YouView billed as the future of UK free-to-air

YouView launched officially this week and DVRs from Humax will appear in shops before the end of July, though the £299 (EUR 372) price tag (a prediction based on retailers taking normal margins without discounting or promotions) makes this a premium product for the UK free-to-air market. There will be ‘zapper’ set-top box versions in the future, Lord Sugar, Chairman of YouView, promised, but he said it made sense to launch the long-awaited hybrid broadcast broadband (HBB) platform with a top-of-the-range product and then simplify it later. “I would not be surprised if, in two years time, there are boxes in the retail channel for £99 (EUR 123). In time, prices will come down,” he added.

The biggest shock was that there is only one launch partner for the DVR devices in retail (Humax) and there was no indication that others are set to come onboard soon. There is a good list of retail partners however, covering John Lewis, Currys, Amazon, Comet, Argos, Euronics (representing independent electronics stores) and Richer Sound. Lord Sugar is pleased with the retail orders so far.

He confirmed that the target audience is non-Pay TV homes who do not want to be tied to a subscription and, in his words, want to make a choice about whether they buy something or not. “Everyone from me to Mrs Smith on the 17th floor of a tower block in Newham [east London] is our customer,” Lord Sugar noted. And if it was not clear already, he emphasised that this is a next-generation Freeview solution designed to succeed and therefore replace the current generation of free-to-air boxes and not complement them in the living room.

As expected, there will be paid content available through the platform if you want it and nobody ruled out the possibility of online movie aggregators like Netflix or LOVEFiLM appearing. In one major content development, it was revealed that NOW TV, the new standalone OTT service from Pay TV giant BSkyB, will be on the platform from day one. The other new content partner is STV, the Scottish commercial broadcaster.

Beyond the retail market, there is of course a significant opportunity for YouView to get into UK homes via its ISP (Internet Service Provider) partners BT and TalkTalk, both of whom are working on YouView devices of their own. These harness the same product architecture and user interface with some additional branding and possibly their own content portals. For many consumers, operator subsidies on devices bundled with broadband/voice deals would be welcome.

There was no word yesterday from either ISP on their YouView plans but TalkTalk will announce its go-to-market strategy at the end of the month. Lord Sugar said the ISPs are still in development, “but not very far behind at all.” The serious marketing and advertising for this new service will wait until the BT and TalkTalk offers are available.

There were no real surprises with the platform itself. The idea of the backwards-facing EPG is well understood (by the industry if not consumers) and used by Virgin Media on its TiVo DVR. The concept of universal search, which interrogates the metadata for all content, whether it is scheduled in the linear guide, stored on the DVR or served from the Internet, is also an acknowledged ideal. The key is how well these concepts are executed and the demonstrations at the launch, held at the London Film Museum, certainly looked great.

The EPG is fresh and bright but crucially it makes it very easy to overview the content across a number of channels at a glance. This is one of the strengths of the Sky programme guide and the EPG here is what you could call Pay TV standard. That is definitely not something you can say for all free-to-air receivers in the UK. Additional data can arrive through broadband where the box is connected to the Internet, providing what Humax calls an ‘enhanced programme guide’.

A backwards-facing EPG may not be unique but it is rare and the seamless movement between broadcast and on-demand programming sets YouView apart from nearly all other Connected TV platforms. It is a hugely powerful concept and Richard Halton, CEO of YouView, demonstrated how easy it is to go backwards in time, click on a show and launch an on-demand session. A day/date timeline at the top of the guide and shading are used to distinguish the past from the present/future.

For Halton, this forwards/backwards guide is the really big benefit of YouView. “If you missed a programme you didn’t even know about on Monday night, and everyone is talking about it at work the next day, you can watch it on the Monday night schedule. “You press two buttons: one to go backwards and one to press ‘OK’ and you are into the on-demand programme. It is a seamless combination of live TV and on-demand content, all through a guide that you can recognise, and a remote control. We believe it is this simplicity that will make YouView a success.”

Search is well presented. When you start typing a programme name, the system anticipates what you might be looking for. So once you have written ‘ea…’ the system start suggesting titles with the most likely matches, like ‘Eastenders’ (the flagship BBC1 soap opera), which in a demonstration appeared at the centre of the screen in clear white writing, while the less likely matches were pushed out towards the edges in increasingly shaded writing. Above the text suggestions are thumbnails of the programmes, providing a more visual experience and providing the option to start playing them immediately. The search takes into account all the metadata surrounding a show. When searching for ‘Emmerdale’  (another popular soap opera on ITV) the system showed you ‘All Star Family Fortunes’ (a game show) because some of the Emmerdale actors appeared on it.

There was not a QWERTY keyboard to be seen. This is a remote-control based experience that uses up/down, left/right and ‘OK’ buttons to guide consumers to content and Halton emphasised that YouView has been designed for people who want to watch TV rather than those who love to play around with slick user interfaces. The design philosophy is that content should be king.

The programme guide goes back in time seven days, showing all the programmes that aired but marking a ‘play’ logo against those that are available on-demand. Another way to access the catch-up content is to go directly to the ‘Player’ section of the menu, where BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4oD and Demand 5 are available. You can then launch into these portals and experience the complete branded player experience, including the usual recommendations and Editor’s Picks, all optimised for TV. There will be archive content available. For example, ITV has one month’s worth of Emmerdale on the platform today and all 18 episodes of the Channel 4 sitcom Black Books, going back over three series, are available.

Lord Sugar declared that the launch of YouView is a great moment in British television, comparing it to the launch of Sky (and therefore the beginnings of Pay TV) in the UK. And he made it clear that there is much more to come, with the platform evolving over time. “What we have here is the template, the carcass of a great new television experience,” he told the launch audience in London.

The Humax DVR itself looks like most other high-end devices of its kind. The box being demonstrated had a 500Gb hard drive but the company will introduce a 1Tb version soon. All the content is being streamed today although in theory there is the possibility for progressive download. Today the DVR has to be connected using Ethernet, which for anyone with their broadband router and main television in separate rooms means Powerline adapters are needed. That is an expense you could do without when the starting price tag is £299. The device does have USB ports and a Wi-Fi dongle is on the roadmap. More importantly, a Wi-Fi enabled box will be launched later.

Lord Sugar praised Humax for being an excellent partner but emphasised that this is not a closed shop. “They are our first partner but there is absolutely no reason why other manufacturers cannot become licensees and start producing boxes for retail or for the ISPs,” he reiterated.

The logic behind using a high-end DVR for launch is to ensure the platform delivers on its promise, with Sugar explaining that YouView will expand the content available and add new features over the coming months to really start exploiting the capabilities of the platform, then see how a stripped down version of the device and architecture can handle those same requirements. “You have to be able to walk before you can run,” he cautioned. But surely if there was ever a new TV platform that could live without a hard drive, this must be it, given that the whole point of YouView is to make network (Internet) delivered VOD easy and customer-friendly.

According to Bob Hannent, Senior Technical Manager for Research at Humax, there is little in the way of additional IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) licensing that raises the cost of the YouView device compared to a Freeview or Freesat (UK free-to-air satellite) DVR. However, the device does have a higher specification than other FTA devices in the market, including the fastest processor Humax has ever used (thanks to a dual-thread Broadcom chipset). He believes that with scale, the cost of YouView devices will compare well with any next-generation Freeview or Freesat devices.

Lord Sugar was asked by one newspaper how much taxpayer money had been spent on the service, which amounts to £20 million if you count the £10 million contributions from the BBC and Channel 4 (each of the seven partners – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Arqiva, BT and TalkTalk – contributed an equal share of the £70 million development costs). Lord Sugar declared: “That is cheap for this great piece of technology and it is their duty to make sure that they apportion some of their funds to making sure that we bring out a great TV system for the future. I do not think it is expensive in this day and age when you compare some of the development expenditure in other organisations.”

The more interesting point, discussed amongst journalists afterwards, was how the ISPs appear to have gained themselves a next-generation Pay TV platform, with the option for unique content offers for their own broadband subscribers, at the cost of just £10 million each.

For the BBC, YouView is considered a good investment. “We have a track record of investing in platforms that make cutting edge technology available to as many people as possible,” Mark Thompson, Director General at the broadcaster, declared.  He pointed to the clarity and simplicity of the YouView offer as defining features, plus the sophistication of the technology and the enormous amount of content that will be available. “This is a very compelling platform and the BBC is proud to be a part of it,” he added.

In response to suggestions that YouView has arrived too late to make an impact in Connected TV, he pointed out: “When the BBC was thinking about getting behind Freeview a lot of people said it is too late and free-to-air broadcasters had missed the boat in digital. Now there are more than 20 million Freeview boxes in homes. When the BBC launched iPlayer, which was delayed for a couple of years because we wanted to make sure it worked perfectly from the start, people said we had missed the boat because other people were already out there with on-demand, and last year iPlayer streamed 2 billion programmes.”

Lord Sugar dismissed the idea that YouView was launching in time for the Olympics and this had been a deadline. “We are launching a TV platform that is going to be around forever so there was no Olympic deadline that had to be met.” Forever is a long time, especially in this business, but we get the point. He is justified in believing that this is a significant moment for the UK television industry.