I attended an interesting First Tuesday session this week at London’s Soho Hotel. The speakers included the BBC, BT, Google and Sky.
It was a heavyweight panel assembled to discuss the issues around IPTV and video-on-demand.
Jeff Nathenson, strategic partner director at YouTube, was about as on-message as anybody within the Google empire could – and should - be on the paradigm shift towards online content.
Of course video on the web isn’t anything new, but even YouTube is now talking long form, quality video-on-demand as the compelling alternative to ‘the TV schedule’, resigning The Radio Times to the dusty files of history, between the Doomsday Book and 101 Ways to Cook a Dodo.
It’s no longer about 10 second clips of people falling off skateboards, this is about monetised, quality programming, such as that already provided by BBC iPlayer, which at its peak has already accounted for 20 per cent of UK internet traffic – and regularly accounts for a quarter of consumer internet traffic.
These are all wonderful intentions but for me those BBC figures point towards the elephant in the room, which is bandwidth and what this all means for the future of the internet. In essence these guys are all building bigger and bigger content juggernauts and if the roads can’t cope… well that’s not their fault.
One panellist, pleading for Chatham House rules in a way that betrayed the courage of his convictions, said: “If ISPs aren’t charging enough then that’s their problem.”
Ouch.
The chap from the BBC meanwhile outlined ‘Project Cheetah’. That will see iPlayer content cached on ISP networks, using kit paid for by the BBC. In doing so, the iPlayer’s massive impact on internet infrastructure will be mitigated. Such a project, in conjunction with – as I understand it, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse - will certainly reduce the bandwidth crunch and potentially ease some of the ill-feeling from ISPs towards the BBC.
Meanwhile, other questions raised were around which companies will dominate in the delivery of download content. Matthew Porter, head of digital at Entertainment UK, said of Apple, the major player in this field for music and latterly movies and television shows: “If the company owns 85 per cent of a market then that’s good for nobody except Apple.”
And if you thought talk of monopolies and anti-competitive practices would have the man from the Beeb squirming in his seat, you’d be wrong. “The BBC is a subscription service. It just happens to be mandatory,” joked Richard Titus from BBC future media and technology.
That will ease any licence fee payer discontent. As will guarantees the BBC will never raise revenue from advertising on the iPlayer – remember that pledge.
But despite incurring costs it could never have anticipated, the BBC talks a good game around iPlayer and its roll-out onto mobile and even the Nintendo Wii suggests the corporation will press on with its loss leader.
Sky and BT were similarly bullish about what IP means to them.
But what became increasingly clear through the presentations and discussions is how Google is still struggling to find a purpose for the investment sink-hole that is YouTube.
Despite the talk, by its own admission YouTube will always find its limitations pegged to the bedroom-enthusiast of the broadcasting world, with some complementary promo for prime time broadcasters thrown in for good measure.
Although he talked up the potential revenue that could make one person a decent wage, Google’s Nathenson conceded YouTube won’t ever have the financial model to compete with the broadcasters’ own offerings. “If you’re looking to go off and shoot The Blue Planet then don’t expect to make your money back on YouTube,” he said.
Comments