Number 10 responds to iPlayer petition…
…And it’s pretty lacklustre. Over 16,000 people signed the petition, demanding that the BBC stop excluding license fee payers who don’t have computers running Microsoft software from its new on demand TV service. But Number Ten are apparently satisfied with the BBC Trust’s commitment that the iPlayer would be cross-platform “as soon as possible”, and the six-month review process the Trust has put in place:
“…the Trust conducted a Public Value Test on the BBC Executive’s proposals to launch new on-demand services, including BBC iPlayer. This included a public consultation and a market impact assessment by Ofcom. In the case of the iPlayer, following the consultation, the Trust noted the strong public demand for the service to be available on a variety of operating systems. The BBC Trust made it a condition of approval for the BBC’s on-demand services that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems, and has given a commitment that it will ensure that the BBC meets this demand as soon as possible.”
As the Open Source Consortium have argued, what the Trust’s provisions fail to acknowledge is the significant competitive advantage this lag time gives the purveyors of the only operating system currently supported by the iPlayer - Microsoft.
The Open Rights Group believes that the BBC should release content that has been bankrolled by license-fee payers in standard formats that are accessible to all.
Read the full petition response here. Read our submission to the BBC Trust’s consultation on on-demand services here.
September 6th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
“As the Open Source Consortium have argued, what the Trust’s provisions fail to acknowledge is the significant competitive advantage this lag time gives the purveyors of the only operating system currently supported by the iPlayer - Microsoft.”
But surely the only alternative would have been to delay the Windows version until the Mac and Linux versions become available? That wouldn’t do anybody any good.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
The alternative would have been to make cross-platform availability a fundamental requirement of the design, rather than an afterthought; to build something that relies (as Becky says) on documented standards, not on a piece of proprietary software available only on one platform.
The argument is that the Beeb had an even more fundamental requirement - to protect the rights of their content providers, although it’s unlikely that DRM can actually achieve that - but they chose to let that requirement override platform-independence.
They also chose to perceive the two requirements as mutually exclusive, rather than using their sizeable software development workforce to design a DRM standard that could be implemented on any platform and promoting it enough to make it worthwhile to do so.
They could even have used their clout - as Apple have recently started doing - to convince their content providers to let them release the content in DRM-free formats, which makes platform-independence a lot easier as they could have just chosen an existing standard format.
Their choices were no doubt made to get something to market more cheaply and quickly, but while for a normal corporation that would be disappointing but excusable, for one funded by the state it is harder to swallow.
September 7th, 2007 at 12:18 am
It goes beyond the iPlayer. The BBC really needs to sort out the content licensing as it’s a complete mess. For example, I have happily paid my TV License for 18 years but as I am currently overseas I am blocked from listening to much of the Beeb’s audio content including streamed sports commentaries. Compare that with the fact that I can listen to four channels of streamed Virgin Radio music here with no restrictions. My local ISP even peers the data so that it doesn’t even count on my monthly download allowance. The Beeb can and should do better in this area.
September 7th, 2007 at 9:59 am
“They also chose to perceive the two requirements as mutually exclusive, rather than using their sizeable software development workforce to design a DRM standard that could be implemented on any platform and promoting it enough to make it worthwhile to do so.”
Call me cynical, but I believe that the reason they didn’t do this was because they would ultimately be responsible for any breach in the DRM system. As it stands, they’ve passed this responsibility on to Microsoft.
September 7th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Maybe the “BBC Trust” setup actually makes the BBC more risk-averse. You’d think an organisation with a government-guaranteed revenue stream (not to mention a lucrative TV licensing scheme that’s backed by national statute) would be willing to take a few risks in order to innovate, but maybe any kind of risk fails the BBC Trust’s “Public Value Test”. I suppose you could argue that the BBC getting sued for “contributory copyright infringement” is not in the public interest…
September 9th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
The whole of the BBC’s technology department is a mess. It is naive on tech news and uses technoligies that are incrimidating and damaging. They need to change this as technology becomes a bigger part of life.
September 18th, 2007 at 2:52 am
It’s LICENCE fee - ‘license’ is the verb, ‘license’ is the noun. The issue is one that would be alien to people in the US, so why the American spelling?
September 18th, 2007 at 2:53 am
That should be “‘licence’ is the noun” Whoops!
September 21st, 2007 at 12:16 am
“Incrimidating” is an awesome word.
September 3rd, 2008 at 8:19 pm
The only alternative would have been to delay the Windows version until the Mac and Linux versions become available.