Kate Bulkley, Media Analyst.

YouView must see big picture

By Kate Bulkley

Broadcast News

For Broadcast December 16, 2010

Departure of Anthony Rose is a massive blow no matter how it is spun.

Many of life’s traditions are being over-turned. Students are protesting rather than sitting at home watching Cash In The Attic; England’s cricketers are on course to win the Ashes in Australia; and we’ve already had enough snow to last a whole winter.

But some things never change. When you get heavyweight broadcasters working on the same project as ISPs, things are never going to run smoothly. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, YouView is on the point of crisis. We could probably have predicted this months ago.

The much-admired, very tech-savvy Anthony Rose has left the project (pushed or walked? Well, there are rumours about both). For Sky and Virgin Media, this is Christmas come early. Rupert Murdoch and Neil Berkett are popping champagne corks while the YouView board is seeking to delay the launch.

What will happen? The spin is that it’s moving from the development stage to the launch phase. The Daily Telegraph last week painted the very unflattering picture that Rose was not up to a product launch. What? The man who launched the fab-u-lous BBC iPlayer, not up to a product launch? Please. More like a clash of strategic priorities from the shareholders, I’d say.

YouView chairman Kip Meek is aware that his job has the whiff of herding cats about it and there are some serious divergences of priorities. On one hand, the broadcasters (and the BBC in particular) want the best possible consumer product - one that will attract viewers to use the new technology and not worry about how it works. To do that, it has to be flexible. One thing that the iPlayer has done well is to launch and then iterate versions to keep up with how consumers use it, such as adding social media bits.

The ISPs have their own priorities. TalkTalk wants YouView to provide a new set top box with VoD, but not necessarily an open app store. Both ISPs want ‘compliance tests’ and more control over customer feedback; plus content at speeds that people will pay for, which flies in the face of the ‘open’ internet championed by Erik Huggers at the BBC.

Let’s be clear: YouView is a unique opportunity. No one else in the world of communications and media is working on anything as revolutionary as this joint effort to get the internet on our TV sets. Hulu in the US, which offers some of the biggest US broadcasters’ content to PCs, doesn’t come close to YouView’s ambition.

But there is a window of opportunity here, with more and more ways to get web content onto your telly. Just this week C4 announced that its on-demand service was coming to Sony’s PS3 consoles, joining ITV and the BBC. Sony says there are 4 million homes with PS3 consoles in the UK, some 80% of which are connected to the internet, and broadcasters should expect a 10% increase in viewers through the consoles. And the broadcasters can sell ads against console-viewed telly.

The relevance of YouView is tied to two things: getting a product out there that serves its ISP and commercial shareholders, and making it compelling to users. In technology, things move fast, and strategic concerns need to be kept big-picture enough so they don’t kill the product dead before it is even born.

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