BBC's iPlayer sold us out -- and then failed

My latest Guardian column, "Downloaded BBC programmes should be forever," talks about how the BBC has sold us out with its failed, DRM-based iPlayer (a reliable source puts the number of active iPlayer users at less than ten thousand and a second reliable source says, "That number sounds high") and how it and the Trustees should have had the guts to go to rightsholders and say, "Sorry, we can't accept any deal that doesn't give the public at least as much freedom as they have with their existing VCRs."

You might decide, hell, I'm a paid-up licence-payer, why shouldn't I use iPlayer to store up several months' worth of the kids' favorite cartoons for them to watch in an all-day marathon on New Year's day - while I sleep off New Year's Eve? You might just reach into the guts of your iPlayer and change the line of code that says, "Delete my shows after 28 days" to "Delete my shows after 28,000 years".

If you did you'd be part of a grand old tradition of shed-tinkerers. A few years back I attended a DRM meeting in Edinburgh. We were wrangling over a DRM for DVB, the digital video standard that is used throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. It was nearly Christmas, and one engineer slipped off at the break to buy his son an electronics kit at John Lewis. When he showed it around, all the engineers in the room immediately broke into nostalgic recollections of "building crystal sets with grandad in the shed" when they were growing up. These were the formative experiences that made engineers out of these gents, and yet there they were, busily designing a broadcast system that would prohibit user modification.

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• [Tzctlp]

  MRA: what are you smoking?

  Why should we give away the right to time shift stuff as we see fit?

  Guess what, all BBC programs are already broadcast unencrypted, anybody can record them in a digital format inexpensively and then distribute them via p2p networks.

  That is already happening, it will continue to happen, DRM or not (how difficult it is to put a camera in front of a DMRed TV and hit the record button?)

  So exactly what is won by insisting on lame DRM that will be broken almost as soon as it is put in the hands of license fee payers?

  The BBC has the clout to release lots of content (both old and new) DRM free.

  Somebody is selling to the production companies the DRM snake oil, some naive souls like you are also buying it, it inconveniences the heck out of us, license fee payers while in the meantime people that infringe copyright as a commercial activity laugh all the way to the bank because they can brake idiotic DRM schemes as they see fit.

• [yer_maw]

  The BBC have lost the plot.

  When clicking on a link to youtube entitled “delia derbyshire speaks here” i get presented with the message:

  “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The BBC”

  Now, they say they can open the archive because of the rightsholders but wikipedia confirmed what i already knew that she dids in 2001. So who exactly is tying the bbc’s hands over the archive and why are they going after clips that in effect by grandparents paid for?

  The US might not have a publicly funded TV network, nbut at least what they do build that comes from the taxpayer gets given not just to Americans but the world (Internet, GPS).

  Why are paying for through taxes what is now obviously a commercial enterprise? I used to support the bbc to the hilt, but now i couldnt care less.

• [yer_maw]

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delia_Derbyshire

  http://www.youtube.com/index?&session=NvzXvARh9o4Zh2eHJcaIDCOshi8_rRBqwwl2Nsa86Lv478ugwcb2CJRy2xJlK1vdXtIKQe8j3rmcxQ4_88natp-zUvEwCdZZvwNHanqcMc5_lKppDDvQYyiksnbNSnTDIboC5qQWe_rCXY3nWHDu3_qeMRrvL-kHSh04aQ6LmJ-L3kI2Fm_3YCqKGZpCA1SRYranSYRCIThGlYyvUmH0CSpyODgAlC1-koNsVV2yw4M=

• [labrador]

  define “every american”

• [Cory Doctorow]

  MRA, see the post that follows yours — the presence of DRM is completely irrelevant to P2P trading of BBC programming. The way that BBC programmes find their way onto P2P is via broadcast captures. That’s because the BBC uses powerful transmitters (and satellites) all over Britain to blanket *the entire country* in unencrypted digital copies of every show they air.

  Regarding “the vast minority.” The BBC’s DRM offering cost tens of millions of (my) (your) pounds, and has attracted *fewer than 10,000 users*. Meanwhile millions of British license payers risk fines and worse to watch BBC programmes they download from UK Nova and other P2P sites. The BBC has a duty to secure such rights as are necessary to decriminalize the act of watching the shows we are required by law to pay for. Anything less is worse than irresponsible — it’s fatal. Why pay for a license fee if it doesn’t entitle you to watch the shows in the way you find most convenient.

• [qedbynature]

  Ok the post didn’t work the first time hence the leading open bracket…I was wondering about the source of the 10,000 download figure?

  My point about VHS is that it represents an entirely different distribution model and for that reason is not valid to this debate. I agree that the concept of personal storage is relevant. And yes if a publicly funded broadcaster is putting out digital content, then there is no physical impediment to stop people from dumping that stuff on the net. DRM as a system is not going to stop that.

  What is a broadcaster to do? Lets assume a couple of possible scenarios. They could do nothing. Let users take the stuff and spread it around willy nilly. No costs involved really and some audience gained perhaps, after all ppl still watch stuff on TV. Long term its a looser but short term its financially neutral.

  Hosting stuff on your own website is a cost. Even if the content is notionally free to you as the host, there are overheads. The costs are much smaller than running a broadcast service but those things are already paid for. The returns for commercial operators are less spectacular than what they currently enjoy with their existing models and competition for advertising naturally drives down prices. But the world is going download so you need to do something. DRM is the straw broadcasters are clutching, thinking it might help them to survive.

  For public broadcasters the issue is maintaining your brand more so than balancing the books although obviously free downloads impacts program sales on dvd. So in providing a free service to the public, like iPlayer, it is reasonable to expect them to attach conditions. I don’t think the conditions are fair and reasonable and if our national broadcaster adopted a similar platform I would refuse to use it. After all I can use a pvr program and do whatever I like with the content, pretty much without fear of retribution.

  The argument that all content from a public broadcaster should be hosted by said broadcaster without any conditions attached is appealing but unlikely to be attractive to the supplier. I think it is more important to lobby for a good quality service that respects the broadcasters brand, is platform neutral and provides a reasonable shelf life for stored programs. As I said before, my observation is that iPlayer fails miserably because it isn’t platform neutral and you don’t have a reasonable shelf life (and because it comes from microsoft).

  david

• [Duality]

  I guess you’ll have seen this article too:

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7114694.stm

  I took part in the information gathering excersise to voice my opposition to using DRM, but obviously they took the opposite route. I then complained to the BBC Trust, but they just replied with the usual “DRM was needed…” stock reply.

  Please feel free to complain too:

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust

• [Uberg33k]

  Yer Maw said : “The US might not have a publicly funded TV network”

  Uh, we do. Its called PBS, although it seems as if Congress in the President are slowly trying to shut it down.

• [Halloween Jack]

  You’d think that the Beeb would have learned the error of using a crappy homegrown multimedia system after the Domesday Project fiasco, wouldn’t you?

• [Dave Rattigan]

  The BBC iPlayer fails for tons of reasons, which I wrote about here.

• [qedbynature]

  Cory, twice you have touted the user stat (<10,000). I was wondering what your source for that number is?

  I agree with your objections to iplayer, although I also think the VHS analogy is overly simplistic to the point of being misleading. Legally the BBC does have some obligations with regard to copyright and as a large media organisation they must play by some of those rules, hence DRM. The BBC could choose to be adventurous but its an unlikely expectation of such a conservative organisation. DRM in itself is no more evil than the internet, it is how it employed and what rights exactly are being managed. Giving viewers the right to store and replay material they might otherwise watch for free is an example. Attempting to restrain them from profiting from storing and redistributing material is another example.

  In the days of VHS, copies were crappy, tapes wore out and distribution was haphazard. Not that youtube is brilliant but the distribution is huge. BBC could easily give everything away via the internet except that probably haven’t got such rights for all their content and they likewise would like to see certain minimum standards applied to their material, as well as maintaining the BBC identity.

  There are plenty of options out there, choosing microsoft’s solution just happened to be the worst possible outcome for the paying public.

• [tainted pete]

  But shouldn’t producers of content have control as to its consumption? As I see it, DRM is a matter of respecting those wishes. The fact that it can be broken is irrelevant. Think of it like going to a concert, and not being allowed to film it. You may think it’s completely arbitrary and unfair, but if the artists say no, the fans should comply out of respect. What license payers pay for is the right to watch over the air broadcast, and they pay 131 pounds for this. People capturing it using available technologies is fair use, nothing wrong with that. But putting it up on P2P networks is blatant disrespect of their terms, and pinning it on their “failure to innovate” is weak pretext. Just like the switch to digital broadcasting, the iPlayer was a move to offer viewers an even better viewing experience, but they were under no compulsion to do so, beyond fears of losing their relevancy. I think the fact that BBC is offering the iPlayer is a cautious but encouragable step, and balances their rights to the shows with the interests of the viewing public, and as it matures, will enable more and more people to partake. But for the vast majority, they are comfortable viewing the shows in their original format on the television, and services like Tivo (available in UK?) already add another degree of convenience, so the iPlayer can’t be deemed a failure because only 10,000 users have accessed it so far.

• [yer_maw]

  I always though PBS was donations for some reason.

• [Ralph Giles]

  PBS is funded by grants and donations, but over the last twenty years they’ve been increasingly dependent on large corporate donations. Worse, the management seems to have to control-of-distribution mania as bad as anyone. They certainly don’t behave as if their work belongs to the public. You can’t download it. If you’re lucky, you can buy the popular shows on DVD at fund-raising prices.

  From my experience the BBC is more public focussed than PBS.

  There are smaller orgs that do produce public work, more in the original vein of PBS, like Pacifica Radio.

• [Cory Doctorow]

  Yes, rightsholders may choose to attach unreasonable conditions to their works.

  The BBC should not buy products from those rightsholders.

  If a production company won’t sell the BBC its programmes on terms that are consistent with the BBC’s public service mission (which surely includes not criminalizing BBC viewers for watching TV on their PCs) then the BBC should buy its programmes from someone else. The BBC is commissioning this work: the terms of the condition should include a fair deal for the license payers.

  Regarding the VCR analogy: of course its apt. For decades, license payers have had the right to record, share, and library their programmes. The BBC has no business trading that right away for license payers who choose to watch their shows on the Internet instead of over the air.

  Tainted Pete@14 — why is the 10,000 figure encouraging? The iPlayer is meant to replace the difficult and illegal process of downloading from P2P with a simpler, legal alternative. In order to be anything but a total failure, the iPlayer needs to be attractive enough to lure away a large proportion of P2P users — and thus far, it has captured a total pool of users that’s less than 5% of the P2P downloaders in the UK. They’ve spent millions of pounds on a piece of nonfunctional technology that is empirically less attractive than P2P.

  Regarding DRM as a means of controlling copying, please think about this before you repeat it. DRM has nothing to do with preventing a programme from showing up on P2P or YouTube. People who want to share BBC programmes don’t download them from iPlayer: they record them over the air. As long as the BBC is blanketing the entire country with cleartext digital copies sent over the air at the speed of light, adding DRM to the iPlayer has zero effect on P2P distribution of its programmes.

  None.

  None at all.

  Zero.

  Zilch.

  Nada.

• [MrA]

  Cory, I think you are missing a fair bit about the iPlayer project.

  The iplayer project is a solution which will work on tvs, mobiles and other pc technologies (including flash). It isn’t just a wmv only solution that will never change.

  An interesting read is over at groklaw with the head of FM&T at the beeb. He points out quite clearly that DRM isn’t the future and that he would like to see it removed. He also mentions why you are in the vast minority in regards to content producers. They have no idea what the internet holds.

  http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071118205358171

  I also think you might want to give the VCR comparable a bit of a rest. Today if the BBC released a drm free file out it can be illegally across the world in a matter of seconds via p2p. In the 80s there was no international peer to peer VHS sharing system.

  In my opinion the DRM are the arm bands for content people. They won’t swim fast, or make any real progress in the big internet pool, but its a vital start to get them in the pool. Just as we see the music business paddle around today thanks to DRM, some, such as EMI have shed their armbands and gone DRM free after finding their bearings. Perhaps this will happen to TV.

  Or we could just make the Peer to peer VHS sharing system over post ….

  PS. keep your ranting up, it helps spread the word that there is a wonderful life without DRM