By Sophie Curtis, 21 October 2009 16:03
NEWS
The BBC Trust has rejected a proposal that would allow UK broadcasters such as Channel 4, ITV and Five to share the BBC's iPlayer technology.
The BBC Trust, the body that oversees the BBC, announced yesterday it thought the scheme "was not the best way to share the BBC iPlayer or to deliver increased public value to licence fee payers".
The initiative was intended to operate partly as a commercial venture, generating revenue from licensing the technology to other broadcasters, and partly as a public service offering - plans that the Trust deemed too complex.
"We were not convinced that there was enough potential value to licence fee payers in the public service part of the proposal, and we have therefore rejected the BBC Executive's proposals for an open iPlayer federation," BBC trustee and chair of the Trust's strategic approvals committee Diane Coyle said in a statement.
The public service side of the project would involve setting up a federation of British broadcasters, which would then provide access to their on-demand video content via the iPlayer. The project would also see the creation of a new listings website, providing access to a selection of content provided by the federation partners.
The Trust said it did not believe the federation was necessary for iPlayer to be shared by other broadcasters.
It also added the degree of co-operation needed between major UK content producers would also need scrutinising to see what effect it could have on competition.
"If the BBC invested a lot of money in it and then it was found to have competition issues, then it wouldn't really be a good thing for the licence-fee payers," a BBC Trust spokesman told silicon.com.
However, the Trust reiterated its support for the principle of sharing the iPlayer.
"The Trust is open to considering an alternative proposal for the licensing of the iPlayer technology to third parties if that can be done on a simple, fair and commercial basis," said Coyle.
Comments
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1. karen challinor
and once more instead of a standard for the media content
a standard that will allow different parties to develop media browsers so that any one media viewer can display media content from any media supplier
a bit like the HTML allowed the development of IE, Firefox, Opera and so on to view the content of websites
we, the poor hapless end users, are forced to have one viewer per content provider all with their own bells and whistles all doing substantially the same job and all occupying space on our systems
a bit like having to have one car for motorway driving, one car for urban and one for pootling around the countryside all sitting in the garage while you use yet another car to commute to work
someone please come up with a standard for IPTV delivery
pretty please
pretty please with sugar on it
let the content providers like the BBC get back to what they are good at i.e. producing content, let them format it to the IPTV standard and let someone else worry about displaying all the standard content