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.'"

Comments

Re:How can the BBCs licence model work over the ne

[clare-ents]

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.