Anthony Rose, YouView Chief technology officer (CTO) has given his take on the kind of apps thats likely to be possible when the YouView broadcast service goes live next year. Speaking at the Mashup event in London Rose said YouView will be based on conventional tv but have three parts to it, open standards, client software and a metadata ingest.

Rose announced the “Silicon Valley kids” such as Google and Apple had let slip about linear television. Viewers would continue to watch linear content because it was the legacy on their TV set and live. “The driver is who creates demand and today it’s the scheduler, but as you move online the user has to work a lot harder. You need to have a new way to create and drive demand in identifying the content.”

To this end Rose described a YouView demo that displayed a thumbs up icon to show whether or not a programme was deemed worth watching by a viewers’ peers. The EPG would not only move from side to side, going backwards in time to access catch-up content that might have been missed, but also backwards and forwards. “It was enormously compelling and I think by displaying it this way rather than up/down is a new way of driving demand and a seamless way of bringing it all in.

Addressing audience concerns about the privacy of user data, Rose said he was relaxed about the capturing of information about a person’s viewing choices, providing they could remove the information in much the same way as the cookies can be cleared from an internet browser.

According to Sky TV, there will not be a very wide market for YouView, talking to TechRadar, Delia Bushel sthe head of Broadband said the upfront costs to access YouView will most likely put off many from buying it.

According to Bushel, a YouView set-top box will cost over ten times the price of a standard Freeview set-top box, which she said “makes it a premium proposition and not an off-the-shelf solution”.

Speaking after the latest Sky complaint about YouView to Ofcom, she added: “We may be in danger of exaggerating the impact that [YouView] will have – I think it will be a niche product for quite some time.”

In another trial application, YouView has mirrored the content of the main screen to a mobile device, enabling audio description for an individual without disturbing fellow viewers.

Rose also said that the use of multicast delivery would significantly decrease the costs of delivering any content over the internet after a summer that has seen the World Cup put a heavy load on ISP networks.

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5. Local TV Companies Say No To YouView