For Digital TV Europe.net April 09, 2009

These are difficult times in TV land. The plummeting TV advertising market brought on by the credit crunch and general downturn has forced TV companies to rip up their business plans, throw out their revenue targets and hunker down.

But amidst all this comes a very interesting move by UK public broadcaster the BBC. The public service broadcaster’s future media and technology division is proposing to set a technical standard that would allow on-demand TV services to be made available via Freeview, the digital terrestrial TV service in the UK, and Freesat, its satellite-delivered equivalent, as well as other IP-connected devices.

The primary motive for the public service-funded BBC is to future-proof these “free” TV platforms so that people who did not necessarily want to pay for their TV could access on-demand content delivered through a broadband connection directly to their TV sets.

Erik Huggers, the director of BBC future media and technology, has referred to Canvas, the new platform, as the “10-foot (viewing) version of the iPhone application” that currently delivers the BBC’s catch-up BBC iPlayer TV service to handheld devices. Huggers says Canvas will “democratise” access to the living room TV screen and put Freeview on an equal footing especially with cable TV platforms that have a built-in return path and broadband connectivity as part of the bundled service.

All this sounds pretty good: a standardised way to take IP content to TVs via Canvas-enabled set-top boxes or other devices. However, one problem may be in the BBC’s ambition to control the specifications for Canvas. Huggers wants the BBC to set the standard and make it available to others to use. It’s a standard that is open rather than an “open standard”. Some in the consumer electronics industry are concerned that the BBC may try to favourFreeview and Freesat boxes over other, non-aligned services. These critics say that the fact that the BBC has already asked BT Vision and ITV to be part of the Canvas venture proves that this is the case.

In fact, one small startup set-top box provider in the UK called IP Vision has become so frustrated with the BBC that it lodged a complaint in late February with the BBC’s Fair Trade Controller claiming that the public broadcaster is withholding the syndication of its on-demand content (ie BBC iPlayer) for no good reason.

Huggers told the annual meeting of the Digital Television Group in early March that the BBC already provides 14 different video streams and four different digital rights management (DRM) applications for the BBC iPlayer. These make the iPlayer available on the Nokia N96 phone, the Wii games console, on Virgin Media and on Sky’s Sky Player.

“If the proliferation of IP-connected devices continues how many do I need to build for, hundreds?” asked Huggers. “At some point the return on investment to port BBC iPlayer to a [vendor] that has 5,000 set tops doesn’t make sense.”

According to Huggers, creating a standard such as Canvas is the way to ease the pressure on the BBC and make VOD more widely available: the idea, says Huggers, is to “get back to a world were we publish to one standard and it just works”.

Certainly the two partners in Canvas, BT Vision and ITV, are both very interested to see the project work. BT Vision provides an IPTV service that bundles a Freeview tuner with a broadband-delivered VOD service. Arguably Canvas would allow BT Vision to offer much, much more, adding some rocket fuel to its service uptake. ITV clearly needs a way to exploit its progammes on the living room TV as well as through itv.com. The fact that ITV does not have a pay-TV strategy makes it all the more important that the company gets a handle on how to exploit and commercialise VOD on the TV set.

While IP Vision and some others worry that Canvas will shut out others, hasn’t the BBC always been in the platform business through its control of the broadcasting frequencies? Good content is great but making sure it gets to the audience is at least as important. There is still a lot to be discussed. The BBC Trust has a consultation on the Canvas project under way at the moment. I think that Canvas is more important to the BBC than the recently scotched Project Kangaroo, which came from the commercial arm of the BBC (BBC Worldwide) in partnership with Channel 4 and ITV. Kangaroo was rejected by the competition authorities, who were worried that the three organisations together would essentially act as a cartel comprising the biggest content producers in the UK with the power to fix prices at the expense of their rivals.

Canvas should not be used as a brickbat to try and beat pay-TV operators: the BBC is a public service for users of free TV and pay-TV alike. But it would serve the BBC and Huggers to make sure they answer the concerns that have been raised so that VOD to the living room TV set is not just the purview of the pay-TV business.