And me!

It's a fatally flawed argument to suggest that because the majority of computers now are Windows based, then the BBC can make a good case for using a Microsoft system for distribution. With the Vista bugs being a case in point, the BBC isn't tying itself to a standard, it's tying itself to a product. The PAL argument is just wrong.

And as a licence fee payer, I would have thought that the BBC would have considered the options. There are systems out there that allow content to be distributed in the way they would want that are open. The choice of the BBC not to use these is almost certainly because of the ability to hack them. Imagine if they released a system based on something open and it got hacked within 3 days? Then the BBC is playing catch up, and essentially all their content is free to everyone, and a large percentage of people will start to use the free/unfettered/illegal version pretty much immediately.

The commercial considerations for the BBC's content come into this quite strongly, and so using an open standard is quite plainly a risky strategy and probably a bad idea. What would have been sensible, and probably much more commercially viable (in terms of licencing across the world), is for the BBC to have created a version of their own software, created a licencing model so that anyone that wished could build a *commercial* client for the software, and then released that. It wouldn't have taken long for someone to release either a free or nearly free version of a player for linux. There are many examples of cut down players with "pro features" removed that this model could have been eminently suitable for this purpose.

My gripe about iPlayer is the forcing of the use of a software product, and not necessarily that it's an MS based piece of kit or that it's a complex platform that needs certain software to run it. There are times when I think that the Linux community expects everything for nothing, and if it's not forthcoming that a company is either "stupid" or "short sighted" or similar. As far as I can see, the Linux community (since that is who I think is mainly driving the frustration at iPlayer) needs to realise that sometimes, it will not win an argument where large-scale commercial concerns will mean linux versions are unlikely to be released for free, and to top it off, let's face it, the linux community could quite possibly be the biggest load of hackers on the net, and therefore a commercial minefield. I can see the lawyers saying something like "if we release this on linux too, we're running a much greater risk of being hacked and losing millions of pounds". With MS, at least if someone hacks it, the BBC can tell MS to take some action, thus providing some protection for their content. The fact that a linux version won't be released at all because of the choice by the BBC to tie itself to an MS product is I think a bigger mistake.

Not sure where all that came from, so I'm going to stop...

...waiting for the flames.

Paul

Richard McMillan wrote:
Me too!

On 01/08/07, *robl* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:


    > 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.

    Me
    -


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