Hello Backstagers, Some of you know about this already, either because I've told you directly, or because you're generally stalking me on the Internet :)
Some time ago I started a project - excitingly called 'Project Baird' - to try to spec out how different bits of existing projects and standards can be used to do cool stuff with what seems to be known in the industry as "Connected TV", as moronic a term as that is. Now, this didn't really go anywhere for a while, but I did end up writing a bunch of blog posts on the subject, some of it in a fair amount of detail. The splendid news is that I've been going through the process of taking all of the stuff I blogged about and feeding it back into Project Baird and trying to push things forward as a proper collaborative effort to produce a set of useful and usable specs dealing with different aspects of Connected TV, building as much as possible on what's out there, especially in Internet Standards Track land. The thinking is that for the vast majority of "future-TV" stuff that's been presented and talked about and demoed, most of the pieces of the puzzle have long since existed. The biggest problem, rather than coming up with clever ways of doing things, is actually picking which of a bunch of alternatives for a given aspect to use given momentum elsewhere, potential for future expansion, and interoperability with other systems (not to mention ease-of-implementation). The general approach is to start off at a high level and get progressively lower-level and more detailed as each part is formalised. I know this is probably of some interest to a number of people on here, and Project Baird deliberately takes a agnostic approach to platforms, broadcasters and devices wherever possible, which should suit many of you down to the ground. So, consider this a formal invitation to have a look and stick your oar in, whether your background/field of interest is in broadcasting, Internet architecture, semantic web, consumer devices, or simply watching TV. The project lives at http://projectbaird.com and is itself hosted on GitHub. As certain areas get turned into formal specs, I'll add people as collaborators on the repository so that everybody's not reliant on me to get changes published. The "Getting involved" section (http://projectbaird.com/getting-involved/) has some information on how to contribute in the meantime. (Certainly, the eye of any broadcast chain experts would be appreciated on the TVDNS spec - http://wiki.github.com/nexgenta/Baird/tvdns) At the moment, much of it is brain-dump stuff, so ideas and comments are very welcome, but there's some promising (IMNSHO!) starting points - if they can be turned into a reality, there are some very exciting applications indeed. Cheers! Mo. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
