The ongoing saga of the iPlayer
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Oh, what a treat... and just in time for Christmas! I am very pleased to find that the BBC has finally indulged my fetish for organic software by releasing a flash streaming version of their iPlayer.

Though of course flash isn't homespun in itself, it is cross platform compatible and so both myself and all those other 'nix and Mac users out there can watch the last seven days of BBC content without the need for any of that Windows tosh! Not a Vista in sight! I need never miss another episode of Cash In The Attic again. Hurrah!

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posted by SkinOfStars @ 11:09 pm, ,


BBC iPlayer
Sunday, November 18, 2007

In a follow-up to my previous post regarding the incompatibility of the new BBC iPlayer I recently found an interview on backstage.bbc in which the developers of the iPlayer and representatives from the Open Source Consotium and the Open Rights Group discuss this very topic. It would seem that the general consensus is that release of the iPlayer to be bound to one operating system was in many ways a demonstration of the problems with DRM (Digital Rights Management) and thankfully just a stepping stone to more open access, initially through streaming and then hopefully to more open access.

Interestingly enough the developers pointed out that it is only a very small piece of the whole delivery system that was written in a proprietary format, namely the bit that goes on your computer. Over 90% of the system is running on Solaris with many of the developers using Debian based systems.

Ok Tony, off you go....

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posted by SkinOfStars @ 10:19 pm, ,


BBC in bed with MS
Tuesday, June 26, 2007

I'm appalled at a recent BBC decision to release its new online watch again service to Windows only. The problem for me is that I love the BBC normally and I want to consume their content but they always make it so hard for me. I don't like to consider myself anti-Microsoft but I don't want to use their software which means that I'm now pretty much stuck with the BBC's text only content. I'm afraid I'm going to be reduced to just listening to a bit of radio 4 when I'm near a radio. If I have already paid my license fee then why should I also have to buy software from an American company to watch it?

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posted by SkinOfStars @ 5:25 pm, ,