OK, so the BBC has decided to use something more involved than a simple user agent check to determine whether it will serve up standards compliant and non DRM encumbered media to a client.
Fair enough. What I still find rather confusing is that, short of using whatever DRM capabilities the iPhone has, they will still be streaming DRM free content to a single platform, something that is likely to be circumventable by other clients soon. Not only that, but the BBC article I posted a link for earlier plainly states that the iPlayer DRM used to protect the downloaded content for Windows is also broken, so in effect supplying DRM encumbered media to a windows client is the same as providing DRM free content (the difference is when the removal of or circumvention of protective measures is carried out). So the BBC is claiming it is not permissible for it to make non-DRM content that it has licensed available, but is doing so and doing so in a manner that makes that content only available to a device (th iPhone) that comes from a single vendor and has a very small market share (I wont go into depth here to draw parallels with reasons given for Linux support as they are self evident). The BBC are also making media available for download to another single vendor provided platform (a vendor that has faced and is facing further anti-trust action in the EU). In the latter case the media is encumbered with DRM, but that DRM has been broken. So in effect the BBC are giving a competitive edge to two commercial entities, one of which is already in hot water for using suspect practices to maintain their dominance, apparently on the basis that that is the only way to protect the media, but without any real protective measures in either case. (I cant remember what happened to the slew of / rumoured anti-trust cases against apple for its pricing, hardware tie-ins and failure to licence FairPlay or I would mention these too.) Now, I am sure that fairly soon the method being used to 'protect' the iPhone specific DRM free content will be identified and circumvented, some people would probably be happy with that as a solution. I would however suggest that using such workarounds will be detrimental. The BBC needs to either provide a platform agnostic DRM capable player (I would even add the fantasy requirement for it to be unbreakable DRM), or resolve its licensing issues (or something else). Earlier in the week a number of people posted references to a BBC blog that seemed to indicate that DRM free, standards compliant media would be available to mobile devices (regardless of type) as long as they were capable of displaying such media in a satisfactory manner, I would rather like to know if that is still the case and how the BBC is going to justify becoming a very nice marketing tool for a select number of device providers (without cost to those providers!). I would be half tempted to suggest that the BBC's best option at this point in time would be to remove the Windows and iPhone specific iPlayer capabilities (others would probably advocate getting rid of the flash player as well, but at least that is marginally more portable, even if it is not open) and wait until they have a solution that does not favour one or more commercial entities, basically what is something that is based on open standards and platform agnostic. Now, I really shouldn't be getting side-tracked by this list as often as I am... Thanks.
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