aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, July 27, 2007
BBC puts shows online. With restrictions.
The BBC launched a new on-demand service called iPlayer on Friday that lets people download from the Internet shows like “EastEnders” and “Planet Earth” that they may have missed on the telly that week. The shows represent as much as 70 percent of the BBC programming, about 400 hours of programs, according to Reuters.
Sounds great, huh?
Unfortunately, the free service is only available to people in Britain and on computers running Microsoft XP. [...]
Once viewed, the downloaded shows are automatically deleted after 30 days and technology prevents people from making copies of them.
Who to blame? PeterB of DefectiveByDesign used to work for BBC Network Radio. Says he:
Let’s start from the top. Queen Elizabeth was directed to bestow Bill Gates with an honorary knighthood in 2002, for “services to global enterprise”. This knighthood came after Microsoft had been convicted of monopolistic practices in the US. And just before the European Commission investigated Microsoft’s bundling of Windows Media Player into Windows ending with €497 million ($666 million) for its breaches of EU competition law.
Bill was nominated for this honor by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who, on June 27, 2007, became the the new Prime Minister of Britain. You may not know this, but Gordon is tight with Bill, and the Labour Party is tight with Microsoft. And after 10 years of one party rule, the UK is a politically tied up Microsoft shop. Everything else that follows in relation to the iPlayer can be connected to this corrupting political association.
Peter’s packing his bags and heading back to the UK to be there on Tuesday, August 14 when DefectiveByDesign will be heading to the BBC Television Studios in London to protest “the incompetent management that has allowed this to happen.”
He wants us to be sure to ask anyone we know in the UK to join the protest. You can sign up to help plan the campaign here.
