BBC Leads TV Technology Market
Speaking at the MediaTelINSIGHT TV Technology seminar, held in conjunction with the MediaGuardian, Rahul Chakkara, Head of BBCi, outlined some of the Corporation’s new devices leading the way in interactive television.
Chakkara started by discussing three main trends identified by the BBC in consumer television viewing in relation to personal video recorder (PVR) usage.
The first pattern Chakkara looked at was “awareness” claiming that although PVRs had taken a long time to get into people’s homes, due to word of mouth, the technology was now increasingly becoming part of their media mix.
The BBCi boss predicted PVR-enabled households to greatly rise over the next few months, with Christmas boosting sales of the devices, leading Chakkara to predict PVR penetration to surpass previous estimates.
The second trend was the rising scale of storage capability, with PVRs increasing their content capacity and therefore the number of programmes they can hold, but not their prices.
Cost of producing content was also shown to be reducing dramatically, enabling more people to make content and thus increase the amount of choice for programme controllers.
These three trends all combine to offer consumers a vast choice of programming available through their PVR boxes. However, with rising content, problems such as navigation and storage of many programmes available must be looked at.
The BBC has developed its own PVR box, called Pandora, which has the ability to hold the entire public service broadcasting for the last nine days.
Chakkara explained: “We have zillions of hours of content available to you. The challenge of Pandora is how we get the content in front of you and make it easier to navigate – from the BBC’s point of view that’s the hardest challenge.”
The head of BBCi also discussed its new PC- based technology, iMP (integrated Media Player), which allows users to view television programmes and listen to radio shows for up to seven days after their original broadcast.
The iMP device was launched last week and is currently undergoing a consumer trial with 5,000 trialists to evaluate the service.
At the MediaTel INSIGHT seminar, the other panellists, including Tess Alps, chairman of PHD; Nigel Foote, managing partner at Starcom; and Andrew McIntosh, research director for ids, all commended the BBC for its high profile role in leading the way with its television technology.
Alps commented: “The BBC has done what we expect them to do with public money, be innovative, take risks in a way that commercial broadcasters may not have done and set standards,”
She continued: “They have set bench marks with everybody else and I do not think there would be nearly as an advanced an interactive society without them.
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