by Derek Morrison, 13 December 2008
So the UK Competition Commmission has put a barrier in the way of the launch on the joint BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 Video on Demand (VoD) service with the working title of the Kangaroo project (perhaps to be called the SewSaw VoD portal?) Sky and Virgin Media weren’t very happy with the triumvirate carving up the video internet download/streaming market in this way and so the Kangaroo project team are now being required to think more inclusively.
The driving force behind Kangaroo is undoubtedly the BBC whose “Listen/View again” iPlayer service has been a bit hit. Consequently, the other mainstream broadcasters now also offer their equivalent services, e.g ITV Catch-up, Channel 4’s 4oD, and Five’s Demand Five.
As some long time readers of Auricle may know I have expressed serious concerns in that the move to such online distribution, broadcasting, and narrowcasting is also introducing new inefficiencies and loss of freedoms whilst being presented in a “white heat of technology” overcoat.
Inefficiencies? Loss of freedoms?
One inefficiency that I had hoped Kangaroo would resolve is the provision of a common single interface for accessing video content. For example, when I wish to change to a different channel (broadcaster) on a television I click a single button on a remote control and it just happens. In the online world each broadcaster imposes their own media player/download device which is one reason that the BBC’s streaming variant of iPlayer is preferred (except by ISPs who perceive it as hogging their bandwidth).
To explain my assertion about impending loss of freedoms its necessary to draw another comparison with the consumer empowering devices such as video tape recorders, DVD, and Hard Disk recorders which enabled archiving of material to watch at the consumers leisure. With digital services like iPlayer (and probably Kangaroo variants) you get a certain amount of time to view and then then the right expires or is taken down at the host web site. So the service giveth but the service will also taketh. And those with Sky+ or equivalent recorders may wish to take careful note of the recent ‘technical error’ which transmitted “inhibit DVD recording” data in the video data stream of the Sky+ service (Sky+ glitch sparks fears over TV archiving, Guardian, 4 December 2008). Oh! and as well as digital rights management systems removing previously enjoyed functionality some argue that technologies like iPlayer will also be a major driver in raising the costs of broadband or creating a two tier internet, e.g. see How iPlayer will become our player for your friends (Guardian, 11 December 2008).
But back to Kangaroo. Rather than providing a single digital interface equivalent to the ease of use offered by the TV service it now looks like Kangaroo is going to become somewhat similar to the US Hulu video archive service. Kangaroo isn’t going to deliver a unified “View Again” service based on a collaborative iPlayer type digital device for very recent programmes, although it may well do so for older stock. For recent programmes it looks like each broadcaster is going to continue to do their own thing on the video download front, although for video streaming at least the Flash player is facilitating a de facto delivery standard. When using the computer as the interface to such material we tend to be pretty tolerant of this type of thing but mainstreaming online broadcasting will meet a less tolerant audience who will want the simplicity and consistency of a TV-type interface. The reality is, of course, that what was once a humble television, in its modern form, looks like becoming yet another example of an embedded computer with various sizes of LCD or similar screens attached. If our desktop and laptop experience so far is anything to go by, that suggests that developers and service providers may well expect that the humans will need to adapt to the rich interface possibilities of their various competing services rather than waste time yearning for the relative simplicity of a bygone age when devices were so simple you just turned them on and used them.
