The Portland Phoenix actually had a feature on broadcatching (RSS + BitTorrent = Tivo for your PC). The article is a pretty good introduction to the concept.
Cinema Minima, the blog for independent films that are actually independent, has declared that "The salient issue facing movie makers is distribution" (Trendwatch: new ways to distribute movies). To that end, they will be paying close attention to developments along the broadcatching front.
Steve Gillmor, one of the first to recognize the potential of RSS+BitTorrent back in Dec '03, has penned an open letter to Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer (Memo to Steve Ballmer). The letter makes the case for increased Microsoft support for RSS, including the broadcatching combination.
Read on for many more links.
Matt of Hit or Miss has stepped up to the RSSTV challenge and is someone else you can suggest shows for whose TiVo will automatically record them (Program my TiVo). Program Matt's TiVo here: Program Matt's TiVo Page.
Infoworld's Jon Udell praises the Webjay collaborative playlist system (Blogs + playlists = collaborative listening). Grumet also thinks webjay is very cool (I stumbled upon webjay.org). Broadcatching is going to make these playlists so much more functional, eventually.
Berkman Center Senior Fellow Jim Moore has a couple posts of interest. In the first, he notes that, "The big advances in standards come when we find simple scalable ways to tie together machines that matter into vast interactive networks." XML and RSS are example of this, and Moore claims that one of the next steps is to tie TiVos into these networks (RSS Video). His second post, though chronologically earlier, is an important note on the potential political importance of broadcatching (TV as the new game 2). TV is and will remain a critically important element in politics. However, broadcatching may be able to shift the traditional balance of power. I'll need to write more about this.
Open Source programmer Bill Lovett sees a lot of potential here and has added the concept to his "project ideas" category (TV Listings via RSS).
Charles Nadeau thinks broadcatching would be great for software distribution and he wants to combine it with CVS (CVS + RSS= !!!).
Information Addiction lists broadcatching as one of many new distribution protocol possibilities, such as BitTorrent+FTP, aka Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol (File Distribution).
From ancient broadcatching days, December 2003, Matt Jones sang the praises of broadcatching and recommends it to the BBC (BitTorrent + RSS = Decentralised Tivo?). A brief trackback is from Submit Response Reading, in which broadcatching encourages the poster to "chuck out" their "broken telly" (Torrent TiVo).
NI3 points to content that would be great to distribute via broadcatching (Amazing!). The windows media video is a "compiliation of crashes set to music." Ok.
Julie Leung has an interesting idea of IMing with friends and family while watching the same program at different locations (TV is torture). I can imagine it getting annoying really quickly, but there are interesting possibilities here for broadcatching.
Finally, Lisa Williams is inspired by RSSTV and broadcatching to imagine user-made commentaries for television, both real time and asynchronous (DIY MST3K). I've been a big fan of this idea for a long time, see LawMeme (The MST3K Syndrome - Coming Soon to a Home Near You?).
Ernest Miller pursues research and writing on cyberlaw, intellectual property, and First Amendment issues. Mr. Miller attended the U.S. Naval Academy before attending Yale Law School, where he was president and co-founder of the Law and Technology Society, and founded the technology law and policy news site LawMeme. He is a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Ernest Miller's blog postings can also be found @
1. Cypherpunk on April 7, 2004 05:19 PM writes...
That Steve Gillmor. He was quite the visionary, wasn't he? He was talking and writing about this stuff way back in December '03. I remember that winter, the winter of 03, we called it. It was a cold one. But that didn't stop Steve Gillmor, thinking and writing about broadcatching. Little did he know that his ideas, after... days... of languishing in obscurity, would take root and grow and blossom into an unstoppable mass movement, one that would last for... months... before another flash in the pan fad came along and crowded that one out.
Seriously, this may be a useful technology, but fundamentally it's just a matter of sending out a notification when a new file is ready for download. Maybe you could tone down the hype a little?
Permalink to Comment2. Ernest Miller on April 7, 2004 05:49 PM writes...
That television, just a fad you know. After all we already have radio and who wants to look at the ugly faces of all those radio actors anyway? And my imagination is so much better than what they could use television for anyway. How would you ever have a television show of "The Shadow - who can cloud men's minds"?
Weblogs, just like homepages, too.
Small improvements in particular technologies can have disproportionate effects. I believe that broadcatching, or something similar, is that sort of technology. Television remains our most powerful medium culturally, politically, in many, many ways. I see broadcatching as allowing much greater entrance to the television space, which would be pretty revolutionary for reasons I will continue to write about.
Maybe I'm wrong and overhyping, but that is why I have a blog, so I can be wrong in public.
Permalink to Comment3. gravy on June 5, 2004 06:14 AM writes...
Television and blogs? Try departurelounge.tv
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