“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,” Tim Ferguson reports for Silicon.com.
“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,” Ferguson reports.
“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,” Ferguson reports.
“The BBC added that developing a version for Apple Macs and Microsoft Vista is ‘absolutely on our critical path for this year,'” Ferguson reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: You must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition. We strongly urge British citizens or residents to sign it here.
British people rock!
I don’t quite understand why Brits hate Macs. Price? Resistance to individuality?
Here about a year ago I emailed the BBC asking why they didn’t support QuickTime.
They sent a snotty reply telling me that the BBC couldn’t support such a non-standard technology and if I wanted to see their videos I should use the world-class standard, Windows.
I did an end run around the buggers and installed Flip4Mac. It worked just fine.
I have since switch to SkyNews for my British news.
Like Anthony Soprano, I am puzzled as why the Brits seem to resist the Mac. Perhaps they will come round with time…and good advertising.
Who cares about anything from the Bull$hit Balloney Crap channel.
The BBC is the worst propaganda outfit, almost as bad as Reuters or CNN.
Watching BCC or reserved for idiots only.
“The BBC is the worst propaganda outfit, almost as bad as Reuters or CNN.”
__________
How can the BBC be “the worst propaganda outfit” and “almost as bad as Reuters or CNN” at the same time? If they are the worst, then wouldn’t that make them *worse* than Reuters or CNN?
Gotta love the Internet. People can make themselves sound smart and stupid all at the same time.
I’m curious why the BBC even embarked on a Windows-only path to begin with? Who’s running that joint?
I’ve successfully Switched 5 Brits, possibly 6, and am working on 7 and 8.
The BBC is an excellent news organization. Since they don’t exist to make money from advertising, they don’t have to slap together a fresh report on Paris Hilton every fifteen minutes.
Sure, they don’t seem to like Israel very much, and their favorite subject by far is “the BBC,” but I would rather get my information about important events from a left-leaning but largely un-beholden organization like them than any outfit controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Talk about propaganda…
That deal with microsoft is a real strange one, though. I can’t imagine a less ideologically compatible pair than those two. Maybe one day the beeb will wake up, covered in Windows Vomit, and scream, “What was I thinking?!?”
Eew.
I’m surprised that the British Gov’t allowed BBC to only offer iPlayer and content to the Windows-only crowd… AFAIK, the British have to pay a TV tax to keep the BBC in business. It seems unfair to the British tax payers that are not Windows users.
Taxation without Representation all over again me thinks
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in-n-out double double cheeseburgers rule!
have you ever sat down with a double double, fries and a large dr pepper while you have MDN on the 17″ macbook pro screen?
heaven, i’m in heaven…………
>The BBC is the worst propaganda outfit, almost as bad as Reuters or CNN.”<
Not really… Fox Noise beats all others for earning “the worst propaganda outfit” moniker on the planet !
Hands down !
What do you expect from such an icon of the evil AENUS (Anustralia, England ‘N US)? I used to have respect for that lot, but like many others I have gone places where democracy and freedom of speech actually mean something.
Now on a lighter side, I heard a great joke the other day.
“What do you call a terrorist that is too stupid to set off a car bomb?
– An american soldier in Iraq.”
rofl!
Nice catch, mate!
I signed up. Signature total currently at 11,135.
If you’re a British citizen and you want to sign the petition but you haven’t …you may be experiencing a hesitation. If you’ve experienced a hesitation lasting more than 4 hours you should consult someone with a clinging participle. very hopefully yours, your distant cousin.
The revolution will NOT be televised…
Look, just because the BBC is a little backwards in their thinking does not give us the right to critique. The last time the Brits did not like our thinking they came over here and showed us a thing or two……. Oh, wait, I suppose their backward thinking has always got them what they deserved.
Let’s dance!!
MDN Word: looked, as in, All looked fine at 8:23 pm EST until that damn Jarrett start a cross atlantic war.
Or PST.
Road Warrior said : “I have gone places where democracy and freedom of speech actually mean something.”
Please tell us where ?
I would, but since the head of the Iraq government has said that the Americans can leave anytime they are looking for a new country to invade, last I heard it was Iran or Pakistan.
Without being specific you might want to look at the first 20 or so peaceful countries, that should give you an idea of where.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY;=/www/story/05-30-2007/0004598231&EDATE;
Just a note, I have been specific before, but that just serves to bring out the yanks with their “other country” bashing. They must be compensating for something.
I am curious also….. Where have you gone.
MDN Word…. “told” As in I was told that you are full of shit!
10,000? That’s all?!! No wonder the Beeb doesn’t give a hoot about their Mac users; they’re clearly mutes.
Wait… this is incredible, you are obviously British with your “yank” comment, and yet you can not properly construct and sentence with in the language? How fitting…. and you all seem to get upset when I say that stupidity has run amok. By know means is my structuring even remotely correct, but hell I do not ever put myself, as a “yank”, in some sort of “better” class than anyone.
Way to go english whores, just keep mothering the future of ignorant, unintelligent human beings. Who knows, maybe one day you will have less than you have. Seems to me at one point your kingdom was a lot larger. Or am I just missing something from my recollection of history?
When in doubt, try not to adapt to the world, stop creating things and starve as many of your own people as possible, while taxing them upwards of 80%. Wait, sorry I forgot that you all already did that.
MDN Word “night” as in, Britain, have a good night.
And no I don’t think our American whores are any different than your whores. All whores are great. Our first ladies have always forgot at some point that sucking dick was important. Just look at the Clinton’s
Just as I know that your Kings ran amok because their Queen’s forgot to put that english sausage in their mouth. Look women, always remember what caught that man for you. Filling a belly with good food, putting a nice shine on that kitchen floor, and filling your belling with our love.
MDN Word “miles” yes women, you traveled a lot to tie that man down, but you forget occasionally that it there are lots of miles still left in that race to keep your man, and you always have more than one friend that would like to be his pipe smoker.
And now the latest news from Australia:
1. ABC (like BBC) uses Flash
2. Commercial station channel 7 use Windows media
3. Commercial station channel 9 (they jerk programming around so we don’t care)
4. Commercial station channel 10 use Windows media
5. SBS commercial and the ethnic channel…no-one really cares.
Cable all over the place but mostly Windows media.
Complain all you want about the BBC but it’s much worse in Australia.
I guess you can sum up the free to air channels in Australia as rank arrogance. If you don’t use Windows then you’re a weirdo Apple user. I exclude the ABC who until recently was using everything but now they’ve gone agnostic.
in-n-out burger!!!!! ROCKS!!!!!!! I am so jealous, every sinced I moved to this socialist state called Washington I have been pining for the day I can again sink my teeth into a double double with cheese, fries and pink lemonade!
Why cant they just make movies in standard formats like mpg or whatever. iPlayer what? Even if they adopted a YouTube format. Don’t get me wrong, I hate flv’s with a passion but at least they seem to play. But no, now we have yet another video codec/format.
Most people who have Windows Media Player, Quicktime and VLC , can play almost anuthing. Why bring in another.
in the US most tv channels use windows media too, unfortunately…
quicktime is very rare, and the BBC uses quicktime for their stock footage archive!!!
in LA the main news station is KTLA, they use windows media bullshit… a disgrace…
and in times of HD windows media is an insult… with the bandwidth WMV uses QT does ok looking HD with 720p…
Why would anyone use BBC for their news? Or anything else for that matter. They have consistently displayed a notable bias againsts anything Apple.
KK
They still are a pretty good news service, if you want news from that half of the world. (Britain/Europe)
Much better than, oh I dunno, Fox maybe.
The BBC is old and heavy and M$ has a huge influence in that bureaucratic structure.
In-n-Out is pretty good, but Hamburger Habit and Fatburger pretty easily beat it.
And btw, the BBC is a far out left-leaning group of anti-American, anti-Macintosh shitheads.
They hate Macs because Macs remind them of everything they hate/envy about America. Macs confront them with excellence. MS crapola, on the other hand, is exactly what they wish America to be: Mediocre at best.
heh – you gotta love the name – the ‘iPlayer’.
Nice attempt to piggy back on the Apple ‘cool factor’ with an ‘i’ player that doesn’t support anything outside of XP. That’s just plain iCrap.
@Oops, really is this a sensible on-topic reply.
I’m British, I didn’t like the MS-Mindows iPlayers platform so I signed the petition. Twice, there are two locations you can register your unsatisfaction.
The BBC have outsourced their IT infrastructure to an external company, so I bet when the iPlayer was first thought of, nobobdy thought about writing it for OS X, just the predominant OS.
Whether we like it or not, there’s just more Windows boxes out there, and alot of applications are written for this platform first.
10,007 now.
The British people hate Mac’s because of the BBC, honestly. To summarise.
When the Acorn company produced a micro, they got the BBC to advertise it for free, by calling it the BBC B. Every school and every computer hobbyist bought one at the time every school and every hobbyist in the states bought apple.
They were all so traumatised, when they had to move to Windows, that they will be the last people globally to admit they were on the wrong platform twice, and finally move to mac.
Just as bad is that it appears to be IE only as well.
i love how they copy the i prefix that apple invented , then use it on some crappy ms shyte
bbc = assholes
I maybe Crabby but I like to think that I look at issues fairly & squarely!
The BBC were the first TV company to adopt the anglepoise imacs & were seen to use them in their TV shows.
The BBC and its outsourced independent production companies use Macs alot for their graphics capability & stability.
When the iplayer concept was announced to the public, you could see the bean counters influence on the announcement as the spokesperson said at the time that the iplayer was being written in the first round for the most common platform because the BBC has to account for any money spent to the public, since the majority of the public own PC’s that is where they were intend to direct their fisrt offering, other platforms would be catered for later.
The argument & petition is based on the fact that the time non IE users were expected to wait for a comptible iplayer is unreasonably too long, given the resources the BBC has, it could easily develop its iplayer for OSX as well, since OSX is opensource, that would cover the majority by probably upto about 80% of the online population.
The iplayer was created to give the BBC freedom from paying a licence fee to a software vendor like M$, Apple or indeed Linux. This gives the BBC & licence fee payer value for money.
So yes fill in the petition in order to let the BBC know that you are disatisfied by their planning & offering, but do not accuse the BBC or the British as not liking all things Apple. The media business have always and will always use Apple Macs, as long as M$ keeps producings VISTA style products!
The bbc are moving all there production software over to apple the problem is the iplayer uses drm and is very complex as it designed so you can download videos but after 30 days they automatically get deleted. They have stated they plan to make it mac compatible but at the moment it uses a windows drm and they are having to change it over to use a different drm (which they should have done from the start) They will be making i for mac in the near future but Unfortunately it will take its time. Also i can tell you that macs are very well liked in the uk and everyone likes them its just a case of re educating people in to the fact that they are not expensive and incompatible . To do that we need more apple stores as 3rd parties have an evan worse record of selling macs in the uk than america.
@Crabapple
Yes, I
… concur. – Why did the last word disappear. Oh beta Safari perhaps.
When I get a minute..I am soo signing up for this.. Its really annoyed me that the BBC have done this..they better improve it soon :/
I think i read somewhere…i cant remember if it was..ah, found it.. ->
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5390000.stm
-_-
Figures..
I lived in Britain for four months, and I was taught that Britons are technically not citizens. They are, in fact, subjects.
Thank You
(Cheers)
MarkHorner: “…When the Acorn company produced a micro, they got the BBC to advertise it for free, by calling it the BBC B.”
Didn’t happen like that. The original BBC B was the result of a government initiative to get computers into schools. It was put out to competition and the Acorn design won. Once the IBM PC arrived it took over and we now have a situation where kids are not taught computing they are taught how to use Microsoft products.
A great many think Gates invented the PC.
Acorn lives on in ARM, (Acorn RISC Machines) the producers of the RISC design which powers a great many products.
I find it sublimely funny that those who call Americans “Yanks” don’t realize that offends a good 30%+ of the country, who don’t consider themselves “Yankees” at all, but “Southerners”. Of course, that would take knowing a little about America before you attack it. (The very people who lambaste American ignorance, know very little about America.)
And the ignorance about the media continues. Let’s just say that Fox news is biased for the sake of argument. Let’s throw in the WSJ, the Washington Times, Drudge, and talk radio. We have these vs. ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC, USA Today, Washington Post, LA Times, New York Times, US News and World Report, Time, Newsweek, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Florida Times-Union, and so forth. So you have all the major non-cable networks, all the newspapers but a few, and all the major glossy mags on the left.
The overwhelming bias of the media is liberal-to-hard left. This hasn’t changed in 40 years.
The BBC have already announced that the Mac version of iPlayer will be available in the Autumn. We’ve already won this battle folks.
However, please sign away if you want. The Linux community are likely still going to be locked out, with the BBC stating that after the Mac they will be concentrating on delivering a solution for mobile phones and cable TV companies.
**** n-n-out burger ****
HIGH cholesterol
coronary failure
OBESITY
Yeah, in-n-out burger really rocks doesn’t it?
So what do the big American televisions channels free distribute their programme content in?
Windows Media with DRM?
Maybe they don’t offer their shows for free download at all? Maybe you have to pay for them, in services like iTunes?
How’s it working for you over in USA?
“Let’s just say that Fox news is biased for the sake of argument.”
Let’s just say that gravity makes objects fall for the sake of aurgument.
Search for British Broadcasting Conspiracy (video – google or torrent).
I was a BBC fan but it was wearing thin, then I noticed a very cleverly crafted subliminal message in a news programme.
@ jarrettnewsdaily
Please disregard if your post was not directed at me.
“Wait… this is incredible, you are obviously British with your “yank” comment”
-That sounds just like an american using the “aim for Bin, hit Saddam guidance system.” Gee, does that mean if I use the term confederate you will think I am from the deep south? When I refered to the Global Peace Index top 20 I meant the ones starting at the top. For the top 20 war mongering countries you read from the bottom.
“you can not properly construct and sentence with in the language?”
-Whatever do you so mean. I do admit that most times I type right into the box without running a spell or grammar check, but I was more than happy to run the sentence I think you are commenting about through a grammar checker and it looks good to me.
I will run the sentence by you again with some additions that might make it clearer.
What do you expect from such an icon [the BBC] of the evil, AENUS (Australia, England ‘N US) [empire]. I used to have respect for that lot [the BBC], but like many others, I have gone places [and these can be physical places, or newsplaces on the net, or historical places like books, for those of us who continue to read).
Perhaps I should have added a few commas. Regardless, I do feel that the post/sentence was clear, and I do hope this made it clearer. Normally I consider pointing out grammar and typos to be indicative of a weak argument, but for this case, since you admit to being a citizen of the terrorist nation known as the USA, it might be worth repeating and repeating and repeating my message it until it becomes the truth to you. After all isn’t that how Iraq suddenly appeared to have weapons of mass destruction? I mean talk about pulling the wool over the eyes of sheep.
“you all seem to get upset when I say that stupidity has run amok.”
Now this is where I don’t know if you are replying to me. This is the first post directed to you (I usually use @ so and so when I am talking to someone specifically). None of my prior posts down this thread was directed specifically at you.
By know means is my structuring even remotely correct, but hell
“I do not ever put myself, as a “yank”, in some sort of “better” class than anyone.”
I won’t disagree with you there but you sure have done a magnificent job putting yourself in a lower class than everyone else. Look at where the US is on the GPI, then look at the lowest country on the scale. You are so busy digging a hole and looking up “poo-pooing” everyone that hasn’t fallen inside. And what a hole, I mean it is going way further than the other end of the earth. Keep digging that way and I am sure you will end up at the place that you mentioned earlier during the sentence. After all, you repeat is so often.
After reading “I do not ever put myself, as a “yank”, in some sort of “better” class than anyone.” then your British comments I had to laugh. Way to go, what a way to treat your ever circling group of allies. I guess you must think that the Brits, really aren’t anyone, not real people, just ignorants, unlike real people, the superior race of the United States (seig Bush).
While I take great offence to the way you address women and mothers, I accept the right for freedom of speech and will make a comment to the topic. After all it looks like you are into belittling everybody (are you figuring out that common yank trait yet?), so go right ahead, keep digging that hole. I figure from your description of women that the men over there are looking for any reason to go anywhere else. It is probably the reason you don’t need a draft…yet.
Thanks for the fun. Please feel free to continue to make a moron out of yourself and demonstrate your lack of geographical prowess.
Now if you will excuse me, I have a few kilometres to go.
Ciao.
“**** n-n-out burger ****……HIGH cholesterol……coronary failure……OBESITY
Yeah, in-n-out burger really rocks doesn’t it?”
_____________________________________
Oh for cryin’ out loud with that food nazi hand wringing B.S.!
I never cease to be stunned at the ignorance of people like you. There is always this assumption with people like you that if a person has a hamburger *at all*, then surely they must be having one at damn near every meal.
I’d bet my last dollar that I’m in better shape than you, and yet, strangely enough, I do have the occasional hamburger. Key word being *occasional*.
Ever hear of the word moderation, you friggin’ idiot.
Whatever kind of support, moral or immoral, I can give the good people of Great Britain, I stand ready to proffer.
To respond to the question of @Vanillacide, It’s not working well. Unfortunately many sites are offering full content that is supposed to work only on Windows and IE. Bear in mind that our commercial broadcasters are not financially or politically beholden to the general public – generally, and can legally get away with a lot more than the BBC, at least on the surface. Evenso, whenever I go to the web site of CBS, ABC, et. al., I write messages of appreciation if their site is enabling to non-Windows users, and severe notes of rebuke if not.
As for our so-called “public broadcasters” – now that’s a different thing. Notably our PBS [Public Broadcasting System], including NPR [Nation Public Radio] – I find these American institutions to be very Windows centric in nature and presentation, especially NPR. To be fair PBS does offer many of their online programs in both QT and WM, but NPR only provides web site feeds in WMA. I use Flip-4-Mac to get around that, but I think it’s nothing less than subversive that NPR won’t provide a truely universal feed format that allows whatever built in player that comes with your OS to be used. And bearing in mind that PBS/NPR are funded by American tax dollars – some of which is obviously subsidiary money for MS.
So in the U.S.of A. We’ve got a ways to go.
Road Warrior said : “Without being specific you might want to look at the first 20 or so peaceful countries, that should give you an idea of where.”
Je vous ai compris !
Yup, I know some people would. Thanks.