YouView CTO Anthony Rose has given an insight into the type of applications that will be possible when the hybrid broadcast service goes live next year. Speaking at the Mashup event Mashup TV, Pay TV, Over The Top (OTT) TV and DLNA, Rose characterised YouView as having three parts to it, open standards, client software and a metadata ingest.
Rose said the “Silicon Valley kids” such as Google and Apple had forgotten about linear television. Viewers would continue to watch linear content because it was the legacy on their TV set and live. “The driver is who creates demand and today it’s the scheduler, but as you move online the user has to work a lot harder. You need to have a new way to create and drive demand in identifying the content.”
To this end Rose described a YouView demo that displayed a thumbs up icon to show whether or not a programme was deemed worth watching by a viewers’ peers. The EPG would not only move from side to side, going backwards in time to access catch-up content that might have been missed, but also backwards and forwards. “It was enormously compelling and I think by displaying it this way rather than up/down is a new way of driving demand and a seamless way of bringing it all in.
Addressing audience concerns about the privacy of user data, Rose said he was relaxed about the capturing of information about a person’s viewing choices, providing they could remove the information in much the same way as the cookies can be cleared from an internet browser.
In another trial application, YouView has mirrored the content of the main screen to a mobile device, enabling audio description for an individual without disturbing fellow viewers.
Rose also explained that the enablement of multicast delivery would significantly reduce the costs of delivering content over the internet after a summer that had seen the World Cup place significant pressure on ISP networks.
