Connected TV

A fascinating insight into some of the technical issues faced by the BBC in the running of its iPlayer service, and the Corporation’s future plans for it, can be found in the latest issue of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) Technical Review. This takes the form of an extended interview by Franc Kozamernik of the EBU’s technical department with Anthony Rose, BBC Controller Vision & Online.

The impulse behind this conversation, incidentally, arises from the fact that the EBU has set up a Project Group to develop something similar to the iPlayer called the “EBU Media Player”, designed to be capable of delivering “all kinds of content including the streams received from satellite, terrestrial, cable and IPTV channels as well as VoD and catch-up TV.” It’s not widely known, I think, that the BBC’s fellow European PSBs are planning to set up a sort of pan-European iPlayer initiative.

The most intriguing part of the interview, however, involves the BBC’s proposed response to the fact that the popularity of the iPlayer is causing problems for ISPs. Rose admits that “The reality is that about 7% of peak UK internet usage is due to the iPlayer,” but rather surprisingly considers this to constitute “only a small fraction of the overall traffic.”

Nevertheless, Rose thinks the issue is worth addressing, suggesting that the BBC provide the iPlayer service in a number of separate tiers offering different picture qualities, so that ISPs can charge their subscribers differing amounts for them. “We were offering streaming initially at 500 Kbit/s. Today we are also offering 800 Kbit/s and in three months time we might be offering 1.5 Mbit/s.”

This “scalable business model”, suggests Rose, would mean that “the user can get a good quality iPlayer service for, say, £10 a month [from the ISP] but for £20, a much better iPlayer quality would be available. If we can create iPlayer in tiers, then ISPs will be able to work out how to sell that.”

Rose goes on to suggest that “Every content provider should create such quality tiers and then ISPs will be able to build business models around these propositions. This can lead to win-win situations and ISPs will see video services as a profit centre rather than a cost burden.”

Such a model looks nice on paper, but it’s probably safe to say that such a proposal would be likely to cause some controversy if adopted!

First, the BBC iPlayer service is funded by the licence fee, and viewers accordingly expect to get it for free. But if ISPs start explicitly allocating different ‘quality’ versions of the iPlayer to different subscription ‘tiers’, users would, in Connected TV’s view, be likely to view it as the creation of a paid-for service where no such subscription previously existed.

Worse still, the ISPs would be perceived to be openly transferring the cost of BBC iPlayer distribution from themselves to the user, rather than either absorbing it themselves or passing it back to the BBC.

This sits uneasily with a principle of universality which requires the BBC to bear the cost of distribution on different platforms through the single fixed fee it collects from all UK television viewers. The cost of the licence fee does not vary depending on whether that viewer is a terrestrial, satellite, cable or online viewer.

That, however, is what the argument between the ISPs and the BBC is all about. The Corporation pays for distribution on the traditional digital TV platforms, they will argue, so why not on broadband?

This argument is likely to intensify when the new proposed broadband-capable Freeview hardware platform - now known as Canvas - emerges. This is designed to incorporate iPlayer capability. According to Rose’s proposal, viewers would find themselves watching broadcast BBC programmes on their TV set through a Canvas box ‘for free’, but paying extra to watch the same programming in catch-up mode at an equivalent quality level through the same box on the same TV set, and presumably through the same EPG.

It will be interesting to see how the ISPs (and the politicians) react…