With an audience like the Digital TV Group you might have expected a little more detail on something as industry shifting as the Canvas IPTV proposals. Instead, like Canvas before it, there is just what people might think it might be.
Erik Huggers, the BBC director of Future Media and Technology, reminded delegates of the work that the two organisations had done together such as switchover and the move towards the new DVB-T2 transmission standard.
“What we have today is an inflection point where the internet is going to have a big impact on TV in the living room and there is a real big opportunity for us to work together on a single standard and avoid a proliferation of hundreds of different ways of getting that medium to the world,” said Huggers.
He pointed to the BBC’s proposals to contribute to the industry as a whole through its Digital Media Initiative, where the BBC will have a tapeless infrastructure by 2012, and to share its resource with other content aggregating organisations.
The BBC is also proposing to share local news facilities with its commercial rivals. Huggers reminded his audience that bbc.co.uk is the only UK originated website in the country’s Top 10 and said the corporation is looking at how the BBC might assist the other organisations to increase their traffic.
Walking the audience through recent developments in the iPlayer, Huggers said that while the launch of the Adobe Air-supported BBC iPlayer Desktop had helped deliver the catch up TV service to Mac and Linux as well as the existing Windows Media base, there would come a time when the amount of different formats meant that some devices would have to be overlooked.
“It’s our intention to make the iPlayer universal, but with our services on a variety of different devices we already have to support 14 flavours of video and four different flavours of DRM just to make it work”, he said. “As an industry we all talk the talk, but as we try to walk the walk it’s quite difficult because there’s no such thing as a common way to get video onto native devices.”
Huggers added that this was an area where the industry could work hand in glove to develop a uniform way of delivering content.
Offering delegates an overview of how BBC content was consumed, Huggers revealed that cross platform 97% of content is to streaming (as opposed to the downloads that were the basis of the original version). Virgin Media’s TV-based version of the iPlayer currently represents one quarter of traffic, in itself demonstrating the potential appeal of Canvas.
Huggers played the obligatory film ‘explaining’ Canvas as “combing the plug and go simplicity of Freeview with the choice and convenience of iPlayer all packaged in one simple to use service”. The “one-off payment and no on-going subscription” tagline adopted by Freeview and latterly Freesat was also in evidence. There remains, however, a disparity as to if Canvas is a standalone IP technology, or one that might fit in with other protocols, and how far it is along the development road, given as Huggers reminded us it still needed the approval of the BBC Trust.
BBC iPlayer modes of use
Nintendo <1%
Apple 8%
iPhone/iPod Touch 1%
Linux 1%
Virgin Media (TV) 26%
Windows 64%
Source: BBC Future Media
Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, Blinkx agreed that Canvas was “ill defined at the moment”. The head of the video search engine said that for the internet to work on the TV it had to be an open platform. “The web is so powerful today because anybody out there can not only publish content, but also produce services that allow you to access and discover that content. If you built a system that is filtered and only has access to certain services, then you’re not going to be able to deliver more innovation.” He praised Canvas as a means to put together standards was a good idea, but the challenge would be doing that without limiting the openness.
David Wood, the head of new media at the European Broadcasting Union, reminded delegates in a brilliantly witty presentation that most organisations claimed to be in favour of common digital standards as long as it was their own. “Europe is losing its capacity for agreeing common systems,” Wood said, pointing to the 720p/50 HD standard supported in Northern Europe as opposed to the 1080i/25 used in other markets.
Having tested all of the available formats, Wood said he had counted 40 different ways to make HD work, but with every file format transfer you lost something. Broadband TV was picking up mainstream support, but Philips, Yahoo and H4TV all had their own way of doing things. “A new one of these comes out every month and we can’t afford to have 72 of these systems.”
Simon Gauntlett, technical director at the DTG, gave delegates details of the new version of The D Book, the industry manual for digital terrestrial television in the UK, and after ten years proving that at least some standards are workable.
For the first time the book includes details of MPEG-4 and HD broadcasting, sound has been enhanced through the addition of surround sound and Dolby Digital Plus. Even subtitling has been tweaked to ensure the captions appear in the right position on HD transmissions.
Significantly, all HD products will be required to have a network return channel. “This will enable broadcasters to deliver the traditional public teletext services and could lead to the likes of the ITV Player and the BBC iPlayer, by providing support for streaming,” explained Gauntlett.
Guidance has been added to indicate to the viewer dangers such as flash photography. Signalling will automatically move channels to their new frequencies without requiring the viewer to rescan their set-top box.
Receiver profiles have been split into four, SD, SD with recorder, HD and HD with recorder, all of which are associated with a well-known trademark from the Freeview stable.
Outside of the halls delegates were able to sample Sky’s 3D proposition. Chris Johns, chief engineer broadcast strategy, BSkyB, emphasised the broadcaster was not planning an imminent launch of the service, but at the same time said he would expect one million of the Sky+ HD boxes being used for the tests to be in subscriber homes by the end of the year. Even so, a new television would still be required at some considerable expense.
“We’ve been investigating it for the past year or so and the aim is not to deliver it to the big screen, but to customers in their homes. We wanted to align it to high quality content to make it a cost effective viewing experience,” said Johns. “It’s a very simple left-right, but enough that when they’re brought together it gives you a 3D image on the screen.”
The Sky system uses dedicated 3D glasses, a long way from the red and green lenses seen in previous experiences, but bringing with it another potential cost. “Most of the screen manufacturers demonstrated the variants at CES and it could be they are available by 2010. At Sky we’d like to be in a position where when they are coming into the marketplace we’d like to be able to deliver the content.”
Johns said that while three to five years was optimistic; the Olympics presented an opportunity to deliver 3D sport into the home. He added that gaming provided another area of interest.
Announcing the Digital TV Group’s 3D consultation, DG Richard Lindsay-Davies said it would help develop and define the role of the group in providing an “exciting and vibrant” technology for the consumer.
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