Youview Promises 'Open Standards' for Application Development

Posted by Richard Kastelein in Breaking News on October 13, 2010  |  0 Comments More from this author  |    |  Follow Richard Kastelein on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

Julian Clover from Broadband TV News has delivered a brilliant scoop on the app play for Youview (formerly known as Project Canvas) during during London's recent Mashup event Mashup TV, Pay TV, Over The Top (OTT) TV and DLNA – along with a few more nibbles of interesting information about the project.

YouView CTO Anthony Rose has given an insight into the type of applications that will be possible when the hybrid broadcast service goes live next year. Speaking at the Mashup event Mashup TV, Pay TV, Over The Top (OTT) TV and DLNA, Rose characterised YouView as having three parts to it, open standards, client software and a metadata ingest.

Rose said the “Silicon Valley kids” such as Google and Apple had forgotten about linear television. Viewers would continue to watch linear content because it was the legacy on their TV set and live. “The driver is who creates demand and today it’s the scheduler, but as you move online the user has to work a lot harder. You need to have a new way to create and drive demand in identifying the content.”

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Open standards is not Open Source of course so it will be interesting to see how 'open' it will be for smaller third party developers.  Though they do appear to make it clear that they are welcoming 3PD from developers on the Youview website. I do believe that in order to fight the Ofcom complaints of Youview from the likes of Virgin Media, IP Vision, Six TV, United For Local Television and the Open Source Consortium, they will have to open up quite a lot. Having said that, there are more than a few developers whom I have spoken to who have tried to get apps into the various so-called 'open' app programmes that are out there with little success.

Interesting that Rose said that Google had 'forgotten' about the linear content aspect – as I believe that Google TV (and purportedly NetTV from Philips) is not missing linear TV as it's platform is developed to bring the web to TV and sit right on top of linear programming. Okay so Google and Apple are not 'Cord Cutting'... yet... but if I stop paying the TV license in the UK, will I be able to get free Youview?

Apparently, YouView has is also making a two screen play to mobile and tablets which will allow for multiple users to engage without having to fight over the remote.

Well worth a read. Here's the link once again.

Mashup runs a number of events and also incorporates a community on their website which is free to join.