Amazing. The BBC has put iPlayer on the iPhone/iPod touch and, for me, it's transformational. Crystal clear, good sound, lovely. Kudos all round. Not quite as useable as YouTube, in that it doesn't have its own menu-screen app yet, but with the SDK in the pipeline that can't be far away. For me, it's more important than iPlayer on a desktop. It's the New Broadcast Paradigm, people - WiFi plus portable device. Let a million TV sets bloom.
Shane Richmond asked me to do an imagined post from 2020 on his Telegraph blog, and here it is:
The last professional journalist retired in 2017, following the completion of the Library of Congress YakYak project, which enabled the semantic tagging of every utterance by every public official in the United States and Europe. The Great Newspaper Crash of 2010 led to mass redundancies amongst journalists, with many of them forced to follow the path trodden by rock musicians in the previous decade - live performance.
Just a bit of fun, you understand....
Absolutely fascinating interview with Ashley Highfield on Groklaw. Fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not least for the detailed insight into the thinking the BBC has to go through, but I found this particularly apposite:
Ashley Highfield: Well, I mean, first of all, let me just address that point of the situation we are in at the moment is because of DRM. The situation we are in at the moment is one where the UK -- I think, pretty much, uniquely -- has almost all of the content, the television content, that is consumed in the UK from all of the major broadcasters and certainly all the main public-service broadcasters -- the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 -- all available, for a period, free at the point of consumption, over IP.
Now, *that* has required a very long-term negotiation with the rights holders who up until two or three years ago were in a position of just simply not allowing any of their content, apart from very short clips, to be made available over IP. So this is something that we have taken the industry through the trade body for rights holders in the UK called PACT, P.A.C.T. -- we have taken them on this journey from no content being made available apart from clips to one where not just us now, but all the broadcasters, public-service broadcasters in the UK, are able to offer their television programs for a period of time free over the Internet.
And the way we've done that is by managing to assure the rights holders that their content will not easily be distributed beyond the UK where they have very important and for them, lucrative secondary rights windows. Now, that has required us to demonstrate a robust use of digital rights management. That's where we are.
And so where we are is a dramatically improved position from where we were two or three years ago when there was no content available -- to where we are now, where all of the broadcasters in the UK accounting for 80% of share of television have got their content up on the internet.
Where we want to get to is a much more flexible world where the content would be free of DRM. Now, that as an outcome would be of benefit for the audience, would be of benefit for the BBC. We've got to find ways in which that would not harm the rights holders' business. And that really is, I suppose, a challenge, and it's a challenge for all of us to work together on.
I still think the BBC's locked into a technology position that is going to get obsolete more rapidly than they anticipate, but I think Highfield should be applauded for showing transparency and for responding to what happened on the BBC blog - according to Highfield's own post, it was actually someone in the Comments who suggested he give an interview to Groklaw. Trebles all round.
Marc Andreessen's put together a helpful little screencast on the Open Social API, particularly in the context of Ning:
Find more screencasts like this on Ning Network Creators
All very cool and all very useful. One question I have is around my lingering obsession with single sign-on. Is this a step towards single sign-on? Could someone build an app that signs me into, say, LinkedIn with my TypeKey?