MetaBroadcast Blog

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.

After Chris presented at BarCamp London 6, a serious URIplay discussion started on Twitter, which you can easily follow. His presentation is on Prezi, and a few photos are available on Flickr.

Last week, Rob spoke at a looong conference (and useful, we hope to learn from his belated account) and now it’s our turn again to announce the next event: Social Camp London, we’ll be there on Saturday. Drop a comment/ twitter/ etc. if you’d like to meet.

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.

finishing touches on the presentation, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

Come see the URIplay presentation at BarCamp London 6. In between 15:00 and 15:30 in the main hall (King’s Cross), Chris will tell you all about the video navigation of the future, involving metadata aggregation, data in media RSS RDF, and the support of BBC RAD Labs in launching the open source code and using the URIplay service in their prototypes.

Cross-posted on Mirona’s personal blog.

Update: The presentation is available over on prezi

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!