RE: Nonsense

"The statement makes no sense! No other BBC broadcasts use DRM. My home recordings don't "self destruct"."

No, they don't. But the right to record something for timeshifting is a real fudge that doesn't fit the rest of UK copyright law very well at all. I wouldn't ever expect to see anything like that happen again. Ultimately rights holders feel the amount of piracy done by people taping things is well understood, accounted for and taken into account in the amount they charge the BBC. But people will keep non DRMed computer files a lot longer, and download more of them, so something needs to be done technically to prevent people keeping them for longer than seven days - or at least (and this is the key point I think) make keeping them from iPlayer et al more difficult than just taping them off the telly in the first place, so the amount of piracy thus remains at that level that's already accounted for.

It's certainly true that on the above logic the rights holders are unwilling to sign the contracts allowing the BBC to distribute programmes via iPlayer unless they have some form of reasonably secure DRM file timeout. And thus it's "this or nothing", given no one else apart from Microsoft makes one for the BBC to buy.

"In the time that's been available, there has been time to produce a multi-platform player from scratch."

The BBC wouldn't be allowed to. Developing a multiplatform DRM software solution would unquestionably fail a Public Value Test by Ofcom and the BBC Trust (and it would - it would only be of benefit to a tiny amount of the population and it would heavily damage the international commercial market for DRM software, and thus it would fail), and probably fall fowl of EU state subsidy law too. They have to buy one in. And the only one they can buy in is Microsofts. Anger might be better placed at Apple/Real et al for failing to build one themselves.