By Tim Ferguson, 23 July 2007 16:26
NEWS
More than 10,000 people have signed an e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website urging the BBC to make its iPlayer available to non-Windows users.
At the time of writing, 10,006 people had signed the petition calling for the Prime Minster to instruct the BBC to provide the iPlayer for other operating systems, such as Linux or Apple's OS X.
iPlayer is the BBC's online on-demand television service which was launched last month. It will be available for public download on 27 July - but only for Windows XP users.
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At the launch of the iPlayer last month, Ashley Highfield, director of future media and technology at the BBC, said: "I'm fundamentally committed to universality. We're not favouring one platform over another."
He added: "Our general rule of thumb is to reach the biggest audiences first."
A BBC statement said it is in the corporation's interests to make its content as "widely available as possible".
The BBC added that developing a version for Apple Macs and Microsoft Vista is "absolutely on our critical path for this year".
Open source industry group, the Open Source Consortium has been invited to meet the Beeb's independent governing body - the BBC Trust - to discuss its concerns about the iPlayer.
Comments
There are 14 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
I notice Channel 4's 4OD is also guilty of only being available to Windows users.
2. Graham Coles
So this is what 'the unique way the BBC are funded' means -- stuff the stupid licence payer if they don't run windows.
Given the amount of rubbish they put on TV these days, the licence fee is just another tax, though one that is beginning to look like a worthwhile saving.
All I can see for my licence fee is crappy logo on half the BBC channels obscuring the programme, stupid 'press red' messages appearing every time I change over and now a bloody useless windows-only player that I can't use.
Frankly if this is all you get for 140 quid a year, they know where they can put it! Anyone for a 'Scrap the licence fee' petition?
3. I hate penguins
Non-Windows users are a bunch of whiners. If you choose a non-mainstream OS option don't expect full support. The BBC are perfectly correct in their approach of hitting their biggest audience first, and then the non-Windows audience.
4. Frustrated
Why the fuss about the No10 petition. Remember the road charge petition 2 million people sign it and they still go ahead with trials.
I was at a meeting with senior local and central government people recently and we were talking about the road charging petition, the general view was....
"of course we are interested in petitions but they have never changed government policy when they were paper based why should they do that now"
Seems the petition is not worth the paper it is not written on.
Another example of the government not taking notice of the electorate... ID cards, Iraq, etc etc etc
5. Charles Wood
I would like to offer some figures on this: less than 1 percent of people that hit our site are non-windows users using the latest version of explorer.
Only less than 1 percent of those are not windows operating system of some sort.
We used to cater for more but I think it is a waste of money. The BBC are well justified in not spending the extra resources.
Apart from that I hate what they broadcast and how they go about it.
6. David King
Not everyone can or wants to use Microsoft software, thus the BBC should make their iplayer available on all platforms. The easiest way to do this is to write the software in java, that way it is platform independent and can run on most hardware running a modern OS, including all recent versions of Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
Channel 4's service is also aimed exclusively at Windows users, but when I tried to use it from Windows XP Pro SP2, it would not work for me. Which means that the TV companies are basically using second-rate programmers who do not know how to make software work for all users. Maybe they should hire better software programmers.
7. David King
Why is there no link to the online petition? I want to sign it right now.
8. anonymous
Surely the BBC should take into account home users rather than encourage the multitude of office Wintel users to use iPlayer retaher than be productive! The percentage of Mac users when discounting the corporate machines is much larger.
Over the past year our company Mac to Windows usage has gone from 9% to 56%.
9. Karen Challinor
the problem here is DRM, thats the only reason it's not available for the various flavours of Linux and probably for the mac too (I'm not too sure of DRM content playback on the mac, so if someone knows better please correct me)
because if someone puts DRM in a package for a linux platform someone from the linux community will swiftly engineer it out again
and as the BBC has assured it's content providers that the downloaded content will be protected by DRM despite it's supposed platform neutral stance, it's got a bit of a problem on it's hands, get rid of DRM and the problem goes away but the content providers back out, keep DRM and they've got the content but are limited in the platforms they can deliver to
but as I have stated before, DRM is a waste of time, the only people it inconveniences are end users, if some pirate seriously wants to copy DRM protected content then they have the money and resources to do so with ease, whereas the end user who just wants a backup or to enjoy the content on a different playback device is stuffed
so they may as well drop DRM and take the loss of content, if they are truly comitted to platform neutrality
but the petition will achieve nothing
10. smokeonit
there's good alternatives to windows media out there..
quicktime is one of them.
the h264 codec offers better picture with less bandwidth...
anyone who installs itunes has quicktime on it's windows pc... so that part should be covered...
the BBC uses quicktime for their stock footage library... so for the BBC to say they don't use quicktime is bull****...
windows media is a very inferior platform. it's only advantage is that microsoft is paying it's users like the BBC subsidies in order to their crap implemented!!!
11. anonymous
Charles Wood said:
"I would like to offer some figures on this: less than 1 percent of people that hit our site are non-windows users using the latest version of explorer."
If they aren't using windows, where do they get this latest release of Explorer? AIUI, IE 7 is only available for windows at this time. There is no IE for GNU/Linux, and the most current on MacOS is IE5.5.
Charles Wood then said:
"Only less than 1 percent of those are not windows operating system of some sort. "
Less than 1% of the people not using windows are not using windows? Are you sure you have your figures straight?
FWIW, I see about 25% of the world using firefox on *something*, and most of the remaining 75% using IE on windows (mostly XP, some windows 98, some Vista). Around 2% using some form of *nix (FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, etc), between 5% and 10% using MacOSX and the rest using windows.
12. artboy
support monkeys always come out with this sort of response whenever any of us non-microsoft slaves make any sort of complaint. Yes MS dominates the market but this is due partly to the fact that developers pander to that market meaning that the rest of us lose out for not wanting to be hit by the millions of viruses that target MS!
13. Daintree Peters
An executable, not a web-based, platform-independent and low-footprint delivery mechanism? What an arcane design...
14. Rob "The Liberator" Anderson
Let's face it folks, this is hardly surprising news. After all, just look at how much free advertising the BBC gave M$ on prime time news shows for the launch of Vista.