On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 06:54:49PM +0100, Adam Leach wrote: > Andy wrote: >> On 29/07/07, mike chamberlain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>> Options 3, Buy an off the shelf solution and use it. Bonus points if >>> the people whose content your licensing are happy with it and will >>> endemnify you against someone cracking it. >>> >> Yes use an Off the shelf solution, provided it satisfies the criteria >> "Platform Neutral". The BBC's claim "We had no choice but to use MS >> DRM" is clearly false as there where 2 perfectly good options. >> > What are these two perfectly good options that could provide the same > fuctionality as Microsoft DRM & Kontiki.
Write a DRM system themselves OR pay someone to write a DRM system. As for alternates to Kontiki then there are plenty of P2P type systems which are more cross-platform without even going to those lengths. Now there may well be good reasons for not writing something yourself or contracting a third party. Namely time to market. However they are valid alternatives. Alternatives the senior management should have considered. That leaves us two versions of what might have occurred. 1) The senior management did not consider these alternatives. Which seems a little short-sighted (and the original Andy would probably say negligent). 2) That time-to-market and maybe cost-issues (although long-term costs would be hard to factor in) were considered far more important than cross-platform issues and the concomitant loss of goodwill. It also seems inevitable that a Kontiki/Microsoft DRM based solution is unlikely to be a valid long-term solution. We have the Mac/Linux issues (I assume Vista can be solved pretty quickly) as well as (at some future date) people wanting to use mobile viewers and off-the-shelf set-top boxes (which usually aren't based off of a Windows code-base). -- Andy Leighton => [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials" - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_ - 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/
