March 2010
18 posts
1 tag
Freeview HD DRM
Ofcom’s consultation on the DRM measures being proposed by the BBC for the Freeview HD platform closes at 5pm on Friday. If you want to respond to it, now would be a good time. I’ll be publishing my full response this evening.
You may find a summary of the issues that I wrote a little while ago to be of interest, especially if you’re not entirely sure what the deal is (there’s plenty of deeper...
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Ogg
There’s a nice post from Måns on the difficiencies of the Ogg container format.
A little while ago I wondered why it was that anybody bothered with Ogg or Matroska when MPEG 4 Parts 12 & 14 (ISO Base Media and the MP4 container formats, respectively) were widely-supported and not completely horrible.
As far as I can tell, it turns out that Ogg and Matroska both pre-date the...
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Some definitions
Conditional access
A means of ensuring that only those people who are supposed to have access to something do. This might be a username and password, or a smartcard, or something else.
Geographic restrictions
A form of conditional access which bases the decision upon where in the world you are. Can be implemented alone (as iPlayer does), or in tandem with other mechanisms (e.g., you must both...
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Blue-Sky thinking
This week, BSkyB’s COO, Mark Darcy, penned an opinion piece in the “Organ Grinder” section of the MediaGuardian, on the subject of Project Canvas.
This piece was particularly interesting, because as far as I know it’s the first whisper on the subject we’ve heard from Sky since the last consultation closed (although I don’t think they’ve disclosed their response to it as they have previously).
...
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“Putting aside the fact that Ashleigh was 17 years old when she went to meet...”
– The Register, a seemingly lone voice of sanity in a sea of hysterical knee-circlejerking.
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War on… you
Everything’s a war nowadays. In truth, it has been for a while, but a whirlwind of unrelated news coverage over the past couple of days has brought it sharply into focus.
There’s the war on piracy, the war on drugs, the war on paedophiles, and, as ever, the war on terror.
Let me be clear about this: I’m no supporter of piracy, paedophiles, or terrorism. Drugs, certainly, cause a lot of...
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“For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube,...”
– YouTube Blog: Broadcast Yourself - Just wow. (via nikf)
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About that Internet piracy study…
Yesterday, Richard Wray wrote up a piece in the Guardian on a study which has been backed by the TUC and claims that by 2015, losses from piracy will reach £218bn and put 1.2 million jobs in peril.
Let’s be clear about something from the outset: my purpose here isn’t to make the case that copyright infringement is fine, or even one of those mythical “victimless crimes”, however these numbers...
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This weekend…
…I went on a trip to Newcastle, and spent much of Saturday getting in the way at the BBC R&D/Backstage stand at Maker Faire 2010.
The BBC team had plenty of kit in tow, and turned around this short video. Ant Miller’s written up a post on the R&D blog, too.
You may also be interested in Rain Ashford’s video of the weekend.
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Response to the on-demand consultation
I posted this to Twitter, but meant to post it here sooner than I did.
This is my response to the BBC Trust’s consultation on the BBC’s on-demand offerings
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Fun with MIME types
Okay, what if you could do this:—
<video poster="http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/imageArchive/programmes/8001_pp.jpg">
<source type="application/vnd.bbc.playlist+xml" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/xml/8001.xml" />
</video>
…or perhaps this…
<video poster="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/images/episode/b00rfgl2_640_360.jpg">
<source...
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Embedding Programmes Ontology metadata in web...
Just a random thought regarding the Programmes Ontology.
I wonder if there’s value in embedding PO metadata in HTML pages showing videos (rather than simply linking to an RDF source via <link rel="alternate" …>.
We already have a way to embed Dublin Core metadata:
<link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
<meta name="DCTERMS.created"...
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“To print to your printer using SMB/CIFS, Windows users must configure an...”
– Mac OS X 10.4 Help: Sharing your printer with Windows users
fucking shitsocks. (via ibroadfo)
Interesting, but makes a lot of sense. Everything on Mac OS X is geared for sending Postscript to printers (be they Postscript printers or not).
Conveniently, Adobe provides a generic driver.
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...
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“My patching system, the EP5S/31, was given the name LEOPARD, notionally standing...”
– Richard Russell’s career at the BBC
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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...
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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.
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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...