Fool. As any of you with children know, there is no spare time with a newborn.

So, here I am now, having lived with - and used when I can - an Ubuntu Linux laptop for the last couple of months. I've been trying it out alongside my usual laptop (Sony Vaio running Windows XP), my new MacBook Pro, and a Vista notebook that we also have in the house.

Firstly, the most obvious advantage of Linux is that it's free (as in cost).

Free is a big advantage. It will, I hope, presage an entirely new range of inexpensive Linux-powered laptops - such as the Elonex £100 machine - that might fulfil an increasing need for web surfing (and iPlayer-type A/V consumption) on the move, with a bigger screen than phone handsets allow (notwithstanding the beauty of the iPhone's display), but much cheaper, smaller and simpler than current laptops.

The second big advantage of Linux is also obvious: it's free as in speech - or "open source" - and therefore any code created on this machine would be available to anyone else, free. (Not that I am about to start hacking into the LAMP stack, my serious coding days ended with Oracle some 14 years ago.)

I make these rather obvious unique-selling-proposition points about Linux because on their own - free and open source, they may well be compelling enough reasons for many to go the Linux route. Putting that aside though, I am intrigued as to how well Ubuntu stacks up as a consumer proposition, next to the might of Windows and MacOS.

Again, for many, this home test might be seen as a pointless exercise, as Linux is currently more frequently used at the enterprise level. (Indeed, a good proportion of bbc.co.uk runs on Linux servers.) The reason for Linux's use in corporations is usually because of its extremely compelling combination of price, performance, reliability and maintainability benefits borne out of (if I understood Jono Bacon correctly), both its relative simplicity / elegance of the design of the core OS, and the fact that at any one time there are literally hundreds of thousands of developers around the world working on improving the code.

But if Linux is going to be a substitute for Windows / MacOS, then I believe it needs to be an easy-to-use, reliable consumer proposition too. I'm no expert tester, so the following comments are merely my own, personal, experiences.

So, I did the ten things I might most commonly do on my XP machine, on the Linux laptop:

1. Installing the OS With the help of George in the office, we put Ubuntu Linux on to an HP laptop. Installation was straightforward.

Initial impressions of an OS with all the tools you need, but without extraneous, memory and hard-disk gobbling consumer apps that I won't use.

2. First thing at home, accessing my wifi Elegant. Easier than Windows: just worked; no hassles. Trying this at work: easy, and get a list of all available networks with the signal-strength of each network displayed in a simple well-designed table. Logging on the next time, it connects automatically and incredibly quickly to the office wifi. I'm already starting to like this.

3. On to the web, and to the BBC homepage Using Firefox, which over the last couple of weeks, appears more stable than Windows IE, and on a par with the Mac's Safari. Initially needed help to get it to display new BBC homepage properly, and the clock in the top right still sits on a black background rather than the colour of the rest of the page. Small quibbles, and ones that are probably caused by our setup rather than Firefox on Linux.

4. Go to BBC iPlayer Streaming works beautifully. Download service to come (please do not make all your comments about this point, which has been discussed before on this blog for example here).

5. Installing Skype With my sister living in Oz, and now an auntie, getting Skype video up and running has a new impetus. Installing the Ubuntu FeistyFawn version of Skype was easy, but I couldn't get access (Server connect failed message). On Windows and Mac, everything worked fine, first time.

It turned out I had installed an old version of Skype (I suppose quite easy when there is no central management of software releases for the few non- free / open source applications on Linux). The external webcam I have also worked out of the box with Windows (obviously, as it had a Windows disk), but I could not find any driver easily that worked with Linux.

George Wright to the rescue with both of these issues, finding the latest version of Skype (albeit a rather simpler version than the Windows one), and, after a long hunt, finding a driver for the external video webcam. I appreciate a lot of drivers are preinstalled, but I'm starting to feel that perhaps the Linux OS is not aimed at my kind of usage (or my lack of time to invest in getting it all set up right).

6. Try some online banking Annoyingly, my bank explicitly doesn't allow access using Linux, for security reasons. Note to self: change to an "open" bank. Actually, what are the implications, if any, of trying online banking via Linux? Do any / most banks enable access? A partial list of UK banks and their support for GNU/ Linux is available here - but I have no idea of its accuracy.

7. Before progressing any further, decide to update my OS There are 67 updates: this is either great news, or a worrying sign of work-in-progress. The updates took 20 minutes to install. Didn't need me to reboot the computer though, nice.

8. Getting photos from my phone onto Flickr Now an easy task. Uploading photos from USB memory stick reader to Flickr. First, the card was instantly recognised and photos dragged to the desktop. Great. Then tried to install a Linux Flickr photo uploader. Flickr themselves don't offer one, so went to their recommended link to jUploadr. Unfortunately, the site was down.

Right, let's use their web-based form (at this point I discover that the screen flips sideways if you have a dialog box wider than the screen to a new "workspace": beautiful). The web-based photo uploader worked, and latest photos now on Flickr.

9. Then played around with image editing software on my desktop Basic, but simple and slick. This is becoming a theme with Linux. Don't expect the bells and whistles or much support from other websites (e.g. my bank, Flickr, Skype, some p2p sites etc.) and you'll be fine.

10. Finally, editing this blog post in word processor OpenOffice Very similar to MS Office's Word. Saving the file in the open ".odt" format means of course that Microsoft Word refuses to recognise it. I am starting to feel the open source community's frustration! I could have saved in Word format but this wasn't obvious at first, and a slightly scary dialogue box suggests that this is a Bad Thing to do.

So, there you have it. I've enjoyed using Ubuntu, it has a simplicity and elegance that I like and some great features that other OSes don't have (and I appreciate that I've only been scratching the surface). And it's free.

But I'd say it's horses for courses. For enterprise-side usage, or as a developers' workstation, or as a cheap platform for people with a fair amount of time on their hands and a willingness to deal with all the websites that only vaguely support Linux, fine.

For me, as a day to day operating system, would I churn from Windows or MacOS for it? Not yet; perhaps in a year or two. Critically though, I think the BBC can, and should, do more to support the Free and Open Source community, and I hope this has at least shown my commitment to listen and learn!

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology

This issue has been around for as long as the net has (see this from 12 years ago).

And it's a really tricky one, and one risks upsetting all interested parties here, not least the ISPs, the music rights holders, and the Open Rights Group (ORG).

But it's also a critical issue that is not to be ducked.

I am at heart a proponent of net neutrality: for example, I believe that ISPs should deliver traffic over their pipes for the same price, irrespective of the value of the content. The user wants to be able to choose their ISP confident that all (legal) content will be treated in the same way.

But ISPs increasingly do have the ability to easily determine the type of content going over their lines (to "traffic shape" or "packet sniff"), so should they in any way be responsible? If they can, should they stop illegal traffic? The music industry thinks they should as part of a wider "value recognition right".

The Open Rights Group thinks they shouldn't. In a press release last week (n.b. correction 3 p.m. - this press release is in fact from 2006), > two years ago the then executive director Suw Charman countered said: "This proposal [of a grouping of music industry bodies] is ill-conceived and grasping. Suggesting that ISPs and telcos should be responsible for the content transferred by their users illustrates how poorly the music industry understand the net."

This is also increasingly a political issue, with Labour and Conservative apparently taking a broadly similar line. Last week at the Broadband Convergence Thinktank, the culture secretary Andy Burnham took the line that "[w]hat is unacceptable offline should not be acceptable online, whether it was fraud, child porn, or theft of intellectual property." [From Andy Burnham: Is The Culture Secretary Right To Call For Tighter Policing Of Qeb Content? at the Guardian's Organgrinder.] As far as I can make out, this merely reiterates a view espoused by Conservative party leader David Cameron a year ago where he said :

ISPs can block access and indeed close down offending file-sharing sites. They have already established the Internet Watch Foundation to monitor child abuse and incitement to racial hatred on the internet.They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy.

Perhaps if the ISPs do not install packet-sniffing content, i.e. remain truly net neutral, they cannot and should not be forced to monitor content.

Perhaps the ISPs risk bringing this on themselves.

If the ISPs do install sophisticated software, with the intention of filtering content and implementing variable charging, then perhaps they should at that point also become more responsible for making a reasonable effort to stop illegal traffic.

Charman says the said that proposals to make ISPs responsible for content sent down their pipes are: "like charging the Post Office a fee in case some of the packages it delivers have illegally copied CDs in them, and making them responsible for the contents of every parcel they deliver."

That got me wondering whether the Post Office does have any obligations to stop or report illegal content. In fact, it's almost the opposite: the Post Office has specific immunity from prosecution for carrying illegal content under Article 96 of the Postal Act 2000 (a fun couple of hours spent last night trawling through this act). And I can't find any obligation on the Post Office to not carry content that they might know to be illegal. In fact, it seems the only time the Post Office can go sniffing for content is when ordered to by the secretary of state in the interest of national security or to "facilitate the attainment of any object which the Secretary of State considers it necessary".

Image from Richard Carter on Flickr.

But this is perhaps the point: the Post Office has no idea what is being carried, and has no technology to do so. If the ISPs implement such technology to try and shape traffic, are they opening Pandora's Box to a world where they are then also required to report users' illegal content down and uploading?

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology

N.B. Editors note. This blog post was originally published yesterday and contained a factual error which has now been corrected (changes can be viewed above). Our apologies.

As this latest debate was sparked off by a piece in the Daily Telegraph, they've let me do an article, which appears in today's paper - you can read it here.

In spite of the The Register's somewhat anti-BBC stance on this issue, its readership seems to have a more balanced set of views that you might want to scroll through here.

All I want to say now is that we actually have a very constructive relationship with the ISPs. We don't think that we should pay for their content distribution costs, but that difference of opinion does not mean we don't work together. We do, and although actually a relatively small player in the internet landscape (about 2% share of time spent online goes to bbc.co.uk), we will do what we can to help drive broadband penetration and adoption, for the benefit of all players.

I'll do a longer post when I've read more of the comments/reactions across the web.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology.

"do people want to consume a lot of information on a 3"x2" screen?".

If TV is to become mobile, or people are to stop buying the morning newspaper (or paperbacks) to read on the train and use the wireless internet instead, then must we believe that the next generation of mobile phones/MP3 players will become a usable device for consuming half an hour plus of media? The jury is out on this one.

It may be an issue less of technology and more of biology: is the screen of an easily pocketable device too small to comfortably stare at for an hour-long commute? The larger-screened laptop, with its high cost, low battery life, steal/breakability, and screen glare is probably not the mass market solution either. Is there a market for a large screen, cheap, reliable, non-eye-straining device?

Elonex thinks so, and is the latest manufacturer to enter the market with their £99 wifi-connected laptop. (Their secret to low-price success? They're betting on open source software: the machine runs Linux). Amazon also thinks there is a market between iTouch and a full-blown laptop, with the book-reader Kindle apparently being the first step towards a more functionally rich (e.g. open internet access) device. And Sony too is soon to be relaunching its eBook (early incarnations of e-books have signally failed to inspire the blogosphere, for example this from Cory Doctorow).

Making the right call here, and correctly forecasting demand for mobile-IP rich media, may well be the difference between success and failure for UK media companies, especially the print industry. (And just to illustrate how complex this market is, in Japan, downloads of books to standard mobile screens has actually been quite a success, as has TV to mobile in Korea.)

Recently, Guardian MD Tim Brooks kindly came along to BBC Future Media & Technology (FM&T) Towers over here to talk to our senior management group about the challenges we all face in the media industry. He stated that as long as we stuck to our guns - providing original, distinctive, quality (and in our case impartial) news, education and entertainment - we would survive the audience shifts away from newspapers and TV to the internet.

Newspaper circulation has been falling for years (and with it, advertising revenues), but the decline appears to be levelling out. Clearly, the advantages of the print newspaper when on the move, (whether in the house or on the train) are key. The advantages of the newspaper over trying to obtain the same information over your Nokia N95 are obvious. Could the Elonex/Open-Kindle change this?

We have seen the false dawn of mass media consumption on mobile devices a number of times. Last year, I made a speech where I forsaw that all the factors that would enable mobile to start being a viable data provider were starting to come into alignment. More recently, our News FM&T head Nic Newman has echoed these sentiments.

Vodaphone CEO Arun Sarin declared recently: "If we have to look at the whole chain of things that have to be right before mobile internet takes off, I feel we are there".

And Vodafone should know what it's talking about, sitting on £2bn of annual data revenues. Yet this growth is not for the most part coming from mobile phones. Data is still a tiny part of the volume going over the mobile phones, if you exclude SMS. What's driving mobile data is laptop computers with high-speed data cards (HSPA) being used predominantly for work emails. 3UK data "dongles" for laptops have been flying off the shelves faster than iPhones.

But if the tide is starting to turn to mobile-IP, what devices will win? Mobile phone, e-readers, £100 Linux laptops, or full blown notebooks?

For the BBC, already the number one provider of content to mobile devices in the UK, what is our role in helping to drive the market for those devices that are open, inexpensive, and can help provide a quality experience and start a new relationship with audiences who may not consume that much of our output through traditional means?

As the founders of the BBC Micro gathered two weeks ago to mark the immensely positive impact this machine had on kickstarting the home computer revolution 26 years ago, I wonder whether there is a similar role we could play now?

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology.

Britain's broadband usage has changed beyond recognition in a matter of months. Since Christmas Day - when the BBC launched its online catch-up service, the iPlayer - a trend towards watching TV on the web has grown enormously.

(A bit of theatrical licence can be granted: Britain's broadband usage has not in fact changed beyond recognition, but perhaps the expectations of broadband users have.)

A diverse number of players, from Channel 4 to MSN to Virgin Broadband have gone on record to say that this is a good thing: all on-demand TV boats are rising on the BBC iPlayer tide.

But many commentators have pointed out that some Internet Service Providers who offer "unlimited broadband" can start to charge their customers extra after only a few TV programmes have been accessed.

What's to be done?

The Telegraph suggested that users stream content rather than download to save money. We don't think this makes any difference.

As an aside, the BBC iPlayer service offers both streaming and downloading, and will continue to do so. Most programmes have a ratio of around eight streams for every download, but high-end drama, such as The Passion had over a quarter of its iPlayer consumption via the P2P download service. To reiterate, the BBC iPlayer is not, as the Telegraph keeps saying, exclusively a peer-to-peer download service.

So, if streaming rather than downloading is not the answer for users to reduce their chances of exceeding their monthly cap and ending up with an additional bill, what is?

How about a Broadband Charter? Here are nineteen potential actions that could help bring clarity to this issue, enable audiences to know what they're paying for, and help ISPs move the broadband market forward (in no particular order):

1. ISPs should be clearer in their marketing (Ofcom can help them). Unlimited broadband should mean unlimited.

2. There should be industry agreement on what you buy is what you get: for a start, an 8Mbs-1 tariff should deliver "at least" 8Mbs-1, not "up to". (I recognise the difficulties with the quality of the line and contention ratios etc., but this issue needs tackling).

3. ISPs which offer genuinely unlimited broadband - i.e., without a cap (or with very high caps) - should (and probably will) more aggressively use this fact as a key point in their marketing.

4. I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers. They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want. If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and which content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy.

5. There could be an industry standard for "high definition broadband". HD Broadband (working title) would be a minimum guaranteed speed of connection (probably 8Mbs-1). All ISPs could market the service (like Sky HD and Virgin HD) and drive up revenue per sub. If this happened, then...

Content Providers:

6. All content providers could create packages or tiers of HD content optimised for this new standard tier of "HD Broadband". (It might need guaranteed quality of service - or, alternatively, this could just be a marketing initiative rather than a regulated service).

7. Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid). I hope it doesn't come to this, as I think we (the BBC and the ISPs) are currently working better together than ever.

8. There are a number of functionality solutions which content providers can implement to lighten the load on the network which should help ISPs refrain from resorting to capping. One of these is bookmarking, which would enable us to know what programmes a user wants, ahead of transmission, and download them off-peak to the user's hard-drive pre-transmission (hidden and encrypted), to be ready to be unlocked immediately after the programme has gone out on traditional linear TV. We are applying to the BBC Trust to be able to offer this service for iPlayer downloads.

9. The best technical solution is usually Moore's Law, which has delivered massive reductions year on year in the wholesale cost of bandwidth and also reduced the bandwidth needed to consume a good quality full-screen TV picture (ever improving video codecs and compression algorithms have helped enormously). But BT Wholesale's prices are regulated by Ofcom, and not subject to Moore's Law.

10. Although some have reported that we are exploring the costs/benefits of moving our content closer to our audience (potentially reducing much duplicated traffic, basically by putting BBC servers into the network), it is far too early to say whether this solution will work, or is even an appropriate intervention for the BBC.

11. We are already taking measures: we make it clear to users to check their ISP's tariffing structure: BBC iPlayer has a warning in its Terms and Conditions before you install the download manager. Further, a pop-up appears after 2GB of iPlayer programmes have been downloaded recommending that you check your ISP monthly cap.

12. Finally, we can either reduce the amount of content we offer, or reduce the quality of the programmes (by reducing bit-rate). As a fixed revenue company, this would be our only recourse if we had to pay more for distribution. This is not a desired outcome for anyone: my worry here is this could stop the rising spring tide of increasing supply, demand and consumption.

Users:

13. Subscribers should (and will) increasingly look for genuinely unlimited deals from their ISPs, and for ISPs that do not throttle bandwidth at peak hours, which can have the effect of causing streaming playback to fail to work correctly.

14. Users can set alerts on some ISPs to warn them when they have exceeded certain levels of monthly consumption.

15. Users should not panic unless they are very heavy users. Typical iPlayer usage (one programme per week per user) on a standard tariff on the UK's largest ISP (BT) would utilise 20% of their monthly allowance, and incur no additional charge.

16. Users should let us, and the ISPs, know their thoughts (hence this blog post).

Government and the Regulators:

17. You can't have a debate about this issue without reference to BT Wholesale (with whom we actually have a very good relationship). The ISPs which have their own network (Virgin) are busily rolling out 50Mb/s broadband. The rest have either installed their own equipment at BT switches (local loop unbundled - LLU), or simply buy capacity wholesale off BT Wholesale (e.g. Tiscali), and are, to a greater or lesser extent, beholden to the (regulated but quite reasonably profit-making motivated) BT Wholesale. There are those who are starting to ask whether, as with the regulator led introduction of LLU that was necessary to kickstart broadband in the first place, there is another sizable intervention required again now.

18. A less radical alternative to an intervention against BT Wholesale would be to encourage alternative forms of distribution. Ofcom is actively looking at everything from Wifi and Wi-Max to sewers, and exploring what encouragement and relaxation of regulation would be required to accelerate these nascent markets.

19. The regulators will undoubtedly determine whether this whole issue is structural, or whether what we are witnessing is that the ISPs are fighting a commercial war on a public policy stage, and that this has nothing to do with content providers or the BBC at all (indeed Ofcom, in their market impact assessment of iPlayer, believe that much of the increase in consumption over IP would happen anyway, with or without iPlayer).

I put down all these points to get the conversation going.

I'm not advocating them (except where I explicitly say so), but we are pulling together our thoughts here at the BBC, and liaising with the ISPs both individually and through the Broadband Stakeholders Group, and with the BBC Trust and Ofcom, so your thoughts on these points are, as ever, very welcome.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology

Finland topped the study, which takes into account 16 countries, with an average connection speed of 21.7Mbps - eight times higher than the UK average.

Globally, Japan leads the way, both in terms of speed and price.

[Image of 3.6Mbps 1円 courtesy of 22n on Flickr.]

According to the ITU, in its Internet Reports (admittedly last year, but I don’t think much has changed), Britain had the eleventh fastest (on average) broadband speed globally, behind most of the G8 and, surprisingly, behind Kazakhstan.

What is the BBC's role in helping to address this? What services and/or interventions (if any) should we make?

Does Freeview offer an example? The UK is now world leading in digital TV takeup and choice after the BBC’s revival of Digital Terrestrial TV after DTT failed twice as OnDigital and ITVDigital.

How can the BBC help deliver greater broadband penetration, speeds and takeup, helping to narrow the digital divide between the technologically savvy haves and the internet-deprived have-nots (not all of whom, by any means see themselves as "deprived")?

It's a subject I've raised before, but Mark's comment on one of my previous posts on the digital divide in the UK asked another question: whether there is another "digital divide" between the BBC's role as provider of content, and its role to drive universal access to all sorts of digital services.

I don't think so.

In fact, I think this duality of purpose goes to the heart of the BBC's mission: create great content for the enjoyment of the individual, and help drive universal usage for the betterment of society.

Indeed, it's enshrined in the Purposes as laid out by the Queen and Parliament in the BBC's Royal Charter (and regulated by the BBC Trust):

• sustaining citizenship and civil society
• promoting education and learning
• stimulating creativity and cultural excellence
• representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities
• bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK
• in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology.

Sorry to be posting this a few days after all the fun, but I've been on paternity leave and yesterday was my first full day back in the office.

So, the BBC iPlayer service on the iPhone got hacked. A way was found to take the iPhone streams and turn them into download files to your desktop. This was obviously not our intention.

We want to get iPlayer onto as many devices and platforms as we can (and as many as makes economic sense, given that we have fixed funding).

The launch on the iPhone/iPod touch platform has increased traffic to iPlayer by 10% (7% from general increased awareness and 3% specifically accessing iPlayer from their iPhone/touch). The team led by Anthony Rose has done a fantastic job: the iPhone implementation of iPlayer looks great, and neither Anthony, nor his boss Erik Huggers, nor I, have any intention of taking down the service.

We know that with each new platform comes more complexity and issues. We know that some platforms are going to be easier to break than others.

But we know that by offering a legitimate service to as many users as possible, most people, most of the time, will respect that rights holders want the BBC to only let their content be available for free at the time of transmission, and now with iPlayer, for a week post-transmission, and that therefore most users will use the legitimate iPlayer product in a legitimate manner.

In fact, more than most: the vast majority. Something like just one twentieth of one percent have accessed a BBC iPlayer programme via a hack.

Clearly, anything more than zero is not ideal, but we live in the real world, and at this level the hack does not undermine the trust we've built with our contributors, rights holders, and on-screen talent, particularly as it does not appear to be a malicious or commercially motivated attack.

As some commentators have pointed out, the reason the volume of iPlayer hacks is this low is probably because if you want to keep a permanent copy of a BBC programme for your personal use, there are easier ways to do it than hacking the iPhone implementation (which we've made considerably harder, if not impossible). You can simply tape/PVR your desired programme from air. If you really want to illegally distribute BBC programmes, then this is possible too. PVR BBC programmes off-air, and then upload the files to a file-sharing site. Most people don't want to break the law. And we do have legal redress, but have needed to use it, or even to threaten to use it, extremely rarely.

We'll try and ensure that it's easy for legitimate users and hard for hackers, and I think the team here is doing a great job at both - but no service (whether the beta of iPlayer last summer or the beta on the iPhone a couple of weeks ago) will necessarily work perfectly out of the box.

I hope that the vastly improved dialogue we now have with the various interested communities out there (developers, Linux users, etc., via this blog among other channels) will enable us to build the services that everyone wants, and that the vast majority of people can get to enjoy BBC programmes on demand... which is the point of all this.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology. Main image by Benjamin Watt.

The Guardian's Mark Sweney asked whether "BBC iPlayer could be broadband TV's Freeview moment?".

My answer: quite possibly, and let's hope so - but let's give it six months.

It's true that all on-demand TV services have seen an up-kick off the back of iPlayer, which is great: the real "Freeview over IP" moment will come I believe when, through a range of services such as iPlayer, the upcoming Kangaroo, and a BBC Archive proposition, the UK audience will be able to get practically any programme ever transmitted, on-demand. Lots of work still to be done here, but we've reached the tipping point for broadband TV, I believe.

One of the comments to Mark's blog post answered another question asked by blogger Iain Dale: "why does the BBC intend charging us twice for watching their programmes", referring to BBC Worldwide's deal to offer programmes through iTunes for £1.89.

'Phazer' succinctly answers this question of whether the licence fee payer hasn't already paid (through the licence fee) for a BBC programme offered via iTunes:

No, you paid for the BBC to licence the content for temporary broadcast. If the BBC were to licence it for copies to keep forever, the licence fee would have to be £800 a year. So, just as with BBC DVD's, they're sold, as then a percentage can go to rights holders.

Another interesting post from telco2.net talks about the impact iPlayer might have on the ISP network.

This is an issue that comes up frequently. The fact is that even with the volumes far exceeding our plans, there has been negligible impact on the UK internet infrastructure. This is not to say that we're complacent, or do not take the issues of network capacity seriously; we do.

There may be a win-win for the industry where services like iPlayer drive demand from users for broadband access in the first place, and for higher bandwidth packages, and for (paid-for) quality-of-service guarantees from the ISPs. At a very constructive dinner I hosted recently with the ISPs, mobile network operators, and content providers (02, Virgin, CarePhoneWarehouse, BT, Tiscali, C4 and ITV amongst others), we agreed it was in no-one's interest to see the UK internet struggle.

The post does touch on a further interesting point, that "Despite access unbundling, 'middle mile' costs remain a key bottleneck", i.e. that well before we need a fully fibre end-to-end broadband network in the UK, there will need to be an upgrade to the UK's "back-haul" network.

Put another way, fibre to the home from the box in the street may not be needed for quite some time, and the core fibre backbone across the UK also has plenty of capacity. But the bit in the middle may need upgrading, and more competition may be needed to stimulate building this key part of the distribution chain.

Coincidentally, I was showing Ofcom CEO Ed Richards around a number of our new projects yesterday morning here in White City, and this exact subject came up. Something we've already touched on here and reported on BBC News, but when the industry regulator takes notice, so should we.

He posed the very interesting idea of the government encouraging using other infrastructure, such as sewers, to lay fibre optics down to create this new capacity in this "middle mile" business (the existing telco cable ducts being apparently totally full), and sent me a couple of links to companies operating in this space, including this article in yesterday's Independent. The business community has responded favourably.

As usual, I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Ashley Highfield is Divisional Director, BBC Future Media & Technology. Image by Jon Jacob.

On the one hand, the Germans announced a review of their support for DAB, and the UK commercial players are likewise voicing concerns about the technology.

On the other hand, Natalie Schwarz (Chairman of 4Digital Radio) has written a rallying call in the Guardian "Why we must stick with digital Radio" and an email from our director of radio Jenny Abramsky last week spoke of the successes of our digital radio in general (now accounting for 10% of all radio listening in the UK) and of the BBC's digital portfolio in particular, with 6Music and BBC 7 putting on many thousands of new listeners in the last quarter.

The BBC faces some tough decisions in the coming years about how much money we put into different distribution technologies. I receive Radio 1 into my house via FM, IP, DAB, DTT, 3G, Digital Satellite, and if you include the fabulous Live Lounge, on CD. Are all these sustainable?

There are some, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer among the most famous, who think that everything will tend towards IP - delivery over the internet. Perhaps surprisingly, I disagree.

But even putting this infrastructure point to one side, and ignoring the basic better economics of sending one signal to everyone (which might be undermined if everyone wants personal radio experience â la last.fm), there are even stronger benefits of DAB radio over the emerging alternative, internet radio.

These benefits are quality, reliability, and ease of use. Time and time again these basics are forgotten in the headlong pursuit of new features and functionality. I have an IP radio in my kitchen, and a DAB radio in my bedroom. The IP radio connects wirelessly via my broadband router out to the internet and brings back literally tens of thousands of radio stations.

As a result, I choose to listen to Riviera Radio from Monaco - an English language station with a playlist somewhere between Radio 1 and Magic (alright, I'm 42) - and BBC news on the hour, with minimal DJ interference. In short, my perfect radio station. I also use the IP radio to listen, on-demand, on Sunday morning, to Jonathan Ross's Saturday morning Radio 2 show. The DAB radio in the bedroom I use for Radio 4, and occasionally for BBC 7.

So IP wins hands down, right? Wrong.

The quality of the IP stream is often woeful. It frequently buffers, meaning I hear nothing for seconds or even minutes on end. It frequently loses the wireless connection, and sometimes gets confused and wants the WEPP key again. I switch it off and on again. About once a day. By contrast the DAB radio just works. Press the button, and on it comes: excellent quality; reasonable range of choice; no bother.

My biggest beef with DAB is that, for some reason I still can't fathom, a new technology has been clothed in old boxes. A bit of retro I don't mind, but old fuddy-duddy-looking leather clad wirelesses, and Dualit Toaster-like DAB receivers is in my opinion not going to take DAB mainstream.

Given that DAB has quality and simplicity sorted, where does it go from here? The biggest benefit of DAB going forward should still be its ease of use, and range of stations, but also its clear benefits over FM. To make the most of these benefits, I want a DAB set with a big touch-screen, with a big on-screen programme guide, showing the stations, the shows on those stations, and the tracks currently playing on those shows. All possible on DAB (and indeed the first big screen DAB sets are starting to come on to the market).

I want this big screen to show me signal strength, news feeds, and the time. I want it to show me programmes coming up, to allow me to bookmark and record programmes, to set up simple searches (scan all stations, and record me any interviews with Goldfrapp, and perhaps provide information about release dates of her upcoming album).

I want DAB to show me weather, traffic and travel information graphically, on the same nice big screen, but unlike IP, reliably, simply, without installation and configuration. It's all possible: I've seen it working from our development teams and research engineers. I want DAB to use its metadata - the information about the programmes - to differentiate itself from FM, which is surely its biggest competitor, rather than from IP. I want DAB to look like a product of the future, not the past.

We can and should do more at the Beeb to work with the industry to innovate around DAB. And like DTT television, it is possible that hybrid boxes (DAB and IP), offering the simplicity and reliability of broadcast with the range and on-demand benefits of IP will become the standard (with the ability to track listening habits and personalise your experience).

These are my personal views, and I'd welcome a debate about this to help inform the medium- and long-term technology decisions we must make at the BBC.

Ashley Highfield is Divisional Director, BBC Future Media & Technology.

A two-tier nation. Every bit as stark a divide as would be access to free health care for some and not others.

I believe this is what the BBC, the broadband and media industry, government and Ofcom could, and should, collectively begin to focus much more time and energy on. With that in mind, I thought much of the debate at the recent Oxford Media Convention was perhaps pointed in the wrong direction.

James Purnell at the OMC. Image by Bill Thompson.

Lets start with Ofcom's idea of a new Public Service Publisher - "PSP".

The conference apparently rang out the "death knell" [see paragraph ten of the article linked to] for the idea of this new body (aka "Arts Council of the Air"), possibly funded from top-slicing the the Beeb's licence fee and creating a new alternative public service new media function.

I was on a lively panel at the conference with two of its strongest advocates, Tom Loosemore (previously of this parish), and Anthony Lilley (CEO Magic Lantern) - both working in some capacity at Ofcom.

I apparently upset Anthony, pointing out how his line had changed in a year, from "there could well be a central PSP service and site - in order to showcase projects for instance - [but] it is not envisaged that the PSP should be set up as a distribution platform in its own right" (quoted in full this time!) to a new softer line where he and Tom talked about merely "dropping stones in the water to cause ripples in government".

If I made a cheap shot, then I apologise. But the PSP was already holed below the water-line before my supposed broadside, when, at the RTS Cambridge Media Conference last year, those most likely to be in favour (Independent producers) called the idea of a new internet alternative to the BBC and Channel 4's offering a "balkanisation of commissioning". MPs later gave it a grilling, too.

So let's move on.

The gap that is there is the digital divide, and recent research indicates that while the percentage of people on the wrong side of the divide may be gradually falling, the remaining rump are hardening in their resistance to digital technologies. I have long been an advocate of not just the BBC's but all players role in helping to bring about " Connected Britain plc", for the benefit of the individual as well as of society.

In a speech I made back in 2004, I called for

a joint initiative with Government, players in the broadband supply chain (both commercial and public sector) and the BBC with its airwaves and cross-promotional opportunities to target those members of society who might find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Well, I and others failed to get such an initiative off the ground. The resurgence in the dot.com market during 2005 led many (not least the previous BBC Chairman Michael Grade) to believe that getting to 100% broadband penetration (availability and take-up and regular usage) would be "axiomatic". Rather like television and radio, everyone would eventually get connected. Without intervention, I do not believe that to be so. For a start, building out the necessary network so that everyone in the country can have truly high-speed broadband will be expensive, and may require the same push from the government as did local loop unbundling.

Bill Thompson (as reported at the Convention - sixteenth paragraph in) has been thinking along similar lines, advocating "a public sector internet".

So how do we get to a more connected Britain?

Broadband roll-out and take up suggests we'll get to about 70-80% by 2012. High speed internet mobile devices with large screens will add another 10% unique reach, meaning we'll have around 2.5-5m homes in the UK outside, looking in, at the time that the world's attention turns on us for the London Olympics.

What may be required is a two-phase approach. The first phase from now to 2012 is to work with Government, Ofcom (and this is where PSP thinking could now focus), the internet service providers, and the wider new media industry, to come up with a South Korean style blue-print. A clear vision and action plan for a digitally enabled society. A newly empowered Broadband Stakeholders Group (under Kip Meek, ex Ofcom, now at Ingenious) might do it. It would include a range of initiatives to provide access, and encourage demand, and enable take-up to the last 20%.

We would like to work with rest of the industry to develop a set of open standards for IP devices into the home. These open-standards devices would connect to both TV (over DTT or DSAT) and the Internet. This should enable any organisation to publish their content and applications to it (like Facebook) to a common look and feel. I'm thinking of services ranging from BBC iPlayer to NHS Direct, from Facebook to booking a driving test. You'd still need a broadband subscription, which might still be out of the reach of many, which leads me to phase 2.

At 2012, we'll have a clear view of how many homes and people are left outside of digital Britain (and a better understanding of the economic and social impact of such a divide).

With almost 100% availability of high speed internet by then, whether by fixed-line IP to the PC, IP-connected TVs, wi-max, or mobile devices, the focus will be on helping as many as possible of the last cohorts on board. How?

Well, a similar framework and set of principles have already been created with the BBC-managed Targeted Help Scheme for the switchover from analogue TV to digital. £600m of the BBC licence fee up to 2012 has been allocated to offer targetted support to help the elderly and disabled make the switch.

Could a similar scheme be introduced post 2012 (perhaps even rolling over any underspend on the first digital TV targetted help scheme), which might include not just a box subsidy but also a subsidised broadband connection for those unable to pay?

The Guardian's Owen Gibson says [paragraph 28]:

[broadband Britain] could yet proved an opportunity for the BBC and is in line with its mission.

But should or shouldn't the BBC get involved in the ideas I've outlined? I'd welcome your thoughts.

Ashley Highfield is Divisional Director, BBC Future Media & Technology.

Some things we're working on and other suggested solutions I've already followed up on (eg Neuros OSD).

The announcement from Macworld about the effective relaunch of the AppleTV (Jobs: "we tried with AppleTV, but its not what people wanted. So we're back with AppleTV take two - no computer is required") is encouraging.

This, coupled with Apple's (long anticipated) move to a rental model, means that we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto this platform too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programmes to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rightsholders currently insist.

Some of the solutions for getting IP to the TV set still fail the "can my mum do it?" test. One post asked "what is your problem?", but this misses the point. I want a solution that my mum can install (her "LAMP stack" takes 60 watt bulbs), and to this end, getting BBC iPlayer onto the Virgin cable TV platform in the spring will be an important step for us.

Working with, rather than against, the existing set-up in the typical home is probably the quickest route to mass market adoption of IP-delivered TV. So, a simple, open upgrade from your current TV to an IP enabled one (see CES announcement from Panasonic amongst others), or a simple upgrade from either analogue TV or your first generation DTT/Freeview box to an open hybrid DTT/IP box are forefront of our thinking right now. How the BBC can help make such an open market in the UK a reality (as we did with Freeview and DAB) is an important challenge.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media And Technology.

The Observer has described the early figures as "remarkably promising". I'd agree. In the first week, we saw more users than we had tentatively expected in the first month; way more. Perhaps we underestimated, but I based forecasts on the known industry ratio of consumption of audio to video on iTunes and other sites. Given that we already have a very healthy audio podcasting and streaming service for BBC content (16m downloads last month), we applied the same industry ratio to estimate video demand from BBC iPlayer.

Except it now looks like demand for long-form video over the web may be much higher than iTunes has witnessed so far: It's too early to say, but I think we may be at the start of rewriting the rule book. So does The Guardian's Mark Lawson, who wrote that "iPlayer may represent the biggest step-change yet in the way television is seen".

have to say that the iplayer has changed my life. Over Christmas I realised that my laptop had turned into an automatic personal video recorder and I would quietly step away from the mahem of the children watching Shrek (again) and have a peaceful moment in my study watching Top Gear in fine streaming quality. Theres no going back now, this is the future, its here and it works! Well done.

One blog post I've come across describes iPlayer as "You Tube for the discerning viewer", which I kind of like. There's more comment here.

On most days, we're already seeing between a quarter and a third of a million programmes watched. This might be a part of the trial that won't convert to long-term regular use, but then again we've not started the internet part of the marketing campaign yet, so one shouldn't read too much in these figures either way.

Streams are outnumbering downloads by a factor of eight to one. I would imagine that eventually this might settle at one download for every three streams, especially when we have implemented bookmarking (pre-ordering of programmes to be downloaded, possibly ahead of transmission so that they are available in your "download manager" immediately after the programme has aired) and "series stacking" (downloading the first few episodes of a drama and binging on them to catch up with the story).

What is being watched, then?

Well, the obvious programmes are at the top - Best Of Top Gear, EastEnders, Sense And Sensibility, Doctor Who - with a small, but not marked, skew to programmes that appeal to a male audience. The top ten programmes account for about half of all consumption, and then the long tail effect starts to really kick in.

The ten programmes between numbers 40 and 50 in the chart still collectively account for 5% of all demand, and all the programmes outside the Top 50 added together still account for nearly half of all programmes. (Programmes as diverse as episodes of Porridge or a history of Factory Records). This chimes with other long tail evidence (and a prediction I gave last year), and bodes very well for Kangaroo, the joint venture between the BBC, ITV, and Channel Four.

What's going to hold back more consumption? I expected difficulty of use, technology issues, or non-compliance with particular platforms to be the main complaints into our call centre run by Capita. Call volumes were, according to Capita, very low, in total hundreds rather than thousands, and the number one complaint is actually the non-availability of a particular programme (usually for rights issues). Number two is the absence of a download button against some programmes (probably from Mac users, a known issue which we're working on).

The in-house support team, and our colleagues in Red Bee did a tremendous job keeping everything running smoothly over the Christmas and New Year period; huge thanks to all of them. The development teams are already hard at work on the next range of features, many aimed at helping the audience discover even more of the programming available through iPlayer, and bringing radio more closely into the fold.

More on all of this next month.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media And Technology.

Bill Gates' keynote at this year's Vegas tech-fest, CES, spoke of the growing importance of in-home wireless connectivity, to ease moving your digital assets from device to device, room to room. Well, this is hardly new news. He's been saying pretty much the same for years.

The question that I have is: why it is still so hard to do, and so costly?

I've tried various solutions over the last few years to get content from my computer to my TV (first photos and music; more recently downloaded and streamed video). For a while, the media centre promised the answer.

But it's been an intensely frustrating piece of kit, with poorly executed and buggy software. And now, speculation is rife that the PC under your TV is not the solution to the "missing 10 yards of rail-road" between PC and TV, and is in fact fast approaching the end of the line (see active-tv blog for a good summary of the issues).

I thought last year that perhaps the solution lay in using a more inexpensive, simpler piece of kit (rather than a full blown PC) as a "media extender", a relatively simple box (with thin client) connected to my TV, that would pick up TV programmes from my server, wirelessly, and allow them to be watched on the TV.

Well, a year of frustration trying to use a couple of such solutions including an Xbox360 has proven that this doesn't currently work well either. At least, not well enough to be a mass market proposition.

Of course, I may have just been using the wrong operating system, but AppleTVs have hardly been flying off the shelves either. When the boss describes one of his products as a "hobby", be warned.

The problem with the Apple solution is that it is geared around their business model of downloading and owning files via iTunes, not streaming A/V from a multitude of websites, or using other formats such as Divx, XviD, MPEG2, and WMV.

Going for the simplest possible solution, I have more recently tried connecting a VGA and audio cable from my laptop to my digital TV (how many TVs have VGA sockets though?), and simply hit Fn-F7; that worked until the laptop battery died and the screen saver kicked in. I know - both easily sorted - but still a hassle, and an untidy solution.

Of course, more and more laptops have decent High Definition screens now anyway, so perhaps some people might just decide to eschew their lounge plasma TV - but I enjoy the 40" screen, surround sound home cinema experience.

Mentioning this to a very tech savvy colleague this morning, he replied that he downloaded programmes through BBC iPlayer, stripped the DRM (hence his anonymity!), re-encoded the file, burned it to DVD from his PC, then took it to his DVD player connected to his TV in the lounge. Hardly a solution for my mum either.

The sorry truth is that all the solutions are currently suboptimal, to say the least. But I don't blame the manufacturers. I think the reason is that there's not been much demand from the audience for these gadgets, and hence the investment in R&D has not been worthwhile. And that's been because there's not been that much legit long-form television video content out there, easily, legally and cheaply available.

Well, there is now. Hundreds of hours a week in the UK. And I think consumer demand will rapidly drive solutions.

A simple, elegant, cheap, open standards box, that easily allows streamed or downloaded, free, rented, or bought programmes, direct from all vendor and other sites (from YouTube to iTunes to DailyMotion to BBC iPlayer) and from your hard drive, in all formats, is what the industry needs from either CES or MacWorld this month.

Can't wait to get my hands on one, and see whether it does the job.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media And Technology.

Many trends are driving this.

• First, the rights clearance framework will enable full-length BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five content to be made available free (with or without ads) over the web.
• Second, cheaper distribution costs, driven by falling prices for streaming from the content distribution networks, are making long-form streaming models viable.
• Third, content owners' long-term technology projects to make this vast amount of content available over IP are now coming on-stream.
• Fourth, audience-facing products are reaching maturity and the quality of the video they serve has improved enormously.
• Finally, improved technologies from Adobe (Air) and Microsoft (Silverlight) will help drive ease of use, adoption and consumption.

I hope that Internet Service Providers ensure their "unlimited broadband" promises mean what they say on the tin and that we see a faster rollout of higher-speed services - hats off to Virgin's 50Mbps broadband service. The only thing missing is the final ten yards of railroad/ getting IP video to the large screen in the living room. 2008 will be the year when a decent range of devices - TV, Xbox Live Marketplace, BT Vision, Tiscali TV or just a simple VGA cable from laptop to TV - finally hit the mainstream.

Bebo's Kate Modern is just the beginning. Other sites like Constant Comedy and VideoJug are showing the way. Watch out TV: here comes IP.

N.B. A version of this post originally appeared in New Media Age [subscription may be required to access link]

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media and Technology.

At the moment, the legal position is that you don't need a licence to watch TV purely on-demand, but you do if you are watching TV live (through any receiving device in the home).

So a live simulcast over the web from the BBC - of, say, the Beijing Olympics - will require a TV licence, but watching an on-demand (non-live) stream or download through the BBC iPlayer will not.

The Help section for the iPlayer confirms the position under "Will I need a TV licence to watch programmes on BBC iPlayer?" It states that:

You do not need a television licence to watch television programmes on the current version of the BBC iPlayer. You will need to be covered by a TV licence if and when the BBC provides a feature that enables you to watch 'live' TV programmes on any later version of the BBC iPlayer which has this option... A 'live' TV programme is a programme which is watched or recorded at the same time (or virtually the same time) as it is being broadcast... [etc]

This raises the next question: "so is the iPlayer undermining the licence fee?".

Well, the number of homes that currently have no television licence, but that do have broadband subscription is currently estimated to be infinitesimally small. The chances are if you want to watch BBC TV programmes via catch-up over the web, you are also watching some BBC programmes at other times, live or time-shifted, via a TV set, and will already have a TV licence.

If we saw, over time, that some people stopped receiving live broadcasts at all, stopped paying their licence fee, but continued to consume televison programmes, solely on-demand through the iPlayer (or other players), then we might have to consider talking to the Government about Part 4 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Communications (Television Licensing) Regulations 2004, so that they can then consider whether on-demand tv viewing might be brought within its aegis.

See this document [pdf] for more details.

So it's an interesting point, but it's not causing our finance director sleepless nights.

Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media and Technology.