Hi, A very interesting interview - many thanks to Backstage and Ashley. A few thoughts:
* It seems clear that all of the portability issues currently affecting the iPlayer beta are a direct result of the requirement for DRM specified at the design stage. If the DRM constraint _were_ relaxed, then it would be possible to exploit all of the existing standardized and open-source media encoding and distribution technologies and completely avoid the current cross-platform incompatibility problems. * One question I have is: why Kontiki? Given that the files being distributed are DRM-wrapped anyway, why not use something more mainstream such as Bittorrent? (Even with a DRM-wrapped payload, RSS feeds carrying BBC series as a set of .torrent files would be very cool!) * From the interview, it is clear that the reason that the current DRM requirements exist is because rights-holders did not want the end-user the to be able to redistribute content to others - because they fear would reduce the value of their other distribution channels. This appears to be faulty reasoning. First, the BBC are _already_ broadcasting all of their content, digitally and in the clear, in the form of RealPlayer streams, terrestrial radio and (HD) television broadcasts and also via internet multicast. Why is it useful to apply DRM to this one distribution channel, when anyone can ignore it and instead obtain a 20Mbit/sec HD digital copy encoded in a standard, well-defined encoding by pointing an antenna at Crystal Palace? Secondly, all evidence to date shows that DRM does not in fact prevent the redistribution of content by end-users -- indeed, the WMPv9 DRM scheme currently used by the iPlayer distribution service had already been broken before the Beta had even launched! * Rights buy-outs: it's not necessary to buy out the rights to putting on live shows, publishing books and many of the other functions mentioned by Ashley in the podcast in order to set up a functional, DRM-free iPlayer service. Moreover, his assertion that all of the downstream rights - for books and so forth - would become worthless if the shows themselves could be readily downloaded seems dubious. Indeed, the value of many related works - books, live shows, etc. - may well _increase_ significantly if the original shows themselves were more readily available. This is because making the content more readily available to the public would help the rights-holders to build a bigger audience for their other works. Indeed, it is partly for this reason that many book authors are now publishing the entire content of their works online under Creative Commons licenses. (This is basically the same argument the BBC made in the case of the Beethoven MP3 downloads which so worried other Classical music distributors.) * One of the things Ashley talks about is a potential new future distribution model which he hopes that technology will enable the publication of content "with no DRM" -- but distributed in an "intelligent wrapper" that is able to enforce a set of rules for how it should behave. I think someone needs to tell Ashley that the mythical future technology he's describing _is_ what the rest of us would call DRM! Cheers, David -- David McBride <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Department of Computing, Imperial College, London
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
