One of the problems of nationally owned Institutions like the UK’s BBC is that everything takes so long. We first heard about the service which eventually became the iPlayer in rumors during 2003/4, and the service came into being in 2005 after flirting with P2P delivery and opting for a more traditional streaming delivery.
Project Canvas, a specialized set top for it and for other similar copycat services from pay TV and broadcasters, was mooted in 2008 and has still to arrive. This week it dropped back another 6 months, with virtually no explanation.
The Project, since named YouView, was supposed to have products in the market in 2010, and that was put off until mid-2011, and the new statement on its web site puts that back to 2012. There is little confidence that it will make that deadline, but at some stage it may arrive.
We have been immensely critical of the government funded and controlled BBC being allowed to create YouView which has then sucked in all free to air TV channels, so that there is a cohesive publishing format and framework for them collectively, which will put at a disadvantage any online effort from pay TV rivals Sky and Virgin, and force them to come on board with the platform if they don’t want to risk missing out on OTT programming. Pure internet enterprises are therefore shut out of the next generation OTT publishing format unless they stump up the fee to put themselves on YouView, making it a ‘de facto’ internet video option for the UK.
This is something that IBM was always famous for, launching what are described as ‘paper’ products, spoilers that prevent the whole market from developing by promising a single unified, cheap platform, and then offer delay after delay. Already outside the UK in the rest of Europe, because the broadcasters there have had a completely different approach to how much control this needs, they have adopted the far simpler HbbTV as a standard, which allows set tops to be built and services offered, irrespective of how the programming looks. Even that may prevent many smaller internet operations from joining, and it is still virtually a broadcasters only club.
All of this means that Over The Top video experiences in Europe cannot find an easy route to the TV set. In the US Google TV is specifically at odds with this process offering an open route for anyone to bring content not just to a PC but to a TV set. There are other platforms which are more prescriptive in the US too, such as Apple TV, Roku and Netflix, but these latter two are services which can port to multiple platforms, and getting on these services is a decision for the companies offering them, not an open environment which offer any old TV program maker a route to market.
In Europe the set tops makers don’t want to back anyone other than the local broadcasters which led to the DVB-T set top bonanza, and so wait for standardization, mass appeal and economies of scale, which puts OTT on hold for another year.
YouView will offer catch up TV from the last 7 days’ catch-up TV, plus on demand video as well as some interactive applications at a set top or a digital TV set without a subscription. A $50 set top will get you something better than a DVR which costs $250 and the service is genuinely free.
We’re really suspicious of this approach, let’s not throw mud at a wall and see what new ideas stick, let’s instead stitch up the entire internet video market to maintain the status quo, in a single business model that no-one has to justify or prove and deliver it as a ‘fait accompli.’
YouView calls itself an open platform, but what it means by this is that anyone can make a set top with it in. It doesn’t mean that anyone can deliver over it.
Richard Halton, CEO, YouView said, ‘Our focus has always been to deliver a product to consumers that is right, but not rushed. Creating a truly open TV platform that will bring consumers increased choice has required significant technological innovation. Our timings for the launch reflect the scale and complexity of this project.’
The nice thing about the delay is that the longer it takes to come out, the more likely that other platforms will be able to grab some market share and that initiatives like Google TV, and pay TV offerings with OTT, can mature and then still beat it to market. The problem then of course is the mass market take up is not assured since it will become a fragmented market. But in our view, better a fragmented market that can follow global trends, than a market dominated entirely by the status quo.