The licence fee charged by the BBC in the UK certainly has it’s share of people for and against it. Personally I am very favourable towards it, I think the output of the BBC is very creative and of a high quality. If anyone is reading this wants more infomation about how it works then go check out the TV Licensing website at www.tvlicensing.co.uk/. In a nutshell if you own a TV in the UK then you are required to pay £131.50 per year (or just £44.00 if you have a black & white TV!!!). As I said I have no problem with the licence fee, it provides a public service with aims very different from commercial channels. In particular as a parent I find the children’s channel ‘CBeebies’ to be a safehaven for my daughter, especially in contrast to the incessant advertisements on other channels!
Another aspect that I think is great about the BBC is the increasing range of alternative ways of listening or viewing content. The bbc.co.uk website has for sometime had various news clips etc available to watch and more recently has added on-demand viewing of shows, sometimes before they actually appear on air. Podcasting has also been embraced by the BBC with a quite a few Radio shows now available to download every week. The Digital Planet and Mark Kermode Film Review podcasts are both a regular part of my podcast consumption.
However, all is not well with the future of BBC’s on-demand service.
Introducing BBC ‘iPlayer’…
Ok, it’s not a new joint product by the BBC and Apple, it’s the name of the BBC’s proposed new on-demand service. There is now an open consultation into these new on-demand services being provided by the BBC Trust [Link edited to point to consultation conclusions as open consultation is now closed]. The ‘Public Value Test’ as it’s known is intended to allow the public to give feedback on the BBC Trust’s initial conclusions for the on-demand service.
The main components of this proposed service are:
- Seven-day TV catch-up over the internet
- Seven-day TV catch-up over cable
- Simulcast TV over the internet (streaming of live television networks)
- Non-digital rights management (DRM) audio downloads over the internet (podcasting of selected radio programmes)
With the exception of the second item they are all to be delivered over the internet, and they sound great in principle. There’s even talk about the possibilities of ‘series stacking’ where entire series will be available to view online. However, the last item in the list hints at where the vision starts to fall apart, DRM.
Doh Rae Me?
Nope, nothing to do with musical scales, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Basically DRM is intended to control the usage of content such as audio and video files, in the case of BBC iPlayer it is intended to control the duration the files held on people’s computers.
Now, I don’t have an issue with the use of DRM in itself, but when you read into the details of the iPlayer proposal you find that the BBC are proposing using Microsoft’s DRM system to control the audio and video. Basically this means the content will only be playable on computers running the Windows operating system, so if you’re like me and use an Apple computer running Mac OSX it means that we (along with anyone using Linux OS) will be unable to watch any of this content due to the fact that Windows Media Player is now discontinued on OSX (and has never existed for those on Linux!) and there is no support for Windows DRM available.
So, what can be done?
Well, remember the BBC Trust’s proposals are undergoing the Public Value Test process, so you have an opportunity to give feedback on their proposals. So, if you care about this even just a little bit then I’d encourage you to check out the questionnaire on the BBC Trust website, pay particular attention to question #5:
"How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?"
You can find the questionnaire and more information on the BBC Trust website by following this link [Link edited to point to consultation conclusions as open consultation is now closed].
Some related links / articles
- Bumbling BBC gives away millions to Microsoft with exclusive 2 year viewer lock-in!
- Is the BBC a monolith?
~Rick
I tried the link under "You can find the questionnaire and more information on the BBC Trust website by following this link."
Which was ment to link to , but it didn't, it went to a (BBC 404 Page not found) page. Is it not opening for me because I do not use Microsoft media player?
Yes thats right I am one of quite a few million who use Mac products and a payer of the BBC license fee.
As for the license fee it is something that we pay for in this country and therefore the service should be available to all of us that do. But as for letting other people in other countries download BBC content for free then I feel that the BBC should limit their usage buy charging them and either freezing the license fee for us in the UK or producing better programming or better still both.
interesting post.
i'd never heard that before.
barney
i'm not quite understanding what all
this is supposed to be about?
must be me or something…
nice to see someone highlighting this issue – i run a linux box, and believe it goes against the term "public service broadcasting" to force us to own third party commercial software in order to view "our" content (if we pay the licence fee we are all shareholders). it's like saying we can only watch the bbc on a sony tv. itis bad enough that the bbc already uses realmedia when there are open-source formats out there. so alastair, what can be done? write to the bbc, or as you say, hand over a chunk of money to bill gates when we have already paid to view the content.
don't have a license; don't watch tv on our 'playstation reserved' tv; do watch programs via bbc website – am i breaking the law?
down with microsoft drm where it's use excludes 'mac geeks'…….. and other apple users!
what can be done? dump the operating system that can't watch the system. and get a lovely new vista machine like mine.
i don't agree that the licence fee is value for money as i watch less than 2 hours of bbc television per week. why don't they enter a pay-per-view agreement like sky then if you want the channels then you pay if not you don't have to pay the tax, sorry fee. i would however be able to watch the program online without a licence – go figure.