BBC Begins Open-Source Streaming Challenge 373
bus_stopper copies and pastes: "The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video. The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment." We've mentioned this project before but this story goes into a bit more depth about the goals and motivations of the developers.
Ogg Theora (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article (Score:3, Interesting)
It can be used for passing video round home networks, rights-managed peer-to-peer file sharing, or playing media in handheld devices, as well as for web streaming.
And this is why it will be fought against on the political front. How much you want to bet that the feds will want to require some sort of keying/user tracing mechanism in order for this "free" technology to be made publically available? Big media will argue that in order for the government to protect copyright, they shouldn't allow technology that can subert other's copyrights.
The BBC (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, it has its problems, but I'd trust the BBC over any politician, especially ones who make threatening noises about its charter every time it does its job by being independent and embarrassing the government of the day...
Re:Ogg Theora (Score:5, Interesting)
IIRC, it takes forever-squared to encode, but once done it beats just about anything in terms of file size and picture quality. Since the BBC's model is going to be encode once, then let the public download at will, this is fine by them.
Re:From the article (Score:5, Interesting)
If the "feds" were to ask the BBC not to release it we'd end up seeing one of your politicians getting an unexpected kicking in his next interview. A few years ago a BBC interviewer asked the Home Secretary (in charge of the police, prisons, immigration, "Homeland Security" etc.) the same question *14* times, when he wouldn't answer the question.
Re:Ogg Theora (Score:2, Interesting)
Last I checked the UK Was Not the 51st State (Score:3, Interesting)
Let the feds scream like stuck pigs.
Now that the Bush administration has completely gutted our diplomatic clout to such a degree we can't even rally people against emerging nuclear threats (remember the boy who cried wolf?), no one but no one is willing to blindly go along with the United States.
Britain is the last staunch ally we have, and at this point we need them more than they need us. If Hollywood's lackeys in Washington try to push London around on this one I suspect they will be in for a very nasty surprise.
Cheney/Bush: "Ban this subversive technology or we'll have to impose tarrifs on many British goods."
UK Prime Minister: "It would be a shame if the US felt it necessary to impose trade tarrifs on the UK. That would depress our economy enough that we could no longer afford the fiscal expenditure to maintain our presence in your latest cockup, that is to say, Iraq. It might well call Afghanistan into question as well."
Cheney/Bush: ??? Who knows if they would be stupid enough to do so anyway, and lose both wars before the year is out, or if they would cave and crawl back into their backrooms for some more Haliburtan deals. Either way the US will have lost even more political and diplomatic clout (which at one time had been our greater asset, far outweighing our military strength), and the BBC's free codec will continue to be developed and deployed, unabated.
And, lest Kerry think he could pull a similiar stunt (remember, as destructive as Bush/Cheney have been on every other front, they are equaled by the Democrats on this particular topic: selling the interests of the people out to Hollywood), he would face exactly the same reaction, and results.
So, I think the BBC is reasonably safe from the depredations of Washington, whether Hollywood and Redmond like it or not.
Ogg Vorbis & Theora (Score:2, Interesting)
A bit of politics (Score:3, Interesting)
Freedom of information is not about paying or not paying for commercial content. Freedom of information is about politics, human rights, rulership and ideology manipulation. BBC is on the side of freedom for some time, and currently under heavy pressure from the conservatives.
Letting free codec technology to public now may help in some near future, when independent journalists will be hunted to underground or illegality.
Re:Ogg Theora (Score:2, Interesting)
There's more to running an open-source project than giving away your code. You have to maintain it, patch bugs, run a mailing list to inform people of the bugs, and so on.
Wouldn't it be better if they collaborated with the Ogg project so that, even though they are developing a new codec, the codec would be an Ogg codec, with the surrounding infrastructure maintained by the Ogg project?
The Future of Television (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the future of TV will involve less and less advertising and licensing fees. Instead, big content producers like the BBC will sell their archives on a pay-per-view basis. Yes, I know they are planning to offer them for free, but if they have any sense they'll bag the license fees and attach a small, reasonable price to each download.
Everyone agrees that the BBC makes great shows, so why shouldn't we cough up a quid or two when we download from their archives? This alone would let them finance future programming in spades, and a direct link between consumption and payment is a much better business model than wooly license fees linked to TV ownership.
Re:From the article (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ogg Theora (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way, I haven't seen a link to it so far, here [bbc.co.uk] is a link the a BBC info page on Dirac and here [sourceforge.net] is the Source Forge page for those wanting the code.
Serious problem for conferences (Score:3, Interesting)
A good alternative to Real and Media encoder that is free is definitely wanted in these areas.
Offtopic: I wonder why the DV's of this conference are still not encoded...
Re:Ogg Theora (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good old Auntie! (Score:2, Interesting)
Channel 5 is entirely pointless and should never have been launched on analog.
despite it's poor start it is becomming a half decent channel it is already well above ITV in quality especially there documentry's, 5 is showing real potentiall. It is a worthwhile channel now perhaps they should scrap ITV and make 5 the new 3.
Re:The Future of Television (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me see if I understand all this:
you must pay L125
Just curious how things work on the other side of the pond
-nB
Ogg Vorbis streams (Score:3, Interesting)
The BBC, IMNSHO (as a licence payer), should be champions of open communications, and this extends to the openness of their distribution formats. I wish they'd stop wasting resources from crappy little mini-sites with gossip and games relating to soap operas.
Rik
Re:Quicktime (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good old Auntie! (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone who appreciates this work by the BBC, take note:
The BBC is currently under assault from the government, and from the other media companies (notably, News Corp AKA Rupert Murdoch). Its charter is up for renewal, and the government is packing the committee with businessmen who are qualified only to dismantle large part of the Beeb... they have no history or qualification in broadcasting and certainly none in public service broadcasting. On top of that, large parts of the BBC internet activity is going to be axed (thanks to more government appointed hatchet men) and the BBC technology division is being hawked off to Siemens -- which will almost certainly kill off any O/S or non-Microsoft oriented projects in the pipeline.
In short, it looks pretty fucking bleak for any BBC role other than meek and mild broadcaster.
Re:Good old Auntie! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's too bad that ComedyChannel.com sends out such bizarre, often-broken HTML. They have some good clips there, but pretty much everyone I know who has looked at it complains about how confusing and, well, "broken" it is.
The fact that they seem to send only Real and Windows media formats might be part of their problem. But there are a number of blogs that link to their clips, and those usually work pretty well. So if we had a good way of extracting the bare URLs from the javascript, we could all see them online, and the whole world would understand US politics.
Re:14 times (Score:2, Interesting)