Articles by Administrator

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

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

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,

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.

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.

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

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

Tags: Internet+TV, Shows, Channels, new+media

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.

Tags: IBC+2006, Amsterdam, MMB, CRC, IBC

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.

Tags: peer-to-peer+streaming, worldcup, TvAnts, broadcast+event, TV, internet+tv, Internet+streaming

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.

Tags: P2P+broadcasting longtail+broadcasting user+generated+media EBU

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

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

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:

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.

Technorati Tags : radio+application, radio+network, radio+2.0, cab+radio, radio+policy, radio+canada, commercial+radio

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)

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!

Technorati Tags : mechanical+turk, podcast+transcripts, cbc, podcasting, podcast+chapters, podcast+segments

• 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?

Technorati Tags : broadcasting+blogosphere, david+sifry, state+blogosphere, blogosphere+channel, blog+broadcast

…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.

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 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.

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.

 

• 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 !!!

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 :

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.

• this week’s President Bush’s State of The Union address (Nielsen): 42 million
• FIFA World Cup 2002 (wikipedia) : cumulative audience 28.8 billion, final match 1.1 billion

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?

• 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.

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)

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).

 

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

“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.”

• 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):

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

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)

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.

 

“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.”

… 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.