YouView launch date questioned
Technical issues, cost concerns hindering roll out, say moles
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YouView may have been forced to put back the release of its IPTV platform by six months, it has been claimed.
The issues: technical hurdles and concerns over the cost of the endeavour, unnamed sources cited by the Daily Mail say.
The upshot: it'll take YouView longer to put its platform in place than originally anticipated.
YouView's official timetable calls for a summer 2011 launch, but the organisation has said that date is not fixed in stone.
It's job, after all, is not an easy one. It is backed by seven key stakeholders - the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, BT, SeeSaw owner Arqiva and TalkTalk - all with existing IPTV platforms. Working out how to get those systems to talk to each other - or even building an entirely new framework from scratch - will take time.
It is the nature of such projects that early appraisals are optimistic, and completion takes longer - and costs more - than originally anticipated.
When complete, YouView will unify the likes of BBC iPlayer, BT Vision, 4oD and ITV Player, and provide a specification hardware vendors can use to build an app that will deliver all these services to their kit.
Likewise, other content providers will be able to sign up and feed their services through YouView safe in the knowledge they don't need to enter into separate deals with the makers of every playback device they want their content to be presented on.
Success, you might think, would depend on an early release, but such is the gravitational pull of the participants - BBC iPlayer alone had 145m view requests last month - YouView will be hard to ignore, whenever it debuts. ®
COMMENTS
Bloom off Rose?
That's funny - YouView said last month that its "technology team has already successfully defined the technical environment, built the user interface, established a framework for content providers and developed the core technical specifications for developing YouView set top boxes." And indeed, that YouView is "moving from the concept and design phase into the delivery phase".
-- as reported by the Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/anthony_rose_leaves_youview/).
But now you say that "working out how to get [existing IPTV] systems to talk to each other - or even building an entirely new framework from scratch - will take time."
Hmm. Perhaps some revision of the Reg's glowing opinion of Anthony Rose is warranted, given his sudden departure last month with so much work still apparently to do?
Unnamed sources
Are worth about as much as the paper they're printed on, and this is the Daily Heil, which hates everything the BBC does - so a heart-threatening dose of salt is probably justified when considering the truth of the story.
Not to mention it's repeating a story from last November, when YouView chairman Kip Meek was pretty honest about the difficulty of meeting the Easter launch target.
Will it be any good ....
as their own site notes:
>>In operations Andrew Burdess, formerly BT Vision Operations Director and Head of Service Operations at NTL, has joined as Director of Operations. He will take responsibility for developing all consumer facing aspects of the platform and ensuring technical resilience of back end services.<<
"technical resilience of back end services" is about the last thing I would EVER have related to NTL's platform. As for BT Vision. Pffffffff!
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