MetaBroadcast Blog

About a week ago, amplus.tv finally started gaining weight, like babies do, and its family sighed with relief. Gone are the newborn wrinkles, here to stay are defining features. Rather than boring you, like parents do, with every little detail that miraculously improved or stabilized (and you have never even noticed), we give you the highlights of the highlights:

1. Login with twitter is smoother, and amplus.tv will remember you forever—as long as you add moving images to your channel at least once every 60 days (and you don’t log out :)
2. The bookmarklet resides now in the website header, and has become much smoother itself (make sure to delete the old one and grab the new version)
3. Every user has an associated user number that is now published in his/ her channel page, to express our excitement with and gratitude for the early explorers of amplus.tv
4. Every bit of moving image, from any channel, was originally spotted by a first user, and now first spotters are visibly credited for their discovery anywhere the video is displayed
5. RSS feed items now include video descriptions, and link back to their amplus.tv channel, crediting the channel maker wherever the feed items travel

Lots of niceness and shininess, no? Hurry up, give it a go, and let us know how we may help you get more out of it. And check out the community channel in the sidebar of this blog :)

amplus.tv is the simplest, cutest tool for building a channel of moving images online. It now recognizes 7 major sources: blip.tv, Daily Motion, Flickr, Hulu, TED, Vimeo and YouTube. To make a channel, login with Twitter and use the shiny, tiny bookmarklet in Firefox. Then take the RSS feed of any channel into readers or miro (lovely FREE player of video feeds), embed any channel on a website (think blog), and send a twitter message about… any channel :)

Cross-posted on Mirona’s professional blog and her personal blog.

amplus refreshed, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

amplus.tv is the simplest, cutest tool for building a channel of moving images online. It requires a Twitter account to sign-in (we only twitter on your behalf when you ask us to), and it recognises at this point 7 major video sources: blip.tv, Daily Motion, Flickr, Hulu, TED, Vimeo and YouTube. To grab any video from these services you use the tiny bookmarklet you receive after sign-in, working like magic in Firefox. Then you can take the feed of any channel into your reader or miro (lovely FREE player of video feeds), embed any channel on a website (think blog), and send a twitter message about… you guessed it, any channel :)

Fair and square, amplus.tv has seen the limelight nearly one month ago at the Open Video Conference, as a cool app based on URIplay, our open source metadata aggregator. Born on June 19th 2009 after 8 days of labour, and hardly pampered meanwhile (as all hands on deck cuddled the TTT baby), amplus.tv is the prototype of a grander design we’ve got baking. While a bit wobbly, needing a new onesie, and craving even more food than the current 7 video sources, the service is already able to entertain large crowds: there’s you, with family and friends, the readers of you blog, with family and friends, then those who look at your channel page on amplus.tv, with family and friends, those who read a twitter message about your channel, with family and friends, and let’s not forget all those who come about an item off your feed in the reader, shared by… their family and friends :)

Yesss, I’ve insisted on family and friends above for a reason: what can be more entertaining, informative, or inspirational than showing dear ones what moves you instead of just telling them? With amplus.tv it’s easy peasy, so get playing and creating, and tell us what you think :)

Cross-posted on Mirona’s professional blog and her personal blog.

amplus.tv, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

We’re excited that Channel 4’s Test Tube Telly is live! It’s a service that helps you to find and watch great content from Channel 4 and YouTube, with a little help from your Facebook friends. We record a list of shows you watched or liked, and share these among your friends.

The team at MetaBroadcast built the innards of the site, and advised on the UX. Fondly nicknamed TTT, the service uses our own social media libraries, and is built on top of URIplay, our open source metadata aggregator. We have been working on similar applications for two years now, and have extensive experience in binding video metadata and social networks, to the point where we build and iterate this type of service very quickly: a month for core development.

It is great fun working with Tom, Andy, and Halmat at Channel 4 to make Test Tube Telly a juicy experiment. Next step? We can’t wait to enhance the site together with C4, and to release much of the metadata code open source, as part of URIplay.

test tube telly, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Present
Chris is ON AIR at the Media Futures Conference, presenting URIplay and our new baby product, amplus (more of a prototype, really). This will be the second LIVE introduction to a simple online tool for building video channels, and I’m very excited that so many people will understand the value of good metadata by seeing (and hopefully using) a straightforward, playful service built in a bit over a week by a smallish team. More about it in a post to follow :)

Update: Download the presentation [PDF, 4.4 MB]. Better yet, see it right now :)

Future
On Saturday, July 4th Chris will make his annual appearance at Open Tech, looking forward to more examples of open data in theory & practice, as well as inspiring conversations. Do find him.

Chris will also stop by miniSPA on July 15th if all goes well on the product front that day.

On September 4th we will attend dConstruct in Brighton, so do get in touch if you want to have a chat there, we’re terribly social.

Past
We enjoyed Twitter Dev Nest in London (follow @devnest) on June 23rd, though Chris was ever so slightly… knackered, just back from his NY trip. Of all talks we were mainly into apps and thus liked, in this order: scoopler (real-time search engine), selective twitter (for Facebook), friendbinder (all your friends in one place, think Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.), where’s my friend (places twitter friends on the map) and tweetrhapsody (a Twitter love story). There was one more app of interest, but I didn’t catch the name :( Otherwise, good beer and pizza :) We’re looking forward to the next one and hope to present, maybe, in 140 seconds, an idea crafted that very night on the seed of much older experience (2007!).

The first public appearance of amplus happened during the first metadata roundtable at the Open Video Conference in New York on June 19th, to illustrate the benefits of clean metadata for video producers and lovers of moving images. Chris then went on and joined the second metadada roundtable on June 20th, and generally met a lot of cool folks changing the world. You can download the presentation [PDF, 6MB] or see it right now.

Previously, Chris had checked the Twitter Dev Nest upon his arrival in NY on June 17th, had fun, and made a note to stop by the one in London and compare. IN NY he met one of the two developers of Tweetboard, a brilliant service for real conversations over Twitter. I had seen it around the web quite a lot already, so I hope it flourishes.

Part of the research for our future consumer product is assessing the volume and quality of video content available online. One approach is to analyse video sources. A couple of days ago Chris pointed towards the Internet Archive as it has dedicated a whole section to public domain video content. They digitise it in several formats, host it, allow us to play it and offer it for download, as well. Regrettably, one cannot yet embed the videos. Why regrettably? Because they are literally sitting on a pot of gold: over 110,000 videos yet to travel the internets and, consequently, promote this amazing treasure and effort.

For more proof that free quality video is available online, let’s also consider:

• The success of YouTube, especially as a viable channel for small budget short movies and animations (rather than your everyday home video/ copyright-infringing publishing of a recorded TV show);
• More and more old movies, cartoons, documentaries a.s.o. are entering the public domain in one country or other (e.g. Mickey Mouse is still copyrighted in the U.S., but not in Russia);
• BitTorrent client Vuze, formerly Azureus, has topped 10 million unique monthly users this January* and a good number of them must enjoy free videos, legally made available in the Vuze library.

These said, let’s now find out where video content resides online, beyond the usual suspects (YouTube, Daily Motion, MySpace, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc.) and spread the good news—shall we?

consumer product survey

Hello, I’m Mirona Iliescu, the Product Manager of MetaBroadcast’s upcoming consumer product, a movie buff, and a social media butterfly. Within the start-up I do all sorts of stuff, from Design to Marketing to Community, but my focus today is to learn how you find and view videos. I believe that there is a lot of fabulous video on the Internet, and I can’t wait to help everyone discover and share it anytime, anywhere, with as few clicks as possible.

Among the first steps to that bright future is a survey we launched a week ago, hoping to learn how people all over the world share video content at the moment, with whom, and with what results and expectations. It takes 15 minutes to complete and it would help us immensely. Feel free not only to fill it in, but also to forward the link (here’s a convenient one: http://tr.im/maketvfun) to family, friends, and colleagues who love good video.

We won’t share your data or your answers, they’re both for internal use. We will, however, follow up with respondents who welcome it, and, later this year, launch a shorter quantitative research. These efforts are meant to inform a design so far built on intuition and assumptions, and help us move on towards building a prototype of our service. But first things first: be a darling and fill the survey that gets the rollercoaster going :)

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!