More details are emerging about Project Canvas, the ambitious joint venture by the BBC, ITV, Five and BT to bring internet video services such as the iPlayer from the bedroom PC to the living-room TV set.
Our interview in today’s FT with Marc Watson, head of BT Vision, revealed how BT envisages Canvas will work for consumers and content owners, should the BBC Trust approve the service.
The BBC, BT and their partners have emphasised from the outset that Canvas will be an “open” platform. Through a system they like to compare to Apple’s App Store, any content owner will be able to put its programming on the Canvas platform, they say, either ad-supported or charged for by subscription or micropayments.
And they are encouraging any broadband provider to join BT in providing Canvas boxes to their customers. Carphone Warehouse, for instance, is considering offering Canvas to customers of its TalkTalk broadband service.
For internet service providers, the commercial appeal is twofold: revenues from consumers, either through faster broadband connections or boosting existing broadband TV services as BT hopes to for BT Vision; and revenues from content owners to ensure their shows are streamed instantly, in TV quality.
BT’s flavour of Canvas will see BT Vision “very prominent” in the user interface, Mr Watson says, on the landing page alongside other channels, recordings and applications. A TalkTalk customer would not be able to get BT Vision, but Carphone Warehouse could fill the same slot with its own TV service.
For content owners wanting to get onto BT’s Canvas box, they are presented with a choice between making their programmes available to “play now” or “play later”. “Play now” will provide the instant-on streaming experience which consumers have come to love with the iPlayer, YouTube and the like. “Play later” will mean consumers have to wait to download a sizable chunk of the programme before they can start watching, as on existing services such as Apple’s iTunes or Microsoft’s Xbox movie stores.
“All content will be labelled either ‘play now’ or ‘play later’,” says Mr Watson. “The promise of quality that Canvas will make to all customers is that once you press play on a programme, play will be continuous and there will be a buffering of course, and it will be at least a television standard, a UK or Freeview television standard.”
Figures from the iPlayer, which started life as a download-only service, suggest that viewers prefer streaming to downloading by a factor of 10 to one. But for content owners to achieve that guaranteed picture quality by streaming, Mr Watson says, “you’ll need some sort of agreement with the relevant ISP”.
In BT’s case, that means content owners have to either pay BT to use its new content delivery network – a service already provided to online broadcasters by companies such as Level3 and Akamai – or sell their content to BT Vision, a pay TV platform.
“I think there will be a heavy incentive on content owners to come and reach an arrangement with BT, to make that content available to BT broadband customers, and there’s a heavy incentive on us to get them to do that,” says Mr Watson. “Canvas is only going to succeed if you get the full range of content that customers want to see. There’s no point in us keeping people out. We’re going to want content owners on the platform. So there’s a natural incentive on both sides to reach a commercial agreement on that.”
What content owners – beyond the BBC, ITV and Five – will make of that proposition remains to be seen. But first, the BBC will have to defend itself from the latest barrage of accusations from Sky.
