New Zealand's national broadcaster (TVNZ) discriminating against non-Windows users?
Apparently, for the Olympics this overriding mandate was forgotten. Personally, I am not following the Olympics at all, but one of my readers alerted me to this (thank you knoydart). He wanted to watch some of the Olympics video streams from TVNZ with his Ubuntu installation, but couldn't do so. After asking TVNZ about this, he received the following reply:
"TVNZ was required to use Windows Media Player due to compatibility issues around Microsoft Silverlight V 1.0, and digital rights management issues with live streamed content in Flash - as our contract with the IOC requires us to restrict access to video content to a New Zealand-resident audience only."No, TVNZ, you are doing it wrong! And you are confusing different issues. See, nobody mandates to you that you have to use Silverlight. Thus, YOUR choice of using Silverlight, rather than the much more established Flash - or (gasp!) an open video format like OGG - is at fault here. Don't choose technology that is vendor proprietary, and which restricts the availability of the content only to those who have the funds to pay for a Microsoft license. We paid you already with our taxes and by watching your ads, it's not your business to push one vendor's technology on people and thus making it impossible for the broadest number of people to see your video streams.
Furthermore, TVNZ is getting all mixed up with different technical issues here: Geographicly restricting video streams has been done plenty of times before, even before Silverlight and even with ordinary Flash streaming. You use IP address ranges, available data bases, etc. The geographic restriction has nothing to do with the chosen streaming technology.
And what's that about DRM (which also should have nothing to do with the geographic restriction)? As I said before, DRM is not only limiting a user's freedom, it is also a strike against free software. Thus, Microsoft and other proprietary OS vendors have a vested interest in promoting its use with the media providers: The more media is offered with DRM, the more are consumers forced to use non-free software and operating systems in order to be able to consume this media.
Thus, any media company that pushes out content that is DRM infested is in effect making a statement against free software, whether they are aware of it or not, and are merely supporting the sales and marketing efforts of proprietary software vendors.
How about ... you know ... growing a spine? The IOC's rediculous restrictions on who can watch something, and where and when shouldn't be tolerated anyway. They would quickly stop those restrictions if the broadcasters of the world wouldn't cave in to their demands.
Most importantly, a tax-payer funded broadcaster has NO business at all pushing proprietary vendor's technologies. It should at all times choose open and free standards as default.
Tag(s):
olympics
beijing
tvnz
new zealand
drm
microsoft
free software
open standards
video streaming
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Comment by callumb, on 21-Aug-2008 11:15 , user id: 33179)
I quite often read your posts, but lately they all seem to be about the same thing. Your utter hatred of anything DRM.
Why do you hate DRM so much?
It is NOT your content - you do NOT own it, so why do you think you can dictate what should be done with it? DRM is a fact of life, the sooner you realise this, the better... for all of us.
Have a nice day :)
Comment by Mark, on 21-Aug-2008 11:16 , user id: )
Yea well its not easy/free for Mac users either - we've gotta buy some 2-bit plugin for Quicktime just to watch it too...
Bastards.
TVNZ needs a good shake-up. I assume you've seen/heard about all the people that got locked outta viewing on their tv unless they had freeview for one of the events.
Comment by Chippo, on 21-Aug-2008 11:22 , user id: 9260)
I asked Tom Cotter, TVNZ general manager content and delivery, this question at the recent Digital Future forum in Auckland. He mentioned that flash just didn't have the capacity for the amount of content they were distributing at the moment.
Media Player streams are encoded once by the server, then streamed out to you. I don't think you can do this with flash, or silverlight for that matter.
I commend TVNZ for providing this content, both for the olympics and TVNZ on demand. It's above and beyond what anyone else in New Zealand is doing and they're making the best out of our slowly growing infrastructure.
FYI, My media center runs OS X and I've been watching the streams fine. Yes, the plugin costs money. But the trial works perfectly and won't expire for a couple of weeks - plenty of time to enjoy the olympics.
Comment by sleemanj, on 21-Aug-2008 14:05 , user id: 27497)
Ok, colour me confused, but I have a TVNZ Olympics stream playing in Epiphany on Ubuntu right now (I wasn't watching it but was sure I had done in the past so gave it another gp and yes it all works just fine).
Amy I missing something?
The link here: http://tvnz.co.nz/content/olympics_live_video
Comment by knoydart, on 21-Aug-2008 14:44 , user id: 34497)
Maybe its just my lack of knowledge that made it fail (hangs head in shame 
). Prob leave it to the professionals next time... I'd like to say I tried with the media player plug ins however sadly didnt succed. Guessing I need to find a different media player to watch the clips.
Comment by sleemanj, on 21-Aug-2008 15:13 , user id: 27497)
@foobar: I don't know how I did it, it just does, perhaps I installed something long ago.
It comes up with the "totem-plugin-viewer 2.22.1 Browser Plugin using GStreamer 0.10.18" which is probably from the "totem-mozilla" package, maybe some of the other totem-* packages
I also have mplayer and vlc installed, perhaps something from there is helping
Comment by sleemanj, on 21-Aug-2008 15:33 , user id: 27497)
I just had a look through synaptic for potential things I have installed that might be helping:
totem-plugins
totem-mozilla
Maybe the codec(s) are found in one of these packages which I also have installed:
libavcodec1d
ubuntu-restricted-extras
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
audacious-plugins-extra
mplayer
transcode
vlc
avidemux
I also have the following third party repository setup as an apt source:
http://repository.akirad.net/ akirad-hardy main
from which I have cinelerra installed, perhaps it's helping
Comment by manhinli, on 21-Aug-2008 16:29 , user id: 31860)
I don't think they use DRM - WMP even says it's unprotected.
But of course, you can just get the MMS (or ASX) links and put it into whatever media player you like.
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Comment by misfit, on 21-Aug-2008 10:51 , user id: )
Don't hate me but I use Windows (XP). However, I can't watch streaming video at TV3's website. Whenever I click the "Watch video" link I get a message saying that it's only available to NZ residents. Ummmm, I *am* an NZ resident and connect through Actrix. Maybe there's something wrong with TV3's IP tables?