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The Register: The UK’s top broadcasters have fessed up to working together on a single system for distributing TV online. ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC’s commercial tentacle said today that they aim to launch the joint service on an unspecified date next year.

Details are scarce in yesterday’s announcement, but we’re promised “an exciting collection of over 10,000 hours of the very best of the UK broadcasters’ current and archive programming”. We’ve known about the project, codenamed “Project Kangaroo”, for some months now. The launch name hasn’t been revealed yet.

A Channel 4 spokeswoman said it will likely be similar to 4OD, where catch-up streaming is free, and download to rent or own are paid for. She said the existing 4OD PC client offering will be superceded by software built for the new system.

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The Register: The BBC’s governing body gave a thumbs-up today to limited plans for a high definition TV channel over Sky, Freesat and cable.

Terrestrial TV viewers will be frozen out until at least 2009 because regulators and industry are yet to decide how to divvy up the spectrum freed by switching off analogue transmitters.

Ofcom has indicated that it favours a technology-agnostic auction, and using superior compression to squeeze HD programming into the existing Freeview band.

The plan is being resisted by some TV companies who want to retain the spectrum. It would let viewers who want HD get it sooner, rather than wait for the analogue switch-off to complete in 2012, as well as help open up the airwaves to new uses such as low-power wireless broadband.

The BBC board had suggested it broadcast four hours of HD using the existing Freeview MPEG2 compression standard until new spectrum regulations are decided. The independent BBC Trustees bounced the idea on grounds it could confuse consumers and mean they buy gear that could quickly become defunct.

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BBC News: The town of Whitehaven in Cumbria has become the first place in the UK to undergo the official switchover from analogue to digital TV.

BBC Two’s signal was switched off at 0200 BST on Wednesday, with digital channels replacing it shortly after.

The other signals will go from 14 November, when 25,000 households will need Freeview, satellite, cable or broadband in order to watch television.

Analogue TV will be switched off in the rest of the UK by the end of 2012.

Any local residents who stayed up to watch the switchover would have been watching BBC Two’s Learning Zone before the screen went blank.

Engineers spent 37 minutes switching off the analogue signal on BBC Two and switching on digital versions of BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, CBBC, BBC News 24 and Five.

Other digital channels will follow when analogue BBC One, ITV1 and Channel 4 are switched off next month.

Industry body Digital UK has been overseeing the country’s switchover from analogue.

Chief executive Ford Ennals said it was “a landmark day for British broadcasting history”.

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Telegraph: Plans by the BBC to introduce the country’s first free-to-air high definition (HD) channel moved a step closer as its sovereign body gave provisional approval for the service.

The BBC Trust said that a dedicated HD service on Freeview, transmitting images four times sharper than conventional broadcasts, would deliver “significant public value” for licence-fee payers.

Currently, HD television is available only to satellite and cable subscribers who have bought an HD set-top box and an HD-ready television.

The new channel, costing €306 million a year by 2012, would screen a mix of BBC programmes including children’s shows, documentaries and lifestyle shows as well as big budget dramas, comedies and live sports events such as Wimbledon, the World Cup and the 2012 London Olympics.

But while the corporation will be able to provide a nine-hour service on Sky and cable, it would initially only be able to run it for four hours in the middle of the night on Freeview because of the lack of digital spectrum.

To make room for the channel, the BBC would take down BBC4 and BBC Parliament between 2am and 6am.

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VNUnet: Microsoft is in talks with the BBC about using the broadcaster’s TV content on its Xbox Live gaming service.

The deal would allow gamers to download BBC programmes to their consoles for viewing.

“We are working diligently on multiple fronts to make this happen,” said Ross Honey, senior director for media at Microsoft’s content and partner strategy group. “The BBC is a great content provider.”

It is not known whether UK gamers would pay for such services, however, as content is usually shown free to television licence payers, although the BBC does sell DVD box sets.

Honey said that Microsoft had also approached several other broadcasters in Europe.

Microsoft already runs a similar video-on-demand service for Xbox owners in the US, offering content from MTV, Disney, Fox, CBS, Paramount and Warner Bros.

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Absolute Gadget: Fans of shows such as Little Britain, I’m Alan Partridge, The Office, Doctor Who and the League of Gentlemen – who’s your mobile phone service provider? If it’s O2, rejoice! The BBC is making clips from her favourite television shows available for O2 users to buy.The mobile phone operator and BBC Worldwide have agreed a deal for 300 pieces of media to appear in the O2 Active mobile portal.
That will include content such as ringtones and mobile phone wallpapers.

“BBC Worldwide has access to some of the best known and most loved TV brands,” said Peter Mercier, head of mobile at BBC Worldwide.

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Guardian Unlimited: The BBC’s much-delayed on-demand broadband TV catch-up service, iPlayer, is to launch on July 27.

The service will give broadband users free access to TV and radio programmes that the BBC has broadcast over the previous seven days.

After conducting a public value test, the BBC Trust gave final approval to the service at the end of April. The iPlayer was expected to launch by November, but this has now been brought forward by several months.

The BBC said today it was in discussions with potential distribution partners including MSN, Telegraph.co.uk, AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo, Myspace, Bebo and Blinkx. The iPlayer service will not be available on Apple computers at launch.

BBC licence fee payers will be able to use the iPlayer to catch up on any television or radio programme aired in the previous seven days.

They will also be able to download programmes and save them on their computers for up to 30 days. Once opened, programmes will be viewable for up to seven days.

The iPlayer project has been in gestation for more than three years, during which time rival broadcasters including Channel 4, ITV, BSkyB, Virgin Media and Channel Five have launched their own on-demand services.

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Engadget: While details on this one don’t seem to be completely fleshed out just yet, whispers are that the BBC could be working with ITV, Channel 4, and potentially other players in the future to bring about a “download service that would pool TV content” from the major UK broadcasters.

Currently, there’s a swarm of on-demand offerings from just about every major broadcaster (4OD, for instance), and this collaborative effort would essentially do for VOD what a prior agreement did for digital TV in Britain.

Reportedly, the download service would be built around a P2P infrastructure of some sort (at least initially), but it was noted that it could expand into a “digital TV service” in the future.

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AV Zombie: The prospect of free-to-air high definition TV broadcasting in the UK moved forward this week with the announcement by the BBC that it plans to launch the Freesat platform early 2008. The venture has been approved by the BBC Trust and will be conducted as a joint venture with ITV.
The proposal is for as many as 200 TV channels to be available, most in standard definition but a selection in high definition, all without the need for a subscription. A range of reception equipment will be made available, both SD and HD, receiver only and PVR. (…)

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GuardianUnlimited: Thousands of hours of broadcasting history are to be made available to the public online as part of a plan to open up the BBC’s entire archive to licence-fee payers free of charge.

The radio and TV material, some of which has never been repeated, includes an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and another with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which the former Beatle talks candidly about the impact their relationship had on the band.

Other programmes include a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time. The episode has never been repeated but could soon be available online as part of the ambitious project, headed by the BBC’s director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield.

The BBC wants to put nearly one million hours of material on the internet for viewers to watch, listen to and download and has already begun the long process of retrieving and transferring programmes. A trial involving 20,000 users will begin next month, and the service could be available nationally in a year’s time. Highfield will announce details of the scheme in a speech this week.

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TechDigest: Apple iTunes may begin selling TV shows to Europe from the spring, according to Luxembourg’s economic minister Jeannot Krecke, who said that Apple had been in talks with Luxembourg authorities for several months.

“Apple is going to extend its electronic retail activities in Luxembourg by launching this coming spring its iTunes video platform for the sale of videos in Europe,” Krecke told Agence France Presse.

And in other iTV news, the BBC is looking to make a little history today possibly becoming the first traditional TV station to offer all of their programming on demand and over the Internet.

The BBC’s new iPlayer service will lets viewers watch all of the BBC’s programmes from the previous 7 days, and even lets them store shows on their PC for up to 30 days. A final decision approving the service will be made May 2nd.

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ElectronicsWeekly: The UK’s four major broadcasters have called for HDTV to be run on the terrestrial TV ahead of the region’s analogue switch off in 2012.

Trials of HDTV on terrestrial by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five have just finished in London, and nearly all (86%) of trialists expected to see HD services within three years, well before analogue switch-off. Nine out of ten believed that the four broadcasters should be at the forefront of HD developments.

“It’s clear even from this small trial that audiences increasingly expect us and the other major broadcasters to offer high quality HD programming on Freeview in the future,” said Seetha Kumar, head of HDTV at the BBC.

The problem is that HDTV takes four to five times the bandwidth of existing standard definition digital TV. The BBC has demonstrated terrestrial HD at 10Mbit/s with MPEG4, and the trial used standard MPEG4 HDTV boxes from Humax and ADB with digital terrestrial TV (DTT) front ends.

The Digital TV Group (DTG) is investigating the use of a polarising approach that could be used to deliver HD services alongside existing broadcasts. This is one of the options or the second generation of the DTT specification by the international DVB standards group, but would require a new radio receiver chip. This is not likely until 2009 at the earliest.

“Technically, the trial has more than fulfilled our expectations. All major technical hurdles are behind us,” said Simon Fell, director of technology at ITV Consumer.

However, the likelihood of HD services before switch-off is low. “We have previously said that the spectrum allocation [after analogue switch-off] will be market led so if there is a demand for HD then that will be what it is used for,” said a Government spokeswoman.

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