YouView Refocus on Specific IPTV Updates for UK Broadband ISPs

The YouView platform, which produces hardware and software to support the broadband-based TV (IPTV) services supplied via BT and TalkTalk (as well as retail set-top-boxes), appears set to stop distributing universal software / feature updates and will start adopting a more ISP-specific approach.

YouView is an IPTV platform that was jointly developed by BT, TalkTalk, the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV and Arqiva some years ago. The platform was originally envisaged as being something that could find its way into many corners of the market, although today it tends to be dominated by BT (Plusnet) and TalkTalk’s Pay-TV services. Since then some of the original backers, such as the BBC, appear to have scaled back their involvement.

The situation has left YouView to go through somewhat of a gradual change and it looks like we’re about to see a new phase in that adjustment. At present any new updates produced by YouView tend to be distributed the same across their entire estate of set-top-boxes, which is largely irrespective of whether that kit is available to the direct retail or ISP-specific channel.

We do of course seem some ISP-specific branding in these updates and a few other differences, yet generally YouView’s feature and design changes have been shared in unison. However a recent statement posted to the YouView community forum (credit SEENIT) suggests that big changes could be on the way.

YouView Statement

There has been a lot of discussion on our forum lately on box updates so we thought it would be useful to put out a statement on this:

We are committed to continuously develop and improve the experience using the advances in technology in order to serve viewers and meet the ambitions of our partners.

Our new Cloud infrastructure helps us achieve this by bringing more flexibility for our partners to tailor their YouView offering according to their needs. As a result devices may vary in functionality, features, Players or Apps.

One of the reasons for this change is because many of the earlier first-generation YouView STBs are now struggling to keep up with all the extra changes and features being added on the software/firmware side, which is to be expected. Hardware needs to keep pace as the software evolves or it becomes sluggish and trickier to implement (memory / CPU limits etc.), which can damage the customer experience.

As a result the additional flexibility, which allows YouView to offer updates that are tailored to specific ISPs or hardware, means that new features should continue to appear on modern kit, while some aspects may be excluded from older hardware that might struggle to support them. However in theory we could also see greater separation between the features being offered to different ISPs.

BT has already said that they will be making use of this, which means that those with older YouView STBs won’t receive all of the future feature additions. A spokesperson for the ISP confirmed to customers, “You won’t be able to get all of the features that other boxes might get in the future.“