built open source
What he meant by that was that the servers all run SLES, mostly, there are a few windows servers in there such as the encoders that record the off air content.
Strangely the BBC outsource the management of Iplayer to Red Bee Media and dont actually run it themselves.
All it is,is some windows boxes recording / capturing off air content from set top box feeds, some linux boxes pushing files around, more linux boxes running the database and an asset management system call Ardome to manage it all.
So yes, the BBC have benefitet quite a lot from there contractors choice to use Linux. But that's it. The gut's of the thing is Ardome which certainly is not open source (but also run's on Linux).
Still, not too sure why they are really bothering to 'protect' their content as it's really just not possible at the moment to stop people recording stuff offair. They would hve to go ahead and encrypt it which they wont do.
Makes little sense to me why they knocked out the XBMC plugin, I'm pretty sure you still had to have a UK IP address to use that plug in anyway, as far as the BBC are concerned your just using a different player.
I expect they didnt know this was going to happen while updating some code. fixed one thing broke another.