BBC head of technology Ashley Highfield’s been upsetting m’techy friends this week, apparently suggesting the mighty bbc.co.uk website has a paltry 600-700 users running Linux. This is part of his justification for climbing into bed partnering with Microsoft for the iPlayer.
Well, I’ve startling news - Guardian Unlimited appears to have more than 13,000 Linux users pouring in. Today alone. And I’m writing this at around 4pm, so I’d imagine a few more will roll in before the day’s up.
Either GU’s doing startlingly well among Linux users - and why wouldn’t we be the technically literate person’s news site of choice? - or, as Martin Belam suggests, Ashley hasn’t got down-and-dirty with his stat system in some time. You just can’t get the help these days, I’d guess.
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COMMENTS / 7 COMMENTS
Ian Douglas added these pithy words on Nov 02 07 at 7:02 pmI found the figure pretty unbelievable too. At the Telegraph we find we have just under one per cent of ur traffic from Linux users:
Nick Reynolds (BBC) added these pithy words on Nov 02 07 at 7:15 pmAshley has now blogged about these figures:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbc.....res_1.html
(NB I am the Editor of the above blog.
Neil T. added these pithy words on Nov 02 07 at 8:01 pmPerhaps they were only counting Linux-only browsers like Ephiphany and Konqueror* originally. It’s good to see from the link in the above comment the number is much higher.
* = You can probably compile these for platforms like FreeBSD but they’re primarily used by Linux users.
Ben Hammersley added these pithy words on Nov 02 07 at 11:30 pmThe problem with Ashley’s logic (apart from his, ooh, pisspoor accounting) is that it requires the 95% or so (by his figures) to not only use Windows XP now, but forever more - because no one is ever going to re-encode all that stuff for a more open standard.
That’s a massively foolish longterm strategy. Sure, Windows & PC might well be the dominant platform right now. But who wants to bet their house on it being so in 10 year’s time? 20? Watch a lot of VHS do you? Still able to load your tapes of Jet Set Willy into your Spectrum?
Unless the BBC content is being stored somewhere in a drm-free, lossless, undegrading format, Highfield really just signed his own Public Disservice warrant, and come the next License Fee review, someone may well ask why the iPlayer doesn’t work on the 2012 model iPhone, and decide to slash the budget a bit to teach them a lesson.
Martin Belam added these pithy words on Nov 05 07 at 5:11 pm>> Unless the BBC content is being stored somewhere in a drm-free, lossless, undegrading format
Ben, have you been to Windmill Lane? It is all on huge great shelves being stored in an outdated digital format already
I doubt very much whether the encoded version that is being pumped to the BBC punter via iPlayer is the only digital copy of material that the BBC is retaining, because, for a start, it isn’t broadcast quality.
Tom Loosemore added these pithy words on Nov 06 07 at 6:52 pm>> Unless the BBC content is being stored somewhere in a drm-free, lossless, undegrading format
C’mon Ben, do you think the BBC is *really* foolish enough to do this? The librarians who look after the BBC archive would eat their own young before allowing the only copy to be stored in a profoundly lossy digital format.
I’ll bet that most of the iPlayer budget is spent on rights.
The next biggest component by far will be proper programme-segmented lossless digital storage with ability to reformat to anything. And reengineering your entire playout system to be programme rather than slot centric costs… that’s why the BBC’s RadioPlayer was so cheap - it just chopped up the broadcast stream which is why you don’t get decent joins between programmes.
I bet the actual iPlayer software was a tiny proportion of the overall budget.
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