August 2010
31 posts
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A question that has cropped up in conversation this evening is “Why is the BBC’s Senior Technologist, Internet Standards job important?”.
Well, I think that’s a question that cropped up. There was some frivolity and possibly talking at cross-purposes. Such is life where each part of an exchange is compressed to one hundred and forty characters.
Even so. Here goes. This is the longish answer.
...
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MT the DG on the BBC at the MGEITF
I was, if I’m being honest, a little disappointed by Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture on Friday. Perhaps I’m too used to the finely-tuned delivery of Steve Jobs at Apple events (and, let’s face it, whatever you think of Apple and its products, Steve Jobs knows how to work a crowd).
It wasn’t just Mark Thompson’s delivery that bothered me, though. The content of his speech, which of course is...
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“why not introduce re-transmission fees … not for the BBC, but for commercial...”
– Mark Thompson, delivering the MacTaggart lecture this year.
The answer: no channel in their right mind would do it. They’d be competing with the free carriage of the BBC.
(The only reason why I bothered posting this was because that quote was picked up by the bbcpress Twitter account…)
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From BBC to YouTube
It’s been suggested to me, on the back of my post yesterday on BBC and HTML5 video, that I go back and have a look at what YouTube said on the subject back in June.
The YouTube post isn’t nearly as incendiary as Erik Huggers’, but they do raise some points which are worth examining (especially in light of some recent news). The constraints upon YouTube are a little different to...
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Connecting Broadcast TV and the Web
Libby Miller has written an excellent post on the NoTube blog describing some of the things Project Baird and NoTube have been collaborating on. It’s a bit technical in places, but hopefully you’ll be able to get an idea of what’s been going on and some of the exciting things it makes possible.
NoTube is an EU-funded project exploring applications of social and semantic TV. The...
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BBC, HTML5 video, etc., etc.
Despite everything, according to the BBC Internet Blog Delicious account, lots of people still don’t get it. So, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
The HTML img element is an awkward but simple beast: it will either display an image, or it’ll display some sort of ‘broken image’ placeholder (in some browsers, this is invisible, but the principle...
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A Note to Web Publishers
nikf:
Dear Web Publishers,
When visiting your site, the amount of time I spend waiting for your shitty Share This! Tweet This! Buzz This! Facebook This! buttons in relation to the overall time spent waiting for an article to load is the likelihood of me never visiting your site again.
No love,
Nik
</aol>
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“Asked about Mr Williams’ career, his uncle called his nephew “very,...”
– MI6 worker found at London flat ‘had been dead weeks’
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A brief note on the topic of the widely-reported...
(For the absence of doubt, I am referring to the successor to the Apple TV).
I have little faith in the long-term lifespan of TV-bound applications. Most applications are single-user, and a decent proportion of TVs are shared: this is a not insignificant mismatch.
That’s not to say there aren’t ways in which it can be useful. The bulk of time spent with a video-on-demand app, for...
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“There is something totally not normal and contrary to economic logic to let...”
– From the FT. Clearly France Telecom’s paying customers don’t factor in to any of this.
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A brief diversionary ponderance upon Flash
Adobe claims Flash is “open”.
Of course, it’s only open in certain senses.
Content providers such as Hulu, YouTube, Channel 4, the BBC, and so on like Flash. These content providers aren’t keen on HTML5 (pick a codec, any codec).
These content providers like Flash precisely because it isn’t open in certain respects. If it was, there would be no benefit to putting as many eggs as...
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The strange little man watched as the two women filled in the sizeable hole they had dug earlier on in the night. As they finished, he turned and crept away.
Vicky Sponge wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. So, that was that. She still wasn’t sure if her sister had talked her into doing the right thing, but one thing was sure: after twenty-five years of marriage, she hated...
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Vicky instinctively glanced at the clerk as she signed the slip. Entirely predictably, a glimmer of amusement flashed across his face as she did.
“Go on, then.”
“Huh?”, replied the clerk.
“I said ‘Go on, then’. Get it over with.”
It was moments like this that she, for a split-second, regretted marrying James. Or at least, not keeping her own surname. “Vicky Goldsmith” was a perfectly good...
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First principles of social media
Some simple guidelines:
Be honest
Honesty really is the best policy. And this applies to “half-truths”, too. Ignore this at your peril: if you conveniently skip details, mislead or misdirect, or worse — outright lie, then you will be found out, and not only will you look very foolish, but you’ll lose a lot of goodwill.
Be open
Don’t hide behind procedures: if...
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Round-up
Following on from the BBC’s Internet Blog’s round-up for the week (featuring yours truly, at least in part), I thought I’d do my own for once. There may be some cross-over — most of the stuff I’ve been paying attention to this week has been BBC-related.
BBC Genome, Archives, Infax
The BBC has announced Genome, a project to scan, OCR and give structure to the entire catalogue of Radio...
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Line-by-line: HTML5, open standards, and the BBC
Let’s do this properly, shall we? This is an inline (as popularised by That E-mail) response to Erik Huggers’ piece on the BBC Internet blog.
Recent commentary on this blog has suggested that our use of Flash on BBC iPlayer and across BBC Online in general, betrays our commitment to open standards. Is this a reasonable assumption? I do not think so.
Okay, starting at the beginning. Erik...
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How... quaint
One of the bits of feedback I’ve had on TVDNS is that a certain very large British corporation involved in broadcasting might prefer to do things a different way: that is, embed a descriptor in the DVB Service Description Table (SDT) pointing at Internet-delivered resources, rather than jumping through the TVDNS hoops.
(This was, as it goes, my original idea, but I figured that something...
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HTML5 video: an update
I received a nice e-mail from Adam Wilcox in response to my post last night on Erik Huggers and open standards.
In it, he mentions a conversation he’d previously had with Alan Rusbridger on the subject of the video element. Alan said, at that time:
There are, also, other complex factors that we must consider concerning how we integrate essential business functions, such as video...
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Erik Huggers and HTML5
This week, following on from his piece on BBC Online’s restructuring, Erik Huggers published another post on open standards in general HTML5 in particular.
As with his BBC Online post, this induced a certain amount of head-scratching. Reading Erik’s posts and subsequently spending several minutes attempting to determine what exactly it is that he’s driving at appears to be a theme of...
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World Service TV
The BBC World Service is, for want of a better term, quite special. Unlike much of the rest of the BBC, it’s funded by a direct Foreign Office grant. It’s a lifeline for many, especially those in what we somewhat patronisingly term “developing nations”. This week’s Economist carries a piece arguing strongly in favour of the World Service.
I’ve been mulling over an idea — for...
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Getting picky (with it)
Statements from people who work for the BBC, both on the record — representing the corporation — and otherwise, often cheerfully gloss over quite important differences between things in this whole iPlayer DRM debacle. Chiefly, the differences between “download” and “streaming” and between “availability” and “retention”.
My position is this: I think iPlayer should work within the same framework...
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A recent Freedom of Information response from the...
(You can also view the original PDF version if you prefer. My thanks to the BBC for providing this response!)
Dear Mo
Freedom of Information Act 2000 – reference number 20100952
Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act (‘the Act’) of 13 July 2010,
seeking:
Is it, or is it not, the case that the primary reason for the BBC not providing streams to
Android devices as...
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BBC Online
Yesterday, Erik Huggers (Director of BBC Future Media & Technology, or “FM&T”) published a blog post outlining his vision for BBC Online, with references to the “Putting Quality First” BBC strategy outlined earlier on in the year.
This has sparked a little bit of conversation about why some people (myself included) think the approach is wrong. Or at least, represented badly in...
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Semantic Web... Applications
Or, “Don’t cross the streams!”
So, I’ve come up with a thing.
WHATWG has been specifying for some time a means for web applications to advertise custom URI scheme and content handlers, via JavaScript. Essentially, an application specifies an activation URL with a placeholder which is replaced by the URL of the document (or the custom-schemed URI) being launched. So, if your placeholder...
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Semweb, Atom [et al] gurus: help?
I have a list of things. These things are contained within an Atom feed. They collectively represent a subset of the state of a particular other thing (for example, over a specific period of time).
Or, more specifically: I have a list of programmes airing on a TV channel on a particular day, represented as an Atom feed. The actual time period isn’t especially important, and there could...
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Neutral zone
Some assorted thoughts. Purely off the top of my head. My logic’s probably flawed in places.
Prioritising traffic in order to make the services you’re selling work properly is fair game, as far as I’m concerned. For example, an operator providing VoIP alongside their Internet access as a package might prioritise the VoIP traffic. I don’t have a problem with this.
Where...
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The world's most exciting IPv6 deployment...
If you’re in the UK Internet industry in some fashion or another and have five minutes to spare in the next few days, I’d appreciate it if you could fill in my very short survey on IPv6 deployment.
I’ll close the survey on the 3rd September and publish the results that weekend (I picked UKNOF17 as a target date for this, but only because it seemed apt; I don’t know...
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Remember that open letter I wrote, regarding the...
Pete Wishart MP has got back to me about it, and has asked — for his records — for “the e-mail address of a few of the key signatories”. He has said he’s happy to send me his reply for me to publish here, though.
So, if you signed it, and don’t mind him knowing what your e-mail address is, could you drop me an e-mail with the subject DEBill Letter to mo (at)...
“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and...”
– Judge Vaughn Walker Hands Victory to Proposition 8 Opponents (via marco) 