Rich Fiscus
16 Sep 2007 7:34
In a move sure to bring more accusations from open source advocates, the BBC's iPlayer development team has added a former executive from Microsoft's digital media division.
iPlayer is the name of the BBC's media player designed to be used for downloading their shows for later viewing. When it was released to a Limited number of viewers earlier this year it was surrounded by contreversy, in part due to the lack of support for non-MS operating systems like Linux.
In addition to the hiring of Jon Billings last week, the project also has Microsoft ties in the the form of BBC future media and technology group head Erik Huggers. At one time Huggers was Microsoft's digital media director.
Other users were upset because of the BBC's poor explanation that the July release would only be available to a limited number of people, and that the player's pre-release status meant it still had more than a few bugs.
Source: The Register