Italian public television switches to DRM crap

Non italians readers may not know that many of us  have an terrible opinion of the nation they live in. Yes, we think even worse about our nation than what foreigners do. Many of us use to complain saying “We’re in Italy” when something is not right (which means more or less: here things work upside-down, we’re all just a bunch retards).

Ok ok, to the point

Italy’s public television service (RAI)  just launched a new portal, full of videos. Can you guess which technology did they choose to empower the whole ? Yes, Silverlight (how did you know ?).

This sounds like a terrible choice for a public service payed with citizen’s money (and nothwithstanding the fact is publicy sustained it’s also ridden with ads). Even worse the new site has to be reported to stop working if you disable the drm option of the Silverlight plugin.

Sad memories

This brings to the memory the bitter image of italia.it, launched by italian politicians as the central and official resource for tourists, which turned out to be an useless stinky piece of crap that we payed 45 millions of euros (yeah, you read that right). Needless to say, it lasted online more or less five months and got offline right after. See in the picture below what used people to think about that website:

“merda” is best translated as “shit” [image credits]

What the ultimate goal of that miserable failure seemed to people was letting some (government’s) friend get the work and make big money out of it. Of course, the work has just got sub-contracted to other companies (IBM, ITS, Tiscover).

Oh, back to the point (again)

Concluding, always well aware to the spirit of times, we managed to put online nothing but a sad mess of drm-filled silverlight clips.

Needless to say they don’t provide any alternative format.And while Moonlight is available to some Linux users, is not available to everyone. Not to PPC mac users. Nor is an open format (like ogg). Nor is at least an estabilished standard (like Flash).

Why all this pain ? Probably for the same exact reasons that lead to the planning and launch (and failure) of italia.it: friends.

Wherever you are, don’t let your representatives do the same with your money.  As you may have guessed, we can’t do much about it, we’re in Italy.

Hey, don’t think think I’m angry

I’m not, I’m used. They do much worse. Like ? Like trying to make people pay the tv tax for computers (without tv tuner) as well, as they are theoretically adaptable to see television (by buying a tv tuner). Fun, uh ?

Forgot, digg !

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