Rich Fiscus
2 Feb 2008 2:35
The BBC has finally gotten their iPlayer to work with software not developed byMicrosoft. It's not a competitor's operating system, however, but rather the Firefox web browser. So while the BBC's video download service, intended to act as a sort of free DVR for people paying the licence fee that keeps the network on the air, no longer requires Internet Explorer, it does still need Windows for its DRM.
While this may not sound like an important enough milestone to get too worked up over, based on statements from Anthony Rose, who took over responsibility for the iPlayer's development in September, "It's good because it's the first real non-Microsoft thing we've been able to do with the download iPlayer."
He also indicates that the long wait for Firefox support isn't actually the BBC's fault. According to Rose the problem was the client provided by Verisign, and the BBC was forced to write their own client from scratch to make it work.
While there's no indication that BBC has made any real progress toward a truly platform agnostic solution that will work on Apple and Linux operating systems, it may not really matter that much to the public. The Flash based Streaming alternative has actually proven more popular with the general public, reportedly by a factor of 8:1.