Examination of Witnesses (Questions 113
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 30 JUNE 1999
MR DOMINIC
MORRIS CBE AND
MR HENRY
PRICE
Mr Gale
113. Mr Morris and Mr Price, welcome and thank
you for joining us this afternoon. As you know, the Broadcasting
Committee is conducting an inquiry entitled "The Development
of Parliamentary Broadcasting" which includes consideration
of matters such as the implications for the House of the introduction
of digital television technology. As the British Broadcasting
Corporation are acknowledged experts in this field, the Committee
has invited you here today to discuss the Corporation's view on
the likely future developments on digital channels which of course
would include availability of the spectrum, coverage of existing
matters on the floor of the House, existing select and standing
committees and those new committees and hearings that are proposed
under the reform of the House of Commons. We would also expect
to cover possible methods of finance and audience share. Before
I invite questions from the Committee, I understand, Mr Morris,
that you have an introductory statement that you would like to
make.
(Mr Morris) Thank you very much indeed,
Chairman. I hope it will not take long but I think it might be
a useful context on what is technically possible and what the
costs of the various different means of distributing what the
House wants to do might be. Our working assumption has been that
the select committee would want to see the following: universal
and convenient access to the proceedings of Parliament, including
all select committees, to complement coverage of proceedings on
the floor which BBC Parliament itself does and perhaps more scope
for that accidental viewing of select committee proceedings to
raise awareness and grow the audiences. The key conclusions that
we draw are that, for the foreseeable future, digital television
will be an expensive and relatively inflexible means of providing
additional coverage on a universal basis. On line distribution,
on the other hand, is a relatively cheap option and will enable
video material, albeit in relatively basic picture quality, to
be made available in a convenient and searchable format. It is
not just the people who are catching it at that moment, but the
possibility for archiving, research, reference etc. In terms of
digital television, the market itself is buoyant. It has taken
off perhaps faster and better even than we had expected and hoped.
Whilst it is a single technology, there are now three distribution
means and there probably will be more in time. The old days of
everybody has an aerial and the days of one broadcast technology
are over. Digital cable, digital satellite and digital terrestrial
are all different consumer propositions and we believe that the
audience will over time stay fragmented between those three platforms.
We have an analysis which we would be happy to give to the Committee
of how we expect that market to segment over the coming six, seven
or eight years. Very roughly, it is about a third, a third and
a third. Today, we believe—and the commercial companies
are understandably coy about how and when they release their take-up
figures—that satellite has about 800,000 households. On
Digital and terrestrial has perhaps 250,000 households in the
time since they launched last October/November. If you wish for
universal availability, the conclusion to come to is that one
needs to be on all three distribution systems, if that is how
people are going to segment. Costs—digital satellite: the
first thing is buying space on a transponder, in effect the transmitter
in the satellite itself, and the means of getting a signal from
Parliament through to an uplink to get it up to the satellite.
There are minor additional costs on BSkyB's platform of listings
on the electronic programme guides so that viewers can easily
access that channel. Our estimate of the cost is that it would
be somewhere between half a million and a million per annum for
that distribution of a channel via digital satellite. Digital
terrestrial is more problematic. It is not simply an issue of
cost; it is an issue of spectrum. At the BBC, we have our own
multiplex. We are able at the moment to put BBC 1 and BBC 2 in
wide screen, plus BBC Choice, News 24 and digital text. We have
had to go to SDN, who have a separate multiplex, simply to get
BBC Knowledge on. We hope that compression techniques and better
equipment will allow perhaps one or two more channels per multiplex
to be put on. That suggests that DTT's capacity is around 40 to
50 channels over the next few years. It is quite expensive real
estate. There are more people wanting to put stuff out, including
high value stuff like pay per view, than there is capacity available.
Digital cable is in principle quite easy to get on to. There will
be plenty of bandwidth. The first digital cable launch is tomorrow
in Manchester and other companies will be rolling out later this
year or early next. The single most important issue is one of
marketing through the cable companies. Again, it is their desire
as commercial operators to put high value commercial propositions
on to their network and high return ones for them. We are ourselves
at a stage of concluding agreements with them, we hope in the
next few days, for the carriage of BBC Parliament on digital cable.
The session the Committee had on that subject some months ago
I think was quite useful because there was a clear commitment
from the cable companies to carry it. Even so, it has not been
entirely free of problems. Two points come from that. One, their
own recognition that as a subscription business the proceedings
of Parliament are a difficult commercial proposition. It is a
deeply appreciative audience but quite a small one. Secondly,
it does compete within that bandwidth and within that what they
can put out to their viewers with pay per view, Hollywood movies
etc. That is where they see their money coming from, understandably.
If you wanted to get universal distribution, it would be difficult
on DTT. You are talking about probably somewhere in the order
of £5 million per annum to get two or three select committees
out and two or three channels out. On line: at the moment, it
is available in 20 per cent of homes, about 20 per cent of primary
schools, 80 per cent of secondary schools and all large companies.
We do not have a figure for small and medium sized enterprises,
but it is growing rapidly in the office world. It is now able
to carry much more than just text and still pictures. One of the
most popular things with the BBC Online's site is real audio,
people being able to pick during the course of the day any item
they may have heard on the Today programme, for example, just
on the click of the mouse. You can get that item up and it is
good radio quality audio. Henry Price has with him, cached in
the laptop he has, a demonstration of what 300 kilobit picture
quality will or can look like today on the Internet. It is good
quality, basic video. We believe that will distribute pretty rapidly
in the office world. The home world is some years away. At the
moment, it is very, very poor quality, fuzzy and jerky motion.
It depends on how fast the telecommunications companies roll out
technologies such as DSL to homes so that those sorts of reasonable
quality, acceptable quality television pictures can be delivered
over the Internet into the home. Possibly five, seven or eight
years is about our best estimate of it. The attractions of Online
are two fold. One, it is cheap in terms of the broadcasting equipment
to get the signal from here to the servers and out. A good quality,
basic, digital camera and simple computer equipment are all that
is needed, not the paraphernalia that I think this Committee is
used to as we broadcast Parliament on television with mixer desks
etc. It is much simpler boadcasting equipment. Bandwidth costs
will come down. Memory costs are relatively cheap and it gives
the option of providing both archive and archive links to video
pictures. Instead of Hansard, which itself is popular as
a text site, if properly archived, one could have searchable,
on a particular subject, a particular select committee, action
video clips of that person brought up for the viewer to watch.
Shall I pause there? I have set a flavour and before we move to
questions, if the select committee would like, they can see the
quality.[1].
114. I think that would be very helpful.
(Mr Price) It will take a couple of minutes to start
up. I will explain what we have on here. These are some extracts
that we have cached in the machine to show what video looks like
today on the Internet in most people's homes. That is fairly recognisable
because a lot of people will have seen it. It shows you how we
expect it to come in the next few years if you are on the cable
system or in an office and how it will improve in time. (The
witness demonstrated on a laptop computer). We have here a
piece of a Celine Dion concert that has been put on to the system.
If you look at how it would look in most people's homes, you can
see the sort of quality we have. You normally would see it in
a little, tiny window like this. If I blow it up to fill the whole
screen, it is clearly not television picture quality. The sound
quality is moderately okay but the picture quality is not acceptable.
That is the sort of thing you would normally operate on the computer,
normally an inch by two inches. If we go now to the 300 kilobit
per second service, you can see it opens in a bigger window. On
the computer at this stage you would say, "What is the difference?"
but if you blow it up to fill the screen you begin to see the
sort of quality you might get. That will be available in most
offices. In fact, a lot of offices will give it to you now. Certainly
in the next couple of years, as offices increase their interconnection
with the network. We are looking slightly ahead of that if we
go down and say, "What will it look like perhaps in five
or six years with the sort of thing that BT are beginning to roll
out now?" This would be what you would probably see at a
BT trial now. They have a couple of hundred homes connected to
a wide band link. That is the sort of quality. Then you begin
to get the sort of thing you would expect to see on a portable
TV and that is a 700 kilobit link. It is beginning to get to the
state of what most people would accept as ordinary television.
115. This may be a question we ought to put
to BT but do you have any indication of how long it is going to
be before acceptable quality of that latter variety is likely
to be available to the home?
(Mr Morris) I think it is fairly a question for BT
and the other independent telecommunications providers but our
working estimate is that that will start to become available in
a significant number of homes from about five or six years from
now. It will ramp up. At current level, it is very poor quality;
300 kilobit, available in a few years; the full one megabit, five,
six or seven years from now.
116. If we could come back to television as
most people know it, which is broadcast, terrestrial television
in the home, the overall use of spectrum is the responsibility
of the Radiocommunications Agency, which is an executive agency
of the Department of Trade and Industry. Once the set multiplexes
are agreed, as they have been, licensing is for the Independent
Television Commission in consultation with the Department of Culture,
Media and Sport. Which government department would the BBC have
to go to, given the constraints that you have already indicated
you have on digital spectrum, to obtain further spectrum specifically
to carry the broadcasting of Parliament?
(Mr Morris) If we wanted to have additional spectrum,
my guess is it would be a broader question around is there another
block of spectrum nearby that can be released. If so, Parliament
and the BBC's wishes would be one part of that and Parliament
itself would have another Broadcasting Act saying how should this
be divvied up. Subject to that, it is for the Department of Culture,
Media and Sport and they in turn would need to work closely with
the Radiocommunications Agency to establish where the spectrum
is and how easy it is to transmit from a common set of transmitters
over that spectrum.
117. Mr Price indicated earlier that the BBC
was likely to gain at least a little ground by compression in
the future. Quite clearly that ground is effectively already spoken
for and I do not think the broadcasting of Parliament is part
of that plan at the moment. Is there to your knowledge at the
moment, or is there likely to be as a result of enhanced compression,
any additional digital spectrum available that might be used for
this purpose?
(Mr Price) There is a continuous development of new
techniques for compression. One of the things you have to remember
with digital television is that it is a hardware based system
so the chip sets going into people's boxes at home now fix to
one extent the compression that is used. It is not like a computer
where you can simply download another plug-in. What we are looking
at and I think all the broadcasters are looking at are more effective
ways of putting that information onto the signals. This is enabling
people to perhaps put a little more into the multiplex than they
had before, but it is probably not with existing equipment going
to give you the sort of order of magnitude of increase that we
are looking for to broadcast a whole new set of services. Coming
back to what Dominic said about finding another frequency, we
have found six frequencies for terrestrial broadcasting now. The
sixth frequency has been quite difficult. On Digital would say
that its coverage is somewhat difficult for them because it is
only 60/70 per cent coverage. Therefore, to find an additional
seventh frequency would become increasingly difficult and you
might be saying, "Okay, we can find a seventh frequency in
some places but not everywhere, however hard we try". We
are really getting quite boxed in, particularly on digital terrestrial,
with what more you can do.
118. This is across the whole spectrum? It is
not just what is available to the BBC?
(Mr Price) No, it is across the whole spectrum. If
you take the spectrum we have for television in the United Kingdom
at the moment, we have really squeezed it pretty hard to get the
six digital terrestrial channels, multiplexes, that are there
now.
119. The reason I ask is because Parliament,
when it agreed to the televising of the House, expected that this
would make a significant contribution to the democratic process
and that we would be able to cover the chamber and most relevant
committees and take those to most people. Mr Morris referred to
universal coverage at the beginning. The ideal would be to make
sure that everybody could have access to as much of the parliamentary
process as possible. Mr Morris indicated that he thought we would
have to use all three systems to do that. What we are looking
at and want to make recommendations about for the future is how
best we can achieve, if not universal, the widest possible coverage
to the largest number of people. What is the view?
(Mr Morris) Lest there be any misapprehension, our
aim is, over the next two or three years, to put the existing
BBC Parliament service on to digital terrestrial. It is one of
our top priorities for the use of compression techniques. That
gives us gavel to gavel coverage on the floor of the House but
I am afraid only weekend summaries of what is happening in the
select committees. We do not believe on anything to do with present
technology it is feasible to get A N Other parliamentary channel
to do one or more of the select committees on a live basis onto
DTT. Our estimates therefore are that potentially 60 per cent
of the population could be served by putting it on cable and on
satellite. It is a straightforward cost issue. It is not a capacity
issue.
1 See Appendix 1 for memorandum submitted by the witness
expanding on his introductory statement. Back
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