"We always look at new distribution opportunities," its chief executive, Jeremy Darroch, told the Guardian recently.ģ) YouView wants to control the user experience According to Neil Berkett, the chief executive of Virgin Media, YouView has insisted that "if we want to use their standards we must also accept … a Canvas-imposed interface". Sky itself has now entered negotiations to join YouView. In addition, YouView's emerging plan to carry a variety of apps seems remarkably open. Yet having ruled itself out of Project Canvas on cost grounds in July, Channel 5 – under the ownership of Richard Desmond – subsequently opted back in. This presupposes a revolution in thinking about public service broadcasting that has yet to take place.Ģ) Membership of the YouView club is "unjustifiably exclusive" Sky has pointed to the cost of participation in YouView. Yet for the BBC and commercial broadcasters, this would mean a future in which distribution is increasingly controlled by pay-TV platforms. This job would be a lot easier if further development of Freeview stalled. Rightly, Darcey suggests the key to capturing these refuseniks involves "getting them to reappraise what pay TV offers, and to revisit a decision they thought they had already made". For Darcey and Sky, these patrons of free TV represent "a big prize". According to Sky's Darcey, roughly the same number are "still getting by on Freeview, Freesat or analogue terrestrial, perhaps supported by a little bit of iPlayer and YouTube". Yet this objection emerges against the backdrop of a 50/50 split between pay TV and free-to-air households.Īround 12m British households subscribe to pay TV. The BBC shouldn't be in the business of delivery platforms Sky argued repeatedly that the BBC's participation in YouView "goes well beyond" its remit. Broadly speaking, those that referred to the here-and-now fell into three categories.ġ. What about the other arguments advanced by YouView's critics? Between May 2009 and March 2010, Sky published four documents outlining its objections to YouView. This doesn't sound like a market in which investment has ground to a halt. Andrew Ladbrook, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, says we're witnessing the dawn of "the era of the connected home, in a way that only a few years ago was unimaginable". In recent months, Google and Apple, hardware manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung, telecoms operators, traditional IT companies and new entrants such as Boxee have all announced new or upgraded plans to bring together web browsing and TV viewing. Paul Heydon, Avista's managing director, suggested "the collective power" of YouView's backers had become "a major cause for concern for investors".Īvista's claim remains hard to square with other evidence. This, at least, is the implication of a recent study by the private equity firm Avista Partners, which argues that investment in UK-based IPTV projects has plummeted. When large players such as the BBC flex their muscles, markets experience a chilling effect. According to an interview last week in Broadcast, Meek expects the London Olympics to be a key moment in take-up of the service, enthusing about the prospect of apps to follow athletes or bookmarked reminders of events. Kip Meek, its chairman, recently warned the launch date may change, saying "the first half of next year" was intended, but adding "it may slip, it's a technology project". Now YouView faces a wait of at least nine months until its first set-top boxes emerge. The consortium endured a last-minute appeal by BSkyB to Ofcom that left YouView's chief executive, Richard Halton, fuming about the pay TV provider's "pursuit of commercial self-interest rather than the public interest". In June, the BBC Trust greenlit YouView, though it laid down multiple conditions. This followed the Office of Fair Trading's decision not to investigate under competition rules. Sky's launch came just three days after Ofcom finally cleared the way for YouView. If both companies feel no pain, this may be because they've been so successful in delaying YouView, the competing free-to-air platform planned by a seven-strong consortium of broadcasters and ISPs. The cable operator plans to launch its own next-generation on-demand service, powered by TiVo's set-top boxes, during the fourth quarter of this year. Virgin Media finds itself in a similar position. "It's a big job to get right but we think we've cracked it," said Mike Darcey, Sky's chief operating officer, adding that the service's lengthy gestation had "caused no pain". H ave Sky and Virgin Media got what they wanted? On 22 October, Sky quietly launched Sky Anytime+, a video-on-demand service that required a vastly expensive rewrite of its set-top box software.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |