91Èȱ¬ iPlayer, Connected TVs and Project Canvas
Post categories: YouView
| 17:30 UK time, Monday, 1 February 2010
The 91Èȱ¬ Trust's consultation of Project Canvas closes tomorrow so it's your last chance to contribute to the debate and have your views considered by the Trust when they decide on Canvas's future. It also seemed a good time for me to reiterate why we believe the opportunities that Canvas presents to content providers and software developers are great.
For the TV industry, the New Year begins with the (CES) in Las Vegas where new products are showcased on their way to our homes. This year, one of the highlights was the ubiquity of internet connected televisions and television devices like the set top boxes. Internet is arriving onto the television. I expect that a large share of televisions and set top boxes sold in the second half of this year will be ready for Internet connection.
Television manufacturers are at the forefront of this innovation. This year, they are introducing a variety of models enabled for content and applications via the Internet. Some of the applications were interesting where you could see consumers using them regularly, while others needed work to make them suitable for the large screen. At the 91Èȱ¬, we recognise this innovation as an opportunity and we have started using it by making the 91Èȱ¬ iPlayer application available on Samsung TV, the Freesat platform and hopefully on other devices soon. We are using our standard products to deliver these.
While these devices innovate and evolve the television experience, what the market wants is an open platform. Instead of working with different technologies and gatekeepers, the content industry wants the existing Internet model on the television. We want to be able to publish directly to the consumers. This ensures that anyone with an idea can participate, enabling a flood of creativity. This is what the 91Èȱ¬ - along with its partners ITV, C4, Five, BT & Talk Talk - aims to address in UK with Project Canvas, granted a provisional approval by the 91Èȱ¬ Trust just before Christmas.
If approved by the 91Èȱ¬ Trust, Canvas will provide the opportunity for software developers and content publishers to create applications to sit upon this platform according to published technical specifications: there will be no editorial gatekeepers, and without the need to do a commercial deal with the platform, we expect this to be an open platform of real scale. Further, the platform's innovative user experience and mainstream brand will, we believe, truly bring together broadband and broadcast content in a seamless way.
The innovation taking place in the market today is truly exciting and we expect next-generation, Canvas-compliant devices will have the potential to move the dial once more.
If you want to know more, the Project Canvas website aims to answer any of your questions about the proposals and keep everyone up to speed with development. If the answer isn't there, you can also contact the Canvas team or the dedicated Twitter feed .
Rahul Chakkara is Controller, TV Platforms, 91Èȱ¬ FM&T.
Comment number 1.
At 1st Feb 2010, mevans6707 wrote:Summary of my comment: Why not allow the PS3 to download and store programs for 30 days - it's got the disk space and is able to do it with Sony's Play TV - it must be possible to get the DRM sorted too!
Detail: We've recently got ourselves a PS3, and this has largely made our desktop PC redundant... except for one thing... downloading programs on iPlayer. We often fall a bit behind on a TV series and don't manage to watch it within 7 days, so we download the programs with iPlayer desktop, also in the evenings our broadband can slow to the point where streaming can become very tiresome for SD content and impossible for HD content - so again, being able to leave it downloading overnight is quite handy. I think we wouldn't switch on the PC for weeks at a time if this was the case!
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Comment number 2.
At 2nd Feb 2010, KernowChris wrote:I'm very sceptical of these Internet equipped TV services now, A minimum spec on every device should include a PVR equivalent maybe on flash memory that would enable 'Canvas' users without fast broadband to buffer content, up to and including HD content, for later viewing, without that the whole project seems doomed to be a fad.
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Comment number 3.
At 2nd Feb 2010, _marko wrote:What are the barriers to Canvas becoming a global standard?
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Comment number 4.
At 2nd Feb 2010, Mo McRoberts wrote:The question you should be asking is , and the answer is "none". Those technical specifications basically define how Canvas will work from a technical perspective and if they're sound, there'll be no reason for others not to adopt.
Canvas, on the other hand, shouldn't be a global standard. The idea of a national publicly-funded broadcaster putting its weight behind a proposal to create a platform where only licensed and branded devices will have access is absolutely crazy, especially when the only way to get licensed/branded is to adhere to both the technical specifications and and implement the prescribed user interface.
(Unless, of course, I'm wrong about this requirement, but if I'm wrong, then the 91Èȱ¬ Trust is too, and given the consultation closes today, they've left it a bit late to correct the error).
It's worth bearing in mind that everything that the 91Èȱ¬ has talked about and demonstrated with respect to Canvas would be possible on top of any well-designed hybrid OTA/IP-linear/on-demand system, rather than only being possible on Canvas, as seems to be intimated: if Canvas doesn't happen (which is still possible, though it looks fairly unlikely that it'll be canned completely), there's no reason the various things from those nifty demos can't be implemented on some other system instead.
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Comment number 5.
At 2nd Feb 2010, Nick Reynolds wrote:Mo - but Rahul says above:
"...there will be no editorial gatekeepers, and without the need to do a commercial deal with the platform, we expect this to be an open platform of real scale."
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Comment number 6.
At 2nd Feb 2010, Mo McRoberts wrote:Nick -
It's a little ambiguous. While it's true no commercial deals need to be made, there are licensing conditions which require x in order to do y even if no money changes hands.
From the third consultation document, paragraph 2.16 states:
That whole paragraph is a bit of a mess, if I'm honest; it's not at all clear what situation is being envisaged/enabled/restricted, nor whether it's talking about third party platforms (which really needs far more explanation of how that's expected to work in practice) or simply unbranded devices; it's not clear how devices will be supplied to users (especially where aforementioned third-party platforms are involved) - there's a danger of Canvas (or rather, its eventual branding) being a fairly meaningless term by the time it's stuck on boxes.
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