Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus might be a good name for a band.

I found this video of Clay Shirky at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco via Warren Ellis. It is 15 minutes long, and the territory covered includes…

• The critical technology for the early phase of the industrial revolution was gin.
• The TV sitcom is the today’s gin. The new social lubricant. The heatsink for the cognitive surplus.
• “Where do people find the time?”
• Wikipedia has taken roughly 100 millions hours of culumative effort so far.
• Americans watch 200 billion hours of TV between them per year.
• “It’s better to do something than to do nothing”
• Even lolcats are an invitation to participation “if you have some sans serif fonts … you can play this game too”
• Media is becoming less about just consumption and more about consumption + production + sharing.
• “This isn’t the sort of thing that society grows out of, it’s the sort of thing that society grows in to.”
• Anecdote: a four year old searching behind a TV, looking for the mouse
• “A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken”
• “Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for“

There’s a transcript of the speech on Clay’s blog. If you’re not into video, go and read that instead.

Mark Morford discusses Clay’s speech on SF Gate. He’s critical about the potential of participatory media for art, creativity and independent thought, saying

if social networking is the future of creativity, the future is bland indeed.

I think he’s missing the point. Yes for sanity’s sake, let’s do more than networking with our surplus. Of course. Let’s make amazing things. Even (gasp) more amazing than Wikipedia. I’m increasingly seeing social networking tools as a radar which helps me (to reiterate those three key points from Shirky’s speech) consume, produce and share. In themselves, those tools are indeed faddish (Twitter is still hot. The love affair with Facebook has come and gone for many people) but the underlying reasons for networking (whether physical or online) remain. Someone’s social network shouldn’t be confused with a tool which helps them maintain and extend that network online. These tools are often (if they want to be successful) a means to an end.

Mark Morford is also concerned about the danger of ‘groupthink’ in collaborative projects:

Wikipedia’s unusual success aside, few things are worse in this human world than creation by committee, by crowd and consumer and the masses. Few things destroy true vision and the integrity of a unique idea more than bowing to the forces of groupthink.

At first glance, that does seem to be a valid challenge. How often do digital-era collaborative social surplus energy projects ever actually feel like committees though? Aren’t they more like communities? Flexible to the point of being fickle perhaps, but not bowing to any (traditional) pecking order other than a very fluid meritocracy which respects contribution over seniority. There’s a creative advantage to projects which use the cognitive surplus of people outside their salaried day-jobs which may make them immune to the influence of the sort of groupthink which Morford has no doubt endured in the real world. Since the participants’ investment in spare time projects is very portable, there’s little danger of them remaining involved in a bland, tired dead-horse project when they can hang out with creative, passionate people doing something authentic in the virtual team next-door.

And let’s not confuse the size of the potential pool of participants with some sort of “how on earth can we scale a team to that many people?” problem. If he wants virtual teams working online with creative integrity, we don’t have to wait; there’s no shortage of them today. The creative energy of the world doesn’t have to be scaled horizontally to include the masses. It might stack. The next Wikipedia is no doubt already already happening, and it might be quite a lot smaller. The good thing is that it won’t be alone.

I’ve been hunting for a Mac equivalent to Windows Live Writer. Here’s my personal checklist/wishlist of what an offline blogging tool should do.

+ = yes
- = no (or if it’s there, I couldn’t find it)
[1] = ⌘+U (or Shift+⌘+U to use clipboard text and bypass the dialog)
[2] = ⌥+⌘+A (or Shift+⌘+A to use clipboard text and bypass the dialog)
[3] = Shift+⌘+L
[4] = Ctrl+K
[f] = with a little bit of fiddling
[e] = via HTML embed codes
[!] = really stupidly wonderfully easy
[w] = only in WYSIWYG mode, for some reason
[u] = Generally not too bad, but <span style=”font-style: italic;”> rather than <em>? Urgh.

Windows Live Writer is by far the best blogging tool I’ve ever used, but sadly it’s Windows only. It’s the benchmark by which I’m judging the others, but it would get big additional bonus points (if points were being given) for making it stupidly, wonderfully easy to insert Flickr photos and YouTube videos, without even needing to paste any HTML. Pasting in the URL for a Flickr photo / YouTube video into the editor is enough to make it do the right thing, which is a wonderful timesaving feature. The web preview auto-detects what your blog looks like, which makes an accurate preview trivially easy too.

Qumana is free, but a bit ‘monetized’ (there’s an Insert Ad button I have no interest in using, and the website says things like “Make money from your blog content by inserting the ads of your choice…”) but it’s nice enough. Each post automatically includes a “Powered by Qumana” link, which can be deleted by hand. The biggest problem with it is that alt+left/right doesn’t do anything, and instead you have to use ⌘+left/right to jump left/right by one word which is just wrong (or at least grossly inconsistent with every other Mac app I’ve ever used). Given my desire to use the keyboard for just about everything I do, this alone is a showstopper.

Ecto costs $17.95. Flickr support comes via a plugin, but sadly the output doesn’t follow the Flickr terms of service (the image should link to the photo page, but doesn’t until you add the link yourself). Rich text editing is nice though.

MarsEdit costs $29.95. It’s Flickr tab makes it very easy to add your own photos. No rich text editing but does have nice support for macros. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with some HTML, it’s great.

Depending on whether you like hacking HTML or really need a rich text editor, you’ll probably prefer MarsEdit or Ecto respectively. I’m enjoying MarsEdit enough to stick with it for now. I still have yet to find anything quite as nice as Windows Live Writer on the Mac though. Have I missed any?

Before there were blogjects, there were blobjects. In the closing speech at SIGGRAPH 2004, Bruce Sterling started by talking about blobjects, or blob-shaped consumer items.

Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought to the consumer shelf.

Sterling goes on (via ‘gizmos’, the current state of the art) to introduce spime.

At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

This subject is covered more completely in his Shaping Things book, which is reviewed here by Cory Doctorow. Cory handily sums up Spime thus:

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities

Meanwhile, to fill the gap between blobjects and spime, we have blogjects. Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ introduces Blogjects, describing them as an “early ancestor” to spime. While spime is still speculative, Bleecker says

I can make Blogjects now because the semantics are immediately legible — objects, that blog. Tonight, I can go into my laboratory and begin to experiment with what a world might be like in which I co-occupy space with objects that blog.

Bleecker says there are three key characteristics of a blogject:

• Blogjects track and trace where they are and where they’ve been;
• Blogjects have self-contained (embedded) histories of their encounters and experiences
• Blogjects always have some form of agency — they can foment action and participate; they have an assertive voice within the social web.

The last point is important, and while he’s not expecting them to pass the Turing test, they need to interact. Good bloggers don’t ignore their comments; thats where most of the fun happens. In the same way, blogjects participate and converse both between themselves and with us.

The significance of the Internet of Things is not at all about instrumented machine-to-machine communication, or sensors that spew reams of data credit card transactions, or quantities of water flows, or records of how many vehicles passed a particular checkpoint along a highway. Those sensor-based things are lifeless, asocial recording instruments when placed alongside of the Blogject. … The social and political import of the Internet of Things is that things can now participate in the conversations that were previously off-limits to Things. … Things, once plugged into the Internet, will become agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on” matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal
matters.

If a blogject is an object that blogs, a tweetject is clearly an object that tweets (an intransitive verb: the act of using Twitter).

There are already lots of examples of objects using Twitter to interact with people, usually to report about the state of things in a convenient form. Botanicalls is an interesting project, aimed at “enhancing person-plant communication” using tools that can be used by people as well as plants. As a result, Pothos is a plant that knows when it needs watering (learn how to make your own).

Gareth Jones wrote about getting his laptop to tweet when Bluetooth devices come in and out of range. For a while that script was updating as gareth_laptop on Twitter. As long as some relevant mobile phones and laptops have Bluetooth enabled, there are some useful and interesting elements of personal presence detection here. Who is nearby? With some additional second-order agents running to work out what these devices are and what they mean (is Gareth at home? If he’s at work, who is nearby?).

Andy Stanford-Clark has an impressively complex home automation setup in his house on the Isle of Wight. It’s been online for a few years already, but has more recently been exposed via Twitter as andy_house. (Although Kelly raises bots as one of her Twitter pet peeves, she makes an exception for Andy’s house.) Andy also Twitter-enabled the Red Jet ferries which go to and from the Isle of Wight, where he lives.

There are many more tweetjects out there too.

There have been lots of weather bots on Twitter for a long time. Here’s one for Brighton and here are links to many more. Radio 1 is tweeting the playlist and summary information about listeners’ text messages. Mario Menti set up a lot more BBC bots too. Tom Morris hooked the various London tube lines up to Twitter. The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank tweets what it’s pointing at (and it’s not alone). Tower Bridge lets us know when it’s opening and closing (and for what). The Heavens Above user updates Londoners with the times and directions of Iridium flares and International Space Station flybys over their city.

There are many more, and lots more will no doubt be added this year. Currently, most Twitter bots are one-directional. Things will get really interesting when more of them converse as well as simply report.

Further reading:

• In this post I’ve already linked to both Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling (and the 2004 SIGGRAPH speech), as well as Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ essay.
• Everyware by Adam Greenfield is relevant, though it deals mainly with the near-term. Andy Piper has a review which you might find helpful.
• OpenSpime is a project to enable “individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors”. Read Tish Shute’s introduction on UgoTrade too.

I’m presenting at the Meeting Professionals International event in London in April: the Europeans Meetings and Events Conference. (Yes, the meta-ness of speaking at a conference about conferences is not lost on me).

I was invited to do something on Web 2.0 and ‘where is technology headed’. After some thought, I’ve written up some notes about social networking, user generated content and virtual worlds in relation to presentations, conferences and events. Inevitably, I ended up thinking mainly about the Backchannel, in its many current forms. Much of that is catching up with what’s been going on in the past few years.

Photo of the Academy Workshop at the Annenberg Center for Communications at the Unversity of Southern California by Justin

Some of this goes back a long way. In 2003 the New York Times quoted a number of internet thought-leaders…

Some people, of course, ignore speakers entirely by surfing the Web or checking their e-mail — a practice that has led some lecturers to plead for connectionless auditoriums or bans on laptop use. But others are genuinely
interested in a lecturer’s topic and want to talk concurrently about what is being said. They may also like to pass around links to Web sites that relate to, and may refute, a speaker’s point. For them, wireless technology allows a back channel of communication, a second track that reveals their thoughts and feedback and records it all for future reference.

“We’re just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes,” said Mr. [Cory] Doctorow, who takes notes and posts them to his Weblog, or blog, during conferences, enabling people to follow the
speaker and Mr. Doctorow’s take on the speaker at the same time.

“To me, it’s a little irritating, frankly,” said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Ludicorp, a company that is developing [Game] Neverending, a multiplayer online game [which would go on to become Flickr]“

Joi Ito: ”I want to make something that I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences,” he said. He describes it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about the significance of the back channel. From the chat
room, he said, ‘”you could send something like, ‘Stop pontificating.’”

That NYT piece also quoted Clay Shirky on in-room chat as a social tool. He has a great paper on the subject on OpenP2P.com from December 2002:

“once the meeting got rolling, the chat room became an invaluable tool”

“Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.” … “The chat room undid these effects”

One of the interesting things about Clay Shirky’s work on in-meeting chat was the large shared screen showing the chat to everyone (in addition to the personal window into the chat.) Here we see that happening at a Le Blogs 2.0 panel…

Photo of on-screen backchannel at Les Blogs 2.0 by Bjoern.

Turning the backchannel from a private thing into a public part of the event is something Cote thought about when blogging about the use of Twitter at conference:

“Things get fascinating when people project that backchannel in a public place,if not right behind the speaker. The idea is to weave the “front-channel” and backchannel together as needed. In doing so, the hope is to add even more value to the talk and conference. This kind of thing freaks the crap out of some (most?) presenters, while others are neutral, and some like it.”

Elizabeth Lane Lawley describes herself as a Backchannel Queen:

“I like the IRC banter—and not just for its entertainment value. I find that particularly when a presentation might be rough, or something I’ve heard before, that the feedback loop provided by the other participants, snarky or
not, often helps me see the content in a new light, and immediately increases the value I take out of the experience.”

Teachers are getting into backchannels too:

“The backchannel has really become my favorite tool of choice when I’m presenting. I’ve purchased an inexpensive ad-free chat room at Chatzy that is password protected and use it for my backchannels when I present. I like to find two people to help: one to serve as Google Jockey (a/k/a Link dropper) and another to serve as a moderator — posing questions to me”

All of which brings us nicely up to date. I won’t be quoting all of that in the talk, but it’s now safely in my head. For the glimpse into the future, I’ll be bringing in virtual worlds and and their use in the backchannel (and more) too, but that’s a conversation for another post.

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).

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section today features an updated version of my “X is the new Y” diagram. [Update: it's actually the front page feature of the Ideas section. Thanks to Kelly for the picture...]

Originally inspired by the LeisureArts chart from 2005, I decided to bring the idea up to date in September. Essentially, it’s a few pages of results from a Google search for “* is the new *” (and “* are the new *”). For this latest version I also added “+2007″ to the search term, so it picks up things that happened (or were at least written about) in 2007. I then ran the results through some basic text processing. “x is the new y” became “x -> y”. This happens to be the required syntax for Graphviz, which then automatically drew the directed graphs for me.

(bigger version)

The search was a bit of a manual process, and I ended up doing additional searches in order to flesh out the diagram (oh.. pirates are the new ninjas.. I wonder what are the new pirates… I’ll search for “* are the new pirates”).

All of this is very similar to my first pass at this idea in September except this latest version, being 2007 specific, misses out more general links and includes culturally specific recent references such as the werewolves -> vampires -> zombies -> pirates -> ninjas chain (which I’m really happy about) as well as the iPhone and a few other recent highlights of this year.

Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe wrote a thoughtful piece about it.

If you want to know what happened in 2007, you could do worse than noting what it was that people decided was the new black, or the new oil, or the new golf.

…

Because it is so ubiquitous and so adaptable, because it so easily captures the human mind’s penchant for analogies, and because it is constantly rendering itself obsolete (what is the new iPhone? who is the new Amy Winehouse?), this off-the-shelf rhetorical device makes an ideal marker of a year’s conversational currents. The charts here are an unsystematic attempt, culled from Web searches, to trace the patterns that emerge.

…

Eventually, sapped by this sort of subversion, the phrase might have to give way to another equally handy one. What the new “new black” would be remains anyone’s guess.

The Boston Globe - ‘The new, new things of 2007′ - December 30, 2007

The team at the Globe took my ugly diagrams, which looked like this…

…and turned them into something beautiful, like this…

If you don’t happen to get the dead-tree version, you can read the article on the Boston Globe site.

Flickr is great, isn’t it? Last week, they introduced in–browser photo editing (via Picnik), and this Thursday they added stats.  If you’re a Pro user, go and activate stats for your account. I think you’ll like it.

By digging around my stats, I now know that this generated ‘fractal flame’ picture (generated using Apophysis) appears on the first page of the results for a Yahoo image search for ‘flame’.

And it seems to be getting (relatively) more popular as a result.

Some other interesting (to me) facts:

• Only 3% of my Flickr traffic comes from my blog (I was expecting that to be higher)
• 19% comes from Google, 10% from Yahoo (a total of 30% from search engines) while 41% of traffic comes from within Flickr itself.

What fun.

I blog, but I tend not to call myself a ‘blogger’ these days. On my twitter profile, and indeed on an early batch my Moo cards, it used to say “Metaverse Evangelist | Blogger | Geek”, but more recently I’ve been dropping the ‘blogger’ bit, since I don’t think it defines me.

I mentioned this to Andy Piper a while ago, and when he later wrote up some thoughts about needing a new strapline. He and James ended coming up with “social bridgebuilder“ between them, which I really like, and describes Andy very well. That’s what he does. He happens to blog in order to share with a wide audience what he’s up to, but if were to describe Andy to someone, I have plenty of phrases like that to use before I’d start defining him as a blogger.

Sacha Chua (whose forthcoming book is no doubt going to convert me to emacs at some point) recently explained that she was between job titles. I like the fact that she describes herself as “tech evangelist, storyteller, geek”, which sums her up nicely. Again, she’s a blogger, but she’s not primarily a blogger.

I think the term ‘blogger’ will gradually fall into disuse. After all, we don’t call someone a “social networker” for having a Facebook profile do we?

Actually, I notice that Hugh MacLeod (the cartoonist) was described yesterday by Bobbie Johnson (the technology correspondent and, incidentally, the newest member of the Speechification team) in a piece in the Guardian as “probably the most popular Facebook user - and by extension the biggest social networker - in Britain”. Hugh retorts on Twitter that “Biggest Blogger” sounds a lot better than “Biggest Social Networker”. While I think he’s right that it sounds better, “blogger” still isn’t much more helpful. Perhaps it is different for Hugh, since he’s a professional blogger, after all, but what I know and love him for is his work as a cartoonist, and lending his online credibility and marketing cluefullness to companies like Stormhoek and Microsoft.

Let’s take another example. Cory Doctorow. He co-writes Boing Boing, one of the the most popular blogs in the world, but he’s also a lot of other things besides. In fact, Cory describes himself as “an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person”, but I found that a Google search for “Cory Doctorow is a” reveals that he’s also describes like this:

• Cory Doctorow is a digital activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing (tagline used in a piece he recently wrote for the Guardian)
• Cory Doctorow is a busy guy. Between co-editing the popular Weblog Boing Boing and working as the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier … (Second Life Herald interview)
• As an evangelist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cory Doctorow is a familiar voice… (O’Reilly Network interview)

All of these suggest that he’s (rightly) known for more than his blog, and I’d almost consider it a disservice to describe him just as a blogger because that happens to be the way he shares his interests and passions.

I enjoy blogging, but I don’t want to be defined by the term. People who communicate on BBSes, forums or IRC have never defined themselves by their tools of communication, have they? Ok, some might have been SysOps, moderators or IRC operators respectively, but probably only while they were online. Increasingly, I’m starting to believe that being a ‘blogger’ today might be a bit like being a ‘telephoner’ in years gone by.

It’s something I do, rather than who I am.

[Hugh MacLeod photo credit: David Sifry. I took the one of Cory myself]

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, if they’re simultaneously being broadcast on TV. This would include the live stream of News 24. I think.
• (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.

If you really know me, you know two fact about me:

1. I’m quite tall. (at 6′ 4½”)
2. I don’t have a TV license (though I do have a TV, connected to a Wii and a Mac Mini)

The first fact means I don’t mind standing near the back of gigs. The second fact means that my entertainment tends to be digital. I rent and buy DVDs, I download and stream the odd thing here and there, and I was very pleased when the BBC and ITV between them offered video streams of every England matches during the last World Cup.

So, as you may have guessed, I was rather excited when the BBC first started talking about what is now their iPlayer. Sadly, for many of the same reasons as Kyb (and many other people) I was also disappointed with it. Employing DRM, only working on Internet Explorer, only working on Windows, pretty-but-difficult interface, there was lots about it not to like.

Well, there have been some updates today, and things are (a little bit) better.

From the messageboard:

From today we are pleased to announce that streaming is now available on BBC iPlayer. This means that Windows, Mac and Linux users can stream programmes on iPlayer as long as their computer has the latest version of Flash. Another change is that you do not have to register or sign in any more to download programmes, and Windows XP and Vista users will have an improved version of Download Manager (formerly the Library) available to them.

I like:

• The fact that there’s now the ability to stream content thanks to a Flash player. Handy for me, since it works in Firefox (on a Mac, no less) meaning I can watch it on my TV.
• The fact that I don’t have to log in to use it. It just works.
• I like the fact that I don’t even need a TV licence to use it.

I dislike:

• The steaming quality is a bit mixed. Have I Got News for You was ok. The audio for Top Gear was dreadful.
• The fact that many of the programmes are still only available for download, not for streaming. And that of course means I’d still need to be using Windows.

At least for now. Back in October, Ashley Highfield (BBC Director of Future Media and Technology) said

“We need to get the streaming service up and look at the ratio of consumption between the services and then we need to look long and hard at whether we build a download service for Mac and Linux.”

For now, I’m using the iPlayer to stream stuff (and hope other Mac users and Linux users will be using it too), but I’m not holding my breath. For some more background and discussion on the DRM issues, see this excellent post from Andrew Bowden.

Come on BBC. You can do this properly.

The other change that happened today was that ‘Listen Again’ audio on demand service has also all gone black-and-pink, and rebranded itself ‘iPlayer’.

Here’s their explanation, which says we should “watch out for further changes over the coming months”. That’s a relief.