Oh, Kangaroo, will you ever see the light of day? Or will you be permanently vaporware?
Kangaroo has come up against another set of problems. The joint venture between BBC ITV and Channel 4 has been referred to the Competition Commission by the Office of Fair Trading. And this is before it has even been seen on a computer screen anywhere.
In a statement, the OFT said ...
"In reaching its decision, the OFT carefully considered all evidence as to whether the joint venture would face enough competition from other sources."
"While it is easy to speculate about what different UK viewers might do if the joint venture charged a higher price, there was a lack of good evidence available on these issues."
If this is the sort of problems kangaroo faces before it is available, I dread to think what will happen when or if it ever launches.
YouTube.com Accounted for Nearly Half of All Videos Viewed Online
LONDON, U.K., June 25, 2008 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service, indicating that 27.4 million U.K. Internet users viewed 3.5 billion videos online in March 2008. comScore Video Metrix, which was the first to market in the U.S. more than two years ago, has become the leading service for online video measurement and is the only service of its kind in the U.K.
Google Sites Ranks as Most Popular Online Video Viewing Property
Google Sites, driven by the popularity of YouTube.com (which accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed on the property in March), attracted a 48-percent share of all online videos viewed in the U.K. BBC Sites ranked second with a 1.2-percent share, followed by Fox Interactive Media (0.9 percent share), Microsoft Sites (0.7 percent share), Yahoo! Sites (0.6 percent share), and French video sharing site, Dailymotion.com (0.4 percent share).
Top U.K. Online Video Properties* Ranked by Videos Viewed
March 2008
Total U.K. – Age 15+, Home & Work Locations**
Source: comScore Video Metrix
Property
Videos (000)
Share (%) of Videos
Total Internet
3,500,627
100.0
Google Sites
1,681,887
48.0
BBC Sites
42,417
1.2
Fox Interactive Media
29,748
0.9
Microsoft Sites
25,287
0.7
Yahoo! Sites
19,975
0.6
DAILYMOTION.COM
15,590
0.4
VEOH.COM
15,070
0.4
Disney Online
13,893
0.4
Viacom Digital
13,528
0.4
Metacafe
13,090
0.4
*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.
**Excludes searches from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
A new updated version of the BBC's hugely successful iPlayer is just "weeks away" and will add radio and personalisation.
The news came at Broadcast's Digital Channels Conference from BBC head of digital media technology Anthony Rose.
"In a few weeks time, we are going live with an all new iPlayer that has radio and TV all in the same interface," he said.
The recommendations will be based on genres and include an Amazon style "people who liked that, liked this".
Rose said that different personalisation techniques will be tested over the next two to three months and will then "have a shoot-out" to decide which are adopted (Why not just use a combination of all the several different techniques available, a la Sky? - Ed).
Broadcast magazine said Individual users on shared computers will be able to protect and build on their own profile with a personal log in, possibly by selecting an avatar. Rose predicted that a lot of the scheduling for these genre clusters will be done by computer but said there will always be a need for human schedulers.
"The endgame is that the linear scheduler isn't quite dead yet. Long live the online scheduler," he said.
As yet there's no word on whether they'll be keeping the delightful black and pink or upping the encoding rates.
