ReadWriteWeb

The BBC is looking to encode TV listing metadata and employ a compression algorithm to circumvent piracy, ad removal and illegal copying. According to a recent blog post by the EFF's Danny O'Brien, the group wants to get mandatory DRM onto digital TV receivers via a broadcast flag. In other words, a "public service broadcaster" wants to lessen the way we consume media by forcing manufacturers to limit product playing abilities. While open source TV services like Boxee allow users to view programs over home networks regardless of the device, a broadcast flag would force all HDTV receivers to include content protection. For those of us who watch our programs online, this could pose a serious problem.

The BBC Music Beta project is an ongoing effort by the BBC to build semantically linked and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections between artists that they may have not known existed.

BBC Radio 1 announced a major update to their music charts about a week ago. Traditionally, mainstream music popularity has been measured by album sales or radio plays -- or a combination of the two. But with albums selling fewer copies through traditional channels and radio losing ground to online music, the Beeb decided to take a look at the web to determine artist popularity. Their new Sound Index app, determines the top 1,000 artists based on buzz across some of the web's largest music, video, and social networking sites.

Lots of Internet TV-related coverage on our network blog last100 this week, including news that Blockbuster is readying a set-top box in junction with the company's recent acquisition of online movie service Movielink; a version of the BBC's TV catch-up service iPlayer is now available for the Nintendo Wii game console; and Joost competitor Babelgum is moving away from being purely a content distributor to also commissioning original and exclusive content of its own.

From YouTube’s continued dominance, the television networks’ newfound willingness to experiment online, the rise of the desktop Internet TV application, and a number of new PC-to-TV devices and set-top boxes — it’s been a big year for Internet TV in all shapes and forms. In this post we look back at 2007 through the lens of last100’s coverage, highlighting some of the important stories and trends, and how they point to what we might expect for Internet TV in 2008.

The BBC's Internet presence came online ten years ago this past weekend on December 15th, 1997, and for the past few months on the new BBC Internet Blog, company executives have been reminiscing about the last 10 years and projecting into the future. Yesterday, Group Controller in Future Media and Technology Erik Huggers wrote an interesting post on why he left Microsoft for civil service at the BBC.

The British Broadcasting Corporation quietly launched a beta version of their spiffed up new homepage last week.

The new page, which the Beeb has dubbed a "lick of paint," draws on a number of so-called web 2.0 design aesthetics: rounded corners, large fonts, big buttons, a soft color palette, and a liberal dash of AJAX.