By Tim Ferguson, 7 September 2007 16:57
NEWS
The government has responded to an e-petition protesting against the way in which the BBC's iPlayer has been developed.
The 10 Downing Street e-petition, signed by 16,071 people urges the Prime Minister to make the BBC develop its online on-demand TV service - currently only available to Windows XP users - for non-Windows platforms.
But the government response reaffirmed that the Beeb's independent governing body, the BBC Trust, has committed to the corporation making the service available for different platforms.
The response from the Prime Minister's office said: "The BBC Trust made it a condition of approval for the BBC's on-demand services that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems, and has given a commitment that it will ensure that the BBC meets this demand as soon as possible. They will measure the BBC's progress on this every six months and publish the findings."
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The BBC has already said it wants to make its content as widely available as possible and that an iPlayer for Apple Macs and Microsoft Vista is on its "critical path" for this year.
But not everyone is happy - Mark Taylor, president of the Open Source Consortium - which has met with the BBC Trust over the issue said "the situation hasn't changed at all as far as we're concerned. It's entirely a non-answer".
Comments
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1. barstep
A review is panned every six months - sounds like a long job to me.
2. anonymous
This is one argument the BBC will never win. 100% platform agnostic? I doubt it is possible within a reasonable budget. So maybe 90% platform agnostic will be good enough?
It makes perfect sense to target the most popular operating systems first, then play catch-up with the other 'major' OSs. As far as I can see that's what the Beeb have done, but obviously they will need to target Apple and Linux as well.
Open source advocates tend to be more audible than anyone else, so the BBC need to be careful not to be overly attentive to open source at the expense of various flavours of Windows and AppleOS.
3. Graham Coles
Same old self-contradictory rubbish as usual.
Clearly they are so committed to having this project cross-platform that it was designed and built on a non-portable proprietory system.
I'd probably be happier with a refund of my licence fee. Another waste of taxpayers money.
4. Karen Challinor
the government response is at heart -"it was going to happen that way anyway, so we'll make it appear that you've won a concession, so you'll vote for us in future"
petitions especially epetitions achieve nothing
the cynical amongst us view them as a way to waste effort and distract the dissenting person, rather than have them lobby their elected representative with theirviews
5. anonymous
The BBC should close the iPlayer Service with immediate effect until it can provide the service for the other platforms. No more waffle or excuses. Where is your project manager? - he wouldn't work for me!
6. Ian Farrell
Can we all receive this new service outside London and a couple of major urban areas anyway?
With current broadband speeds and ISP throttling is this even a topic that interest the majority?
Probably not. Most of the material on TV isn't worth watching anyway so who needs another delivery system?
In a couple of years maybe this will be a issue for the majority, right now it isn't even on the radar. By the time "the rest of us" can get a reasonable service the BBC will no doubt have delivered a multi-platform player. In the meantime, they have to start somewhere and isn't it better to start with the OS the most of us actually use on which to develop version one. By version 3 it should be on Apple and Linux, just in time to coincide with a better broadband than we have now, maybe.
7. Mark
I'm sure there are more than 16,000 users running Vista that would also like access......
Open sauce, who needs it.
8. anonymous
The BBC is required not to discriminate. However there is a difference between discriminating between people on grounds of race, sex, religion, ability and pandering to people who just happen to have made an alternative technology decision. As a public service being prudent with my money I applaud the fact that the bbc hasn't wasted it on a minority.