Confused BBC tech chief: Only 600 Linux users visit our website
Everything you need to know about Virtualization at The Register's eSymposium — The BBC's technology boss Ashley Highfield has provoked consternation in the UK's open source community by claiming that only a few hundred …
Context & Ripple Effects
The claim lands four months after the iPlayer launch row reached the BBC Trust, where open sourcers formally complained that the catch-up service shipped Windows-only despite the BBC's confirmed continued reliance on DRM for downloads. Ashley Highfield's figure of roughly 600 monthly Linux visitors is being read as a statistical justification for that exclusivity — if the non-Windows audience is negligible, the argument goes, porting iPlayer is not worth the cost.
The timing is awkward: it follows an October in which mainstream coverage declared Linux's next leap and Ubuntu shipped its most polished desktop release yet, so the 'year of the Linux desktop' narrative collides directly with a public broadcaster measuring its audience at three figures. The syndicated pickup by WebProNews, framed as 'BBC denies secret iPlayer deal with Microsoft', shows the story travelling as a trust question about platform deals, not just a traffic statistic.
First-order effects
- Highfield's number instantly becomes the contested fact in the iPlayer debate: open source advocates can attack the measurement methodology rather than argue abstractly for porting costs, putting the BBC under fresh pressure to publish how it counts platforms.
- The BBC Trust now has a concrete data point to weigh against licence-fee-payer complaints that a publicly funded service excludes non-Windows users.
Second-order effects
- If the 600 figure is challenged successfully, the cost-benefit case for a Windows-only iPlayer weakens, forcing the BBC to either commission cross-platform development or defend DRM as the real constraint rather than audience size.
- Microsoft benefits by default as long as the statistic stands unchallenged — every month of exclusivity entrenches Windows Media-based DRM as the de facto standard for UK catch-up TV.
Third-order effects
- The episode crystallises a structural tension for public broadcasters: nominal openness of web content versus usable openness of services, where DRM and single-platform delivery quietly decide who can watch.
- If platform-exclusivity arguments based on small measured audiences become accepted practice among broadcasters, minority operating systems lose access to flagship public media services, further skewing the desktop market they were beginning to penetrate.
The trend: Publicly funded broadcasters are discovering that DRM-locked, single-platform on-demand services turn audience statistics into political ammunition, with the BBC's iPlayer as the test case.