Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Licensed with a Licence

Posted by Roo - 29/11/08 at 12:11:00 am

I’m hoping the title will help me remember: License, verb. Licence, noun.

Back in December, I explained why I didn’t have a TV licence, and hadn’t for many years. I also said

“As the BBC (hopefully) continues to open up ways of me watching content on my terms, of course I’m open minded…”

That post gathered a lot of interesting discussion and debate, and continues to attract comments.

Swamp TV shared under a CC licence by James Good on Flickr

I now have a TV licence.

It’s fair to say that things have changed since December. I now work for the BBC, for one thing. In Telvision Centre, no less. I didn’t get the licence just because I work there though. I think there’s room at the BBC for digital, online types who don’t watch any live TV. I actually think the BBC could do with more people who inhabit and understand the web. The point is that I’d changed my whole attitude to TV. I want to watch it, and watch more of it, and the BBC is (sycophantic as it may sound) getting better at letting me watch it in the way I want to.

It took several months of me falling in love with television, but also for the BBC to improve its online offering, to make up my mind. I can now watch BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC News, BBC Parliament and even CBBC and CBeebies (though I’m not exactly in the target demographic for those last two) live, on the web, all for 38p per day. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally decided it’s worth it.

I wish that Channel 4 would improve their online offering. I’m happy to watch adverts (I quite like adverts For a long time it’s been part of the appeal of going to the cinema, being somewhat of a novelty to see what amazing thing Sony or Honda will do next) but I’m rather annoyed at not being able to use 4OD catchup service on my Mac though, let along watch Channel 4 live on the web. So at least I can watch Channel 4, and other channels, through the TV now.

Of course, getting properly into television means I want to watch more of all television, not just BBC content and DVDs. Strange and ironic that part of the reason I’m getting a license is to allow me to watch The Other Side(s), but it’s true.

I think our TV (a nice big flat screen job) even has a freeview receiver, but since it’s never been tuned in to the ariel since we bought it. It’s so far only been used for the Wii, Xbox 360 and Mac.

I now have to figure out how to use these additional features of this mysterious device.

Social Telly – a roundup of social viewing stuff

Posted by Roo - 25/11/08 at 10:11:22 pm

Television has always been a social thing. Whether it’s because you’re watching it with family and friends at home, watching football in the pub, chatting at school or work with friends about that programme that you all love the night before, television is about much more than a broadcast.

During the recent US election, I was being rather traditional, tucked up in bed listening to Radio 4 (quite different from my approach in the 2005 UK general election, when Nick and I were even live-blogging the action). While I was being sleepy and passive this year, my friend Jo was being social online. Here’s what her screen looked like, complete with live-streaming BBC News, IM chat and Twitter.

I’ve been building this list for ages, but it’s finally time for a roundup of social viewing tools. Here are some examples of how the web is being used to make different sorts of conversations possible around television:

Curation and communities

• There are a few blogs about television. Watchification is “selecting the really good stuff from the BBC iPlayer…” and other sources. (Disclaimer: I’m the tech geek behind the curtains at Watchification). Curation is interesting. By highlighting Twitter, Delicious and Flickr content, the tag pages are getting (IMHO) more useful too.

• Smashing Telly is “a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web”. Like Watchification, it’s an example of comments around curated programmes rather than live chat.

Social recommendations

• I keep hearing people asking ‘what’s the last.fm of television?’ Dan recently sent me an invite to Boxee, which apparently
  

  “gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.”

  I’ve only just started using it, and although it seems far from perfect it is only an alpha at this stage. The integration with other platforms, the desktop app and the last.fm-like scrobbling looks interesting.

• TIOTI has been around for a bit longer than Boxee. It invites you to:
  

  Find your favorite TV shows and brand new ones you’ll love, Share shows you like with your friends and see what they are watching, Download or stream TV shows from dozens of places online, Get involved and post your thoughts, improve our guide or add pics and vids.

Annotations

• YouTube started offering video annotations after Google acquired Omnisio but only (so far) gives the video uploader a way to add annotations to the video, so it’s not (yet?) a social annotation tool.
• Viddler, on the other hand, offer time-stamped comments and tagging, which are displayed along the video timeline and (by default) pop up at the appropriate time.

Playing the backchannel

• CurrentTV recently partnered with Twitter to display relevant Twitter updates live on-screen. Discuss the presidential debates while watching it (using Twitter tags) and have your comment displayed on TV.

• MTV’s Backchannel takes a different approach to annotating episodes of The Hills, turning the process of ‘tagging’ and ‘clicking’, to endorse a tag, into a game. Playing Backchannel won’t (as far as I can tell) stream the show to you, you just play in the browser while you’re watching the show at the same time.

Live chat

• When I think of live chat around TV, I think of Joost. Joost’s ‘channel chat’ has been overhauled a couple of times since the early days (I seem to remember it being initially based on IRC, then in 2007 they announced a partnership with Meebo) and more recently it seems to have gone away completely since they moved to Flash (or am I missing it?).

• BanterTV combines iPlayer simulcast embeds with real-time chat.

• The Electric Sheep Company’s WebFlock provides features for social viewing including
  

  a visually immersive environment for social interaction, media consumption and game play

• Lycos Cinema is “is Synchronized Movie Watching” (complete with a frankly horrible introductory video) and invites you to
  

  Watch thousands of movies and tv shows with your friends and chat live while you watch.

• What about the BBC? Anthony Rose recently announced some prototype work with Microsoft, in which iPlayer was hooked up to Windows Live Mesh. This was announced recently at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference and blogged in more detail by Microsoft’s Marc Holmes. Strategic, or experiment? You decide.

Of all of them, I find the asychronous chat using comments in the timeline on Viddler, and the game-playing elements of MTV’s Backchannel to be the most interesting. There must be lots of examples I’ve missed, but it’s an area I’ll continue to watch with interest.

Behind the scenes at the One Show – take 2

Posted by Roo - 06/11/08 at 01:11:53 am

Tonight I sat in an edit suite in Broadcast Centre and watched the One Show being put together, live and on-the-fly. Writing up my notes on the way home, especially after a beer, I’m afraid I am liable to gush.

As I mentioned when I visited the studio last week, it’s a half-hour show, and the preparation beforehand is pretty intense. Tonight: Sir David Attenborough. In the edit suite in the minutes before the show does live there are regular update on how many minutes to go. As the news finishes the audio is turned up and the edit suite drops into a different gear.

The room is dominated by an impressive control desk facing 38 monitors. One shows the autocue (someone sat just behind me was editing the text on the fly when necessary); another shows graphics (“Viz”), which were overlaid onto the screen, needing to be counted in and out; two monitors showing 4-way split screens (including ‘The Rivals, showing what else is on air right now); another three monitors displaying three possible outside broadcast feeds (not used tonight); four monitors showing taped VT (VT = ‘videotape’, but of course they’re actually spooled from hard disks); five monitors showing the five different cameras in the studio (including a lovely swoopy wide-angle job) and, despite about ten being blank and unused this evening, many more.

The suite is pictured in the photo above (not taken by me. It appears in Ciaran’s recent post on the One Show Backstage blog.

Camera operators are referred to by both their name or their number. So I heard instructions like

• “Four, give me Hardeep”
• “Give me a three-shot, Richard”

and so on.

At one point, 5 minutes before the end of the show, during the pre-filmed VT segment about the Highland Clearances, the editor asked the guy sitting next to him something like “doesn’t McCain have Scottish blood?”. It was a question he couldn’t answer of the top of his head, so he dashed to a computer and brought back a whispered answer to the editor just in time for him to pass his tip on to one of the presenters. Seconds later, as the taped segment comes to an end and the studio is once again live, Adrian Chiles chips in to the conversation with Hardeep, “McCain is of Scots descent…”, to which Hardeep responds to a (IMHO) rather weak joke about oven chips, but never mind. The point is that it went from an idea in the editors head to conversational point in a presenter’s mouth on live TV in the space of a few seconds.

After the show was over, Sir David stuck around for a short interview for the website, based on questions submitted as comments on the blog. He talked about user generated content and spoke charmingly about dragons. A consummate professional, and a lovely man. The video is now online here).

Once again, I feel very glad to be working in television. Especially that weird and relatively small bit of television that handles how we engage people as participants (rather than just viewers) online. Ciaran, and the others behind the scenes at the One Show are carefully giving a very broad audience something more than just 30 minutes of live telly. They’ve providing an opportunity for a conversation.

The episode I watched being made is already online, as is a blog post about the episode, which was being discussed before I was even on the train.

Behind the Scenes at the One Show

Posted by Roo - 29/10/08 at 11:10:07 pm

I was invited to go behind the scenes at The One Show tonight.

Having seen me venture on to the Watchdog set (twice), Ciarán Ryan (content producer at The One Show) recently emailed me to suggest I might want to take a look behind the scenes and watch Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley in action. Like Watchdog, The One Show is broadcast live, but rather than weekly this goes out every week-day evening, 7:00 to 7:30 pm. Because of this daily schedule the show has its own studio on the first floor of White City.

Tonight guests were Ricky Gervais, Hardeep Singh Kohli and Hector the Dalmation.

Live television really is a very special thing. The tension and excitement are palpable because, at least for the studio portions of the show, there are no second chances. My heart rate jumped the moment I stepped into the room and heard “Phones off, everyone!”.

The atmosphere in the studio is helped by having a small crowd of people off-camera, enjoying the show; there’s a healthy collection of crew and staff gathered at the back of the set watching the action. A dozen or so people stand around behind the cameras, staying out of the way and cheerfully enjoying the on-screen proceedings. Aside from weird interlopers like myself, this crowd is made up of the researchers, writers and web team who between them all make the programme happen. For most of them, this daily half-hour is the slot in which the things they’ve been planning and working on crystalise into reality, are captured and broadcast live to the nation. Obviously the VT (video tape) segments of the show are prepared earlier, and (as with Watchdog) while those are being played the atmosphere transforms. It doesn’t relax, it just takes a deep breath and gets ready for the next live chunk. “Ten seconds, everyone!” and we’re back on air.

I had no trouble staying out of the way at the back while enjoying a great view of Ricky and Hardeep chatting with Adrian and Christine on the sofa. It might not surprise to you, but I was struck by how relaxed the hosts and guests seemed about everything. This is live television; aren’t you nervous? Perhaps it’s a gene, some quirk of personality which allows someone not to seize up as soon as a camera points at them, that sets ‘on-screen talent’ apart from the rest of us.

Even Hector the dog looked relaxed. He was supposed to sing along to the One Show theme tune at the end (this being his adorable trait, which reminds me of ‘That’s Life’ and the dog that could say(?) ‘sausages’). Sadly, Hector merely looked confused and issued only a short ‘woof’. Never mind. It’s hard for a Dalmatian to look anything but adorable, and apart from climbing on the sofa (I was mentally telling him off. Down. Bad boy) he was a star.

Meanwhile, Ciarán was very busy back-stage, grabbing pictures of the action his lovely Canon 5D and regularly dashing back to his desk to upload them. Most were candid behind-the-scenes photos for the One Show backstage blog.

He was kind enough to snap one of me backstage as a memory of my visit to share with you.

Photo by Ciarán Ryan. Thanks, Ciarán!

I really enjoyed the evening. What a privilege it is to be invited behind the scenes to see television being made. It gives me a totally different appreciation of the effort and attention to detail involved in making 30 minutes of televised output. Many thanks to Ciarán for inviting me, and to everyone else for putting up with me.

You can watch the episode I saw being made (if you’re in the UK, for the next seven days) here.

On the way out of the studio, I had a quick look at the remarkable edit suite, which boasts 20+ monitors showing each of the cameras, the taped segments, still images, and a live view of what else is being broadcast to the networks, wonderfully labeled ‘Rivals’. I’ve (somehow, wonderfully, excitingly) been invited back in a couple of weeks to watch another episode being made, but this time watching the edit rather than the studio. Geek heaven.

I think I’m hooked. I’m falling in love with television.

Back on the box

Posted by Roo - 20/10/08 at 11:10:19 pm

Thanks again to Nick for grabbing a ‘where’s wally’ shot of my second Watchdog appearance. (Last week’s TV debut, with detailed comments, is here.)

This week, I was invited to sit-there-and-look-busy to fill a space in the Watchdog desks. I’ve done a lot of work with them this week, so it felt quite natural to join them in their office. The computer in front of me was initially switched off, and with not much time to spare before the live broadcast began I made frantic notes and tried to ignore the camera. I turned the desktop PC on during the first pre-taped segment and proceeded to spend a very productive half-hour checking my email, blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the studio. Quite a nice place to hot-desk on a Monday night, really.

I’m on Watchdog

Posted by Roo - 13/10/08 at 11:10:20 pm

I’m feeling ridiculously pleased at having made it onto the set of tonight’s episode of Watchdog. As far as I know, my first ever TV appearance.

(Back left. Looking tall.)

Thanks to Nick for grabbing a screenshot while I was on train home.

Argh. A wasted opportunity for an ARG

Posted by Roo - 06/07/08 at 09:07:25 pm

Considering that season two of Torchwood had an accompanying Alternate Reality Game, I was excited to see what was apparently a mobile phone number prominently featured in the penultimate episode of Dr Who.

It even completely filled the screen for a few moments.

Considering the amount of screen time given to something that was ostensibly Dr Who’s mobile number, it seems more incredible that this wasn’t the beginning of an ARG. It turns out to be one of the telephone numbers reserved by Ofcom for drama purposes.

Bah. What a wasted opportunity. That was a rabbit hole waiting to happen.

BBC + iTunes

Posted by Roo - 21/02/08 at 02:02:26 pm

BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones announced a while ago that he is

“too old to Twitter and too mature for Myspace. Some things are best left to the young”

Now he’s talking about the BBC+iTunes deal, saying that

once you’ve handed over your credit card details, buying a programme from iTunes is an awful lot easier and more reliable than hunting it down on the web and trying to suck it into your computer

which is similarly nonsense. The comment thread is pretty interesting, and gives a sense of how strongly people feel about content they rightly love, and want to consume in a way that makes sense to them. Here are snippets from just the first three responses:

1. gillick says …if you buy a program from iTunes then you will only be able to watch it on Apple approved devices. Whereas you can buy the DVD, rip it and then watch it on any device…
2. Daniel Delahoyde says …yet more evidence of the BBC’s commitment to and promotion of DRM and proprietary media players and formats. … Those who want access to the BBC’s content online should not have to pay Apple for the privilege or have to use a Microsoft operating system and media player to view the programmes they want to see.
3. Ewan says …It’s strange that you refer to being “able to pay £1.89 to download and own a programme”, when ownership implies a degree of control that simply doesn’t exist here … This isn’t ownership, it a limited and controlling lend back of something we already paid for…

I can see why the BBC might want to investigate new revenue streams to support their work. They already sell DVDs, and nobody I know has a problem with that. I love the fact I can buy a DVD and watch it wherever and whenever I want. The reason this move is controversial is that, as outlined in the comments above, it’s providing people with less value, not more. I don’t mind if the BBC charges for alternatives to live broadcast. Give me the choice. Give me a way to buy content I love and I’ll take it, but make it easier, not harder, for me to put it on my choice of computer and device. The first stage will be to drop the fallacy that DRM is going to help.

If you’re new to this argument, you might want to go back to what was being said by Cory Doctorow last year (and be sure to read this amazing discussion which broke out on Euan Semple’s blog).

Watchification

Posted by Roo - 21/02/08 at 12:02:26 am

I’ve been helping out as the ‘chief engineer’ at Speechification for a while, and I’m now proud to be joining Russell and Steve in making Watchification happen too.

The aim of the project is reassuringly simple: in the same way that Speechification curates speech radio from around the world, we want to make it easy for people to find the best bits of TV, both old and new. The iPlayer is great, but there’s so much there. Where do you start? Isn’t it nice when friends suggest stuff you might enjoy? Since word-of-mouth is how I discover all of the television I watch, it’s something I appreciate greatly. So we’re trying to do that. Expect it to grow and change as we get used to doing it, and learn what works. We may have some design improvements coming soon, but more on that later.

With my ‘chief engineer’ hat on, I knocked up a nifty little WordPress hack over the weekend, using the Custom Fields GUI plugin as a starting point. I make it easy for contributors to paste a unique ID from iPlayer or YouTube (or Google Video…) which is then extracted so the blog can automatically build the appropriate embed code for iPlayer, YouTube or Google Video, depending on the video source. Realistically, it’s only a little bit easier than copying and pasting an embed code, but capturing the URL (and the editor, the producer, etc) in metadata allows us to have more fun with the data later too. Here’s what it looks like…

If you’re interested enough in television to want to share your favourite bits of it with the world and would like to become a contributor yourself, let me know (roo at rooreynolds dot com).

Thoughts on TV Licensing

Posted by Roo - 14/12/07 at 09:12:08 pm

I recently wrote about the iPlayer, and made a throwaway comment about not having a TV licence, yet enjoying the ability to finally be able to legally watch TV programmes online, on my Mac. It sparked quite a discussion. Nick Reynolds (no relation) of the BBC kindly pointed out the new licence fee page on the BBC site. I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but the legislation (of which more in a moment) has indeed changed. The page makes a good job of explaining the new situation:

“You need a TV licence to use any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, set-top box, video or DVD recorder, computer or mobile phone to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on TV.”

(This is all only relevant in the UK by the way. Americans *cough*, I mean the 56% of my non-UK visitors (of which only about half are from the US) may feel free to look away now).

I find this interesting. Before 2004, and in older documents, it used to say something more like

A TV Licence provides a legal permission to install or use television receiving equipment in order to receive or record television programme services. ‘Television receiving equipment’ can be a television set, a VCR, a set-top box, a TV-enabled personal computer or any other equipment designed or modified to enable it to receive television programmes.

The change is down to new legislation which came into force on April 1st (honestly) 2004, and was announced in a written ministerial statement by Tessa Jowell on 11th March 2004. More interestingly, the act itself is the Statutory Instrument 2004 No 692. The Communications Act (Television Licensing) Regulations 2004 (which was an update to earlier acts from 1926, 1949 and 2003. Part three, section nine says that “television receiver” means any “apparatus installed or used for the purpose of receiving (whether by means of wireless telegraphy or otherwise) any television programme service, whether or not it is installed or used for any other purpose.”

The thing that broadens it even further is the text in 9.2…

In this regulation, any reference to receiving a television programme service includes a reference to receiving by any means any programme included in that service, where that programme is received at the same time (or virtually the same time) as it is received by members of the public by virtue of its being broadcast or distributed as part of that service.

So when the TV licence talks about using a computer, it no longer only means computers with TV receiving cards in them. Steve Hewlett does a good job of explaining this in a Media FAQ in the Guardian last year.

To cut a very long story short, any device that can receive live TV pictures, whether or not originally designed or intended to do so, must be covered by a licence if you use it for that purpose.

Let’s just take that in for a moment. Watching a live TV broadcast, regardless of whether you do it on your TV, your computer, or even (as Steve points out in that post) your mobile phone, means you must have a TV licence. He goes on to say that

…while the new regulations might have succeeded in redefining the term “television” to mean any device capable of receiving it by any broadcast or quasi-broadcast means, they still define a “television programme service” as essentially a live, real-time broadcast stream…

… while the regulations extend beyond traditional broadcasting to cover internet and mobile live streaming, receiving TV programmes on-demand, or say as part of an internet-based catch-up service, appears not to be covered.

If correct, this would mean if you only watched programmes on demand via new services – such as the BBC’s emerging seven-day catch-up facility, or in any way other than via a live broadcast stream, however delivered, you would not be liable to pay the licence fee even if you used your old-fashioned TV.

All very interesting. So, some observations and questions.

• In the UK, while you (still) don’t need a TV licence to own a TV, you do need a TV licence to watch live broadcasts which originate from the UK, regardless of the equipment used. This would include the live stream of News 24.
• (Currently) I can use iPlayer to watch TV shows without needing a licence, because they’re not being simulcast on the TV. I have not used Channel 4′s 4oD, but I believe the same is true. It’s a download service, not live broadcast, and even the new Flash streaming flavour of iPlayer is video on-demand rather than being “received at the same time (or virtually the same time) as it is received by members of the public by virtue of its being broadcast”. Theoretically, I can continue to watch iPlayer without needing a licence, and only my conscience about supporting the programme makers to trouble me.
• The TV licensing authority can already ask to see my TV, and I can tell them (and eventually show them) that I don’t use it to watch broadcast TV. If I don’t have a licence and I chose not to watch live streamed TV though a browser if it’s offered, will I have to prove that to them too?

Why all this interest in the licence? Well, we got rid of our household TV, video, and PC capture card a few years ago. We’d realised we were watching whatever was on, and not enjoying it any more. It was time to go cold turkey. There was a clearing of the house, and part of the cleansing ritual was to (probably a bit smugly) cancel the licence. If I went through the same process now, I’d probably have kept the licence, because the radio and web content is worth the money, but at the time I didn’t think so.

The thing that really put my off the TV licence was actually the licensing authority themselves. When I cancelled it, and again when we moved house, and again when we bought a TV set (not tuned or even connected to the antenna, but bought in order to more fully enjoy DVDs and the Wii) I was quite disgusted with the regular letters, often very aggressive in tone, demanding we purchase a TV licence, with no expectation that people might not actually watch it. The regular bullying was annoying, and rather hardened my will against the system.

Things are changing. My previous frame of mind was in a previous era, a time in which I wasn’t addicted to the amazing content on Radio 4, and when iPlayer didn’t exist. As the BBC (hopefully) continues to open up ways of me watching content on my terms, of course I’m open minded about paying for services I use. I sometime (rarely) even want to watch live broadcasts, especially things like Wimbledon and the World Cup. What I want is to be able to get content when I want it, and I want to be able to do that on a Mac as well as on Widows.

There’s an interesting loophole at the moment, by which I can watch shows through the on-demand services, as long as I don’t record or watch them from a live broadcast. Personally, I may soon choose to pay for a licence anyway, but I wonder how many people the BBC expects will actually be jumping in the other direction, and cancelling licences so they can use the catch-up services on iPlayer (and 4od) for free.