Digital TV Blog

Nearly half of the UK’s cable viewers use VoD

According to Virgin Media, roughly 1.6m of their digital cable television customers, representing nearly half of its TV customer base, make use of the Virgin Central VoD (Video on Demand) services. This includes pay per view content such as movies and music videos as well as content offered on the 7 day catch up service and the BBC iPlayer channel.

The company, which has seen net TV customer additions of 24,800 in the second quarter of 2008, reported that average views of video on demand content per month were 24, compared to 14 during the same period last year.

“During the quarter, we launched the BBC’s iPlayer service on our VoD platform offering hundreds of hours of BBC ‘catch-up’ content,” a Virgin spokesperson explained. “Virgin Media is the first TV platform to make BBC iPlayer available in full screen picture quality directly to its 3.4m digital TV subscribers. Developments like this give VoD a new impetus and help establish on-demand as a genuinely mainstream TV service.”

Virgin also noted that take up of its high definition PVR package V+ is used by nearly half a million of its customers (424,900) or some 13% of its digital TV customer base.

in spite of poor financial management

The BBC Trust has approved a 48% rise in the budget allocation for the BBC website, to £110 million. The increase comes after a review by the corporation’s regulator found that BBC websites cost over 50% more than had been budgeted for last year, due to misallocation of funds and “poor financial management.”

The BBC had planned to spend £74 million on its websites last year, but ended up spending a whopping £110 million because it did not properly account for the cost of maintaining its large collection of sites, which include online local, national and international news, as well as sports commentary pages and weather. £13.8 million of spending for IT support for the websites was misallocated, while staffing costs were £11.1 million higher than had been planned for.

The overspending displayed a “lack of financial accountability” in BBC institutions which resulted in a “serious breach,” according to the trust.

In response to the report, the BBC has said that it will adopt a “cautious approach to new investments” this year. However, in addition to the corporation’s current online services, it wants £39 million extra cash next year for local video news services and educational websites for primary school children, taking the BBC online budget to over £150 million. The iPlayer catch-up service comes under a separate budget.

In a statement the BBC management said that the poor budgeting was “regrettable and we recognise the need to address this.” It is currently drafting a timetable to apply for fresh investment.

Doctor Who and Dot Cotton top downloads

The BBC iPlayer service on Virgin Media saw more than 10m viewers make use of its service in June, according to the first batch of figures released by the quad play company. The June figures are significantly up from the 1.4 million views of BBC content via Virgin when the service was launched in May.

Virgin Media, the first Digital TV platform to give the BBC iPlayer catch-up service its own stand alone menu, managed to attract half as many viewings as the iPlayer website did in June.

Pressing the ‘red button’ on remotes whilst watching a BBC channel on Virgin Media TV brings up the iPlayer menu, without the user having to directly access the internet. Among the top viewings were repeats of EastEnders, Doctor Who and the frankly disturbing kids show In the Night Garden.

Malcolm Wall, the chief executive of content at Virgin Media, said that the figures underlined the “continued success of our on-demand offering,” a sentiment echoed by Rahul Chakkara, the BBC controller for TV platforms, who said: “The initial success on Virgin Media underlines the multiplatform appeal of the BBC iPlayer proposition.”

The iPlayer, which is available to all UK viewers who have an internet connection, has been running fully since Christmas and pulls in an average of 1.5 million users each week.

More Prime Time Reality Family Fun

Amateur choir is to be given a prime-time face-lift on a new show hosted by Myleen Klass and Nick Knowles. Last Choir Standing, to be shown on BBC1, will scour the country for the choir with the most talent, passion and pizzazz. The two presenters will be joined by a panel of judges, X-factor style – the much-loved Tenor Russell Watson, Holby City actress and west-end singer Sharon D. Clarke, and seasoned choral conductor Suzi Digby OBE. The 27 choirs who make it onto the programme will gradually be whittled down to six, when the audience decide who to keep and who to boot.

The choirs couldn’t be more diverse, from a group of hip-hop street kids who struggle to follow the music or the conductor and the all-male Hertfordshire Police Choir to a group of handbag-wielding housewives singing Britney Spears.

Singing in choirs is apparently one of Britain’s favourite pastimes with over 25,000 registered choirs and at least half a million members. “It’s one of the things the UK truly excels at,” says Suzi. “More than any other country, we have an amazing amateur tradition. We are the only country with a 1,000-year unbroken tradition of cathedral choir schools. It is one of the things we really do well.”

Nonetheless, choirs have not always been seen as cool and many of us hold back from singing in public. “There was this idea that if you were going off to choir practice, you were a sad loser,” Suzi continues.

“People also get a psychological block about singing. Parents say their children can’t, siblings laugh – it doesn’t take much for it all to shut down.”

Still, the programme aims to raise the profile of choral Singing. Co-host Nick Knowles, better known as the host of DIY SOS and City Hospital, enthuses that “The public will be treated to some fantastic performances from all the choirs, and it will ultimately be up to them to decide who will be the Last Choir Standing. This will be entertainment television at its best – getting the whole country involved.”
Last Choir Standing will air on Saturday Nights on BBC1 next month.

BBC iPlayer and 4oD come bundled gratis

BT Vision has introduced a monthly subscription for its previously free on-demand digital TV content.

BT Vision who want to make use of the 7-day catch up service now have to sign up for the new £3 a month Replay service for their IPTV demand/Freeview hybrid. However, the subscription also covers the 4oD and BBC iPlayer online services, allowing viewers to enjoy on-demand content on big, widescreens in the living room as opposed to grainy, pixellated flatscreen monitor displays.

Virgin Media, which also offers all its TV customers free catch up TV from the BBC and 4oD said it had no plans to start charging its customers for this content – bearing in mind that Virgin who already charge a premium for their souped-up cable service can probably afford to absorb the cost of on-demand downloads.

TV Tuners for your lappy

Anyone remember the TV Tuner which came out for the Sega Game Gear? On the surface, it was amazing; cheap portable TV! In colour! In reality, it was a shoddy dissapointment, with intermittent reception, crap sound and wrong colours – and that was at the best of times. Plus, the already battery draining nature of the Game Gear, which normally ate up a massive 6 AA’s in the space of four hours, was amplified by this non-functioning monstrosity to the point where you couldn’t actually watch an entire 90 minutes of a football match plus the attendant commentary without the power dying halfway through. It was all well and good if you plugged it in via the mains adapter, but chances are if you were anywhere near a mains socket, then you’d be close to a proper TV set as well, sort of defeating the TV Tuner’s USP.

Fortunately, things have moved on a lot since 1991, no pun intended. A number of a companies have recently started churning out tiny DVB Digital TV tuners which connect to laptops via a USB port, allowing for Freeview channels to be viewed on the move. For about a tenner, you get a Tuner/USB Dongle thingy which comes with an aerial and a remote control – simply run the install CD on your laptop, plug it in and watch it go.

Of the devices currently available, the punchily titled Lupo Digital TV DVB-T USB Adapter Freeview Receiver for PC and Laptop is the most popular, costing a mere £9.99. HD fanatics will be pleased to know that an 1080i HDTV Ready option is available for £15.95 from ebuyer.com.

Whilst TV cards have been available for computers for years now, the release of these plug and play style devices, along with platforms like 4oD and BBC iPlayer, only goes to show how the role of the computer in the household is changing, occupying areas traditionally held by other devices. How long will it be before we can link up our computers to sensors in fridges, which automatically send out orders to the local supermarket when we get a bit low on milk? How long before the Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf becomes a reality?

Project Kangaroo given the hop

The highly anticipated video-on-demand and catch-up service being jointly-developed by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 is apparently going to launch under the name ‘SeeSaw’, according to a recently leaked report.

The service, known so far as Project Kangaroo, due to the fact that it would allow viewers to ‘hop’ from channel to channel has been provisionally renamed SeeSaw, possibly for phonetic reasons, almost certainly because it rolls off the tongue a lot better than Project Kangaroo did.

The trans-channel VoD platform is said to launch sometime next year. BBC Worldwide has yet to seek approval from the BBC Trust, while the project is also being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading.

Currently the project exists in name only - there are no details on how the service would work, whether it would follow the iPlayer/4oD format of offering a 7-day online catch-up service, an archive facility or a combination of the two.

It has been suggested that newly launched Freesat platform will eventually allow customers to stream or view downloaded content from the BBC iPlayer on their living room screens, echoing the recent BBC and Virgin Media agreement.

Digital satellite for the masses

Freesat, the UK’s latest package of free-to-air digital satellite TV channels, has now gone live, allowing viewers access to standard-definition and HD broadcasts for a single, one-off payment.

Freesat, whose logo (left) looks like a handful of colourful guitar plectrums, is the long-awaited result of the collaboration between terrestrial providers ITV and the BBC, which can offer free-to-air channels to regions of the country, such as Cornwall, which currently cannot receive Freeview.

It is rumoured that the BBC iPlayer, along with Project Kangaroo, will become available on Freesat within a year.

Punters fork out for a dish and a set-top box, of which there will be two versions available, SD-only and an HD compatible version. The SD-only kit is mooted to be around £49, with HD receivers reportedly costing around £120-£150. A series of integrated Freesat-compatible iDTV sets are also set to be released, presumably in both SD and HD incarnations.

There is also said to be a one-off installation fee of around £80, although this is said to be variable due to the physical constraints of the property in question, and where in the country the dish is being fitted.

Then there’s installation, which Freesat today said will in the region of £80, though the exact figure will depend on the nature of the property to which the dish will be connected and where in the country it’s located.

Auntie and Ninty bunk up

The BBC’s Future Media and Technology department has announced the inking of a deal with Nintendo UK, that will bring the popular BBC iPlayer to owners of the Nintendo Wii console in the form of an application which streams content to your TV screens over a broadband connection.

Erik Huggers, (a man who sounds like a cutesy cartoon Viking) of le Beeb revealed that Nintendo Wii owners will be able to stream BBC content directly to their tellies via their console via the Opera browser feature of the Wii, a move which should equal joy for twentysomethings across the nation who until recently were forced to watch grainy, low-res episodes of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe on YouTube via their TVs via their Wiis.

“Working with Nintendo marks another exciting milestone for the BBC iPlayer,” Huggers said. “It underlines our commitment to reaching new audiences by making the BBC iPlayer available on as many platforms as possible.”

Once the iPlayer service for the Wii is live, a notification message will be sent to all Wii consoles in the UK currently connected to the internet. In other cross-platform console and digital telly news, BT Vision have hooked up with Xbox 360 manufacturers Microsoft, and Sony are preparing to launch their Play TV install app for the PlayStation 3 which turns their shiny black boxes into a combined games machine/Freeview receiver with record and rewindability.