There was (perhaps still is?) a long-running battle as the BBC added extra protections around the iOS stream and users built various scripts to exploit this and download episodes. For example, I think that the BBC site uses the installed certificates to verify that the player is really an iPhone.
Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically.
> Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically.
I agree about the difficult this poses. Given the kind of wide range of Android devices, simple content protection might not really be possible. Verifying a device as Android doesn't really tell you much about the kind of hardware that it is running on, so for business types this kind of uncertainty makes them unwilling to try alternatives.
Big Content will not really care about Android until it is easy enough and/or profitable enough to service. Given that Android doesn't have an easy way to implement DRM schemes right now, it is unlikely that many companies will be rushing forward to work on Android until some easier solutions are available.
The interesting thing is that the BBC were happy to get iPlayer working on the iPhone originally. That didn't have any meaningful DRM, at least nothing that couldn't be done to a similar degree on Android.
I suspect that this is because iPhones are "cool" and someone high up just demanded that it should happen.
Weren't iPhones better locked down at that time? I'm thinking it was a calculated risk. Much like start-ups will do risky things when they first launch. iPlayer was effectively an internal start-up too.
Targeting iPhone is like supporting a cable company's set top box, so highly prized because it's straightforward; whereas targeting Android is like supporting a myriad of smart TVs.
Targeting iPhone is like supporting a cable company's set top box, so highly prized because it's straightforward; whereas targeting Android is like supporting a myriad of smart TVs.
That's certainly true for supportability. It's easy to test and confirm that it works on the 2 or 3 iphone models, less so for all the Android devices. That's potentially bad from a PR point of view.
For drm-esque security it makes little difference though. The 'attack' in this case was from people running a script and pretending to be an iPhone, not from people running unauthorised software on iPhones themselves.
The BBC (website) has a long, sad history of picking crappy media formats. They used Real Audio and Video long after that was clearly a bad idea, then when they had to switch away they picked Flash.
