BBC opens a little more content for Linux

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has long dabbled with free software, starting a number of new projects and opening content via their backstage developer network. Now they've announced a bold new step forward, releasing an experimental service—initially just for Linux users—with open access to some multimedia content, which has already spun out in unexpected ways.

The BBC's Research and Innovation team took a fairly conventional commissioning process for this experiment. Having identified the feature—help existing content to "surface" in multimedia applications, so users don't need to browse around the web site—they went on to find the right approach. George Wright and his team settled on integrating BBC content into the Totem media player with Canonical, aiming to get a first version out with the recent Intrepid release. Things then moved quickly. Discussions with the company contracted to do the Totem work (Collabora) started in spring 2008, although according to Christian Schaller from Collabora "it was probably around July things got concrete". Over a few autumn months the work was completed, opening up a large number of radio shows to Ubuntu users worldwide (although much of the content is restricted to the UK because that's who pays the TV license that funds the BBC).

This great new feature, exclusive to Ubuntu, was promoted in the Intrepid press release but received little attention in the media. Given that it still only delivers a fraction of the content you can get through iPlayer (proprietary Windows software full of DRM technology) this is hardly surprising. That you can stream Dirac-encoded videos released under Creative Commons licenses is obviously still a bit geeky for most.

But that doesn't stop free software developers. Barely days after the Totem announcement, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen wrote a script to neatly integrate the content in Amarok 2.0. As a core Amarok developer his main motivation was familiar: "I wanted to inspire other people to write similar scripts for Amarok 2, and I think it is important to have some good example scripts ready when Amarok 2.0.0 final is released". I've been watching the Amarok 2 betas come along, and having given the "get more features" dialogs in KDE a miss over the past few years, I was pleasantly surprised how well this worked. You just go to the script manager, click to get some more scripts, install the BBC script and—like magic—you get all the BBC content in the "internet" tab on the left.

Wright's team did all the hard low-level work to make this kind of adaptation straightforward. The Amarok script has delighted Wright, who is a long-time Amarok user; they've even been in touch with Nielsen to see how they can help improve the integration.

The question everyone wants an answer to is: will this ever match iPlayer for content range? Wright's team have a fairly wide remit, but they're not in charge of releasing content, so this is unlikely to change the Corporation's attitude towards DRM overnight. According to Wright, the content teams have given great feedback, but over the past five years we've seen promises of an open Creative Archive wither away, with a consumer-facing focus on proprietary products like iPlayer. Truly open content from the BBC, or even the volume of copyrighted-but-available archives released by the National Public Radio (NPR) in the US (also integrated into Amarok ), is probably still a long way off.

This new service is strictly experimental, Wright says, "it's a way to experiment with distribution platforms and free software". They've also learned a lot more about developing in a free software community; although many of them have been Linux users for years, this was a first for them. Working to the feature freezes for Gnome and Ubuntu Intrepid meant the UI isn't a nice as they might have hoped, but it's a great start.

The open service is here to stay. They're not sure if they'll keep developing the Totem feature and patching against mainline in Ubuntu or Totem; time will tell. More work between Collabora, the BBC, and Canonical is also uncertain. But, since the code is all open, we can definitely expect the Totem and Amarok features to be maintained. We can also look forward to more open content integrated into free desktops in the future in a way that is extremely difficult to do with proprietary platforms.