[Sussex] [OFF TOPIC] A Plea to the Myth community.

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 08:53 +0000, Steve Dobson wrote:
> 
> 
> I think the BBC broadly agree.  Having talked to one of the BBC's R&D
> people about this I believe that the view of the BBC is as a licence
> payer you have already paid and the BBC has a responsibility to make
> those programmes available to you.

Steve,

The issue here is that the BBC is, in many (most) cases also "just the
broadcaster". The vast majority of programmes broadcast are
Copyright-owned by third party companies. The exceptions include,
however, things like the News, which is still widely regarded as the
best for analysis in the Anglosphere (albeit nothing like as good as,
say, CNN for live coverage.)

As Paul has already said, IMP (Interactive Media Player) trials are well
on the way. These allow a download of selected content with a DRM-lock
so that it can be played up to 7 days after the original broadcast, and
will then be unplayable (and the software will remove.) They are, at
present, Windows-only. [1]

This is on the basis that the purpose of the trial is to allow a
time-shift in viewing, not the creation of private archives. (The BBC's
own revenue from DVDs would be badly hit if this happened.)


Here's an interesting line of lobbying. Rather than saying "you should
support this because it's free", which can be countered by the simple
argument "we support Windows because it's what the vast majority of our
licence-payers use", how about this:

"Dear BBC, we understand that you are supporting the Windows platform
because it is the most common among your licence payers. However, we
would ask that you concentrate resources in favour of Linux rather than
the Mac as a second platform, because Linux is the second-most common
platform." :-)

M.