BBC iPlayer Woes and Call To Action

Being a UK Citizen, TV License payer and Ubuntu user, I am incandescent with rage that the BBC is increasingly cosying up to a certain proprietary software vendor from Redmond. The BBC iPlayer is a new tool to facilitate the download and playback of BBC content (TV/Radio programmes) onto a computer legally.

I would love to be able to download programmes I missed and watch them at my leisure. Unfortunately the BBC is discriminating against me because I chose not to use Windows on my computer. The BBC iPlayer will only run on Windows XP. The BBC has (when pushed) talked of a “planned” Mac OSX version, and I understand Linux is also under consideration. This should not be the case, we should not be second class citizens. We pay our license fees to fund the programmes the BBC makes, just the same as Windows users might.

I was therefore pleased to see Alexander Hanffs latest blog post titled iPlayer Letter Writing Campaign where he starts to get a letter writing campaign going in order to raise the profile of this issue.

Personally I am unsure how the various organisations – the BBC Trust, OFCOM, Office of Fair Trading and individuals MPs will react to a templated letter received (hopefully) en masse, but we will soon find out.

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