Earlier in January I commented on the fact that the BBC’s news site was giving Bill Gates and his company (the name escapes me for the moment) a lot of air-time, and seemed to revere Gates as the saviour of the universe. So I was very interested when the following headline popped up in NewsFox (an RSS reader extension for Firefox).

‘MP accuses BBC chief of illegally championing Microsoft’ - as featured in the site bookmarked by every good IT professional, The Register.

“At last” I thought, “someone has noticed”. However, the story isn’t about the BBC giving so much airtime to Microsoft (oh yeah, that’s the company name I was trying to remember) or worshipping Bill’s every move (or movement) - it’s about the BBC’s iPlayer service. iPlayer allows you to catch up on programs you might have missed… a bit like Sky Plus but cheaper and more reliable.

Liberal Democrat John Pugh MP accuses the BBC (a public body) of “handing a commercial advantage to that company [Microsoft]“. The problem is that the iPlayer is only fully-supported using Internet Explorer on a Windows operating system. Well yes, that does seem a tad Microsoft-centric, doesn’t it?

Pugh continued “What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.”

Visit the iPlayer in Mozilla Firefox and you’ll see the message “Sorry, downloading BBC iPlayer programmes is currently only available in Internet Explorer”. You can actually play the content in Firefox, but you can’t download it. A link takes you to a page which explains the issue further:

“ActiveX, an essential component in making the BBC iPlayer Download Manager communicate with the BBC iPlayer website, only functions in Internet Explorer which is why you must use this browser.”

Well, balls to that - no-one is going to tell me which browser to use. The Register article goes on to discuss the fact that Linux and Mac users don’t have the option of begrudgingly opening Internet Explorer. If they’d used Java, then all three communities would be given a chance to use the technology.

But remember, the BBC are impartial.