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How can we best serve you media XML?

We're just a few weeks into 2006 and already it's clear to most that one of this year's hot topics will be the maturation of services that deliver video over IP. Google's recent announcement at CES about their Google Video service is surely just the first of many important announcements for this year.

2006 is of course also the year the BBC hopes to be launching the MyBBCPlayer.

Meanwhile, in the backstage broom-cupboard, we've been thinking about how we can best serve you XML feeds of BBC video content (well, feeds that link to and describe BBC video content, to be pedantic).

BBC News already offers a set of RSS feeds for their BBC New Player video service. However, these feeds contain links to pages that contain an embedded player, rather than links to the media assets themselves. Whilst this makes sense as a consumer-orientated service, clearly this does not help backstage developers who want to develop new propositions directly around these video items.

So we'd like to know how we can serve you developer-friendly XML feeds about our video. We're going to create some developer feeds which contain links directly to the media, but there are a number of format options floating about and we want to find out which option would work best for the backstage community.

Are you a big fan of the Yahoo! sponsored Media RSS? Or maybe you would just prefer simple enclosure tags? Are there any other options we have missed?

At the moment, I'm personally persuaded by MediaRSS. In most instances, for each of our videos we need to reflect:


  • Multiple encoding formats

  • Multiple encoding bit-rates

  • Whether they are available to all or just UK-based IP's

MediaRSS allows you to do all of that. But what I'd like to know is how easy it is for you to handle? Is there a MediaRSS parser available for your favourite language?

What if we offered enclosures instead? How would you like to see the above information represented within enclosure tagged RSS2.0 feeds?

So, please let me know what your thoughts are on the above - either by leaving your comment below or posting an email to the backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list (do subscribe if you havn't already)!

Many thanks
Ben

  • 16 Jan 2006 12:24 PM

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Comments  Post a comment

  • 1.
  • On 16 Jan 2006 03:03 PM,
  • Stephen said:

My personal preference is the Yahoo format of MediaRSS. With http://go.yahoo.com and Yahoo Widgets and the openness of the developer community there. This gives I think the most avenues to have applications that will work on your TV, Desktop and Mobiles. And the fact that Yahoo also has a good base here in Australia giving the BBC a greater opportunity in other countries and compatibility.

  • 2.
  • On 03 Mar 2006 07:02 PM,
  • Rob Whall said:

MediaRSS also looks good to me. I don't know of any direct parsers, but it appears simple enough that any XML parser should be able to return the relavent information without too much trouble. Do you have any ideas on what your schedule is for providing the information in XML format?

Thanks,
rob

"An RSS module that supplements the element capabilities of RSS 2.0 to allow for more robust media syndication."

If by 'robust' Yahoo! mean compatible, I'm all for that.

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