Anger over BBC radio streaming changes

[C E Macfarlane]

See below ...

>     This train of thought doesn't address a key issue: the BBC had full
>     control over development of the PAL broadcast standard, and
>     was able to
>     develop and refine it prior to using it commercially. New
>     Media (i.e.,
>     internetty stuff) is the Wild West again, whoever has the most market
>     inertia becomes the de facto leader and you have multiple concurrent
>     'standards' all of which can be superceded or made obsolete
>     by the Next
>     Big Thing.

Which is EXACTLY why the BBC had no business getting involved in the first
place.  By creating a false sense of de facto standards, simply through they
themselves adopting them, they painted themselves into a corner where the
situation that has arisen  - that they can no longer support what they have
adopted  -  was bound to happen.

[Big, big snips follow because most of your reply missed that fundamental
point ...]

>     ... all these Internet radios which no
>     longer work
>     are not due to the BBC not coding firmware updates for them, that
>     responsibility falls to that of the manufacturer to provide
>     functionality according to the agreed specification for the
>     format.

The problem is that the "agreed specification for the format" today is not
the same "agreed specification for the format" as it was yesterday, because
the BBC are for ever changing it.  No manufacturer on earth, however big,
can possibly hope to keep up with the incessant changes introduced by the
BBC into the comparatively small, by world-wide standards, UK market, and it
is absurdly naive, self-centred, and arrogant of the BBC to expect that
anyone should do so, just because they may wish it so.  The BBC are the
tail, they should not expect to wag the dog.  The onus is on them to spend
our money wisely by adopting well-tested, well-established, stable
technologies and then STICKing with them.  They should not be p*ssing into
the wind making the endless changes that they have, such as the wide
selection from only the last year or so that was outlined in the extract in
my last post.

>     And to clarify: the BBC provides a facility to access its systems to
>     *third party developers*, who then code their apps.

But then within a year or less, they change things so radically that those
developers soon realise that they have merely wasted their time, and
withdraw support.

>     Manufacturers also spec devices with underpowered chips
> 	[...]
>	DVB-T2 was initially developed by BBC R&D and now sees
>     widescale, painfree adoption by industry.

[Snipped as irrelevant to this thread]

>     The BBC works immensely hard to maintain support for the widest range
>     of devices as is feasible - they only just stopped support
>     for the Wii
>     player two weeks ago!

Oh! So that's ANOTHER broken device then ...

>     There's a list of BBC iPlayer Certified devices on the iPlayer site:
>     http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/information/

<sarcasm>Yes, how helpful of you to provide again the link I provided in the
extract in my previous post, for all the world as though you had discovered
it yourself, and was providing it to the rest of us out of the kindness of
your heart!</sarcasm>.

However, the point I made was that very few of those TVs currently supported
go back the even the 6.4 years I calculated as being the lifetime of a TV in
2010, let alone the 8 years that I have read as being the normal lifetime
now, and, even worse, hardly any non-TV devices such as Blu-Ray or DVD
players, even comparatively recent ones, are supported at all.

>     Some manufacturers seemingly do a single version of the 'iPlayer app'
>     for a particular model of TV then never update it even when
>     updates are
>     required.

Understandably so, because iPlayer changes too often for it to be worth
anyone's time trying to track the endlessly shifting goalposts.

>     > 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.
>
>     Whilst I am against it, it's undeniable that electronics
>     companies have
>     pushed for shorter lifespans. My colleague has just this
>     minute told me
>     a story about how his Freeview set top box (with iPlayer!)
>     displayed a
>     message recently warning him that functionality would stop. Lo and
>     behold, it did, on the day it said - because of the move to
>     HLS delivery
>     for iPlayer TV.

Another model to add to the broken-by-the-BBC list then ... the scrap heap
grows almost daily ...

>     It's economics

While economics plays some part, this discussion is about, and the
outstanding feature of it is, the number of devices that have stopped
working not because their hardware has failed, but because of arbitrary
changes made by the BBC.  None of the devices discussed in this thread or
the approximately 1 million estimated devices outlined in the extract quoted
in my previous post stopped working for any other reason than the BBC took a
decision that broke them.

>     Your other points - age of device, speed of access using the 'Smart'
>     interface, etc - reinforce my points.

They reinforce my points, most of your reply is irrelevant.

>	I'm not happy about it,
>     but it's
>     how it is. I pay a monthly Murdoch tax for Sky TV

It's your money to waste in giving it to Murdoch, but don't expect sympathy
here, and, again, it's irrelevant to this thread.

>     The BBC has not broken anything. They *have* changed the way they
>     provide access to their content, moving to a much more efficient and
>     technologically current method of data delivery.

Which is another way of saying that they HAVE broken equipment belonging to
others.  You don't have to go round to someone's house with a sledge-hammer
to break their equipment, just breaking the things it relies on will do the
trick, as the BBC proves regularly.

>     The fact is, manufacturers have all sold us lemons by
>     advertising these
>     whizz-bang devices which actually are crippled out the box
>     with no real
>     prospect of ever being able to update the software yourself
>     due to their
>     locked down, proprietary OSes and platforms. And they'll do
>     it again and
>     again with this year's latest product -- it's classic capitalism!

Again, irrelevant as such, but it does reinforce the point that the BBC
shouldn't be getting involved in something that it cannot support
indefinitely into the future.

>     Nobody is owed anything.

Yes they are.  The general public, who pays for BBC's existence out of a
form of taxation, is owed that it should spend it's money wisely, and not
waste it in the profligate manner that is has on ill-advised IT services
that it can not properly support.

>	Your Smart TV or
>     internet radio may not be working properly any more, but in reality
>     you're already in a very, very small minority. Go complain to the
>     manufacturer, it's their fault they didn't design their product well
>     enough to survive one revolution of a technology lifecycle.

The manufacturer didn't break it, the BBC did.

>     Nobody is entitled to the iPlayer's content, it's not funded
>     (currently...!) by the TV License

I think this news will be a major surprise to everyone here.  AFIAA, the BBC
sources of income are primarily the licence fee, retail sales of content on
DVD and the like, and sales of content to foreign broadcasters through BBC
Worldwide.  As the iPlayer service is clearly not funded specifically by the
latter two, where's the money coming from?
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC

>	it's an amazing
>     value-added extra the
>     BBC is having to fund whilst the TV licence has remained frozen since
>     the last Charter Renewal (in real terms, a significant
>     reduction, even
>     before the top slicing for Local TV funding, having to now fund the
>     World Service and loads of other big projects).

Empty hype that again is not relevant to the complaints being made.

>     A software upgradeable, incredibly
>     powerful, eminently affordable, future-proofed, get_iplayer
>     capable and
>     100% self-supported with a great user community.

The BBC's incessant changes have been breaking get_iplayer as well, in case
you hadn't noticed, or have you forgotten already the unannounced withdrawal
of the open source RSS streams last October, in flagrant contravention of
its obligations under the G8 Charter?
	https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-c
harter-and-technical-annex

>     I'm far more concerned about the minority of the minority who relied
>     upon these now-defunct modes of access due to special access
>     requirements (blind/partially sighted being a big one). The
>     iPlayer web
>     site I think needs some improvement in that area, and I'm not
>     sure about
>     the accessibility of the various smartphone/tablet Radio
>     apps. However
>     the BBC inevitably has blind members of staff who I am sure will have
>     been VERY vocal about problems.

Yes, there at least we can agree, the iPlayer website is appalling  -  not
just for those people, but also for those like myself who are on low
bandwidth broadband connections.

Perhaps the idiots who designed it would like to take the following test:
see if they can use it over dial-up.  If they can't, simplify it until they
can.  When they can, they know it will be simple enough to work over
low-bandwidth broadband, and thereby it will also work better for
disadvantaged people as well.

www.macfh.co.uk/CEMH.html

UK Residents:

If you feel can possibly support it
please sign the following ePetition
before closing time of 30/03/2015 23:59:-

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/71556