> I believe you live in England. Does the BBC, who mainly developed No - next door in Wales
> Dirac, use Dirac for webcasting? Who are the associates who > participated in development. AI couldn't find any after a quick at > Google's. The BBC uses flash primarily, and has previously used realplayer. The BBC isn't just a state TV business - it does real R&D and Dirac was part of that work. Some time after the Dirac work the BBC went with a windows only based iplayer project, got beaten up by the BBC trust (which is responsible for keeping the BBC in order - a full time job because the BBC at times has problems remembering its public service duties or even following its own charter) and introduced the flash player as well. As I understand it the flash player is basically all their traffic now. Unlike youtube the BBC flash doesn't yet work with gnash unfortunately. > Because of DRM, it even seems unsure the BBC itself will use it: > > <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/22/bbc-drm-cory-doctorow> This doesn't affect webcasting. OFCOM regulates the free to air service which the BBC are busy trying to corrupt (in almost certain violation of their charter). As the agreements for the free to air service stand they require the specifications used are "open" (for some version of open). The BBC is thus obliged to ask for permission to sneakily screw it all up, and fortunately got caught with its pants down. I imagine that will end up in court with the BBC having to make an embarrasing climbdown as they did with their internet tv platform, their educational internet project, and a list of other fiascos where they wasted tons of public money on by not following the rules that forbid the BBC from distorting markets with public money unless they can show clear public interest. As I understand it the BBC is perfectly at liberty to encrypt and DRM its web streaming services to death without the permission of OFCOM. It might have trouble showing public interest in the proposal however, unless it was truely cross platform and didn't distort markets. That said there are certainly content providers with concerns about the ease with which people record the flash streams for long term watching as it eats into follow on DVD sales. Of course DRM won't fix that problem anyway but their are people in the BBC food chain dumb enough not to get it, or short enough of backbone to explain this to the content creators. Alan -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
