Applications

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

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

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.

 

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.

… 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.

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.

• 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)

“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.”

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.  

 

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

• 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