Open BBC: No Huggs for Real Player

Former Microsoftie turned BBC big cheese Erik Huggers has decided the future is not only bright, it's open. Today Huggers has said that Auntie will be dropping proprietary standards: "I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions." How kind of him. Behind the scenes the BBC has been making these versions of media for some time (the iPhone version of iPlayer has used H.264 all along), but it's worth it... if only to dump the incredibly irritating Real Player.