Verily I say unto thee, that dapunka spake thusly:
> Some posters there said "Forget iPlayer, use MythTV" and "I can use my
> Virgin TV Drive to record programmes off Freeview with no problem".
> And I did a bit of googling, and found USB TV sticks for £30 that
> enable you to watch and record Freeview programmes on your PC. So who
> cares about iPlayer and its DRM hell?
This is the crux of the argument, and reveals the hypocrisy of what the
BBC is claiming (supposedly at the behest of their content providers).
BBC programming is *already* available, in a digital (broadcast) format,
free to air, and can be recorded as such, in a digital format, without
DRM infection.
So what the Hell is the justification for crippling the Web version of
that content?
BBC content is already broadcast around the world, so it can't be
because the content providers require the opportunity to exploit
overseas revenue, and given the largely UK-centric nature of most of
that programming, it's unlikely to have a very valuable overseas
marketability anyway. I'm not suggesting that *nobody* would be
interested, I just mean that the market for such material is
comparatively smaller, and hardly worth exploiting.
And think about this: If said content was is such high demand overseas,
then what is there to prevent UK viewers from simply recording that
content free-to-air then retransmitting it (e.g. via BitTorrent)
overseas? The phrase "shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted"
comes to mind. It's a complete waste of time, and more importantly, UK
license fee payers' money.
Then there's the quality issue. Web content, in whatever format, can not
be considered premium content IMHO. They're just cruddy compressed files
that I wouldn't let anywhere near my A/V gear. It's like YouTube ...
fine to watch on a PC to pass a few minutes of boredom, but hardly
collectable.
The way these "content providers" are bitching and wailing, you'd think
they were exposing military secrets on the Web; rather than cruddy,
highly compressed, poor quality, low resolution, barely entertaining
repeats of something that was already broadcast free-to-air.
Then after making this ludicrous demand for DRM that serves no rational
purpose, they then decide that they must use a technology that excludes
everyone except Microsoft customers, despite the fact that equally
viable, but cross-platform, technology is already available elsewhere
(RealNetworks).
I don't get it.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "Proprietary licenses, the crack cocaine of software finance."
| - Matt Asay, CNET
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Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
01:02:48 up 12 days, 23:57, 3 users, load average: 0.39, 0.30, 0.40
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