Digital rights are crushing open source Internet TV

EVERYTHING IS TELLY, the smiling participants in an Intel video told the audience but in fact digital rights management (DRM) is locking progress into, well, your telly.

At Chipzilla's 30 June future of television event the CTO of the BBC led second generation Iplayer Project Canvas, Anthony Rose, told the audience that the TV programme UI to end all UIs will be set-top box only because of DRM. Canvas is described as an open platform using common standards through which viewers will access both free and pay to view programming.

In response to a question about whether Canvas will be accessible through a variety of television and computing devices, Rose said, "Content rights is the problem not the technology. We don't have the rights for it to work on other devices." However he promised that a Canvas website will be accessible for basic content data such as what's available when you get home.

"For now it is just a set top box proposition," Rose told the audience, a day after Talk Talk announced that it will give away Canvas set-top boxes with a new broadband offer expected in 2011. Rose told the Intel event audience that his team still had "quite a lot of tech work to do" and that the first half of 2011 is the likely commercial launch timeframe for the telly technology. He said that he expects we'll see TV sets that are Canvas enabled in the future, too.

The Intel event also heard that the online viewing of programmes only represents two per cent of total UK telly watching but no data was given on how much of that is illegally streamed or downloaded by filesharers, which makes a mockery of DRM.

Ad agency WPP Corporation CEO Sir Martin Sorrell described a telly business landscape that is dominated today by the content providers, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and others, but will soon see battles between them, mobile TV enabled computing device manufacturers and the "platform providers", the likes of Rupert Murdoch's Sky and Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Media. Sorrell explained that his company's analysis is that the platform providers will win because "customers want a single relationship and not a portfolio [of companies to deal with]".

Sky and Virgin Media have already criticised Project Canvas as being government intervention and potentially market distorting. Rose defended Canvas saying there was nothing stopping both companies allowing their programming to be accessed as free or pay to view through Canvas. The truth about Sky and Virgin Media's intentions is probably that they don't want another platform provider, such as Canvas, making it more difficult to carve up the future Internet telly market between them. µ