Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC News partnership with Microsoft

[Jon Grant]

Hi!

Simon Morris wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 11:45 +0100, Gareth Bowker wrote:
>> Hi Simon,
>>
>>> The BBC has announced today a partnership with Microsoft to deliver "Web
>>> 2.0" (Whatever that means) content services to the public.
>> Do you have a link to the announcement?
> 
> Yes, Sorry. I meant to include that in the original post
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5390000.stm

Oh dear, Bill Gates' chum Ashley Highfield is colluding on this one
again. Highfield already sold out the licence fee payers to Microsoft
with his DRM iMP player. (Incidentally the BBC is ramping up for the roll
out of Highfield's DRM iMP at present.) I wrote about this on my blog a
last year:
http://jguk.org/2005/blog_2005_06_02_downloadable_bbc_audio_content.html

[...]
>> OK. I can't make a start on this before 6pm. Do you have any time before
>> then?
> 
> Possibly. I just hope this isn't a done deal.

Most likely it is, Highfield shared the stage with Gates [1] [2] [3].
Regulatory
approval will be more of a rubber-stamp considering Mark Thompson
attended the "fact finding mission" /to Seattle/ -- ironic they didn't
visit Silicon valley on their trip!? There are no independent tech people
on the board to represent our side of the debate.

Some related info, at present BBC Technology division run by Siemens is
split approx 50/50 between unixy and windows groups, with the unix group
doing real streaming and websites, and windows group doing forums and
WMP streams. So the switch to Microsoft seems gradual and accepted
within the BBC, under the guise of their refocusing, modernisation and
reform etc.

Let's hope we can get them to take a better direction forward!

Kind regards
Jon

Reference
[1]: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060321/3061/

[2]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4828336.stm

[3]:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news_web/video/9012da68003d168/bb/09012da68003d1c6_16x9_bb.ram>
(Video only viewable with RealNetworks RealPlayer codecs)