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German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

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Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#51

Post by freedomben »

sealeck wrote: post #22
blueflow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to call that the Rundfunkbeitrag is not legally a tax (Steuer), but a tax (Beitrag). For some reason that difference does not seem to exist in English and it translates to the same word??

Tax vs contribution?

I think contribution is a much higher level word that is way too abstract to be useful in this context.

When I think of "Contributions" I think of a voluntary transfer of money, whether from an individual to an organization or from an individual to themselves (like "contributions" to an IRA or 401k for example). But a contribution could even be sharing ideas with a group of friends (contributing to the conversation) or anything really.

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#52

Post by subpixel »

ffsm8 wrote: post #33
Adverblessly wrote: post #25

Here in Israel they just upload most of their TV content to YT, some if it is really good. They used to also stream (and archive) their news stuff, but for some reason I'm getting a 404. (You can look up Kan11 and Kan11news if you are curious, though I don't think they have translations so probably not useful if you don't speak Hebrew). EDIT: Looks like it is only broken for me in FireFox...

That was the case in Germany too, at least for a few years. They've since changed their tune and ceased uploading whole episodes, only excerpts go onto YouTube now with links to their own "Mediathek". From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private e…

ARD is experimenting with trying to get users to jump out of YT for content, but they still post a lot of material there.

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#53

Post by freedomben »

riedel wrote: post #6
drewmcarthur wrote: post #3

public means public, if something is paid for by tax money, it should be licensed for public use

This often a complicated case regarding competition law. In our neoliberal world giving away something for free that was subsidized is often seen as destroying market. The national CIO of Germany at one time recommended public bodies to us copyleft (also the EC opted for EPL) , rather than putting it into public domain. I also like this idea. However, this is fundamentaly different from the US. The German weather ser…

Thanks, I strongly feel that publicy-funded software should be at least open source if not public domain, but the market impact is a wrinkle I hadn't considered before.

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#54

Post by biosboiii »

The current streaming service is shit.

If you stream via Chromecast, you can see your connection getting dropped by adaptive bitrate streaming in realtime.

It's always low quality, medium quality, high quality, ultra high quality, lag, then low quality again. You cannot change it to a fixed level manually too, on the Chromecast.

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#55

Post by aeyes »

fweimer wrote: post #26
aeyes wrote: post #16

Why was the original title changed? They aren't open sourcing anything today. They are planning to develop new tech which they might open source. But all this still has to be approved by the regulator and the government. That said, I have seen some of the tech from the inside ~10 years ago. The ARD player was developed by a third party and there was no budget to bring this in house. Things might have changed but redo…

The original German article makes it clear it's only about the web front end and some ancillary services, not the video streaming service as such. The latter seems to be mostly Akamai-based.

Exactly, that's why I wrote "the player" which is the most interesting tech.

The rest of the system wasn't very interesting back in the day, just an off-the-shelf CMS and internal feeds to pull in all the content from the different channels automatically.

Here is an old interview with the technical directors from back then explaining some of the internals: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_2010-Q1_Mediathek.p...

The sites have changed quite a lot since then and they have added subscription content as well. Maybe they now have code which would be more interesting to open source.

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#56

Post by Ringz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #45
ffsm8 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the case in Germany too, at least for a few years. They've since changed their tune and ceased uploading whole episodes, only excerpts go onto YouTube now with links to their own "Mediathek". From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private e…

> From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private entity that's headquartered abroad That's one thing, but IIRC the larger part was that the private broadcasters whined as they always do.

Just like they whined about one of the best public funded and free weather apps out there and sued them: DWD

https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#57

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

_tk_ wrote: post #31
throw_pm23 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but it continued: ca. 2015, you have to pay it anyway, with no exemptions ca. 2020, they start randomly sending out delay penalties, even if you are late by days, without ever notifying you of the due dates ca. 2022, they sneakily shift the 3-months fee forward, first you can pay it at the end of the period, then in the middle month, then soon at the beginning meanwhile, the programming gets worse and worse ever…

If you vote for fascists - whose lead candidates seem to be spying for Russia and China - because of a 17€ license fee per month, then you should reevaluate your perspective on the public broadcasting system and on money.

> fascists

Well, they aren't actually. Lay off the hyperbole.

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#59

Post by PurpleRamen »

Adverblessly wrote: post #25

Here in Israel they just upload most of their TV content to YT, some if it is really good. They used to also stream (and archive) their news stuff, but for some reason I'm getting a 404. (You can look up Kan11 and Kan11news if you are curious, though I don't think they have translations so probably not useful if you don't speak Hebrew). EDIT: Looks like it is only broken for me in FireFox...

German TV is doing that too, but there are harsh limitations on what they can make available and how long it can stay online, because private broadcaster sued them 20 something years ago. Since then, the rules change from time to time, and Public Broadcaster are carefully exploring what they really can do.

Re: German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

#60

Post by PurpleRamen »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #57
_tk_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you vote for fascists - whose lead candidates seem to be spying for Russia and China - because of a 17€ license fee per month, then you should reevaluate your perspective on the public broadcasting system and on money.

> fascists Well, they aren't actually. Lay off the hyperbole.

There are court rulings saying something different.
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