Anger over BBC radio streaming changes

[C E Macfarlane]

>     > The BBC should never have adopted any proprietary format in
>     the first place.
>
>     Back when they first started streaming stuff online, the only
>     available
>     products were proprietary. Remember how they started off with Real
>     Audio? As soon as non-proprietary formats became available, they tried
>     them out. When I was working at KW sometime around 2000 or
>     so, we had an
>     extensive Ogg Vorbis trial, for example, but it never got
>     much traction.
>     I don't remember why it didn't take off - presumably lack of client
>     support, because despite me being a bit of a geek I found the
>     RA streams
>     far easier to use.

When you're in the position of a major official government organisation as
well as a public corporation set up by Royal Charter, such as is the BBC, if
you can't do something properly with the tools around at the time, you don't
do it at all.  You don't waste millions or billions of public money which
pays for your very existence on something you can't support indefinitely
into the future.  You don't encourage manufacturers to make, and the public,
whose 'taxes' are paying your wages, to buy, kit in the belief that, if it's
supported by the BBC, it must be safe to spend money on it, and then pull
the plug on that kit not long after.

>     > The BBC is paid for out of our taxes
>
>     No it isn't.

The licence fee is a form of taxation.

>     >                                      and it should be using
>     open source
>     > formats whose future support is more certain
>
>     but that's what people are complaining about!

No, they're complaining at the almost incessant changes in these services
that render kit obsolete before it has reached its natural end-of-life.

>     > However, once having made the mistake of adopting such a
>     standard, they have
>     > a duty to adopt for a reasonable minimum length of time.
>     Analogue VHF
>     > television broadcasting lasted I believe about 20 years before being
>     > switched off ...
>
>     They did. Real Audio and Windows Stuff *were* adopted for a more than
>     reasonable length of time. Well over a decade IIRC.

Hardly compares with the potential lifetime of the kit itself, let alone how
long the BBC's core broadcasting services have to last.  Suppose Radio 1 had
been switched off a decade after its inception?

>     > And it is not as if this is an isolated example.  I have calculated
>     > elsewhere that AT LEAST a million items of equipment have
>     either been
>     > disastrously castrated or even made entirely useless by
>     similar actions by
>     > the BBC over approximately the last year alone.
>
>     That's only meaningful if you include data on how old those
>     devices were
>     and how many were still in use at the time Auntie "castrated" them.

Quote from a previous letter of mine to the BBC:

"""
As far as the more complicated matter of numbers of users affected is
concerned, I hazard a ball-park assessment based on the most recent, while
yet sufficiently complete, figures that I can find, from here ...

http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/media-centre/news/report-reveals-latest-u
k-tv-watching-trends-NEWS35

... from which we have that in 2010 9.5m TVs were sold, there were 2.4 TVs
per licensed household, and over 25m licences issued.  Therefore there were
approximately 25m x 2.4 = 60m licensed TVs in use, of which 9.5mpa were
being replaced, suggesting an average lifespan of about 60m / 9.5mpa = 6.3
years, or a churn rate of approximately 16%/year.  Note that this is being
generous, because 2010 was mid-DSO and it might reasonably be expected that
then there were more people renewing their sets than now, and consequently
that now there is a higher proportion of old sets in use than in 2010.
Indeed, I have read that the average TV lasts about 8 years, but no figures
were given in support, so I will use 6.3 years as calculated above.

>From more recent figures of 10%, it seems reasonable to assume that around
5% of those new purchases may have been internet connected or 'Smart' TVs,
or roughly 0.5m for 2010, and for the sake of argument I shall assume the
same for 2009.

Referring now to the BBC's own lists of iPlayer certified TVs ...
	http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/information
... I shall be generous and accept your own figure of 1,200 compatible
models for including and post 2010, even though I have reasonable grounds
for suspicion that your lists refer to pre-October 2014, and therefore that
since then the number of models supported has consequently reduced, perhaps
by a great deal, perhaps even catastrophically.  For example:

1)	Post 44 in the aforementioned thread above "Prospero 2nd November 2014 -
19:04":

"Well, I just bought a Samsung smart TV and a Linux-based satellite
receiver, both of which have iPlayer plug-ins, neither of which now work."

2)	Post 45 above "Tom Halbert 2nd November 2014 - 19:44":

"You have broken my mother's TV and my hard disk receiver box. Both were
bought because they "had iplayer". They should last 20 years not 20 months."

3)	Post 50 "Bob 3rd November 2014 - 8:42":

"1) I pay a TV licence.
2) In 2011 I purchased a Sony 46HX920 TV and BDP-S780 blue-ray player. They
were not cheap, total cost was near to 1800 pounds. Neither of them will
work any more with Iplayer, due to BBC decision to switch of the "big"
iplayer. That is not my fault, it is BBC fault, yet both of these devices
were advertised and sold as iplayer capable.
3) I purchased a Minix X8H media player (android device). It has worked fine
with iplayer until a few days ago. Now (since BBC latest changes), it
reports "no network connection", even though it is correctly connected to
the internet and other services (such as ITV player, filmon) work fine."

Note "I just bought", "20 months", "2011".

However I have counted the models pre 2010, and I can only find 12 that are
supported, so that's a maximum rate of 12/1200 = 1% supported of models
which pre-date 2010, and 99% not over 6.3 - (2010 - 2014 inclusive) = more
than a year of sales, or about 0.64 million TVs that the BBC have
arbitrarily decided to break, representing about 1% of the license payers
whose 'taxes' pay for the BBC's very existence.

But, actually, we can deduce the from the circumstantial evidence available,
some of which was quoted above, that this is a MINIMUM and that the real
figures are very likely to be considerably higher than that.  And I haven't
even included Network Media Players, such as my own which has not worked
with iPlayer since too long ago to remember, Blu-Ray and DVD Players, nor
that many users found the iPlayer site so slow and unusable that simply they
preferred to use the RSS feeds in an RSS viewer to search for programmes,
and then to download or watch programmes via official BBC-provided iPlayer
functionality, nor the estimated 40,000 users of BigScreen which the BBC
broke around August ...
	http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/New-BBC-iPlayer-for-Connected-TVs
-update
... nor the loss of iPlayer Radio on Smart TVs in May which also upset a
great number of people ...
	http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/New-BBC-iPlayer-for-TVs-out-of-pr
eview
... nor the fact that iPlayer no longer allows one to download radio
programmes, and so on, and so on.

This year's track record alone is sufficient demonstration that, ever since
the inception of iPlayer, the BBC have broken their customer's equipment
time and time again by changing the way iPlayer works, often, as at the end
of October, in an arbitrary fashion with little or no advance warning and
little or no overlap of functionality to allow people time to obtain
firmware updates for their equipment, which latter supposes that
manufacturers in the limited UK market might even feel obliged to try to
support the endlessly moving iPlayer goalposts by providing such updates,
whereas, understandably enough, they might not.
"""