The BBC and content distribution

The BBC are a great British institution. The UK would be a poorer place without them in my opinion. I do have the odd grievance here and there regarding how often they seem to promote Microsoft. Sometimes the news.bbc.co.uk frontpage can seem like an advertorial for that company. Today for instance the technology page contains the word "Microsoft" 5 times. Not much mention of any of their opposition there.

I don't mind, it's nice that they think about things more important than Russel Brand (although I have always liked Andrew Sachs).

Previously there were issues with how the iPlayer would be mostly a Windows product. The iPlayer has worked to a limited extent on Linux. Today however the BBC have published a little info on work the BBC have undertaken to bring BBC content to the linux desktop. A nice read.

This is quite an important step as it is bringing some content that I have already paid for through the license fee - to me - regardless of the desktop in question.

Looking at PlanetLotus - the BBC keeps cropping up in news stories. Does that relate to the importance of the BBC or the demographic? I will be interesting to find out which.

The BBC have an article discussing how there is an issue with older Word documents becoming harder to read as older versions of Windows and Office are made obsolete.
Here's the accompanying movie.



Lovely - so the solution appears to be that the BBC demonstrate how cool Vista looks as opposed to older versions and then proceeds to demonstrate the need to use MS Virtual PC in conjunction with an ever increasing selection of Virtual PC images just to read a text document. Have they heard of Heath Robinson?

Of course - if you really want to be able to read some important documents after a decade or two - you could choose ODF, OpenOffice, StarOffice, Lotus Notes 8, Neo Office, etc....who mentioned license fee?