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This is a classical Microsoft move, a Microsoftie join a company ruins it and then rejoins the mothership, resistance *is* futile ..

BBC failed Digital Project Cancelled

Project Kangaroo Cancelled

Highfield joins Microsoft after just four months at Project Kangaroo

BBC appoints Microsoft man to control future media

I was watching Channel4 news just a moment ago and they mentioned the BBC's Canvas platform that rivals this setup. The interesting thing though - they mentioned open source. On the tele! Wow.

Ahem, it might not be open source, but it is an open standard, they specifically mentioned it being used for BC and ITV programmes, but also for any content provider - like newspapers or, well anyone. This is not the same as the Project Kangaroo that would broadcast programmes from the 3 main UK broadcasters, this is a content-delivery platform, not the content.

This blog talks about it in a bit more detail.

http://informitv.com/articles/2008/10/14/bbcopenscanvas/

Unusually BskyB has complained about having to suffer from competition!.

Bullshit! An open standard is a patent-free standard. Other standards as ISO etc. might be covered by patents. We call them standards as opposed to "open" standards although the specification is made available. Standards can be Spen Standards but not all standards are open. Proprietary Formats are no "standards" anyway, we speak of de-facto standards.

Generally speaking you can make the Open Source test. If it cannot be implemented using the GPL or BSD it is not an open standard. Otherwise we face a problem of vendor control.

Ah, and by the way:

Last September in Seattle, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates met Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, and Ashley Highfield, then director of new media and technology, now known as future media and technology. They signed a non-exclusive memorandum of understanding which aimed to identify areas of common interest between Microsoft and the BBC on which a strategic alliance could be developed.

A central area of potential co-operation is the BBC iPlayer project, for which the BBC Trust last week gave final approval following an open consultation.

So the BBC became a Microsoft drone and stopped its free codec project earlier this year.

The guy who leads the iPlayer project was responsible for WMP while he was working at Microsoft Europe.

Biggest bar to all of this is the price-point.

In the UK a couple of weeks ago, with analog switchoff a couple of months away in some parts of the country, Tesco started selling set-top boxes for £10 - thats around $20. So get talking to some Chinese manufacturers, I'm sure they can do the same for the US market (different encodings on both the analog and digital ends, but still it shouldn't be in the same ballpark).

Mod him up. Interactive services are the great white (red?) elephants of modern TV. Content providers only push them as a revenue stream. They rarely offer anything insightful - in the UK, I can only think of the BBC's sport coverage, offering eg actions from many courts at Wimbledon. In the commercial sector, just ask Andy Duncan of Channel 4 whether interactive services are worthwhile. In the US, do we see much interactive penetration? Has Fox convinced idiots to part with money to vote via the TV on American Idol? For this is surely the only useful application, in their eyes.

informitv has a story Broadcast Machine promises to open internet TV that seems to suggest that creating "substantial non-infringing uses" through legitimate activities such as video blogging could be used as a defence against general action for copyright infringement.

informitv has a story Broadcast Machine promises to open internet TV that seems to suggest that creating "substantial non-infringing uses" through legitimate activities such as video blogging could be used as a defence against general action for copyright infringement.