“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.
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