‘Project Canvas’ Broadband catch-up venture to cost £24 million

easel The BBC, ITV and UK Broadband market leaders BT quietly announced the tentatively titled ‘Project Canvas’ last year – a joint IPTV-based venture which is intended to “bring catch-up from the PC to the TV” – which, according to the BBC Trust is set to cost backers a cool £24 million.

Project Canvas is aimed at providing Freeview and Freesat owners with a broadband connection access to a library of catch-up and on-demand programming on their TV screens, presumably following the IPTV model employed by BT Vision, the digital TV offering from BT, although the Canvas service will be altogether separate from BT Vision, as the service will be made available to anybody with a broadband connection, regardless of whose broadband services they subscribe to.

The Beeb, ITV and BT are all hopeful that the service will be up and running by the beginning of 2010, and hope to attract interest from other major partners, such as Channel 4 and Five.
Today the BBC Trust has launched a consultation into the BBC’s proposals that will be completed by 24 July this year, with the partners hopeful of launching Canvas on Freeview, the free-to-air digital terrestrial TV service, and Freesat, its digital satellite equivalent, in early 2010.

New set top box equipment will have to be purchased for the service, which was billed as ‘Freeview mark two’ by an unnamed source in yesterday’s Guardian.

The boxes plus set-up and connection fees, according to the BBC Trust could end up costing anywhere between £100 and £200, but as Project Canvas is an open platform, it is therefore open to all hardware manufacturers, and so installation and equipment costs would invariably fall as take-up increased. Freeview boxes, when they first came out, cost upwards of three figures, but are now available for as little as £10 from electrical retailers. The new receivers would all be HD Ready, and include interactive programme guides, and the ability to pause, record and rewind a la Sky+.

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