A company partly owned by the BBC says remote controls for streaming-only devices should be forced to include buttons for channel numbers, programme guides and subtitles.
The call came in Everyone TV’s response to an Ofcom consultation on a review of broadcast rules and regulations.
Jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, the company has day to day responsibility for overseeing and delivering the broadcasters’ three TV platforms; Freeview Play, Freesat and Freely.
Streaming-only devices such as Fire TV, Roku and Apple TV sticks and boxes often have minimalist remote controls designed around their core purpose of delivering app-based content.
In its consultation response, Everyone TV contrasts this with the approach taken by the services it operates which all draw on an industry technical specification known as the D-book.
Remotes for those services include buttons necessary to navigate through programme guides, buttons to manually type in a channel number, coloured hot keys which are often used to access on demand services or ‘restart’ features, and buttons dedicated to activating subtitles.
Noting that some traditional TV makers have started to add their own buttons, such as ones to access the device’s home screen and dedicated guides for FAST channels, Everyone TV writes: that “many streaming-only device manufacturers, who are not bound by the D-book, have gone further: removing numbers, coloured buttons, subtitle buttons and clear guide buttons.”
It says the absence of such buttons can be a barrier to some users, especially those who are “less digitally skilled” and calls on Ofcom to mandate that devices offering live channels via any means include “easily identifiable and accessible numbered buttons, coloured buttons, and a single, distinctive guide button on remotes.”
However the response omits to reflect the fact that several of its broadcaster shareholders declined to make their channels available via the Fire TV stick’s guide until relatively recently and have also faced claims of failing to allow the streamed versions of their channels to appear in guides on other devices on the same terms they’re provided to Freely.
And, although Everyone TV’s response cites the Apple TV as another device with none of the traditional buttons on its remote, the box has no guide at all meaning many of the demanded buttons would be useless.
Additionally, Apple TV users who watch iPlayer would have had no use of a dedicated subtitle button until last July when the BBC finally brought subtitles to the device after a decade of insisting it was impossible to do so.
Everyone TV’s consultation response is in sync with the ongoing campaign for its shareholders to be protected from audiences’ growing adoption of global streaming services over traditional broadcaster offerings and the increasing popularity of streaming sticks and boxes.
Broadcasters have already successfully argued that their apps should benefit from mandated “prominence” on such streaming devices, with final rules on how this will be implemented set for release in the coming months.
As part of its response, the company also echoed complaints made by broadcasters that the big streamers are able to buy branded buttons on remotes and goes on to argue that some such services are “making supply of their services conditional on securing one”.
However the broadcasters themselves benefited for decades from imposing similar requirements on set top box and TV makers who, in return for using the Freeview and Freesat brands, had to include prominent buttons to heavily branded guides and menus and relegate any subscription apps to separate menus.