Comments on: The BBC on the future of iPlayer on the iPhone

By: Grphelan

Grphelan — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:58:00 +0000

I believe this is disgrace i am a licence payer and expect to have access via my iphone

By: Gerry White

Gerry White — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:32:40 +0000

Actually, I have just found out that it DOES seem to be region locked, odd that – so why isn’t it free ? or at least a smaller price… Especially as the US are getting free shows, we aren’t … There is even a link you can follow on your iphone to go through to this “free programmes” page – but you get charged.

I almost wish I was an american .

Have a nice day!

By: Gerry White

Gerry White — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:12:46 +0000

Free to air – UK only, commerically available through BBC WorldWide, worldwide … Its a cocktail but they have to preserve the relationships etc…

For those with a dark sense of humour checkout the podcast “pets” it is awesome and shows how it could be done …

For it to work for the BBC it would need to be region locked and ‘time’ as well, the complication is that everything probably has it’s own licensing agreement, but as you say you can download most things (illegally) if you know how, or alternatively record directly using something like a PVR and compress… (completely off topic, got one of those new freesat pvr’s with a network port on the back, if I could somehow just get that to ‘copy’ off to something else, that I could then compress to iPhone format, I could catch up on my Neighbours watching!)…

Kangaroo I think is dead in the water, but still at least the BBC have moved away from the evilness of Kontiki malware …

By: Matt Radford

Matt Radford — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:08:16 +0000

That is the thing with DRM isn’t it Mo? We’ve already paid for this content through the licence fee. I understand that the BBC has to enforce the rights associated with broadcast, but surely the Beeb is a big enough beast to alter this relationship?

But if they don’t, does it matter? Yes, it would be great to have official downloads, but things like the iPhone script ipl2iph and various torrent sites mean that most content is already available. However, this does restrict it to the more technical user.

By: Mo

Mo — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:57:18 +0000

I’ve seen ThePhazer repeat the line about Apple paying for bandwidth a couple of times on the BBC blogs’ comment sections, but even when asked directly, hasn’t been able cite a source for it. I remain sceptical.

As you point out, though, the DRM’s all a bit pointless when it’s free to air. I can often find stuff on BitTorrent (and—hypothetically—have it downloaded and transcoded on a modern machine), long before it’s available for the iPhone via iPlayer.