MetaBroadcast Blog

We’re pleased to announce that the source code for URIplay is now available under the Apache 2.0 License. URIplay is an open media metadata aggregator about which we’ve written on this blog previously.

The BBC have provided loads of support for the URIplay project, and own copyright to much of the code. The team over at RAD Labs have worked hard to ensure that BBC code can be released this way. You can read more on the RAD Labs blog.

MetaBroadcast is actively developing URIplay to support a number of commercial projects. Our latest (near-daily…) updates will remain licensed under Apache 2.0, with the goal of encouraging a community of contributors.

Check out the source over on the URIplay Google Code project for today’s latest revision, and send questions our way. We’d love to hear from developers and publishers.

Today we are very excited to announce the first public release of URIplay, an open media metadata aggregator. A huge range of great audio and video content is now available online, but the content is fragmented across many different sites and platforms, with little connection between one siloed system and the next. We believe in the generative power of the web, we believe in linked data, and we want to see many ways to browse a full range of media content.

Enter URIplay, which aims to provide a single interface to metadata about audio and video content, built through a community effort. It makes light work of integrating content from a range of sources. Some cool things that you can do with today’s release:

• Access podcasts and YouTube data through the same interface—integrate only once for two sources, with more sources to follow.
• Read data using standard RSS or RDF libraries.
• Get context from Wikipedia, for example a list of everything Aaron Sorkin has made.
• Look items up via their iMDB links (using info from Wikipedia and DBpedia).
• Include data from the live web, via Twitter search. For example, what’s hot on YouTube?
• Subscribe to links in iTunes (e.g., this aggregate podcast made from an OPML file of interesting stuff) and in Miro (e.g., this list of the latest YouTube videos discussed on Twitter—paste it into Miro’s box titled ‘Add Channel’).
• Follow links to other sources of data, such as MOAT and Freebase.
• Diagnose the reasons for any latency—we return a breakdown of what we were doing while your app was waiting.

The work for this release has been completed by the MetaBroadcast team, with loads of support from the fine people at BBC RAD Labs. URIplay is a distributed system. The Java URIplay software running at uriplay.org makes calls to other services across the web to compile the necessary data. The BBC has also deployed a URIplay server, which means we can delegate queries regarding bbc.co.uk URIs to them. This launch is just the start of the journey for URIplay. We hope to add much more content over the coming months, find ways to better link disparate datasets, and add more servers. We’re actively seeking further involvement from developers and content publishers. Try our interactive demo at http://uriplay.org/, and join us on our Google Group or at Google Code. Finally, we’ll be releasing the full source code soon, under a permissive open source licence.

UPDATE: The code is now available, over on Google Code

The Guardian published a nice piece yesterday about our prototyping with BBC RAD Labs.

We’re really excited about this work because it has given us a the chance to develop our ideas around social navigation of media content, and aggregation of metadata from several providers. MetaBroadcast’s role on this project was to develop much of the web social media guide, and the backend metadata aggregator.

The project gave us a great opportunity to further develop the URIplay software and ontology. During March we’re planning to release the URIplay source code, and a public URIplay API for developers, in collaboration with the BBC.

If you’re interested, you’ll find a discussion of the details over on our Google Group.

Hi, my name is Chris Jackson. I’m one of the founders of MetaBroadcast, a start-up based in London.

As our name implies, MetaBroadcast makes software for manipulating audio and video metadata. We’re doing this because we’re passionate about helping people to easily find the best audio and video. There’s so much amazing material out there these days, from films to TV to shorter content, but it can be difficult to find the best stuff for you.

For just over a year we’ve been working with the BBC on a couple of innovative projects:

• URIplay, a community effort to improve the quality of metadata.
• Social Media Guide, an internal BBC prototype exploring ways of navigating and finding content.

At the moment we’re working on releasing this work as a mix of open source code, public APIs, and a consumer product.

We plan to use this blog to share and discuss a mixture of observations from our engineering and product design work. Let the fun begin!