Project Canvas news update - 24 March

Quite a few noteworthy items from the last few days around Project Canvas:

• 22 March - The project announced that Arqiva has joined as the seventh partner to the venture. (Arqiva is the communications infrastructure company; it has a share in Freeview, and it also launched SeeSaw, the VoD project that came out of the defunct Project Kangaroo).  News release here (PDF). Arqiva have made no secret of their desire to bring SeeSaw to the TV.
• 22 March - At the same time, it was announced that Project Canvas made a submission (on its own initiative) to OFT (the Office of Fair Trading). The goal is to satisfy OFT that the venture is not any form of merger. Post on the official Canvas site here. The submission has triggered a consultation. There is a page here on the OFT site, but it is not clear how to comment, or who is eligible to comment. Comments close on April 7.
• It was mentioned in an article (which we can’t relocate!) that the BBC Trust’s final ruling on the BBC involvement would be delayed from the spring target - apparently tied to the OFT consultation - but we can’t find any official mention of this. (Do you know more? Drop us an email - ProjectCanvasUK@gmail.com)  (Update - C21Media & TechRadar are 2 sites that mention the delayed final ruling.)
• 23 March - From the IPTV World Forum, Julian Clover (from Broadband TV News) tweeted this:  “Halton: Canvas in ‘private discussions’ with HbbTV to ‘take two programmes into alignment’ ”
  
• 18 March - BSkyB made public its full submission to the BBC Trust’s final consultation on Canvas. It is available here as a PDF.  PaidContent:UK has their usual good summary.
• 17 March - BSkyB COO Mike Darcy argues in The Guardian Sky’s main objections again (that the market will develop standards, shephered by the industry body DTG (Digital TV Group), & that the BBC should not be using license fee money) and also says that BT could be one of the biggest (unfair) beneficiaries of the BBC money, with Canvas boosting it’s ailing BT Vision product.
• 23 March - Presumably in response to Darcy’s piece, perennial supporter Michael Cornish, CEO of VoD provider Blinkbox, has a piece in the Guardian pushing the benefit to end consumers of an open standard. (On this note, the PR guys must be very happy - check out all the tweets that mention the whole takeaway of “great for consumers” alongside the article link.)