The blocks on both services are easily removed through the use of a proxy that can replace the browser’s header in the outbound HTTP request.

I have both professional and personal experience in media convergence; Throughout my career I’ve worked for three companies that did streaming video, from adult content (Gamelink), to mainstream media and Independent film (Ifilm/Viacom). On a personal level, the flooding of my loft space has forced me into some temporary housing where I currently cannot not install Internet or Cable service, and I’m forced into using the slow (but not entirely awful) landlord provided WiFi.

Initially the WiFi service was a nightmare, but after the introduction of a pair of Meraki mesh access points, I was able to boost the signal to the point where the PS3 and laptops in the living room could access video. Meraki’s hardware has proven to be excellent under poor signal conditions and simple to use.

On the big Samsung TV that I own, this leaves me with a few options for video at home:

• Hulu/Youtube via the PS3
  
• The same, via laptop
  
• Pay-to-play via the Playstation Store

• Pay-to-play via iTunes
  
• Basic Cable (no DVR, no channels, no time-shifting)

Most of these are great options (basic cable not withstanding). Laptop based options require me to connect cables, to lose the use of my laptop for the duration of the show, and because of the way the Mac supports full-screen websites, I can’t use fullscreen and the laptop’s screen at the same time. The PS3 is slow to download (although some of the best video I’ve seen on my TV), all Laptop options inconvenient (because of the cables)

It’s not about the technology either; We have the technology! It all works, just not as smoothly as the experience of loafing one’s self in front of the TV and pressing a couple buttons on a remote.

Content creators should be making every attempt to make it easier to consume their content, with advertising. There’s a duality here, where the online video world treats the laptop as a 1st class citizen and the TV as a second class citizen, and vice-versa when it comes to the Big Media world of Television.

All of this is about money — whom is paid and whom is not for the big business of the media world. The blocking needs to stop, and ad revenues shared between the content creators and the new distribution world of digital devices connected to large screens. There is fundamentally no difference between a large monitor, and the large flatscreen in front of my couch.

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle‘s “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“.

Read that, perhaps while watching/listening toKevin Kelly‘s riveting talk (from the TED EG conference) on the next 5000 days of the web (that’s right, we’re only 5000 days old) and the future of the Semantic web. Kelly says we’re building not a series of small machines on the Internet, but one gigantic thinking machine, approaching the connectivity level of the human mind.

The trick here is that you connect Traktor to a local Icecast2 install, turn on audio broadcast (with no listeners) in Traktor, and then read XML off the Icecast2 install to extract which song is playing from Traktor. Traktor is very smart about the current song as well. It looks at the decks and crossfader to determine the current, live song, and forwards that to Icecast.

We can extract this and use it for our digital display!

The source for this dumb trick follows below…

(Sorry for the bad layout of this code; I have to fix our CSS file after the recent site upgrade)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
#
# Pull the current song from my local icecast server and forward the
# song data to the snarkatron.
#
# Whatever you set the server name to in Traktor, it will be used as
# the ‘dj subtitle’ on the 2nd line of the display.
#
# J. Adams
#
#

use strict;
use LWP;
use XML::Simple;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

my $lastartist = “”;
my $lasttitle = “”;

while (1) {
# fetch icecast stats.
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

$browser->credentials(
‘localhost:8000′,
‘Icecast2 Server’,
‘admin’ => ‘XXXXXXXXXXX’
);

my $url = “http://XXXXXXXXXX:8000/admin/stats.xml”;

my $response = $browser->get($url);

die “Error: “, $response->header(‘WWW-Authenticate’) ||
‘Error accessing’,
“\n “, $response->status_line, “\n at $url\n Aborting”
unless $response->is_success;

# parse it
my $xs = new XML::Simple;
my $data = $xs->XMLin( $response->content );

# no source, means no connection to icecast!

if (defined($data->{source})) {

if (($lastartist ne $data->{source}->{artist}) &&
($lasttitle ne $data->{source}->{title}) ) {
print “Update…\n”;
print $data->{source}->{server_name} . “\n”;
print $data->{source}->{artist} . “\n”;
print $data->{source}->{title} . “\n”;

# update snarkatron
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $req = (POST ‘http://XXXXXXXXXXXX/addsong.cgi’,
["djname" => $data->{source}->{server_name},
"band" => $data->{source}->{artist},
"sngtitle" => $data->{source}->{title},
"Add" => "Add"
]);

my $postrequest = $ua->request($req);
my $postcontent = $postrequest->content;
}

$lastartist = $data->{source}->{artist};
$lasttitle = $data->{source}->{title};
} else {
print “WARNING: Traktor is not transmitting to Icecast! Enable the Broadcast! (sleeping for retry…)\n”;
}

# increase for production
sleep(5);

}

Let me know if it breaks at all.

Lots of work being done this week on researching message queues, software, writing presentations for eLine, and slowly working my way out of the last job. I have a few days off next week and then it’s into the morass that is Twitter. Can’t wait!

Have you seen The website is down Yet? It’s pretty close to a typical day at my last job.

So many followers, so quickly. Thanks for the love!

Here I’ll discuss emerging technologies for web development (Ruby/Rails, Python, and other web frameworks), streaming media (audio and video), Syndication of content, and scaling issues related to media in general.

I currently work for a medium-sized streaming media company, serving massive amounts of video-on-demand content to subscribers, and have worked in the Internet industry for nearly 18 years. In the past, I’ve worked at many companies, like Apple and c|net, building security and large scale infrastructures to support your favorite web applications.

My recent work includes The San Francisco Bay Guardian, research into distributed media storage and delivery, and an automated XML/RSS feed system using Ruby/Rails.