Television on the internet – Westminster eForum
I don’t attend a great number of conferences, and I am always fascinated when I do by the struggle speakers have to say something genuinely visionary while at the same time accurately reflecting the realities to which the organisations they represent are acutely sensitive.
In this context, today’s Westminster eForum on VoD, IPTV and Webcasting managed a particularly good balancing act, with some excellent commentary from Richard Halton (Project Canvas), Tess Alps (Thinkbox), Asanga Gunatillaka (Virgin TV) and Pete Johnson (BBFC) amongst others. All managed to avoid being bogged down by gazing into crystal balls and demonstrated quite how exciting a combination high quality creative content and new distribution methods can be.
Much of the discussion focused on what on-demand channels need to offer consumers to attract mainstream viewers. For what it’s worth, I think many of the panelists underestimated the appetite for VoD services based on current behaviours which I feel require only a unified and accessible platform to be changed forever.
For this reason, it was great to hear John Keeling from Arqiva mention the power of the PS3′s iPlayer integration, and fascinating to find out more about Project Canvas, which will offer an open platform for public broadcasting, a new wave of semi-professional but high quality content providers and traditional broadcasters alike- think AppStore meets Freeview meets YouTube channels.
Much of the rest of the discussion concerned the difficulty of regulating on-demand (and particularly Internet-based services). On this I have very little to say other than gosh, that does sound difficult.
One theme not touched on quite as much as I’d like was the nature of the content itself, and how this affects both the role of traditional broadcasters and regulatory bodies.
In terms of this “universal and accessible platform”, presumably eventually all TV signals will eventually just become another internet stream, and TV’s just a variant design of the “media centre PC”?
I like the role the PS3 is trying to play in the integration of home entertainment, bu they don’t (to me) seem to have advertised that role enough – I’ve heard lots of people dismiss the PS3 as an inferior, overpriced games console without realising its fantastic benefits as an all-round media platform
Jonathan Theodore
26 Sep 09 at 11.02 PM