Canvas Emerges

Project Canvas emerged in the aftermath of Project Kangaroo, which the Competition Commission shuttered after complaints from Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB and Virgin Media about the possibility of it creating a monopoly.

The BBC moved on to Project Canvas, a more ambitious undertaking, and one that has also been the subject of criticism from BSkyB and Virgin Media, the largest satellite and cable operators in the U.K.

But no matter, as Project Canvas has now cleared the first hurdle on its path to becoming reality.

BBC Trust Approval

The BBC Trust is the body which governs the BBC and everything it does. This is needed because the BBC is a publicly-funded corporation rather than a private, commercial company.

At the end of November it emerged that Project Canvas could be delayed until 2011 due to the notoriously laborious red tape at the BBC. But that now looks like being a pessimistic timescale as the BBC Trust has approved Canvas after nine months of consultation and review.

Proposed Conditions

The BBC Trust’s approval is merely a preliminary one at this stage. It is now holding a second round of consultation until February, and has set some conditions on the BBC’s participation in the venture.

BBC News reports the following conditions as having been proposed:

• The core technical specification must be published well in advance to allow manufacturers to adapt to the Canvas standard.

• Other content providers must have access to the platform.

• Any quality standards for internet service providers must be applied on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.

• A Trust review, 12 months after its launch, will assess the effects Canvas has on the partner’s incentives to syndicate their content to other platforms.

• The platform must remain accessible without a subscription.

• The BBC must return for further approval if costs exceed those projected by more than 20% in any one year.

• The BBC must report on whether the proposed accessibility features, such as audio description, have been incorporated. The Trust will review the signposting of content and parental controls.

Conclusions

While this doesn’t mean Project Canvas will definitely see the light of day, it makes it much more likely. And that could mean Canvas set-top boxes on sales by this time next year.

The proposed cost is £200 and for that price it would seem to be a bargain, enabling a whole range of online TV offerings to be watched in the living room.

Boxee

Boxee is best described as a cross-platform, open-source media center for all. It allows computer users to manage all their media content, including video, from one central location thanks to a downloadable piece of software.

Boxee works on PC, Mac, and Linux and is designed to be used with a TV, bringing Web video into the living room. In August, Boxee secured new funding to enable it to take the service to the next level. And it’s doing just that.

Boxee Beta

Boxee is currently in alpha and has a growing band of users. However, it’s now entered a private beta, with selected users testing the new software until it’s deemed ready to be rolled out to the general public.

The new interface is designed to be user-friendly and accessible by as many people as possible. To that end, the homepage is being made easier to navigate, with social media interaction and recommendations taking center stage.

Local and Internet content is now as one, making everything easier to play. The queuing options and apps options have been made easier to follow and the ability to share content has been increased. There are screenshots galore on the Boxee blog.

Boxee Box

For those either without a computer or who prefer to have dedicated systems rather than using their computer as a middleman, Boxee is releasing the Boxee Box from D-Link.

The Boxee Box has been developed by D-Link, with Astro Design responsible for the very brave “submerged cube” look of it. The Boxee Box will be available to buy during the second quarter of 2010 and cost around $200.

The Boxee Box includes as RF remote, Wi-Fi, a multitude of outputs, and two USB slots. The system will be demonstrated in full during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

Content Partners

Lastly comes news of a quartet of new content partners joining Boxee. Clicker indexes videos from YouTube, ComedyCentral and others; The Escapist is a video games news site most-known for Zero Punctuation; Suicide Girls is a site for fans of dirty, punk and emo girls (who isn’t?); The Tisch School of the Arts is part of NYU.

Conclusions

With these new announcements Boxee is well on its way to mainstream adoption, and that should happen over the next 12 months or so. However, to truly grab people’s attention it needs a big-hitter in the content department. Hulu would do nicely.

DMGI basically pushes online content by doing all of the admin i.e. processing, encoding, delivering, and marketing before punting the transcoded material into the market place.

Big Names Under Its Belt

Founded in 2005 with an express focus on music it wasn’t until 2006 that the company branched out into video content. Now the household names that DMGI processes video for include big hitters such as iTunes, Joost, YouTube, Walmart, Amazon, Veoh, Netflix, Helio and mSpot.

Great work if you can get it and judging by that who’s who of broadband video customer list, it looks like DMGI have something of a stronghold on the corporate transcoding market, making this deal great news for Telestream.

“Episode Engine is a perfect addition to DMGI’s high-volume Final Cut Pro workflow. It underscores the value of Episode’s scalability to start with a desktop application, easily expand to a server-based solution and continue to grow to a clustered server environment to meet DMGI’s rapidly growing business needs”

Said David Heppe, President/COO at Telestream *whilst laughing all the way to the bank* (probably).

[Via Press Release]

“Juniper Networks has added the E-120 Router to their E-Series which offers providers the ability to give media agencies and programmers viewing data with a level of detail that even Nielsen can’t provide,” said Gary Southwell, Juniper’s director of multiplay solutions. 

“It’s no longer a sample of subscriber activity, it’s a per channel, per time slot, per ad slot view of actual IPTV usage.”

“The E120 addresses a major concern for service providers, specifically how to cost-effectively scale their IPTV services to reach a larger subscriber base served by smaller, space and power-constrained sites,” said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst, Broadband and IPTV, Infonetics Research.

However Motorola has had a strong placement in the set top box (STB) market for some time. Last year it announced that it has shifted 50 million cable boxes.

Those 70 million devices span from the many partner companies that DivX has teamed up with over the past few years. Davis Freeberg decided to delve a little deeper into these partnerships to see who has come one board with DivX and who has been jumping ship.

ThePlatform has been powering a variety of online video destinations including ABC News, A&E, Amp’d Mobile, CNBC, College Sports TV, Court TV, Comcast, E!, Hearst, Microsoft, the Oxygen Network, PRIMEDIA, Scripps, Sony/BMG Music, Ruckus, Vongo, Telstra, Verizon Wireless, and G4.

The features that really separates thePlatform from other video platforms like Brightcove is its ability to customize.

Companies using Microsoft’s IPTV Platform

• AT&T
• U-Verse TV
• BT
• BT Vision
• DT
• T-Online Germany
• T-Home
• Magyar Telecom
• Slovak Telecom
• Swisscom
• Bluewin TV
• T-Online France
• Club Internet
• Beijing Telecom
• Bell Canada
• TDC (Denmark)
• Telecom Italia
• T-Online Spain
• Ya.com
• Wind (Italy)
• Verizon
• FiOS TV
• (Foundation Hybrid)

Trial Customers

• BellSouth
• Reliance Communications
• Singtel
• Telkom South Africa

For best debt consolidation online visit Smackdebt