Competition try to tear Canvas

Project Canvas, the joint venture between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, BT, TalkTalk and Arqiva which will deliver TV channels through a set top box (which is connected to an aerial for receiving DTV and the Internet for IPTV) and is now known as Youview has been given the go-ahead by Ofcom.

Actually Ofcom has decided not to accept complaints from Virgin Media, IP Vision and 11 other parties including BSkyB.

Ofcom's reasons are that the IP TV market is still fledgeling and it's too soon to see if Youview will make a difference in the market, Youview should benefit consumers and if they do harm the competition will the harm outweigh the benefit and the alleged harm may not occur depending on the technical specifications of the system.

Youview has gone through many iterations and current traditional pap-per-view systems like Virgin and Sky have the most to lose if a generic IP TV system can be brought into play that utilises people's broadband to deliver high quality IP TV services. Both BT and TalkTalk are part of the project and will be delivering fibre-to-the-street cabinet/premises (FTTC/FTTP) services which will deliver 40Mb/s - 100Mb/s to the home, which is enough for HDTV, thus negating the need for people to buy satellite TV or cable TV.

The fill press release is available from Ofcom

Project Canvas becomes Youview

The hotly debated TV service known as Project Canvas has now come out of hiding to be called Youview TV Ltd and known as Youview.

Youview has several main partners, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, BT, TalkTalk and Arquiva with innovation partners from Cisco, Humax and Technicolor.

Youview will be available through a set-top-box which connects to your TV aerial and your broadband connection offering access to standard TV services (which can be watched as they're broadcast or after). The standard services will be free, though PayTV options will also be available giving access to movies and other premium content (like shows).

The obvious company that isn't a partner is BSkyB and they tried to kill Project Canvas off initially as a major threat to their PayTV services.

Youview has also published various technical documents which should allow anyone to develop for the platform, provide content services and even build set-top-boxes. How open they'll actually be is as yet unknown as only the original players are currently content providers.

In the US Apple TV (with it's reduced price of $99 for the box) is seen as a threat to traditional broadcasters and more so with services such as google_ad_client = "ca-pub-6436042832350334"; google_ad_host = "ca-host-pub-1556223355139109"; google_ad_host_channel = "L0007"; google_ad_slot = "7906232303"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60;