Ho ho ho... The BBC strike again
So this is a good one... The BBC's head of technology, Ashley Highfield, in making excuses for the Windows XP/Vista only iPlayer, claims that only 400-600 people access the BBC website using Linux. Really. How odd. Now either (a) Mr Highfield doesn't know how to read a log file, and/or (b) needs a better logfile analyser or (c) is talking rubbish. Because despite other issues, the BBC remains a major source of quality news, and at least one major Linux distribution has Firefox pre-configured with the BBC "live bookmarks" in the bookmarks toolbar; ergo it seems far more likely that tens of thousands of BBC visitors are visiting the site.
A little supporting evidence for my counter-claim comes from this petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/linuxbbc
which at time of writing had 459 signatures...
---- Update ----
The nice man from the BBC has now conceded there might be 30,000 Linux users visiting the website. Still seems a low estimate to me, but nevermind. If it is a correct figure then if they are all licence fee payers that's the best part of £3,000,000 in licence fees. So, either supply a standards compliant iPlayer or give us the money back...
Posted at 02:54PM Nov 02, 2007 by Chris Puttick in Technology | Comments[1]
Posted by Chris Puttick on November 03, 2007 at 10:15 AM GMT #