The Project Canvas Fallacy
The sales pitch for Project Canvas runs along these lines:
- In order to do certain kinds of cool stuff, you need a platform which both the broadcasters and the consumer electronics manufacturers can get behind, and is technically capable of it.
- Project Canvas provides seeks to be this platform
- Therefore, in order to do these kinds of cool things, we need Project Canvas.
This is, quite obviously, flawed logic. The technical aspects will certainly be clever and interesting, and very few people doubt the combination of the BBC and BT could pull it off. But Project Canvas isn’t just a technical standard: it’s a commercial joint venture, with membership requirements, bias, financial commitments, and so on.
Erik Huggers has warned that if Project Canvas doesn’t go ahead, the alternative will be a bleak world of a myriad of competing platforms, and broadcasters will spend all of their time catering to the different platforms.
There are two ways of looking at this.
First is that, as the BBC is getting behind it, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that it will be a success: nobody else will bother competing, and so it’ll be a cakewalk.
But then, if this the case, why does the BBC need to create a joint venture in order to see this happen? Why not second some staff (cost: considerably less than tens of millions of pounds) to an industry body tasked with creating the technical specs? Or wait for somebody else to come up with them and decide that they’re the preferred option? In short, just because the BBC has proposed an option doesn’t mean it’s the only option, and it definitely doesn’t mean it’s the right option, and it’s important to separate that from the need to take broadcasting technology further.
The other way of looking at it is that no matter what the BBC does, it’ll still face competition, and there will still be fragmentation, at which point Project Canvas is just a gigantic waste of money.
That’s the problem with Canvas.
