The quality was abysmal though, and RealVideo? Urgh. The simile employed in the DbD article is a little inaccurate, the more I think about it; the BBC's choice of MS-based systems for its iPlayer platform is more like their choice to broadcast in PAL - more or less an international industry standard, even with its flaws (and subsequent improvements and patches)... Because even PAL, as a standard, as it exists today, has been quite significantly modified in its operation and composition when compared against how it existed when it was first used.
So, it's more like the BBC saying "well, you can choose to tune your TV by any broadcasting standard you wish - NTSC, SECAM or PAL, but you'll only get our channels if you use the PAL standard. They're not forcing ownership of any one OS onto users, in fact I've never actually bought a copy of Windows in my life (when I was younger, I used a computer which came with it pre-supplied, and I've had a couple of dodgy copies in my time but my University gave me a copy of XP Pro and WS2003 as part of their MS programme)... I know the simile starts to fall over there, because the Beeb is compelled to make it available to as many people as possible. However, here's something for the rest of you to pick apart: If the BBC decided that, by making available the iPlayer using the framework as it exists today, with MS DRM and Kontiki as the CDN, running on a Windows NT5/6 OS, they were making their content available to as many people as humanly possible within the reasonable expectations of a wildly-varied install base of computers and network configurations, would they really be THAT far off the mark, and wouldn't that on its own be justification for how they eventually went about rolling out iPlayer? Having Windows installed on most of the computers around the world makes it a good starting point for common ground, as does using MS DRM - again, something which is quite well integrated into the OS (overlooking its well-known flaws for now, but every DRM scheme has those, blah blah blah). The technology is quite mature now, and works quite well in most cases (although this 4OD/Sky/BBC clash is going to cause problems down the line) the sheer amount of installed copies of Windows on computers worldwide perhaps makes it the most viable option for the BBC to choose / have chosen? Not that I'm condoning the choice, personally I'll always prefer an agnostic system, but, well, maybe the BBC were just realists when it came to the practicalities of development cost versus ROI from creating versions for (EXTREMELY) minority OSes? I mean, come on, hands up who here on the list uses Linux as their primary OS. For pretty much everybody here, it's probably gotta be either a flavour of Windows or OSX (given that many creative media types seem to gravitate towards the prettier, sorry, more aesthetically-pleasing Macs). I know that OSX development got a whole lot easier when his Jobsiness decreed the change to Mactels, but it's still another dollop of man months to get it ported and working as well as the Win32 build. Percentages speak a lot to people signing off on cheques to fund development lifecycles... What's the takeup of Windows versus Mac? Inc. Technology has this article (http://technology.inc.com/hardware/articles/200707/macvspc.html) which has 2006 business usage figures: Linux -- 1 percent Mac OS X -- 1 percent Windows XP -- 71 percent Windows 2000 -- 20 percent Windows "other" (primarily Windows 95, 98 and ME) -- 7 percent. The home user has much less of a tie to Windows than businesses do, with their bulk licensing schemes and long-term investmnents in bespoke soft- and hardware solutions... But even so, there's not reallllllly that much incentive to change, and if a user's been using one OS for a while, they'll likely stick with it. OSX still only has a 6% market share (reference: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/1840206&from=rss and discussion based on same statistics at http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/mac_os_x_usage_up_down_or_flat /)... Whilst no means the only authoritative figures, I'd hazard that they're fairly representative of real-world usage. Even if Apple has seen that 33% increase in year-on-year growth of unit sales, their installbase is still but a mere dollop of ketchup next to the pack of quarter-pounders that is the Windows PC installbase, and I also think the amount of new PCs being sold with Windows on trounces the amount of new Macs being sold, whichever way you look at it. >From a CNET article comment on those same statistics, I saw this: According to IDC: Apple's worldwide share is in the Others category, behind HP, behind Dell, behind Lenovo, behind Acer, and behind Toshiba. HP's worldwide share is 19.3% with 36.5% growth. http://news.com.com/5208-10784_3-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=29486&messageID=2 93420&start=-1 More in-depth coverage of the IDC figures here: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/07/18/apples_u_s_mac_market_share_ri ses_to_5_6_percent_in_q2.html (The Mac takeup is still less than I thought it would be!) From that article's discussion: "In the second calendar quarter of 2006, Mac sales in the U.S. accounted for 57 percent of all Mac sales (760,000 out of 1.327 million). With 960,000 units sold in the U.S. this quarter, Apple will sell about 1.68 million Macs worldwide if the U.S./World ratio stays constant." So, maybe all this factored into the BBC's equations when they were deciding how to go about this fancy new-fangled iPlayer thingumajig, and they just decided to go with the hardware and OS combination which would reap an almost instant ~90% availability? That last 10% is unfortunately (for them) going to probably one of the more vocal percentages, but when you contrast that lot / us lot with the millions of (fairly?) happy PC-with-XP users all pootling along with iPlayer and not kicking up a fuss, I think the BBC can go to the Trust, "look, we've done our best for the moment given the time and technological constraints, give us a while to roll it out to everyone but unless you guys can suggest a better way to give immediate 100% availability, can you just shut up and let us get on with it?" Sorry, just thinking in type, playing Devil's advocate a little... But it is something worth thinking about. Oh, and of course to get any semblance of decent content on there they had to kowtow to rights holders and their licensing terms, but let's just sidestep that for the moment. (PS - A whole lot more reading on problems with home Linux takeup here: http://ubuntucat.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/types-of-desktop-linux-adoption-ba rriers/ (just found at random, but still interesting reading given that it's coming from a Linux user)) > -----Original Message----- > From: Martin Belam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 01 August 2007 00:21 > To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk > Cc: Dave Crossland > Subject: Re: [backstage] More iPlayer protesting > > "From today, you will need to own a Microsoft operating > system to view BBC programming on the web. This is akin to > saying you must own a Sony TV set to watch BBC TV." > > He's quite right, because when they launched the trial of the > iPlayer, the BBC shut off the cross-platform system they > *used* to run that allowed you to watch hundreds of hours of > BBC TV on the web on-demand for nothing ;-) > > cheers, > martin > > > > > > > On 31/07/07, Gordon Joly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > At 19:41 +0100 31/7/07, Dave Crossland wrote: > > >On 30/07/07, Jeremy Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> > > >> From time to time there has been (mostly around iPlayer) some > > >> strong criticism of how the BBC develops products. That's good. > > > > > >http://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/BBCcorrupted > > > > > >August 14th seems like a date for the diary :-) > > > > > > > > > Channels, IE 4? > > > > Gordo > > > > -- > > "Think Feynman"///////// > > http://pobox.com/~gordo/ > > [EMAIL PROTECTED]/// > > - > > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, > > please visit > > http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > > Unofficial list archive: > > http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ > > > > > -- > Martin Belam - http://www.currybet.net > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To > unsubscribe, please visit > http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
