As policy adviser of distribution technologies for the NPO, ‘Nederlandse Publieke Omroep’ (Dutch Public Broadcasting), Bram Tullemans finds himself situated at the heart of the debate on open video distribution. He has been occupied with Uitzending Gemist, a Dutch service website which provides television programs from the public channels online short after they were broadcasted on tv. After YouTube, Tullemans points out, Uitzendinggemist.nl is the biggest video platform for the Dutch, receiving thirteen million views each month. Bram Tullemans is also exploring new possibilities for distributing video through other platforms and formats such as DivX TV, Bombykol and interactive tv.
Being the last speaker of the session and assuming that people are eager to get to lunch, Bram announces not to rattle about too long. He introduces to his audience the way the Dutch broadcasting system works. When an emerging channel has a certain amount of subscribers, they can start their own broadcasting company. This way, public channels broadcast a wide range of programs about different kinds subjects with different points of view. The umbrella instance of all those loose companies is the NPO. It’s goal, according to Tullemans, is “to maximize our audience with diverse content. We don’t want people to only see the blockbusters, but also give alternatives”. While this diverse content is the strong point of the NPO, it is also its weakness when it comes to publishing on the web.
Because, as Tullemans points out, the main issue for content distribution is licensing. Agreements, distribution rights, licenses. They complicate the open exhibition of streamed or downloadable video’s. Producers will charge far more if their content is being placed on the web, because it counts as an extra, very large distribution platform.
NPO doesn’t program the used software itself. It judges the quality of the Open Source Software (OSS) it wants to use according to four properties. First, according to the available rights and possibilities the software includes. Second, the ease of use. Third is manageability and adaptation possibilities, and fourth is the cost of use in context. When an OSS is picked, it will have to be changed and adapted to fit the needs and purposes of the NPO. At this point NPO hires people to solve those problems. Bram Tullemans explains the workflow further: first is the content production, mostly by external (and/or foreign) producers. Then the production environment is established. Next is the content management by the NPO and the people they hired for adaptation solutions. Then comes the distribution of the end result: the audiovisual product. In this step, the old fashioned ways as well as the new ones are taken in account. Lastly, the audiovisual webplayers are designed to fit the concerning content. This can mean adding extra layers of information, which will be important in the future, or imposing limits on the availability of the player, for example from different countries.
In the past, a lot of effort has been put into MMbase software. Also, they use the engine behind popular websites such as YouTube and Wikipedia: Lighttpd. Now the technical department of the NPO is experimenting with Tribler Software (known for its collaboration with the Blender Foundation) and is looking forward to using HTML5. With the latter, no player has to be downloaded for a user to be able to see the video’s, for it has a built-in browser player. However, the at the NPO, they don’t want to be portrayed as “leechers of open source software”. It is only resourceful and wonderful that the hard work of the communities is being put to use. If you keep in mind that communities can dissolve unexpectedly.
The message I feel Bram Tullemans wants to get across is that through the sharp-witted use of (open source) software, as much content can be delivered to as much people as possible. However, legal issues at every level (form the production of the content to the embedding of the resulting video by a user) can stand in the way of this distribution. It is not only necessary to shape the software into a suitable form for large scale video distribution, but also to outsmart and solve the licensing problems.