BBC Opens TV Listings For Remix

ntoll writes "In a continuation of their free software friendly activities the BBC has announced that they want to open up their TV listings to creative developers. They explain, 'Developers and designers are being encouraged to come up with innovative ways of using TV and radio schedules by taking part in a BBC competition. The competition, announced at the Open Tech conference in London, has been organised by the BBC's backstage developer network. Backstage lets people remix the BBC's content to make new applications. We want people to innovate and come up with prototypes to demonstrate new ways of exploring the BBC's TV schedule.'"

Comments

TV Anytime eh?

[Komarosu]

All posted in TV Anytime format, even the BBC have wrote a little opensource Java API for it...

Now to hunt down a parser in PHP...

What a challenge!

[riflemann]

Mixing videos and music - ok, that's pretty normal and doesnt take a skilled person to come up with something..

But mixing a TV guide??? A lot more of a challenge.

I guess what they are after is for example something where someone can do better seraching through the guide, or perhaps linking the information within an application.

One such thing could be linking an article or other media where you can refer it to an upcoming show on tv. Eg, you're browsing some website about natural disasters, and have it automatically tell you about an upcoming TV show about floods.

That's about the extent of my creative juices though..

Brittania Rules

[Doc Ruby]

Imagine an American media company pursuing this project. That's not even science fiction, it's fantasy.

But what do I expect from my country, whose highest cultural aspirations are inevitably reruns in a British accent? All copyrighted, even patented, of course. While the British have a long enough cultural memory that they've been remixing Shakespeare for a half millennium.

Re:Brittania Rules

[Doc Ruby]

We also have "PBS", akin to the BBC - the home of "Sesame Street" (Kermit the Frog, Big Bird, etc). In fact, most BBC content rerun for American audiences was broadcast by PBS. That's where Monty Python's American audience comes from, as well as lesser lights like Masterpiece Theatre (note the spelling) and other British fare, especially televised literary adaptations. PBS is funded by Congress, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So we do pay a tax, into the slush fund, for the most popular channel among the 500 on our "dial". Popular, at least, as measured by polls on trust and importance, if not by ratings. Which makes sense for a noncommercial channel, which doesn't make business and advertising decisions keyed to ratings.

If the BBC can make this project work, I'd love to see PBS do the same. It would make PBS even more popular, freeing it to fill the vacuum of "community content and programming" kept vacant by the commercial networks. PBS is under threat from Republicans who want it to become a government propaganda channel like Fox News (and its corporate competitors). Building an interactive community with its content would help it withstand even the vicious attack it suddenly comes under. By removing much of the editorial control which, even when fair, can still be targeted with loaded "bias" complaints designed to bias it. If the content and messages originate, are selected by, and resonate among the people, it's harder to talk about some fake "media elitism".

Ideas you could try...

[cmeans]

Here's a few ideas, not sure how good they are:

• Integrate it with your Calendar. For shows you're interested in (or might be). Good even for people who have a TiVo or other PVR.
• An extension of this would be for it to read your calendar/email/web sites to know the kinds of things you're interested in, then it could highlight shows that relate to your interests. Categorize by business and personal interests/events.

Already in use with MythTV

[gilesjuk]

I've been using the BBC listings with MythTV for months now. The XMLTV script used to parse the HTML, but the BBC realised serving all the HTML results in greater server load, so they made XML data available.