The Office of Communications (Ofcom), the independent regulator and competition authority for the communication industries in the United Kingdom, could eventually derail the BBC’s proposed new set-top box project, dubbed “iPlayer in hardware”. The regulator wrote to the BBC Trust outlining several concerns it had about the new project and their consequences for competition.
“Commercially-led propositions which seek to compete with Canvas should not be unfairly prevented from accessing BBC content,” it read. It also has concerns about technical standards, user interface (EPG), the BBC’s partnerships with other broadcasters and program quality standards.
Project Canvas is a Linux-based box that attempts to update Freeview with PVR functionality, web access, IPTV and other features. It won’t be manufactured by the BBC, but the broadcaster wants to set a specification that other broadcasters can use. It’s also promised not to aggregate content for the box, or give preferential treatment to BBC content in the Canvas spec.
The BBC Trust has yet to determine whether to let the BBC proceed with the project. “There is a danger television viewers could ultimately be divided into two groups - those with internet connected functionality and those without,” the BBC’s Richard Halton told IPTV World Forum in February. “The BBC would like to ensure that, as before, there is a choice in TV between those who wish to take a subscription and those who don’t.”
Result for: attempts
Last October South Park Studios, creators of the Comedy Central show with the same name, submitted an iPhone app to Apple. According to a sneak preview at that time it would allow you to get wallpaper for your phone, read the studio’s news feed, stream full episodes from their website, and even purchase them from the iTunes store. Now it seems Apple has decided not to approve the app.
An announcement on the South Park website gave fans the bad news, saying “After a couple of attempts to get the application approved, we are sad to say that our app has been rejected. According to Apple, the content was ‘potentially offensive.’”
No doubt this is not the sort of news Apple would like to see right now. They’re already defending themselves in a dispute with the Electronic Frontier Foundation over iPhone jailbreaking.
The EFF recently filed a request with the Library of Congress asking for jailbreaking to be exempt from the DMCA. They argue that it’s essential for giving consumers an option to use whatever software they want on their phones, rather than being limited to whatever Apple allows.
Result for: attempts
A new service called Vertor launched recently with a goal to make the BitTorrent protocol even more popular, easy-to-use and reliable. It uses an automatic system to download content from various BitTorrent sources and verify that the contents are real and safe. The downloads are snagged by an array of 5 servers, running on dual-core technology with 8GB of RAM each currently.
Vertor has a number of ways to avoid adding a bad torrent to its database…
When a torrent file is retrieved it is queued on the servers for download. If the download does not start after a number of attempts, a “download error” status is tagged and the torrent file is not added to the database.
If the download turns out to be an archive (or set of common archives), the system will decompress the data and create a file list. If this fails, the content is marked as “protected” and is not added to the database.
If the download includes video content, the system will automatically take screenshots from the files. If the screenshots are blank, then the downloads are marked as DRM protected and not added.
If the download contains audio content, small chunks of the data is cut for verification purposes.
If a text file is determined to contain a description of the contents, it is saved and is downloadable for users on the site.
The Vertor system can also determine if the downloaded content contains viruses or other malicious files. It is certainly a clever concept and it will be interesting to see how it evolves as a service.
