Friday, February 16 2007 @ 11:57 PM EST Contributed by: sde
The BBC has a long and glorious past as a technological innovator. Throughout the history of broadcasting, it has often been the first to develop and promote new technologies. Sadly, it seems now to be teetering on the brink of making technical choices that will not only damage its own reputation as a world-class institution, but which will also have serious knock-on consequences for free software.
As the worlds of computing and media began increasingly to overlap, it was inevitable that the BBC would need to make decisions about which formats and licensing schemes it would adopt for digital versions of its content that were delivered over the Internet.
To begin with, it offered RealMedia streams for its Audio on Demand service, which meant that GNU/Linux users were on an equal footing with those running Windows. Even more promising was the BBC's participation in the Creative Archive project. This was set up in April 2005 by the BBC and several other major UK institutions to make archive video and audio material available under the Creative Archive licence, which was based on the Creative Commons licences. As well as offering liberal licensing terms, the Creative Archive also chose to release the material in a variety of formats - Quicktime, Windows Media and MPEG1 - to promote the widest possible use.
