I've been told by someone who works at the BBC (in "new media") that it's a consquences of them being early adopters. When they started up their streaming program, Real was the only format that was widely accessible on all kinds of platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux etc) and Real agreed to let the BBC use their format free of charge without any licensing fees. This ticked all the boxes in the charter about open/accessible/value for money with the licence fee etc.
Over time it became apparent that other formats were going to need to be supported (such as WMA etc), but each format addition required approval against the requirements of the charter, and this got increasingly difficult because of the restrictions on the licence fee increases and because of the increasing licencing demands that were being made by the format providers. So you end up with the current hotchpotch of streams and formats. I guess this was a big part of the decision to get iPlayer up and running and to move stuff across to that single platform. -- Siduhe Who am I on 'LAST.FM' (http://www.last.fm/user/siduhe)? "-Siduhe Loved Tracks radio got the thumbs up. Feedback included: yeah, it's good... got the odd dodgy track tho...-" (c) 'ModelCitizen' (http://www.last.fm/user/Modelcitizen) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Siduhe's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=723 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=51829 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
