BT appoints former BBC adviser to help it beat broadcasters at own game

chris

BT has appointed a former BBC policy adviser as its first head of media and convergence policy as it moves further into the media sector, taking on broadcasting giants including the BBC, BSkyB and ITV.

The appointment of Simon Milner, to be announced today, comes as BT is pulled into regulatory arguments about so-called converged services, which pull together online and broadcast offerings.

BT launched an internet TV product, BT Vision, just over a year ago, and has been buying content to beef up the service, including delayed coverage of Premiership football games and, most recently, the Isle of Wight music festival.

Its move into TV has come with a more forthright attitude towards regulation. Last year it joined forces with Setanta, Top Up TV and Virgin Media to ask Ofcom for a review of the UK pay-TV market, accusing Sky of running a "vicious circle" of control that crushes competition.

So far, BT's moves into television and other forms of content have been relatively conservative.

Take-up of BT Vision has been subdued compared with Sky and Virgin Media, with nearly 200,000 users signed up.

It piggy-backs on Freeview, with users supplementing the free-to-air digital TV channels with content from the Vision service.

But rival Orange, which has a web-based television, or IPTV, service in France, is set to launch a service soon.

The broadcasters are also increasingly interested in providing downloadable or streamed content. This means that the so-called convergence market is becoming increasingly crowded. Alliances are being formed between former enemies to grab content rights, while companies that once relied on one another for access to customers are dealing directly with a new online audience. Regulation has struggled to keep up.

The success of the BBC's iPlayer seven-day catch-up service and Channel 4's 4oD have proved that consumers want to watch what they want, when they want. ITV, meanwhile, is poised to relaunch its ITV.com portal to include more sport and news video content.

Channel 4, ITV and the BBC's commercial arm are working on their own video-on-demand service, codenamed Project Kangaroo, which could undermine the attractiveness of BT Vision and challenge iTunes' market position.

Milner joined BT in October 2005 from the BBC, where he was a UK policy adviser. He was also project manager for the BBC's 1999 review of future funding.

He said: "Convergence has been a hot debating topic for at least a decade. For BT and our customers, it's now a reality and it's generating policy conundrums which need tackling."


Source: guardian online