The government funded BBC continues to rapidly evolve it’s online presence to provide not only recently aired shows, but extensive archives and downloads. It appears the Beeb may get it. If only BBC online programming was easily accessible to US viewers, they could have a large new audience, especially with the writers strike in deadlock.

But it’s barely out of the blocks before it’s due to be re-launched, now able to work with Macs and Linux, not only PCs, and permitting downloading as well as streaming. It’s pert of a greater revamp of the BBC site, which will include social media tools and better integration of features, reports The Guardian.

“2008 will be the year when we start to find out how [TV over the internet] gets into the living room and how users can access these services from their couch. It doesn’t make sense to make all these services available on each platform, but we need to figure out how these platforms can complement each other,” said Eric Huggers, BBC group controller of future media and technology at the Future Media conference. (from Digital Times)

You may or may not heard of Hulu a service to view shows off the net. You had to be registered to get to it. Well now there is OpenHulu. It does not require registration but you do have ads. I watched a Simpson’s episode. It worked. It could use more buffering but it worked.

Just another example of how content will not be constrained to closed in systems.

OpenHulu.

It appears that Paramount has an inkling that the future of their franchise depends on alternate venues of delivery. In that regard, the next release of Jackass [not my taste] will be released as an IPTV offering first. –

In a radical departure from the traditional movie business model, Paramount Digital Entertainment and MTV New Media are co-producing “Jackass 2.5,” a sequel to its two-time boxoffice hit that will skip multiplexes entirely.

Instead, “2.5″ will be offered online for free for two weeks beginning Dec. 19 courtesy of Blockbuster, which will exclusively host the 64-minute film during that period. The movie will be made available at blockbuster.jackassworld.com.

Link for full story.

We reported earlier that now defunct Moviebeam was the canary in the closed IPTV box coal mine, and it appears that Apple TV may also be running out of oxygen.

from an article on the Enquirer:

When the MacIntellytosh was first released, the tame US trade press claimed that The Blessed Steve Jobs had built another winner. They were certain of this fact because Steve told them so and he would not invite them to another Apple shindig unless they agreed.

However analysts were not so certain. Forrester Research even said that it was going to be as dead as a Dodo by 2008.

It argued that technology was out of date when it hit the shops in April and it depended on there being an Itunes TV revolution which was unlikely to happen.

Now it is looking like the sales figures are proving Forrester right.

Without the Steve Jobs cult of personality, I doubt that Apple TV would have reached it’s still disappointing sales numbers. Apple TV is solution looking for a problem - a closed box at $300+ that enables you to buy content from a single source. If Apple were to build a box that had a tuner, and would play and record any format from any source, they would have have a winner on the level of the iPhone. I’ll bet that users of the open box would still buy a few videos on iTunes as well.