BBC iPlayer viewers now need a TV licence to watch to catch up with their favourite shows

[Jonathan Larmour]

On 14/05/16 20:36, Rob Wood wrote:
> Have a look at this
> 
> http://publicsectortenders.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=40256&theme=PublicSectorTenders

Oh dear. The fact the BBC are not doing it in-house, and instead choosing a
tender specifically for the lowest bidder ("most economic tender"), makes it
more likely that there won't even be Linux support, nevermind anything
get_iplayer can inter-operate with.

If it was just a case of extending BBC iD I'm sure that could be done
in-house, so this must be something much larger and more complicated given the
budget of £3-5 million.

I also feel sorry for most "smart" TV owners as their built-in iPlayer apps
tend to get obsoleted after a few years when the manufacturer stops bothering
to provide updates (which for example is true for my TV too, although GiP has
avoided that being a problem). When authentication is required, a lot of
manufacturers are simply not going to bother putting in the effort to update
apps for "old" TVs, i.e. anything not currently in the shops.

If anyone on the list has relevant contacts in the BBC, it would be
interesting to know what they have in mind.

Jifl