Round up: Friday 25 June 2010
Post categories: round up
| 11:30 UK time, Friday, 25 June 2010
Today's news is that the BBC Trust have given conditional approval to the BBC's involvement in Project Canvas. Conditions include the publication of the "completed elements of the Canvas core technical specification ....within 20 working days from this final approval", and "the final core technical specification will be published no later than eight months before launch of the first set-top boxes". Read the full set of conditions here.
The people who deal with FOI requests at the Beeb are being kept busy by Intenet blog regular Paul Jakma. On his blog Paul has published More BBC iPlayer Encryption FOI Materials which includes two interesting papers: "Pan-BBC Approach to Combating Piracy" and "Public/Press reaction to introduction of SWF Verification on iPlayer - Briefing Paper". Both PDFs are available on Paul's blog.
Briantist, aka Brian Butterworth (or should that be Brian Butterworth aka Briantist?), has put together the excellent little icon iPlayer image featured at the top of this round up.
On the Backstage list he wrote:
"I read https://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/16/stephen-fry-doctor-whoSo, I found a folder with 15,871 very small caches of the pictures used for each of the iPlayer programmes. Well, they were when I removed 90,000 duplicates. I've made 5,000 of the programme images into a single relevant image.
https://bnb.bpweb.net/iplayerimages/
Zoom in."
Some interesting things you might have missed in our delicious feed (You can also follow the BBC on Blogs delicious feed on Twitter):
As always there's some good stuff on the R&D blog including Prototyping George Wright's Weeknotes and The Value of Everyting: a meeting where the British Library, the BFI and BBC's R&D "came together to work out, jointly, the future for preserving and accessing file-based BBC content."
What HiFi? reported BBC confirms use of variable bit-rate encoding on HD channel saying:
"What does this mean? Well basically, it's a process which maintains a similar average bit-rate despite being able to allocate more bandwidth for more demanding scenes - such as fast-action sports like football - when required."
Wednesday's World Cup game between England and Slovenia racked up a record number of views for the online stream and there's some good analysis of the numbers from the always excellent James Cridland on his blog. It's also worth looking at Paidcontent's Five Percent Of English Soccer Viewers Watched Match Online.
The Archive team have put up a World Cup collection, starting with interviews with the 1966 World Cup winning squad but over the next couple of weeks they'll be adding to it.
Finally but most importantly Backstage's Ian Forrester is back and getting better. He's written a couple of very eloquent posts (Thank you part 1 and Thank you part 2) on Cubicgarden.com that had the Internet blog quite tearful. Brilliant news.
Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog.
Comment number 1.
At 08:16 26th Jun 2010, Paul Jakma wrote:There's another, earlier FOI response too on iPlayer. Unfortunately, I still havn't received information on the main theme of my requests: which organisations are constraining the BBC, as the BBC claims, and how? I still think there is a significant public interest in the public being able to independently assess the arguments the BBC has made for its control-grab of TV devices (in so far as iPlayer players are TV devices - one day not too far off they surely will be universally considered that). Also, it would be nice if the BBC would conclude that it was in its interest to find a form of content protection that still allowed for Free Software players.
Very curiously awaiting the promised BBC blog post on content protection.
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