MetaBroadcast Blog

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.

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!