Tumbled Logic

Karsten Manufacturing Corporation

Trademark details for “PING”, bearing a “First use” date of 2008:

IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer software, namely, file sharing software; communications software for electronically exchanging data, and graphics accessible via a computer network; computer software and hardware for processing images, graphics, audio, video, and text; all of the foregoing marketed to consumers and golf retailers; Downloadable video recordings featuring sports and sports instructions, the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers; Interactive video game programs, the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers; Computer software for wireless content delivery, the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers. FIRST USE: 20081103. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20081103

(From this one)

IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Computer services, namely, providing search platforms to allow users to request content from and receive content to a mobile device or a computer; Providing user-defined generated content and content of others automatically selected and customized based on the known or estimated geographical location of a user; all of the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers. FIRST USE: 20080530. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20080530

(From this one)

Cripes.

Hat tip to Dj Walker-Morgan

While I think about it…

Why the chuff did Apple license the “Ping” trademark from the clothing manufacturer? The use of the term “Ping” in computer networking (and, as a follow-on, social networking) is as old as the hills. So much so that MBA-laden salesdroids use it with such disturbing incongruent regularity that many of us have an instinctive nervous twitch encountering the word whenever it’s used to refer to people (rather than devices) communicating.

The Apple Event

Nothing earth-shattering here. A few good, a few bad, and definitely some uglies.

iPod touch

Camera is finally here, but is rubbish. Other aspects are nice, but predictable. Shame it persists with this curvy-backed nonsense, though.

iPod shuffle

Screams of “Okay, we screwed up”. Fair play.

iPod nano

Dinky. If anything’s going to kill the Shuffle, this will be it.

iTunes

• That icon is horrible.
• Somebody on Twitter said (apologies, can’t find original tweet to link) something along the lines of: “If you’re going to break UI conventions, you’d better do something stellar”. This is true here. defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1
• It’s not iTunes X

iTunes Ping

The idea of sharing musical taste and consumption info across your social network is not a bad idea, nor is it a new one. Last.fm is clearly the key example of this, but Spotify also does it. Recommending gigs and other artists based on the aggregated information (which is pretty much just an extension to Genius) is also not a bad idea.

Building a completely new social network to do it is bonkers. It’s not even a fallback for those people who have neither {Twitter,Facebook} accounts. Apparently Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to” (according to Jobs, via word of mouth) — yet Facebook’s terms are more or less fine for everybody else, including Spotify and the BBC? Something smells fishy here. And, really, no OAuth-based Twitter integration? The iTunes Store is alrightly lightly-integrated with both Twitter and Facebook, so not supporting these two seems a little strange.

iOS 4.1

Meh. The bugfixes are the only really interesting thing here.

iOS 4.2

This is where it gets interesting, though “November” is now Autumn, apparently. This is the long-awaited unified iOS supporting iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Folders, multitasking and IPv6 are pretty high on my list of “I wish the iPad would hurry up and get these” list. Printing is a big deal. I don’t doubt that there’ll be more stuff.

Apple TV

Nothing huge here. Certainly not the device certain people were predicting. While it does run iOS — apparently — this is an implementation detail (easiest way to support the A4; porting Tiger to ARM would be No Fun). Still called the Apple TV (no shocker there). On the plus side, it’s a quarter of the size of the old model, has fewer ports, and I suspect runs cooler. Oh, and it’s a fair bit cheaper.

The loss of an internal disk makes sense: streaming (rather than syncing) from iTunes libraries has always worked fairly well on the Apple TV, provided your network wasn’t flaky. 802.11n is a lot more prevalent now than when the original or revised models were released, and it hasn’t lost wired Ethernet.

Even so, if price wasn’t the key factor preventing you from getting one, you’re unlikely to be blown away by one now (unless you live in the US and want a device for Netflix streaming).

Speaking personally, as somebody who does have an Apple TV which sees regular use, the price change has taken my plan of moving the current one into the living room so that the kids can use it in there and getting a new one for the bedroom from “would like to do” to “will probably do”. However it’s worth stressing that we have a vast library of content that the Apple TV can play out of the box already, having spent some considerable time over the past couple of years ripping our entire DVD collection to H.264+AAC MP4s.

Hardware-wise, it essentially does nothing that the old one doesn’t do, and the only significant software change for the time being is Netflix. If you live in the US. Still no 1080p (I suspect that’d be a push on the A4, not to mention streaming bandwidth and the lack of content on the iTunes Store, but even so). Still very definitely a hobby, albeit a cheaper one.

I still think scope for apps on the Apple TV is limited: there’s games, but they’ll need a control mechanism of some kind (conversations at the weekend headed towards a multitouch Wiimote-style device), and there’s VoD. Video on Demand certainly has a market, but I’d much rather there was a sensible way for the device to do that by itself.

From BBC News:

The High Court in London refused to grant the BBC an injunction blocking the publication by HarperCollins of an autobiography that unmasks the character on the BBC Two show.

:

The BBC argued that the planned book - an autobiography of former Formula Three driver Ben Collins - would breach confidentiality obligations.

A question that has cropped up in conversation this evening is “Why is the BBC’s Senior Technologist, Internet Standards job important?”.

Well, I think that’s a question that cropped up. There was some frivolity and possibly talking at cross-purposes. Such is life where each part of an exchange is compressed to one hundred and forty characters.

Even so. Here goes. This is the longish answer.

The BBC exists because of standards. Not just Internet standards, of course. While broadcasting standards haven’t always been identical the world over (to a certain extent because electricity standards haven’t been the world over), they have all shared the common properties of being non-discrimatory as much as possible. Who didn’t build a radio when they were growing up?

Okay, who out of the geeks and the engineers didn’t build a radio when they were growing up? I suspect there were periods in days gone by when significant chunks of the BBC’s listeners were counted amongst its audience solely on the basis of self-built radios (I have no idea if this still applies to the World Service listenership; it wouldn’t surprise me if it did).

Anyway, the point is: fundamental to public-service broadcasting is the principle of being indiscriminate. This isn’t some airy-fairy piece of doctrine. Rather, it’s the reason for the BBC’s existence, and sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the BBC’s independence from meddling governments.

To put it another way, the BBC has a duty to approach the public with open arms. It’s not feasible to cater to everybody’s individual requirements one-by-one. Conversely, the BBC can’t opt for a single manufacturer (or cartel) and require anybody who wants to tune in to buy their equipment: as the BBC is a publicly-funded broadcaster, it amounts to state aid for the manufacturer in question and potentially breaks all manner of rules. Just imagine if only Sony TVs could receive BBC TV. It would get even crazier when you brought other broadcasters into the mix. Philips TVs support ITV, Panasonic support ITV and Channel Four. You get the idea.

Instead, a set of common — vendor neutral — standards are adhered to. Anybody with the technical skills and access to the right components and manufacturing setup can create a receiver. This applied to radio (where “manufacturing setup” meant “a screwdriver and a soldering iron or a breadboard”), and it applied to TV, although the manufacturing requirements were higher.

As the Internet becomes an ever-increasing part of the BBC’s operations, there’s no sensible way for the same not to apply here too. While it’s true that the Internet is “different” to TV and radio, when you get down to the nitty-gritty of “how we and the BBC communicate with one another”, the need to be speaking the same language in a technical sense is the same.

In a very real sense, for the BBC’s approach to standards on the Internet to be anything less than embracing in all but the shortest of terms — given the steadily-increasingly importance of “the Internet” to it — is as ridiculous an idea as the coalition Government seizing direct control of the corporation and giving Cameron and Clegg a prime-time Saturday night talk show, and ultimately would be just as damaging to the survival of the BBC.

The big question is: why has it taken so long? Perhaps there’s been a longstanding refusal amongst certain quarters to recognise that the Internet is actually a Big Deal. Perhaps it’s been recognised that the Internet is a Big Deal, but it’s been viewed as an opportunity not just to connect and engage with audiences more effectively, but to use new technology to alter the relationship between the two parties in a way which puts the public at a disadvantage. Perhaps it’s overcompensation for the mooted “great levelling” effect of that the Internet has. I don’t know.

But, it’s fair to say that you don’t need to have read the job spec to know that the BBC desperately needs people on the inside promoting and advocating the old-fashioned way of doing things: common standards and open access. Coincidentally, for much of the Internet, this is both the old-fashioned and the new-fangled way of doing things.

It’s not a one-way street, of course. The BBC has traditionally (and does to this day) participated in standards bodies. Where it’s been particular quiet is the W3C, WHATWG, and IETF arenas. When’s the last time you saw an Internet Draft released by the BBC? (It was quite some time ago). Hell, even Apple churns them out (some of them are quite interesting, by the way). Or activity on the HTML WG mailing lists from people @bbc.co.uk? Is Atom working for the BBC? What about RDF? What problems does it have with Multicast? IPv6? RTSP? If it’s not using technologies, is it telling anybody why not, and collaborating with other experts outside of the corporation on solutions? Just as it has in the past in other areas, doing this serves everybody’s interests.

The bottom line: this is an extremely difficult, but absolutely vital, job. It’s a job which needs somebody who believes in the BBC — and why it is what it is. In fact, Internet standards at the BBC could be rephrased as The BBC’s principles and values where we make use of the Internet.

MT the DG on the BBC at the MGEITF

I was, if I’m being honest, a little disappointed by Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture on Friday. Perhaps I’m too used to the finely-tuned delivery of Steve Jobs at Apple events (and, let’s face it, whatever you think of Apple and its products, Steve Jobs knows how to work a crowd).

It wasn’t just Mark Thompson’s delivery that bothered me, though. The content of his speech, which of course is what really matters, didn’t seem all there either. The Director General had a prime opportunity to reframe the entire Sky/BBC battle as one of meaningless irrelevance — this, to my mind, would have been a good thing. This particular protracted battle is only marginally less dull, and just as worthy of the playground, as Adobe’s war of words with Apple.

Instead, Mark Thompson merely drew it out further — though not really answering many of the concerns raised by Sky (and shared by some in the industry) and taking the opportunity to put the boot in about Sky’s low levels of investment in British television and cross-media ownership, not to mention throwing a few punches at the press.

This was a MacTaggart lecture delivered not just to a room full of industry types. It was carried live on the BBC News Channel and simulcast via the web in several places. The transcript is available online (both from the BBC and others), and there’s been extensive coverage both in the news media and the likes of Twitter and blogs. In this context, I think Mark Thompson missed a trick in a big way. Rather than play to an audience which is sometimes renowned (not entirely unfairly) for navel-gazing, he had an opportunity to speak to the wider public, and to the vast majority of BBC staff who weren’t in Edinburgh. Rather than playground squabbles, I would have liked to have seen a galvanising speech championing all of the good things the BBC is doing.

The lecture contained some interesting statements. He harked back to Dennis Potter’s MacTaggart lecture in 1993, describing public service broadcasting, inlcuding the line “One that would not put anyone on the wrong side of an encryption wall. One that would treat everyone as being of equal value.” — unfortunate given the various Freeview HD and iPlayer non-neutrality issues that have been rumbling on over the course of the last year or so. His emphasis on the “Service” in “Public Service Broadcasting” was good to see, though.

Canvas was described in the dullest possible terms. Now, to be clear, Canvas isn’t terribly exciting. It’s a step towards convergence, certainly, but it’s a baby step and one which appears incredibly short-sighted at this stage. And, as regular readers of my blog and Tweets will be painfully aware, its execution is somewhat incongruous with its proclamations of openness. Even so, Canvas’s stunted innovation is still a hell of a lot more interesting than Mark Thompson made it sound.

The speech did contain one quite canny move, throwing down the gauntlet to some rightsholders groups: the announcement was made that the BBC was looking for a way to allow UK TV Licence Fee-payers who happen to be abroad (the key example cited was servicemen and women deployed out of the country) to access domestic iPlayer content. This was met with near-immediate opposition by PACT. Perhaps PACT doesn’t care what the public, press and politicians think. One thing’s for sure — you need some balls to side with the industry body in a “our Brave Boys versus PACT” showdown.

Inevitably, there came the talk of cuts. Cuts to executive pay, and to the Licence Fee, complete with a cringeworthy reference to public support for the BBC in the form of “Twitter feeds”. Honestly, he might as well have started dancing to Rod Stewart at that point, that’s how painful it was. Even so, the point was — in a nutshell — that Jeremy Hunt’s going to give his views and you’d all do well to remember that the BBC has a hell of a lot more public support than a Tory Culture Secretary.

I think it’s clear that Mark Thompson works a lot better behind the camera than in front of it, and that — like many off-camera BBC staff — he’s not entirely comfortable in the public eye. That’s not really something you can hold against him. But at the same time, many have viewed this year’s MacTaggart as being critical, and possibly even a turning-point in his role as Director General.

I don’t think Thompson’s speech came anywhere close to capitalising upon the opportunity he was afforded — an opportunity not simply to mount a basic defence of the BBC, to attack critics, or to talk in broad terms about some of the stuff the corporation has produced recently, but instead to look to the future.

An opportunity to rouse not just the TV industry but the wider, watching, public — not just low-level “background noise” support for the basic principles of the BBC, but to get people on their feet and proclaiming: “I want the BBC to do that and that and that. Make them happen!”

From BBC to YouTube

It’s been suggested to me, on the back of my post yesterday on BBC and HTML5 video, that I go back and have a look at what YouTube said on the subject back in June.

The YouTube post isn’t nearly as incendiary as Erik Huggers’, but they do raise some points which are worth examining (especially in light of some recent news). The constraints upon YouTube are a little different to the BBC — YouTube has a large body of unchanging content which is growing over time, whereas iPlayer not only adds new content but also expires older content on a regular basis — this means that rolling out new codecs or containers is significantly more of a logistical challenge for YouTube than it is for the BBC with iPlayer.

Standard Video Format

This has been a bugbear since the earliest days of HTML5 video and will continue to be for a while yet. Even so, there’s a question: do you want to target everybody with a browser which understands the HTML5 video element, or is a significant subset good enough? Is serving H.264+AAC in MP4 containers for all of the existing videos which exist in this format and only looking at things like WebM for new content good enough, or does everything have to be the same?

[It’s worth noting that lots of videos on YouTube — those from commercial partners — aren’t available as MP4-over-HTTP at all, which is why iOS devices and the Apple TV (and presumably others) can’t play 4oD content on YouTube, for example.]

This is one big area where YouTube has it harder than most, simply because of the vast body of existing content which you would ideally go back and transcode.

One thing I didn’t cover in yesterday’s post related to this — and my comments regarding fallbacks and feature/codec detection are particularly relevant to this issue — is the announcement from the MPEG LA that AVC (that is, H.264) will remain royalty-free forever for “Internet video that is free to end-users”. I haven’t looked in detail at the announcement yet, where I suspect the devil lies, and I very much suspect that this won’t change Mozilla’s stance all that much. At the same time, I’m not convinced that Mozilla will continue to make life difficult for its users who do want to watch video in this format in perpetuity. I’d be surprised if some sort of plugin mechanism didn’t arise which allows for third-party codec support.

Robust video streaming

YouTube is correct here, and it’s something that was pointed out to me yesterday too — the HTML5 standard itself doesn’t include a decent streaming mechanism. On the other hand, though, Apple’s approach is a open specification (and has been since day one), and is one for which a range of tools exist. Another option is, of course, RTSP, which has been curiously neglected by browsers supporting HTML5 video (even desktop Safari, which defers to QuickTime — itself supporting RTSP — for playback doesn’t do RTSP in the context of HTML5 video).

There also needs to be an event model so that supporting JavaScript can have the same sort of control and introspection afforded to ActionScript, rather than necessarily relying on the UA to do it right (this could be especially useful in conjunction with WebSockets, of course).

Erik Huggers would have got a decidedly different reaction if his post had announced that the BBC was exploring (or even proposing) solutions in this area, rather than pitching vague criticisms. As an organisation, the BBC hasn’t been particularly active (and by that I mean “not at all”) in even describing its needs to those writing the specifications, let alone getting involved in ensuring that they’re properly met. Hopefully the newly-created role of Senior Technologist for Internet Standards will change that moving forward.

Google has a role here too, of course, as both a browser vendor and a content provider it’s in a position to see both sides of the coin.

Content Protection

I don’t know what I can say here which I haven’t said before (and most recently yesterday). There’s a fundamental incompatibility between “content protection” and any kind of open system.

Encapsulation + Embedding

Again, more of a concern for YouTube than for iPlayer, this one. There are ways around it. Many sites accomplish embedding by way of JavaScript lumps rather than the embed and object elements directly. Some specialised markup and content management systems do have specific “YouTube” tags or buttons which avoid the copying/pasting of markup (and keep users of the system from embedding arbitrary stuff), but I think this is a bit of a red herring — content management systems, forums and the like would catch up eventually; there’s no reason to prevent Flash streaming just because HTML5-based video is available, and in all honesty (speaking personally), I’d look get video on youtube.com working right first before getting hung on the embedding side of things — there’s nothing to say it all has to be tackled simultaneously.

Luke Blaney also points out that YouTube updated their embedding code a little while ago to use iframes (and so allowing for HTML5 video embedding).

Fullscreen Video

This is a fair point, especially in the context of overlaid content (such as subtitles or hypergraphics). I can think of a few ways that it could be sorted out sanely, though I haven’t looked deeply at the discussions which have been ongoing. Again, it’s worth stressing that Google (and the BBC, who would undoubtedly have similar issues) should be actively contributing in this area.

Camera and Microphone access

Well. Yes. This isn’t really an HTML5 video thing at all — this is a “why we still use Flash at all” justification, which isn’t really the same thing.

The key — with all of this — is pragmatism. Nobody sane wants content providers to serve just HTML5 video in anything but the longest term — instead, they want things to work, even where Flash is not available or performs badly. It doesn’t have to be a great stand-off.

Connecting Broadcast TV and the Web

Libby Miller has written an excellent post on the NoTube blog describing some of the things Project Baird and NoTube have been collaborating on. It’s a bit technical in places, but hopefully you’ll be able to get an idea of what’s been going on and some of the exciting things it makes possible.

NoTube is an EU-funded project exploring applications of social and semantic TV. The NoTube Partners include the BBC, the Open University, IRT, VU Amsterdam, and Ontotext.

Project Baird is a collaborative project open to all interested parties seeking to build on (wherever possible) existing specifications in order to provide building blocks for “next-generation” TV, most notably “connected TVs” and second-screen applications.

Project Baird and NoTube have been collaborating in this area over the course of the last few months, as part of NoTube’s WP7c workpackage, developing specifications and complementary (and sometimes competing!) prototypes.

I want to stress that this is very much early days — what Libby’s described in her post is (for want of a better term) early proof-of-concept work. From the point of view of Project Baird, this helps tremendously in creating better, realistic, specifications. I can’t speak for anybody else, of course, but I’m extremely happy that we’ve been able to collaborate in this — open — fashion on what promises to be a very exciting area of broadcasting technology.

Special thanks to Libby Miller, Dan Brickley, Vicky Buser, Michael Sparks and Andrew McParland for their parts in making this work as well as it has so far. Thanks also to the various people and organisations (some of them quite familiar by now!) involved in RadioDNS, and of course everybody else who’s contributed ideas and feedback, via NoTube, Project Baird, the BBC and other organisations in various capacities.

This will probably be the last post on this for a while from me as I focus on the actual work, but I’d encourage anybody with an interest in this area to join the mailing list and keep an eye on the NoTube blog.