BBC Trust Makes Sensible Ruling on Canvas

The BBC Trust's ruling on the BBC's Canvas initiative makes for very sensible reading, restricting the corporation' empire building ambitions admirably and turning Canvas into what it should be all along - an open platform enabling the next generation of content delivery for all content providers, not a closed club of self-interested organizations.

The BBC has pretended that this was an open source initiative whereas it has been anything but, so the requirement that the specification as it stands be published within twenty days means that we will finally get to see what progress has been made over the past two years.

The free-to-air requirement is rather more restrictive and could pose a problem for the BBC's commercial partners.

What is, perhaps, going to be important is positioning on the default EPG, but surely this should be editable by the user anyway of this platform is going to be any good - nothing is more annoying than those hundreds of channels you never watch clogging up the EPG. It remains to be seen if the 'top five' slots will need to be reserved as they are for current broadcast platforms.

So, a good result for the industry. Well done, BBC Trust.