TechCrunch UK alerted me to this first, the Guardian followed up with a piece later on (edited after comment from Mike Butcher, see comments). Finally, the heavyweights of the UK Broadcast industry are teaming up to offer a combined on-demand television service.
A little while ago I wrote among other things the excerpt below in a follow up entry to my college dissertation:
The biggest problem in my opinion facing the large scale adoption of both download and streaming television services is that everyone is offering their own solutions, instead of flicking the TV channel to see something different you end up closing down and then starting up another proprietary application or browsing to another webpage to view content from that one provider which seems from a user perspective a most unworkable and undesirable solution.
Nice to see they got the message one way or another, just a pity so much money had to be spent on the BBC iPlayer before this happened (I know ITV and C4 spent money to built thier respective offerings as well but they are commercial entities not tax beneficiearies and so entitled to do what they want without having to justifiy it to the country).
The piece by the Guardian makes mention of third party content but also interestingly delivering content ultimatly to the TV, it would be interesting to see if there are plans to perhaps integrate this with FreeSat which is due to launch next year. There is of course hope on the TechCrunch post that they’ll employ a more user friendly (read: non-existant) DRM system which might also be a bit more open to other platforms and browsers but I rather doubt this will happen. Both the BBC iPlayer and the 4od service from C4 use the Kontiki system which is very restrictive and very in love with Windows XP, add to this the fact that the chap who’s managing all of this is Lesley MacKenzie of Sky fame who also use the Kontiki system and that seems like the easiest solution to employ from their point of view and their developers.
Whats frustrating in many ways is why they can’t go with Joost or similar as a front end for this. Looking at the Whats On page on the Joost website there’s a lot of known channels popping up here and there and the mecanism is already built. The cynic in me thinks the reason for not going with something like this is slight desperation by the Broadcasters to hang onto whatever control they can, plus of course not loosing too much of the money two of them have previously invested in the aforementioned Kontiki based system!
Update: Jeremy Stone (BBC) posted on the BBC Backstage mailing list about an article Ashley Highfield has just written which explains why they’re not going with Joost or similar as a distribution method. I’m not convinced by his argument, I can see a certain point of view with advertising revenue (will this be there for UK users?), however I believe this will actually only confuse users more having two offerings which at face value provide very similar services.
Anyway, no point in speculating too much at this point, we’ll have to wait a bit for the facts to come out.
Tags: IPTV
Actually the original piece was with TechCrunch. We beat everybody by an hour.
Cheers Mike, my bad, should have checked the time stamps!