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RobCla

Listed below are comments made by RobCla between Wednesday, 17th September 2008 and Wednesday, 1st April 2009.

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Why no Wire? 4:10pm on 01 Apr 2009 'The Phazer' seems to have missed my point.

We don't know what price HBO were asking the BBC to be able to include The Wire on iPlayer. We don't know whether this was negotiated at all, or if HBO's terms were just accepted straight off the bat.

If we refer to a show that wrapped last year a 'seven year old show' - in which case surely HBO can't still be asking a premium price for it?

And yes, why buy the broadcast rights to anything when DVD box sets exist? Perhaps the BBC have some crazy idea that people might want to be introduced to new programmes without having to spend considerable sums of money?

Anyway, I hope the BBC are at least going to have the sense to repeat the show in a weekly slot after the initial run.
Why no Wire? 8:26pm on 31 Mar 2009 If rights are the problem, get better lawyers. If Apple can persuade the music industry to abandon DRM on iTunes, surely the BBC can use some of its guaranteed income of public money to get a fair deal for its viewers.

I'd be more ready to applaud the iPlayer if the BBC hadn't spent years digging in its heels, sided with the content providers and offered up limp excuses for every consumer-hostile limitation: why access was limited to specific operating systems and browsers, why there was no browser-based client, why the quality was lower than broadcast, and why streaming and downloaded programmes are only available for a few days.

The Wire is deserving as any TV show can be to be described as 'important'. Its serial nature (and the gimmicky scheduling decision) makes it all the more vital that its available on catch-up services. If the BBC aren't able to reach an agreement in this case I have to wonder how seriously they take rights at all.
BBC TV on the web redefined 00:08am on 17 Sep 2008 Impressive work, although not something I'd ever need to use personally until the BBC fixes its DRM.

I don't really have any use for increasingly cute implementations of the 'channels' metaphor.

I don't know how much of the design was the result of focus-testing. However it seems more like an elaborate attempt at trying to prove the relevance of broadcast delivery to an audience that is increasingly migrating online and has stopped watching.

On a more constructive note, the links to the channel pages are pretty deeply buried on the BBC.co.uk front page, although I assume this will change soon. Also, having to scroll to the bottom of a channel page to get to the channels menu is fiddly and unintuitive.

Having a top-level section for channel idents is a bit frivolous. Programme trailers (for example) would be more useful.

Also! It's a bit disconcerting that there isn't a central textual thread (a 'web log' if you will) tracking pertinent updates in a manageable way.

The page looks like an Interactive TV frontend (wide, cluttered, dozens of clashing styles, nothing to guide the eye to anything), rather than a readable website.

Seriously, I use news.bbc.co.uk every day - why can't the rest of the BBC's web presence take some cues from this instead of assaulting the visitor with a jumble of multicoloured boxes?

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