A STRUGGLE has begun for the future of television transmission over the internet. Its outcome will dictate whether the net becomes an outlet for programmes and films that cater to a diverse variety of tastes, or merely another source of bland reruns and repackaged shows from mainstream TV.
TV companies are already experimenting with internet broadcasts. Services range from rebroadcasts of old programmes, such as Warner Brothers and AOL鈥檚 In2TV, launching in January, to the Apple iTunes Music Store鈥檚 sale of new episodes from US series such as Lost and Desperate Housewives. With each network hoping to gain a foothold in this potentially lucrative market, expect to see the number of similar commercial ventures soar.
But while the big names of broadcasting prepare to battle it out, a handful of nascent small-scale networks are also getting in on the act. One prototype network, temporarily called DTV, is using the same free-to-download open-source approach to its software that spawned the Linux operating system and the Firefox web browser. Its authors have banded together under the banner of a fledgling non-profit organisation called the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), based in Worcester, Massachusetts. DTV, which is so far available only for the Macintosh OS X and Linux operating systems, integrates a channel guide, video downloader and viewer into one simple, free software package. The source code for the software has also been published, allowing anyone to adapt and improve it.
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PCF has also developed an open-source video publishing tool called Broadcast Machine, which anyone can use to start up a DTV channel of their own. Upload the Broadcast Machine software to your web server, and establishing your own DTV channel and making programmes available to DTV viewers around the world becomes as easy as adding attachments to an email, or so the organisation boasts. 鈥淪omeone whose day-to-day experience of using the internet is limited to email or browsing web pages would still be able to figure it out and get some videos and watch them and come back for more,鈥� says Holmes Wilson, co-founder of PCF.
The organisation鈥檚 vision has drawn financial support from philanthropists Andy and Deborah Rappaport and from Mitch Kapor, the developer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet 鈥� the application that helped launch the PC revolution in the early 1980s. 鈥淭he people who did this are not first and foremost hard-core technologists,鈥� Kapor says. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e designers, users and activists, and I think that鈥檚 given them a certain freedom to work at a higher, more user-oriented design level.鈥�
DTV uses a simplified version of BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer distribution tool. It is a 鈥渟warming鈥� system: every user who downloads a file also passes around parts of that same file to other downloaders. This means that if a file becomes popular, the burden of uploading it is passed from the website distributing it to the downloaders themselves, which avoids the need for the originating website to provide the huge bandwidth that would otherwise be required. Much to movie and television companies鈥� frustration, BitTorrent has no central clearing house and thus no place to police copyright restrictions.
Another fledgling public-access internet TV network is attempting to bridge the gap between the peer-to-peer, open-source vision and the centrally managed and distributed frameworks of today鈥檚 network television. In April, the Open Media Network (OMN) of Sunnyvale, California, released a prototype version of its free-to-download internet TV browser and broadcaster. OMN, the brainchild of former Netscape executive Mike Homer, is slicker than DTV and boasts more professional content, with shows from US public television stations such as KQED in San Francisco and KTCA in Minneapolis/St Paul. Flagship DTV channels, by comparison, tend to be outside-the-mainstream feeds likely to appeal to open-source purists, such as the alternative news programme Democracy Now, and former US vice-president Al Gore鈥檚 youth-oriented cable network Current.
In place of BitTorrent, OMN uses a commercial swarming file-sharing platform developed by Homer and called Kontiki. Unlike BitTorrent, Kontiki allows copyright holders to put expiry dates on their videos and to control downloads via a central server. An independent film-maker using the OMN/Kontiki system would initially upload his or her film onto the Kontiki server. Anyone downloading the film to watch it would retain fragments on their own computer, from where other users would be able to download it, thus relieving the burden on the server鈥檚 bandwidth. However, the server would retain control over the film, and if a commercial distributor spotted it the film-maker could take it off OMN and distribute it through conventional, profitable channels.
鈥淓nhanced exposure, either in addition to or instead of [film festivals], is going to happen more and more on the internet. I think OMN is a great place for that, because we can handle very large files,鈥� says Wayne Dyer, the network鈥檚 director of development and content.
DVD or even HDTV-quality broadcasts can now be viewed on OMN. And when the next version of the browser is made available early next year, users will be able to download video files to Apple鈥檚 Video iPod, a PC running Windows Media Player or a TiVo hard-disc recording device, for viewing on the move or on a traditional TV set.
Danny O鈥橞rien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group also founded by Kapor, says it remains unclear exactly how internet TV systems will evolve. It is unlikely that it will consist exclusively of straightforward adaptations of today鈥檚 TV programming, and OMN and DTV offer a glimpse of one direction it may go. 鈥淲atching Desperate Housewives on your Video iPod is OK,鈥� O鈥橞rien says. 鈥淏ut being able to video something and send it to somebody鈥檚 phone, or edit something, or subscribe to a channel that is composed entirely of crochet-loving fans of German industrial music, that鈥檚 new, and that鈥檚 transformative. And it will feed into and change everything to do with how TV is made.鈥�
Squeezing in the bits
One of the vexed questions surrounding the design of the framework for internet television is what method to use to compress the video and audio signal. There is no prospect any time soon of internet bandwidth being sufficient to carry high-resolution signals that have not been compressed by some kind of digital coder-decoder (鈥渃odec鈥�).
The most popular codec is MP3 鈥� or MPEG Audio Layer 3, to give it its proper name. Apple鈥檚 Quicktime is another. But these and most other existing codecs depend on patented algorithms, so using them requires a licence from the patent holders. The price of every DVD player or decoder card, for instance, includes a $2.50 fee paid to a conglomerate of electronics corporations for their patent on the MPEG-2 codec, and built into the price of every DVD disc is a 4-cent MPEG-2 licence fee. To avoid the need for such payments, Linux programmers prefer to use an open-source royalty-free audio codec called Ogg Vorbis.
As a result of the need to pay patent holders, patent licensing 鈥渉as a braking effect on the uptake of new technology鈥�, says Tim Borer of the BBC鈥檚 research and development labs in Tadworth, Surrey.
So Borer is heading up an effort to do for video codecs what Ogg Vorbis did for audio. The BBC鈥檚 Dirac video codec project is able to compress standard-definition television signals down to the same data rates as Apple鈥檚 Quicktime and Microsoft鈥檚 .wmv family of codecs. This equates to reducing footage at 720-by-576-pixel resolution to a 1-megabit-per-second stream. It cannot yet compress high-resolution video signals in real time.
Dirac was developed with its specifications and source code free and open to all, and can be used by anyone without payment. It will be submitted to an international standards body for approval next year.
