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We’ve been holding back with Apple news since the vomit-inducing coverage of the iPhone launch that many publications gave (Engadget and Gizmodo appearing top of the list, in that order).
Here’s one worth noting though, Apple has announced that they’ve now sold over THREE BILLION tracks.
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Today the BBC has opened a list for up to 500,000 UK TV license payers to sign up for access to iPlayer – if they have an appropriate computers setup.
Over the next six months, those who sign up will be let on to the Beta trial to use iPlayer. (Those of us who have been on the 15,000 people iPlayer trial will have noticed that there was a new release of the software last night.)
Let’s be clear, we do think that the iPlayer is an advance for the BBC, and the functions and control it gives views are welcome.
Where it really lets itself down is that it is dependant on a very thin slice of technology needs.
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If you listen to our interview with Mark Taylor, you’ll have heard a very interesting point that was raise in the OSC discussion with the BBC Trust.
The BBC Trust are totally fine with BBC content going out to over the Internet _without_ content protection – ie DRM.
This would be in-line with the BBC’s view of distributing their TV content over satellite in the UK, where in 2003 they made Sky beam out the BBC TV channels without encryption – much to Sky’s displeasure – saving themselves £40m – £85m in the process.
This is of course still an avenue open to the BBC. We wonder how much of the License payers money would be saved on DRM if they were to take this route?
We got the exclusive opportunity to interview the members of the Open Source Consortium (OSC) that has met with the BBC Trust, directly after they had been discussing the BBC iPlayer with them for the first time.
From there we scooped the iPlayer On Linux a must story, but there was a lot more detail in the interview than we could get into the piece.
Various highlights were
If you, like many others, are unhappy about the iPlayer only being available on a particular version of Windows, get yourself over to the iPlayer petition. Every vote counts, so join the current 12,000+ that have said they don’t like it.
Sorry about the popping in part of the recording (like the beginning), but I left the mic windshield at the office – blast!)
[audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/osc-post-bbc-trust-iplayer-meeting.mp3]
Ofcom has published a proposal that some VoIP services should allow users to call 999 to connect to emergency services as soon as by early 2008.
They’ve carried out research that has revealed that as many as 78% of those with VoIP thought that they could, or did not know if they could.
Ofcom’s concern is that VoIP users cannot connect to emergency services when they really need it – ie. in an emergency.
If people have to locate a landline or mobile phone, costing them a delay of seconds or minutes in getting through to emergency services, it could prove critical.
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We’re all aware that the BBC is planning to make their iPlayer compatible with Macs … and we even know that now that the BBC Trust has committed to make it work with Linux (shock horror).
Well if you’re like most of the tech population, you might be scratching your heads, wondering how the bleep they’re going to be doing it – given that the whole system relies on Microsoft technology to deliver any of it, and in particular the DRM. Especially as, to date Microsoft has steadfastly refused to deliver a media player for the Mac that has DRM built in.
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We’ve been in touch with the BBC Trust today, to follow up the statement that was mentioned in our piece about the BBC Trust position on the iPlayer and Linux playback. Here it is in full with our observations at the end.
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The Open Source Consortium (OSC), the organisation leading the charge to make the BBC iPlayer open to all platforms, not just Microsoft Windows, met with the BBC Trust yesterday to find that there was a lot of agreement in their ambitions.
Speaking to Mark Taylor of the OSC straight after the BBC Trust meeting, I learnt that The Trust had declared that they “share the vision” of the OSC. Not surprisingly the OSC representatives felt very buoyant but the very positive meeting.
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Ben Lavender, the person who came up with the idea behind the BBC iPlayer, originally called iMP, is leaving the BBC this afternoon.
We’d been told about the news a while back, but have held off until the information was public. Looking at his Linkedin profile, we see that it now shows his new role, as Group Digital & Product Director at LoveFilm.
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Trebles all round at Twofour Digital as they announce the winning of the three year contract to produce and host the webcasts of all proceedings from the House of Commons and House of Lords, made available through the Parliament Web site.
The webcasts include live coverage of all UK parliamentary proceedings and Select, Public Bill and General Committees as well as selected archive footage.
We imagine this is in no small way due to Phil Haggar now being within the Twofour fold, them having bought his Makeni Webcasting production company back in April this year.
What’s the relevance? We first met the very competent Mr Haggar when he ran Westminster Digital way back in 1999 – whose business backbone was … Webcasting Parliament.
It appears that Twofour’s ambitions don’t stop there, besides growing through acquisitions of companies, it’s also working for the European Parliament to design and deliver a ground breaking webTV channel broadcasting scheduled content in 20+ languages.