“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.
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.