Blackarrow Consulting

Outside of the walled gardens of mainstream IPTV providers like BBC iPlayer, Tiscali/Homechoice and BT Vision, there is a lot of content being provided by over the Internet to PCs and to TV connected PCs. I am not talking about the fenced gardens like Youtube, but the content being provided by companies such as Revision3, etc. Some of this content is not techie geek stuff, so is starting to hit the mainstream, and the growth of Plasmas and LCD TVs has also put the VGA connector of the PC on the TV, allowing easy and simple connection of even the most low powered machine to act as a Media hub or occasional catch-up TV interface.

An interesting problem that has not really happened to these guys yet, the providers of content through RSS feeds down through services like Miro etc, is what happens when what they produce transgresses the refined tastes of a large western country like the UK. I am not talking the obvious nasties here of porn, but of subtler content. What can be subtler? Well in the mid 1980s, there was a documentary produced about the war/struggle in Northern Ireland during which members of Sinn Fein were heard with their real voices (shock horror!). Due to a nice banning order by the UK government on anything like that (at the time every-time Gerry Adams wanted to talk on camera, his voice was dubbed by a nice actor – an interesting way around censorship), it was not shown on the TV and there was a huge bustup about this, about censorship etc.

Well what happened back then was this video did the rounds of all the student unions, and was shown directly the UK student population, well everyone who wanted to see it. I saw it and I cannot remember much else about it, but at the end of the day this was content that was banned by the UK government for reasons that matched its own political ends. It was censorship.

Today of course, this content would be distributed over the Internet and what would the UK government do? Would it ban it? Possibly. How would it ban it? Pretty much the only way it could ban it would be to actively filter in much the same way that standard web pages are filtered today and here comes the rub. It could result in the complete blocking of whole sites like Revision3 rather than just specific content, in the same way that Wikipedia today has suffered this problem. A problem which has not necessarily resulted in the censorship of content but has resulted in unforeseen issues with the engagement of the UK population on the global internet.

The other issue is the existing mechanism is designed very well for web pages and graphic images, but is it suited and scalable to deal with video content over RSS, Torrents and HTTP? have a look and you decide.

So what do we do? I can support the banning of content that is obscene and nasty, but not content that is just a different point of view. How do you tell the difference and does the UK (and other countries) have a system in place that can do the job without impeding the active involvement of the UK in the global Internet?