Sam's World Of No

Google and the like have lulled us into a false sense of security about the word ‘Beta’. It’s hardly worth listing examples so I’ll just remind you of one: Gmail is still in beta, three and a half years later. Everyone I know uses gmail. It’s like saying that television is still in beta.

But of course, ‘beta’ is very much part of Web 2.0 marketing and, on the other hand, pragmatism. Release early, learn quickly, and realise that users are - generally - the best judge of products. They’re certainly the best barometer of their success.

Unfortunately, when it comes to BBC iPlayer, beta means what it meant 10 years ago - ‘not finished. At all’. And to call it a public beta is ludicrous. You need support for an operating system other than XP? Go fish. How about you prefer not to use IE to access stuff? Go fish. How about you don’t really feel the love for Windows Media Player? Go fish. Or maybe you think that the days of broadcasting rights, where the money is in the advertising/product placement etc, rather than the content of the show, are over and that DRM is little more than a throwback to the now-antiquated idea that the money is in the copyright?

Yeh. Fishing time for you. ‘Public beta’ my foot.

I presume, although I cannot say as I have no information either way, that my biggest annoyance with iPlayer also stems from this ridiculous corporate obsession with DRM. This is when programmes, some weeks, are not available for no apparent reason. Pretty much all I want to watch is Later with Jools, Have I Got News For you, and Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Everything else is on at a convenient time so I watch them live. These three programmes, however, I had got into the habit of missing (even if I was around and near to a TV) on the basis that I could download them on iPlayer, as I had been doing for several weeks.

Therein lies the rub. These programmes and - judging from the message boards, others - are not always available. With no explanation, stuff just isn’t there. First I thought that maybe the search facility was broken, so I trawled through the annoying navigation to confirm that these shows were, indeed, not there.

No wonder iPlayer doesn’t allow you (as far as I can tell) to subscribe to a programme and have it download automatically every week. This would instantly break when, with no explanation, programmes disappeared.

So please, dear BBC, ditch your obsession with DRM and please tell us why stuff is disappearing. This will mean that you can keep people happy and move onto non-Microsoft products. Oh and dear reader, take a look at a different view of this subject. Tell me that programmes dissapearing isn’t a consequence of DRM and its underlying reasoning, and I’ll blame something else - next in line on the blame train is the stupid iPlayer interface, and in particular the context menu. Seriously guys, that menu belongs on a serial generator. I half expect to have homemade metal thrashing out of my speakers every time I open it.

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