Could Canvas Be The New BBC Micro?

There’s a a sense of deja vu around. Just as the government calls for initiatives to get people online, the BBC is engaged in a project to do just that.

But this is not quite a re-run of the old BBC Micro, the State-backed £200 educational computer which, when it was launched in 1981, sold 1.5 million units and got a generation programming.

Canvas – a new set-top box

Project Canvas is backed by licence-fee money, and will be a £200 box, but I wouildn’t call it educational.  Crudely put, it’s an aid to couch potatoes. In the simplest terms, It’s a set-top box for an extended BBC iPlayer. It’s designed to use broadband connections to usher users quickly through to content from all the terrestrial broadcasters (including Five content, even though the broadcaster pulled out of active involvement).

Canvas is on the verge of getting really started, having got BBC Tust approval, and despite complaints from rival broadcasters – although the project has promised an open interface for other providers’ content. It has a home page you can look at.

It’s clearly aimed at getting non-technical people in front of online content as simply as possible. And this means it is hitting exactly the same target audience as Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox and her Race Online 2012 programme.

Her aim is to get the digital refuseniks online, with the prospect of allowing them to interact better with Government. This has the spin-off benefit of saving the Government money, by allowing it to “switch off” paper-based forms. As the Race Online site smartly puts it, “we’re all better off when everyone’s online”.

People who don’t like computers

Most people I know wouldn’t touch a £200 set-top-box that allows them to do some of the things they can do with a £200 PC. All PCs can drive modern TVs, and are very well able to access iPlayer and other online content.

But Canvas is aimed at people who don’t like computers – as I say, exactly the same people Fox is trying to sign up.

There’s a side problem here for both Canvas and Fox: some people live where broadband does not reach. The government is asking for ideas here. And even if Race Online only works in urban areas, it could be a big help for rural not-spots: there would suddenly be a bigger incentive for the Government to get the last few people online.

So here is what seems to me an obvious bit of joined up thinking. If both Canvas and Fox are aiming at the same people, couldn’t Canvas also act as a government portal?

Obviously, it could. The Canvas plans include the ability to host regular Internet content – including some kind of app store. Government departments could easily make widgets for that, without falling foul of the new austerity drive against so-called “vanity sites”.

Of course, it’s not the ideal way to interact with government web sites. People will have to use some sort of keyboard, and some kind of pointing device. By the time these are in place, the person who got a Canvas box because they don’t like computers, has been fooled into actually having one.

And interacting, from a sofa, with a government website on the opposite wall, is not going to be the best way to fill in a tax form.

But if  the government wants to get people online, and it’s possible to turn this super-easy device into a government portal that will get the unwilling to do things online, then why not even subsidise it for people it particularly wants to see connected?

This might make a good counterpart to the government’s Home Access Scheme which has been giving out laptops to poor families. There’s only another 20,000 grants to go there, and getting a set-top box instead of a proper laptop might be second best. Though questions could well be asked about the private companies who would benefit.

In a sense, Canvas’ difficulty is the fact that it is aimed at the remnant, the people who have not joined the online rapture already.

The BBC Micro had the easy job

The BBC Micro had the easy job of getting the first two million plus into the digital age. It simply lured in people with a pent-up urge to program and play with computing.

Urging the last eyeballs onto the web will be a harder job – and one that is in some ways analogous to the tricky “final third” of broadband coverage. It may be just as hard as the rural broadband problem – though it’s not such a clear case of needing funding.

Getting the rural not-spots covered means engineering, either by digging fibre, or maybe by upgrading wireless. Getting the digital refuseniks online will be a trickier proposition.

But however the issues of government support play out, I think Canvas should have an acknowledged role in it.