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No Programme Left Behind:Liberating Television from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral

Tom Loosemore

Saturday 5th July 2008

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The Small Print:

Warning: this speaker may give the impression of vague technical plausibility. This is erroneous. In truth, he’s one of those managerial bluffer types with ideas above his station. The last code he wrote was some catastrophically bad PHP back in 1999, leading an erstwhile colleague to revoke his access to CVS, stating ‘he knows just enough to be terribly dangerous’. Caveat Emptor.

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My House, North London

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Alexandra Palace

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Someone just broke TV

10/04/23 8

Bang to rights, Sir Tim…

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How is TV broken?

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99.9999% of TV is not longer with us

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And even the 0.00001% that is available…

can’t be found can’t be shared

can’t be linked to

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“Make All TV Ever Available,

Findable &

Addressable.”

The Organising Problem:

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Digital TVDigital Satellite DVB-S Digital Cable DVB-C Digital Terrestrial DVB-T (aka

Freeview)Digital Mobile DVB-H

Digital RadioDigital Audio Broadcast DABDigital Radio Mondial DRM

Internet BroadcastLive Unicast streamingMulticast streaming (bbc.co.uk/multicast)

Digital Broadcasting in the UK

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Freeview: The UK’s best TV, free.

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Pros:Rich AV Content Accessible Well structuredExtremely ScalableVery High AvailabilityProven

Cons Documentation

Licence Ephemeral

How does Freeview stack up as an API?

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DVB-T Broadcast Audio & Video API

2Mbs MPEG2 streamWidescreenStereoView a single channel, or capture a multiplexLicence: Some programmes with CC licence

DVB-T Broadcast Metadata API

“Next 8 days” programme infoTitle, description, genre, channel, start time etc.UIDs & series linking not implemented.Licence: OK

Freeview is really a pair of linked APIs

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BBC Broadcast Metadata API

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/BbcWebApi

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

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Damn. Ok, at least publish the catalogue.

open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue

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“Make All TV Ever Available,

Findable &

Addressable.”

OK. now back to that Organising Challenge:

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My Danny O’Brien Moment

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Dom & Nick Ludlam

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Promise.tv : The last week’s TV, in a box.

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OK, but…

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“Make All TV Ever Available,

Findable &

Addressable.”

Once again, that Organising Problem:

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“How about a year’s worth of TV?”

Real-time transcode MPEG2 to MPEG4 0.5 GB per channel per hour 12 GB per channel per day1 TB stores a channel for 3 months24 TB stores all BBC TV for a year

Much too large to sit in living room20,000 programmes - too many for ‘grid’ EPG…

…and so to the Web!

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

BBCRedux.com

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BBCMacro.com: A year of BBC TV

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Of course, it did the usual schedule stuff

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But you could also search 20,000+ programmes

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Download programme, Programme information,

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Tags hacked via term extraction

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Et voila: the collected works of Cruickshank

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User Ratings; User Comments

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People + Programmes = Social Scheduling

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OK, but…

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“Make All TV Ever Available,

Findable &

Addressable.”

Back, for the final time, to that Organising Problem:

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Need. More. Storage.

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What if… ?

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Some maths.

Real-time transcode MPEG2 to MPEG4 An hour-long programme is 500MB120TB stores all decent UK TV for a year

So we need 10TB/month storage

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Some more maths.

Assume each Impossibox had a 1TB diskAssume 100 bought each monthThat’s an additional 100TB storage each month

But we only need 10TB each month

100 boxes/month = 10 copies of each programme

And a very nicely seeded bittorrent cloud...

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How the Impossibox Network Seeds

BBC One Jun – Aug

2008

BBC Two Jul – Sep 2008

BBC Four Jul – Dec

2008

ITV1 Aug – Oct

2008

Channel Four Sep – Nov

2008BBC Two Sep – Nov

2008

Tracker server

TV

TV Metadata

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How you watch any programme, ever

BBC Two May – Jul

2008

BBC Four Jan – Jun 2008

ITV1 Oct– Dec

2008

Channel Five Feb – Apr

2008BBC Two

Mar – May 2008

BBC One Jun – Aug

2008

TV Metadata

Tracker server

Tracker Data

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…has built a couple of prototypes

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Impossibox Spec

MythTV ++

 Metadata db

Torrent Creator

RSS in/out 

 OS

(Debian) 

 1 TB Local

Storage 

Freeview Tuner

Remote Control

TV Out

 Platform (AMD 64)

 

  Tracker Server  

   

 Networked

Storage 

   

TV Metadata

TV

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What Else Could It Do?

The ma’ and pa’ of all social TV navigation?Integration with DSL router? Popularity-based seeding?ISP-sensitive p2p?Targeted advertising?Encryption / PPV?

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Thank You

Tom Loosemoretom@loosemore.com