Categories
Radio & Music Technology Television

Weinberger on the BBC / Are presentations redundant?

So this is nice – via my boss I’m directed to a brief piece by David Weinberger on some of the work going on around the BBC at the moment and featuring some of the stuff we’ve been doing in BBC Radio and Music Interactive:

“My goodness but the BBC is up to lots of interesting things! I don’t even know where to start. Every episode of every program is getting its own URL and will be intensely metadated. An experiment lets you phone in to bookmark songs you hear on the radio. They’re putting RSS all over the place. They’re handing out video cameras to people who can’t afford them and posting the results. The BBC is showing us what mainstream media might be like if its mandate were simply to make our lives better.”

I’ve written quite a lot around the edges of the work we’ve done on making a page and identifier for every episode of every programme – New Radio 3 Site Launches, Developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites, In which my mind starts to settle after ETech 2005 and The Age of Point-at-Things are all good places to start if you’re interested in that stuff. My personal opinion is that it’s pretty integral to the future media landscape and that although it doesn’t seem like a terribly interesting project, the stuff that falls out from having it implemented is absolutely enormous.

The project to do with tagging and bookmarking songs you hear on the radio came directly out of the R&D team that Matt Webb and I ran until he ponced off and abandoned me (working with the irrepressible Gavin Bell who I also worked with on the PIPs stuff above). We learned a hell of a lot of interesting things during that piece of work about some of the potential uses for fauxonomic tagging which I fully intend to drag out into the open as quickly as possible. On the subject of tagging, there’s a new weblog on the subject featuring Peter Merholz and David Weinberger which looks like it could be interesting.

At the moment the best representations on the web of the work that we’ve been doing in both of these areas are the two papers that we delivered at ETech: Reinventing Radio: Supplemented One-to-Many with Many-to-Many and On Programme Information Pages. Which brings me to another thing that’s slowly started to dawn on me – when I do a paper at a conference I expect the industry repercussions and the interest in the work we are doing to escalate enormously. But what I’ve recently begun to notice is that the stuff that captures people’s attention isn’t at the conferences at all – it’s the weblog posts that create linkable pages that people can talk and converse around that get people interested. Without something written in the medium of the industry, the work might as well not have happened at all. With this in mind, expect to see transcribed versions of the various papers appearing online either in a complete form or broken up into more digestible chunks over the next few days/weeks. It’s all in the public domain now anyway so I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t talk about it.

Categories
Social Software Technology Television

Social Software for Set-Top boxes…

You can download the core part of the material that follows as a PDF presentation entitled Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).

A buddy-list for television:
Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your screen with the merest tap of a ‘friends’ key on your remote control. The buddy list would be the first stage of an interface that would let you add and remove friends, and see what your friends are watching in real-time – whether they be watching live television or something stored on their PVRs. Adding friends would be simple – you could enter letters on screen using your remote, or browse your existing friends’ contact lists.

Being able to see what your friends were watching on television would remind you of programmes that you also wanted to see, it would help you spot programmes that your social circle thought were interesting and it could start to give you a shared social context for conversations about the media that you and your friends had both enjoyed.

Obviously there might be some programmes that you might wish to view with a significant other, but wouldn’t necessarily want to advertise to the rest of the world that you were watching. For this reason your personalised settings would have to have all kinds of options to help you control how you were being represented to the wider world that were as simple to use and unobtrusive as possible. Primary among the tools at your disposal would be your ability to tell your set-top box not to advertise that you were watching any shows marked as for adults only and to mark certain channels as similarly private. These settings would obviously be on by default.

Presence alerts:
One of the core functions of a socially enabled set-top box would be to create the impression of watching television alongside your peer group and friends – even if you were geographically distant from one another. One key way to do this would be to create a sensation of simultaneity – to remind you that there are other people in your social circle doing things at the same time as you. This would allow you to create a mental impression of what your friends were doing.

Here are two versions of an alert that could fade up gently onto the screen when someone on your buddy list changes channel. These alerts would work in two ways – if the person was changing channel and landed on a station as a programme was just about to begin or within the first three or four minutes of a programme, then the alert would be immediate. This would give you the opportunity to change over to that channel as well without missing too much of the show. If – however – they were changing over to a channel in the middle of a show or they changed the channel again within ten seconds, then the alert would not be sent. They would have to have been watching the new channel for a few minutes before an alert would be sent. There would be nothing more intrusive and irritating than watching someone compulsively flick between channels at a distance (except perhaps being in the room with them as they did so).

The most important part of all these alerts is that they provide you with the option to join the person concerned in whichever programme they happen to now be watching…

Watch with your friends:
Now we have the concept of joining a friend to watch a show, we have to ask what should that experience be like? How should your parallel engagement manifest itself. Traditionally, net-mediated social spaces have tended towards text as a communicative medium. But this would seem like an enormously clumsy way to interact during a television programme.

Television is an audio-visual medium and there’s no reason why your engagement with your friends shouldn’t also be audio-visual. For this reason a simple high quality webcam above the television would help you see how your friends were responding to what was on screen – it would help you feel an experience of shared engagement without there being a need for overt discussion. By default your conversations with your friends would be muted, and you could – of course – minimise their images if they started to get annoying, but if you wanted to shout and scream alongside your friends, then you’d simply turn the sound back on. This would be the perfect form of engagement around certain sporting events, or for making a well-known television programme or film just the backgrounded context for a shared conversation.

In the mock-up below, you can see the cameras of three of your friends on the right. One person has wandered away from their TV…

Chatting and planning:
If your friends were in the room with you during an ad break, you might chat about the programme you’ve just been watching or bitch about the adverts in front of you. You might turn the sound down low for a few seconds and talk about something else completely. There are lots of contexts where the programme on television might not be the main focus of activity around the television. These might be times when it’s still important to have a sense of what’s happening on the screen, but where the social activity has been dragged to the foreground.

Set-top box social software would have to support such engagements. So how about a second view when you’re in one of these social situations? From having the programme in the foreground, one simple switch of the button could drag your friends into the limelight. The programme could be fully or partially muted, and your friends automatically unmuted. Then you could chat to each other about the programme you’d just watched, or wait for the adverts to end together. You could even use these opportunities to plan what to watch next. If this was handled in a similar way to group formation and parties in online gaming structures like Halo 2, then perhaps one person could even set up the next programme and stream it to everyone else, or cue forward to show their friends the best part of a particular dance sequence or the key quote from a political interview.

Choosing channels and playing games:
Having this technology in place under your television could create a tremendous platform for all kinds of other applications or games to be layered on top of your television experience. And these could be equally usable with people in the same room as yourself. If you gave everyone a personalised remote control (or installed universal remote control software in something like a mobile phone) then people could propose changing channels but be over-ruled by other people in the room. The wonderful browsing experience of flicking through music video channels could be turned into a game, with each song being rated on the fly by everyone present or telepresent and records kept of channels and songs that people tended to enjoy. The same controls could be hooked up to other forms of interactive television or to net-enabled functionality on the boxes themselves…

Sharing a social library:
And finally, to return to the idea of media discovery and regenerating a social context around television programming, how about if the shows that many of your friends had decided in advance to record were automatically recorded by your device too. How would it be if you never missed the show that everyone was talking about? And if you had – your box could ask its peers for some kind of swarmed download if anyone still had a copy and it could appear in your local library overnight.

All this of course, is just the very beginning of the kinds of things that you could create with a socially-enabled TV set-top box. It’s all basically just extensions of stuff that we’re already doing in other media. There are still technological barriers of course – bandwidth and synchronisation being core problems. But we’re gradually on the way to solving them.

To repeat – If you’d like to download this piece as a simple to read and print PDF presentation then you can do so here: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).

Addendum:
Here are a few related links that people have brought to my attention since posting this stuff up or since I finished work on the presentation and illustrations. I’m a little cross with myself for not posting this stuff up before, but hey…

Categories
Television

Celebrity, historical, fictional Big Brother…

So after due consideration over lunch at Benugo the other day, here is our fully worked-through and comprehensive list of our ideal celebrity / historical / fictional Big Brother:

I’m particularly keen on the idea of having HAL 9000 – a disembodied omnipresent computer intelligence – in the Big Brother house. Ho hum.

Categories
Technology Television

A really rough proposal for an Apple Media Hub (Illustrations)

This part is mostly about: Illustrations of what an Apple Media Hub might look like and how it might function. If you have not done so already, you should first go and read Part One and Part Two which do not contain pictures anywhere near as pretty and are harder work to read.

What follows are illustrations of my basic concept here – a brushed metal, almost featureless box that sits underneath a television acting as wifi hub bringing internet access and local area network functionality into the home – and providing as a basic first feature set (1) the assisted capture of video from the TV or from CDs, (2) the watching of DVDs and (3) the remote-controlled play of media across multiple devices through local hubs. You can download the full diagram from here: Full Apple Media Hub Montage, or you can just peer menacingly at the details below:

Categories
Technology Television

A really rough proposal for an Apple Media Hub (Part Two)

This part is mostly about: How to get a device into people’s homes that opens up these markets and these possibilities and lets people do more stuff with their stuff. If you have not done so already, you should first go and read Part One.

So from now on, I’m going to talk a lot about what I think specifically Apple should do because I think they’re the best placed in the world to do this stuff right now. Their brand isn’t as geeky as Microsoft – and they’re have already demonstrated that people will buy entertainment technology from them (the iPod) even though they’ve traditionally been better known for their computers. Companies like Tivo – at least at the moment – are too narrowly focused on one form of digital media to really be able to mount that much of a challenge in this area (and I think they’re probably more than aware of that by the way that they’ve started to work more with Microsoft. Sony would also be a good condender in this area if they weren’t busy trying to develop new types of smart guns with which they can shoot themselves in the foot with startling new levels of efficiency.

One of the big questions that we’re going to come up against in thinking through the home media hub will be how do we get people to buy the devices we’re talking about. Not all new technologies gel with consumers immediately. One technique for getting new tech into people’s homes is to combine or hybridise it with existing equipment. Many people had their first DVD player as a pleasant side-effect of buying a Playstation or Xbox. The Xbox also allowed people to rip songs to its internal hard disk – functionality that I doubt many people would have gone out and directly bought at that stage. And Playstations with built-in PVRs have been mooted for a while now. Hybridisation seems to be an almost natural process when it comes to the handling of media – potentially because the web-like models and increasing mobility and granularity of media objects that we’re moving toward is turning out to be similar for video, web pages, songs, photographs… So hybridisation is likely to be an answer – but hybridisation with what?

So the obvious bits of existing technology that our future home media hub will need to be able to hook into with are:

  • The internet – for the purchasing of on-demand video and music, and to have a return path for data
  • TV – for video playback and rich visual interfaces for stuff
  • Audio equipment / Stereos etc – for the playing of downloaded or ripped music
  • Home computers etc, that may wish to manipulate or handle media artifactrs in some richer way

What hardware / functionality does this imply?

  • Obviously the first piece of implied functionality that any hub has is a large amount of digital storage and some way of navigating around the material stored upon it.
  • If we want this device to have mass appeal then it has to be something that you could sell – or rent as part of a service package – to people who don’t yet have internet access (or don’t even have a computer). One clear way to do this would be to disaggregate internet access from the computer, and instead place some form of cable or ADSL modem within the media hub itself. This would seem to me to be the most reasonable approach.
  • In order to distribute that internet access to other devices, the simplest solution would seem to be to fit the device with a wifi hub. This immediately creates the potential for a local area network of connected devices streaming and connected to one another without the complexities of setting up dedicated routers. In principle then small Airport-Express style local hubs could be distributed next to other devices in the home that do not yet have home local area network functionality built into them. This could also distribute the internet access throughout a home in the most effective way.
  • If there are going to be any cabled connections then it would make sense to have them be between the device and the equipment with which it is likely to communicate the most possible data. This may very well be a local computer or laptop for some people, but for most – with video files being so enormous, it makes most sense for the device to be attached to the home television.
  • And in order to be a useful device for storing or playing digital music, then – if again we assume that we’re marketing to people who may not have a computer already – then we have to consider putting some kind of CD-playing or ripping functionality into the device itself.
  • This has another advantage, because if we’re considering putting in a CD slot, then there seems little reason why the same slot should not be usable for DVDs. This would then immediately increase the value of the device for people – particularly given that we’re already assuming that it’s going to be connected to the television in some way.
  • And given that we’re talking about handling large files and connecting to a television – PVR functionality seems like a natural fit.

So far then, we have a box (and not yet a desperately inexpensive one) that should be connected to a television, has a large hard-disk within it that can contain video and audio and has a slot for inserting DVDs or CDs. This is essentially then, a cut-down monitor-less iMac – for those of you who have been paying attention. Clearly you’d want to to create non-OSX-style interfaces since people are likely to want to use the device via a remote control of some kind, but if such a device has been mooted for around $500 (by Mac rumour-mongers), then it’s not inconceivable that you could bring something to market that people would be interested in buying.

In fact, if you look at devices that are already on the market, there are some that are not a million miles away from this model already. Two particular devices are already available that attach to a computer, have large hard disks, have some wired connections via the telephone or ADSL – and one of them already allows the ripping of music. On the one hand we have the dedicated PVR and on the other the dedicated gaming platform.

In order then to get this new device into people’s homes you could either:

  1. Further develop the entertainment features of gaming consoles, making them into full media hubs for the home.
  2. Further develop the connectivity and cross-media functionality of the PVR to a similar effect.

Marketing our partially mooted speculative device as an extension of a gaming console has some clear advantages – there’s already a decent amount of money to be made from gaming, the people who use them are keen consumers of new technology and much of the functionality is already in place. If I were Microsoft of Sony I would be moving in these directions. But I think I’d also be looking for a model that would appeal to a wider market than gamers. For many the gaming elements of a hybrid device could be a turn-off.

PVRs are similarly strong in some areas, but they haven’t yet set the world on fire. The consensus opinion appears to be that the main problem is that it is hard to articulate to people what a PVR does. Once people have bought one, they generally find them a delight to use. In which case a company like Apple that has little chance of being able to bring a successful gaming console to market is still in with a chance. It’s not necessarily terribly hard to evolve the concept of the PVR into a cross-media device, for watching and recording TV, watching DVDs and streaming music around a home. And once you’ve turned it into a media manager, then all Apple would have to do is make reference to their other successful piece of navigational technology:

DVD Player, iTunes at Home, PVR – it’s the iPod for everything else

At this point you should have a bit of a sense of the direction I’d be going with this stuff, so I’ll move on to putting up some illustrations of the concept and trying to articulate precisely how I think it should work…

Categories
Technology Television

A really rough proposal for an Apple Media Hub (Part One)

This part is mostly about: The drive towards digital media in the home, and changes in the media creation and distribution ecology:

So I’m going to write this quickly because it’s been stuck in my head for months, and even when I’ve dedicated large chunks of my weekend to trying to get it down, it hasn’t gone terribly well. So my assumption is – find a place to start. Run at it like a mad thing. Don’t worry too much if it’s really dense or confusing, or childishly stupid in places or really badly written or wanders off the mark. Just get it out in the open with all the pretty pictures and stuff you’ve been thinking about before you go insane.

The starting point is an assumption. It’s that we’re looking for better connection between our entertainment devices and our computers, and that we’re increasingly looking towards fully digitally-distributed entertainment media in all parts of our lives. Fundamentally I’m looking at what kind of future home-entertainment-based, digital media playing and manipulating Digital Hub should we be aspiring towards?

The other assumption is that there are companies out there who are interested in working in this space. I think this is demonstrable by looking at the people already in the environment – companies like Sky, Tivo, Apple, Microsoft etc. Again – not a huge assumption to be making.

One of the reasons that companies are interested in this space is because we’re finally reaching the point where home entertainment electronics are converging with computer technologies and the internet. A whole generation of web users are circumventing traditional media distribution channels to get hold of their television programming, films and music. The people who make these things are now looking to go back on the initiative and bring greater functionality – functionality under their control – back to the people.

In the meantime, the companies that make technology and software have clearly realised that there’s money to be made in meeting these needs and so are developing technologies at a fair rate of knots. One way to think about this is to think about the number of desktop and laptop computers in the world and then to think about the number of televisions, VCRs and standalone DVD players in the world. Now imagine that you’ve cornered the market for the operating systems for all these devices. For Microsoft – that’s got to be an insanely attractive proposition. You add to that some attempts to help mediate between content producers and people who watch and view content – DRM, for example – and you start to look indispensible to the ecology. And that’s kind of a license to print money – particularly if (like Apple) you’re also trying to make your service the definitive place to buy the media products themselves…

You could take this still further. Traditional broadcasters have had it pretty easy. They had regulated but basically pretty neutral carriers that they paid cash money to. Then they got to broadcast a set of TV and radio programmes when made most sense to them, and marketed against the relatively limited number of other networks who constituted their competitors. The explosion of TV stations made that situation a bit more tenuous, but that’s nothing compared to the enormous changes that are coming up. Given that there’s value in the long tail, and that programmes are increasingly time-shifted and watched at the audience’s convenience, we can predict with some increasing accuracy that we are approaching a time of addressable and permanently online programming, downloaded or streams or distributed on-demand.

Basically this is broadcast media becoming more like the web. And when you have a web-like ecology of programming out there, then you need mechanisms for finding programming. The mediators in this environment have tremendous power – they can build collaborative filtering mechanisms or page-rank mechanisms or whatever to move you from one type of media product to another. They can sell advertising on their services to direct you to one type of media rather than another. On the web these mediators are in competition with one another – search engine versus search engine, e-commerce venture versus e-commerce venture. But if these mediation mechanisms are built into the very hardware you’re using, then you essentially have some form of lock-in. This is why – in my opinion – it’s really really good for Sky that they control the EPGs on their platform and the PVR functionality, but less good for the BBC.

In a nutshell, early adopter consumers are working around the current short-falls in entertainment technology, and that suggests that there’s a market for new and better media-handling devices. And there’s a hell of a lot of money and power to be made in this environment too – both in terms of directly making cash from licensing software and selling appliances, but also in terms of controlling and influencing the interface between consumers and the media they might want to consume.

Now read Part Two: How to get a device into people’s homes that opens up these markets and these possibilities and lets people do more stuff with their stuff.

Categories
Journalism Television

I have no opinion about this whatsoever…

I have no opinion about this whatsoever. Here are just four links in a row, presented in a reverse-chronological (most recent first) fashion with no attempt whatsoever to make a point, which nonetheless are prefaced with a proviso that any position you may infer that I have is entirely mine and not that of my employer. And I don’t have one anyway:

That’s your lot. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Categories
Gay Politics Politics Television

On pets…

So Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was apparently – woo – a tremendous success in the States and everyone was so happy about it and stuff because – ha ha – funny gay men patronising the dumbass straight men – how funny is that!? But now – if the reports are to be believed – then there’s going to be a “Straight Eye for the Queer Guy” show coming out, designed to turn the tables back again with – ha ha – hilarious consequences. But some of my gay colleagues are protesting that turning the tables back again isn’t really acceptable behaviour… Their argument is that gay people already know enough about straight life – given that they’ve had to spend many years trying to fit into straight culture (while being taught that their lives will be immoral, diseased and short-lived) before erupting free from this stigma in a blaze of brightly-coloured taffeta and nicely-tapered trouser-bottoms. Their point is – I suppose – that one’s a tasteless misrepresentation, and the other isn’t.

I’m just having trouble figuring out which is which! Because as far as I can see, both of them share one thing in common – a flagrant and blatantly patronising image of gay people as cheery little inoffensive sexless chappies. Well bollocks to that. Bollocks to happy gay people on TV, bollocks to the straight audiences, bollocks to the producers, bollocks to the bloody cameramen, bollocks to any passing trannies. Bollocks, if you will, to absolutely bloody everyone. I’m going to say this once and once only – and I hope it doesn’t come as too much of a shock to anyone: It’s not just Straight Eye for the Queer guy that will be patronising shit that sells an image of gayness that is damaging and frustratingly bland. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was patronising shit as well.

I can’t really believe that was a shock to anyone, but just in case – I’m sorry for those of you who fell over and hit your head…

I suppose back in the late eighties, when the prevailing mood was that gay people were diseased perverts that would lead short, shameful and disgusting lives, the idea that we might get portrayed as happy little child-puppets might have been quite appealing. But that time has passed and I think we’ve all had enough now of that newest of grotesque gay stereotypes archetypes – that of the girl’s-best-friend, sexless, happy, home-keeping, stylish queer. I might actually bloody vomit if I see it one more time on television and if I get my greasy hands on Kevin Kline let me reassure you that I’ll be giving him a piece of my oh-so-wise, well-tailored and witty gay mind.

It’s not because it’s an unpleasant image of homosexual individuals, and it’s not because there aren’t any gay men that are all smiley and pastel in the world (because there are, and they’re lovely). It’s just because I’m sick to death with being “understood” by people I meet as being a “good-natured, slightly-dim, fashion-obssessed hysterical best-friend-in-times-of-need” kind of guy on the basis of the representation of ‘my kind’ in a few shit films and TV shows. There are differences between gay people and straight people – don’t get me wrong. But there aren’t any scientists world-wide who truly understand what the hell they are, and this leads me to suspect that maybe it would be foolish to think that a twenty minute comedy show would have a better idea.

Now I’ve read my Foucault like the best of them, and I believe him to be right when he says that categorising something is a way of asserting power over it. Hence the creation (and medicalisation) of homosexuality a little over a hundred years ago. And I’m with him on the next step too – that the creation of the category also creates an identity around which the group can rebel, to try and recast itself. But it works the other way around too. We started off as godless, sex-obsessed, dirty monsters and we fought and we’ve rebelled. And now instead we’re god-loving, relationship-focused, kitchen-cleaning princes among men who like little dogs, Versace and television where ‘we’ get to patronise people. Our ‘positive’ image has already been reincorporated and recontextualised and reconsidered and represented. The tremendous variety of gay male experience – from the most delicate to the most brutal, from the most elegant to the most fierce, from the most diplomatic to the most battle-ready, even from the most tacky to the most trivially crass – all of it is reduced down to the image of gay men as fussy little children – who play at ‘houses’, play at ‘cooking’, play at ‘being men’, play at life.

Well I want out. And this is where I turn around to face my comrades who loved “Queer Eye” but are cross about its sequel. I say to you that it’s not enough that a programme on television should just be ostensibly ‘nice’ about gay people. It’s shouldn’t float our boats that some show finds it entertaining to see the happy poofs take the piss out of groups that used to kick our heads in either. If you want some honour in your programming, demand that it shows you a larger variety of truths. Most particularly, demand that it shows you the truth of identity as something negotiated, fought for, forged, lost and potentially rebuilt. Don’t let them tell you it’s something that you’re born with, something inevitable that you’ll grow into whatever aspirations you might have. Because identity is a negotiation between the world around you and what nature gave you, mediated by your mind, morals, attitudes and beliefs. It can’t be given to you like you’d give a pet a name…

Categories
Television

Third pilot of the week: Alias…

Third pilot of the week is Alias. When a young woman reveals to her fiancé that she works for the CIA, he is executed by a hit squad hired by her employers. How she deals with this, whether her employers are actually the CIA, and what she needs to stay alive and redeem the loss of her lover are the questions addressed in the first part of the series – which is essentially yet another Nikita rip-off with a couple of twists. That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining, because it is. That’s not to say it isn’t exciting, because it is. And that’s not to say it doesn’t have potential, because it does. But it’ll have to do something new pretty soon to maintain people’s interest.

Categories
Television

A most entertaining pile of crap…

My second pilot of the day is Thieves, which was frankly the most entertaining pile of crap I’ve seen in months. The plot is totally ridiculous – two crack thieves – one male and one female – are foiled during an attempted hoist. There is continual sexual tension between them and – apparently for this reason – the government keeps them on to recover stolen items for the government. Complete hokum and glorious fun. Hart to Hart meets Nikita with a dash of Moonlighting thrown in for good measure. The copy I saw was clearly mid-production – a variety of special effects shots hadn’t been added yet, and the music was directly lifted in from ‘relevant’ movies as a placeholder (particular treats including bits of music from Out of Sight, American Beauty and Snatch). The end of the episode was a bit mid-budget / Baywatch Nights abandoned warehouse-style final confrontation cliché-of-the-week, but generally, everyone was pretty cool, pretty good and pretty damn pretty.