The owner of a pub that doubles as a Wi-Fi hotspot has paid out £8,000 after someone illegally downloaded material subject to copyright laws on their premises. Meanwhile, a new survey shows that as many as one in five wireless users could be vulnerable to Wi-Fi hijacking across Britain.

The BBC Trust today turned down plans for the BBC to share the iPlayer among a ‘Federation’ of public service broadcasters – namely, ITV, Channel 4 and Five.
In what must have seemed a little too much like a return to the days of Kangaroo the BBC had suggested that iPlayer could be shared among the [...]

In a second submission to the BBC Trust Sky has again accused the publicly funded broadcaster of “riding a coach and horses” through the embryonic market for online television.
In another  stinging attack on Project Canvas, published this evening, the satellite broadcaster and ISP accuses the BBC of misspending licence fee money to “stifle innovation” in [...]

Ofcom’s just announced its proposals for regulating the UK’s infamously “nascent” video-on-demand marketplace. In line with revisions to European law, content could be regulated as soon as December this year.

According to the BBC’s IPTV Programme Director, Project Canvas could have an innovative way of storing content locally in order to reduce the bandwidth demands of the service. Not only that, Richard Halton says there’s a “real opportunity” that the much-hyped Project Canvas will reach the market next year. Meanwhile, there’s news on Hulu and Arqiva’s own video-on-demand (VOD) plans.

Outlaw.com concludes that net neutrality has no status in UK law.

Sky has launched a scathing attack on the BBC and the BBC Trust over the proposed Project Canvas which would see BBC, ITV and BT collaboration on a set top box which would bring online video content to the living room – essentially a Freeview box but with iPlayer-style functionality.
Sky’s response to the BBC Trust [...]

The BBC’s Anthony Rose has been discussing the bandwidth use and other aspects of the popular iPlayer service with CNET UK.

The BBC and Sky are, perhaps unsurprisingly, at loggerheads as to how central the BBC should be in delivering the government’s vision for Digital Britain.
Last week Sky asserted the government should reconsider its call, through the interim Digital Britain report, for the BBC to play a role in marketing broadband Britain and helping to set [...]

The BBC is bringing the download version of the iPlayer (as opposed to the streaming video version) to Mac and Linux users by using Adobe’s AIR cross platform technology. AIR allows flash type content delivery in a standalone executable outside the web browser and will also provide the Digital Rights Management (DRM) required to time-limit [...]

BBC engineers have used the lull after frenzied downloading and streaming of the Olympics to fix a bug with iPlayer that was causing BT Home Hubs and O2 and Be wireless routers to reset.
The annoying bug was believed to be a problem in the BBC’s encoding of the system that was affecting wireless routes using [...]

The BBC is changing a number of aspects of their iPlayer TV and Radio service. Originally conceived as a download “catch up” service using P2P services it is now largely used in streaming mode, no doubt reflecting the technical ability and attention span of the viewing population.
The changes include a new “high quality” option which [...]