Joint venture plans set-top boxes allowing people to watch live TV and web programmes
The planned internet television service Youview will be based around conventional television broadcasts that viewers are familiar with, one of its bosses has said.
Youview, a joint venture between the BBC and other domestic broadcasters and technology companies, will offer set-top boxes for viewers to plug into televisions that will allow them to watch live TV and internet broadcasts. It was previously known as Project Canvas and is a collaboration between ITV, Channel 4, Five, Arqiva, BT, Talktalk and the BBC.
Speaking at a Mashup conference in London, Youview’s chief technology officer Anthony Rose said that some technology companies were ignoring what he called ‘linear television’ (standard over-the-air broadcasts).
According to the industry news website Broadband TV News he said the “Silicon Valley kids” Google and Apple, which are bringing out their own TV set-top-boxes, have forgotten about conventional broadcasting, but that viewers would continue to watch it because it was what they were used to.
Mr Rose said that today the schedulers at television stations are the people who “create demand” for programmes but that “as you move online the user has to work a lot harder. You need to have a new way to create and drive demand.”
He also said that current demonstration versions of the Youview service display a ‘thumbs up’ icon to show that other viewers were impressed with a particular programme, and that in the electronic programme guide viewers can move backwards through the calendar to catch up on shows they’ve missed.
Another demonstration showed the box transmitting data both to a television screen and a mobile device. This allows, for example, one viewer to listen to audio description without disturbing others in the room.
Mr Rose said that although the service will automatically capture information about what people were watching, it wouldn’t be a privacy problem as long as there was an option to erase the data, as there is in modern web browsers.
