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BBC To Create Internet Protocol TV Standard
Robadob sends word that the BBC has been granted approval for Project Canvas, "a partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4, and TalkTalk to develop a so-called Internet Protocol Television standard." The approval came with several interesting requirements: "Project Canvas must always remain free-to-air but users 'may be charged for additional pay services that third parties might choose to provide via the Canvas platform, for example video on demand services, as well as the broadband subscription fees.' Access to Project Canvas must not be 'bundled with other products or services' and 'listing on the electronic program guide will be awarded in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner." In addition, a preliminary draft of the tech specs for the project must be published within 20 working days, in order to allow broadcasters and manufacturers of set-top boxes to adopt the new standards. Significantly, "Other broadcasters and content providers must have access to the platform."
You might want to consider this very thing was done with the likes of MPEGII-TS, ISDB-T, DVB-H etc... more than 5 years ago. You don't need to invent a new standard, but merely use the ones already in existence. And these standards are already open, implemented, and well understood.
Nobody wants a BBC-only internet tv.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I'm working with a contractor whose contract is ending at the end of this month. He's had a couple of calls about jobs from agencies whose clients are "large media companies" about a massive ongoing project. I guess this is what it is. He's a Linux specialist too, so I guess there'll be a lot of Linux experts needed in the coming months.
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Standards need to be COMPLETELY open, even to those who don't want to follow your rules, if you want them to do well. Restricting this to companies that wish to play by your rules is a great way to ensure that others will create a competing standard and basically nullify any real forward progress this might have.
Also, this line is screwy:
"In addition, a preliminary draft of the tech specs for the project must be published within 20 working days, in order to allow broadcasters and manufacturers of set-top boxes to adopt the new standards."
What the hell kind of timeline is that? What broadcaster or manufacturer is saying "We're making new boxes in 20 days, so you had better have the draft ready by then." That's a ridiculous amount of time for such a massive standard. In addition, a preliminary draft of the tech specs for the project must be published within 20 working days, in order to allow broadcasters and manufacturers of set-top boxes to adopt the new standards.
Unless, of course, the standard is so generic as to be useless. If so, let me write it for you:
Equipment or software rendering this service must support video with synchronized audio delivered via internet protocol.
There, saved you 20 days.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Haha, from resistance to IPv6 to BT's WBC/UBC wholesale pipe pricing scheme to Apple turning W3C into his charioteer, the last 10 years of the Internet's development has been little more than content and hardware providers trying so hard to take away the notion that Internet is a network of networks of connected peers.
I mean look, my Tivo is basically a computer and I can use it to watch youtube. However the one thing I really want to do is use my tivo to watch on demand stuff. You'd think all they'd have to do is write an app to use the "IPTV" standard and then have my Tivo connect to one of Comcast servers to request an on-demand program. I mean seriously, my Tivo is hooked up to the ethernet, that's hooked up to the internet through Comcast so I'm inside their network and I'm using their cable cards on top of it. They can't have a stupid server that would let me watch stuff on my tivo and instead they've got to hack together some stupid switched video system to implement on demand?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
So the BBC have found a new way to waste my BBC tax money. This is not their business.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
What's really needed is some sort of organized access to downloadable broadcast content. I rarely watch live TV. I really don't care when the shows are on.
Right now, if you want a particular show, you have to figure out where to download, if it's even available for downloading. But usually, all you get is a postage-sized streaming window.
Many new TV sets coming out today can grab video contents from a small collection of online content. This needs to be scaled up, so that people can simply ditch the old-style cable and satellite monopolies. I want to turn on my TV, and select from a choice of live streams, from the news channels, or available list of archived shows.
Oh, and since most folks have multiple sets, it would be nice to have a standard by which your server in the basement can retrieve the shows on your behalf, and your TV sets fetch the video from it, instead of having all your TV sets waste bandwidth downloading the same show.
I rather think it is precisely their business. The idea that the BBC should be restricted to radio broadcasting is ridiculous. I guess that when FM started, people like you would have suggested that the BBC be limited to AM broadcasting. And when the first video was transmitted, that they should be restricted to audio only.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I thought BBC had already standardized on Bittorrent :-O
Why all the negative comments, sounds good
"The service will see a range of set-top boxes available to access on-demand TV services such as iPlayer and ITVplayer. "
As a U.S. BBC fan this doesn't sound good AT ALL, actually. You can almost guarantee that somewhere in there is region control... the exact same problem U.S. fans have with iPlayer.
Region control on the Internet is a step BACKWARDS.
I wish to region control my job before gets sent abroad ;)
I dont usually agree with Region Control at all but in the case of the BBC iPLayer it makes a little more sense. The BBC is funded by the Tax Payer so everyone in Britain gets free access to iPlayer, though one could argue we deserve more access to the BBC's content, since we are paying for the content. This is a different situation than the company who produce, for example, "The Corbert Report" limiting the free streaming on their website to US only since they are getting funded by the Ad revenue of the viewers which non-us viewers could potentially be a part of unlike the BBC which is essentially "pre-payed" content so to provide free access to it worldwide would be unfair for those people who have paid to access it. Though I do think BBC Worldwide should do some sort of Streaming service with ad's like Hulu and Youtube's "TV Shows".
the exact same problem U.S. fans have with iPlayer.
You guys started it with your stupid DVD region encoding, and releasing films over here weeks or months after they are released in the US.
Sauce, goose, gander, etc?
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I understand the issue with the License, but there are big fans (like me) in the U.S. that would gladly pay for a British TV License so they could see their favorite shows at broadcast. The fact is the BBC (and some of the government bureaucracy) so far has simply just cut off other fans around the world when the technology is there.
Plus, as someone else has mentioned already, region encoding is simply an artificial way for broadcasters to keep their advantage from the time when NTSC to PAL conversions cost thousands of dollars and physically had to be shipped to the U.S. There is no reason for the time lag any more...
That was corporate decision making. Don't get me confused with the corporate wankheads. I'm not in favor of THAT, either.
I prefer on-demand content for my TV shows, for which BitTorrent is the perfect solution. For sports live streaming is required, as I came to realize with the football[1] World Cup, and there is no good open standard today. I hope GoalBit gets momentum, but so far only proprietary applications[2] have some live content available (mostly copyright infringing channels from asia).
I feel really guilty about wasting all that bandwidth with that Flash streaming crap.
[1] football: the sport played with the feet, not hands
[2] e.g.: Veetle, Stream Torrent, SopCast, TVAnts.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
sure, but if you could embed paid-for content in there too, the BBC Worldwide (or BBS America) could then legitimately sell the content to you. Currently, the standards don't allow for that which means they have to block you entirely.
Maybe that lesson will sink in to bloody American video hosting sites that region-lock the clips people post in Slashdot and Techdirt. There's nothing more annoying than a post to the effect of "Look at this - it's AWESOME!!!!" above a black box saying "This video is not available in your area". What *is* the point of region locking a trailer? I can understand region locking a whole movie, even if I don't agree with it, but locking people out of a trailer is just plain perverse.
It will most doubtlessly be region-locked
or should I say, Standards brough to you by the BBC? My answer is no, don't do it. They are pro DRM and proving to side with the likes of the RIAA and MPAA and similar. I don't want DRM being part of a standard at all! If anything, standards should be developed by indpendent working groups, not by corporations with corporate interests. Independent working groups ensure that standards are open and I am thankful that Wireless N was developed this way. When companies develop standards, we get patents and closed source "standards." Allowing corporations to develop standards lead to the rise of Cisco as a dominant, veritable monopoly in computer networking. While I like the BBC, do I want to be dominated by it? No.
I understand the issue with the License, but there are big fans (like me) in the U.S. that would gladly pay for a British TV License so they could see their favorite shows at broadcast.
No, then it wouldn't be a BBC-style licence.
In order for the US to pay the licence, you would need to force ALL americans to pay the licence, so that the ones who liked BBC stuff could watch it. The others could go fuck themselves and pay up the cash anyway.
Your proposal sounds more like paying a subscription for BBC content, which is what I, and others who wish to scrap the licence fee, want.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
...the bbs is in the internet? lol... looks like i've never had to care... xD
What *is* the point of region locking a trailer?
Its all the mindless robots in marketing & advertising.
They have loads of useless stats that tells them things like a certain story
will appeal more to males aged 18-25 in one region and 25-30 in another or
that adding a bit more action/blood/loud noise/side-boob will appeal more to
certain areas. Most media produced these days is so bad that it survives mostly
on hype/bullshit and marketing. Thats why things like the Wolverine leak affects
them so much. If people review things based on the content and not the special
effects it rarely ends well.
I do not pay a TV licence. I do not own a TV. About once a year there is a program that everyone is talking about that I would like to see. I emailed the BBC to ask if it was legal for me to use iPlayer if I did not have a TV licence. They said this was perfectly legal, a licence is only needed if I owned a device capable of receiving live broadcast quality TV. They said I would only need a TV licence for my Internet PC if the BBC started live streaming the signal to the Internet. I am guessing there are a good number of people who do not have a TV and do not pay licence fee because they do not like what the BBC produces. It is important for us to be able to opt out of 'being able to receive' live BBC TV without having to disconnect from the Internet. I know this announcement is about on demand content but the format may pave the way for live Internet broadcasts. If the BBC make it 'free' to access what they may really mean is they are making all UK internet users liable for a TV licence.
They really waste too much money thinking about things other than the terrestrial TV service.
We pay money to own a TV capable of receiving over the air TV, not for websites, IPTV or other pet projects.
Just to clarify, since the description isn't exactly clear, basically they're doing for IP TV what they did for free-to-air digital television with Freeview.
That is, bundling it together for convenient free access on a cheap box to go under the TV.
Like Freeview, this is not "a BBC project", but a coalition between all the major broadcasters in the UK plus a few others on the technology/infrastructure side. Again like Freeview, a company (apparently "YouTV" is most likely) will be set up to manage it and each broadcaster will have a share and board representation. BBC will probably take lead, because they initiated it and because the other broadcasters trust it more than they trust each other.
They have stated that it will be an "open standard", but no, not "open" in the sense of what /. would call open with respect to internet standards. They mean open in that any manufacturer can make the hardware and relatively light editorial controls over standards of the TV on it (no, don't expect channel 4chan to be on there). That probably doesn't matter much though since this is a TV box-set thing: consider it more a relatively open consumer product rather than a relatively closed internet standard.
Personally I think it's about time. Just like they did with Freeview (and iPlayer, and well, quite a lot of TV/radio throughout history), the BBC have sat back, given capitalism the first opportunity, saw the lacklustre efforts going nowhere then stepped in to get the job done. It's really quite absurd that a non-commercial entity is consistently the one pushing media technology forward in the UK with any enthusiasm, and even more ridiculous that they are the one that comes across as consumer-focused. Don't get me wrong, I still think they do things around the time I would expect a non-profit "me too" organisation would, what is strange is that capitalism isn't already there. Nearly all the traditional media companies seem to just crap their pants at the sound of the word "internet".
Not sure exactly where this leaves the cable and satellite operators though, what with this + Freeview HD all that infrastructure is starting to look redundant.
There's some apparently independent wiki-type site with lots of info here.
Idiot me, should have been:
I just hope that not only DRM'ed licenced feeds are allowed on Canvas
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
This is a different situation than the company who produce, for example, "The Corbert Report" limiting the free streaming on their website to US only since they are getting funded by the Ad revenue of the viewers
The problem isn't that Comedy Central doesn't think they can make money by showing ads to foreigners; the problem is that in they have given other TV channels the exclusive rights to broadcast shows like "The Colbert Report" in foreign countries. If they started streaming their shows for free to countries where the rights to broadcast them belong to another company, they would be violating the terms of the licensing agreements. The only company there is to blame for not streaming the Colbert Report in your country is the channel that airs it on TV.
The MPEG-4 Part 12 standard or MP4 container is capable of nearly everything that one needs from a standards perspective to set up any kind of streaming A/V media. The metadata boxes/atoms are totally customizable and extensible even to the point of custom device application delivery. All major CODECs are supported within the container. It can be muxed in real-time (with some trickery). All one needs to do is choose the audio and video CODECs and to define the custom metadata if/when necessary, gear your tool set to your choices, and you're done. You can even do DRM and live ad splicing if you want and your system supports it. There's a reason Adobe uses it in their .f4v variant, and why online streaming content providers and even now Microsoft in Expressions are using MP4 and its variants.
MPEG TS is higher in container overhead than MP4. Vudu happens to use it in their service, but it's a cut down version and was used primarily because the set of targeted devices for playback used it(i.e. TVs and STBs). I'd never choose it if I was starting any kind of streaming media service or defining a standard. There are even plenty of tools from companies like Rhozet and Digital Rapids to be able to batch re-mux and re-encode any content from MPEG TS to MP4.
By the way, you're all over the map with your standards. ISDB-T and DVB-H are broadcast standards that encompass much more than the media container specification, like the modulation scheme and receiver-level RF tests. MPEG TS is a container format defined in MPEG-2 Part 1 and is completely agnostic to broadcast standards and that physical medium, even though it is used almost exclusively in that domain.
Region locking is nothing next to all web video being locked-up in Flash format, which anyone not using Windows/Mac/Linux on x86 (or just can't subject themselves to the insecurity) is locked-out from. This even though there are many open source players that would handle the video just fine if it was simply "embed"-ed in the page, rather than using some SWF app as a front-end to everything.
I think your priorities are a bit off... There are far more important issues at hand.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm so glad that the future "Internet Standards" will be put together by the BBC. I hope they get good input from the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc.
Good things we don't leave Internet Standards in the hands of those pesky idiots at the IETF, NANOG, or vendors like Cisco, Juniper, et al.
I was going to say more but I think I'll go write a Broadcasting Standard.
Ehud
Tucson
P.S. Please don't mod me down. It's my birthday.
Crazy, I thought the US had too!
Do you see what I did there?
There's a reason why there are region locks. It is because iPlayer is there to support the UK citizens, as it's their money being spent producing the programmes. Yes - it's free for them online, but they've already paid for the shows with taxes.
This is blinging
Of course, you're right. It's far more important to make sure that the 1% of users on non-standard hardware have the opportunity to see the video than that the rest of the world gets to see it.
This is the BBC that developed the open source DIRAC codec, talked about open source, then proceeded to create a Microsoft-only iPlayer restricted by country IP and based on h263? If somebody is judged on their actions rather than their words, the BBC are not to be trusted.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
You'll find the majority of computers in the world are not x86 compatible. Remember ARM? You know, that thing in your cell phone, DVD player, toaster, etc.?
And even with x86, Adobe simply doesn't provide a plugin for many OSes.
And on platforms where it does, there are innumerable legitimate reasons for people to refuse to install it.
It's perfectly clear what your problem is. Your only concern is what YOU get out of it, and are perfectly happy to be short-sighted about it all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There is no such thing as truly fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory in software. This is known an 'RAND' in other circles, and what it usually means is: (patent) license fee applies, same rate to everyone. This instantly discriminates against free implementations, because they're basically excluded. This famously came up in Web standards back in 2000, with the W3C being pro-RAND. This nearly resulted in them being disbanded, because their entire purpose was a free web, not a closed one.
The word 'Open' has completely lost its meaning in recent years, and this year in particular it's had a final assault against it. You can declare anything as 'Open' so long as you make a passing gesture at documentation. That documentation can even be under 'RAND' license (you have to pay to see it, but hey, everyone pays equally to see it, e.g ISO standards). The content protection keys aren't open (they're secret). The implementation isn't necessarily 'open' because there are restrictions on what you can and can't implement.
The more this comes up, the more I agree with folks who say 'Open' is often a way to misrepresent something as more 'Free' than it is. It has turned into a marketing bullet point. Hell, even Skype just announced an 'Open' version of their library for Linux (binary blob, license restriction, implementation restriction, er, why the fuck is that called open?)
So back on subject: Project Canvas sounds all very nice, but to me it sounds like a Closed, Licensed, Restricted but Documented system. The BBC should absolutely research IPTV standards, but not a system like this. Leave inventing DRM to Big Business. BBC, what do you think your entire purpose is?
I'm not ever paying for anything you produce.
Just thought you should know.
Be seeing you...
I live in the UK, and was responding to a post about people outside the UK being region-locked from seeing BBC content. I *get* that content. (Oh, and I *don't* have a cell 'phone.)
You would rather make sure that someone who really wanted to see something could jump on a 'plane with any device and watch it when they arrive, rather than walking to the closest computer that can run Flash or firing up an alternate OS. But because they get to watch it on their own device, it's better, right?
Get *your* priorities straight. First stamp out region locking, then set about enforcing an "open" video standard. Of course, if you can do both at the same time, then so much the better.
As a licence payer, I'm happy for Iplayer to be open to all.
And the licence fee doesn't really work consistently. A UK person who only watches non-BBC TV has to payer the fee. But a UK person who watches BBC content on Iplayer, but doesn't watch TV as its broadcase, doesn't have to pay the fee!
My impression of this project from the media coverage over the last year or so was that it is a standardisation effort for Internet connected set-top boxes. i.e. consistent user interface, applications, widgets, hardware capabilities, etc, and a joint effort between all the UK television channels (with the notable exception of Rupert Murdoch/News Corp, who are un-surprisingly a little bit anti) and some hardware manufacturers.
i.e. it's not so much about creation of new technologies, more about making sure that manufacturers and content providers are all working from the same page?
So that we can avoid all the crap that has been seen with the many set top boxes recently where one does hulu or whatever, another does iPlayer, another does Netflix, and each one doesn't do the others, and needs a custom app for each platform.
Reading through the comments on here, no-one seems to be looking at it from that point of view - but seem to be taking the stance of 'OMG!! We don't need new IPTV protocols/containers/codecs/etc'.
I always thought that their intent is really not too disimilar to GoogleTV - standardise the platform so everyone can get on with watching stuff, or selling people stuff to watch without worrying about which versions of which devices etc.
Region-locking can be worked around by technical methods, like using a proxy (of some sort). Proprietary locking cannot.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Does that mean we won't be forced to use a flash-based clusterfuck that doesn't work half the time, like the BBC currently uses?
Have you never heard of running another OS under an emulator?