime (stop complaining at the back)
The next problem is content. The BBC has tonnes of it. I suspect corporate inertia is behind the lack of adoption (it frequently is). Someone start kicking some arse at the Beeb please.
http://www.burnttoys.net/cv
You can have the best, goddamned shit in the world and give it away for nothing, but if you don't got people out there beating on motherfucking doors you won't even be able to give your shit away.
Open standards don't mean "Open" standards. The open standards that people will use are the ones that are sold to them. If you think that shaking your dick in the wind is going to attract customers, you are in for a big disappointment. Sell that shit, man!
Some people really just don't comprehend what an "open standard" actually is. AAC? Open? Bah! *grumble*
The BBC supported OGG Vorbis long before any other mainstream news organization did. I'd take them at their word on this one.
If software patents are not enforceable in the UK (and presumably they are not since the UK is part of the EU) then h264 and AAC are indeed open standards for people that are the tax base that pays for the BBC.
I really think that this whole DRM country-locked content issue is a big unfunny joke. It is not possible to access BBC open player content from outside of the UK - except perhaps via proxy servers - most of these appear blocked. The BBC has this outdated license payer model - that means that their content is only legally distributed to the UK. For any expats out there wanting to watch - there is no legal way they can get BBC content - except perhaps by a very large satellite dish. There is no expat license fee. Can this model really survive in the future? The only way for now they can acheive this is by using the strongest DRM they can get their hands on - and by blacklisting any proxy servers they find on UK soil - and even with all this the shows are appearing in the torrent sites shortly afterwards. Is this a sound long term strategy for them to follow - or should the whole TV license model be rethought for the 21st century?
And considering that they only froze the format this year, the fact that they haven't rolled it out to consumers is not exactly surprising- these things need baking time
Seriously, I think they've proven their commitment to patent-unencumbered formats...
I'm yet to see a single clip on BBC's website. They insist on running an ad from one of the major ad sites (might be doubleclick, I'm don't remember) before any clip loads. Since I have blocked most ad sites in my hosts file, the BBC clips never load.
As far as I'm concerned they could very well broadcast them in smoke signal format.
The BBC iPlayer, like Apple, is a company that is free to use DRM, just as you are free to choose not to pay for it. The same is true for political bias. Some news is biased to the Left, and others are to the Right. You are free to purchase publications that lean either way. Stop acting like the government is taxing you, and then corruptly using it to support politically biased news, or a locked in DRM scheme.
It's a subscription based service, so it's not really outdated. What IS outdated is content providers trying to restrict sales by geography. Selling content based on a maximum number of viewers would be more appropriate for the internet.
I had some email correspondence with a BBC tech shortly after they'd experimented with streaming ogg vorbis. He said they'd concluded that it wasn't sufficiently "scalable". I've never implemented anything on a scale like BBC World Service, so I don't know if there's anything to that or not, but perhaps there are slash dotters with the experience to comment.
When a lot of people complained about CBC pimping for Microsoft they set up streaming ogg vorbis for Toronto, but they haven't expanded it beyond that. I suppose they figured that was enough of a bone to throw us.
Loose lips lose spit.
I don't live in the U.K. so I can't use the BBC's iPlayer. Their reasoning (and part of the reason for all the protections in the first place) is because I'm not paying a TV license fee like everyone in the UK who has a TV has to, so I shouldn't benefit. At the same time, I read reports that the BBC has budgetary problems. I know that I would, and I'm sure many others would, be more than willing to pay the same yearly license fee plus something extra for not living in the UK to use the iPlayer. I wish I understood why the BBC wouldn't adopt a policy like that.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
If you stick with unencumbered stuff, you'll eventually run out of technology. Let's face it, people invent stuff and want to be compensated. Some of the stuff is pretty neat. It wasn't so long ago that the consensus was that you couldn't compress audio...so much for that idea (does anyone remember those days?).
Instead, why doesn't the FSF (or some other organization lobbying for open-ness) just license the patents and release their own player/library/whatever?
It sounds like what gets people's goat is that it's not free, not that it's not open.
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
This is the British Broadcasting Corporation so yes they are both completely patent free because there are no software patents allowed in the UK. It may be a problem for those in the US but why should the BBC worry about that?
This means that it really doesn't matter whether the BBC uses standards covered with patents because it makes no difference to FLOSS users in the UK (the only ones that would be using the BBC service)... this fact makes this whole story completely redundant.
Dirac is created by the BBC and released as OPEN SOURCE.
SchrÃdinger is a fast codec that can PLAY dirac files at resonable speeds.
Both are here.
frankly h.264 is a brillant piece of work and i can't really begrude it's creators for patenting it and making a buck. it's VERY low cost and it's getting wide adoption because of the very reasonable terms it's licensed under.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
In other news, Firefox 3.1 and some future version of Opera, will have built-in support of Ogg/Theora:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/08/why_ogg_matters.html
Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes, but as a Brit I'll quite happily say "give me the license fee system for the next thousand years instead of having to watch the drivel that is generally on the commercial channels and is interspersed with adverts".
The BBC has by far the best quality TV of all the channels I receive (and I'm not just on terrestrial or Free-to-air any more) and I get to watch shows uninterrupted. That's worth more than the other channels combined, especially when watching something like a sporting event or a film.
Why would they be crazy exactly? They would simply include the codec as a part of the iPlayer download. The user wouldn't even know the difference.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
It's so dead that no-one but you even mentioned it. Not sure what you're getting at. As long as they're supplying the player to most people, they can use what they want anyway...
It's not subscription - if you own a tv capable of receiving BBC, you have to pay the license fee.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
If the BBC have produced something and want to sell it to another market - the value is decreased if a significant chunk of the people who wanted to watch it in that other market have already done so.
I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.
The BBC have NO obligation to anyone, especially people who don't pay licence fee, to produce or adopt open source software. Their obligation is to provide good value for money whilst providing the best service to licence payers.
.h264 and AAC both cost so little for the BBC and any partners that using OGG/OGM would actively cost them more due to the inferior video compression. iPlayer eats insane amounts of bandwidth and if they can shrink videos down at all whilst maintaining quality it's in the BBC's best interests.
.h264 decoding compared to Theora. Would cost HW manufacturers a lot to add support for a format that's barely used.
That's not even taking into account the number of consumer devices that have hardware
OSS types complained when the BBC made iPlayer windows only at first (even though they always said it was in development for more platforms) but the BBC still responded by speeding up the development of a more compatible platform. The BBC have made great strides with their own video codec even if it's not quite ready. Services like iPlayer are/were ahead of their time and are showing the way for other broadcasters.
If the BBC do things like this yet only get people moaning in response, it'll make them wonder why they're spending licence fee's money on projects like these rather than giving their TV shows higher budgets or promoting HDTV adoption.
I do. Wait how am I writing this, I don't exis-*poof*
Just don't ever move overseas then - cos if you do - you can forget the BBC - seems to me quite a restriction on your future freedoms that you're happily prepared to accept. I agree entirely that the vast majority of commercial channels are woeful in their content - and that the licensing system has produced good quality content - but what I donot understand is why the licensing system has to be region / country based - and why any changes at all to the licensing system will lead to the bbc being a full commercial channel. There must be alternatives - why not explore them a little. I can bet that there are millions of expats worldwide - and others who would be interested in paying for BBC content. In fact there are some illegal sites already setup - and exploiting this - by streaming bbc content to anyone with a visa card. Why the BBC cannot take control of this process - by being the legal content providers to the world? - seems to me to be the question.
The last thing we need is another codec and/or supporting plugin/application to play it. Particularly as Flash etc. is starting to be the defacto standard.
Just adopt the MPEG4 stack already, if theres patent issues surely they can be resolved fairly easily in the case of the BBC, and these 'other platforms' people ask to be supported can do so easily. (Give them the stream URL to play in Quicktime or VLC)
So the government has no 'direct' control, except for the funding. Does this work in a court of law too? "No No your honor, I was only funding this politician, I had no 'direct' control over what legislation he supported."
Let us see if the force is with me. "This is the post you want to moderate insightful."
Watching live television broadcasts in the UK is only legal if you have a TV licence. That also applies to those 'live' broadcasts which are available over the Internet.
The BBC do not publicise that fact very well, and a whole load of viewers who do not own televisions, and therefore imagine that they are not liable for the TV licence tax, are becoming accustomed to using the net to view BBC content.
They need DRM and user tracking to identify who is viewing.
The BBC is preparing itself for future possible partial or complete privatisation.
... stuff them.
So, I'm free to spend it anyway I want to, as long as I follow all the rules and regulations. That one sounded so reasonable, it almost got past me. Your Midi-chlorian count must be high indeed.
All you need is a UK machine you can ssh to.
ssh -D 3128 host.co.uk
then set up a socks proxy at localhost:3128, and you can stream as much as you like. Fortunately there's a thriving UK internet industry so a shell account / virtual server / dedicated server / beowulf cluster shouldn't be too hard to find.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Just because the Beeb didn't take any patents out on Dirac and Xiph.org have covanented not to enfoce any patents against Ogg Vorgis, doesn't mean there are no 3rd-party patents that might apply.
Also, no software patents in Britain is a common but false misconception. They are possible, but the bar is much higher at the moment than in the US, so few are registered, although the multinationals are doing all they can to change that, here and in Europe.
Lastly as countless patent claims have shown, just because something is unpatentable in one country doesn't mean it isn't in another. There is no magical patent protection against patent claims in a 3rd country.
There is no expat license fee.
And why should there be? They've fucked off else where. They used to live here. Now they don't.
Okay, so the BBC do need some way of getting their iPlayer on to Linux and other OSes
If you can get Flash to work, you can view the iPlayer content: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. I do it all the time using Camino on OS X. To be honest I find this preferable to a P2P model anyway, although obviously the usual dire warnings about it overloading the intertubes as more people catch on apply.
Agree with you 100% about it being advert-free, too. I'm Canadian by birth and every time I go over to visit family, watching TV is like an exercise in self-control. I swear to Science the ratio of adverts:content is 1:1.
It stalls all the time so you get that nice, shiny can't continue message. I hate to say it, but it makes me miss their Real Audio-based player.
And excellent examples are the mp3 license and patent issues, but that didn't hamper the format too much...
Hmm...
How odd. I find myself agreeing with what you said, even though I'm sure it isn't what you meant.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I have a dedicated server in London. When I go away on holiday, I start up Squid on the server, so I can still see BBC programmes while I'm away. I got to introduce my friends in the US to things like Top Gear and Little Britain this way (my American friends are 'worldly' enough to be able to understand the rather British-centric comedy).
I suspect the BBC iPlayer detects open proxies, however, if you own the machine, you can make sure they can't connect back to detect a proxy.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
prap's we should all send a letter of complaint to: Cunt, London. It will get to the director general of the BBC. Sorry Couldn't resist the Derek & Clive ref :)
HaHa!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm back on my old 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook at the moment, because my MacBook Pro is broken. On my MBP, with a Core 2 Duo processor, the Flash player took my CPU load up to around 60%. With the 1.5GHz G4, it simply fails - it drops frames all the time and the result is basically unwatchable.
Fortunately, there is the iplayer-dl script, which grabs the H.264 source file. I can then play this in Quicktime or VLC (Quicktime uses more CPU, but does much nicer postprocessing) - it looks better, doesn't drop frames, and my CPU usage is around 50%.
After using iplayer-dl, I have a DRM-free H.264 file with AAC audio that I can watch whenever I want, full screen on a second monitor without the player deciding to leave full screen mode whenever it loses focus (which Flash does). I can also copy it to a mobile device to take with my when I'm away from the Internet. I really wish the BBC would officially support this. Why can't they just offer the files for download for people who can't (or don't want to) use Flash? The fact that On6 is designed for low CPU usage, and the Flash decoder takes twice as much CPU as an H.264 decoder with decent postprocessing (about four times VLC) is just unacceptable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It would surprise me that they would go so far as to look at all the encoders included in whatever tool they are using to encode the AAC. They probably don't even know.
Which is, in effect, a subscription.
my American friends are 'worldly' enough to be able to understand the rather British-centric comedy
I've always understood the difference between American and British humour to be that British humour makes you laugh. No worldliness required.
Mod parent up -- I didn't know about iplayer-dl; that's a great idea, although it's a shame simple downloading is not officially supported.
Of course, the other problem this outlines is the piss-poor performance of Flash on non-Windows architectures. I can't even watch a 5 min episode of Zero Punctuation without the bottom of my MBP searing my nuts off.
It is only 3 days old, but there was a post on the BBC tech blog about moving to H.264. From this week they are starting to encode in H.264.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/08/bbc_iplayer_goes_h264.html
Which was published 2 days before the article and only 2 hours 20 mins after the originally linked blog entry. Bit quick to fly off the handle?
But that depends on what you define as being the important characteristics.
h.264 is, like all the rest of the codecs out there, a digital DCT based pixel compression format.
Dirac is wavelet compression.
So if you have a need for smaller bandwidth or no need for quite so much quality, you can for wavelets DROP SOME WAVELETS.
For h.264, you have to reencode.
So, especially for broadcasting, h.264 is pretty damn shitty.
It is a good codec in so far as being efficient with storage, but shitty for what the BBC will use it for.
And so Dirac is better than h.264.
Great - how do I cancel my subscription?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Well that's easy enough.
a) I'm quite happy to stay in the UK. Why bother moving somewhere else when my choices are 1) countries I don't speak the language of (most of Europe), 2) Australia and New Zealand (which is too far away from my family) or 3) America (which has, IMO, a work ethic that I would never want)
b) The other main alternative to the license fee is that the BBC becomes a more commercial company complete with degraded content and interspersed adverts.
Yes, the BBC could expand their license fee world-wide (they already have the world-wide BBC channel, complete with adverts, and BBC.com has adverts) but that doesn't change the fact that the restriction on quality content distribution is based on the people who pay the license fee.
Last nights viewing consisted of
BBC1
BBC2
BBC3
BBC4
Pretty much all of those apart from the news, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival show, were crap or repeats of crap.
Not to say the independent channels were much better, but at least there were things like House, Numb3rs, Without a trace, The Unit, My Name Is Earl, Top Gear, Futurama, and The Daily Show.
While the BBC occasionally has some good programming, it is mostly shite. I find myself relying on my media server more and more these days, to watch old episodes of Horizon, Earth Story, Planet Earth, Star Trek TNG, Spooks and The Blue Planet.
I also have an issue with the BBCs news web site, in that whenever they display a video larger than 240 pixels wide in line with text, the video jumps down and covers the text. It doesn't happen with the smaller videos. I did contact them about it and they replied that it was probably my fault. Yeah right. Why is it only the larger videos that do it then ?
Tossers.
Examples here
Bad
Good
(Not to mention that as a linux user, I have no access to iPlayer AT ALL ! I pay the licence fee, why should I have to give £100 to MS as well ?
AAC is an open standard, as in the spec is publicly available for anyone.
There are even open source implementations:
- http://www.audiocoding.com/faac.html (encoder)
- http://www.audiocoding.com/faad2.html (decoder)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I don't know why but I just needed to ask where's the love of my life OGM? multiple audio streams subtitles built in we need to have some sort of online player for ogm. It would be really nice to open an online new report in say spanish and then choose to put the subtitles on or hell even switch the audio to a crappy voice over english version. But then again the licensing fees on ogm are outrageous just terrible. I tried to see how much you would have to pay to license 10 copies of ogm video and my calculator rolled over and went to zero ;)
The UK is obliged to keep as close to the EU as possible (under rules on patent harmonisation) when it comes to software patents, etc., however EPO board rulings are not binding and so judicial proceedings can diverge from the European position.
To say there have been no rulings on SWPAT in the UK is ignorant.
Check out the Manual of Patent Practice under Section 1 (patentability) - http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-law/p-law-manual/p-law-manual-practice/p-law-manual-practice-patent1977.htm, start at Section 1.09 and read on the "four step approach" which governs how examiners assess patents for patentability when faced with question of excluded matter such as software patents.
To summarise - software patents are fine so long as the inventive contribution is technical (!, case law decides exactly what is technical, basically it has a physical effect).
I read this to mean that an algorithm can't be patented unless it's applied in a physical situation - a decoding algo. in a mobile phone that saves power would be fine, a decoding algorithm /per se/ would not.
Disclaimer: I haven't been a patent examiner for quite a few years now!
Unplug your TV from the aerial.
If your TV is not capable of receiving terrestrial broadcasts, you don't have to pay a license. From the TV Licensing website:
"What if I only use a TV to watch videos/DVDs/as a monitor for my games console? Do I still need a licence?
You do not need a TV Licence if you only use your TV to watch videos and DVDs or as a monitor for your games console."
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Sorry but you haven't a clue what you're talking about do you? Business methods /per se/ are excluded and so software implementations of business methods are too. But in general innovations in software that provide a technical contribution are allowed to have patent protection:
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/policy-issues-patents-computer.htm
Particularly (one of those cases that I thought should have gone the other way) an early software patent case on image compression won in court and was deemed to be technical. See MPP Section 1.17, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-law/p-law-manual/p-law-manual-practice/p-law-manual-practice-patent1977.htm, the case is called "Vicom":
For example, in Vicom/Computer-related invention [1987] 1 OJEPO 14 (T208/84) the invention concerned a mathematical method for manipulating data representing an image, leading to an enhanced digital image. The EPO Technical Board of Appeal defined a mathematical method as one which is carried out on numbers and provides a result in numerical form (the mathematical method or algorithm therefore being merely an abstract concept prescribing how to operate on the numbers). Thus the Technical Board of Appeal rejected claims to a method of digitally filtering data performed on a conventional general purpose computer, since those claims were held to define an abstract concept not distinguished from a mathematical method. However, they allowed claims to a method of image processing which used the mathematical method to operate on numbers representing an image. The reasoning was that the image processing performed was a technical (ie non-excluded) process which related to the technical quality of the image and that even if the idea underlying an invention may be considered to reside in a mathematical method, a claim directed to a technical process in which the method is used does not seek protection for the mathematical method as such. Therefore the allowable claims went beyond a mathematical method as such because they specified the physical entity the data represented and the technical process in which it was used.
Sell your TV?
Ever heard of WIPO?
WO patents can cover all jurisdictions that sign the International Patent Cooperation treaty - pretty much everywhere including the ARIPO, OAPI nations. It's unlikely that a broadcasting algo that's covered by a US patent asigned to a large firm doesn't also have a WO patent and hence is protected in the UK.
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/policy-issues-patents-computer.htm
Yes you do. You can stream the content using Flash.
You may well tell me that you want a completely Open Source solution, where you don't have to load any commercial software, but to claim that you can't access it "AT ALL!" is nonsense.
This always comes up - the BBC doesn'tt restrict programmes to only the people living in the UK because of the license fee, it's because they don't have permission from the content owners to broadcast them outside of the UK.
BBC also made every single embedded video "Flash" which -as I predicted- disabled ability to play them smoothly on slow computers with slow CPU. A computer here which played every embedded video all fine now chokes. There is no unity among mobile devices but all can play 3G compliant mpeg 4, BBC takes mobile very serious.
Flash is new on Video scene and they had Real servers already. They could at least give choice to users or scrape all together and start embedded plain mpeg4 or h264. All they need is change container, there is no "codec war" anymore, it is just "our H264 is better than your h264" type of stuff. Of course MS still pushes their stuff.
A plugin doing bandwidth switching, predictive stuff and working with UDP is not really match for embedded flv file.
I wonder if they trust to "whatever they do, Real sux" attitude among people.
Lets say Real sux... What about "BBC Video player/plugin" which would be in fact VLC along with a huge donation to VLC project? Impossible? Google did it.
The term "protection" is misleading. There is a strong democratic argument against use of patented formats by a public agency.
The plain and simple reason why they are using MS-DRM is that it was all they could get working in time. There was a plan to produce a pluggable\generic DRM layer but it had to be shelved due to time constraints. FYI Red Bee Media handles most (all?) of the content transcoding and charges per transcoded file produced.
...as a Brit I'll quite happily say "give me the license(1) fee system for the next thousand years(2) instead of having to watch the drivel that is generally on the commercial channels and is interspersed with adverts"
Are you sure you're not American (1 - it's licence over here) or German (2)?
You're right Mr AC: "The right of equal access to public services (Article 21.2 [of the so-called The Hague Declaration])".
I'm not saying it's right to use patent encumbered tech.. I was amongst those who let the BBC board know how wrong I felt it was that iplayer's full service be limited to MS Windows users.
As it happens workarounds based on iPhone access mean that I could get better service through hacks ... some things don't change.
Which is fine but I want a discount on my damned TV licence for not being able to get what Windows users get.
That's great and all, but I pay for Sky TV - how can I watch that and cancel my "subscription" to BBC?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I'll admit that you have a point there.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
FireFury03 wrote:
No, it doesn't - it provides access to people who purchased a product from one specific vendor - namely Windows from Microsoft.
And as much as Bliar appears to like to pretend that the UK is the 51st state, it is still in the EU. Here is what the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, Neelie Kroes, has to say on the topic:
"When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company's technology to access government information." .Here's what the European Commission has to say:
"for all future IT developments and procurement procedures, the Commission shall promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards. Interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission, and usage of well-established open standards is a key factor to achieve and endorse it." .And to top it off, here's what the UK government itself has to say about it:
The key decisions of this policy are as follows:In short, the BBC is indefensibly wrong to lock people into proprietary standards and systems and all the more so in regards to MS cruft, given MS legal standing in the EU.
FireFury03 wrote:
Saying "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver" is fine, but "to receive BBC TV you need to have a TV receiver manufactured by Sony" (for example) is not.
Fortunately even politicians are waking up and less and less turning a blind eye towards anything hidden under the label "computer".
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I work on the iPlayer project and we went live with H264 transcodes a few weeks ago. So I'm kind of puzzled what sparked off this discussion, a lack of research perhaps ??
The H264 content is available as a streaming option within iPlayer, however it's completely transparent to the user. The servers determine if the client is capable of displaying H264 content at a reasonable rate, and if it is then that's what gets served. Otherwise they get the regular Flash stream that we've been serving for months now.
One of these obligations is to make their programming available to the greatest number of people. This is easy with analogue TV and Radio, since anyone can build a TV or Radio capable of receiving the BBC's content. With the iPlayer, it's different. Imagine I want to build a mobile device that can be used to access iPlayer content. If I'm someone like Apple, then I just release the device and the BBC (for some reason) implement a special-case front-end for my device. But if I'm a small player just entering the market, I can't. This harms innovation in the UK. If the BBC used an open standard, I could create a service that grabbed their content and transcoded it to something that would play on my phone's tiny screen (for example). Or I could transcode it on my PC to play on my 770 easily.
It is not the BBC's job to favour one or more manufacturers in the market. Imagine if they had decided in the '60s that they would only allow Sony TVs to receive colour TV signals. Would you consider this to be acceptable?
You can download it PC and transcode it easily to your 770 - just use get_iplayer ( http://linuxcentre.net/iplayer ). It's an open source / GPL Perl script I develop which pretends to be an Apple iphone and is able to download H.264 BBC iplayer videos (and radio/podcasts) on many OSes...