It was good to see that the BBC Trust are getting tough with the BBC over their iPlayer project. The BBC have said that they may not do a download service for anything other than PC’s, offering only a streaming service for other platforms. The BBC Trust have come back saying that iPlayer was only approved on condition that it was platform neutral – when asked if offering just video streaming across all platforms would fulfil the BBC Trust’s terms of approval for iPlayer, a spokesman for the regulators said: “We required platform neutrality across downloads, streaming and cable [set-top boxes].” Having said that, since the current iPlayer that the BBC Trust approved is heavily based on Windows Media Player the prospects of that ever being platform neutral always seemed minimal to me!
[...] at that – ruling out licence payers using other platforms such as the Mac. Indeed I’ve blogged previously about the pressure that the BBC is under by the BBC Trust to get such a cross-platform [...]