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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