We speak to Richard Halton, Director of IPTV at the BBC and responsible for the Project Canvas initiative.

Prior to this position, Mr. Halton was Controller of Business Strategy at the BBC (2006-08), co-led Creative Future, the BBC's editorial strategy (2005-06) and was Controller of Television Strategy (2003-05).  Through these different roles Richard has been instrumental in shaping the BBC's response to the changing audience, competitive and technology environment, led the development of a number of the BBC's existing services and led teams responsible for many of the BBC's existing commercial and policy frameworks.

Project Canvas has made some solid progress since last year's IPTV World Forum, having added new partners (including Channel 4 and ISP TalkTalk), and received conditional approval from the BBC Trust.  Where do preparations currently stand for launch of the service?

RH: The Trust closed their public consultation on the Canvas proposals on February 2nd, and we are expecting their final conclusions back in due course. We’re not able to commit to a launch date at this stage, but it has always been our ambition to launch before the end of 2010.

However, this is obviously dependent on the Trust’s final conclusions and we can’t predict at this stage whether or not this will be possible. In the meantime, we are working closely with industry bodies including the DTG to develop an IPTV common standard on which we would be able to build the open Canvas platform, should the BBC Trust grant final approval.



Erik Huggers, Director of Future Media & Technology, recently stated that the service could well include an app store.  Do you think this will be a general trend for all advanced TV services and devices?

We are hugely excited by the opportunity of the Canvas open platform hosting apps from a wide range of content providers. There will be no commercial relationship between Canvas & content providers, breaking down the barriers to entry that have traditionally existed to gaining access to the TV screen, providing content producers with a host of exciting creative & public service opportunities.

I can’t speak for the rest of the industry, but certainly Canvas will offer a valuable open platform on which apps would be able to prosper, encouraging innovation across the creative industries.



How do you think the recent introduction of high-speed fibre-based broadband connections by BT will affect the potential of broadband-based TV services in the UK, such as Project Canvas?


Naturally, as the Internet takes on more and more significance as a means of delivering content in this country, then the greater the investment in high-speed broadband, the better.

However, we don’t envisage that Canvas will require huge amounts of bandwidth to deliver an excellent user experience: if you work to the mandate in the Digital Britain report that there should be a minimum broadband speed of 2 Mbps by 2012, this will be enough to deliver Canvas services according to figures submitted to the BBC Trust.

The original set of proposals for Project Canvas also contain a minimum quality threshold for Canvas so that consumers will receive a guarantee from their ISP that they offer a fast enough service to ensure a high quality Canvas experience. This assurance for consumers will apply to all content providers that sit on the platform.

How do you see it dovetailing with present services such as BT Vision, and proposed platforms such as HbbTV?

BT Vision is currently BT's proprietary TV platform. BT partners in Canvas, it's their call on how Canvas would change the BT Vision proposition, but in addition to models for them as an ISP, BT Vision could operate on Canvas as a pay-TV service same as any other. Point is there's lots of opportunity for lots of business models.
 
HbbTV is not so much a platform as a common standard similar to that the DTG are working on. An open platform needs a common standard to comply with and the canvas team are also working closely with DTG on this - we see this as an essential pre-condition to Canvas.

Canvas is working with HbbTV to ensure there's alignment where possible, and our hope would be that the HbbTV and DTG standards are compatible as this makes life easier for the manufacturers. It's a complicated three-way process with a lot of stakeholders involved but our focus is on making things as simple as possible for the value chain and consumer.


On a wider level, do you think IP-based TV services will eventually dominate Europe's pay-TV markets, or will there continue to be a plethora of access technologies for the foreseeable future?

Linear and on-demand are only starting to converge, so it's probably premature to start picking winners. We expect linear will continue to be prominent for some years yet so no-one is writing off DTT or DSat just yet, not least because of the limited capacity on IP networks - and that the market will continue to support a range of free-to-air and subscription platforms.
 
Should it be approved, Canvas’ role in creating an open IPTV platform will bring all this together in one open platform, supporting both free and paid-for content - driving innovation in the industry, and secure the future for free-to-air broadcasting in the UK, following in the footsteps of the BBC’s involvement in Freesat and Freeview.