Capstan Channel Syndication: A format for syndicating time-based video

A few months ago, when I had an unexpected amount of time to myself, I began looking at what it would take to put video content on the set-top boxes from companies like Boxee, Roku and Popbox. It became clear very quickly that it would take a lot more than simply posting a bunch of videos to the web. Each one of these platforms has its own API, its own content description format and its own developer program. Some platforms give the set-top box vendor the power to control which content is made available to its customers. It presents a Tower of Babel for content suppliers.

On the other hand, you've got RSS, which is as close to a universal content syndication format on the Internet as you can find. RSS works extremely well for static content; what I mean by static in this context is that everything in an RSS feed is available right now, not at some point in the future. Video on demand (VOD) works fine with RSS; when you upload a new video, you update your RSS feed and either push the information to clients or let them pull the information from your server.

Broadcast and cable television work in a different way. They use schedules: Certain episodes of certain series are scheduled at specific times on specific days. Those episodes (and the program segments that comprise them) may or may not be made available on a VOD basis at a future time. RSS isn't designed for that--an RSS feed can tell you what's available right now, but not what's going to be available a week from Tuesday at 0800 UTC. It doesn't give client developers enough information to build a unified interface to live, scheduled and on-demand programming, all at the same time.

There are several other issues: The same episode of a program can shift from scheduled, to live, to on demand, over time. Content providers may want to make video available on a pay-per-view or subscription basis, so they need ways of authenticating viewers, protecting their content and processing transactions, and they would much rather not support different systems for every set-top box and client vendor.

I looked hard at making RSS do all of this, and yes, it can be done with Namespaces, but it would be like cutting the back end off of a sedan, welding on a truck bed and calling it a pickup truck. It's much better to develop a new XML Schema that's purpose-built for the application. And so, that's what I did.

I call the result Capstan Channel Syndication, or CCS. Why Capstan? Capstans are the metal spindles that guide magnetic tape through audio and video tape recorders, and I thought that "capstan" would give a retro feel to a format that's designed specifically for Internet video in the 21st Century. Rather than go into the details of CCS, there's a more detailed description of what it's for here, and a downloadable copy of the specification here.

I've made CCS available as open source under Apache License 2.0, the least restrictive widely used open source license I could find. Neither I nor my consulting firm have a horse in this race--I'm not working on, promoting or investing in any video client, set-top box or Online Video Provider companies. If you want to participate in the process of defining CCS, I invite you to do so at the ccs-format Google Code site.

I'm hoping that CCS will be adopted by client and set-top box developers to enable them to get access to much more content without having to write and market their own APIs, and by content providers who will be able to write one CCS specification instead of a different application for every client and set-top box. Adopting CCS doesn't preclude anyone from writing and promoting their own APIs, so client and set-top box developers can still encourage content providers to take advantage of special capabilities of their platforms. However, my hope is that CCS will become the "baseline" for making time-based video available on the web.

Hulu Part 2: At war with everybody

Paul Yanez, a talented developer who had previously written a clone of Joost as a Flash application, recently released a program called MyMediaPlayer to provide a desktop interface for Hulu. This app uses Hulu's published, public specifications for accessing and displaying videos. It uses the Hulu player, doesn't strip out any advertising, doesn't introduce any advertising of its own and is free. Nevertheless, Hulu has repeatedly come up with ways to block MyMediaPlayer, and it appears that after five rounds of reworking the application in order to get it working again, Mr. Yanez has given up.

In the same vein, Boxee was able to reestablish support for Hulu by connecting to that company's RSS feeds, the same feeds used by Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Nevertheless, in just a few hours, Hulu blocked Boxee's access to its RSS feeds. As I write this, Boxee claims that it has worked around Hulu's changes and can again access the RSS feeds. Perhaps the best thing that Boxee could do is to change its browser user agent to look like Internet Explorer, so that Hulu would have to effectively shut down the RSS feed to block Boxee.

I don't know why Hulu is doing this, but it's only making itself look idiotic. All of its blocks will eventually be worked around, and its content isn't so precious that it's only available in one place. As I've written before, its actions are encouraging, rather than discouraging, piracy. Every time I see one of its commercials, I see a company that doesn't get it trying to act cool. Perhaps the people who called the company "ClownCo" weren't wrong, just premature.

Confronting the Great Firewall of China

I returned yesterday from China, where I was in Shenzhen, attending ZTE's Global Analyst Conference. (More on ZTE in a future post.) Using the Internet there was an adventure in finding out what I could, and more usually couldn't, get to. Many of the sites that I regularly visit (most of which could hardly be called political or provocative) were blocked.

Pretty much any blog, no matter its contents, was out of reach. I tried accessing blogs through both a feed reader and Firefox to see if the problem was that RSS feeds were blocked, but I got the same result. Even blogs that are completely politically innocuous, such as Engadget and Gizmodo, were unavailable.

Interestingly, I could post to my own blog, but I couldn't read it. Similarly, my mail client could send mail, but not receive it; the only way that I could receive mail was through a web client. I was in Shanghai and Hangzhou last year, and I didn't notice the same level of interference.

On my way back to the States, I had a wait for my return flight at Hong Kong International Airport. Using PCCW's free WiFi service, I fired up my browser, feed reader and mail client, and everything worked just fine. I could access all of the sites that were blocked just a half-hour away on the Chinese mainland, as well as get my mail.

It may have been the combination of the Great Firewall with the fact that my hotel was right next to the local police station, but I felt more than a little paranoid and uncomfortable while I was in Shenzhen. The city is very modern (it's the place where China's experiment with Capitalism inside of Communism began,) and the people were very friendly, but I frankly don't look forward to going back.