"Basically in each and every article you've written about the iPlayer so far (maybe with the exception of this one) you've asked for the download version to actually be pulled. WTF would be the point in doing that?"

Not in each and evey one to be fair. It's an opinion I arrived at relatively recently, after covering the story for several months.

The point of it would be to save the fees paid to Microsoft in WMV licensing and Verisign in Kontiki licensing, and the public money that'll be wasted by maintaining and updating the client for a small portion of the people who'll use and pay for iPlayer.

iPlayer is meant to complement the TV service, not different implementations of itself, and the Flash version does that just fine - and is much more popular.

Bias is a much abused word. Having an opinion is not synonymous with bias. I believe I arrived at my opinion objectively and based on the evidence. You arrived at a different opinion, but that's fine.

Regards multicast, here it is from the horse's mouth: http://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/