Yesterday I saw the talk Treating Digital Broadcast as just another API and other such ruminations (Suw Charman transcript) by Tom Loosemore from the BBC here on XTECH. He showed us some interesting trends and advances in digital broadcasting but he also shattered my perception that the BBC is very ahead in these matters.
Broadcasting I used to think the Dutch Broadcasting Corporation (we call it de Omroep but in English DBC seems easier) was lagging behind the BBC’s new media efforts but it seems that it had already got something over them with the old Uitzendinggemist.nl (literally: “Missed a show”) site. Then yesterday they released the vastly improved new version of Uitzendinggemist.nl.
Online DVR DBC has had Uitzendinggemist.nl for years now. It’s a repository where television shows produced by Dutch broadcasting are recoded (to Real and Windows Media) and stored after broadcast. People can watch them streaming from the server if they’ve ‘missed a show’. There are two quality levels, the higher of which is completely acceptable to watch on a television-like display. You’re not meant to store stuff locally, but you can manage if you try hard enough.
What’s so great about this service?
I haven’t owned a television for two years now and have been getting by completely by the DBC provided DVR service. DBC are serving about 20TB of archive video material from their website and it is widely popular with people. The news alone was requested almost 4 million times in 2005. A lot of people (myself included) don’t feel the need for a PVR anymore.
I don’t have a lot of time to watch television anyway and I mostly watch News and Commentary stuff which I can track perfectly using Uitzendinggemist.nl even on a Mac. The only things I’m missing out on are commercials, video clips and live events.
Digital Rights The BBC has similar initiatives but most of these are tied hand and foot by the various rights and regulations limiting the distribution. Most of their content is not wholly owned by them and they have to use Windows Media DRM on it (bad for Mac users). Most of the stuff they have, they can’t distribute outside of the UK in any case.
DBC content from Uitzendinggemist.nl is available world wide, so Dutch speaking expats can follow Dutch news but als watch the newest drama productions and anything produced by the DBC actually.
The New Site That was just the old stuff, yesterday the new site went live and it rocks. Changes:
The new site is going to drop support for Real Media in the near future. This is partly due to the greatly reduced popularity of the media format. They will then add MPEG4 coding to enable VODcast distribution of the programs.
It incorporates basic social features such as ratings and number of views for a show and recommendations based on those statistics: What’s popular!, What are people watching now? and What shows am I going to miss tomorrow?. The next logical step is to incorporate social networks into this and recommend shows to me based on what my friends are watching. More features seem to be coming soon. Soon they will enable queueing of programs so you can compose your own personalized tv night.
Digital television providers are looking to incorporate the DBC programming into their services and players. That way their customers can watch the full catalogue of DBC on their televisions using a remote.
APIs What the BBC does do a lot better than the DBC for now, is the APIs and metadata initiatives they have released. At DBC you have to navigate your way through a crowded web site missing a lot of uniformity and searchability and a lot of the URLs to the media files are (intenionally) mangled or hidden.
Building a customized interface or any other kind of innovative mashup is only possable by screen srcaping the site (and that’s not easy).
DBC could use an openness injection from the BBC very badly.
Bandwidth To reduce the costs in bandwidth, DBC wants to host the most popular media files at the providers themselves.
DBC has also funded research of Tribler at Delft, University of Technology. Tribler is a social Peer to Peer program both to offload part of the bandwidth they are spending serving all the media files and to help people use social information to discover video that they will find interesting.
Dutch sources:
