the P4 was probably the biggest example of a miss-prediction here).
Wow, you've forgotten the Itanic already? I'd say that that was a much bigger failure than the P4.:)
Truth be told, IA64 is actually a very nice technology, but Intel massively misjudged advancements in compiler technology as well as what the market could use. A big jump to a new architecture was never going to go down well in a market that is inundated with closed-source code. It isn't as if the users can say "we want this architecture" and recompile all their proprietary software. 5 years after the introduction of x86_64 the vast majority of x86_64 systems are still running pure IA32 code so IA64 didn't really stand a chance,.
If they go too fast then this screws up the core team because they suddenly have more transistors than they expect.
Well, it isn't so bad - sure, you're not getting the highest performance you can if you're not using the full transistor count, but on the other hand you are burning less power than you would've had if the feature size hadn't been scaled down so much. These days, power dissipation is very important - depending on your market it is often more important than performance. Being able to offer a processor with the same performance as your competitors, but with a way lower power dissipation is certainly a Good Thing.
No, you often don't vote because you are a lazy ass.
There's a difference between being lazy and just plain not having time to do the research. A party who expects everyone to do hours and hours of research before voting isn't going to get many votes.
You can look up voting records, history, etc...
Voting records aren't going to tell me about the policies of an MP who has never been elected.
Y'know I've never been a fan of negative ad campaigns. If the best thing you can say about your product is "we don't suck as much as the other guy" I'm probably not going to bother switching.
This is why I often don't vote - none of the parties tell me what *they* plan to do, they only tell me what they think the other party is going to get wrong. So clearly if they aren't going to tell anyone about their policies then the policies are probably not worth voting for.
Sadly, negative campaigns (both commercial and political) seem to become more and more popular so presumably they do work.:(
presumably they have some, but it's generally considered a good idea to tell the marketing guys what they are before they start designing the ads
I looked at the ads and concluded that they'd got a bunch of marketing guys who had no clue what they were supposed to be selling and gave them a *lot* of glue to sniff...
What about the systems loaded with crapola? Microsoft has been bullying systems manufacturers for years. Microsoft could have required that in order to get the cheap wholesale price, the systems makers had to distribute their malware some other way (e.g., a rebate coupon if you run a CD and install all the crap). This issue simply wasn't on Microsoft's radar screen.
It would also be illegal. MS's monopoly position makes it illegal for them to prevent an OEM from installing whatever software they want on machines (especially if MS happen to allow the OEM to install MS software - imagine the fallout from a OEM contract that allowed vendors to ship computers with Windows and MS Office but not Windows and Open Office).
It would, however, be a sensible idea to mandate that the OEMs ship vanilla Windows installation media with their machines so that it is actually possible for the end user to wipe the crapware.
Microsoft missed several things this time around
Historically, MS have been pretty good at seriously misjudging the future. I can still recall them saying that they would never bother to support the internet because it's only a fad. And then later, they would never put tabbed browsing in IE because no one wanted it.
It's only their sheer size and market dominance that allows them to get away with some of the huge mistakes they've made over the years - usually when they decide they aren't going to support the Next Big Thing, some third party fills the gap and is then squashed out of existence when MS realise their mistake and start bundling their own implementation with the OS (or worse: they rip off the third party application and pass it off as their own [cough]Stacker[/cough]).
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
Isn't this what driver signing was supposed to address? If MS signed a bunch of crappy drivers, they really have only themselves to blame for not testing them well enough and declining to sign them.
The other question I have to ask is: WTF crazy screwed up architecture allows a *printer* driver to influence the stability of the whole OS?
They have no control over the shit quality of apps loaded by OEMs.
They could make things a bit easier for the users in this regard though. Buy a modern laptop and you get Windows preinstalled with crapware and an option to burn a "recovery image" to CD.
Want to reinstall the machine? You either have to go and buy a brand new copy of Windows (even though you have a perfectly valid licence to use Windows) or you have to use the "recovery image" which will get you the crapware-ridden Windows installation.
How about MS either mandate that OEMs actually supply unmodified Windows installation media so that you can do a fresh install and be rid of all the crapware, or make it easy for licensed Windows users to get clean Windows install media direct from MS for free.
As far as I'm concerned the same thing can be said of religion.
I would say that religion falls firmly into the category of superstition.
However, these guys seem to be using a different definition of superstition than I would: They are saying that superstition is a tendency to link cause and effect where that link is rarely true - the example of the rustling grass is a case where the link is rarely true, but the prehistoric human knows it is _occasionally_ true because she's seen people being eaten by lions after hearing the grass rustle (or has been told about such incidents). To me, this isn't an example of superstition, it is an example of assessing a real risk.
I would describe superstition as a tendency to link cause and effect where there is no evidence that the link is *ever* true - take for example, belief in ghosts, religion, etc.
How do you know the TVs being sold don't have SCART? Pretty every TV I've seen sold in the UK in the last ten years does
So why do you need the soon to be obsolete tuner? May as well just remove the tuner from the TV - saves cost and reduces confusion.
To be honest, I think TVs with integrated tuners will go the way of the dinosaur within a few years anyway - no point in paying for an integrated DVB-T tuner when you are just going to use the TV to display the output of your PVR or DVB-S/DVB-C receiver.
Hmm, maybe the government should put stickers on Linux machines to say "this machine can't run Windows software" too.
A Linux machine is just as capable as a Windows machine, even though it may not run the same software and that isn't something that is going to change soon. On the other hand, a PAL tuner is shortly going to go from working (as it has done for decades) to receive broadcast TV to being of very little use to anyone.
The government is putting rather a lot of money into trying to inform people about DSO. Informing people that the TV they are thinking of buying may well become useless to them when DSO happens seems like low hanging fruit.
It's like people buying cheap HD DVD players after HD DVD was killed. I'm not sure why, but a lot of people did. What you're suggesting is that some government bureacrat work out a set of rules to decide what was obsolete, if people understood the implications of the obsoleteness.
That is a *very* different situation. In the case of DSO, the government themselves are mandating the obsolescence of the devices. After DSO, a PAL tuner will *not* be able to receive any broadcast TV, but an HD DVD player will still continue to play all your HD DVDs as it always did, even after it is obsolete.
They'd have to fine people for not displaying the right sticker
Not really - you just give the public the automatic right to a refund when they discover they were never informed about the impending obsolescence of their new TV.
which means someone would need to check. You're far better off just allowing the market to handle this.
The American way is always "let the market handle it" and it patently doesn't work very well (unless you consider consumers being regularly screwed over by large corporations to be an example of it working). The European way is to regulate the market to protect the consumer and historically has worked rather better.
Because some people might want to buy them who already own set top boxes?
Why would you want a PAL tuner in a TV that is plugged into a set top box, given that the STB should be connected by SCART, not UHF...
Who cares, it's not up to the government to stop people buying obsolete things.
Actually, it is part of the government's job to stop companies misleading people into buying stuff that will very soon be useless. At the very least they should mandate that big "This TV will not be able to receive broadcast TV in a few months" stickers be put on them. Not everyone is well informed about the current state of the digital switchover - I imagine that quite a few people still buy PAL TVs with absolutely no idea that they will cease to be useful (without a set top box) within months.
"Simply tear off the cover and dispose of the display unit in your recycling."
Colour me very surprised if the council don't just landfill the thing because it is too much effort for them to split it up into it's component parts...
paid for satellite with Sky (there might be a few analog boxes left out there, but I think all new ones use digital signals)
You don't need to pay Sky - most of the channels on Astra 28.2E and Eurobird 28.5E (which are where Sky dishes are pointing) are transmitted in the clear and can be picked up with any DVB-S decoder with no subscription. If you want a freeview style off-the-shelf solution then buy a freesat box, otherwise get any random DVB-S receiver (I use a MythTV system with a Hauppauge Nova-S-Plus card).
I don't think there are any British analogue satellite channels any more - not for a good few years.
Just about every new TV comes with support for Freeview
Sadly there still seem to be quite a few PAL CRTs for sale - I have no idea why the sale of these soon to be obsolete sets hasn't been banned.
Don't panic: those very clever Europeans can save the day (again): you can have a ride in the ATV:-)
Which isn't currently capable of transporting humans to orbit, and whilst ESA have made comments about doing so they don't seem to have much intention of it.
The half-life of Uranium 238 (5x10^9 years) will require some serious shortening.
Why exactly do we need to dispose of U238 (which occurs naturally in relatively large quantities anyway)?
The highly radioactive products which come from running a nuclear reactor are the problem, and highly radioactive means a much shorter half-life. Of course, the enviro-hippies love to harp on about the enormous half-life of uranium because it's a wonderfully big number to quote at the public... it also demonstrates that they have absolutely no clue.
Re-reading the article, it appears to be unofficial, but rather then sending out a C&D notice, they instead tried to give a job to the guy who wrote it.
I was specifically talking about the BBC Trust themselves, not the BBC. The Trust have been quite explicit with what they mean by "platform agnostic" (they are basically happy for proprietary closed systems that work on Windows/Linux/OS X, which certainly isn't my definition of "platform agnostic").
But anyway, I want to reiterate - the service that was agreed with the BBC Trust was a platform agnostic download service (i.e. what the Windows users get), not a Flash-only streaming service running at a lower quality and a Windows-only high quality download service. So the BBC broke the agreement.
Yes, you do have to stream it, although I find that far more useful then sitting around waiting for the whole thing to download with their application.
It becomes significantly less useful if you want to watch something when travelling. Trying to stream full-screen TV over GPRS is crazyness, downloading it while you're at home and watching it on the train is more sensible.
Also, not all systems can use Flash - x86_64 hardware has been available since 2003, very few people buy IA32 kit any more, but Adobe still haven't bothered to release a 64 bit Flash. Sure, you _can_ kludge it to work on a x86_64 system, but it isn't fun. If you're not on x86 hardware at all you're probably totally screwed.
but you can't really blame the BBC for slow internet connections.
I can blame the BBC for designing a system that is so adversely affected by slow internet connections when there is no sane reason why they couldn't have provided a download service for *all* platforms instead of just one.
I'm completely with you that iPlayer isn't what it should be just yet, but I have high hopes for it, since the team doing the work seem to get that they can't go Windows only
I certainly hope that they have seen the error of their ways. If they provide a non-flash site for downloading the un-DRMed H.264 files then I think it will be a fantastic service. There's no sign of this yet though, so I won't hold my breath.
Everybody can watch the iPlayer. It works on Linux, Mac, Solaris etc. Hell, it even works on my Wii.
A cut down streaming-only, lower-quality system is available to non-Windows systems which can run Flash (if you can't run Flash then you are SOL). The download service is Windows only, and even the BBC Trust has said that this is not what was agreed when the BBC applied to develop the iPlayer system.
No, it doesn't - it provides access to people who purchased a product from one specific vendor - namely Windows from Microsoft.
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.
You can't license the patents and distribute something under the GPL, because the GPL requires you to also licence the patents to anyone you license the software to, and anyone they license the software to, ad infinitum.
Wrong - GPL 3 has a clause requiring patent licences, earlier versions do not. Most stuff is still under GPL 2.
Or you could do what Ogg Foundation and the BBC are doing - develop your own CODECs and not patent the techniques.
As with all software, anything you develop is almost certainly infringing _someone's_ patent somewhere in the world (probably the US) because the patent system is so utterly broken. Even if that patent is invalid, you still have to defend yourself in court (or just avoid dealing with and visiting the US:)
And that's the problem. Either encoding or decoding, you will need a patent license from MPEG-LA. I think that is not going anywhere soon. Anyway, as long as the standard is open, it is fine by me.
If you are decoding in software you do _not_ require a patent licence, since software patents are not legal in the EU.
The BBC is 'free' only to those who have already paid by buying a TV licence.
Errm, no... you can access all the BBC services that are _not_ broadcast TV for free if you live in the UK even without a licence.
DRM is needed to provide for the possibility of further privatisation - just in case.
How about they wait until the licence fee is abolished before using DRM? Next you'll be telling me that they have to start broadcasting adverts just in case they ever get privatised.
In any case, the DRM serves no useful purpose because all the DRMed content has already been broadcast in the clear to the whole UK and a sizable chunk of Europe.
The patents in the MPEG-LA pool is not exactly 100% software patents, there are lots of hardware-based patents too. Streaming h.264 videos (online or Over The Air like DVB-T) for example will need dedicated ASIC/FPGA hardware for real-time rate-control mechanisms that was dependent on non-software patents in the MPEG-LA pool. No organization out there worth its salt will do software-based h.264 streaming when reliability and mission-critical goals are essential.
Licences required for encoding are largely irrelevant since the BBC can buy them for themselves. If licences were required for decoding then that would make life hard for end-users and that is problematic.
It's worth noting that if you download one of the H.264 files intended for the iPhone from iPlayer and take a look at the headers, you can see that the audio track was encoded with libfaac, a GPL'd implementation of Dolby's patented algorithms used in encoding AAC. Possibly the BBC has bought a license to use this from Dolby (although, if they have, they'd have got Dolby's reference implementation of the algorithms too, so they'd probably use that instead)
I wouldn't be especially surprised if the BBC had the equivalent of a site-licence for this sort of technology, and ended up using libfaac rather than the Dolby code because it happened to be the easiest library to integrate into their systems (which are almost certainly built on top of lots of other Free software, so it is likely they haven't written software to use libfaac themselves, they probably just use some Free software that already used it.
Slashdot Mirror
the P4 was probably the biggest example of a miss-prediction here).
Wow, you've forgotten the Itanic already? I'd say that that was a much bigger failure than the P4. :)
Truth be told, IA64 is actually a very nice technology, but Intel massively misjudged advancements in compiler technology as well as what the market could use. A big jump to a new architecture was never going to go down well in a market that is inundated with closed-source code. It isn't as if the users can say "we want this architecture" and recompile all their proprietary software. 5 years after the introduction of x86_64 the vast majority of x86_64 systems are still running pure IA32 code so IA64 didn't really stand a chance,.
If they go too fast then this screws up the core team because they suddenly have more transistors than they expect.
Well, it isn't so bad - sure, you're not getting the highest performance you can if you're not using the full transistor count, but on the other hand you are burning less power than you would've had if the feature size hadn't been scaled down so much. These days, power dissipation is very important - depending on your market it is often more important than performance. Being able to offer a processor with the same performance as your competitors, but with a way lower power dissipation is certainly a Good Thing.
No, you often don't vote because you are a lazy ass.
There's a difference between being lazy and just plain not having time to do the research. A party who expects everyone to do hours and hours of research before voting isn't going to get many votes.
You can look up voting records, history, etc...
Voting records aren't going to tell me about the policies of an MP who has never been elected.
Y'know I've never been a fan of negative ad campaigns. If the best thing you can say about your product is "we don't suck as much as the other guy" I'm probably not going to bother switching.
This is why I often don't vote - none of the parties tell me what *they* plan to do, they only tell me what they think the other party is going to get wrong. So clearly if they aren't going to tell anyone about their policies then the policies are probably not worth voting for.
Sadly, negative campaigns (both commercial and political) seem to become more and more popular so presumably they do work. :(
presumably they have some, but it's generally considered a good idea to tell the marketing guys what they are before they start designing the ads
I looked at the ads and concluded that they'd got a bunch of marketing guys who had no clue what they were supposed to be selling and gave them a *lot* of glue to sniff...
What about the systems loaded with crapola? Microsoft has been bullying systems manufacturers for years. Microsoft could have required that in order to get the cheap wholesale price, the systems makers had to distribute their malware some other way (e.g., a rebate coupon if you run a CD and install all the crap). This issue simply wasn't on Microsoft's radar screen.
It would also be illegal. MS's monopoly position makes it illegal for them to prevent an OEM from installing whatever software they want on machines (especially if MS happen to allow the OEM to install MS software - imagine the fallout from a OEM contract that allowed vendors to ship computers with Windows and MS Office but not Windows and Open Office).
It would, however, be a sensible idea to mandate that the OEMs ship vanilla Windows installation media with their machines so that it is actually possible for the end user to wipe the crapware.
Microsoft missed several things this time around
Historically, MS have been pretty good at seriously misjudging the future. I can still recall them saying that they would never bother to support the internet because it's only a fad. And then later, they would never put tabbed browsing in IE because no one wanted it.
It's only their sheer size and market dominance that allows them to get away with some of the huge mistakes they've made over the years - usually when they decide they aren't going to support the Next Big Thing, some third party fills the gap and is then squashed out of existence when MS realise their mistake and start bundling their own implementation with the OS (or worse: they rip off the third party application and pass it off as their own [cough]Stacker[/cough]).
Microsoft has no control over the shit quality of drivers released by hardware manufacturers.
Isn't this what driver signing was supposed to address? If MS signed a bunch of crappy drivers, they really have only themselves to blame for not testing them well enough and declining to sign them.
The other question I have to ask is: WTF crazy screwed up architecture allows a *printer* driver to influence the stability of the whole OS?
They have no control over the shit quality of apps loaded by OEMs.
They could make things a bit easier for the users in this regard though. Buy a modern laptop and you get Windows preinstalled with crapware and an option to burn a "recovery image" to CD.
Want to reinstall the machine? You either have to go and buy a brand new copy of Windows (even though you have a perfectly valid licence to use Windows) or you have to use the "recovery image" which will get you the crapware-ridden Windows installation.
How about MS either mandate that OEMs actually supply unmodified Windows installation media so that you can do a fresh install and be rid of all the crapware, or make it easy for licensed Windows users to get clean Windows install media direct from MS for free.
As far as I'm concerned the same thing can be said of religion.
I would say that religion falls firmly into the category of superstition.
However, these guys seem to be using a different definition of superstition than I would: They are saying that superstition is a tendency to link cause and effect where that link is rarely true - the example of the rustling grass is a case where the link is rarely true, but the prehistoric human knows it is _occasionally_ true because she's seen people being eaten by lions after hearing the grass rustle (or has been told about such incidents). To me, this isn't an example of superstition, it is an example of assessing a real risk.
I would describe superstition as a tendency to link cause and effect where there is no evidence that the link is *ever* true - take for example, belief in ghosts, religion, etc.
Everyone in the UK has digital, about 0.1% of TV's have tuners, end of story.
Congratulations, you've managed to completely miss the point of the thread.
How do you know the TVs being sold don't have SCART? Pretty every TV I've seen sold in the UK in the last ten years does
So why do you need the soon to be obsolete tuner? May as well just remove the tuner from the TV - saves cost and reduces confusion.
To be honest, I think TVs with integrated tuners will go the way of the dinosaur within a few years anyway - no point in paying for an integrated DVB-T tuner when you are just going to use the TV to display the output of your PVR or DVB-S/DVB-C receiver.
Hmm, maybe the government should put stickers on Linux machines to say "this machine can't run Windows software" too.
A Linux machine is just as capable as a Windows machine, even though it may not run the same software and that isn't something that is going to change soon. On the other hand, a PAL tuner is shortly going to go from working (as it has done for decades) to receive broadcast TV to being of very little use to anyone.
The government is putting rather a lot of money into trying to inform people about DSO. Informing people that the TV they are thinking of buying may well become useless to them when DSO happens seems like low hanging fruit.
It's like people buying cheap HD DVD players after HD DVD was killed. I'm not sure why, but a lot of people did. What you're suggesting is that some government bureacrat work out a set of rules to decide what was obsolete, if people understood the implications of the obsoleteness.
That is a *very* different situation. In the case of DSO, the government themselves are mandating the obsolescence of the devices. After DSO, a PAL tuner will *not* be able to receive any broadcast TV, but an HD DVD player will still continue to play all your HD DVDs as it always did, even after it is obsolete.
They'd have to fine people for not displaying the right sticker
Not really - you just give the public the automatic right to a refund when they discover they were never informed about the impending obsolescence of their new TV.
which means someone would need to check. You're far better off just allowing the market to handle this.
The American way is always "let the market handle it" and it patently doesn't work very well (unless you consider consumers being regularly screwed over by large corporations to be an example of it working). The European way is to regulate the market to protect the consumer and historically has worked rather better.
Especially if you have an old video recorder and piles and piles of tapes. (OK, the recorder might have scart too, but some equipment doesn't...)
It'd have to be *very* old to not have a composite output...
But in any case, even though there are a few (extremely nichÃ) uses, there's no good reason not to mandate a warning label.
Because some people might want to buy them who already own set top boxes?
Why would you want a PAL tuner in a TV that is plugged into a set top box, given that the STB should be connected by SCART, not UHF...
Who cares, it's not up to the government to stop people buying obsolete things.
Actually, it is part of the government's job to stop companies misleading people into buying stuff that will very soon be useless. At the very least they should mandate that big "This TV will not be able to receive broadcast TV in a few months" stickers be put on them. Not everyone is well informed about the current state of the digital switchover - I imagine that quite a few people still buy PAL TVs with absolutely no idea that they will cease to be useful (without a set top box) within months.
http://www.esquire.com/features/recycle-e-ink-cover
"Simply tear off the cover and dispose of the display unit in your recycling."
Colour me very surprised if the council don't just landfill the thing because it is too much effort for them to split it up into it's component parts...
paid for satellite with Sky (there might be a few analog boxes left out there, but I think all new ones use digital signals)
You don't need to pay Sky - most of the channels on Astra 28.2E and Eurobird 28.5E (which are where Sky dishes are pointing) are transmitted in the clear and can be picked up with any DVB-S decoder with no subscription. If you want a freeview style off-the-shelf solution then buy a freesat box, otherwise get any random DVB-S receiver (I use a MythTV system with a Hauppauge Nova-S-Plus card).
I don't think there are any British analogue satellite channels any more - not for a good few years.
Just about every new TV comes with support for Freeview
Sadly there still seem to be quite a few PAL CRTs for sale - I have no idea why the sale of these soon to be obsolete sets hasn't been banned.
Don't panic: those very clever Europeans can save the day (again): you can have a ride in the ATV :-)
Which isn't currently capable of transporting humans to orbit, and whilst ESA have made comments about doing so they don't seem to have much intention of it.
Not all the junk is orbiting at the same inclination you know...
Because of so-called Depleted Uranium (DU), littered everywhere on modern battlefields.
You could always, you know, shove it in a nuclear reactor and generate electricity...
The half-life of Uranium 238 (5x10^9 years) will require some serious shortening.
Why exactly do we need to dispose of U238 (which occurs naturally in relatively large quantities anyway)?
The highly radioactive products which come from running a nuclear reactor are the problem, and highly radioactive means a much shorter half-life. Of course, the enviro-hippies love to harp on about the enormous half-life of uranium because it's a wonderfully big number to quote at the public... it also demonstrates that they have absolutely no clue.
Re-reading the article, it appears to be unofficial, but rather then sending out a C&D notice, they instead tried to give a job to the guy who wrote it.
I was specifically talking about the BBC Trust themselves, not the BBC. The Trust have been quite explicit with what they mean by "platform agnostic" (they are basically happy for proprietary closed systems that work on Windows/Linux/OS X, which certainly isn't my definition of "platform agnostic").
But anyway, I want to reiterate - the service that was agreed with the BBC Trust was a platform agnostic download service (i.e. what the Windows users get), not a Flash-only streaming service running at a lower quality and a Windows-only high quality download service. So the BBC broke the agreement.
Yes, you do have to stream it, although I find that far more useful then sitting around waiting for the whole thing to download with their application.
It becomes significantly less useful if you want to watch something when travelling. Trying to stream full-screen TV over GPRS is crazyness, downloading it while you're at home and watching it on the train is more sensible.
Also, not all systems can use Flash - x86_64 hardware has been available since 2003, very few people buy IA32 kit any more, but Adobe still haven't bothered to release a 64 bit Flash. Sure, you _can_ kludge it to work on a x86_64 system, but it isn't fun. If you're not on x86 hardware at all you're probably totally screwed.
but you can't really blame the BBC for slow internet connections.
I can blame the BBC for designing a system that is so adversely affected by slow internet connections when there is no sane reason why they couldn't have provided a download service for *all* platforms instead of just one.
I'm completely with you that iPlayer isn't what it should be just yet, but I have high hopes for it, since the team doing the work seem to get that they can't go Windows only
I certainly hope that they have seen the error of their ways. If they provide a non-flash site for downloading the un-DRMed H.264 files then I think it will be a fantastic service. There's no sign of this yet though, so I won't hold my breath.
Everybody can watch the iPlayer. It works on Linux, Mac, Solaris etc. Hell, it even works on my Wii.
A cut down streaming-only, lower-quality system is available to non-Windows systems which can run Flash (if you can't run Flash then you are SOL). The download service is Windows only, and even the BBC Trust has said that this is not what was agreed when the BBC applied to develop the iPlayer system.
And it does.
No, it doesn't - it provides access to people who purchased a product from one specific vendor - namely Windows from Microsoft.
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.
You can't license the patents and distribute something under the GPL, because the GPL requires you to also licence the patents to anyone you license the software to, and anyone they license the software to, ad infinitum.
Wrong - GPL 3 has a clause requiring patent licences, earlier versions do not. Most stuff is still under GPL 2.
Or you could do what Ogg Foundation and the BBC are doing - develop your own CODECs and not patent the techniques.
As with all software, anything you develop is almost certainly infringing _someone's_ patent somewhere in the world (probably the US) because the patent system is so utterly broken. Even if that patent is invalid, you still have to defend yourself in court (or just avoid dealing with and visiting the US :)
And that's the problem. Either encoding or decoding, you will need a patent license from MPEG-LA. I think that is not going anywhere soon. Anyway, as long as the standard is open, it is fine by me.
If you are decoding in software you do _not_ require a patent licence, since software patents are not legal in the EU.
Wrong.
The BBC is 'free' only to those who have already paid by buying a TV licence.
Errm, no... you can access all the BBC services that are _not_ broadcast TV for free if you live in the UK even without a licence.
DRM is needed to provide for the possibility of further privatisation - just in case.
How about they wait until the licence fee is abolished before using DRM? Next you'll be telling me that they have to start broadcasting adverts just in case they ever get privatised.
In any case, the DRM serves no useful purpose because all the DRMed content has already been broadcast in the clear to the whole UK and a sizable chunk of Europe.
The patents in the MPEG-LA pool is not exactly 100% software patents, there are lots of hardware-based patents too. Streaming h.264 videos (online or Over The Air like DVB-T) for example will need dedicated ASIC/FPGA hardware for real-time rate-control mechanisms that was dependent on non-software patents in the MPEG-LA pool. No organization out there worth its salt will do software-based h.264 streaming when reliability and mission-critical goals are essential.
Licences required for encoding are largely irrelevant since the BBC can buy them for themselves. If licences were required for decoding then that would make life hard for end-users and that is problematic.
It's worth noting that if you download one of the H.264 files intended for the iPhone from iPlayer and take a look at the headers, you can see that the audio track was encoded with libfaac, a GPL'd implementation of Dolby's patented algorithms used in encoding AAC. Possibly the BBC has bought a license to use this from Dolby (although, if they have, they'd have got Dolby's reference implementation of the algorithms too, so they'd probably use that instead)
I wouldn't be especially surprised if the BBC had the equivalent of a site-licence for this sort of technology, and ended up using libfaac rather than the Dolby code because it happened to be the easiest library to integrate into their systems (which are almost certainly built on top of lots of other Free software, so it is likely they haven't written software to use libfaac themselves, they probably just use some Free software that already used it.
But this is all conjecture.