BBC iPlayer - behaviour we wouldn't tolerate from Microsoft

I love the BBC. But I despise their attitude to users of iPlayer.

Essentially, the approach seems to be that as long as they deliver for the majority of users (the ones with the new equipment), then it's OK to abandon the rest, at minimal notice.

Early in 2014, you could "Listen Again" to radio programmes using the iPlayer app that worked on many variants of Android. Some time around May, they split off the Radio content to a separate iPlayer Radio - which was only available for Android 4 and upwards. The justification "more than 80%" of users were on Android 4 , so it was OK to abandon those pesky people on older systems.

Early in 2014, those with old-fashioned "CRT televisions could access BBC iPlayer (for TV and for Radio) using a Roku box (also badged as Now TV). In November 2014, BBC pulled the Radio content (again using the "small number of users not worth the bother" argument, as exposed on Feedback R4 21/11/14). And at the same time they changed the screen layout so that CRT users can no longer see the top and bottom menus even for the residual TV programme functionality.

Listen Again for Radio is still supposedly available for owners of older Android devices via the BBC iPlayer website. Except that there is about a 5% chance that pressing "Play" will actually result in your hearing the right programme (and that only with Opera browser). Want to ask the BBC to help? Get ready for two weeks (or more) each time you ask a question, which would be bearable if they answered the questions you asked. But with each response referring to a problem you didn't ask about, I ended up taking many weeks to get nowhere.

How would the world react if Microsoft abandoned those with PCs that they decided were a trivial minority - without public notice?

RBS - hopelessly inefficient, or sneakily greedy?

We moved our current account from RBS (after 25 years: having bombarded us with questionnaires every time we went into a branch, when we left, they showed no interest in finding out why we had gone).

A few months later, someone refunded a payment to the now-closed account.

It would be too much to hope that the banking industry had thought of such an occurrence and designed an automatic procedure to route the funds to the new account.

Instead, RBS wrote to us (by post) and asked us to contact them about how we could get hold of the money - a whole £4.80.

When we didn't get around to calling them, they wrote again. So I did call - could I come in to the branch so that they could hand me the £4.80? No, I couldn't. The assistant seemed out of options here, but I gave her the sort code and account number for the new account and insisted that they must have the means to transfer the funds electronically. The assistant wasn't sure this was possible, went away for a few minutes, and then came back to say she thought she had found a way.

A week or so later an envelope arrived with a cheque payable to us jointly.

So, after two letters and 10 minutes of staff time (not counting my wasted time), they did what they could have done in the first place.

Are they hopelessly inefficient, or is this a deliberate policy: relying on intertia to allow them to pocket the funds from the substantial proportion of customers who don't get their act together to jump through the required hoops?