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BBC Activates DRM For Its iPlayer Content
oik writes "The BBC has quietly added DRM to its iPlayer content. This breaks support for things like the XBMC plugin as well as other non-approved third-party players. The get-iplayer download page has a good summary of what happened, including links to The Reg articles and the BBC's response to users' complaints."
A stupid decision given the BBC broadcast DRM free mpeg2 over the airwaves. A £30 USB TV card will let you record broadcast quality TV, so why do they feel that lower quality net streaming is a risk?
No, it is about taking rights away from the consumer, in an attempt to enforce and manage the rights of the producer.
Unfortunately, it is often not really enforceable making people that attempts to use their fair-use rights into criminals, but still not providing the sought after control of the producers.
So, it is a loose-loose situation.
A great deal of re-thinking of the situation ought to be done.
I stopped paying the TV license when they introduced MS DRM on iPlayer originally (I haven't had a TV for a while, but I kept paying the license fee because I thought the online news was valuable). I'm absolutely disgusted by this. The BBC streams HD H.264 unencrypted over the air. It's absolutely ludicrous that they should DRM the online streams. If you want to pirate their content, just stick a DVB-T card in your computer, grab the streams, and upload them (optionally after transcoding). This is exactly what happens - you can get anything on iPlayer from various torrent sites at a higher quality from the OTA broadcast. So why are they adding DRM? There is absolutely no legitimate justification for it.
The BBC is a large organisation. They should not bow to pressure on this issue - if content is not available DRM free then they should refuse to license it at all, even for terrestrial broadcast.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Do you have rtmpdump installed by any chance?
The BBC make available low-res streams. Totem supports these. My understanding is the higher-res streams now require rtmpdump installed to access, which is a tool that's hard for distros to ship due to anti-circumvention laws. E.g. Adobe have tried to use the DMCA to take down rtmpdump.
I.e. my understanding is that the BBCs' move only frustrates those who must shy away from all legal risk. It doesn't really stop anyone - DRM never does.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
And did I write that I wanted the rights of the producer erased and leave the content provider in the cold? Please show me how you read that into it? (atarashii meagane katta ho ga ii kamoshirenai?).
It is a digital world, and the producer side, or what seems to be the defenders of the content producers have amalgamated too much political backing, actually leaving the consumers out in the cold, and I would like to move the balance the other way, even just a little.
And I am not trying to convince anyone to pay a TV license fee or any other fee. Where did I write that?
Actually, I just want content producers to concentrate on doing that, produce content and make it available on reasonable terms.
Today, too often some content is either not available or not on reasonable terms if it is.
I've not got rtmpdump installed to the best of my knowledge (at least, there's no file containing that name on my system). I've just tried this:
get_iplayer --get --modes=flashvhigh 859
Which gets a pretty large (670Mb) Flash file containing a 45-min episode of Top Gear which I assume that's hi-res (it looks it).
So again - works for me using a pretty much default install of Ubuntu 9.10.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
The right to play the content on any device I see fit? At any time?
When I have bought a tune or a video the producer shouldn't care where I play it as along as it is for myself or my household. Your rights stops at my front door.
And I am still not trying to convince anyone to pay a TV license for materials and I don't "fire up iPlayer and get the fucking video". So now you want to combine the consumers usage with a specific device?
I just want to be able to purchase a CD or DVD with music or video content on it. As simple as that.
I've not got rtmpdump installed to the best of my knowledge (at least, there's no file containing that name on my system).
Do you have a file flvstreamer (which is a fork of rtmpdump used by get_iplayer)? If so it's the same thing, and if it works on the BBC's streams then it's been patched to get around Adobe's verification, so is a copyright circumvention device.
What about the BBC's own completely open codec, Dirac?
It's completely open, and any arguments against it based on low market share could also be levelled at Theora. Dirac has the advantage of offering significantly better quality compression than Theora...
DRM music will never go away!
Can you even buy DRM'd music any more? Other than for the Zune of course. Let's not consider the trivial fringe markets. I understood it was pretty much MP3 or better everywhere now. Am I mistaken?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes. They profit from the sale of DVD's and Blu-ray. You may not like it, but they do
Two straw men in one. Thank you for point out the obvious - yes, I know they sell DVDs. And no, it's not true that I don't like it. I've never complained about them selling DVDs etc, since that doesn't affect those of us who pay for it. The issue is when they introduce DRM as an argument for making even more money, since that does affect us.
If they did not have this option, I would probably not be able to freely view this content via browser as is.
Why not? And if you're not paying for the BBC, yet you can watch it, then how is that helping the BBC's profits?
Is BBC entirely funded by the tax-payer? Do you agree that any taxes eliminated by profits that they may make are a good thing?
What taxes eliminated by profits?
It is reasonable to call the BBC fee a tax, however this doesn't mean it's funded out of general taxation. There is a specific TV licence fee.
Not to mention that no one is arguing against profits. You still have to show that DRM increases their profits.
I can only assume that the BBC is much like PBS in the US (public funded). PBS is a wasteland of uninteresting content here and doesn't have near the recognition of BBC. If they have a successful model that doesn't cost your tax payers too much, I personally wouldn't be so quick to criticize this move.
You are seriously suggesting that the BBC is better than PBS, because of DRM? How does that account for all the decades when they didn't have DRM? How can you possibly argue that we can't criticise this move now, based on the quality of the BBC so far?
It costs us £145.50 a year (from April). Even if DRM does help them lower the fee, it's hardly helping if licence payers are simply instead having to pay more by buying DVDs - they're still paying one way or the other! And the biggest point you are missing is that, since the BBC is funded by the public, its quality is not going to go down just because they don't have DRM. That's the poorest argument for DRM I've ever heard. Speaking as someone who pays for the BBC - unlike you - I don't want DRM.