No Programme Left Behind: Liberating Television from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral Tom Loosemore Saturday 5th July 2008

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 .

My House, North London

Alexandra Palace

Someone just broke TV

Bang to rights, Sir Tim…

How is TV broken?

99.9999% of TV is not longer with us

And even the 0.00001% that is available… can’t be found can’t be shared can’t be linked to

“ Make All TV Ever Available, Findable & Addressable.” The Organising Problem:

Digital TV Digital Satellite DVB-S Digital Cable DVB-C Digital Terrestrial DVB-T (aka Freeview) Digital Mobile DVB-H Digital Radio Digital Audio Broadcast DAB Digital Radio Mondial DRM Internet Broadcast Live Unicast streaming Multicast streaming (bbc.co.uk/multicast) Digital Broadcasting in the UK

Freeview: The UK’s best TV, free.

Pros : Rich AV Content Accessible Well structured Extremely Scalable Very High Availability Proven Cons Documentation Licence Ephemeral How does Freeview stack up as an API?

DVB-T Broadcast Audio & Video API 2Mbs MPEG2 stream Widescreen Stereo View a single channel, or capture a multiplex Licence: Some programmes with CC licence DVB-T Broadcast Metadata API “Next 8 days” programme info Title, description, genre, channel, start time etc. UIDs & series linking not implemented. Licence: OK Freeview is really a pair of linked APIs

BBC Broadcast Metadata API http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/BbcWebApi

Damn. Ok, at least publish the catalogue. open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue

“ Make All TV Ever Available, Findable & Addressable.” OK. now back to that Organising Challenge:

My Danny O’Brien Moment

Dom & Nick Ludlam

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

Is a Record-everything PVR possible? Each Freeview channel is 2 Mbps MPEG2 Approx 2 GB per channel per hour 50 GB per channel per day 1 TB stores 4 channels for 7 days 3 TB stores nearly all good UK TV for 7 days But box would need 12 tuner cards… or would it?

OK, but…

“ Make All TV Ever Available, Findable & Addressable.” Once again, that Organising Problem:

“ 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 day 1 TB stores a channel for 3 months 24 TB stores all BBC TV for a year Much too large to sit in living room 20,000 programmes - too many for ‘grid’ EPG… …and so to the Web!

BBCRedux.com

BBCMacro.com: A year of BBC TV

Of course, it did the usual schedule stuff

But you could also search 20,000+ programmes

Download programme, Programme information,

Tags hacked via term extraction

Et voila: the collected works of Cruickshank

User Ratings; User Comments

People + Programmes = Social Scheduling

OK, but…

“ Make All TV Ever Available, Findable & Addressable.” Back, for the final time, to that Organising Problem:

Need. More. Storage.

What if… ?

Some maths. Real-time transcode MPEG2 to MPEG4 An hour-long programme is 500MB 120TB stores all decent UK TV for a year So we need 10TB/month storage

Some more maths. Assume each Impossibox had a 1TB disk Assume 100 bought each month That’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...

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 2008 BBC Two Sep – Nov 2008 Tracker server TV TV Metadata

How you watch any programme, ever BBC One Jun – Aug 2008 BBC Two May – Jul 2008 BBC Four Jan – Jun 2008 ITV1 Oct– Dec 2008 Channel Five Feb – Apr 2008 BBC Two Mar – May 2008 TV Metadata Tracker server Tracker Data

… has built a couple of prototypes

Impossibox Spec TV Metadata TV Platform (AMD 64) TV Out Remote Control Freeview Tuner 1 TB Local Storage OS (Debian) RSS in/out Torrent Creator Metadata db MythTV ++ Networked Storage Tracker Server

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?

Thank You Tom Loosemore [email_address]