Preoccupations

BBC Multicast

I'd love to try the BBC Multicast Technical Trial:

The BBC & ITV intend to test the technical possibilities of streaming more of their TV channels via broadband. We intend to Multicast these. This should result in a higher quality viewer experience. We are running this technical trial to seek some feedback about the quality and availability of these TV channels.

For the channels available, go here.

My ISP, the excellent Zen, does a good job of explaining what Multicast is:

Multicast is way of streaming video over the Internet in an efficient way. For example all Zen Internet customers wanting to watch the BBC News stream can get the stream from Zen’s network rather than getting multiple copies from the BBC. This helps reduce the amount of bandwidth required by large organisations wanting to stream content to many users, and reduces costs to the ISP receiving that content too. This means that more streams of a high quality can be provided to many more people.

Both my routers are Draytek (2600G and 2800: great build quality) and neither yet supports the Multicast IGMP protocol, it seems. The 2600 series may never support it. Zen's forum entry on Multicast Routers calls both series incompatible, but Draytek's UK forum has this admin posting (login required):

Multicast is in development for the Vigor2800 series, although it is not yet part of the official specification. There are generally two parts to operation, IGMP Proxy (available as a 'beta' function already on Vigor2800) and IGMP Snooping which should be available in beta soon.

To enable IGMP Proxy, use telnet command "ip igmp_proxy".

Note : this applies to Vigor2800 series only. Older ADSL models do not have the capacity for this additional function.

So, I'll give Multicast a whirl at the weekend when I'm running off the 2800 router. Anyone else having fun trying to get Multicast working at home?

Technorati tags: BBC, Multicast, IGMP, streaming, Zen, Draytek

The leaving of Liverpool

We had much less time in Liverpool yesterday than we'd hoped for: beware, traveller — the M5 and M6 have so many roadworks … I lost count, the journey up taking almost twice as long as it should have done.

So, a rushed job when it came to the Albert Docks and a bit of the centre, but enough to make me appreciate what a mighty city this has been … and how vibrant it is today, with all its possibilities and problems: European City of Culture, 2008, yet Liverpool University (where one of our sons is studying) lies cheek-by-jowl with some of the worst inner city areas I've seen in the UK.

Down in the Docks, the Tate is very fine. We had enough time to take in the New Realism room in the DLA Piper Series: International Modern Art. I liked the early Chapman brothers' piece, Disasters of War, which I'd heard a lot about and not seen before, the Grayson Perry pots, Germaine Richier's Storm Man and Hurricane Woman, the Giacometti portraits (of his brother, Diego) … I want to come back to Liverpool many more times, see much more of the city, get round all of the Tate and see the Walker and Lever galleries.

When we got back home, there was Tom Coates' posting to read: On the BBC Annotatable Audio project ... — 'a demonstration of a functional working interface for the annotation of audio that's designed to allow the collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music'. Euan Semple comments: 'After 21 years working in broadcasting I reckon this is one of the coolest things to happen for a very, very long time. The ramifications of this will go very deep indeed'.

All the more fitting that our journey back took in some good to outstanding radio on Radio 4. I'd pick out here:

• Antony Beevor and Gillian Slovo discussing the significance of novelist and war reporter Vasily Grossman with Francine Stock (Great Lives). A towering figure — to protect his second wife and her children, whom he'd adopted, he dared even to misquote Stalin in a letter to the head of the NKVD — his masterpiece, Life and Fate, was published after his death. I'm ashamed to say I've never read it, but it's now on my list for the Xmas break.



• David Cannadine exploring the way the UK we know today differs so much from that of those whose lives were rooted primarily in the first half of the twentieth century (A Point of View): if you're in your mid-40s to mid-60s, you didn't know a world dominated by two World Wars and the greatest economic slump the modern world has ever experienced; instead, the social disruption of the Butler Education Act, plus the immense amount of money poured into education, created a country where, for all its faults, "those in charge" today do not have to be the product of inherited or privately financed privilege — he cited (as examples) grammar school boys Melvyn Bragg (In Our Time), Andrew Turnbull (former Cabinet Secretary) and Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England). These short programmes are his for the next 13 weeks and he seems to be setting out to look at the role Universities play in our society and how they are to be funded.

Non!

Sitting here, thinking about our so-seemingly-long-gone election and the French referendum on the proposed EU constitution (with the Dutch voting today), I enjoyed John Naughton's post about Neil Kinnock's Today programme interview (live yesterday, Tuesday):

Talking about the French referendum result, he outlined a cogent case for regarding it as a wholly French-made shambles. He blamed Jacques Chirac for mismanaging the disastrous Nice summit which launched the thing on the world, and pointed out that instead of a simple document setting out the rules needed to make workable an EU of 25 countries, it had ballooned (under the tutelage of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a former French President) into a bloated half-assed attempt to do for Europe what the Founding Fathers once did for the United States. As for the interpretation that the Non vote was an expression of dissatisfaction with Chirac, Kinnock pointed out that it was the French Left who had put Chirac where he is today. Their failure to agree on, and support, a viable left-wing candidate in the last Presidential election led them in a panic to vote for Chirac in order to keep the fascist Jean Marie le Pen from winning. But on Sunday, those same leftists allied with fascists, racists, Europhobes and sundry discontents to ‘rebuke’ the guy they had installed in power. It was a truly great rant. If only Kinnock had been that sharp when he was Leader of the labour Party.

On Tuesday, the interview could be heard again here on the Today site.

What interested me about this is what Tom Coates and Dan Hill have drawn attention to in posting about the new BCC Download and Podcast trial: it is 'one of those areas where the BBC's traditional mission to explain, demystify and advocate new technology is entirely in line with the need to create useful, usable user experiences' (Dan Hill); 'the move towards "three ways of listening" really excited me and I love the fact that the XML button is clickable and you have a form input box where you can select and copy the URL without accidentally clicking on the XML link and getting a page full of mark-up' (Tom Coates).

A future for Radio

Interesting reports from ETech 2005 about the BBC team's presentation on Reinventing Radio. Robert Kaye no longer listens to radio in the US, but 'I am pleased to report that radio is not dead and that radio may still have a chance -- at least in the UK':

I'm pleased to see that the BBC is thinking about approaches to reinvigorating radio. The team laid out their principles as follows:

• An individual should be rewarded for participating
• Contributions should provide value to others
• The BBC should get value from the service and expose that value back to the contributors

When comparing these principles to the principles in use by US broadcasters (read: increase shareholder value, regardless of what our customers think) they are simply revolutionary. I do hope that these principles are not a fluke at the BBC and that the results that came from them will be broadly applied at the BBC.

The remainder of the presentation covered two other projects at the BBC: Phonetags, which applies the principles from above using a del.ico.us tagging folksonomy to provide music bookmarking, tagging, organizing and sharing. The presentation also covered group listening which aims to apply the above principles to collaborative listening to gather more relevant data about people listening to music. In a lot of ways it sound similar to what last.fm is doing with their Audioscrobbler and personal music channel projects.

Tom Coates reflects on his part in ETech here. I can well imagine that not everyone, even at ETech, would "get it". Programme Information Pages is surely also a very exciting development — and reemer.com was switched on by it:

I attended a fantastic presentation by a bunch of folks from the BBC. They created a system for assigning unique identifiers, and adding metadata, to every BBC television and radio program. This data can then be used to generate a web page for a given show based on the unique identifier, which would serve as sort of a "permalink" for a given BBC TV show. This type of system could be very useful to any major media organization, and the BBC folks have developed the SMEF, or Standard Media Exchange Framework for providing a method for media orgs to start developing such a system. Once this kind of system is in place, and there are relatable relationships between content entities, there are many applications that could live on top of such a data repository. …

You can check out this page on the BBC Radio 3 site as an example of how the BBC is innovating through the development of a system architecture that is more suited to an atomic interweb world.

David Weinberger has a summary of both presentations, here (Reinventing Radio)and here (Programme Information Pages).

Update (20.3.2005): two interesting postings at The Long Tail — Exploding Radio and Exploding Radio II.

Odeo

Evan Williams on Odeo:

So, the big news in my world is that I'm working on a new thing involving what has become known as podcasting. …

Odeo aims to enable this new distribution channel and medium by creating the best one-source solution for finding, subscribing to, and publishing audio content.

I'm super-excited to see where this goes. Podcasting is going to be freakin' huge. … But it's the same story as blogging (with several unique charastics of its own), but in a whole new medium that is much bigger than people think. And it'll happen much, much faster. It's about personal media, time-shifting, and the long, long tail. And I love that shit. Amazing things are going to be created.

Odeo is in beta right now. We plan to be inviting people to the system, um, real soon now. Sign up to get an invite when available.

Odeo blog

Chris Morris

Anyone interested in Chris Morris, satirist par excellence (The Day Today, Brasseye, etc), will find Cook'd and Bomb'd of great interest (link via Metafilter). It's a fan site with many downloads: the On The Hour page gives links to downloads of both the Series 1 and Series 2 broadcasts.

When Armando Iannucci, the producer of Radio 1's cutting edge comedy series The Mary Whitehouse Experience, heard Chris Morris reading out some of his ridiculous but also faintly plausible mock news stories on GLR, he contacted Morris to suggest that they should collaborate on a series. The result was On The Hour, a slick parody of current affairs broadcasting, that shoehorned Morris' surreal stories and interviews into an alarmingly convincing pastiche news presentation style, attacking everything from war reporting to the BBC's time signal along the way. Morris presented the show, in addition to writing it in conjunction with Iannucci, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, David Quantick, Steven Wells and Andrew Glover, and acting as associate producer. On The Hour was without question a groundbreaking landmark in radio comedy, and went on to win several awards including the 1992 Writer's Guild award for Best Comedy. Twelve episodes were made between 1991 and 1992, as well as a short special for Radio 1. All episodes exist in the BBC's archives, and a compilation of two hours of material is available on a BBC Radio Collection cassette.