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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
Arrived in Las Vegas yesterday, the same day we left, April the 13th. Finding suitable food to eat was the order of the day followed by the time sync exercise ‘how long can I stay awake’…
Today we hit the shopping opportunities just past the airport including Fry’s Electronics. Generally remarkably well restrained as we wandered past HD-DVDs, Blue Ray discs, and a massive section of ordinary old DVDs. Was mightily tempted to pick at least one of the three volume box sets of the Tomorrow People.
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’…
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.
Yesterday, as predicted by a certain media commentator, Apple opened iTunes and a proper Apple Store in NZ. Nice to see some NZ music there and promoted. No telly or film available.
I prefer nice physical objects and come out in a nasty little rash when handling DRM goods so I’m not likely to be an iTunes punter.
But just to test myself I searched for music I’ve been trying to track down retail in downtown Auckland. Sadly neither Hellwood or Nomo were returned from my iTunes searches.
Channel 4
Channel 4 in the UK launched a catch up TV service, 4oD. Wouldn’t get excited it’s UK & Eire only. It’s Windows only, XP and above, using Windows Media Player 10 or 11 with associated DRM. Not sure if that’s the plays for sure DRM or the Zune DRM or another form of DRM being offering by Microsoft;)
4oD appears very similar to the BBCs offering.
UK IP Report
More interesting is the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property which also emerged overnight. The leaks reported by the BBC seem to have been accurate – including the contentious issue of term extension for protection for sound recordings and related performers’ rights, which Gowers recommends is not extended past the current 50 years.
Gowers is recommending:
strongerenforcement of IP, up to 10 years for online copyright infringement
balance – providing consumers with a private copying exception, to allow format shifting (e.g. to copy your CD onto an iPod), allowing educational users to access content.
helping UK business to create/protect their IP with various restructuring and new initiatives
Recommendation 4:Policy makers should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered retrospectively.
Gaming
Meanwhile today the Nintendo Wii is launched in NZ & Oz. It reinforces the fact that the quality of gaming is not just down to the power of CPU and GPU of the console. And it looks like a lot of fun… I plan some serious research later in the day.
I’m not into WOW but couldn’t help come across the LeeroyJenkins meme.
It’s kinda bonghead humor but I can’t help appreciate the Jenkins inspired promos for Spike TV below.
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.
The product comprises of three basic elements:
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)
On demand content charges:
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’.
As previouslymentioned this is a prototype that has been created using one of the bright new shiny tools of the web-o-sphere – Rails on Ruby.
It provides plenty of ways to connect into it (RSS, RDF, FOAF) with the terms of use allowing non-commercial reuse – enabling those with the skill and passion to create new applications using the archive data.
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
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.
