Comments on: Count them—three IPTV Platforms!

By: 4. Sitting back with broaderband (2009 Trends) « David j Carr | Digital fragments and Brand Reality Creative

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:47:31 +0000

[...] have people connecting PCs to TVs. Net connections can now be built into TV sets by default as the Canvas project among others (replacing the failed dream of Project Kangaroo) makes the convergence of TV [...]

By: Steve Bowbrick

Steve Bowbrick — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:47:10 +0000

@Ed Good comments but, first of all, a large (and growing) proportion of UK TV households already pay twice: for Sky or Virgin on top of the licence fee. In many cases, in fact, the cost of pay TV access exceeds the licence fee by a large margin. In this context an additional fee for Canvas wouldn’t seem too strange.

Second, the ISPs’ argument is that the BBC happily pays for transmission to the home for terrestrial viewers right now – and even funded most of the capital investment needed to build the masts and relays in the first place (and remember they’ve just co-funded satellite delivery for FreeSat). They say the BBC should at least co-fund the delivery of iPlayer to the home too. This is obviously a very optimistic bit of kite flying but it’s not an entirely unreasonable argument.

Third, you’re right that a single iPlayer stream is not a big deal but some BBC shows now get 20% of their audience from iPlayer. It doesn’t take much extrapolation to arrive at a very very large bandwidth cost! And this is very high quality, top priority bandwidth too: you need an absolutely stable 1.5Mb/s over a long period to deliver a high quality TV stream. That’s very different from the choppy, low priority bandwidth that can be used to deliver a torrent.

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:02:33 +0000

So, is Canvas the future of the TV license? Having to pay your ISP to receive Canvas plus for a TV license could easily double the effective cost of watching TV… I don’t see how both a charged-for Canvas and the TV license can coexist.

That said, when I pay my ISP for 50GB of data at 8Mbit a month, I don’t see why they should say that’s ‘50GB excluding Canvas’… It seems like BBC is trying to make ISPs happy that their customers are actually using the products they’ve been sold.

Bandwidth-wise, iPlayer is not that intensive – less so than downloading a copy of a programme off bittorrent or elsewhere…

By: links for 2008-12-19 | I’ve Said Too Much

links for 2008-12-19 | I’ve Said Too Much — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:11:15 +0000

[...] BBC Common Platform: Count them – three IPTV Platforms (tags: bbc iplayer iptv canvas) This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 4:01 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]

By: Dadblog » links for 2008-12-19

Dadblog » links for 2008-12-19 — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:01:46 +0000

[...] BBC Common Platform: Count them – three IPTV Platforms (tags: bbc iplayer iptv canvas) [...]

By: BBC iPlayer Desktop Application « OUseful.Info, the blog…

BBC iPlayer Desktop Application « OUseful.Info, the blog… — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:08:46 +0000

[...] was the poosibility of an iPlayer hosting broadband set-top box, code named “Canvas” (Count them – three IPTV Platforms, BBC, ITV and BT plan broadband Freeview service). Possibly related posts: (automatically [...]