Some straightforward questions for Project Canvas
Will it be possible to deliver linear services over IP to badged (and strictly compliant—thus, all) devices which, from a UX perspective, are equivalent to “traditional” broadcasts—e.g., Freeview/Freesat? (If not, isn’t that awfully short-sighted)?
Will service availability be automatically determined with the ability for the user to override? (e.g., over the air transport stream includes packets which contain the URL of a metadata endpoint; new services can be added by entering a domain name—DNS-SD or similar can then be used to discover the actual endpoint URL given the domain name; UAs could always attempt to tack “.com” on the end to make life easy—this is just one way of doing it, of course).
Assuming compliance with laws and regulations (including the implementation of the EU Television without Frontiers directive), is it possible to deliver both linear and on-demand content to badged devices, presented to consumers in the same way that members’ services are, without membership of the Joint Venture?
If the answer to all of these questions is “yes”, then I’m left wondering what the immense cost of the Joint Venture is actually for.
If the answer to any of the questions is “no”, then I’m not sure how it can be called an “open platform” according to well-understood sense of the term (noting that it’s been disclosed that membership of the Joint Venture is limited, both in financial terms, and a slightly more nebulous governance clause in order to preserve the right “balance”, as it were).
If somebody from the preliminary project team could hit me up with answers, that’d be grand.
