planes, books and creative commons

I flew to Brisbane and back last week on Air NZ. Watched a film and some TV eps on the back of seat screen, which I took for granted. Coming back I figure I’ll do the same, had already mentally selected a couple of choices for the film, based on my previous scan of the selection available. Sit down in aircraft seat at Brisbane International to see a sticker advertising seat back entertainment coming soon, along with a photo showing me how it would look. One I was expecting the back of seat screen based on my experiences, flying with other carriers generally and specifically having had it available on the reverse flight but three days ago. So I was kinda gutted to find that this wasn’t the case. But having a facsimile screen sticker taunt my expectations really slapped the salt into the customer experience graze. I see the same stickers are now placed on the back of Auckland bus seats, where they are unreadable unless you bend down to read them. Winning strategy all round Mr and Ms Marketing bods.

So instead of a film on the way back I chewed all too fast through the sixth installment of Australian Labor politician/sleuth Murray Whelan, Sucked In. Whilst those around me were sucking in wind through their teeth as the lightening crackled around us on our descent into Auckland I was attempting to stifle my cackling laughter. Still no sign that John Clarke et al will dramatise anymore of these books beyond the first two novels Stiff and The Brush Off. Something should be done.

The purpose of flying to Brisbane was to attend the Building an Australasian Commons conference held by Creative Commons Australia. The Aussies are well onto it, well funded, well organised and producing projects that are being used throughout the global CC community. Though to be fair they based their version 3.0 set of licences on the NZ licences that were launched last year. I caught up with Louise O’Brien from CC Aotearoa New Zealand who indicated that they are still planning to hold regional CC events, including Auckland, and that they hope to launch a more complete web site in the future.
There needs to be greater publicity of CC in NZ and I hope these efforts raise awareness. I have come across a number of people using CC licences in NZ that were unaware that there were specific NZ licences available.

television graphics, final cut pro, motion and xml

Updated: Code now available

Yesterday I got an email from an engineer at the mothership asking for advice on tweaking a small utility I put together. The utility automates the creation of on-screen menus for TVNZ 6, which are created using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and indirectly use Apple’s Motion.

Today via Creative Workflow Hacks I see that Apple has now documented the Motion XML format, which should make it easier for assembling smooth automated workflows. The FCP XML format is already well documented.

Database + XML + Python + Python libraries + FCP/Motion = rocking solution

I did some weekend based research on FCP’s Apple Event (AE) support whilst investigating the best way to do those menus. With the help of HAS’s appscript AE bridge I put together a first cut of some Python code that could get and send XML to FCP via AE. I didn’t use this approach in the actual solution, instead opting just to have the operator manually import a XML file.

I’ve placed that code onto the Python code snippets site Useless Python, hoping that it err may be useful to some. Why is Useless Python developed in PHP?

It’s not available yet, will link directly to it after it’s been reviewed and approved.

Well, turns out Useless Python is useless, nothing happening there. So I've pasted the code onto Pastie for those that are interested

Filed under: mac  media  python 

last two weeks only

Two weeks ago I resigned from TVNZ. I start full time study for a LLB in a fortnight. It’s an exciting prospect and I can’t wait to get stuck in. I will not be around for the launch of TVNZ7, though I will sure to set up the PVR to check out Russell’s show.

The last two weeks at TVNZ will be focused on helping define first draft of business/technical architecture for the content aspects of the enterprise. The next two days, however, I’m going to be in Wellington at Webstock.

libarylookup:: auckland region public libraries

I’ve used Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup bookmarklet for doing lookups against the University of Auckland Library for quite some time. It’s a great tool that provides you with a quick way of seeing whether a book of interest is available in your local library. Say you’re looking at an interesting read on Amazon, click on LibraryLookup in your bookmark toolbar and a new browser window opens up, with search results from the local library, showing whether the book is available. If it is you can log in to the library and request the book, quickly mitigating the temptation of a one click purchase.

LibraryLookup works by finding an ISBN number within a web page and using that to search the library’s collection. Which is great however as I’m not enrolled at university this year I have been using Auckland City Public library to quell my urges to purchase books. After a cursory g search returned naught for the Public Library I peeked and poked the necessary url gubbins into the librarylookup code. So here are the results, bookmarklets for the Auckland region libraries. Drag the relevant one into your bookmark toolbar. If you’re having problems with this check out this screencast from Jon.

Auckland ISBN Lookup

Manakau ISBN Lookup

North Shore ISBN Lookup

Rodney ISBN Lookup

Waitakere ISBN Lookup

For those that want details

As the Auckland, Manakau, Waitakere and North Shore city libraries all use ELGAR (e Libraries for a Greater Auckland Region) there is a single base url for all libraries. The parameter searchscope defines which library’s collection is searched and the associated skin in which the results are returned within. Here are the codes for the specific libraries.

1 = ELGAR overview
2 = Auckland
3 = Auckland Kids
4 = Manakau
5 = Manakau Kids
6 = North Shore
7 = North Shore Kids
8 = Rodney
9 = Rodney Kids
10 = Waitakere
11 = Waitakere Kids

ibc conference audio freely available

Back a week, from Amsterdam & London. I didn’t attend any of conference sessions at IBC as I was fully booked with media management, video editing, video storage and traffic/scheduling vendors. However due to some forward thinking from the IBC organisers I can listen to all the sessions freely. So can you.

The pages with mp3 links can be found here. I couldn’t be asked to right-click, save and import all those files into iTunes, so I russled up a feed to do it automatically. Point your iTunes/NetNewsWire or similar at http://syntho.org/site_media/ibc07.xml Apparently its the same deal as last year, not that I knew that last year’s were available freely, so here’s a feed for 2006.

phones, video and synthetic programming

A quick Pythonic burst before I depart for IBC later this week.

Video
In my spare time I’ve been tinkering around with Final Cut Pro’s XML capabilities and FCP’s interesting Apple Event support with the goal of automating the production of some channel elements. Python’s great libraries and the community behind their production is one of its strengths. For this work I have employed Appscript from HAS to allow me to send Apple Events to FCP. For the XML processing Fredrik Lundh’s elementtree was the natural choice. I used the Python Imaging Library (PIL) for a similar project several years ago for the automated production of id boards.
Once I’ve cleaned things up I’ll publish my FCP Apple Event class as an example of using Appscript.

Phones
Python for s60 mobile platform went gold last month. I need to dust off my PC to install some Windows only software that’s required to create a developer certificate. The dev cert allows you to get at the tastier capabilities of the phone.

Synthetic Programming
Corepy is a Python package for creating applications targeted at the IBM’s PowerPC and Cell architectures.

“Synthetic programming was developed to provide a new approach to high-performance and multi-core computing using scripting languages. The design of the synthetic programming environment encourages developers to experiment with different approaches for mapping algorithms to processing resources and generating optimized code sequences.

Synthetic programming itself is a methodology for building applications that combines high-level language code with user generated machine code. The synthetic programming environment exposes the underlying processor instructions as first-class functions in the host language and provides components for building and executing instruction sequences built using the instruction interfaces. The instruction sequences, called synthetic programs, can contain any instruction available for the processor, allowing developers to create highly optimized kernels for high-performance tasks. An application can contain many synthetic programs, all of which can be executed an arbitrary number of times synchronously or asynchronously, allowing the application to make full use of data and processing resources.” - Mueller C., Synthetic Programming: User-directed Run-time Code Synthesis for High Performance Computing

So the ease of use and elegance of Python is employed to create high performance machine code, making “assembly fun again”.

This is one of those times when having an older machine has its advantages as copepy will only run on PPC Macintoshes, so time available I’ll be able to load it up on the trusty PowerBook. Probably of more interest to those in scientific programming, such bioinformatics.

TV Listings Copyright :: ICE TV Decision

A week ago the Federal Court of Australia found against Nine Networks in a copyright case it brought against ICE TV. Nine asserted that ICE TV had infringed the copyright of their TV Schedule in the production and communication of their ICE Guide.

The case is important as it has determined, within the Australian jurisdiction, that copyright for a compilation - such as a weekly TV schedule must be considered as a whole and that there is no separate copyright for components, such as the time and title information within that schedule.

“Nine cannot claim copyright in the time and title information for a single day or week as if that information were itself a separate compilation.” - Bennett J

It also provides an interesting window into the world of Australian TV scheduling and listings production. For the details you’ll have to read the full decision.

BTW: Talking of TV schedules I see that Fiona Rae is providing a ‘wheat from chaft’ look ahead for the week on NZ screens. Who would have known that C4 was screening Skins otherwise?

Here’s my 5 minute summary of the case

Facts

ICE TV provides an digital EPG service for consumers in Australia.
ICE have created their own system, comprising of a database and prediction process.
The basis of their system is data that was collected by watching television and compiled into the initial channel templates.
Part of ICE TV’s process is checking their predictions of the TV schedules against the guides published by third parties.
These aggregated listings are created by a small number of companies, including Pagemasters.
(BTW: Pagemasters is used by NZ publishers both for TV listings and more recently for subcontracted sub-editing).
The aggregators are provided with the weekly schedules by the TV Networks, including Nine.

Bennett J identified the following issues for determination.

What is the identity of the Nine work(s) in which copyright subsists?

“Nine can claim copyright in the Weekly Schedule. It cannot claim copyright in the components of the Weekly Schedule as if they are separate compilations. They are not.”

What is the effect of aggregation on the copyright subsisting in the Nine work(s)?

“The process of aggregation does not “destroy” Nine’s copyright in the Weekly Schedule. The Weekly Schedule remains a copyright work but it is separate and distinct from the Aggregated Guides, which are themselves original literary works and copyright protected compilations.”

Did Ice copy the Nine work(s) when it created the first templates for the IceGuide?

“It is at law open to a person to ascertain the facts recorded in a compilation by independent inquiry and to compile his or her own compilation containing the results of that inquiry. So long as the second compiler does not copy the first compilation, there would be no infringement of any copyright in that compilation ‘any more than the existence of copyright in a photograph of a scene signifies that there is copyright in the scene itself, which, therefore, a later photographer is not at liberty to photograph from the same viewpoint’”

Do Ice’s present activities infringe Nine’s copyright?

“Different content and modes of expression and arrangement may be utilised for a television schedule. The Weekly Schedule, the Aggregated Guides and the IceGuide each differ in their manner of selection, expression and arrangement. It follows that form and content are each relevant to the question of infringement.

Ice does not engage in broadcasting. It does not take the skill and labour of placing programs in an order that appeals to viewers in that Ice plays no part in the placement of programs. It does not take the format of the Weekly Schedule. It does not take synopses from the Weekly Schedule. It conducts its own research and drafts its own synopses.

Ice does take slivers of time and title information each day from the Aggregated Guides. For the reasons I have set out in detail, Ice does not reproduce a substantial part of the Weekly Schedule in so doing.

It follows that Ice has not infringed Nine’s copyright in the course of making and updating the IceGuide.”

For other takes:
William Patry provides comment.
ICE TV’s reaction
Sydney Morning Herald Report

nab roundup & disney explains copyright

Couple of quick media link outs on a Monday morning…

media tech geekery
Alex Lindsay from TWIT/Pixel Corps provides a great walk through of NAB. About twenty minutes long.
The rest of Gear Media Tech is worth subscribing to if you find this interesting.

disney characters explain copyright
Personally I find the edits a little clunky but as a concept it’s 10 out of 10. Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University has created an overview of (US) copyright using excerpts from Disney animations.
Stream version
YouTube version

“they’re applauding because i’m a pissant”

Freeview

Freeview has been around for a month on my non-Freeview tuner. I don’t get to use the MHEG-5 based EPG but contrary to some press reports I still have an EPG. Given that’s how I select what to record on the Topfield PVR I would not be terribly happy if it disappeared.
I am happy to have TV3 and C4 available to record. The Daily Show now gets selected in my weekly time-shifting trawl through the EPG, where I select the programmes that week that will get recorded and which we will watch…whenever and without commercials. After a hard days work a bit of Jon Stewart with dinner is nice way to start the evening. The quote above is from last night’s show, or rather the episode that I watched last night, but was probably recorded the night before.

Final Cut Pro & MXF

Talking of work I never really concluded the discussion of my investigation into mixing FCP and MXF within a workflow. FCP 6.0 does not provide any MXF capabilities period. Compressor 3, bundled as part of FCP Studio, can use an optional Episode Pro plugin from Telestream that provides the ability to rewrap QuickTime <=> MXF. I believe that Omneon’s ProExchange also provides this functionality.
In the scenario that I was looking into we’ll probably stick with QuickTime from ingest through production and play-out but will rewrap into MXF for archiving.

Python and the Nokia E65

Don’t have much time for happy hacking the Nokia E65. I am a bit disappointed that the 3rd edition S60 security model is so restrictive that I couldn’t get some of the API to produce any results in my initial peeking. location.gsm_location() produces nada without ReadDeviceData, ReadUserData, and Location privileges. It seems that in order to get these privileges on the phone you own you need to acquire a developer certificate. Hmmmmmm.
I’m not a big user/fan of Twitter but I was planning to do a proof of concept script that would update Twitter as one moved between cell locations.

Lastly

Jim Barksdale argues for the need to more effectively archive our bits.
And given Microsoft’s recent patent threats this video of Columbia Law Professor, Eben Moglen, is worth five minutes of your time.

Post NAB Catchup

Despite ambitious plans to blog everyday about NAB its now a week after my return from Vegas. So here’s a quick wrap….

I spent way too much time in meetings at NAB. To do justice to show like NAB you really need at least four people, allowing each to attend the meetings relevant to them and allowing each to have time to free range the floor. It was only on the last day that I managed to get a limited walk of the floor. Even then it was highly directed as I paced the halls looking up the stands others had recommended to me.

The world of broadcast management applications isn’t booming. Its a small and increasingly smaller market so that’s no surprise. I was surprised to also see a lack of movement and excitement around media asset management (MAM). Obviously Proximity reborn as Final Cut Server provided some noise but otherwise it seemed very much business as usual with the existing players and no interesting new entrants.

The exception to this was the MXF Mastering Format demo given by the Advanced Media Workflow Association. Unfortunately I can’t link to anything substantial on it as the materials are available to members only. But it represents a new approach to the way in which media is managed, a more distributed method, and a concrete example of how MXF can be used to solve broadcasters media management problems. It is result of two years work by Omneon, EMC, Marquis Broadcast, Metaglue, OpenCube, Pro-Bel, Quantum, Snell & Wilcox, Softel and TMD , who focused their efforts on the multilingual audio and captioning requirements of Turner Broadcasting in London.

On the new distribution front Microsoft and Adobe battled it out with their respective announcements on Silverlight and Apollo. In terms of impact Silverlight is available as a cross platform, cross browser plug in capable of playing DRM wrapped media. In theory this means that DRM video services should now be able to be made available to Macintosh users. Practically and pragmatically this is of course not guaranteed. This week at Microsoft’s MIX further announcements on Silverlight have been made around programming. Silverlight contains a new dynamically focused version (DLR) of the .NET runtime (CLR) to provide an environment in which dynamic languages such as Javascript, Python and Ruby can better be run within. The creator of the .NET/CLR version of Python, Jim Hugunin, who now works for Microsoft provides some more details on the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). Whilst the full presentation by Ray Ozzie is available as a Windows video stream. I’ve already tried some of the Python samples running within Firefox on a Mac (PPC) and they’re taking down Firefox every time. Will update if I can get these working.

[Back at NAB] One night I excused myself from the industry cocktail circuit and paid cash money to attend a massive FCP Users Group meeting. Walter Murch gave a great talk on the production process of the new film, Youth Without Youth from Francis Ford Coppola. Murch is the editor on YWY and described how he approached the edit in FCP. Similar stuff to his book In the Blink of an Eye. The film was shot on the digital Sony CineAlta F900 cameras, 2 used statically, and when they needed a third an Arri film camera was employed. It was slightly unclear but they seemed to record vi HDSDI onto an external deck and record onto internal cassettes as well. The material was digitised as DV for the offline editing, effects done in Shake and then conformed against the HD material. Sound was handled in Pro Tools.

Apple’s announcements on FCP 6, Color and Final Cut Server made the largest noise at NAB. I asked everyone I met at NAB what were the big things for them and just about everyone polled listed Apple’s products in their top three. I was posed the question what will the impact of Apple’s “bang for buck” announcements be for mainstream media. Apple have aggressively priced FCP and the introduction of Color - effectively bundled for free and FCP Server continue this. So for traditional broadcasters and decent sized production houses they can look to continue to see cost savings, either by switching to FCP or to some extent by waiting for Avid to react and continue their ongoing price cutting.

More importantly it continues to drop the barrier of entry to video production. Be it for traditional programmes or the new net based forms of video delivery. For a great source of ongoing discussion on this topic I recommend checking out Twit.tv and the Pixel Corps - who are closely related, as is Video Grunt, who has a great series of videocasts on aspect ratio which a few people should try watching…

For me FCP/MXF and possibly FCP Server will be the focus of some ongoing exploration in the coming months. In particular around integration, using FCP’s XML project format, which I hope I’ll have some time to comment about. Be

nab, fcp and spam

NAB FCP
Today I’m off to NAB, the massive US broadcasting show held in Vegas. Should be fun but manic. Every hour of my first three days is already booked. Hope to be able to get away from my vendor relationship duties and prowl the floor for the small funky stuff. Apparently Apple have an event on Sunday.

Will there be a new version of Final Cut Pro? Probably.
Will FCP support MXF? I hope so.
How will the acquisition of Proximity by Apple be expressed in product terms at NAB? No bloody idea, but we’ll find out soon enough.

SPAM
The judicious use of postfix’s configuration in combination with Gmail has created a good solution for my email. I had almost given up on email prior to the new approach. Configuring postfix was reasonably straight forward as there are good online resources available. However at one stage I did manage to generate an email storm. Over the years I have collected a number of domains and the new email system handles them all. With my first attempt at configuring postfix I generated an email for each of the domains when the system received an email for any of the domains. Email stopped getting through to Gmail. Looked in the postfix logs to see Gmail telling me ‘slow down you move too fast’…

Apple TV plays DivX/Xvid

Barely out on the US street the Apple TV is winning friends and being happily hacked.

There are obligatory unmake disassembly photo-sets, with the best being the dissection and commentary at anandtech.com.

There are walkthroughs on how to supersize the hard disk inside of the Apple TV.

And then there are the approaches to getting Divx/Xdvid content playing on an Apple TV. There two basic angles, either transcode the xvid into a codec that the Apple TV can playback or arm the Apple TV with the codecs necessary to play xvid.
The hacks are coming thick and fast because the Apple TV is running a version of Mac OS X that naturally uses QuickTime as the media foundation. At the moment all but the transcode require disassembling the Apple TV - however all that’s needed is for someone to discover how to connect (ssh) into Apple TV for there to be a reasonably friendly method of watching divx/xvid on your TV.

Odds on… by the time Apple TV gets into NZ shops this will have happened.

Updated: Awkward TV is a wiki pulling together a great collection Apple TV resources.

hyperlocal, news 2.0

Hyperlocal
Continuing the hyperlocal meme is a segment within the excellent PBS documentary, Frontline Newswar. An investigation into the future of news.
Part 3 examines the changing news scape. The impact of new, lower cost creation and distribution technologies, citing rocketboom.com, aaa and the dailykos.com as examples of the challengers to old media.
Rob Curley and his teams’ efforts at Lawrence Journal, Daily Naples and the Washington Post are highlighted as exemplars of hyperlocal. Using the web and online video to create a richer and more personal local news offering.

All four parts are online streaming in Quicktime or Windows Media.
Newswar is great viewing* and the site has a ton of additional interviews and resources. The Frontline team do not hold back on the issue of quality, standards and innovation within US news. Thought always in that classic, understated, serious documentary style.

‘Why TV News Sucks’
David Rosenblum, the digital videojournalist, on the other hand tells it straight up. In a post entitled Why TV News Sucks he rails against the same old format of news production “Guy at a desk with a box over his shoulder” and pleads for innovation.

Newspapers: As is, to be
Mark Glaser looks at imagining a future tense for newspapers using “as is”/”will be” couplets for contrast.

The way it is: Newspapers try to cover all the news themselves.
The way it will be: “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.”

NZ?
So whilst the portals assemble their own corporate mashups where is the hyperlocal in NZ? Will the big print players get into their own video production? Or will we see the rise of a new class of independent and locally focused cross media organisations?

*I’ve watched most of Part 3 and one segment of Part 1. Having to watch video at your desk on your computer isn’t a great experience. This subject deserves a post on its own.

hyperlocal

Part 1

Part 2

Here’s a couple of interviews with Mark Whitaker, former Newsweek editor, who is now VP and Editor in Chief of New Ventures Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI). He speaks with Jeff Jarvis about hyperlocal publishing. If that concept sounds familiar it may be because Rob Curley ex-Lawrence Journal-World is also at WPNI. Along with Django lead developer Adrian Holovaty.

Whitaker sees local bloggers providing “good solid reporting around the country” taking the place of the local papers. Many of which are closing in the US.
Supporting this move WPNI is creating an ad marketplace for local bloggers - which also provides WPNI with a way of participating in the more targeted models of advertising.
He also sees video as a key element for online newspapers. He suggests that although broadcasters should have the natural advantage in exploiting video online they are limited by self imposed assumptions over production values and what works on TV.

copyright amendment workshop

I attended the Auckland InternetNZ session on the Copyright Amendment Bill last Wednesday. This was part of InternetNZ’s process of consultation to help frame their submission to the Commerce Select Committee. The presentations and discussions also helped many in translating the language of statute to discover the essence of the bill. The submission period has now been extended, so you have until March 9 to provide your input into the proposed changes.
The materials from the presentations are available online.

Here are a few issues that emerged:

Format shifting
The provisions provide weak rights to the consumer. As previous noted:

• There is a two year sunset clause which will see this right removed unless the clause is renewed by an Order in Council.
• Companies can remove this right through contracting out.
• It is limited to audio material.

One issue I hadn’t seen raised before is the “private and domestic” use clause limiting the format shifted music to your home. Clive Elliott raised the question of whether it would be legal to listen to your format shifted iPod music at work.

As noted by more than one learned lawyer at the workshop - the format & time shifting clauses will be irrelevant to most NZers. After all we have been happily time shifting since Sony introduced the consumer video tape recorder in 1975, have been copying CDs onto iPods/MP3 players since the Diamond Rio appeared and will continue to copy DVDs onto portable video players such as the video iPod. Despite the fact that this will remain illegal if the bill is passed in its present form.

Law? The Big Picture
This is an area where the law as statute and the law as in what is socially acceptable are poles part. The format shifting and time shifting provisions do help close up the gap. The question of what is fair in the balance between copyright holder and society was raised by questions from the floor. These sought to question or reframe the basis of copyright. As Bronwyn Turley from the Ministry of Economic Development noted the process, leading to this bill, has solely been targeting a digital update of current legislation, and not a complete review of copyright.
More importantly NZ’s ability to redesign copyright within our jurisdiction is framed by our international relationships including the treaties on IP and Trade we are signatories of.

TPM test case
If the bill passes, without change to the TPM sections, we will have an interesting test case with the introduction of the new high definition video discs into NZ. More specifically the test will involve the lawful playback and viewing of region controlled video. Although the back catalog HD DVD discs now available appear to be region free, it is clear that some form of Region Playback Control (RPC) is likely to be introduced. This would bring HD DVD in line with Blu Ray which already has defined its RPC. Therefore it appears certain that we will be able to legally import a HD DVD or Blu Ray disc which will not play in a NZ zone player. It is equally clear that the MPA et al are aware of this thorny issue and are lobbying against it through submissions to the US government.

TPMs & Creative Innovation
During Peter Gutmann’s presentation on TPMs he cited an example of a creative individual being stymied by TPMs that prevented them from viewing their own content on a PC. The TPM in question was Macrovision, an analog video TPM. This issue emerged last year when there were fresh attempts to impose measures against the so called analog hole. TPMs pose a real danger to creators. In protecting ‘proper’ content all other content is assumed to be illegal. This will remove or reduce the functionality available to creators who are limited to consumer level equipment. Given that copyright is supposed to exist to promote the creation of works, if TPMs place a barrier to creation you have to wonder if they have a place in copyright legislation.

Creative Commons & Govt
There was some brief talk during the panel on the history of attempts to get a NZ set CC licences available. Afterwards during drinks there was a suggestion raised that when a NZ CC non-commercial licence exists it would be a great way to allow government departments, SOEs and CROCs to provide non-commercial use of our information and content assets - whilst still allowing commercial exploitation. By allowing citizens to experiment with our national assets commercial applications could be discovered. In a similar way that the BBC’s Backstage non-commercial feeds have helped spawn commercial licence paying applications. BTW for a great discussion on the realities of DRM and complex rights situation within archives spend a hour listening to backstage’s first podcast.

baacamp

“All had fun, and came away physically exhausted but mentally recharged” - Nat Torkington

baacamp was a great experience. Here’s a selection of my memories from the weekend:

Networks
Friday evening saw Minister David Cunliffe give his pitch on the government’s approach to ensuring NZ has the necessary infrastructure in place to compete online. He seemed genuinely surprised by the consequences of de-peering which was communicated to him by the room. As noted by others in the room he took that issue away as a priority.

Energy
David Haywood gave a talk on energy. Starting by explaining the difference between store and flow based energy. Then looking at each of the flow based sources and discussing their merits. Including work he’s been involved with around wave generation and sterling engines. Peering also raised its head here, in relation to the difference between what an electricity network will sell and buy electricity. This is an issue when you have home based wind or solar generators with excess electricity that can offering to others back on the grid.

Copyright
Judith Tizard fronted to give her position on the whys and wherefores of the Copyright Amendment Bill. Followed by some analysis by lawyer and policy foosters.
Judith started out by recounting a meeting with a music executive who had urged her to continue making formating shifting - of music - just a ‘little bit illegal’. She also explained that a goal of the bill was to put in place copyright law that would continue to relevant in the face of future technological developments. I wish the bill truly reflected a policy and rights based approach. However the exclusion of format shifting of video from the bill demonstrates the political reality that the movie industry continues to trump consumer rights.
It would be a shame if the bill was to be passed in this state. Video format shifting of material is happening now across NZ in exactly the same way the music is being format shifted. This bill would then create law which continue to make things a ‘little bit illegal’ for those: copying their DVDs to the media centres or transcoding and copying their DVDs onto their video iPod.
There was very limited discussion on TPMs (aka DRM), some this was around the desire to access DRMed content sans DRM. In the music world there are signs that DRM is dying. The latest being Steve Jobs’ open letter reaction to Norway’s stance. Of course there will be plenty more opportunity to discuss the bill next week at the InternetNZ workshops. I intend to get to the Auckland session.

Xero
As someone with a couple of recently created small trading entities the Xero preview was of direct interest to me. It’s accounting Web 2.0. style for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Naturally that means great data integration/interchange and a well thought out user experience.
Rod Drury, the man behind Xero, talked about the capital bootstrapping process that has got them to where they are. The trade sale of email archiver AfterMail was part of the process. In the world post Sarbanes-Oxley archiving email is required for many companies. Accounting is another activity that is required. Do I spot a MO? Find an activity companies are compelled to do - then provide a solution which makes the activity as painless and as valuable as possible?
Its certainly not a bad starting angle for startups.

“Fucking big web sites”
Artur Bergman from Six Apart gave a wonderfully deadpan presentation on how to handle seriously loaded dynamically generated web sites. In-between dissing filesystems, databases and codecs he explained the pragmatic approach that LiveJournal has taken. Their Perl based tools (Perbal, memcached, GearMan and MogileFS) created for this end are open source and were in use by a number those in attendance. This presentation from OSCON 2005 provides insight into their architecture.

Auckland City
The talk by Richard Simpson on how to punctuate Auckland was remarkable for two reasons. Firstly there were almost as many non-Aucklanders in the audience as those living in Jaffaville. But more importantly the discovery that there is someone in council who has big, ballsy and in many respects, beautiful ideas on how we can transform Auckland into the city it deserves to be. Including a new bridge - for all transport, a national stadium that would help link the CBD with the Domain and a canal between the two harbours. Shame there are no plans for an aqueduct on the canal though;)

Thanks!!!
Big Thanks for organising/supporting the whole experience to Nat, Russell, Jenine, Vern and the sponsors including Google, Xero and Karajoz.

BT Vision

British Telecom have just gone live with their Vision product/service in the UK. It provides Freeview channels, on demand IPTV content and a PVR.

• DVB-T receiver
  
• IPTV ‘receiver’
  
• PVR (80Gig)
  

It connects to BT supplied broadband (ADSL) to allow access to the on-demand IPTV content. Freeview channels, received via terrestrial digital signal, can be recorded on the PVR. The IPTV content does not appear to be recordable.

There is a one off install charge for the box (90 pounds sterling)

Films from £1.99
Music videos from only 29p
TV shows from only 79
Kids’ shows from only 49p

Monthly subscriptions to on demand content 6-9 pounds per channel. Costs aren’t provided for their Sports package, which includes Premier League football. The access to football from start of season 2007 is crucial, it will allow viewers to watch the majority (288 of 380) of Premier league matches ‘near-live’.

disney-abc to stream top shows

ABC Television has announced that they will stream episodes of their top rating shows the day after they have first been transmitted in the US.

Its a two month trial being supported by sponsorship revenue from Ford, Proctor & Gamble, Universal Pictures and AT&T. You’ll be able to choose which sponsor ads you’ll see but there will be no ability to fast forward through them.

“Current episodes of “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” and “Commander In Chief,” as well as the entire present season of “Alias,” will be available for streaming during May and June, marking the first time a broadcast network has made multiple series available for viewing online, free of charge to consumers.” – Disney-ABC Television group press release

This could be BIG.

There’s a slew of comment on this naturally:

Wall Street Journal: Disney’s Web Move Shakes Up Decades-Old TV Model

Buzz Machine: Exploding TV

A VC: Disney Proves Me Right and Wrong

How Not to Think Strategically About the Future of Media, pt 193941

BBC: Disney puts shows online for free

There is no mention of any limitations to the streaming, bar having the bandwidth to receive it. So in theory this will be able to be viewed in NZ? Will this have any immediate impact in NZ? The local distribution partners in the US aren’t so happy. One wonders about the worldwide distribution channels including NZ.

You could argue these episodes are already available to those who really want them, via a torrent. But viewing them streaming from a web site is significantly easier and in this case would be legal. (Unlike a significant amount on YouTube and Google Video).

This means that its something your Mum could and would feel happy about doing.