YouView launch date questioned

YouView may have been forced to put back the release of its IPTV platform by six months, it has been claimed. The issues: technical hurdles and concerns over the cost of the endeavour, unnamed sources cited by the Daily Mail say. The upshot: it'll take YouView longer to put its platform in place than originally anticipated. …

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly surprising

BBC tech is usually notoriously late these days. The news website launched last summer was originally due in Feb, the original iPlayer was massively delayed.

When something is released on time (ie the weather site update a couple of years ago) its usually so abhorred that it ends up being re-done anyway.

I'm sure YouView will be a riproaring success, but I doubt we'll see it before the Olympics.......

[Fuzz]

iplayer originally poor too

the original p2p iplayer implementation was also poor. It wasn't until the flash version in a browser that it started becoming popular.

[euauikapaui]

Bloom off Rose?

That's funny - YouView said last month that its "technology team has already successfully defined the technical environment, built the user interface, established a framework for content providers and developed the core technical specifications for developing YouView set top boxes." And indeed, that YouView is "moving from the concept and design phase into the delivery phase".

-- as reported by the Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/anthony_rose_leaves_youview/).

But now you say that "working out how to get [existing IPTV] systems to talk to each other - or even building an entirely new framework from scratch - will take time."

Hmm. Perhaps some revision of the Reg's glowing opinion of Anthony Rose is warranted, given his sudden departure last month with so much work still apparently to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it be any good ....

as their own site notes:

>>In operations Andrew Burdess, formerly BT Vision Operations Director and Head of Service Operations at NTL, has joined as Director of Operations. He will take responsibility for developing all consumer facing aspects of the platform and ensuring technical resilience of back end services.<<

"technical resilience of back end services" is about the last thing I would EVER have related to NTL's platform. As for BT Vision. Pffffffff!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unnamed sources

Are worth about as much as the paper they're printed on, and this is the Daily Heil, which hates everything the BBC does - so a heart-threatening dose of salt is probably justified when considering the truth of the story.

Not to mention it's repeating a story from last November, when YouView chairman Kip Meek was pretty honest about the difficulty of meeting the Easter launch target.