This Kangaroo has ceased to be....

(Photo Credit - Flickr user Thomas Rosenzweig)
Right, I'm going to keep this [relatively] short, as I was looking forward to having the BBC's back catalogue on tap as much as the next comedy addict. What's that? Have I heard of YouTube. Oh!

So the Competitions Commission have pulled the plug on Project Kangaroo. The idea of the 3 main broadcast content providers in the UK all distributing through the same portal whilst selling ads separately was referred to in the report as something that 'has to be stopped'. And you can see the Commission's point. After all, this is supposed to be the future of TV, not just exactly the same model as we have now. I can't see the difference between a TV screen that's been showing content from three UK-based content providers since 1982, and a computer screen doing the same. The only winners are the walled gardens that the ISPs would love to lock us into. Something like Boxee is great, but only for the few people who know that they want this type of app and go out and look for it. The sort of marketing that BBC, ITV and C4 can throw at a new technology between them would put UK internet usageitself onto a different level.

Where do they go to from here? Well the market for their content isn't going anywhere. It's just the portal that they aren't allowed to collaborate on. I'd expect to see ITV.com, 4OD and iPlayer scaled up quickly, but this isn't a replacement. It was the robust aggregation platform that would have been the success of of Kangaroo - everything all in one place. If the broadcasters were brave, they would free the content: instream ad units, distributable anywhere. Don't worry too much about the actual viewing platform. Sound familiar? Because it's where we're all going to be viewing our archive UK content now. Until Hulu launches, and BBC, ITV and C4 sell them the content rights. So that 18 months of legal review has got us where exactly? The same result, but US owned.

Oh my god they really don't get it!

ITV have announced that they are testing embeddable ad formats to run within audio-visual content, by searching for blank areas of the picture to stream them into.This from TimesOnline

Television viewers who like to fast-forward through advertising breaks may want to look away now. ITV is developing a new form of unavoidable advertisement that can be embedded in television programmes. The new technology, which is known as “automatically placed overlay advertising”, uses complex computer algorithms to find clear space, such as blue sky or blank walls, in video footage in which to display logos or messages.

The technology, which was developed for ITV by Keystream, a Californian company, is currently being tested in news footage on the broadcaster’s ITV Local website. If it is well received, and if regulations permit it, ITV hopes to transfer it to the television screen.

Simon Fell, head of future technology at ITV, said: “There’s a lot of potential. If there’s a scene in a programme where there’s time, then it could give us a chance to get an ad away. But obviously on television you won’t be seeing one of these appearing at a crunch point in a drama.

I don't know where to start on how wrong this is, but if the head of future technology wants to use his development budget in this way you've got to worry for the short term future of the company. Unfortunately it is hardly surprising from a company whose chairman is so confused about the media landscape in 2008 that he claimed YouTube is 'parasitically leeching content from ITV'. I don't believe for a minute that he really doesn't get the difference between content and distribution, but the both these stories suggest that ITV are so commited to their old business model that they are proactively pr-ing the fact that they are out of date. The scary thing is that as one third of Kangaroo, they are going to be able to drive the shoutloud-interupt-ignore ad model into the future