http://techdirt.com/articles/20100329/1010368763.shtml

Sounds about right...

If I can view BBC news for free on the internet, why shouldn't I be allowed to view it for free on my iPhone? (If i had one.)
I pay my bloody license fee, so I want access to their news how and when I want.

BooHoo. If the Guardian and such have iPhone apps then the BBC should carry on regardless of what they say.
Is anyone really going to pay to access newspapers websites?

Can the iPhone not browse the BBC news (or other) website without a specific app?

Yes, it can. But the idea is that the whole UX could be improved with a dedicated app, that allowed users access the information the BBC provides in a much more convenient way. You could, for example, store a number of articles for reading offline, for example (that was just off the top of my head, so rather poor).

So the iPhone browser is falling short here, not the BBC. Surely it would be better to have one browser that does the job rather than an app for each website you decide to get news from?

The iPhone browser is fine. What is needed is the BBC web site (and any other, BTW) to provide content more suited to a mobile phone screen. Using properly formatted HTML and CSS, this can be done fairly easily. This may be quite a costly exercise for the BBC as they would need to cover all pages, and it may just be cheaper to develop an app which plugs into the content database directly.

AFAIK The BBC sites automatically check to see what you are using and deliver the correctly formatted content to you . they use various CSS swapped in when appropriate. It gets around having to do each page.

Then they are not detecting the iPhone version of Safari. It identifies itself as such to the server, so they just haven’t written the CSS then.

If HTML is the best delivery method for the data you're supplying. The New York Times iPhone app does more than what could be done in any browser on any platform. In the same way I use wikipanion to browse wikipedia on miPod, apps are generally more tailored at using one specific data set in a way that html doesn't allow. What I'm trying to say is that whilst a html+web-browser combo is a very good general-purpose means to access all sorts of data that all sorts of organisations publish, an app will allow you to use one specific set of data in a way that is best-suited to that data.

I would have thought that if you can view the BBC pages view safari on the iPhone or iPad then it is not really an issue. It might be harder to find what you want but this might be a non issue. That said if the BBC want to provide this content to effectively high value customers why not?