British TV Rivals Team Up For Joint Online TV On-Demand Service
Duncan Riley
38 comments »
British TV networks the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 will launch a new joint online TV on-demand service that will provide a one-stop shop of content from all channels.
The new service, as yet unnamed will be launched in 2008 and will include free downloads, streaming, show rental and purchase via the internet, with possible future expansion onto other platforms. Shows available will include locally produced content and possibly US and other non-British content as well. Like existing online offerings from the networks it is presumed that the service will be available to residents of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland only.
The BBC has had ongoing problems with its iPlayer service which faced delays and budgets blowouts, then came under attack for being available to Windows users only.
The significance of the service has been described by the BBC as “historic;” to put the deal in perspective it would be like CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox coming together for a joint portal where all their shows would be available to be viewed on demand, for download (to say an iPod), purchased or rented. Ultimately the biggest winner from the deal will be the British viewer who will have unparalleled access to legal TV content online in the one spot. Here’s hoping that the idea might be taken up in other countries.
TechCrunch UK has more.
The iplayer tanked, lets hope they do a better job with this one. Channel 4’s 4oD will now be shelved and ITV’s online strategy has been quite poor. I cant help but feel this thing may suck.
JohnofScribbleSheet
I think that they’re even trying it is a good thing, particularly the scope of what they are proposing (downloads, rentals etc etc), certainly ahead of the game compared to elsewhere, here’s hoping for all our British readers that it doesn’t suck
I think it should be Northern Ireland, not Northern Island. Unless it’s just available to some random island in the North Sea?
Mother f****** US spell checker…. sorry, it’s hard enough converting Her Majesty’s English into American, and then it does weird things when I’m not looking. My bad + fixed
BBC need to scrap their TV License everyone is FORCED to pay.
Putting everybody in the mix with their own ideas on how to deliver OD services could be either a great success in finding the best solutions, or just another case of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. Will be interesting all the same.
These companies have gone through the pain of building and launching their own platform, dealing with the only real DRM format in town and finding that the offering was crap and no one was interested. I’m hopeful that this announcement means that they’ve learnt something from their experience, and have a greater understanding that iTunes is not the answer and neither is a web experience like Hulu. But a Flash/H.264 system might just be the ticket - it opens the audience up wide with a tecnology they already understand, it could possibly allow web/ set-top/ Media Centre/ AppleTV/ PS3/ Xbox/ PVP options, and most importantly try to stop the fragmentation of commercial video on the web that has come about from ignorance, greed, a total lack of understanding the audience and no really universal useful DRM/compression standard.
Northern Ireland is in the United Kingdom … I guess it means Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
UK = GB + NI
GB = ENGLAND + SCOTLAND + WALES
It will probably be available to the Irish Republic as well as all the stations mentioned are broadcasted there under the same Digital packages as it’s UK viewers.
The BBC put pregnant women in prison for non payment of their forced license. Shame on you BBC. They have a long history dating back to the birth of television of trying to monopolizing the industry and locking up the airwaves. Now they have serious competition with the likes of the stage6 format they are be latently scratching their corporate heads as to a plan b.
There are many alternatives emerging that will evolve over the next few years and soon there really will be a huge whole in the ad revenue from the standard programmed TV format and we will all be enjoying content on demand that suites our preferences and that will finally be free of the propaganda that the establishments worldwide like to populate everyone with.
Here is a little preview:
http://startupcrunch.org/where.....v_season_2
Dillon
perhaps, although given the package might include US shows as well I’d be surprised, wouldn’t there be local Irish stations with rights to those shows?
It is really funny that in the day and age of internet proxies that these companies think that geolocation using IP Address is actually a valid way to control content distribution
About time! wrote a long article complaining about iPlayer just a few days ago. They better get it right this time.
One thing I don’t understand is why don’t they just strike a deal with Joost, zattoo or really any other content provider available out there? Seems stupid to reinvent the wheel.
I’m getting closer and closer to giving Comcast the you know what!
There might be. But there might also be other channels (there are hundreds) broadcasting in the UK that have the rights…
I can’t see how the iPlayer “tanked”, it hasn’t even been officially released yet, and as a user myself I have to say it’s pretty good, although admittedly flawed. 4oD was just awful when it first launched although has improved with time, with less errors for a start and more free content (as well as streaming AT LAST). ITV just don’t seem to have a clue what they’re doing yet with on demand content.
This should be good if it works.
I’d wager this arrangement has an obstructive element to it — one of fighting off Sky Plus.
And given that the BBC did a deal with either Sky or Satanta for the football, this could be a great little channel to fool around with.
However, how this deal hangs together — and more crucially, is delivered — will be the deciding factors in whether it sinks or sails…
Re the licence moaners:
The BBC licence represents great value for money compared with the dross on Channel 4 and ITV (which you have to endure adverts for) not to mention Sky (which you have to endure adverts for AND pay far more than the TV licence). The BBC makes mistakes but it is responsible for virtually all of the good comedy, satire, drama and documentaries on the box and even its reality TV is watchable (Dragons’ Den, The Apprentice). Channel 4’s contribution to the nation consists mainly of imported Dutch monstrosities like Big Brother and Deal or No Deal and American serials, while ITV has the James Bond back catalogue.
Without the BBC there would be no decent TV news (commercial TV news is a bad joke), no State of Play, no Yes Minister, no Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Doctor Who, and nothing by Attenborough unless he agreed to film tits of the non-avine variety. So I pay it happily. As for those who only watch Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity and resent being forced to pay for decent television, excuse me while I fail to give a toss.
Now, on topic: this will be great, if and only if it’s easier to get something off Kangaroo than to Bittorrent it. Channel 4’s 4oD software, which has been out for a while, is usable but technically awful; slow, unresponsive, buggy and to rent something you have to click ‘Confirm’ or ‘OK’ at least one more time than is necessary. With no rival software to speak of this could very easily be designed with no thought to how pleasant it is to use.
Considering just how badly old media is suffering from new media, you would think that every leading Global Media Company that is suffering at the hands of YouTube, Bittorrent and PirateBay - would look at ways of developing an online Global Media Platform that can exclusively distribute they own official Media Content.
We all beg, steal or borrow official Media Content over the internet because all the ‘rights’ owners of this official Media Content, haven’t a clue how to market and distribute their exclusive material online.
All of these current pie-in-the-sky online Media Partnerships, like Hulu and this new Brit TV Pack, will fail dismally due to old media’s lack of vision and understanding of what today’s web media users really want.
Until Global Media Companies get the perfect online business model right, they will all be placing their money into the wrong Global Media Jukebox.
Interestingly, they’ve already done this to a certain extent on Bebo. All of the above companies were partners in Bebo’s “open media” launch a few weeks back, which was heralded as a Hulu/Joost competitor at the time.
I wonder how they plan to differentiate or integrate this new offering into what they’re doing on the social network front.
BBC is trying to monopolize the media, they should have democratic approach rather than limited service for residents of the UK of Great Britain and Northern Ireland only.
Democratic approach? They don’t have the licenses to hand it off to people outside the UK and they shouldn’t, you don’t pay for the content like we do, why should you get it for free then?
As for monopolizing the media, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Why can’t we all just get along like these guys?
I’d be surprised if it was UK-only, given the BBC’s good record of serving not just the British public but the global public (the BBC World Service being the shining example, often the only alternative to state propaganda to people living in authoritarian countries). Of course, it isn’t solely the BBC’s call given the involvement of ITV and Channel 4. I’d like to know where the presumption that it will be UK-only comes from.
If it was UK-only, couldn’t worldwide viewers get around it by connecting through UK proxies?
This is a typically logical approach from the Brits as they typically do many things smarter at the social level than the US, just look at their mobile, TV and healthcare infrastructures. This may appear to be less democratic but the average person in the UK has significantly more power as a democratic member than say someone in the US.
US citizens have been forced into fear. With the weakening dollar and the Irac war most US citizens have no clue that they’re entering the poverty level at a global level. Corporate greed and corrupt Republican governments over the last 30 years have ruined America and this continues to help smarter countries like the UK and China build the dominant and stronger economies, not to mention better technology infrastructures.
IMPEACH BUSH!
@ I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog
The BBC World Service (although I agree a great national export) may be controlled by the BBC but is actually funded by the British Foreign Office and not our license fees so would not really be part of this venture.
The platform may offer a few shows for free to the rest of the world (such as BBC News for example) to demonstrate why they should BUY UK created content. Also, I see no reason why the rentals and other paid parts of the project couldn’t be opened up to the rest of the world as well (although their distribution rights would have to worked out first) - but for free TV on demand that will most likely not be available to the rest of the world. We pay a license fee for the BBC content (and many people would resent paying for content given free to the rest of the world), and the ads for the other UK channels would be UK focused so wouldn’t be appropriate for other parts of the world.
As for the UK proxy option to bypass the UK-only part - there are always ways around on the internet, but that loophole could be closed quite quickly. Firstly, you could be made to enter a valid TV license paying UK address and secondly - they could just make people put their TV license number in as part of registration which would make life a lot more difficult for non-UK residents to fake.
Unfortunately it has one Hulu’s limitation, content is only available selectively in specific countries. I am a private Hulu beta user currently and I read that Hulu is working to make their content globally available, how long before that happens, only god knows. However, what I saw of Hulu so far is nice, it even has closed caption, nice touch =).
BBC 3 and 4, BBC News 24 and the ITV channels aren’t available on the Sky EPG in Ireland (though you can find them with manual tuning - it makes them invisible to PVRs though). Channel 4 goes dark in Ireland (again, on satellite) whenever a US import show is on.
Irish digital cable subscribers can get most of this stuff. Analogue cable doesn’t have enough channel slots to carry most of it.
Channel 5 isn’t available at all, anywhere, except to people near the border who can pick it up on UHF.
Yes, there are Irish channels with rights which supercede the UK networks. RTE, for example, was running Lost and the last series of The West Wing about six months ahead of the UK. And paying a lot less money for the privilege.
@Stefano Buliani
They don’t strike a deal, because everyone at this point wants to be king of the hill.
It’s the same reason why NBC and company decided to build Hulu.com
Somebody will be number one eventually.
I suppose Joost must be thinking a few things:
1) Good thing we started earlier than everybody else
2) We better keep our advantage and work harder than ever, there’s a lot of competition and it only means we’re on the right market, but we need to face the technological innovation of competition popping out from every corner.
Joost, you gotta get your shit together.
1) Make a flash player (even if its not p2p, you need the viral presence)
eventually flash will allow for p2p networking and you’ll be able to serve… or make a plugin that gets installed automatically on the browsers as you install joost, who knows it might work.
2) Bend over and get your pants off before content owners, you need better conent, you got too much crap in there.
3) Think of alternative ways to browse content. As it gets bigger, you need to start thinking of Channels > Shows > Seasons, not a channel per show, that’s gay.
The BBC license fee isn’t un-democratic - in fact, seeing as the Beeb is answerable to the Government and to public opinion it’s arguably THE most democratic media organisation on the planet (insert your own anti-government comments here).
The fact that these three organisations are talking to each other about anything is pretty remarkable, although it does suggest this thing will die, horribly, smothered in its sleep by too many committees arguing over what colour the play button should be. It’s also though about damn time one of the major broadcasters sorted it out - so far (for such large organisations) their efforts have been mostly woefully out-of-date / slow / buggy / confusing / light on content.
Oh, and as for anyone who says that the future will only consist of everyone watching TV content as and when they feel like it - don’t be daft. Stuff happens live, and that’s how people like to watch it. World Cup Final? Nah, I’ll watch that tomorrow. Final of Pop Idol? Nah, I’ll watch a re-run instead…
Sweet news, though I hope they extend distribution to the U.S.
Not talking about the license stuff. The idea itself is great. I wish we could have such an on demand tv broadcast in germany too.
Watch what you want, when you want - at payable prices. There is nothing more annoying than being bound to a certain time when watching a series or movie. Lets see what the future will bring…
Despite the downsides of its Kontiki distribution service, the BBC iPlayer is shaping up very nicely. The codec used works well, and since the BBC increased the resolution to the full 576p25*, the picture quality is excellent.
*- (well, 544, but who’s counting)
Won’t work!
They are doing it without partnering with MS!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
These days the online video (VOD, LIVE) are getting hot.
I tried iPlayer (BBC) before, but not the good experience due to my ISP blocked the traffic. Also, iPlayer is always buffering for me.
Hopefully, less bugs in the future.
Recently, it’s getting better.
I always keep my eyes on the hot spots of Online Video, such as Joost, Lulu Player, Brightcove, Zattoo, PPlive and so on.
From my point of view, all those technology have their unique advantages. For instance, Joost already had the good reputation before it was launched (Founder of Skype), Lulu Player, of course, we all know News Groups.
Zattoo, I talked to their CTO, then i got very surprised for their Latency is only about 5 seconds, which is kind of unbelievable.
PPLive, the Chinese P2P company with more 10 millions users.
However, as I often use those “Player” above, I found each “Player” cant provide me the speed as I expected, unstill yesterday I watched a NBA game in CCTV.com (The Chinese Central Television), which the speed is excellent, and it only took 6 seconds for the initial buffering; in addition, there was no buffering at all during the game.
http://nba.sports.cctv.com/14/index.shtml
I will dig who is the technology provider.
It’s impressive to see the Big 3 collaborating…. it’s not easy to get 3 very different, very large companies working together. The split revenue model works - ITV and Channel 4 keep their ad supported approach. The BBC has less flexibility - VOD on the PC is a pretty tough sell, hence Channel 4’s 4OD going largely free (Ad supported), and sites like Hulu in the US doing the same. And if the BBC shows ads, people will be up in arms.
Clearly this is going to be a big market; and as long as they don’t try to block other competitors like blinkBox out, by forcing production companies to do exclusive deals, it should be good for consumers too. If they do manage to force the Indies into working only with them, then consumers will suffer from limited choice and less innovation. blinkBox is a start-up that offers consumers the ability to watch film and TV, but that’s just the beginning. We let them play and interact with the content too, and meet others who share their film and TV tastes, and more….. Let’s hope the consumers don’t get starved for choice by a Goliath who kills the small innovators off.