IBC - A Few Afterthoughts and Reflections
Colin Dixon, Practice Manager, Broadband Media
Sept. 18, 2007
As I sit here on the plane returning to the U.S. after a most enjoyable IBC, I find myself thinking about the state of the digital media industry as reflected in the show's conference sessions and exhibit halls. Every vendor was trying to position themselves as providing "key solutions" capable of leading operators and content providers to the "Promised Land" of this shiny new digital, HD, Internet-enabled, space/time/deviceshifting video-driven world. Despite this positioning, none of the vendors seemed to know precisely where this hallowed place might be found, or at least their message was difficult to discern from amongst the clatter and noise of the show.
BBC and iPlayer
Despite this five-day clamor, one company seemed to separate itself from the others: the BBC. On the very first day of conference sessions (the day before the tradeshow opened), I sat in on a presentation by Richard Cooper, Head of Technology New Media at the BBC. He described BBC's content strategy and the products and services needed to implement it.
For the BBC, everything starts with a simple mandate: to meet its audience wherever they may be, a substantial percentage of which is now online. Accordingly, Cooper spent a good deal of time describing the BBC's iPlayer initiative, a new service which makes all of the BBC's national TV broadcasts available for free download to anyone in the UK for one full week from original broadcast. Once a viewer downloads a show, they have 30 days to start watching it and seven days to finish. As Cooper explained, with the iPlayer service, the BBC has made "the unmissable unmissable." Users of the service seem to think the same thing, already downloading on average two shows a week.
Harnessing the Disruptive Power of Broadband Video
But how will the BBC feel when this content starts showing up on some of the 140 million broadband-enabled televisions as opposed to just PCs?¹ Far from worrying about whether this marginalizes its broadcast channels, the BBC is actually banking on it being there (a novel stance among broadcasters, for certain).
One key component of the BBC's strategy involves developing a video streaming service. At the moment, the BBC is trialing a streaming service with more than 1,000 hours of archive content, a library which will eventually see the entire BBC video archive cross-referenced, indexed, searchable, and available on-demand, on-line. Most interesting is that this streaming service (and its vast library of content) is actually targeted for the living room television, not the PC.
In the grand tradition of the BBC Computer and BBC Basic, the Company is also trialing a hybrid Freeview broadband set-top box (no doubt to be called BBC STB!) capable of streaming content directly to the viewer's TV using 1.5 Mbps MPEG-4.² If you want to watch an episode of Doctor Who from 1975, you can quickly find and watch "The Mind Robber." If you want to find other shows with Patrick Troughton (one of the actors who played Doctor Who), you can quickly do that as well and, if you are so inclined, watch him play Robin Hood.
Scale Matters
The BBC is certainly not the first to deliver these types of services, but the sheer scale of the undertaking is nothing short of breathtaking. To be sure, part of the reason it can take on such a huge task is because it is relatively unencumbered by the profit motive. With every U.K. household paying on average £135.50 ($280) per year to the BBC, the company has a budget to rival some small countries! And as the TV consumer starts to watch video on every device that has a screen, and every device becomes connected to the Internet, the BBC will be well positioned to deliver content everywhere their viewers happen to be.
So, as a microcosm of where we are and where we are headed in our industry, the BBC provides us with a fascinating test market and possibly a beacon to the future. I, for one, can't wait for IBC 2008 to hear how these projects have evolved.
1 TDG's forecast for global broadband TV households in 2011.
2 Freeview is the name given to free-to-air digital terrestrial television in the UK. It is not a service of the BBC.
This is one of Colin Dixon's Opinions on IBC 2007. Read his other Opinions:
IBC-1:Trapped in IPTV Land
IBC-2: Of Guides, Graphics and Quality
About The Diffusion Group (TDG):
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