BBC Director General grilled by MPs on iPlayer

Yesterday, BBC Director General Mark Thompson and other BBC representatives appeared in front of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. During the meeting, Dr John Pugh MP tackled him about the iPlayer. You can watch the full Public Accounts Committee meeting here (the talk of iPlayer starts about 10 minutes in).

During the meeting there is discussion of iPlayer’s total cost to the licence fee-payer – the BBC representatives are unable to give a figure, but start the bidding at £20m, excluding staff costs. Thomson gives incorrect information – that Mac and Linux versions of iPlayer have the same functionality as Windows versions – and has to change his evidence at the end. Perhaps it was this confusion that prompted Dr John Pugh MP to follow up the encounter with a letter direct to Mark Thomson today discussing platform neutrality in greater detail. A copy of this letter has been passed to the Open Rights Group. Pugh writes:

“The more fundamental issue is [iPlayer’s] failure to apply open standards and be sufficiently interoperable to work fully (stream and download) on more than one platform. The BBC is funded by licence players not all of whom have or chose to use a computer running Windows XP or Vista. By guaranteeing full functionality to the products of one software vendor it is as a public body handing a commercial advantage to that company – effectively illegal state aid!”

Dr John Pugh MP has previously accused the UK government of illegal state aid by excluding Linux and Mac Users from government services such as the Department of Work and Pensions online benefits system.

The BBC could avoid accusations like this if it eschewed DRM and instead employed standard formats. The BBC has made the wrong decision about DRM in its on-demand services. DRM threatens the future of public service broadcasting in the on-demand world and the BBC Trust and OfCom should assess the long-term economic case for the way the BBC buys rights to exhibit the programmes it commissions.