Tumbled Logic

Children today are in the midst of a sea-change in broadcasting. They’re growing up with widespread access to both live and on-demand output at the touch of a few buttons across a multitude of devices. Their parents are the generation who grew up with the BBC Microcomputer, the Domesday Project, Teletext, and some of the finest programming — still enjoyed today — that the British broadcasting industry has ever produced.

That generation, my generation — a generation which then grasped emerging convergent technologies with both hands — is at least in part responsible for the landscape of the broadcasting world as it exists today. As children, possibilities unfolded before us despite the crude state of the available technology. We saw beyond the low-resolution graphics, awkward interfaces and lack of computing power. We saw what these ideas could become.

As adults, we have striven to make those possibilities a reality, and the technologies required to do this are becoming widespread. Much of it is still in its infancy, but rich hypermedia, access to television and radio from a range of devices (from the television to the mobile phone and beyond), and instant, affordable, global telecommunications are together changing the way our children — and us — are informed, educated and entertained.

User Agent/Referrer Verification

This is a snippet of code which verifies access to a given resource based upon a combination of access to a referring resource and a user-agent string. The client generates an sha256-hmac based on the contents of the referring resource (which the client must have access to) and its user-agent string. This HMAC is sent along with the request for a resource.

Thus, given a list of referring resources and valid user agents, the server can generate a list of valid keys by performing the same sha256-hmac process on each combination. If a client sends a request which does not appear in this list of keys, the request is denied.

I would be interested on an expert opinion as to whether this is considered an “effective” technological copyright-protection mechanism according to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended by The Copyright and Related Rights Regulation 2003), and whether implementing a third-party client which implements this protocol (for the purposes of interoperability) constitutes “any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures” as specified by section 296ZB of the Act.

Canvas

It’s not often that the DTG, Sky and Virgin Media all agree on something.

Even rarer is that the dissenting body is the BBC.

Even rarer still is that much of the criticism levelled at the BBC and its partners is sentiment I share.

Either the world’s about to end, or we might collectively have a point.

Birtspeak 2.0

The BBC should also make a step-change towards simplicity in its operations and structure, dismantling the remaining elements of its traditional hierarchy and replacing them with a flatter, more dynamic and flexible structure that reflects the nature of the BBC’s new challenges: wholly focused on serving the public with fewer management layers; better team-working and pan-BBC collaboration; and stronger performance management.

— BBC Strategy Review, March 2010

Broadcast versus on-demand

Kate says:

I believe that on-demand will replace broadcast when >95% of the pop has broadband & there is a good “feed me TV” mode for on-demand

Now, I don’t technically disagree with this statement, but there are a few hidden conditions which means it’s a lot further off than availability of the raw technology belies.

First, there’s not just the general provision of broadband, but the means by which it’s architected. As Kate alluded to in an earlier tweet, we need smart “routers” which can cache content; effectively, CDN nodes within very very easy reach of everyone. Technically, this isn’t hugely difficult, and there are lots of ways by which content can be fed to them (which is where effective use of multicast can help, too), but in many current ISP’s networks, there actually isn’t somewhere that you can place such a node which won’t cost you just as much for the consumer to access as it would were they to stream the content directly from source. Of course, BT will be happy to sell you a solution which avoids this (which again, in part is built on multicast).

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. Some ISPs could do this today, and it’s not hugely different from how cable TV works. But actually deploying this on a useful scale requires having enough demand from both on-demand providers and ISPs to make the cost of the nodes affordable, which relies on the ISP’s networks to be amenable to their placement, and so on, and so forth. This is not a “it won’t happen”, but it probably won’t happen within the next five years without some serious game-changer appearing in the domestic ISP market.

Next, in order to “feed” content in place of editorially-chosen programming, you need to have rich enough metadata — not just for new programmes, which only make up a comparatively small proportion of what is broadcast and people watch, but also for all the things we’re making and broadcasting today, all the way back to those episodes of Fawlty Towers and classic Star Trek.

This is a huge challenge, much bigger than trying to get intelligent lightweight content-delivery nodes into every ISP in the land. The technical aspects of matching preferences to metadata are fairly straightforward, but to deploy this as a replacement for, say, BBC One (with access to the same content that the controller of BBC One has) would require a monstrous amount of effort. But, on the plus side, it’s effort which is being undertaken.

We’ve already seen Joost try — and fail — to do precisely this, and they failed for a few reasons (chief amongst them being availability of content that people want to watch). Getting content that people want to watch and getting the metadata attached to it appropriately and getting enough of it that’s a serious contender and packaging all of this up into a device people can just plug into their TVs cost-effectively is a big challenge. A huge challenge, in fact.

Finally, there’s the matter of identity: even with the prevalence of iPlayer, people still differentiate between the BBC’s different channels (even without the BBC’s own brand identity efforts). It’s a safe bet that a documentary on the life and works of Tolstoy is probably BBC Four fare, while a new 18-35 comedy series is at home on BBC Three. Technology aside, there’s something to be said for the editorial choices of others. This is relatively easy to solve, though: rather than building a profile for a complete channel, you start with one of the existing ones and add/remove as desired (e.g., “BBC One without the property shows and more drama”).

All in all, I don’t think it’s something that’s pie-in-the-sky, but by the same token I think it’ll be a good ten years (a lifetime in technology, and a lifetime in some respects in the broadcast world) before we see anything which achieves it with a serious chance of success and survival.

Wow

A couple of days ago, I posted about a collaborative playlist I’d created on Spotify called “Discoveries”.

When I posted the link, the playlist contained just three tracks, and I haven’t added any since. I just took a look and it now contains 66 tracks — four and a half hours of music.

I’m actually quite blown away by this. I love the idea of a huge ever-growing playlist that, whoever you are, contains music that other people are just discovering. I do wonder how long before it’s indistinguishable from random selection or the “radio” feature, though.

I’ve seen syncing the playlist for offline playback on my iPod touch. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’ve been quite enjoying it. Keep adding stuff!

BBC signals an end to an era of expansion

This from an article in The Times (prop: R. Murdoch), which may potentially be seen as a means for one of the BBC’s fiercest critics (R. Murdoch) to exert pressure upon the corporation.

It’s also, to my mind, unusual for “Trust sources” to leak the conclusions from a consultation several weeks before the report is due.

Further, it’s not necessarily true that the BBC has seen an “era of expansion”.

Still, let us take the claims at face value.

There are some aspects of these cuts which aren’t necessarily a terrible thing. In fact, some I’d actually — on balance — agree with. I am biased. I don’t have the benefit of the big picture across all of the audience demographics. BBC Switch is something which makes me feel old (in that it garners a reaction of “what? are you talking that way for real?”), Blast! is something I have no idea of, but from my white middle-class observation point BBC Asian Network appears to have been a moderate success.

(I refuse to be drawn into the 6Music debate).

But, on the flip-side…

“The corporation’s web pages are to be halved, backed by a 25 per cent cut in staff numbers. Its £112 million budget will also be cut by 25 per cent.”

I don’t know what this means, and I build web sites for a living. People I know who build web sites for a living don’t know what it means. People who work for the BBC don’t know what it means. Nobody knows what it means because it makes no sense at all. How do you “halve” web pages? Is URI count the principal measure of a site’s size? Or is it the amount of content? How much of it is generated automatically from things which the BBC has internally anyway? How much of it is user-generated? Once you take away News, Weather, iPlayer, the blogs, the message-boards, H2G2 and /programmes, what do you have left? Maybe the educational stuff should go? Or the games on CBeebies (as much as I dislike Flash, my three year old shares no such derision)? What about the BBC Food content? Sport? Where must the axe fall?

“It is also pledging to include more links to newspaper articles to drive traffic to the websites of rival publishers.”

Didn’t those publishers get really quite uppity when Google did that? Confused. dot com.

“The BBC will also try to calm the nerves of local newspaper groups — who are suspicious of the corporation after its aborted plans to develop video-driven local websites — with a pledge not ever to produce services at a “more local” level than is currently the case.”

“Local newspaper groups” are increasingly the same as “national newspaper groups”, for those who haven’t been paying any attention. What does ”more local” mean anyway? I mean, the BBC goes really quite local for me (it once used one of my photos, for example), but I wouldn’t rely on it for anything important that was happening locally. Social media has killed the news in that respect for me (especially now that local authorities are getting in on the old social game).

On the numbers: I don’t honestly know if they add up. They could be plucked out of thin air just as easily as they could be dead-on for all I know.

The Trap

Do not make the mistake of confusing “works because of” and “works in spite of”.