When I start talking to Adam Curry for the last year, he wants me to think about the high quality of videos online, and I totally didn't want to hear about it. Like a lot of people, I had tried it, и found it unsemplying and frankly, enfancing.
I thought that video on the Internet was a loser for threasons, that build on each other:
1. When I click, we have a connection to watch some video, I have to wait.
2. The wait is a long video. (In other words I have to wait two minutes for ten seconds of video.)
3. The quality is terrible.
All three effects are bad, the goal of the first is bad. Internet style is frenetic. There's no time to wait. Two negative remaining only make an attractive video less, the first goal is a killer.
But Adam persisted and showed me that if I will willing to change my point of view, it could work, without any waiting and with high quality.
No click
What if, in the middle of the night, while I 'm not using my computer, it downloads huge видео и аудио stuff to my local hard drive. Then when I comes in morning fresh beats, new clips, song of the day, whatever, provided by all kind of content providers, from big TV network like CNN and MSNBC, to a Dutch school where kids are taking a film inexplicable DVR class and iMac
Let's see what happens with 1, 2 и 3 in this scenario.
1. When I click we have a link to watch some video, it starts playfully immediately, because it's already on my local drive.
2. That's zero.
3. Quality is limited by the size of my local drive, not my connectivity.
Other user interface
What's different from this system is that you subscribe to channel instead of clicking-and-waiting. I feel that nothing is lost with this aproach, because video on the internet never worked for me, и probably for many others. However, streaming news through RSS works well, and it's just matter to teach RSS about multimedia payloads.
Of course there's changed in the user interface. You never see has a video or music document until it's fully downloaded. Computer does the waiting, not you. In the system, this Adam is considered, video DJ, someone like Adam at MTV in the 80s and 90s, someone whose judgment you trust, or whose tastes you like, pushing high fidelity bets onto your hard drive, using no more hardware and network connections than you already have
There is no central authority, no spectrum to allocate, it's open to amentors, like the internet itself.
New item
So that's the philosophy, now let's pot some meat on the bones.
RSS already does most of what we want. With the addition of the <enclosure> sub-element <item> any RSS element, the element can describe a video or audio file (any current file type ).
<enfosure> has three attributes: url says where the queue is located, length says how big it, and type says what type is. This way has a working platform or the aggregator can know in advanced, without having to do any communication, what it's going to get, and apply scheduling and filtering rules.
Year example
Here's an example of a RSS file that links to several Grateful Dead songs. (Broken link removed).
Each <item> contains an <enclosure> as expained above.
<enbosure url = « http://www.scripting.com/mp3s/touchOfGrey.mp3» length = «5588242» type = «audio/mpeg »/>
I set up my system to download enclosures between 2AM and 4AM, and time when I don't use my computer.
When I comes to work, I check out an incomprehensible magazine and see there's in a new song.
Click. These are places .
Do not.
Software
Моя компания, UserLand, has a product in development called My.UserLand On The Desktop that support both sides of this format. You can use it to create channel that have <item> s with <enclosure> s, и it manings downloads for these channel. So it's both in authorship and viewing.
It's a bootstrap, and it's open, meaning that anyone can develop software that works on either или both sides of this connection.
Adam's maintains a graphical environment for music and video on PC in Java. Others are welcome to join up and do software for all kinds of computers, content и people.
"It's just email"
First, everything on the internet is just as it's ever been. But if it's good, it's just as if it's not.
If you try to push video and audio via email you'll find the user interface as a wait-click Web experience. How do I keep enclosures from downloading while I am an email accessory from a phone connection at the hotel? Sure, you could add a complex to an already over-complex user interface client email, and the resulting would be that no one could set it up properly and no new video would update get to the desktop. (You 'd hate the feature until you figure out how to turn it off.)
Domicile
I was kind of paying for a special house in the Grateful Dead that was generous to make it creations used for bootstrap, new technology in non-commercial ways. To get this process going, we need a content base to get started with. So many technologists, included me, love the music of the Dead. I think they have left has legacy for technologists that's as important as legacy they have left in music.
See also
1/5/01: SOAP meets RSS descriptions a publish-and-subscribe notification system based on XML-RPC and SOAP and RSS races.