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DigiBnetwork Launches First DAB+ DIN Car Radio Receiver

March 22, 2010 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

A new receiver is always good news for an emerging technology like DAB.

A more interesting aspect of this launch though is the context that made it possible.

DigiBnetwork, a commercial broadcaster in Malta, convinced a manufacturer to produce a new DIN car receiver. DigiBnetwork went as far as to create and own this new “bluestate” brand. DigiBnetworks now sells the receiver through EBay and its website. This, in a sense, represents a “verticalized” business model as DigiBnetwork has control over a whole DAB ecosystem: content, network, receivers. We typically know this type of control from mobile communications operators.

I find this development quite exciting because it shows that even a small country like Malta can influence new developments in consumer electronics. With this development, it looks like the huge economies of scale and size of markets are not required anymore to justify the production of new devices. This is something we’ve been saying for a few years now with our Openmokast project which we hoped would catalyze the emergence of broadcast smart phones MADE BY BROADCASTERS.

The “bluestate” car receiver seems to be a step in this direction. Congratulations DigiBnetwork!

Lets see now who comes up with the first broadcaster-led smart phone.

Inbox - CRC.png

Live Traffic Information on GPS Devices in Canada

December 9, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Mobility, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

In my recent reflexions about the new potential for hybrid radio based on FM I identified RDS-TMC as an incentive to maintain and even expand the FM (RDS) infrastructure in Canada. While speaking about that at a meeting last week I learned that Corus Entertainment was deploying RDS-TMC traffic for Garmin devices in major cities in Canada. I’m not sure how long it has been there but I think it is quite new. And now that I’m aware of that, I see traffic enabled Garmin devices advertised everywhere… and prices are very reasonable.

So last week I ordered a Garmin model 265WT from Tigerdirect.ca (170$). The “T” at the end of the model number indicates that the FM RDS-TMC is included in the box. With such package, traffic information seems to be included for free for the whole life of the device. I’m not quite clear about that but for some reasons, Garmin also sells lifetime traffic information for 50$ on their website. Maybe some devices have to be activated before traffic information works?

Anyways. I received the device yesterday and was eager to try it. That’s what I did on my way home last night. It was very simple to install. In fact, nothing special has to be done. The lighter power cord must be plugged into the device and the car (the FM RDS receiver is part of that cord) and that’s it. When I launched the device, it took just a few seconds before I could see a little “traffic icon” on the maps.

Pressing on that icon revealed two types of traffic information. I took a picture (shown below) of the traffic situation last night at around 7pm in Ottawa. As we can see, there was heavy traffic on the main highway in Ottawa… and that was no surprise to me… it was perfect timing for my experiment: hockey night! And every time its the same thing: the highway gets jammed at the “Scotiabank Place”. So that’s the red segment on the map here.

IMG_3197.JPG-1.0 (RGB, 1 layer) 3888x2592 – GIMP.png

The other traffic display shows a list of the various problem zones. This is shown on the second photo I took:

IMG_3199.JPG.png

So very positive experience for me. I’m impressed. It works well and is very easy to use. The next step will be to see how real-time navigation and re-routing works considering the traffic. In the meantime, I guess canadians will want a new Garmin for Christmas because they certainly understand that traffic is a major enhancement on a GPS device.

If you wonder where exactly the service is available, have a look at this page on the Navteq website. A quick scan over the list shows following regions: Hamilton-Burlington, Montreal-Laval, Oshawa-Whitby-Clarington, Ottawa-Gatineau, St. Catharines-Niagara Falls-Welland, Toronto-Mississauga and Vancouver-Surrey-Burnaby.

! UPDATE, WARNING: I was told that the service has not been officially launched yet. I guess that this means it may be unstable or could even be stopped anytime. Please consider this if you think of buying yourself a new Garmin for Christmas.

My eComm 2009 Talk Now Available on Video

December 2, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

I’m happy that my eComm talk finally got published online, 8 months after the conference. Events sponsors got published much earlier but hey, that’s fair for a professionally produced clip. I must admit that the AV infrastructure and the team at the event were excellent.

My talk was titled: “Mobile Digital Broadcasting: An Infrastructure for One-to-Many Converged Services”. We took this opportunity to officially release our Openmokast open source software framework. I was happy that my live demo worked as expected!



We had prepared a clip just in case the “demo effect” would hit on me on stage. Luckily this was not the case but the clip (which is more detailed than the live demo) can still be seen on our crcmmb Youtube Channel or here below:




And here are the slides I used for this presentation:

eComm Presentation

View more documents from Francois Lefebvre.

eComm was also for me a great occasion to meet with David Burges who presented his OpenBTS project live using the USRP as well. His demo looked incredibly like mine except he demonstrated live cell phone communications going through his GSM open source base station. There are lots of commonalities between our projects but essentially, both are about democratizing communications technologies to catalyze innovation.

Livio NPR Radio

November 26, 2009 in Consumer devices, Industry, Networked media, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

The NPR Radio by Livio_ NPR Shop.pngLivio announces its NPR branded Internet Radio Appliance. This device will offer a specialized menu to easily access NPR’s 800 radio stations. Of course, all other Internet radio stations can be accessed as well.

Are such “specialized” devices the future? We’ve seen the WikiReader recently which only does one thing: portable unconnected access to Wikipedia.

I don’t know but it makes great sense to me. I would love to see a CBC / Radio-Canada device like this. CBC/RC have great Internet offerings but they tend to “capture” the audience into their branded web portals. Because of this, many CBC/RC Internet radio streams are not accessible through Internet appliances other than full fledged PC’s. A branded device seems to be a good compromise to escape the PC prison.

Another very promising effect of this device is that it will help fund NPR’s programming since they will collect a portion of the proceeds. What an original way to fund public broadcasters!

   

Challenges for GPRS and 3G Radio

July 24, 2009 in Infrastructures, Mobility, Networked media, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

There is a nice post on the Public Radio Player (PRP) blog about some challenges for Internet radio when distributed over mobile wireless networks and some strategies used in the PRP.

“A dropped stream is the nemesis of any regular Public Radio Tuner user. Nothing is worse than being caught up in a great public radio program and have it suddenly cut out….”

Some challenges can be expected:

  • loss of signal while roaming from cell to cell. Networks are optimized for voice calls but not for data yet.
  • minimal bitrate like 32 kbps is desirable but connection is still not guaranteed and sound quality is no great
  • buffers have to be implemented in receiver to mitigate signal loss.

Results of a survey made by PC World suggest that 3G coverage may not be adequate for the delivery of sustained bitrates in major cities in USA. Like this table shows, networks speeds can be impressive but their reliability vary greatly so that live radio transmissions may be hard to achieve.

There is certainly a lot of room for experimentation here in this new area but I tend to believe that it could take a while before we see 3G replace true “physical layer” broadcast networks for live transmissions.

Royalty-Free Public Domain – A path towards Ubiquity

July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

I read this excellent story some time ago in Vanity Fair titled “An oral history of the Internet“. I believe that one of the reasons why the Internet is what it is now comes from the fact that the Web is a royalty-free technology. And that does not happen by itself. To produce RF-tech these days, one has got to fight for it and give up potential revenue streams. That is what the CERN team did. Robert Cailliau says:

“At one point cern was toying with patenting the World Wide Web. I was talking about that with Tim one day, and he looked at me, and I could see that he wasn’t enthusiastic. He said, Robert, do you want to be rich? I thought, Well, it helps, no? He apparently didn’t care about that. What he cared about was to make sure that the thing would work, that it would just be there for everybody. He convinced me of that, and then I worked for about six months, very hard with the legal service, to make sure that cern put the whole thing in the public domain.”

The least we can say is that the strategy worked. The Web is now ubiquitous.

Is there a lesson here for creating the mobile broadcast system of tomorrow?

Broadcasting the Twittersphere

July 8, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, User Generated Media by Administrator | 3 comments

I think that Twitter and micro-blogging in general have properties that could be exploited along with broadcasting services. I’ll write my thoughts about this later on.

As a first step in this reflexion, I’d like to estimate the total bandwidth of Twitter, that is, how many kilobits per second are being Tweeted on average.

I made a similar exercise some time ago with regards to the blogosphere in a post titled “Broadcasting the Blogosphere: 30 million voices for the price of one!”.

So I found some twitter services that provide relevant data. For example, TweeSpeed is an instant speed meter that shows the current number of tweets per minute. A graph showing the speed per hour during the last week is also available. A quick look at that graph now suggests that 700.000 tweets per hour would be a reasonable approximation for last week’s average, excluding the peek caused by the “Michael Jackson Effect”. Twitpocalypse currently reports 221 tweets per second which results in a similar value (221*60*60 =795.600 tweets per hour ). On another front, the recent HubSpot State of the Twittershpere report provides similar amounts on a daily basis instead of per hour. I suspect that this is a mistake. I’ll be pessimistic and take the largest number. The Hubspot report also informs on the distribution of actual tweet length. I’ll average the tweet length to 110 characters per tweet.

So the math goes like this:

110ch * 1byte/ch * 700k/hour = 77 Mbytes/hour

or

TOTAL TWITTER BANDWIDTH = 170 kbps !

Again, very surprising results! The current Twitter bandwidth is barely higher than a typical Internet or DAB radio station. The whole Twittershpere would only require to sacrifice a couple of off-air DAB stations in every market. I feel that very innovative datacasting/social applications could be built based on this!

FLOSS Media Centers

July 7, 2009 in Consumer devices, Networked media by Administrator | No comments

Media centers could become the main interfaces to media content in home networks . The Telematics Freedom Foundation recently released a short report on Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) options here. The report compares features of projects like XBMC, MythTV, freevo, Moovida (Elisa) and so on.

Ads worth more on the net than on TV

June 30, 2009 in Applications, Industry, Networked media, Services by Administrator | No comments

PC world reports that for the first time, advertising during a specific “TV” show will cost more on the net than on traditional TV channel:

If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers.

FemtoDAB

June 24, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Services by Administrator | 4 comments

According to this article, Vodafone will be next week the first mobile network operator to launch a femtocell product in Europe:

“Looking like a home router, femtocells give 3G coverage indoors, and use home broadband to connect calls across the Internet to the mobile network.”

“… will be available on different price plans… Essentially, the femto is free to anyone on a £30 contract, and £5 otherwise – including dongle customers”

Femtocells are in fact compact devices (similar to Wi-Fi routers) that act as very low power cell phone base stations that can be installed in end-users premises. Typical cell phones can connect to them instead of the remote “high-power” towers operated by mobile network operators. Femtocells carry the usual communication services through standard Internet connections in homes and offices.

Key benefits to operators (O) and users (U):

  • Better in-building coverage (O, U)
  • Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
  • Off-loading cellular networks (O)
  • MNOs can still charge service costs while using end-users resources (Internet) (O)
  • Use the mobile device at home at lower rates (U)
  • Does not need regular phone service at home anymore (O, U)

Could this femtocell approach be exploited in the context of digital broadcasting as well? At CRC, we have developed a compact software transmitter for DAB. This platform could be further integrated as a low-cost personal DAB transmitter or FemtoDAB cell!

Such a FemtoDAB approach could offer interesting benefits:

  • Better in-building coverage (O, U)
  • Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
  • Outdoor, indoor roaming with the same device (broadcast enabled handhelds) (U)
  • Transmission of additional Internet radio content in the femtoDAB cell (U)

One of the challenges will be to make FemtoDAB more attractive than the Wi-Fi options.

Do you see any use cases for FemtoDAB?

In-car Wi-Fi Internet Radio

June 24, 2009 in Consumer devices, Infrastructures, Mobility, Networked media by Administrator | 1 comment

As Internet radio appliances are becoming available, there is still the issue that they can’t be used in your car.

This could change thanks to so-called “in-car WiFi routers” which are designed to provide Internet access through 3G mobile telephony networks.

AutoNet Mobile offers such device and service combination:

we create a Wi-Fi hot spot that allows everyone in the car to connect multiple devices to the internet, in and around the car! it’s the next step in in-car entertainment and productvity. we make internet in your car easier than ever because we provide both the in-car router and the monthly service. our affordable monthly service plans start at only $29 per month.

This still represent an expensive proposition for radio though. One hour daily consumption of good quality Internet radio content could easily reach the 29$ 1Gb limit.

Where They Destroy Packets…

May 14, 2009 in Divers, Legislation, Uncategorized by Administrator | 1 comment

I never had a good memory for proverbs and quotes. However, this one (in bold below) by “Heinrich Heine” stuck in my mind when I heard it some 15 years ago while visiting north Germany (Wikipedia excerpt):

Among the thousands of books burned on Berlin’s Opernplatz in 1933, following the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, were works by Heinrich Heine. To commemorate the terrible event, one of the most famous lines of Heine’s 1821 play Almansor was engraved in the ground at the site: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (”Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.”) In the original text, Heine had been referring to the burning of the Quran during the Spanish Inquisition.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to express the same idea but in relation to the Internet and the fact that it is being deep packet inspected and throttled and filtered and fire-walled. I’m not so sure I figured it out yet but I came up with this line:

“Where they destroy packets, they will ultimately also destroy people”

I like it. Any ideas on how to improve it?

RDS Enabled Handhelds

April 24, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, Mobility, Services by Administrator | 1 comment

The current financial context is not optimal for deploying new broadcast networks. Some will tend to think twice on how to maximize the use of the current infrastructure.

Isn’t that the case with FM radio? Will it truly benefit from going digital?

One of the compromise I find attractive is starting to emerge: enabling mobile phone handsets to receive FM AND RDS. Such an effort led by GSS and Silicon Laboratiroes is reported here at RadioWorld.

GSS believes that cell phones that can receive FM without cumbersome headphone antennas will not only be more popular with consumers but can then put RDS capabilities into the hands of many more consumers, which in turn will better support the penetration of emergency alerting systems like its Alert FM.

App Stores Everywhere but in Broadcast Handsets

February 18, 2009 in Applications, Consumer devices, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Application Stores are the big thing at the Mobile World Congress this week. Few stories here and here and here. While Apple’s AppStore and Google’s Android marketplace have been known for some time now, we hear that Nokia, Microsoft and RIM have similar plans.

As we mention in our recent EBU paper, new functionality in handsets will be done in software. This is quite new in the mobile world but we are definitely used to this principle with our personal computers. We buy software for them. That’s what makes them extremely flexible, evolutive and thus useful. This paradigm emerges on mobile phone platforms now because they are evolving as generic and powerful computing platforms too.

This trend was identified early on by Apple (as usual) who created the AppStore as part of the iPhone ecosystem. The AppStore creates a marketplace for developers and end-users. Developers offer their new creations through the system, typically for a small fee, while end-users shop for applications through iTunes. The whole process of purchasing, installing and removing applications has been streamlined to provide a “frictionless” end-user experience, apart from the few dollars that one has to leave on the table!

I believe that the key benefit from these new marketplaces for applications is innovation. A democratized marketplace for innovation.

Before, application innovation was limited to MNOs and key partners of the mobility value chain. Now, anybody can create new applications. New applications will come from the masses, like Google, Wikipedia, Flickr, Youtube came from new players and non-incumbents.

Also, with more open marketplaces comes increased competition. That is good for consumers. End-users are only one click away from competing applications.

And what if the competing application is free? Such platforms will make “free” and “pay for” applications equally accessible. Could this lead to the erosion of the software market? Many think so. In order to sell their apps, developers will have no other choice but to offer leading edge products with truly exclusive features.

What does this mean for broadcasting? At the moment not so much I guess. The perspective is attractive though. What if moving from DAB to DAB+ could simply be achieved through a new software app. A broadcaster would announce the move and asks its listeners to go buy the 2$ piece of software on the app store. In exchange, end users get more channels. Click, pay, download, … voila! What if all new broadcast applications could be offered this way? EPG, Slideshow, TPEG traffic overlay for google maps,… and so on. In fact, we don’t know what the mobile broadcast applications of the future will be. But we know it will be in software. We just need broadcast receivers in those handsets.

Radio on Mobile Devices

February 15, 2009 in Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Mobility and radio go hand in hand. James Cridland reports on a current positive trend:

“RAJAR’s recent figures were upbeat about listening to the radio on mobile devices. (They only monitor ‘listening via mobile phones’, despite many MP3 players also having FM radios built-in)”

Competing business models between mobile network operators and broadcasters prevent broadcast receivers from being integrated into mobile phones. At CRC, we work on a project that would allow broadcasters to sponsor and eventually develop their own receivers. The project is called Openmokast. We published our thoughts and results about this in a paper released as part of last month’s EBU Technical Review.

We suggest that innovation in mobile digital broadcasting (including digital radio) will happen with the event of open source platforms like Android and Openmoko.

Google Ends Radio AdSense

February 14, 2009 in Applications, Infrastructures, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Last summer at Broadcast Asia, I discovered that Google planned to extend its AdSense Internet advertising program to Radio. I ran into a very modest Google booth that displayed their new radio automation software acquired from dMarc, a market leader I was told. When I saw that, I thought it was an obvious business for Google.

Well, it looks like this project was killed. May I suggest a strategy: Google, release your automation software to the open source community like you did with Android. This could attract new developers that support your AdSense program for free… and some competing options, of course!

iPlayer Reach

February 2, 2009 in Infrastructures, Networked media, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Some important numbers about the use of iPlayer can be seen here in this TIMESONLINE story:

Before that, they appear on iPlayer, the free service which notched up 41m programme requests in December and 271m during the whole of 2008.

Coopers

December 9, 2008 in Applications, Infrastructures, Services by Administrator | No comments

COOPERS is an EU funded project that was created to develop innovative telematics applications. TPEG is used to transmit traffic information via DAB:

The goal of the project is the enhancement of road safety by direct and up to date traffic information communication between infrastructure and motorised vehicles on a motorway section. COOPERS started in February 2006 with the duration of 48 months and a total Budget of more than 16.800.000 €.

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Canada to Go All GSM

October 15, 2008 in Consumer devices, Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Bell and Telus, the two wireless operators in Canada that are based on Qualcomm’s CDMA technology, announced last week their plans to deploy GSM technology jointly. CBC reports:

“BCE unit Bell and Telus both announced Friday they would be making a significant investment in upgrading their networks, adding high speed packet access, or HSPA, cellular technology to their third-generation networks.”

This could have an impact on the mobile broadcasting technology that will be deployed in Canada. The natural link between CDMA and MediaFLO is quite strong since both technologies belong to Qualcomm. Could this mean less chances for MediaFLO to establish in Canada?

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Mobile Multimedia: A Complex Ecosystem

September 21, 2007 in Consumer devices, Industry, Legislation by Administrator | No comments

Skip Pizzi writes a very interesting piece on the mobile multimedia landscape. He argues that the recent collapse of two major efforts to provide mobile TV (BT-Movio and Modeo) shows the complexity of this new ecosystem.

This is quite different from the traditional world of wireless delivery, where there were really only two businesses involved: 1) broadcasters, who created, distributed and delivered content through the air to consumers, and 2) manufacturers, who built receivers that consumers simply bought, turned on and tuned to broadcast channels to receive content.

Today the chain includes content providers, their hosting services, distribution networks (the Internet backbone), last-mile connectivity (wireless service providers) and compatible devices.

He also points to the fact that telecom carriers have the control over the technologies and functionalities that are enabled on the cell phones. For example, I didn’t know that FM receivers are embedded in many cell phone platforms in the US market today. However, that functionality is simple not enabled!

I believe that technologies should serve our needs and provide a better quality of life (QoL !). An ecosystem that locks down functionality that is there and deployed must be, in fact, VERY complex!

Tags: mobile+multimedia, broadacsting+phones

The Closed Skype Needs Openness

March 21, 2007 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

Skype requires an open Internet. A so called neutral net. That’s the case for fixed access and this will be no different in the mobile space. Carriers will understandably do all they can to stop that.

So Skype has to support “open” values.

The problem I see is that on the technology side, Skype is “closed”. It uses a proprietary protocol that is incompatible with SIP, the open standard widely adopted by the VOIP Industry.

On the other hand, I suppose it’s a good thing to have Skype fight the net neutrality war with its big $$$$. Nothing will prevent me then, if they succeed, to use my favorite SIP-based mobile phone!

Tags: Skype, net neutrality, SIP

Video at VON 2007

March 21, 2007 in Industry, Networked media, Services, User Generated Media by Administrator | 1 comment

I spent the last three days at the new video track of the VON conference which has been dealing with Voice On the Net for the last ten years. As we know, video on the net is currently gaining ground on a daily basis with Youtube, Google Video, video blogging and many other passionate artists, producers and and so on. That’s the reason why video was inserted in the VON program this year and I realize that video on the net will probably face regulatory issues that VOIP had to go through in the recent years: intellectual property, copyright protection and network neutrality just to name a few. In fact, Jeff Pulver is being proactive on that issue by launching the Video On the Net Alliance to advocate for this emerging Internet video industry.

Voice over IP is disruptive. The flexibility provided by VOIP is an important factor for its success, but its impact is also quite important in that it opened the telecommunication playing field to new players that can operate outside the grasp of the incumbent telecommunication industry. Jeff Pulver officially stated that VOIP, an industry he triggered, is now well established. “We are now the incumbents who can be disrupted”.

In that respect, video on the net will allow the same type of disruption. Broadcasters and broadcast regulation can (and will) be circumvented by people and organizations who see the Net as an effective distribution platform.

Does Skype ring a bell? Well, they could potentially be #1 in both spaces. But that’s the topic of my next post.

Tags: video+on+the+net, VON2007,

P2P Superbowl 2007

February 5, 2007 in Applications, Infrastructures, Networked media, P2P by Administrator | 1 comment

Last year I reported that the Superbowl was not available off the Net. After my positive experiment last summer with the soccer WorldCup 2006, I knew I should be able to access a live peer-to-peer stream of the Superbowl somehow. Well, thanks to Technorati and this post at The Frog Blog, I was watching the show live within a minute.

Notebook vs TV

Here you see the two live scenes I could watch simultaneously earlier tonight; a wifi notebook with the P2P TVUPlayer software and my plain old 36″ tube. I observed a one minute latency on the notebook.
Like the WorldCup on TVAnts, the stream robustness was impressive. Once it got started, the stream simply never stopped. Its data rate fluctuated between 350 and 400 kbps. This is not great video quality but when that’s the only signal you have access to, it’s far better than nothing. For myself, I was happy to see the original CBS Superbowl commercials live for the first time. Here in Canada, the original commercials are always “Canadianized” by the local networks except on some pricy pay TV services.

TVU Player

So overall, it looks like P2P streaming works well. However, TVU Networks statistics would be required in order to really be able to assess what’s going on here. Also, I don’t know at this point if TVU is a pure P2P solution of if they rely on additional servers or CDNs to provide critical capacity.

Although I find these new P2P developpments very exciting, the real new trend in the States this year was certainly HD TV. With their new HD wide screens, sports fans got closer to mother nature this year; they could enjoy and observe each and every raindrop that fell on the field in Miami Gardens!

Tags: P2P+streaming, networked+media, Superbowl, peer-to-peer

TV-Like Content from The Net

September 7, 2006 in Networked media, Services by Administrator | No comments

Watching TV-like content through the net is certainly gaining ground these days. Jeff Pulver and his team just published a great list of “cahnnels” only available from the net.

Link

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IBC 2006 Conference

September 7, 2006 in Industry by Administrator | No comments

I just arrived yesterday in Amsterdam to participate at the IBC 2006 Conference and Exhibition. We managed to setup our booth yesterday and I will actually be presenting a paper tomorrow in the session titled "Multimedia on the Move" at 14:00 – facts for the upwardly mobile". I wrote the paper with my colleague Pascal and it’s about new developments of our "End-To-End Mobile Multimedia Platform" at CRC. For more details please see our MMB Website.

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P2P Broadcasting

July 5, 2006 in Uncategorized by Administrator | 1 comment

I haven’t had much time to publish lately but I could not resist posting this.

I recently had been wondering about the availability of WorldCup 2006 games on the Internet. I seemed pretty obvious to me that the games would be available through Bittorrent considering the very high interest it generates in the worldwide community. While looking around for recent matches, I quickly realized that not only were they available for download but also as live streams. And it’s amazing how well it works.

I ‘m currently watching the first half of the French-Portugal semi-finals live (1-0 right now). It simply works. I have a very good quality reception with constant 420kbps. I don’t know much about the technical details but the player I’m using is called TvAnts and is based on peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming. Installation details can be found here. There actually seems to be many technical solutions for P2P streaming already. I’ll be looking into that later on.

Although these re-transmission of commercial channels are probably not quite compliant with the FIFA terms, this clearly shows that the Internet infrastructure, when used adequately (P2P here), can already support large scale distribution of traditionally broadcast events.

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EBU recommends P2P

June 5, 2006 in Applications, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

In his EBU seminar report titled "From P2P to Broadcasting", Franc Kozamernik concludes:

Broadcasters have no choice but to adopt P2P technology and adjust it to their needs. In so doing, broadcasters should coordinate their activities closely with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and P2P service/technology providers.
Thanks to P2P, the Internet (both wired and wireless) may become not just a complementary delivery channel (as it is today), but indeed a primary channel for niche content and on-demand services.

I strongly agree with this and as I probably mentioned here already, P2P is good for broadcasters but also for the the whole user generated media (UGM) community. With P2P, anyone can afford "large coverage": the distribution network is free. That’s why broadcasters have to do the same.

However, I would argue that P2P networks would be good for the head of the Longtail as well as for niche and on-demand content. In fact, P2P networks are much more efficient for content that is popular. In this case, many more seeds provide a much better and faster access to the desired content.

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Journanalists

May 12, 2006 in Uncategorized, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

No, there’s no typo in the title.

Bill Buzenberg of Minnesota Public Radio demonstrated this morning at “Beyond Broadcast 2006″, very interesting new “broadcast-conversations” applications based on the Web involving the audience.

In many of the scenarios presented, journalists become more or less “analysts” of the massive data they get after submitting story proposals. They first do the voxpop before going to the specialists.

So that’s where it comes from. I’ m proposing a term for this new function: “Jounanalists”, resulting of course from the combination of journalist and analyst.

Technorati Tags: beyondbroadcast, journanalists, journanalism

Beyond Broadcast 2006

May 12, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Legislation, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

So I’m sitting right there, waiting for the event to begin.

Beyond Broadcast 2006 is loaded with great, experienced speakers with all possible backgrounds: braodcasters, journalists, technologists and so on. The theme is important:

We will explore the thesis that traditional public media — public broadcasting, cable access television, etc — face a unique opportunity to embrace new participatory web-based media models — podcasting, video blogs, social software, etc — and create a stronger and more vital public service.

And if I’ m lucky, my MMB demo will work fine this afternoon! I’ll try to report later.

Technorati Tags: beyondbroadcast, broadcasting+2.0, public+media, public+broadcasting

BBC 2.0

April 26, 2006 in public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Media Guardian reports that Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology, announced a radical rebuild  of their web presence:
 

Mr Highfield’s presentation, Beyond Broadcast, outlined a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts – “share”, “find” and “play”.

He said the philosophy of “share” would be at the heart of what he dubbed bbc.co.uk 2.0.

Mr Highfield said the share concept would allow users to “create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, encouraging them to launch there own blogs and post home videos on the site.

The BBC is also running a competition to revamp the bbc.co.uk 2.0 website, asking the public to redesign the homepage to “exploit the fuctionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia”.

 

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Radio Realities

March 25, 2006 in Industry, Legislation by Administrator | No comments

In their submission delivered this week for the canadian “Review of the Commercial Radio Policy“, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) has published an interesting summary of the “Radio 2.0″ landscape:

 2006_03_25_cab_realitites.jpg

This list shows very well that there are lots of new content sources (I would add “user generated media somewhere in the list”) and distribution mechanisms. This is really bad news to commercial radio broadcasters because it can only mean fragmentation.

What can save them?

I would argue that the solution lies in the separation of the application and the network. Roughly, I think that broadcasters will have to sell their application (radio) through other networks while they will also have to open their networks to other applications.

In a digital world, bits are bits… and the “radio” bits may not be the “killer app” for the “radio” pipe. Because in the future, their will be no such thing as ”radio” pipes. There will only be dumb pipes for “ones” and “zeros”. That’s all.

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Net Neutrality in Broadcasting

March 23, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Legislation by Administrator | 1 comment

Within some hours after its publication, Michael Geist already posted a first glance analysis of the final report of the canadian “Telecommunications Policy Review Panel”. To a certain extent, it looks like that Panel has recognized the need to protect network neutrality principles. To me, this sounds like good news.
 
Net neutrality is one of the important topics in telecommunications this year. To give you an idea, net neutrality guarantees that all IP packets get the same treatment whoever sent them, whatever they carry and whatever the path they travel. Without net neutrality, your ISP could “slow down” or even block a VOIP service that’s provided by a competitor. In the wireless world, net neutrality will allow you to make Skype calls with your cell phone over your data plan (and thus avoiding the usual premium fees for voice services). Net neutrality should consequently allow for a more competitive and innovative market.
 
With this in mind, I’ve been wondering if net neutrality principles could also somehow be defined for terrestrial broadcasting. Do current broadcast regulations guarantee content diversity and fair access to braodcast networks? Would they support the new “user generated media” trend?
 
First, let’s not forget that broadcasting IS telecommunications. Broadcasting is a particular form of telecommunications specialized in one-to-many messages. It is unidirectional but has a very high data transfer capacity (because we’ve allocated large spectrum chunks to it!). Digital broadcasting will be a component (if we ever get it) of the global communications infrastructure.
 
Considering these great properties, could we imagine a flexible, Internet-like broadcast context where content and applications would dynamically and fairly get their chance to “hold the mike” for some time?
 
To take an example, I could imagine a “Top 100 YouTube” off-air mobile video channel. In such a service, nobody would be in control… or actually everybody since popularity, derived form real Internet consumption statistics, would be the content selection criteria. So in the end, the people would decide, implicitly, what content they want to “promote” to the broadcast level. Because again, in an pre-WiMax era (?), terrestrial broadcasting is still an extremely powerful delivery network.
 
In other words, I realize that this would suggest a reversed broadcast system. Before, content got popular BECAUSE it aired on broadcast networks. Today, the actual popularity could be derived from the Internet and used as the principal criteria to decide how to populate the broadcast spectrum. This would probably allow for a more natural emergence of content.
 
Would this be a way to support network neutrality principles in braodcasting? Your comments please.
 
Will we consider concepts like these in the current canadian Review of the Commercial Radio Policy? I think I would not bet on this one!
 
 

Podcast Transcripts and the Mechanical Turk

March 15, 2006 in Applications, Media formats by Administrator | 1 comment

One of the recurring theme at ETECH last week was the “mechanical Turk”. In his introductory Keynote, Bruce Sterling first suggested that the artificial intelligence (AI) dream had slowed down the development of computer science in general. Because of this, research has been focused on emulating humans with machines, instead of complementing humans. Tim O’reilly talked about IA (intelligence augmentation) as opposed to AI. According to Wikipedia:

The Turk was a famous hoax which purported to be a chess-playing automaton first constructed and unveiled in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804)

Mechanical Turk

In other words, the mechanical Turk is about putting a human intelligence inside the machine.

New web services are now implementing this very simple principle for applications where humans are much better than computers. In fact, amazon.com is offering a new open platform for the development of third party web services. It’s called… guess what? The “amazon mechanical turk” on the theme “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”.

More interesting to you, dear readers of Broadcasting 2.0, is that some people have built a podcasting transcription service called castingwords.com and it is actually based on amazon’s Turk system. In fact, for 42 cents a minute, castingwords.com will transcribe almost any podcast (in English) within 24 hours with the help of amazon’s “tested” transcription Turks.

And why would prodcast transcripts be useful? I think that they would mainly help increase the overall “granularity” of the “podcastsphere”. This, in turn, would drive much better finding, remixing and sharing capabilities.

Most of the time right now, search results lead to full podcast files with variable durations ranging from some minutes up to over an hour. These searches normally operate on podcast names or short descriptions. As a consequence, a search for interviews with a specific politician (for example) would result in many hours of listening because there is no good mechanism to locate specific content inside a podcast itself.

With good podcasts, “chapters” are very handy here but if you’re like me, your favorite podcast has no chapters. In my case, it’s a 2.5 hours French speaking CBC daily podcast called “Indicatif Présent“. Can you imagine? 12.5 listening hours per week. Do I have time to listen to all this? No. Would I like to be able to locate stuff more precisely here? Absolutely. Why? Because I NEED to be able to skip what’s not interesting to me.

Along with podcast tagging and content “markers”, transcripts would also support very important functions like remixing and sharing.

To me, remixing is the capability that I need to aggregate my personal podcast stream based on podcast segments that I get from different sources. Remixing here is the ability to collate 10 minutes from one show here with 2 minutes from another one there with 15 minutes of music with…, and so on. Again, I can’t do that easily with my favorite CBC show right now. Podcast users, and probably most of us in the future, will want that flexibility. There is too much good content out there.

Finally, transcripts alone may not be the solution but we need mechanisms to annotate (or tag) media content like we do for photos (Flickr.com) or bookmarks (del.icio.us.com). Good annotation allows for better retrieving as well as sharing possibilities. Very often, I find myself having to write down podcasts timing information in order to retrieve specific segments or share them with friends. That’s not convenient at all.

Coming back to our mechanical Turk and my favorite CBC podcast. With castingwords.com, the whole transcript of a single show would amount to roughly 75$ (46cents/min. x 150 min.). So is there a reason why CBC can’t do it right away (they could do it themselves if they wished). What is 75$ in a 2.5 hours public radio show budget?

Observations of my own behavior make me think that it all comes down to this: either they do it or they won’t get my attention!

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Broadcasting the Blogosphere: 30 million voices for the price of one!

March 13, 2006 in Applications, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | 2 comments

What is the size of the whole blogosphere? What capacity would be required to transmit it over a broadcast channel? Let’s see…
 
Blogging is still exploding. In his “state of the blogosphere” speech last week at ETECH, David Sifry, CEO of the blog indexing web service Technorati, presented the latest statistics:
  • 30.000.000 blogs worldwide
  • 100.000 new blogs are created daily
  • the blogosphere is 60 times larger than 3 years ago
  • there are 1.5 million legitimate posts(by humans for humans) per day

Let’s assume that each post contains 500 characters, no pictures, and that they are posted regularly over time. This would produce a constant bandwidth of:

500ch * 1byte/ch *1.5 million = 750 Mbytes / day

or

70 kbps !

What? The most massive conversation of the world requires only 70 kbps? That’s less than a single digital broadcasting audio channel! That’s 30 million voices for the price of one! Let’s turn the numbers around once again: with 70 kbps we could have each and every Canadian (30 million, all ages!) broadcast one 500 characters message to all other Canadians every 20 days?!?

That’s impressive. Does that make sense? I think I would agree to trade a local FM station in my area for this new “Whole Blogosphere Channel”. Would you?

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Consumer-Generated Media

March 8, 2006 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

Consumer-generated media (CGM) is a relatively new expression that refers to content that is produced by… well… consumers (Wikipedia definition). This is really taking off now with blogs, podcasts, video blogs and so on. I used to refer to it as grass root or bottom-up media. This type of content could probably also be called Citizen Media or User Generated Media. I found this paper that describes CGM and other acronyms such as EGM (enterprise …) and CGM2 (consuber-generated multimedia).
 
Anyway, this is really happening. A web service like YouTube.com gets 20.000 uploads per day! How much of this is really CGM? Well… many files now are TV recordings. Because of this, YouTube can be seen as a huge collective PVR that “stimulates” a direct competition for attention between corporate TV and CGM.
 
So I’ll start using these acronyms… until new ones emerge!
 
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ETECH report #1

March 7, 2006 in Divers by Administrator | 1 comment

I’m just back to my hotel, looking on the blogosphere for some “early” analysis of the opening keynotes tonight. Only 2 posts on Technorati by now.
 
Because I must say I did not catch much of Bruce Sterling’s talk about “The Internet of Things”. Well, all I got is that it will happen in 30 years from now. We can’t name it today because we’re just in the middle of it. We (the ETECH crowd) can’t name it because we’re to close and too tech oriented to see the big picture. We only see the tech side of it.
 
“The Internet of Things” is not Web 2.0 because Web 2.0 is today. Web 2.0 formulates new mechanisms by which Web 1.0 guys can exploit new web stuff (I’m not so sure Mr. O’reilly appreciated this statement?).
 
I understood that “The Internet of Things” will be about searching, linking, ranking, sorting,… these entities he calls spimes: objects that are traceable in space and time.
 
Now I need to understand what all this really means. I’m sure I’ll find some great analysis tomorrow.
 
On the other hand, I found that the two organizers keynotes (Rael Dornfest and Tim O’Reilly) were not as punchy as last year. They repeated a lot of stuff for the new crowd (at least half of the attendees). They also did not focus much on the theme “Attention” which I did expect. Also a bit surprising that the main opening keynote was not related to this theme.
 
I’m still looking forward for tomorrow’s great line of speakers.
 
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Attention Economy at ETECH 2006

March 6, 2006 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

This year again I have the opportunity to attend this “alpha geek” brainstorming session. The theme this year: The Attention Economy :
 
…bandwidth continues to broaden, storage grows ever larger and cheaper, and content keeps pouring from the firehose. How do we visualize all of this digital data, filter it, remix it, and access it in meaningful ways? The coming technical challenge is not about generating digital content-we have more than enough already. It’s time to do something with that data. It’s time to build The Attention Economy.
 
Broadcasting has to deal with attention a lot. All these new information and entertainment sources segment users attention. There is a lot of new content out there but the total attention pool is not necessarily increasing.
 
I’m sure I’ll get away with new ideas.

Financing vlogs

February 23, 2006 in Services by Administrator | No comments

Rocketboom is certainly one of the most popular video blogs (vlog) right now. Because of this, the producers (a small team of 2 I think…) were able to sell five 15 seconds ads for $40.000… all that through EBay (search for item number 5661816188 on EBay to see the details). Will this be a new trend in advertising? Rocketboom is seen by over 100.000 people daily.
 
2006_02_rocketboom_logo.jpg
 
I got aware of that yesterday (2 weeks late!) while testing the Democracy player with recent Rocketboom shows.

Democracy Internet TV Platform

February 21, 2006 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

The Participatory Culture Foundation is on a roll. They just released today the first Windows version of their popular DTV software, which they renamed Democracy player.
 
2006_02_democracy.jpg
 
Democracy is actually a complete internet TV platform to watch, share and “broadcast” video on the net. It is based on four main technologies: Democracy player, Broadcast Machine, Channel guide and the Video Bomb web application.
 
I think that DTV was a better name for the player since it made a direct and “punchy” reference to the more traditional broadcasting world of Digital Television.
 
The metallic black GUI looks great. It’s quite similar to the recently released iTunes “killer” Songbird. The application crashed when I first ran it but was fine the second time. I also had trouble downloading some video files (the download simply stopped).
 
Anyways, it looks to me like all these applications show the way forward. Great work PCF!

Videobomb

February 15, 2006 in Applications, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Videobomb is a good example of the power of adding "social" features to video clips viewing services. Here, viewers "bomb" (vote) for clips of their choice:

Video Bomb filters up the hottest videos on the Internet: people submit links to the ‘Incoming!’ page and you bomb the best ones. If a video gets a lot of bombs quickly, it makes it to the front page.

Last week I spent at least one hour watching front page entries and I must admit I was laughing to tears. After that I called my friend (over Skype) and I told him to have a look at the best clips. As I expected, I heard him laugh a lot but I was missing the possiblity for us to view the clips simultaneously.

It becomes also clear with such a service that It will be essential to be able to "bomb" media content on-the-go somehow with the portable media player. This information could be uploaded to the network at the next PC sync. opportunity.

Rivendell GPL radio automation software suite

February 9, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Infrastructures, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Three weeks ago I reported about LiveSupport, an open radio automation software. Well, here is another platform I found: Rivendell. Doc Searls reports about it in his recent Linux Journal column:
 
Rivendell aims to be a complete radio broadcast automation solution, with facilities for the acquisition, management, scheduling and playout of audio content. As a robust, functionally complete digital audio system for broadcast radio applications, Rivendell uses industry standard components like the GNU/Linux Operating System, the AudioScience HPI Driver Architecture and the MySQL Database Engine. Rivendell is being developed under the GNU Public License.
 
2006_02_09_salem_rivendell.gif
 
This looks like a very professionnal an complete radio automation suite that’s already being used in commercial ventures. Intersetingly, Rivendell can be used as the basis for internet radio as well.

Satellite services to mobile phones

February 8, 2006 in Applications, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

After radio, with Sirius and XM, PanAmSat plans to provide mobile video to consumers:
 
PanAmSat Holding Corp. is starting a new business that will sell and distribute ethnic programming for television in the United States, a move that the company hopes will pave the way for other new initiatives that get the satellite company into more consumer businesses such as Internet video and mobile phones.
 
This approach could be similar to the Korean DMB-S system.
 

Branding Méli-Mélo

February 8, 2006 in Divers, Industry by Administrator | No comments

In french there is this expression “méli-mélo” that means something like a mish-mash, a mess or a mix.
 
Well I think I observed some pattern in “mixing” letters together to get a brand for a mobile media service. Have a look at these brands:
  • Melodeo : music service “integrator” for wireless operators
  • Modeo: Cowncastle mobile TV service for the US based on DVB-H
  • Movio: BT mobile TV service based on DAB

I should get the following trademarks: Mevio, Medeo, Molideo, my MeliMelo of course and why not Osolemio !!!

CBC Technology Review

February 7, 2006 in Infrastructures, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

Our canadian public broadcast engineers from CBC/SRC published in January the first issue of their new bi-annual  Technology Review . As Ray Carnovale (VP and CTO) puts it in his editorial :

This semi-annual electronic publication will give an opportunity for us at CBC/Radio-Canada to describe and promote the significance of our activities in the Technology group, and to share our ideas both inside and outside the Corporation. As a service group, our role is to bring our collective knowledge and expertise to enable the infrastructure for our media partners to create the highest quality programming for the Canadian public.

 

I like the WEB/PDF format that we also enjoy from the very famous EBU Technical Review .

I think it’s a great initiative and I’m looking forward to read about CBC’s views on the future of broadcasting…. or, well, broadcasting 2.0!

Superbowl Commercials

February 6, 2006 in Applications, Services by Administrator | No comments

Watch the full 20 minutes of Super Bowl commercials back-to-back on Google video or download them as video podcasts here.
 
This is intersting in particular for those of us who only see a local remix and never get to see them live!

Super Bowl viewers ratings: 1 billion ? Urban myth?

February 5, 2006 in Industry, Services by Administrator | 2 comments

I’m just scratching the surface of this subject but 5 minutes ago I heard, on CBC news (canadian public broadcaster), that the Super Bowl attracted 1 billion viewers… I haven’t found the answer yet but as I said in my previous post, wikipedia (whoever that is!) suggests that this is probalby an urban myth:
 
There is a popular urban myth regarding the Super Bowl — that the game is watched in 234 countries by 1 billion people, a fact unlikely to be true considering the time of the event, and the lack of popularity American Football has outside of the United States. In actual fact, Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005 was watched by 93 million viewers in total, of which 98 percent were in North America. Approximately half of the remaining 2 million worldwide viewers watched from the United Kingdom.
 
Just to have a better idea, I found the ratings of other big broadcast events:

My guts feelings tell me that soccer is the real global sport. How could american football be so popular all around the globe?

Anyone has the answer?

Super Bowl and Broadcasting

February 5, 2006 in Applications, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

The 40th Super Bowl is currently live on TV. Either through cable, satellite, IPTV or off air, it requires a capacity that we can’t have off the Net today. With its extremely high Nielsen ratings, it shows the best features of broadcasting: Live, high capacity bitstream, one-to-many-many-many. The broadcast infrastructure is at its best here. It’s currently the only channel that supports the dissimination of the head of the longtail live, in HD, to the largest audience of the year.
 
2006_02_05_SuperBowlXL.png
 
By the way, wikipedia provides a good description of the event. There could be as much as 100 millions viewers this year, mostly in the U.S. (1 billion is an urban legend) . As a comparison, there were 3.8 billion viewers of the 2000 olympic games in Sydney.
 
Well, now I have to leave you. Mick Jagger is singing his “I can’t get no satisfaction”. I’ll be one of 100 millions with you…

Podcasting according to Rogers

February 5, 2006 in Uncategorized by Administrator | 7 comments

Last week, this press release anounced North America’s first wireless podcast service.  Rogers Wireless will offer more than 1500 podcasts to canadian consumers using melodeo’s mobilecast technology.
 
2006_02_05-mobilcast.gif
 
The service costs 5$ per month plus, of course, data traffic.
 
I have my doubts about this service model. I feel that there is no real benefit compared to downloading and synching to the PC. Podcasts are convenient because they are normally not time critical. They are time-shifting proof. I see other problems too:
  • Limited (filtered) offer: there are (will be) millions of podcasts out there
  • Pay for something that’s free.
  • Could be hard on the battery. Podcasts are large files

Mobile Broadcasting such as DMB and DVB-H will also be much more efficient for that kind of applications.

tvmobilenews.com

January 31, 2006 in Industry, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Interesting web news on mobile TV(no RSS feed though!):
 

TV mobile News is a partnership between two leading commentators on the mobile and TV industry.

Together they aim to help the TV and mobile industries understand each other better and to help them explore the opportunites from the technology.

Link via (SmartMobs)

IP Wireless and TDtv

January 31, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

The 3GSM world congress is coming in two weeks and that is probably the reason why we see so many press releases these days. Mobile TV will definitely be a hot topic this year.
 
Well recently, the TDtv technolgy was anounced:
 
IPWireless Mobile Broadband technology is a packet data implementation of the international 3GPP Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) standard. Time-division-duplex (TDD) is used, according to the 3GPP UMTS UTRA UMTS TD-CDMA standard, allowing operation on unpaired spectrum anywhere in these bands. Chip rates of 3.84 and 7.68 megachips/sec (Mcps) are supported, for operation in channelization of 5 and10 MHz (6 and 12 MHz in the MMDS band).
 
TDtv is a Sprint Nextel effort to keep Mobile TV within the 3G ecosystem. It is based on the multimedia broadcast and multicast service (MBMS) specification.
 

A solution for the Long Tail in P2P systems

January 30, 2006 in Applications, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

Peer to peer systems have properties that are very similar to those of broadcasting. Very often, the availability of content is strongly related to its popularity. For this reason, P2P is good for the distribution of the head of the long tail.
 
Here is an interesting paper that presents a methodology to maintain the availability of long tail content on P2P systems:
 
We describe an efficient incentive mechanism for P2P systems that gen- erates a wide diversity of content offerings while responding adaptively to customer demand. Files are served and paid for through a parimutuel market similar to that commonly used for betting in horse races. An analysis of the performance of such a system shows that there exists an equilibrium with a long tail in the distribution of content offerings, which guarantees the real time provision of any content regardless of its popu- larity.

Freedom to Connect Conference

January 26, 2006 in Industry, Legislation by Administrator | No comments

For the second time, David Isenberg (the very bright father of the “stupid network”) brings us this great conference.
 
F2C is where communications policy meets networking technology, network economics, networked applications, and network construction and operation. F2C is dedicated to the proposition that strong networks build strong democracies, and vice versa.
 

2006_01_26_F2C-logo246.gif

 
WATCH OUT!!! The logo is not up to date. The meeting is on April 3-4.
 

Blast Podcast

January 25, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Services by Administrator | No comments

Blast Podcast is a web service that matches advertisers and podcasters by inserting relevant ads. They now offer video ads insertion.
 
Fruitcast seems to have a similar product.
 
This matching of products with cunsumers and content is the traditional function of broadcasters. Maybe it’s the only function that’s left for them in the future although these guys here already grab a piece of the market.

A new mobile TV alliance

January 23, 2006 in Applications, Industry, Mobility, Services by Administrator | No comments

Nokia announced the following today:
 

… Other firms in the alliance include Intel Corp., Motorola, Texas Instruments and Modeo, owned by Crown Castle International Corp., it said in a statement. The tie-up, called the Mobile DTV Alliance, aims to encourage open standards for TV broadcasts to mobiles, focusing on the North American market.

DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld) technology bypasses mobile networks and broadcasts directly to handsets from TV masts, allowing millions of phone users to access the service at the same time.

2006_01_23_nokia.jpg
 
This seems to build a united DVB-H front against Qualcomm’s MediaFLO in the US.
 

Godzilla PVR

January 20, 2006 in Applications, Consumer devices by Administrator | No comments

The geeks at Snapstream have build another Monster PVR:
 
This system is an ultra high end HTPC showcasing Beyond TV 4 and capable of recording 11 shows, 4 high definition and 7 standard definition, at once. With Beyond TV 4’s HDTV support and with its unlimited tuners, you can create your own monster system.
 

Open source automation software for radio stations

January 19, 2006 in Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

LiveSupport looks like a promising open platform for small public radio operators:
 
LiveSupport is the first free and open radio management software that provides live studio broadcast capabilities as well as remote automation in one integrated system.
 
2006_01_19_livesupport_logo_side_by_side.jpeg
 

MIPTV – MILIA digital pitching competition

January 19, 2006 in Applications, Media formats by Administrator | No comments

I was at the Milia conference for the first time in Cannes, France, in 1993. Back then it was very well attended and presented great speakers (Nocholas Negroponte and others). Over the years they kept their focus on “content”. I was there three years ago again and even tough it was much smaller, great stuff was discussed as they started to introduce “mobile content”.
 
Last year Milia merged with MIPTV, a much larger event. This year again will have its deal of great “content” sessions.
 
For those of you who have innovative ideas for multimedia content and applications, BBC and KBC (Korean Broadcsating Corporation) are organising a “pitching competion”. As you see here, they’ve got it all:
If you have concepts that push the boundaries for Interactive mobile content and formats, creative solutions for user-generated content, ideas that will help web users navigate the ‘long tail’ of a broadcaster’s rich archives, innovative content or applications for DMB Mobile TV, then you should enter Content 360 – Digital Pitching Competition at MIPTV featuring MILIA 2006.
 
A total of 75.000 Euros will be awarded to the best 5 pitches.
 
Good luck!
 

Convergence at CRTC

January 17, 2006 in Legislation by Administrator | No comments

I had missed that one. CRTC makes a first move to adapt its structure to the convergence reality:
Effective immediately, broadcasting and telecommunications policy and operations will largely be grouped under a converged structure and leadership. A new integrated Industry Analysis, Economics and Technology section will be created as a resource for both broadcasting and telecommunications.
 
In my opinion, broadcasting is a particular application of the more general field of “telecommunications”. This being said, broadcasting requires specific caracteristics that are not always available in telecommunications systems today. That’s precisely the case with wireless networks. Also, applications exploiting the broadcast paradigm have specific properties. Currently, the wireless telecommunications industry shows a great interest in broadcasting technologies such DVB-H and DAB/DMB.
 
Convergence is a slow and difficult process in industries, organisations and especially governments. This here is good news.

Review of commercial radio policy in Canada

January 17, 2006 in Legislation, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will be holding a public hearing in May 2006. The notice underlines the fact that since the last policy review in 1998, we have seen many “dramatic” technological changes:
 
The seven years since the 1998 Policy came into effect have seen the advent of new digital technologies and methods of distribution that are having a profound effect on the way in which people, particularly young people, obtain and listen to music. This is presenting the radio industry with new opportunities, but also new challenges: in addition to the satellite radio services now available, file-sharing, podcasting, downloading, and audio streaming, all facilitated through the increasing ubiquity of the Internet, offer new and often more flexible alternatives to the traditional practices of purchasing recorded music and listening to radio broadcasting.
 
Radio has to be redifined. Even the term “radio” has no clear meaning within this new context. The former definition of radio is based on some specific networking technologies (AM, FM, …), value chains (advertising,…), formats (talk/music mix,…) and so on. A radio broadcaster today has three roles: operate the network, manage content and finaly sell advertizing time. In our new converging world, the radio ecosystem will be broader, richer and much more flexible. Everyone can be a braodcaster. Everyone can afford to be a braodcaster. To listeners, all this will bring more convenience and choice.
 
I have strong doubts that the new policy will address all the Broadcasting 2.0 challenges and opportunities but at least, CRTC seems to be willing to have look at them.

A NYT story about Internet media

January 16, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Services by Administrator | No comments

A short review at the NYT about the new Internet content dissemination models:
 
“At one level it’s clear that the dam has broken,” said Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel. “There’s an inevitable move to use the Internet as a distribution medium, and that’s not going to stop.”

Motorola iRadio

January 16, 2006 in Mobility, Services by Administrator | 1 comment

This Reuters.com story tells us a little bit about the new iRadio service by Motorola. After looking at the iRadio website , I would summarize the whole story with this:
 
iRadio = podcasting by Motorola
 
Althoug the name is not ideal (somewhat confusing because it is absolutely not radio) I prefer it to Podcasting. Podcasting is a direct reference to the iPod and I find it sad that we’re stuck with a product-based terminology for such an important innovation. Nevertheless, the iPod, in conjunction with iTunes, is probably the best platform for podcasting.
 
After launching the Rokr cellular phone last September with Apple, Motorola introduces the new Rokr E2 that will receive iRadio services.
 
2006_01_16_motorola-rokr_e2.gif
Here is a factsheet of the RoKr E2
 

Mobile TV at CES 2006

January 10, 2006 in Infrastructures, Mobility, Services by Administrator | No comments

Mobile TV made the news last week at CES 2006 with announcments and product demonstrations. From now on, one of the two major ventures will be called Modeo (formerly known as Crown Castle Mobile Media) while the other one has been known under the name of  MediaFLO (Qualcomm) for a while now.
 
Both services will be very similar with, of course, some variations. This paper  at C|Net provides a very good comparative overview of the two technologies.
 
This Nokia device was presented running a Modeo demo last week. Here is another device by Motorola .

My audio setup for the Christmas Holidays

January 9, 2006 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

I am happy to be back on Broadcasting 2.0 after two weeks of silence.
 
I would like to relate here my recent experiments with streaming audio as part of my home network.
 
The system I configured (late at night on december 23!) was base on four major technologies:
  • the squeezebox music network player made by Slim Devices
  • the SlimServer, provided by the same company
  • the Apple Mac mini
  • a WRT54G Linksys Wifi access point

The client side looked quite funny with the slim device feeding an old amplifier from the 70s (note the 8-track cartridge player):

2005_12_slimdevice.JPG

On the Mac I also installed a VNC server so that I could control it without a keybord and a monitor connected to it:

2005_12_macmini.JPG

All I can say is that the setup ran flawlessly throughout my two weeks at home. The quality of service was also very impressive even while the microwave oven was on (I have had some bad experience with that in the past). The slimdevice is also impressively well thought in terms of user friendliness.

Slingbox

December 22, 2005 in Applications, Consumer devices, Infrastructures by Administrator | 1 comment

The slingbox is certainly a Broadcasting 2.0 device. It sits on top of your home TV and streams the remotely selected channel to you, anywhere you are in the world, through the Internet.
 

2005_12_22_slingbox.jpg

Jeff Pulver relates his very positive experience with this device.

I recall that around year 2000 we have seen many such disruptive devices that were to change the broadcast experience forever (Kerbango was one of the most expected ones). Then the bubble…. Today, iPods and Co. show that we’re back on track.

Link (via pulverblog)

Spoiling PVR Content

December 22, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

I never thought about it but this guy avoids Yahoo! homepage for fear of seeing the results of content he planned to watch from his PVR:
 
Yahoo! News has spoiled yet another television event for PVR users. This morning they posted a link on their Yahoo! homepage that said R—— denies R——, wins Apprentice. For those of you who’ve yet to watch the show, I won’t ruin it for you, but knowing the winner of the Apprentice will immedietely suck out a lot of joy and suspense from the season finale.
 
He ads that since 10% of americans are using PVRs, Yahoo! should consider posting this type of results on secondary pages.
 
 

WiBro demo in Turin

December 22, 2005 in Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Telecom Italia and Samsung will demonstrate the WiBro system (the Corean flavor of WiMax) at the 2006 winter olympics in Turin, Italy. After that, we will have the DMB system in demonstration in Germany, presenting the FiFa Worldcup 2006. We have an interesting year for broadcasting ahead of us.
 

411-Song

December 21, 2005 in Applications, Mobility by Administrator | 2 comments

Another new cell phone pay service in the US. It identifies the song that you’re currently hearing on radio… or anywhere else actually. Simple system:
 
“How many times have you heard a song and wished you knew who it was or wished you could get it before you forget it? Now you can, just call (866) 411-SONG, here’s how: * Hear a song you love; * Call (866) 411-SONG; * Wait for the beep and hold your cell near the music for just 15 seconds; * We identify the song and send you a text with all the song info (artist and song name) and a link to GET it.”
 
See the demo. At 3.99$ a month it’s not cheap though.
 
 

Qualcomm IP

December 20, 2005 in Consumer devices, Industry by Administrator | No comments

And as I was browsing through The Register, I found this story about the big picture of IP ownership in the mobile wireless world. It looks like patents are moving from one hand to the other in a perpetual fight.
 

Mobile WiMAX Standard Finalized

December 20, 2005 in Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

I’m a little bit late on the news but I just noticed that the IEEE 802.16e has been finalized two weeks ago. As Om Malik puts it, that was the easiest part:
 
… now companies have to get onboard with the concept, start developing silicon and equipment. But more than that, money has to be found, to essentially (and eventually) replicate the cellular mobile infrastructure. It is going to be a very costly and long drawn out process. It might be easy to get caught in the euphoria surrounding the news, but we all need to take a deep breath and get prepared for a long haul.
 
The Register has a short story about this announcement.
 
I have not had the time to look into the specification but WiMAX could be seen as a threat to mobile broadcasting systems such as DMB, DVB-H or MediaFLO. And since WiMAX’s mother tongue is “Internet”,  it could be seen as the long awaited and open platform for disruptive mobile applications. Broadcasting 2.0 believers will have to dig into WiMAX broadcasting capabilities.
 

A very compact DMB receiver

December 20, 2005 in Consumer devices by Administrator | No comments

Samsung has just announced its new tiny DMB phone model number SCH-B360 / SPH-B3600 / SPH-B3650.

2005_12_20small_samsung_dmb_tv_mobile.jpg

Everyday we’re getting closer to mobile TV applications. It’s still not clear to me how important our needs for real-time video streams on-the-move are. But TV was never mobile. It’s certainly worth a try.
 

European “MI FRIENDS” DMB Project

December 19, 2005 in Applications, Services by Administrator | No comments

This looks like another huge project under the Celtic Eureka umbrella. MI FRIENDS will be a two years project for the 75 official participants.
 
The project aimes at a new architecture of inter-working media services based on infrastructures of broadcasting and telecommunications for the media needs of a mobile information society. 
The project goal is to develop and test new mobile media technologies from an economic point of view paying particular regard to social and cultural aspects with media consumer in its centre.  
 
This looks quite interesting since it will give particular attention to DMB technologies as well as to social and cultural aspects.
 

Satellite Radio arrives in Canada

December 19, 2005 in Applications, Industry, Infrastructures by Administrator | 1 comment

I’m quite impressed to see that this becomes real so quickly. I went shopping tonight and took this shot:
 

bestbuysat19dec2005.jpg

 
It’s not just available. It’s on the storefront in big letters. The marketing forces behind XM and Sirius will give them a lead over DAB for a while… maybe a very long while!
 
Satellite Radio is Broadcasting 2.0. It’s pay radio. DAB is also Broadcasting 2.0. It’s free digital broadcasting.

BBC Integrated Media Player (iMP)

December 19, 2005 in Applications, Infrastructures, Media formats, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

The BBC iMP is a great Broadcasting 2.0 software application. Since September, some lucky folks in the UK are actually testing it.
 
The software builds a peer to peer (P2P) network to support the distribution of BBC content. Each file is DRM protected and stays accessible for 7 days after its “transmission”. In other words, it’s a BBC only PVR with a one week memory. That’s quite limitative but hey, that’s just a trial. Let’s hope they get positive feedback from their community.
 
And in the meantime, the trial period has been extended until the end of February 2006.
 

Tony Ageh, BBC Controller, Internet says: “We really want to understand the benefits that iMP can bring to our audiences.

We know that there is likely to be a ‘honeymoon’ period of a few weeks, when our participants are likely to use iMP more often than normal. The data from the extra two months should really help us to comprehend what users want from the service and how they are using it.

“This will be invaluable for us in making our case to the BBC Board of Governors for a full roll out of iMP.”

 

Link

“About” this blog

December 19, 2005 in Divers by Administrator | No comments

I just posted a first draft of the about section for this blog. I took it from another text I wrote some time ago. It is not precisely nor extensively what I understand under Broadcasting 2.0 but it’s certainly a good start. I’ll try to work on it in the coming weeks.

CBC 2.0

December 18, 2005 in Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

A good post on “dose” where CBC’s vision of the future is questioned. That’s all Broadcasting 2.0.
Producing & disseminating audio is so cheap and easy now, and so much wonderful audio will be produced in the coming years — by smart public broadcasters, and also by joes and janes at home — all of it accessible on net. Why listen to CBC if they insist of becoming AOL audio, and do not understand what’s happening on the web? Why support an institution that does not reflect anything i believe in? (freedom, the responsibilities of a public broadcaster, diversity, non-commercialness etc).
 
In a comment, Tod Maffin provides some answers.
 

Tim Berners-Lee just started his blog

December 18, 2005 in Divers by Administrator | No comments

Well, I ‘m certainly not the WWW inventor but I started my blog two weeks before him!
 

MPEG LASeR Standard

December 15, 2005 in Media formats, Mobility by Administrator | 1 comment

LASeR is a recent open standardization effort targeting “rich media” mobile multimedia platforms. As such, it could become a component of the broadcasting DAB and DVB-H consumer devices. 
Here is an excerpt from the technical white paper:
The inherent content and binary encoding structure makes it inappropriate for the mobile. Instead of compromising on the technology performances, MPEG reached the conclusion that an optimum between feature richness/compression efficiency and device constraints needed to be found and decided to create a new standard for Rich Media for constrained devices.

Podcasting Survey at CBC

December 14, 2005 in Media formats, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | No comments

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,  as well as its french counterpart SRC, has a limited but good podcast offering.  CBC currently conducts a survey to better understand their listeners’ needs. Would I be paying for the podcast shows?
 
Before podcasting, my favorite radio show was “unavailable” to me. In fact, it airs daily from 9 to 11 AM while… guess what? …I’m at work. Podcasting is not just a nice to have alternative. It’s the only way I can access this great content (for which I paid for… some fractions of seconds of it at least!).
 
So before I have to pay for this, I would probably suggest to take down most of the costly FM transmitter networks and replace them by some inexpensive P2P seeding servers.
 

Media roundtrip

December 14, 2005 in Industry, Infrastructures by Administrator | No comments

A popular radio show goes to Sirius then cable tv and now, video streaming on the Internet. 50% of its 100.000 audience listens to it through podcasting. That’s Broadcasting 2.0.
 

Grassroot media

December 12, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

Today, my colleague pointed me to these incredible video clips produced by a friend of his son. I’m not so sure about the tools he uses but in a couple of minutes you see it all: 3D animations, The Matrix effects and much more. And on top of all, great scenarios.
 
Here are two extremely popular examples of what creative and highly motivated minds will do with… well… very low budgets!
  • Original Star Trek sequel brougth to you by real real fans: Wired december 2005 paper
  • The Codex: a group of teens who build and record SF clips from an X-Box game engine!

These guys distribute their content over Internet. Peer-to-peer networks are used to disseminate the video files efficiently and at no cost. This makes sense, of course, when files are large and extremely popular.

These are great examples of  what Broadcasting 2.0 is about: high volumes of data, one-to-many cheap distribution and also, great alternative content that people want to see.

Jack FM radio format

December 12, 2005 in Services by Administrator | No comments

Chris Anderson has a post on his Long Tail blog about a new radio format that could at best extend radio’s life:
I’ve been following the rise of Jack FM a lot lately… It’s alleged to be the fastest growing new broadcast format in radio today (I think that honor might actually go to latin radio, but it’s certainly one of the most popular), based on the idea of pulling the songs played from a much longer playlist and having no DJs.
 
The Jack FM format is based on 1000 titles playlists instead of the very commonl 100 or even 40 hits playlists.
 

I stumbled upon “StumbleUpon”

December 8, 2005 in Applications by Administrator | No comments

Needless to say I am no native english speaker (nor writer!). In my previous post I used the expression “stumbled upon”. Since I had some doubts about the validity of the expression I googled it.
 
I learned three things:
  • There is a great social Web application called StumbleUpon
  • On the Web you can stumble upon everything (including StumbleUpon.com)
  • “to stumble upon” is a valid english expression

An Open Source Media manifesto

December 8, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

Just stumbled upon this short manifesto on the Internet Archive. It was mostly articulated around the 2004 US elections.
 
 In the digital era, free expression and public critique is both easier and harder than in the past with print media. In the digital world, free expression means posting text, audio, and video on the Internet for others to see. Free services exist for those that want to post text, but audio and video pose cost constraints that only the professionals can afford. Furthermore, public critique requires an ability to refer to and quote other’s comments, and then add commentary around these quotations. Again, this is easy in the text world of the World Wide Web through hypertext links, but audio and video are not yet easy because of a lack of tools to easily quote from these sources. “Deep linking” into video is possible in theory but not in practice.

Less attention for mainstream media

December 7, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

The amount of time we spend with traditional mass media keeps declining. The most affected sectors: books, box office, newspapers, music and radio. Chris Anderson provides some numbers in his Long Tail blog.
 
 

Open cell phones

November 21, 2005 in Consumer devices by Administrator | No comments

This article presents the efforts of new hacker communities trying to implement open mobile platforms. As it is for digital broadcasting “terminals”, cell phones tend to be closed platforms for which current “incumbents” have the exclusive power to innovate. In this article however, they claim that only open platforms will pave the way to future applications. We’ve seen that model work pretty well for the Internet, haven’t we? Could this also apply to mobile networks? And digital mobile networks such as DVB-H, DMB or MediaFLO?
 
BTW Surj Patel (the guy interviewed) is also the conference chair of the very promising O’reilly ETEL event next january.
 
 

Open Source Media (OSM)

November 21, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

I’m not quite sure about the OSM model but it looks like the most popular blogger/news get paid by the service.
 
 
 

Will subscription media kill broadcacast?

November 16, 2005 in Media formats, Services by Administrator | No comments

An interesting debate initiated by Tom Coates about streaming vs time-shifted media:
 
…Because it’s not streaming that’s most affected by a combination of on demand and ‘deliver it to me’ subscribable podcast-like functionality. The main potential victim here is broadcast itself. Those of us who have Tivos or PVR functionality are already used to the idea that we don’t have to sit in front of the television when something’s being broadcast to watch our shows. And as a consequence, I very infrequently do.
 
Of course, time-shifting works fine as long as there is no need for live broadcasts. However, there will always be a need for live stuff like: sports events, breaking news, interactive-participatory shows, the President’s address to the nation, emergency warnings,…
 
 
 

Internet Media by AOL Time Warner

November 16, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

New plans by Warner to make 100 old TV shows available for download. Two minutes of “non-skipable” advertizing will be presented at the beginning of each episode.
 

Hilton Line-In Clock

November 9, 2005 in Consumer devices by Administrator | No comments

 
Recently I spent some days at Hilton hotel. I was gladly surprised to discover that the typical clock radio was equipped with an external line-in jack for my iPod. In an open media world, the line-in jack is a de-facto standard. Will we have similar open interfaces for our portable HDTV devices in hotel rooms? And how about a standards-based physical interface for car radios?
 
 
Hilton line-in clock.jpg
 
 
 

DTV soon for Windows

November 9, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

A great project example that shows (even with its name) how Internet media could provide a similar (or better) experience than TV.
 

Welcome

November 8, 2005 in Uncategorized by Administrator | No comments

This is the first post. Thanks for visiting. A lot to read sooooon…