The BBC, slammed by the British public and government alike for handing its iPlayer program to Microsoft, has made clear that the full application will remain Windows-only. Only a stripped-down YouTube-alike version is planned for other platforms. From the Guardian:
If it's not entirely obvious, Mac- and Linux-folk, this is the Beeb telling you that you are simply too few to matter.
The BBC iPlayer program's descent into absurdity has a certain inexorable rhythm to it. First, the corporation makes a big party of asking the public how it should make available its enormous archive of publicly-funded shows. Then it mysteriously changes its mind and opts for a DRM-infested, Microsoft-only system. Then Microsoft men mysteriously start finding their way into BBC jobs involved with the iPlayer program. And now, like the punchline to a long, expensive, taxpayer-funded joke, the BBC has decided not to make a non-Windows iPLayer at all.
Mainstream media like The Guardian—"BBC iPlayer Mac-friendly by 2008,"
it reports—seem to have been suckered into publishing BBC press releases as news stories. I find it hard to believe that anyone these days could think embedded flash applets and, for the love of God, Facebook widgets, are in any way the same thing as a bona-fide native application that maintains a downloaded library of content. But there you go, and here we are.
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