It seems the BBC is moving away from what it was set up to provide – services for everyone, free of commercial interests and political bias – with the organization set release its iPlayer to a Windows-only audience.

The decision prompted critics to put up an e-petition on the Downing Street website as the current iPlayer will not work on PCs running on Vista, Linux, or Mac but only on Windows XP.

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the BBC from making its iPlayer on-demand television service available to Windows users only, and instruct the corporation to provide its service for other operating systems also”, the petition stated.

At the time of writing, more than 10,000 people had signed the petition.

iPlayer is an on-demand television service of the BBC that was launched last month and will be available for public download this week. The service allows viewers to download TV shows for seven days after they are aired and store them for 30 days.

The BBC’s Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology, said at the launch of the service: “I am fundamentally committed to universality, to getting the BBC iPlayer to everyone in the UK who pays their license fee. This is the approach we have always taken but we have always started with the platform that reaches the most number of people and then rolled it out from there.”

The BBC, however, clarified that its new iPlayer which is currently slated to be released is only a public beta version. The version for Macs will be available by the autumn, while other platform versions will follow.

The Open Source Consortium (OSC) has already made its complaints to the BBC Trust, which oversees the BBC.

Earlier, BBC Trust approved the iPlayer service on a condition that the platform neutrality is achieved at the earliest possible time and the service be reviewed every six months.

Talks between the OSC and BBC Trust are expected to take place. Should the talks fail to satisfy the OSC, the consortium is expected to elevate its complaint to the European Commission.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 11:48 am under Technology.

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