Re: [backstage] Finally, that bloody BBC Weather feed - here it is...
On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 10:04:09PM +0100, Oliver Cole wrote: Odd, considering we were like the second place they rolled out the maps? Oli I suspect they have four seperate contracts with their upstream data providers: US, UK, JP, everywhere else. The US and everywhere else providers allow for a geocoding API, the UK contract doesn't. (I haven't tried JP geocoding, and haven't heard any reports either way.) -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Last played songs?
On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 05:04:53PM +0100, Richard P Edwards wrote: Hi, I would like to add to this. If you look on the Pete Tong Radio 1 web-site, for example, you will see that a playlist is published as much as possible. Note, by the way, that the Pete Tong show (if it's the one I'm thinking of; I've only caught the beginning of it once -- not my cup of tea) contains just about every possible special case. It contains music mixed from the source well in advance, it contains a live show, it probably contains single performances split into multiple 2 hour chuncks. It's likely nearly impossible for even the majority of the transcript to be up live, and I suspect at many points in the show, he's has on two different tracks, plus his own drum machine. Two points come to mind... 1. If the shows are specialist then it is very important that the audience has this information. 2. In which ever case, for the sake of the music business and new artists, there should never be a situation where this information is not documented for MCPS/PRS etc.. I assume what you mean is so that the artists get paid. There's a limit to that, though. Artists don't need to get paid for several weeks (possibly several months). They don't get paid for a few seconds of the song. In fact, I'm surprised they get paid directly by the BBC at all -- in the US, the recording industry gives away tracks, including the right to play them on air -- to the radio. They consider it great advertising. OTOH, around here there's a lot more TV advertising for music. (Not on the BBC, obviously.) Therefore 80% actually online now, is far better than the odd piece missed, for everyone concerned. Anyway - what do those show producers do whilst on air? Um, produce the show? It takes a lot of effort to make this sort of thing look effortless. Who do you think listens to everybody calling the Jo Whiley show? (Which reminds me of another fun special case -- every morning on her show at approx 10:30, she has a segment during which the entire point is that the audience doesn't know what tracks are being played in real-time, the 7 song shuffle.) -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Last played songs?
On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 02:12:41PM +0100, Dan Hill wrote: And there's still the odd bit of vinyl etc. chucked in at the last minute - plus live outside broadcasts etc. Which means metadata input retrospectively, or thereabouts. As BBC radio shows are 'hand-built' rather than selected by track-rotation software, it's a bit tricky to get a 100% accurate live feed - but we're putting a fair bit of effort into making that available. It'd certianly be a very good start to get the feed set up without being 100%, then add more information to the existing API. That is, times when the input isn't from a track on the computer, just show CD Player 1, Vinyl 1, Mic 1, etc, with an attribute that it's not a real track. Don't forget to inclue the possibilty of multiple sources being live at once. Warn your users that new tags and attributes may show up later, and to expect multi-namespacing. Release early, release often. -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Last played songs?
On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 02:57:05PM +0100, Dan Hill wrote: Release early, release often. Indeed, although we're concentrating on 'mainstream' users for these feeds, rather than Backstage, so I'd rather we tended towards 100% and avoided unecessary studio info where possible. It may be that we have a fuller feed for Backstage etc. alongside. I think the general public would like partial info better then none too -- it's just fine for them if it sometimes shows up with (custom content). Even better if it knows what mics are live, and who is sitting in front of them, though obviously that'd require some extra work for producers (or engineers, depending on how the show works). The last 20% takes 80% of the time, but a large amount of your audience only cares about the first 80% anyway. IOW, when you can't figure out what's being played, just put in a placeholder. -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] MetaWeather.com Update
On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 10:02 +, Jason Cartwright wrote: Hey all, Some new features on www.MetaWeather.com * More locations (31 now, we're working on more) How difficult is it to add a location? If it's just a matter of finding the location's IDs on the various sources, could you add a form to create your own location, then add them to the list available to the public once they've been verified? If there's more to it then that, I'd be interested in hearing what the process was. * More weather data sources (Wunderground, NOAA are new) You should probably link to your sources in the about section, possibly with their computed goodness. * RSS feeds for each location - e.g. http://www.metaweather.com/Syndicate/?format=rsslocation=3 Nice. If my location were there (Abingdon, but Oxford is probably close enough to be interesting), I might start looking more at how livejournal will present that, and think about a better WTDI -- perhaps another option that creates a new item when it changes it's mind about what the weather will be, or starts predicting a day that previously had no prediction? * You can 'correct' observations, and add your own basic data in Sounds interesting. Can you also make your own predictions, and see how good they are? -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Hourly news flashes via IM
On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 00:17 +, Mario Menti wrote: Any more feedback/suggestions/problems, please keep them coming. Not sure how much I'll be able to do about it in the very short term (as a skiing holiday in my native Switzerland is beckoning), but issues and suggestions will certainly be considered/addressed in due time. Oh, Copyright Copyright: (C) British Broadcasting... is a bit redundant. Also, it doesn't give a year, which is required for a valid copyright notice. Just a minor nit. -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Hourly news flashes via IM
On Thu, 2006-02-09 at 11:39 +, Mario Menti wrote: Someone suggested off-line it would be nice to have an IM bot that pushes news to them automatically, without you having to request it. So I sat down last night and implemented something like this (pretty raw in its current state): It's rather nifty, but I wish it wouldn't message me with the same article more then once -- that is, ignore stories that it's already messaged me. (After the first hour anybody is there, that falls into sync again, or just give people a short first one.) -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Timezone bug?
On Sun, 2005-10-30 at 14:07 +, Hywel Williams wrote: I can't see anything wrong with the times in the data sets both for today and the 29th's tarball. Remember that they're all in UTC (hence the Z at the end of the time), so anything up until 31st October appears to be out of synch by an hour. I'll look into it in more detail tomorrow to ensure there isn't a problem, but at the end of the day, it's up to the end application to sort out daylight savings. OK. It turns out, that you are right. The information in the tvtime data is, in fact, correct. My clock, as it turns out, was wrong, possibly having something to do with the loss of power in my house this morning. Many apologies. The time difference you're seeing is the difference between the published time and the actual time the playout server was going to show the programme. Thanks; that explains it -- quite well -- and it is more or less as I summarized. For my present application, I think I'm going to continue on with showing the published times, but for some project the actual times are far more useful. In the future, a TV-Anytime service may be broadcast along with a tv/radio digital service or provided as a live Internet feed and this exact time could be used to, say start a PVR or stream recorder. I knew that was planned; thanks for confirming that it hasn't yet happened. (Now there's one less option I have for guessing what all the various data streams are.) As to separating the name - I'll look into the TV-Anytime standard to see if there's a field for this (I don't recollect one) There's not one. I was hoping the data could have an extra namespace added to it, and a bbc:episodeTitle.../bbc:episodeTitle element, or the like. Natrually, I wouldn't expect that data to show up on the over-the-air version of the tvanytime data -- I doubt the encoding definition or most decoders would support alternate namespaces being present. The synopsis provided is in fact a slightly cleaned up version of the one that goes out to Sky and Freeview, so to extract the title from the synopsis, I'd have to somehow work out which part of the text is the episode title. If there's a pattern, it's easy to write a filter. Where different schedulers do it in different ways, that's where it gets complicated. Ah. I was hoping that the data got combined into the synopsis in code, not by people. I've looked into it, and while it is fairly regular when it is there, it's hard to tell an episode title from a short first paragraph. -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
[backstage] Timezone bug?
Hello, backstagers: It looks like the data generator on the BBC end is having timezone issues -- all data I have for today (from the 20051029 tarball) is an hour off. For a while I thought that it was on my end, but no, the actual XML files get it wrong. Also, I noticed that at least for some shows, the time in the ProgramURL does not agree with the time in the PublishedStartTime by a few minutes. What does this difference represent? Are the PublishedStartTimes simply inaccurate but look nice, or is there something more interesting going on? Also, rather unrelatedly, would it be possible to get the name of the episode in a seperate element from the free-text descriptions? Thank you, -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Backstage - Stagnant
On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 02:23 +0100, Tom Loosemore wrote:
There are several reasons (some sound, some not-so-sound) why we've
not yet managed to make more APIs available. All I can ask for is
(yet more) patience. We do have some tasty new stuff in the works - a
BBC programme archive catalogue API, for instance - although the
postcoder API probably isn't going to be as sexy as we'd dearly wish,
for all the usual dull rights-related reasons. Before he set off on
his hols, Ben was hopeful about weather, but the truth is you never
really know what fresh problems are going to hit until the 'go live'
button is just about to be pressed (and sometimes only after that...).
The benefits of 'open media' are second nature to many people on this
list, but it still an alien concept to most rights holders, be they
inside or outside the BBC. Much of our work has focused on selling
an open media model inside the BBC - probably too much of our time,
seeing how we've neglected the very people we should be serving
first (you lot).
Our lack of engagement and communication with all of you on this list
is exceptionally bad form, for which I apologise on behalf of the BBC.
One thing: Could you /please/ start sending us some sort of ongoing
status things on the competition. Even if every day you send a mail
that says we've looked at these 5 prototypes, and the winner today is
'foo', then when you run out of prototypes to take a first look at, run
second-stages, etc, until you get to a winner. That's how the quiz
shows do it, and there's no reason not to emulate them.
Really, I think as much as giving weekly status reports is considered to
be Evil with a capital E, they wouldn't go amiss. If we don't know what
you're doing, it's difficult to find ways to help you do what we want
you to do, or even understand why it is that you seem to get nothing
done. I suspect you /are/ getting a lot done, we just aren't hearing
about it.
Maybe we really have 'gone a bit native'. Strange behaviours surface
when you see bbc.co.uk at the end of your email address; fear of
bringing opprobrium to the BBC due to saying the wrong thing in
public can cause otherwise eloquent BBC employees to clam up. Ask us
questions - there are lots of BBC people on this list.
I quite understand; suddenly when I became management at a web forum I
frequented, all the things I cursed the Gods for made sense. (Yes, I do
mean the Gods; the site in question is perlmonks.org.)
1) What is the BBC's Internet Strategy?
It's here, in strategy-speak powerpoint.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/newmedia/bbccoukstrat.ppt
or here, or horridly exported html
http://www.tomski.com/bbcstrategy/bbccoukstrat.htm
To summarise, the BBC's internet priorities are:
i) On Demand ('How can we make our programme available on demand?')
Well, this really seems pretty easy. Give us URLs. Duh. I know, I
know, now the scepter of rights bears it's ugly head. My first
question is what are the rights?
Are there old shows in your archive that have had their copyrights
expire? If so, there's no reason they can't be placed up right now,
other then potentially bandwidth. (To which I'd say that you should
offer them via torrent -- you keep running the tracker and a single
seed, and let the mob effect take care of the rest.)
What are the relevant contract terms for the other ones? How much would
it cost users if every time they downloaded a show, they paid the full
royality on it? There are likely plenty of shows people would download
that way. (I'd assume that there isn't Crown Copyright involved, and if
there were isn't the Crown free to allow you to give away copies of
Her[1] material?)
[1] -- (Or is it Its, since the Crown in question will outlive it's
present holder? I'm afraid I'm not up on the protocol involved, not
having been born to this culture.)
Could you set up a dvd-on-demand program? Users go through the catalog,
say I want this, this, and this, you burn a DVD, and in the mail it
goes. On a contractual basis, it's the same as the DVDs the BBC already
offers of many of it's shows. It's not as simple as just downloading,
for anybody (except possibly people who don't know how to watch movies
on their computer), but it gets around any rights issues, except with
contracts so old as to have no clause dealing with selling copies of the
material rather then broadcasting it.
-=- James Mastros
-
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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] combining prototypes?
On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 10:14 +0100, Mario Menti wrote: Is anyone interested in sitting down together and discussing the potential of integrating some of the various ideas and concepts shown in these prototypes? I'm certainly interested in a collaborative effort to produce an ultimate all-singing-all-dancing TV site for users in the UK. (Indeed, I rather wish I'd known more about the MighTyV effort earlier; I might have been able to earn myself a slice of that rackmount server.) -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] combining prototypes?
On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 15:47 +0100, David Sargeant wrote: To me the ideas services offered comes in two forms: - Search - Reminder To me the number 1 question that I have with TV that I can't answer well is what should I watch now, which really isn't either of those. On the other hand, pretty much any TV app has a lot in common -- like what data it wants. What you do with the data, of course, varies. It'd be nice to have to only make one account, etc, and to get all the mob-driven data that MighTyV has, even if I end up doing something different with the data. Mostly, though, I suspect the great majority of the projects end up being in a few categories, with lots of different implementers of the same ideas. If we can collaborate within each category, we should be able to make a category-killer in each category, and if we can wrap those up into one website, we've got an amazing site. -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Presenting the TVMap!
On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 10:27 +0100, Ben Metcalfe wrote: Just to confirm Graeme's spot on here, you've go up until midnight MONDAY (today) to get your entries in. if you have submitted something already don't worry - we will hold off judging until tomorrow, so feel free to spend the final day tweaking + tuning! I just wanted to make sure -- I submitted my prototype to the web site last night, but it has not shown up on the web site -- at the bottom of the frontpage, on http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/, or http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/index.xml. Just to make sure it hasn't been completely eaten by your database, it's at http://desert-island.dynodns.net/~theorb/tvsched/grid.pl. Like (as I find out now) several other entries, it's about similarity, but it tries to do it within a useful and intuitive interface, and give you immediately useful information -- like a simple intuitive rating of how much it expects you to like (or dislike) the program. (Yes, I did use the word intuitive twice. And I spelt program with one 'm' and no 'e'.) It, of course, could use some tweaks to the algorithm, and lots of optimization -- it's just a prototype, after all. -=- James Mastros PS -- In a couple days, after winners are announced, we should probably all have an on-list discussion about what we'd like to happen with the format -- additional information that would be useful, and where to put it. - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Presenting the TVMap!
On Sun, 2005-10-02 at 23:25 +0100, Thomas Scott wrote: Whew. Talk about cutting it fine. 40 minutes until the competition deadline, but I've just managed to finish my first prototype! WHAT? I thought the compitition had almost 24 hours to go -- until oct 3rd at midnight, (23:59!) -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] BUG: dodgy data..
On Sun, 2005-09-18 at 13:15 -0700, Hywel Williams wrote: Thanks for keeping us informed about these anomalies - most appreciated. Many of these happen unfortunately further up the chain from where the data is generated but these two certainly sound like they shouldn't have slipped the net. Speaking of upstream problems, would it be possible to undo the upstream formatting of directors and actors and stick in the approprate CreditsList elements? I'm currently doing this in my importer script, but it seems silly for each individual user to solve this, rather then you doing so once. (If you like, I'll give you the perl code I'm using to do this -- but it sound like you're using C anyway.) Any errors that come through from our scheduling department that are obviously bogus (e.g. 5.1 surround or any other signification other than stereo or mono) should be trapped and are given a default value within the permitted range. Isn't it possible for DVB-T signals to have 2 audio channels -- or is this not done for bandwidth reasons? I'll check the code on Monday to see how on earth that happened! Almost certainly a case statement gong wrong and giving it both 2 and 1 channels I suspect... Pesky breaks, always going missing at the worst time... Thanks, -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Some changes to the TV-Anytime data
On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 11:39 +0100, Ben Metcalfe wrote: So here's a thought : Supposing each broadcast program is subtitled - most are, to meet disability guidelines for deaf viewers. How about publishing the subtitle files as part of backstage, in W3C TT format (maybe in the final draft format until the complete spec is ratified). Then in the TV data feeds, publish a linkage to the subtitle file. So, not actually embedded in the TV data feeds, but as a separate dataset. Now we'd have something similar to the google video and Blinkx text searches. This is certainly an interest idea, and ties in with other projects we are looking at within the BBC. I think there are issues with the way the data is stored that might make this tricky to sort out, but I will certainly look into it. If there aren't permissioning problems, or the permissioning problems can be worked around by a statement (you must only store this data on servers in the UK, and cannot give this data to people outside the UK, for example), simply giving permission without giving data would be useful -- the data can be culled from the broadcast programme easily enough. (Of course, having it on the web would be more useful -- that way it can be searched before the programme first airs.) -=- James Mastros - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
