Tuesday, August 17

The BBC's open media project

The BBC just published some interesting official news on their attempts to publish their entire content archive online.
Researchers at the BBC have been studying how to put the Corporation's archive online after chairman Michael Grade labelled it public property and said that it should, as far as possible, be made freely available.

There are formidable obstacles to placing the entire archive online, which amounts to a national memory bank involving copyright, repeat fees and partnership deals. But engineers now know what would be required to do so.
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The BBC is doing some other navel gazing as its Charter comes up for review, and radical ideas are being thrown about.

It is developing an open source video codec, called Dirac, to replace the Real Networks software currently used to stream video from the BBC site. This could challenge other commercial formats, including Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9.

BBC researchers are also grappling with other implications of the convergence of computing with consumer electronics, including the possibility that easy TV recording on cheap portable devices could see consumers start to view programmes in chunks, rather like reading a book.

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