I love the BBC, it offers a great service with reporters distributed all over the world and some of their research units are developing leading edge technologies to do with video technologies, music and all sorts of things to do with broadcast, HD TV, DVB as well as IPTV (such as BBC iPlayer and the list goes on. The TV License is one of the few taxes that I don’t actually mind paying. For those that are interested in the new technologies that the BBC is playing with I recommend reading the BBC Internet Blog.
One of the cool new features they are developing a new beta product called Sound Index. Details about exactly what it does can be found on the site here. In very basic terms it takes information from various music sites around the net such as iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, lastFM, and more, they then apply an algorithm which creates a ranking of the top 1000 songs and artists online. Very cool and very interesting!
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:19 am
Stephen Fry has written and interesting blog post and/or podcast about a speech he made at the BBC about some recent issues/thought people have had regarding BBC licensing.
http://stephenfry.com/blog/
http://stephenfry.com/podcasts/
His podcasts (though he’s only done 4 so far) are very funny - at least the first 3 were, haven’t listened to all of the latest one yet.