The Mobile phone company Orange is considering signing up to join BBC backed Project Canvas venture to bring VoD services to the Freeview and Freesat platforms.

If Orange can strike a deal then it will secure the number of Project Canvas partners back to seven after Channel Five pulled out last week.

Last year Orange was looking at buying the technology behind the now defunct Project Kangaroo venture, the broadband TV joint venture between ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC,  it was to boost its Orange broadband service and offer a more attrractive package to its customers.

The company pulled out and Arqiva sealed a deal, subsequently using it to launch online TV service SeeSaw. Arqiva is also a partner in Project Canvas.

“Orange has definitely held talks with them, they have been keen to be involved for some time although I think it went cold [for a while] when they decided to wholly focus on the integration with T-Mobile,” said one industry source. “Last year they looked at Kangaroo.”

The company is one of the big five broadband players in the UK market but is the only major one not to be able to offer some form of VoD service to help entice customers with bundled packages of products.

BT, which runs the BT Vision VoD service, and TalkTalk are Project Canvas partners, while both BSkyB and Virgin Media have their own conventional pay-TV and VoD offerings.

“Orange have for a long time been trying to come up with a TV strategy in the UK,” said an industry source. “They wouldn’t want to be the only ‘to consumer’ provider of fixed broadband without a TV component. It shows that triple play [offering a bundle of products to consumers] is so important in this market.”

In May the Project Canvas director, Richard Halton, said that the venture was seeking another partner for a company that can add “scale and expertise to the platform … it is a question of finding an organisation that shares the aims of the venture”.

It is believed that the partner could be Virgin Media, which has said that it is not opposed to Project Canvas in principle but has a number of issues with the venture. Virgin Media is expected to lodge a complaint with the media regulator Ofcom arguing that the project breaches competition laws.

An Ofcom spokesman said: “We have not received a complaint about Canvas, but if one were to be made to us on competition grounds we would consider it carefully working closely with the OFT.”

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4. Virgin Media Trying To Scupper The Project Canvas Launch
5. Tabloid Newspaper Owner To Buy Channel Five And Return To Project Canvas?