Stupid, Lazy or Mean?

Examples of bad Customer Service or downright dishonesty. Some from organisations who have ignored my attempts to get them to fix things. Others from organisations that make it nigh on impossible to complain at all. And the odd tilt at Government

Saturday, November 22, 2014

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?


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