“The BBC’s plans for a TV catch-up service for licence payers is slowly transforming into a serious rival to iTunes, delivering music and video from a variety of broadcasters to a media-hungry world,” Tom Dunmore reports for Stuff Magazine. “The BBC is in a unique position in the UK: a taxpayer-funded broadcaster that can afford to produce best-of-breed TV and online services without the support of advertising.”
Dunmore reports, “The original idea behind iPlayer – known during last year’s trial as iMP – was to allow viewers to catch up with the last week’s BBC TV and radio shows by downloading them from the web or streaming them over iPTV. Now BBC Worldwide head honcho John Smith is inviting rival broadcasters like C4, ITV and Sky to participate in iPlayer, making it an online alternative to the Freeview digital terrestrial platform.”
“Fortunately, one of the findings of the BBC Trust’s initial report into iPlayer was that it had to be accessible through different platforms – including Mac and Linux, which currently lack the Windows Media 10 DRM used by C4 and Sky. Let’s hope that the BBC can find a less stringent, more open copy protection system that allows wireless streaming and transferring video to portable devices. If it works, it could force iTunes – and, more importantly, the studios and labels backing it – to ditch restrictive, product-specific DRM altogether,” Dunmore reports.
Full article here.
Related articles:
British citizens: e-petition Prime Minister regarding Mac compatibility for BBC ‘iPlayer’ – February 22, 2007
Ask the BBC make upcoming iPlayer on-demand service Mac compatible – February 01, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: AOL Music Now folds – January 12, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Virgin shutters U.S. music service – January 05, 2007
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: MSN Music stops selling music downloads – November 03, 2006
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Japan’s Oricon bows out – November 01, 2006
More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: Tower Records liquidated – October 09, 2006
Apple’s iTunes Music Store has blood on its play button: BuyMusic.com is dead – March 28, 2004
At least BBC has brought us a few goods things: Monty Python and those Agatha Christie mystery shows
Think of this, in the UK you can get a box in ASDA (British Wal-mart) for $40 that will give you access to ~30 channels of TV for free, without a monthly fee or cable. Compare this to having to pay your cable company $40-$100 a month for crap, and the BBC license fee starts looking cheap. Regardless of the anti-BBC hatred on this site, BBC1-4 are excellent channels and well worth the money, and BBC radio is so far ahead of any radio in the USA in terms of quality and variety, its difficult to even compare.
Auntie Beeb might fuck up a few times, but the World would be a worst off place without her.
poirot is still actually made , and is a massive success
i don’t see why i should subsidise the bbc’s property expansion either
bbc = an outdated overstaffed waste of space
and they can’t even be original or show a smidgen of integrity
they copy apple with the i moniker
then kiss bill gates arse at every opportunity
Its amazing how many “false” news stories get published when the sources for the story are bald-faced lying government types.
If only the U.S. had one news agency/network with the integrity of the BBC. Instead, the U.S.’s best news source are Comedy Central and the Onion.
True, the use of the copycat name iPlayer is tactless.
But, dear friends, what’s so wrong with using TaxPayers’ money for that purpose? It’s much better than allocating it for yet another war, for instance.
And we should also acknowledge that the BBC, as a news organization, is far superior in terms of insight and objectivity than any organization that the US has to offer, with the possible exception of the NPR.
“From another reluctant paying member of the license system, I wish the BBC programming could be better.”
John, I would respond that the “better programming” concern applies to virtually all television networks — whether licence fee funded or advertiser funded. Yes, the BBC could do better. But so could ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, and all the rest too.
In my view, this has more to do with the tastes of the TV viewing public, and less to do with the funding model.
TV Licence payers have ample scope to make their views known: Just vote with your feet. Watch what you want, don’t watch what you don’t, and let the ratings speak for themselves.
While you’re all getting your knickers in a twist about whether or not the Beeb is good or evil, you’re missing the more important part of this story: Microsoft is taking control of the downloadable/streaming media market because of Windows Media DRM. Unfortunately it fits the needs of the content providers, in that it allows for temporary licensing (ie subscription or limited time) and there doesn’t seem to be any real competition (sorry, no pun intended). One of the reasons that many such services are not Mac compatible is only because of this. It’s time for Apple (despite Steve’s anti-DRM stance) to produce and distribute a version of Fairplay, even if they call it something else, that can be used for these sort of services. Just think of the attraction: all of a sudden all this content becomes iTunes/iPod compatible!
Otherwise I’m afraid it’s the original Apple/Microsoft story all over again: Microsoft just concentrates on getting everybody on their second-rate bandwagon while Apple hold out for better solutions until there’s no-one left to persuade; they’re all using Microsoft and don’t care…
“And we should also acknowledge that the BBC, as a news organization, is far superior in terms of insight and objectivity than any organization that the US has to offer, with the possible exception of the NPR.”
macula, NPR doesn’t come near the breadth, depth, and incisiveness of the reporting you find on the BBC news.
The BBC World Service is respected the entire world over. I get much more out of the news, analysis, and comment on the BBC’s News Hour and the From Our Own Correspondent series, than I ever get from NPR’s All Things Considered or Morning Edition.
NPR is far too heavily biased towards American news, whereas BBC World Service news covers events happening around the globe.
And before you ask, the equivalent worldwide radio arm of the US — the Voice of America — the best I can say about it is that it at least isn’t overt propaganda. But I still wouldn’t trust it over the BBC World Service.
Other US broadcasts, though, such as Radio Liberty/ Radio Free Europe or Radio Marti to Cuba, really are propaganda and not worth listening to.
As for Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV — the radio and TV pablum that the US broadcasts to the Arab world — the less said the better.
At the bottom of my list is Radio Moscow, at least back in the days of the Cold War. It was unbelievably stupid – trying to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the like. (I’m showing my age here.)
My point is that publicly funded broadcasting can be a good thing. So can advertiser funded networks. The funding model is not the key determinant, though. It’s the integrity and quality of the people running the networks that determines that, along with the willingness of the audience to recognise and watch or listen to programs that they like and want more of.
BBC sometimes has good pieces, as long as its not news.
The news is a disgrace, ala Goebbles propaganda of the worst kind.
How could the brits go so wrong… ah I forgot, its everywhere the same.
If you are a looser with no aim in life, become a journalist.
“as a BBC journalist with a strong sense of morals I highly disagree”
You must be kidding right? The BBC sewage that is being broadpissed as “news” is a disgrace. Even worst than CNN, and that is no small accomplishment.
maczealot, you’re clearly a wingnut.
To compare BBC news with Nazi propaganda is just plain stupid.
Why don’t you just go away?
Oops, I meant MacGuy, not maczealot.
Sorry, maczealot – didn’t mean to lump you in together with this MacGuy wingnut…
Anyone else find it ironic that Apple is labeled as “anticompetitive” by Europe when they’re competing on their own product merits, but it’s just fine if a government-subsidized outfit that doesn’t have to make money swoops in and tries to out-compete iTunes.
Wow. iPlayer. What a clever name. Those guys at the BBC are Sofa King clever.
Ah yes – Socialism at its finest. And look who’s hidding at the center ready to take over yet a larger chuck on the world and it’s people and their minds and ways of doing things, its Microsoft.
If the BBC can’t be trusted to NOT be dupped by the likes of MS, then I don’t really see how they can be any more trustworthy than any “commercial” network news. The assumption that the BBC is somehow more apolitical or any less self interested (read that as money mongering) than any other “commercial” news entity is blind stupidity.
But BBC, you go ahead and shed out an obviously MS exclusive delivery system and let’s see what happens? Personally I still believe that there are just enough people in the world who actually have their respective brains in gear that there will be either a quiet riot, or an outright backlash the likes of which has never been seen before – but let’s see, maybe I give the world’s populations too much credit.
God I hate the BBC, they generally make some very good programmes, but their news programmes are absolutely left wing, I would challenge anyone to refute that, and while I’m not anti left-wing, it absolutely galls me that I have to pay towards something that I do not support! I find myself seething with rage when I listen to the openly-biased propagandist reporting, all by, as someone above quite rightly put it, some lefty loser in life who decides to become a reporter. While I feel the BBC has been a great institution, it is now full of these lefty creeps and should be sold off, and other lefty creeps such as “wingnuts Go Away’ and his/her ilk can then pay to watch all they want, by themselves, now that would be fair.
Socialism at it’s best.
Taking money of out your wallet, and using it to compete with companies that employ the rest of us.
Fantastic! What better way to stifle innovation! Brilliant! Now let’s have another Guinness!
Yo BBC, here is an idea: Why not can your gov. funded and controlled TV, and let the free market, thus consumers, decide what it wants.
Just a wild and crazy idea!
Regarding the BBC and the English government’s use of “license fees” to support MS.
1. If it looks like a tax, smells like a tax, and is required of you by the government with laws penalizing you if you don’t pay it, then it’s not a license IMO. A license is something I go to the DMV to get when I want to drive my car. I don’t have to drive, and I can choose not to buy a license and take the bus.
2. Didn’t we have a dust up, or maybe it was a family squabble, between our two countries a couple hundred years ago or so about “taxation without representation?”
3. It’s comforting in a sick/demented kinda way to see that the politics in the mother country are just as screwed up as over here in the USA…
Macula-degeneration— with the possible exception of the NPR.
NPR–National Pravda Radio—run by a bunch of pinkos.
Wtf? I go away for a little while, and now the wingnuts are sprouting like mushrooms. Ugh.
Go away, you pea-brained morons. You’re doing a terrific job disguising your intelligence.
Case in point: “Jim – the independent voter”, who claims that the TV LIcence in the UK is a tax.
BZZZT!
Wrongo, baby. The TV Licence in the UK is indeed a licence … to use a television in your household. If you don’t have a television, you don’t have to pay the licence fee.
Which makes it directly analogous to your beloved drivers licence fee example.
So the TV Licence is not a tax, any more than a drivers licence fee is a tax.
Get a clue before you open your mouth next time, whydontcha?
Better yet, all you wingut cases of arrested development – why don’t you go huddle together for safety at the CPAC convention and stare at Ann Coulter’s adams apple.
Leave the rest of us ordinary folks the heck alone.
5 years too late but good luck Beeb. Here’s a radicaly idea. Why ot peddle your wares through the UK iTunes Store. Why invest all that money into something deemed to fail. You may do allright but no way current entrenched iTunes customers a just gonna ditch that to something else. Oh and please Beed can you give quicktime a go for your news site. Less cumbersome than wmp or real. There are still 22 million users in the world hey.
First off: Yay BBC — they’re great!
Second: Eric, you have some excellent points — I agree
Third: It seems that the Mac community has been hit with it’s first virus, the little boys who’ve been crashing this site lately. No manners. No class. No good ideas. They’re the original “tax & spend” — tax our patience and spend our precious time on their dorky distractions.
Bias? Sheesh. Look at this site for bias. The BBC had a front page news article slamming Vista last week. I emailed MDN the story, got a reply, and yet the failed to link to the article. Given the zeal with which they normally publish any anti-Microsoft story, makes you wonder why. Clearly doesn’t fit their xenophobic agenda that the BBC somehow belongs to a state-funded conspiracry to “diss” Apple.
As for this story, what junk. Nowhere has the BBC said that it plans to take on iTunes. That’s solely the rather uninformed opinion of the author. All the BBC are planning to do is offer free online content of its own content, and of other UK broadcasters. Good luck to them. I fail to see what all the outrage is about.
I’m getting increasingly disturbed by the some of the attitudes emerging from the US these days. I hope it’s a passing phase and will be looked back on with embarassment, like the McCarthy era.