Norway's public broadcaster sells out taxpayers to Microsoft
Link: Norway's public broadcaster sells out taxpayers to Microsoft
The Norwegian public broadcaster has broken new ground with a project that has put 20,000 video clips and 12 radio stations online. That’s the good news. Hell, it’s better than good. It is breathtakingly amazing.
The bad news is that they’ve released this media in Microsoft’s DRM format for Windows Media Center.
I quite agree. This is horrible.
Comments
Comment from Asbjørn Ulsberg on 2005-10-29 14:57
Yes it is, but when you think about when this started, which media formats were available then and what it costs to build up a streaming infrastructure as large as this, you really should stop complaining. After all, having it available in any format is better than not having anything available at all.
The only reasonable choice today would be MPEG-4, and you won’t find a single soul inside NRK that would despite this. Everyone would agree. However, the decision and project to create a web TV was not taken today. It was taken many, many years ago, long before MPEG-4 was done and the alternatives that existed then was Quicktime (poor support and not much more open) and Real Video (insanely expensive server licenses). Plus, Windows Media was superior to any existing format in terms of quality.
So at the time the decision was made, Windows Media was the only sane choice to make. It worked, it still works, and it was the best alternative available at the time. And now that the infrastructure is built up and around it, it’s not done in a jiffey to change it all to MPEG-4. It will take just as long time and cost just as much money to build up an infrastructure around another streaming format as it took to do so for WMV.
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