LinuxJournal has an excellent article discussing why the BBC shouldn’t adopt Windows Media as their preffered methods of audio and video delivery.

The BBC has a long and glorious past as a technological innovator. Throughout the history of broadcasting, it has often been the first to develop and promote new technologies. Sadly, it seems now to be teetering on the brink of making technical choices that will not only damage its own reputation as a world-class institution, but which will also have serious knock-on consequences for free software.

The article then goes on to look at the background of the BBC’s streaming audio and video content. The article then goes on to discuss why they shouldn’t adopt Windows Media and indeed Windows Media DRM.

If it adopts only a Windows-based system, the BBC becomes beholden to Microsoft, and loses any possibility of independent action in the future, as the example of Korea shows only too painfully. Similarly, DRM is anything but open and transparent. And with rumours that even the music industry is recognising how counter-productive DRM is, now is precisely the moment to fight and beat DRM, not foist it on even more people.

There is even a e-petition for UK users to sign which urges the Prime Minister not to let the BBC trust implement a player which only Windows users can access and to open the streaming platform up to all users including Open Source. To Read the full article here.

Click.tv is offering a nifty Flash-based collaborative video annotation and tagging service, somewhat similar to our Northwestern University partners’ Project Pad web application. A seemingly unique feature of Click.tv among the widely-available web annotators is its capacity for multiple annotation tracks.

One early application has been to combine Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired’s Cult of Mac and others’ coverage of last week’s keynote address at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. So if you want to get your geek on and witness the first searchable, collaborative streaming index of the Reality Distortion Field in action, head on over to the Jobsnote on Macrumors/Click.tv.

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)

The BBC has entered a formal relationship with Microsoft, opening the door to future deals on the delivery of digital content. In some ways this is similar the Beeb’s broadband service, under which it has signed agreements with many UK ISPs to provide access to superior-quality streams of BBC content.

Yet this could go much further - the possibilities raised in the ZDnet article include content pushed to Xbox 360s and Windows Live Messenger.

Hopefully the promise of these facilities won’t be overshadowed by the BBC neglecting efforts to support relatively open methods of distribution, e.g. their multicast video trial (which uses the MPEG4/AVC a.k.a. H.264 video codec).

BBC Signs ‘Memo of Understanding’ With Microsoft:

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft has signed a memorandum of understanding with the BBC for ’strategic partnerships’ in the development of next-generation digital broadcasting techniques. They are also speaking to other companies such as Real and Linden Labs. Windows Media Centre platform, Windows Live Messenger application and the Xbox 360 console have all been suggested as potential gateways for BBC content. It is unclear how this impacts on existing BBC research projects such as Dirac, although it is understood that the BBC would face heavy criticism if its content was only available via Microsoft products.”

(Via Slashdot).

“Red5 is a server that not only streams content to the Flash plugin, but
it can push calls and information to the Flash client! It can also
receive video/audio/data from a flash client and either save or
rebroadcast that content.”

This is something that is really worth a look. It should be able to stream mp3 on-demand as we require but of course the client will still be relying on the flash plugin.