The Scottish Executive has just announced that it will help to fund a new Scottish Gaelic Digital TV station. It is estimated that the channel currently being developed by the Gaelic Media Service (GMS) will cost between £16m and £17m. GMS is working in partnership with the BBC to develop the Gaelic digital channel.

GMS will use the funding to commission a range of programmes to be broadcast when the new channel is launched later this year.

It will also receive an additional £100,000 to purchase the Scottish Media Group (SMG) Gaelic archive which it has built up over a number of years. Patricia Ferguson, the Culture Minister said: “This funding demonstrates that we are serious about promoting the use of Gaelic in Scotland.”

“It also recognises our commitment to Gaelic broadcasting and reflects the importance of the language to our history and culture. “Gaelic digital television should have a significant impact on the status and use of language, boosting the confidence of Gaelic native speakers and learners.”

“It will also build artistic and technical skills and extend economic opportunities.”

The minister said GMS and the BBC had made “significant progress” towards delivery of a dedicated Gaelic television service which would complement existing radio and online services already provided by the BBC.

From BBC News

More information on Gaelic Media Services can be found at their website.

BBC Audio and Music Interactive released a public version of their audio annotator yesterday, entitled ‘Find Listen Label’. The annotator is browser-based and is being launched in collaboration with Radio 4’s “All in the Mind” (listen to episodes of this programme in our archive here).

The annotator works by allowing users registered on the BBC website to attach notes to parts of an audio ’stream’, and displays those notes in a time-based and synchronised manner along with the media itself, much like our own Project Pad media tools suite. Tristan Ferne has more information on his blog about Find Listen Label, or you can try it yourself.

Coverage from the BBC Backstage blog:

[Backstage Blog] Find Listen Label:

Audio and Music have just launched their Annotatable Audio project. Tristan Ferne has the scoop.

We’ve just launched Find Listen Label, previously known as Annotatable Audio. It’s a tool for BBC Radio listeners to segment and annotate radio programmes on the web - wiki style - creating better navigation within the programme by providing segments or chapters and enhancing the findability of the programme by annotating it with descriptions and tags about the content. We’ve launched this prototype with Radio 4’s “All In The Mind” as a partner programme and it will be up for around 4 weeks before we evaluate how well it has worked.

Have a play…

It will start to become really powerful when/if we launch it across many of our programmes and start to use the generated data in other products and sites, and we have plans to open the data up to backstage.

So what things could you build or do with the data from this project. Answers in the Prototype or Ideas section.

(Via Backstage.bbc.co.uk).

On 13th March 2007 David and Iain of the Spoken Word joined David Jordan from the BBC’s ‘Future Media and Technology’ department at the JISC Conference 2007 in Birmingham.

The JISC conference provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Spoken Word’s work alongside the other projects involved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme including DialogPlus (University of Southampton and Penn State University), DART (London School of Economics) and DIDET (University of Strathclyde and Stanford University).

All those inviolved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme shared a stand, answered questions and handed out leaflets to others present at the conference.

The conference also provided the backdrop for a 15 minute JISC funded film promoting the work of the digital libraries in the classroom programmes that includes David and Iain of Spoken Word, Alan Hutton, Douglas Chalmers, various Caledonian University students and the Saltire Centre…by popular demand the film will appear on the Spoken Word site shortly!

The conference was also useful for meeting with people that the project had previously collaborated with. Notably David met with Chris Awre from the University of Hull who, like ourselves, is currently part of the Fedora users group. Recently we have started a new collaboration with the University of Hull in the form of the JISC REMAP project.

However the most notable meeting took place with Tom Loosemore who is project director of BBC 2.0 at JISC. He has played a key role in the BBC’s New Media strategy over the past few years and so the meeting was of great interest. The meeting took place after Tom had presented to the conference about the 15 web development principles that the BBC are currently using as a structure to develop their web services and reach out to even more users. A brief outline of his presentation can be found by clicking here. In the coming months we hope to visit the BBC to talk to staff in the Future Media and Technology department and carry out a presentation about the work of the Spoken Word project.

Photo Courtesy of: ClickCLickElectric

The BBC wants other UK broadcasters to work with it to create a new online TV-show portal. The company’s proposals are being described as an attempt to create an alternative to iTunes video downloads in a Financial Times report.

According to the Financial Times, John Smith, chief executive of BBC Worldwide, said the BBC’s online service (which uses iPlayer software and doesn’t yet support Macs) could be a virtual Freeview.

The report explains: “iPlayer could be like Freeview in creating a new digital platform for broadcasters, giving them a chance to control their own destiny, but like Sky in its opportunities for monetisation.”

Read more information here.

More interesting developments from BBC Future Media and Technology …..
BBC Press Release 2nd March 2007

YouTube content to include two BBC-branded entertainment channels showing short-form videos

Dedicated channel for BBC News clips also to be featured on YouTube

The BBC, BBC Worldwide and YouTube today announced the beginning of a partnership to offer Internet users across the world new and innovative ways to experience and enjoy BBC content through YouTube.

This non-exclusive partnership will create branded BBC “Channels” on YouTube operating under separate BBC and BBC Worldwide agreements.

The partnership reflects YouTube’s commitment to work with content owners to make compelling video accessible online, and the BBC’s commitment to increase reach through the partnership, to bring new audiences to the proposed BBC iPlayer service, and to secure commercial revenue via BBC Worldwide, its commercial subsidiary, to supplement the licence fee.

The partnership, which will build over time, comprises three elements:

From the BBC: Clips of new shows and specially commissioned promotional content linked to popular series suchas Doctor Who and Life On Mars. At launch, the YouTube community will be able to enjoy a range of specially- created video diaries including David Tennant and Freema Agyeman, who’ll take viewers around the set of Doctor Who; John Simm going back in time for Life On Mars; and Clive Myrie on the streets of the red zone of Baghdad

From BBC Worldwide: An entertainment channel called “BBC Worldwide” showing clips from material such as Top Gear, Spooks, The Catherine Tate Show, The Mighty Boosh and a range of factual programmes including those presented by David Attenborough. The channel will include a limited amount of advertising.

From BBC World, the BBC’s international commercial television channel: Around 30 news clips per day will be offered, with up-to-the-minute news and analysis from around the world. The advertising-funded clips will be available to users outside the UK only.

Users will be able to comment on clips, rate them, recommend them to friends and post their own video responses to communicate with the BBC and other viewers.

Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, said: “This ground-breaking partnership between the BBC and YouTube is fantastic news for our audiences. YouTube is a key gateway through which to engage new audiences in the UK and abroad.

“The partnership provides both a creative outlet for a range of short-form content from BBC programme makers and the opportunity to learn about new forms of audience behaviour.

“It’s essential that the BBC embraces new ways of reaching wider audiences with non-exclusive partnerships such as these.”

Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of Google, said: “We’re delighted to be joining forces with the BBC to bring the best TV programming available to the YouTube community.

“We will continue to invest in our platforms and technologies to help our partners make the most of the enormous opportunities presented by the billion people now online.”

Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube, said: “We’re constantly looking for innovative ways to bring the best content to our community.

“The BBC is a premier source for quality programming, and we’re excited that they are leading the way in enabling two-way dialogue and real engagement with an entirely new audience. We hope to open up an entirely new audience for their content, while deepening their relationship with their existing viewers.”

Benefits

The non-exclusive partnership reflects the BBC’s commitment to reach audiences in new ways.

The aim is to offer audiences a taste of BBC programming with clips which will (subject to the conclusion of the ongoing PVT process) link them to the BBC’s proposed iPlayer service on bbc.co.uk.

For BBC Worldwide the partnership forms part of a strategy to bring great British content to new audiences around the world through its global TV channels and its proposed new digital businesses - the commercial iPlayer and the commercialisation of international traffic to bbc.co.uk. Increasing levels of funds will be returned to the BBC for investment in new programming.

Clips on BBC News (available to users outside the UK only) and “BBC Worldwide” will benefit from Google and YouTube’s advertising platforms, generating new revenues for investment in BBC programme development and creation. Advertising will be governed by a comprehensive set of guidelines.

Full BBC Press Release

This link is straight from the pages of Ofcom. It highlights an assessment of the market impact of the BBC’s proposals for an on demand service.  Many of the BBC’s commercial rivals are weary of the corporation’s plans and are lobbying for Ofcom to take on the role of regulating BBC activity. The link can be found by clicking here.

The BBC trust has given initial approval to the BBC to proceed with it’s plans for an ‘on demand’ service that allows viewers to watch programmes online or download and keep them on their computer for up to thirty days after they were first broadcast. This story can be found on the BBC website by clicking here.

Zudeo, the video store from the makers of BitTorrent client Azureus, has just announced a deal to distribute select programming from the BBC. The BBC/Zudeo deal will only be available for American users. This move does not appear to be directly related to the BBC iPlayer project currently ongoing inside the UK, to provide a licensed public IPTV service.
More from Ben Metcalfe’s blog

This press release is of great interest to us. Note the iPlayer etc and the positions of Adam Lee and Julie Rowbotham:
“The BBC Programme Catalogue experiment is overseen by Loosemore with Julie Rowbotham and Adam Lee.” But the competion may be of direct interest to us?

BBC - Press Office - BBC’s Director of New Media & Technology defines vision for the future: “BBC New Media & Technology today announces a competition to re-design and re-imagine the bbc.co.uk home page in the Web 2.0 world.

The competition (open.bbc.co.uk/reboot) asks individuals not only to re-design the homepage, but also to take it back to the drawing board so that it exploits the functionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia.”

(Via .)

An interesting development delivered by a commercial company leveraging the JANET network to deliver TV directly to campus PCs. The bandwidth usage is limited by the fact that JANET supports IP multicasting - so only one external connection is made per stream. If a university doesn’t already have TV wiring in rooms, this sort of thing is probably a lot more economical than installing the wiring, since it leverages existing infrastructure.

If you are a student on the campuses in Leeds or Liverpool then you should be able to receive the new TV over broadband service from Freewire. The service delivers a variety of channels including the standard five channels, plus E4, CBeebies, Film4 and others. Currently the service only streams onto a PC and uses a 2.5Mbps MPEG4 mulit-cast stream

The student service uses the Janet network to distribute the multi-cast signal down to Ethernet sockets in student accomodation. The eventual aim of the service is to sign deals with other service providers, in particular unbundled providers. Once the BT 21CN roll-out is complete and an IP network available to exchanges around the UK, it may become more economic to provide a multi-cast video stream to large numbers of people in the UK.

Freewire also seems to have plans to roll-out its own broadband service, which if launched as detailed looks almost too good to be true, a rate adaptive up to 8Mbps ADSL service for £19.99 with unlimited usage.

(Via ADSLguide.org.uk)