Little said the emergence of technologies such as TiVo and Sky+ show consumers now want TV on demand -- broadcasters, he said, must embrace the ability of the internet to deliver on that demand.
"As broadcasters we are driven by the consumer. Scheduled broadcasting is now dying. The idea of the seven 'til nine peak schedule time is no longer relevant -- technologies such as TiVo are now driving the market and we must provide content for users to watch whenever they want," said Little, adding "the internet will enable that."
Little added that consumers have seized upon the now-widespread availability of broadband and broadcasters must now give them something to stretch their bandwidth and make those fat pipes worth the money.
Little said the BBC is on the verge of releasing an "Internet media player" which will enable online viewers "to go back over the last seven to 14 days of BBC content and watch whatever they like".
The bandwidth issue is key to both developing such content and innovation, while another panellist speaking at the Cal-IT Europe Forum in London said it can no longer be an excuse.
Mike Barrett, European technology director at CNET Networks, publisher of ZDNet UK, said: "The internet business five years ago was very scary and very immature. There were no proven business models and most importantly no bandwidth. Back then if you had a 2Mb connection you were state of the art."
"We have spent the past five years overcoming those obstacles and bandwidth is now incredibly cheap," added Barrett, saying media companies must now push forward and innovate with content and delivery, potentially to an increasing array of form factors such as 3G/smartphones and PDAs as well as users' broadband-connected PCs.
Talkback
I hope they're quick - I missed Spooks last night
At last!! now I don't have to get shafted into getting Sky+"£149 + subsciption+£10 a month for extra room deal" don't think so!!
The BBC is the best broadcaster in the world, sure you've got HBO which I like but all round you can't beat the BBC for it's services like its unrivelled Radio stations: currently people use the playback feature for radio like crazy and TV broadcasting like the news news is watched globaly, especially by the Americans.
This involves some interesting technical issues which have so far been ignored by (most / all?) UK ISPs and the Broadband Equipment manufacturers.
1) The BBC is going to want to send streams at 300k to 1Mbps+ for reasonable quality.
2) for real time true 'broadcast' streams IP Multicasting was designed to eliminate the need for a stream per listener -Using Mulitcasting you need one stream per programme out of the BBC and a stream per ISP out of the Internet Exchange.
3) The BBC has been experiementing with MC for years.
The problems are
a) Few ISPs have any experience of Mulitcasting or even mention it on their web sites.
b) Although it is a "mandatory" part of IP it is not AFAIK implemented (fully) in most domestic ADSL equipment - it should be available in Cisco based equipment.
c) The current BT ADSL infrastructure based on ATM cannot easily handle Multiicasting - it creates a Virtual circuit for every user back to the ISP's router, so BT in the present design AFAIK cannot benefit from the bandwidth savings without overlaying a whole virtual mulitcast support out to the local exchanges where the DSLAMs are. located.
d) Broadband Cable Modem infrastructures with their LAN like architectures can potentially benefit from Mulitcasting more easily
e) and then there is NAT and firewalling which I have not even thought through as to what its implications are.
Maybe this will help we poor souls who can't receive terrestrial, don't want Sky's expensive rubbish but have broadband.