The Open Rights Group commented on this yesterday.
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2007/10/16/bbc-u-turn-full-iplayer-service-may-never-be-available-to-mac-and-linux-users/
Heres the text, if you want the in line links you will need to get them from
the above link.
Yesterday, the BBC announced that a cross-platform “streamed” version of its
on-demand service the iPlayer would be available by the end of the year.
According to this report from BBC News Online:
“At the end of the year users of Windows, Mac or Linux machines will be
able to watch streamed versions of their favourite TV programmes inside a web
browser, as well as share the video with friends and embed programmes on their
own websites, sites such as Facebook and blogs.”
If the idea sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because back in March, when the BBC
Trust put the iPlayer out for consultation, the Open Rights Group gently
suggested that streaming was a far better short term solution to on-demand
services than DRM-restricted market-distorting technologies that would serve to
widen the digital divide. We observed that:
“Such an approach is cheaper, lower risk, more inclusive (it works for
example in libraries) and more flexible than the current BBC proposal. It may
not appeal to consultants looking to make huge profits at public expense
however, precisely because it is simple, clean and low-risk.
“It does not, of itself, address the desire for users to obtain content in
DRM-free downloadable form for any platform, but it provides a basis until the
BBC is able to identify more open solutions for the download of content,
preferably ones which do not depend upon DRM… The Open Rights Group considers
it is quite possible that, as already is clearly happening in the music world,
the use of DRM will soon be abandoned by the market itself.”
You can read our full submission to the BBC Trust here. But enough of the
I-told-you-so-s. Is yesterday’s move good news for licence fee payers who do
not use Windows? Well, not really. Although they will now be given online
access to content their licence fee has helped pay for, there are still
fundamental inequities between users on different platforms, and this still
leaves the BBC deforming the market in favour of Microsoft DRM and Windows.
People on Macs, Linux, PDAs and other handheld devices are still losing out on
all the features that make the downloadable iPlayer different from, say, the
kind of streaming that the BBC has done for years with the RadioPlayer.
And that’s not all. Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology
at the BBC has now indicated that the full, downloadable iPlayer may never be
made available to those who do not use the latest versions of Windows. When the
iPlayer launched in June, Highfield was quoted as saying:
“I am fundamentally committed to universality, to getting the BBC iPlayer
to everyone in the UK who pays their licence fee.”
But yesterday, he admitted:
“We need to look long and hard at whether we build a download service for
Mac and Linux. It comes down to cost per person and reach at the end of the
day.”
The BBC could avoid all this mess if it eschewed DRM and instead employed
standard formats. The Open Rights Group believes that the BBC cannot be truly
public service in the 21st century until it gives the British public access to
the programmes that they have paid for without DRM or restriction. This is not
a technology problem, but cuts to the heart of what the BBC is for and how it
makes and commissions programming. ORG challenges the BBC and the BBC Trust to
re-examine the BBC’s commissioning and rights frameworks with the goal of
creating public service content, owned by the public and available to all.
Update: The BBC Trust have hit back at the Future Media and Technology team,
reiterating their condition that the entire service must be platform neutral
and adding “we would expect BBC management to come back to us if they are
planning any changes to iPlayer.” Read the full report here.
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