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.

I tried iPlayer (BBC) before, but not the good experience due to my ISP blocked the traffic. Also, iPlayer is always buffering for me.
Recently, it’s getting better. Hopefully, less bugs in the future.

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.

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

*- (well, 544, but who’s counting)

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of the major broadcasters sorted it out - so far (for such large organisations) their efforts have been mostly woefully out-of-date / slow / buggy / confusing / light on content.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…

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.

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.

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.

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!

If it was UK-only, couldn’t worldwide viewers get around it by connecting through UK proxies?

As for monopolizing the media, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

I wonder how they plan to differentiate or integrate this new offering into what they’re doing on the social network front.

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.

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.

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…

This should be good if it works.

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.