The perils of going 'Over-The-Top' - you tend to get shot at

Erik Huggers, the BBC's director of future media and technology told IBC delegates last week that the BBC wanted to open up its interactive platform, not to become an aggregator of content, but to strengthen the hands of broadcasters as a group.

The BBC, said Huggers, had no intention of moving other broadcasters' content onto its site, but it wanted to establish an environment in which all broadcasters could run on-demand services (from their own web sites) without having to team up with incompatible intermediaries. One of the big problems, he said, was the huge effort and expense required to support different end-devices with codecs - things like set-tops, games machines and mobile phones.

"There are currently 23 versions of iPlayer we port to devices like TV platforms, games consoles and mobile phones," the BBC reported Huggers as saying in his address. "They are all using different codecs and different file formats, because they think their codec is going to make a difference. The additional cost of formatting is starting to become problematic and something the industry should rise to the occasion and solve," he said.

An open iPlayer, enabling an open federation of services, will be good way to iron all that expensive incompatibility out.

"How can it be that as broadcasters we are in a position where the tuner decides how we broadcast the show?"

Huggers' last sentence is the most revealing. To the access network provider an iPlayer-armed BBC is an 'over-the-top' interloper, disintermediating the network owner from its rightfully lucrative relationship with its customers.

To the broadcaster, these end networks are just the providers of the 'tuners' and they should fall into line to support a single set of standards so that they don't drag the whole interactive thing down before it really starts to get going.

In effect, the BBC wants to establish a dominant 'broadcaster-to-viewer' framework that will rationalise the market and drive its development.