may 29th
Oh, my goodness. I think I drank a bit too much wine last night. Teachers dinner and all that. My downfall came when we went to the Irish bar in the town and I drank two pints of ‘Guinness’, which fair curdled in my stomach. Bleeurrgh. Feeling ace today, oh yes.
Nothing going on, so I’m going to talk a little bit about how Arsenal.com have changed from normal service providers to Sky Sports. With this change comes the news that the Plus service will no longer be available to Macintosh users. So that means that we can’t avail of any of the clips, interviews, highlights etc, but most importantly it means we can’t get the live commentary on match day.
According to Arsenal.com this is because “…the Microsoft Digital Rights Management (DRM) licence system used is Version 7 and Mac OS does not support this.”
I did email them about three days ago to ask them to clarify this, but they haven’t had the manners to reply. Now, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here, but my understanding of this piece of jargon is as follows.
When you use Windows to use the Arsenal Plus service, Media Player has some kind of digital key which means you can only use Arsenal plus on one computer, the content is essentially licensed to you and locked to your PC. With Macintosh they are unable to do that, so it’s not a situation that the content is not compatible with Mac, it’s that they cannot lock it to your computer. This digital key is the problem, not providing the content itself.
I’m waiting to hear from them, but if this is the case it’s pretty shoddy. I’ve had to subscribe to Arsenal+ for the last couple of seasons. I’m really not that interested in the interviews, or the goal highlights or the other stuff like how Igors feels about playing for Beveren, but I really need the commentary on match day. For the club to ignore anyone who doesn’t have a Windows PC is a great load of cunty bollocks, in my opinion, especially when they’re only ignoring us because they can’t implement some kind of dodgy licensing system.
If, like me, you have a Mac and you want to be able to listen to match day commentary next season, please send an email to [email protected] and tell them how you feel. I’ll be contacting the club and I’ll let you know what they say.
Today I have to go to Barcelona to meet a very small friend. I call him Frodo.
