BBC ‘to face EU action’
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007The BBC’s decision to offer its ‘iPlayer’ download service only to customers of Microsoft is facing referral to the EU’s competition authorities. For those of you outside the UK, I’ll give a bit of background:
The BBC is funded by the public through a tax known as the ‘TV licence’. Anyone who owns a TV is obliged to be a paying customer of the BBC, even if they have no interest in is content. Failure to pay results in criminal sanctions. As well as having to provide the service which members of the public have paid for (some under protest), the BBC is required by its charter to be impartial.
The company intends to use Microsoft DRM with its ‘iPlayer’ service, which results in the exclusion of all BBC customers who are not also customers of Microsoft (as the latter has not provided DRM players for other operating systems). This is despite the existing use of RealMedia for all of the BBC’s streaming video services - a DRM system which is available on most computer operating systems. This shows that there is no need to endorse one operating system vendor in order to ‘protect’ content.
EU law prohibits companies from concluding market-restricting agreements which harm competition or consumers. The Open Source Consortium (who I’ve never heard of, despite using a lot of OSS) plans to make a complaint to the EU authorities on this basis. Although I’m actually a Windows user myself, I think it is unacceptable for a publicly-funded broadcaster such as the BBC to refuse to provide its services to customers of companies other than Microsoft. What is worse is that the government has allowed this to go as far as the EU - this proposal should have been stomped on at the UK level.