Our take...
Screen Digest predicted at the IPTV service's launch that BT Vision would ultimately offer a push HD video-on-demand service to its customers. The existence of an HDMI port on the BT Vision V-box suggested that HD content was in the pipeline for the service, while the low bandwidths of BT's consumer broadband connections ensured that any HD content offered could not be streamed to the consumer, but instead would have to be downloaded.

While HD will be undoubtedly useful as a marketing tool, the main issue for BT will be in persuading consumers to actually buy the content. On a 2Mbps connection, an HD film at 4.5Gb will take over 5 hours to download. Even at 8Mbps, the download will take nearly an hour and a half to complete. This requires substantial premeditation on the part of the consumer and does not play into the hands of the spur-of-the-moment purchases which on-demand services often rely on. Alternative push-VoD solutions, for instance, Sky Anytime or Top-Up TV, rely on the system automatically loading a range of content to the consumer's box, which can then be viewed at a moment's notice. One issue with this approach for BT is the fact that just 10 HD films could take up close to one third of the PVR's hard disk space, and yet could only be viewed by consumers with HD-ready TV sets; however, a simple solution to this would be simply to provide the option for the consumer to activate such a feature. In the meantime however, BT's download strategy does limit the likelihood that consumers will rent HD videos. As a final point, the £4.95 pricepoint, while comparable to rival HD offers from Virgin for instance, is nonetheless a 65 per cent premium on standard definition versions of films. Coupled with the lengthy wait, this is likely to prove to be a turn-off to all but the keenest HD fanatics.