Mark Kent wrote:
> So far, they've not really owned up to where it went. The best the
> managed to come up with for the Parliamentary committee was "More
> than £20 million", well, £200 million is more than £20 millions...
The Telegraph puts it at around £100 Million (up to December 2007):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/12/20/dlbbc120.xml
The Times reckons it's more like £130 Million:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article1995890.ece?token=null&offset=0
Ashley Highfield tried to whitewash that figure with excuses, in a
Groklaw interview:
[quote]
Q: Let's talk about costs for a moment. Now, there have been some
enormous costs discussed, costs that are going to come. Now, the
impression I have -- I could certainly be wrong -- is that well beyond
the iPlayer client software project, there are other costs which could
include rights, or software licenses, or consulting, or development.
What is the picture on costs?
Ashley Highfield: Well, I think that there may be a bit of confusion out
there, that the headline costs projected for the next five years for
iPlayer, the costs that were in the public realm, of £130 million
[pounds], are for all of the BBC's digitization and storage of its
digital content, of the rights clearance, of the distribution, well
beyond just the implementation of iPlayer or the use of all of that
content by iPlayer.
[quote]
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20071118205358171
Right ... so a handful of servers transcoding and serving media files
(which they already had ... remember the Beeb has been showing Real
Media and Windows Media video on its site for /years/), combined with
the supposed cost of "rights clearance" (for content they are already
licensed to broadcast), and a chunk of software from the Vole called
"iPlayer" ... cost £130 Million. And we're supposed to believe that the
proportion of the £130 Million that was wasted on the actual iPlayer
software was "marginal".
Yeah, OK.
The MSBBC has (so far) lied about interoperable downloads (Mark Thomson:
"You can do that now")[1]; lied about the overall cost of the iPlayer
(Zarin Patel: "in the region of £20 Million")[1]; lied about bringing
downloads to Linux in 2008 (Eric Huggers: "Full support for Mac and
Linux platforms is expected to be introduced at some point in 2008")[2];
and lied about the total number of Linux visitors on the iPlayer site
(Ashley Highfield: "around 400 to 600 are Linux users")[3].
Now it seems they are lying about the distribution of costs for the
iPlayer service too.
[1]<http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5sfQk9NXlns>
[2]<http://www.connected-home-news.com/content/view/585/47/>
[3]<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/02/highfield_bbc_linux_website_users_bafflement/>
> I think we can be fairly sure that something less than honest has
> been afoot.
The whole farce stinks to high heaven of corruption, but then given the
preponderance of ex-Softies infesting the MSBBC, is that really surprising?
--
K.
http://slated.org
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