• Five pulls out as a venture partner (July 9) – the cash-strapped broadcaster said it couldn’t commit the necessary cash until it has completed a strategic review to see what role Canvas might play in its future.
• Orange was rumoured to be in talks to join the venture – this first came up in mid July, but nothing has been confirmed as yet.
• Kip Meek – ex-Ofcom as well as ex-Phorm director and ex-Ingenious Media – rumoured to be appointed Chairman, and then confirmed (23 July). Meek will be responsible for finding a CEO for the venture.
• Five set to return to Project Canvas – after the broadcaster was bought by Richard Desmond, who has a desire for the broadcaster to continue to be involved as a venture partner. Desmond bought Five on 23 July.

(Remember there’s a full timeline page over on the unofficial Project Canvas wiki.)

So we thought we’d look back and see just how popular that news has been, compared to other phases in Canvas’ life. The graph below doesn’t show anywhere near the whole life of Canvas (we might revisit later on and add more historical data), but it does show the ebb & flow of key Project Canvas news announcements between April 1 and yesterday (July 10).

There’s no doubt that the Five news tweets will keep going over the weekend & Monday, so we’ll try to remember to update the graph below mid next week…

It’s a wide image, so click the preview below to open up the full size.

Ouch.

From this FT article:

“We are very disappointed but I don’t think anyone feels the fundamental strategic rationale [for Canvas] has been diminished,” said Richard Halton, programme director at Project Canvas. “We don’t think this changes the likely scale or impact of the platform.”

And Media Guardian article here.

We’ll come back to some of the detail over the coming days, but in summary, the BBC is now allowed to continue to be involved in the initiative (which involves 6 other companies too, with a possible 7th to join later on too).

The Trust did impose some conditions on BBC involvement – all of which can be found in summary here at the BBC site – but there really wasn’t anything there that the BBC Exec wasn’t planning on doing already. The Trust’s conditions just ensure those plans are committed to by all companies in the venture, otherwise the BBC – and its cash – will need to drop out.

Below is a word cloud of two documents from Friday – the final conclusions from the BBC Trust (the top cloud), and those submissions  made to the Trust after its provisional conclusions earlier this year that were not held as confidential (the bottom cloud). (Both word clouds made with Wordle.net). Both have had the terms “BBC” “Trust” and “Canvas” taken out.

• Sky announced it’s Sky+ Anytime capabilities – true pull VoD over the internet – will be switched on in Q4, with staff trials currently underway.  Telegraph article.
• A deal between Sky & Virgin Media was announced, in which Sky will buy the latter’s TV channels including Virgin 1 (to be re-branded or closed), Living, Bravo & Challenge. Carriage of Sky 1 and Sky Arts on Virgin were also part of the deal, as was some on demand content from Sky.  Broadband TV News article here.
• PaidContent UK has it that YouTube is considering linking out to the VoD sites of broadcasters, in a similar way to the feature BBC iPlayer announced last week. The article notes it’s all very early days though.

• Tim Bradshaw (his twitter) at the FT has it that a final brand name being considered from the shortlist for the initiative is ‘YouView’. FT article here. One of the Intellectual Property Office marks referred to in the article is here at the IPO site.
• The same article has the project partners conceding that a likely revised launch date to consumers is spring 2011, rather than end of 2010 as originally hoped for, given the delays caused by regulatory approval.
• One part of the advertising duties for Project Canvas has been awarded, to agency Saint@RKCR/Y&R. The agency will look after the digital advertising for the project (while it wasn’t explicitly mentioned, chances are high that this includes the consumer-facing website too).  The rest of the advertising – which presumably means the offline advertising and the strategic work – is still out to pitch. Campaign Live article.
• Two days after the OFT’s decision, chairman of TalkTalk – one of the Canvas partners – Charles Dunstone had a piece in the Guardian defending the initiative. In it he admits there have been differences over the strategic direction of the project at times.
• Post the OFT approval for Canvas, Sky’s COO Mike Darcey has come out and said he believes BBC & ITV knew how to work the regulator, based on their experience with the blocked Project Kangaroo. Telegraph article.
• Sky’s director of on-demand Griff Parry has repeated that Sky are not altogether ruling out appearing on Project Canvasas as a platform (and re-iterated that it is the BBC’s involvement that Sky objects to). TechRadar article.
• Channel Five appointed Capablue to handle Five’s involvement in Canvas, including strategy and technical requirements. NMA article.

• Arguagbly the biggest splash was made by Google when it announced Google TV at its IO developer conference. Find different views all around the web, but the prevalent view seems to be a positive one. Here’s one article from BusinesssInsider, including a link to some pics.
• Also big news was the beta release of the new version of BBC iPlayer. This is the version that has Facebook & Twitter connective functionality, recommendation functionality, and will also shortly direct users out to VoD sites of other providers including C4, Five, ITV & SeeSaw when they search for non-BBC programs on the iPlayer site. Press release here & a Guardian guide here.
• Predictably, Sky doesn’t like how iPlayer will direct users, and fears it is becoming a portal without any approval or oversight. Guardian article here. Has anyone heard what other players think of the feature?
• Measurement: The Broadband Measurement Working Group says its now happy with a methodology it’s developed to measure audiences for online TV simulcast. MAD article.
• BBC iPlayer stats for April are out – record figures once again. All the detail is available from the link found here.
• More stats: ITV has a good deck up on SlideShare - a state of the VoD nation.
• And one final, bleedingly obvious, one: YouGov research has shown that online TV viewing is up year on year, by 54%. NMA article here.
• TunerFish is another new service that aims to capitalise on second screen viewing. This one goes down the Foursquare-esque route of awarding points & badges for viewing declaration, and is from within Comcast.  NewTeeVee article here.
• Mini-mini-landmark: The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has for the first time banned an ad shown on VoD. BrandRepublic article.
• SeeSaw has now introduced its paid service, giving access to back catalogue TV content. Guardian article.

This leaves the initiative freer to progress (although it still needs final approval from the BBC Trust for the BBC’s  continued involvement) having by-passed one big potential regulatory hurdle.

More as the OFT’s findings are published on their site.

Update: 15.47 – OFT’s media release is here. The key reason for their decision:  none of the partners are contributing an existing business to the venture.

Below however are some figures that provide a little context to the £50m figure – all drawn from some aspect of the consumer electronics and broadcasting areas that Project Canvas will play in. While the comparisons are not exactly like-for-like  (for example the Canvas marketing spend will no doubt be front-weighted rather than split evenly over 4 years, and broadcasters’ spend will no doubt increase over the 2009 figures shown) it gives us a rough idea of how the c. £50m for Canvas is set to massively outspend other similar initiatives such as FreeSat & Freeview and even broadcasters, and pale in comparison to only some of the broadcasters & pay-tv efforts.

• 08 May – YouTube is said to be looking to offer content owners a mechanism whereby they can charge for access to their videos in a self-service manner (CNET article). Understandably it will only initially be available to those who are already content partners.
• 04-06 May – Some of the latest stats around VoD consumption: Virgin Media saw 200 million VoD views across 2.1 mill homes (TechRadar); time-shifted TV consumption is at 6.9% of all Tv viewing (& 13.7% in households with PVRs) says TV marketing body Thinkbox (MediaWeek); Five served 51mill total VoD viewers online in 2009, with 1.3mill long-form videos per month (PaidContent UK); ITV served an avg 16.4 million views per month to 8.7 million unique viewers per month over Q1 (ITV release).
• Not directly related to VoD yet, but Sky announced record growth in its HD boxes – adding almost half a million of them in Q1  (Broadband TV News). This is important because the Sky+ HD box has the ethernet connection that will allow for Sky’s true-pull VoD offering to be launched to the entire HD install base later this year.
• 04 May – Robert at PaidContent UK has a post showing some of the BBC iPlayer’s socialised aspects out in the wild (on Twitter). ‘Version 3′ of iPlayer has long been touted by Huggers & Rose as the social version, but as far as we are aware, there’s not been any publicly discussed launch/roll-out date.
• 27 April -  Hulu has reportedly ‘abandoned’ plans to launch in the UK. Emma Barnett at the Telegraph has this article. We say reportedly however because – like all the past Telegraph pieces about how close a Hulu dea/launch was claimed to be, there is still no official statement from any party including Hulu – just the “sources close to…”.  For the record, the reasons for Hulu’s withdrawal are the oft-repeated ones: ITV is not syndicating it’s VoD content, and C4 and Five want to sell ad inventory around their content in any syndication deals they’re striking.
• Bill Scott at Easel.tv has a piece on what a good app store could mean for TV.