Mostly Harmless

I can’t help but laugh at the fact that the BBC had to implement Microsoft DRM technology into their iPlayer application. The reasoning behind this…

“The rights holders - the people that make the programmes, from Ricky Gervais to the independent producers that account for up to a third of our programming - simply wouldn’t have given us the rights to their programmes unless we could demonstrate very robust digital rights management.”

…is all well and good. But wait! Doesn’t the BBC already distribute programming in an unencrypted fashion through which it can be readily recorded and redistributed without restriction? (I’ll give you a clue, it’s on the roof…)

So this player developed presumably with license payer’s money is a total irrelevance to me as I don’t run a Microsoft operating system for more than a small % of time anymore. One of the major reasons I gave up the operating system is because it forces you to do things the way the company thinks you should do them, rather than the way that makes most logical sense. Can I get a refund on the bandwidth costs for this as well as anymore reality TV muck you choose to produce? No? Didn’t think so.

A decent digital TV card or box for the PC now costs about £30 - £50, recordings from which can be readily burnt to DVD. Funnily enough the ability for people to record television programming so that they can keep it historically hasn’t cause the market to collapse - the VCR was not the end of media as we know it and neither was the DVD or hard disk drive recorder. The sales of pre-recorded DVD format releases should have proved this beyond all doubt.

I didn’t take Ricky Gervais for a delusional paranoid - but there we go, stranger than fiction.

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