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Canvas chairman gives up Phorm job

Kip Meek to appoint CEO

Kip Meek has been appointed chairman of the Canvas company, and will lead the hunt for a CEO for the TV platform. He'll be giving up his non-executive directorships at the Broadband Stakeholder Group and Phorm.

Meek's association with the latter raised a few eyebrows when he was linked with the post recently - Canvas boxes will return a huge amount of TV and web information to the consortium.

Meek's welcome statement sought to dispel some of the concern around the BBC-led initiative:

"It will also allow third-party business models to thrive through an open platform, bringing the benefits of next-generation TV to anyone who wants it," he said. Critics claim that the platform is far from open, and Canvas' insistence on retaining branding has kept TV players such as Samsung, Sony and Panasonic away - as well as traditional pay-TV rivals such as Sky and Virgin.

Recently the BBC Trust gave its final approval to the project on several conditions. One is that the Cartel Canvas royalty schedule reflects cost-recovery rather than profit, among other conditions. Another is that it should be genuinely open. It stipulated that "completed elements of the Canvas core technical specification [are] to be published within 20 working days from this final approval".

That was on 25 June.

You'll notice that more than 20 days have elapsed since then. So why haven't core Canvas specs been published? Because they're not deemed to be "completed". But they are "completed" enough for manufacturers, including Cisco, to build Canvas boxes. They're beavering away to get them ready for Christmas next Spring. ®

Update

A Canvas spokesperson says the final specs should be released by August 19th. ®

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