[SWLUG] New protest and petition against BBC's Windows-only iPlayer

[Steve Hill]

On Fri, 3 Aug 2007, Dafydd Walters wrote:

> Here's the new on-line petition at the Downing Street E-Petitions
> web-site. Please consider signing this:
>
>  http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/iplayer/

I've signed it, but I have absolutely no faith in the petitions doing any 
good - most petitions don't get a response, and the ones that do always 
get a "we're right, you're wrong, we're going to continue doing this 
anyway" response.

Personally, I have no interest in iPlayer being available for multiple 
platforms - as far as I'm concerned the BBC has a duty to be platform 
agnostic and that means using an open standard so that anyone can write a 
player for *any* platform.  Using a propriatory format and releasing 
players for a select few platforms (e.g. Windows, OS X, Linux) is not 
"platform agnostic" - what if I want to play it on my phone or some other 
device not running one of those OSes?

The BBC keep claiming that they need DRM for content delivered over IP but 
that content delivered over DVB should be free-to-air - this doesn't make 
any sense to me.  You can restrict content delivered over IP to more or 
less the same population as the DVB stream covers by restricting delivery 
to only UK IP addresses.  Sure, someone in the UK can proxy the content 
and deliver it to someone outside the UK, but they could do that with DVB 
just as easilly anyway.

So from what I can tell, all the reasoning for needing DRM is unfounded - 
if you need DRM for IP delivery, why not for DVB too?

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence