BBC iPlayer and Apple iPhone: FIGHT!

Davey Winder
Monday, 13 October 2008 15:09

IT Industry - Market

Rose states that "getting protected media to work on portable media players has always been a challenge" and that "until recently, Apple was the only company that provided a seamless store-to-device user experience."

The BBC has worked with Microsoft and the Windows Media DRM technology, to produce a 'sideloading' concept whereby you download content to your PC and then onto your mobile device for playback.

It says that it is also working on an over the air proposition for the Nokia N96 that will enable content to be downloaded directly from the BBC iPlayer site to the phone, with no PC middle-man to handle the DRM stuff.

This is made possible, Rose says, because the BBC has been able to build an Open Mobile Alliance DRM service which the N96 supports. So why can it not do something similar for the iPhone? Surely it is not beyond the ken of the BBC techies to develop an iPhone iPlayer application using their own DRM system?

Heck, others have done it already. Is there not the iPlayer Downloader which downloads content streams from iPlayer meant for the iPhone and bypasses the DRM issue altogether, allowing it to then be viewed wherever and whenever? But instead, Auntie continues to play the blame game with Apple firmly at the steel toe-capped end of the BBC boot.

Of course, the irony is that iPlayer content can as just mentioned already be streamed to the iPhone via a WiFi broadband connection. It just cannot be legally downloaded for viewing on the iPhone without that WiFi broadband connection being available.

So why not do a deal with iTunes which I am sure would happily distribute BBC programming? There is no reason why this content could not remain both free and time-restricted, keeping everyone happy.