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BBC given green light on Project Canvas

By Barry Collins

Posted on 22 Dec 2009 at 10:49

The BBC Trust has given the go-ahead to Project Canvas, a joint internet television service from Britain's leading broadcasters.

Canvas will see the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 team up with broadband providers including BT and TalkTalk to deliver IPTV to people's television sets, via set-top boxes. The service could go live as early as next year.

The BBC's participation in the service had been in doubt, after the Corporation's governing body - the BBC Trust - questioned whether the service would deliver value for money and harm the interests of commercial providers.

Q&A

Project Canvas - the new Freeview?

However, in a statement the Trust said that "after careful consideration, the Trust has provisionally concluded that Canvas is likely to benefit licence-fee payers.

"We believe Canvas could be an important part of the way in which the BBC delivers its services in the future."

The Trust adds that it is "proposing some conditions on the BBC's participation in the venture, to secure public value and lessen any adverse impact Canvas might have on the wider market". Those include giving unimpaired access to rival broadcasters and a stipulation that users must be able to access the Canvas platform without paying a subscription.

The announcement is likely to be met with dismay by rivals Sky and Virgin Media, who have argued that the service could harm their pay-TV business and offers nothing that commercial providers wouldn't provide.

It's believed that Canvas may offer Sky and Virgin the chance to sell their premium channels via the service to soften the impact on their businesses.

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User comments

steve_adey

Can't see how this is different to Freeview apart from the delivery mechanism. So what are Sky and Virgin afraid of? In fact, it sounds like it may be of value to them. Sky gets delivered through the XBox, instead of satellite. They do like to whinge as soon as something new comes along.
Anyway, virgin are in a perfecft position to offer internet tv.

By Steve_Adey on 22 Dec 2009

Phew

I was worried that common sense wouldn't prevail and this project would be stopped.

Thank goodness that iPlayer, ITVplayer etc. will be merged into a compatible system.

By Stiggy on 22 Dec 2009

Sounds more than a little similar to Project Kangaroo which was stopped by the Competition Commission.

By peterm2k on 22 Dec 2009

Re: steve_adey

It's different in that it will be "on demand". Basically, iPlayer through a set-top box with iTV, C4 and others thrown in to the mix. It's sort of already available to a lot of people with iPlayer games consoles - so it's not all THAT exciting. The addition of the other channels is the only new bit. And, given that the year started with a '1' the last time I watched iTV, I won't be getting too excited by it all.

By Bassey1976 on 22 Dec 2009

You can bet that Virgin and BT will be whining about bandwidth usage though

By ballem on 22 Dec 2009

Freesat

Question, what impact will it have on freesat?

By delturner1 on 22 Dec 2009

Changed?

I understood this was to be the successor to Freeview. i.e. give a return channel, for interactive TV. More advanced than voting on XFactor.
All this stuff about further clogging up the internet with video is new, unimaginative, unwelcome and not broadcasting, hence not BBC territory. Bait and switch to get it through the BBC Trust?

By EconSim on 27 Dec 2009

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