Last week, I blogged about how Norway’s public service broadcaster had launched a downloadable video service that would only be usable through Microsoft’s media player, delivering what amounted to a gigantic subsidy to an American technology company by giving it sole control over who could make a device that capitalized on the publicly funded video in the broadcaster’s archive. (A Microsoft “evangelist” posted an angry response, and I replied)
The public service broadcaster and the Norwegian people have been having a vigorous discussion online about this and the upshot is that the broadcaster is seeking advice on building an open streaming platform to deliver Norway’s video to Norwegians without delivering an advantage to any technology company or platform. They’re seeking your input on building this system.
Below you’ll find a link to a site where you can join the discussion: if you have expertise to offer in this field, here’s the place to go:
But – to speed up the work, could we use the power of the internet to gather forces and draft a solution? Something that we could point broadcasters to when they say that there is no alternative? Because, I am afraid that this discussion is quite ineffective as long as the general opinion is that no alternative exist. If I could reach out to the BoingBoing and Slashdot crowd, the brains, geeks, programmers and utterly talented people out there. Maybe we could find the solution that is as real as Firefox is for replacing IE?
The internet is an excellent tool for doing more than pointing out what’s wrong. It’s absolutely capable of helping find a solution as well.
I will be more than happy if this results in the broadcasters realizing that they are simply not informed, and that a complete and working alternative is right there in front of them.