broadcast-brainstorming

Brainstorming for a Broadcast Microformat

This is a brainstorm for Internet radio and TV streams i.e real-time streams corresponding to radio and TV stations rather than individual items or collections of content (as currently proposed for hAudio).

The scope could also encompass broadcast radio and TV if this is considered to be useful in an Internet context.

Examples can be found here broadcast-examples

Contributors

• Chris Newell, BBC Research
• Andy Mabbett

The Problem

The web provides an alternative transmission medium for radio and TV stations, enabling these to reach a global audience. New Internet-only services have also appeared. A large number of services are now available and there are many web-based directories listing Internet radio and TV stations under various categories. These directories have to be maintained by hand because the information cannot easily be collected automatically from web sites. The information these directories provide is not easily extracted by web browsers and devices such as Internet Radios.

Elements that come up often in practice

The metadata is either general information (e.g. station name) or technical information (e.g. bandwidth)

General information

• Station name (could use hCard's "organization-unit")
• Broadcaster (could use hCard's "organization-name")
• Description (could also be hCard's "note")
• Image URL (logo) (could use hCard's "logo")
• Category (genre) (could use rel-tag)
• Language (used by the station rather than for the description)
• Location (could use hCard's "adr" & children)
• Station website (could use hCard's "url")
• Station email (could use hCard's "e-mail")
• AM/FM frequency (could use "measure" microformat)
• Rating (hReview?)
• "Now playing" information (could use hAudio for radio and hVideo for TV)
• Schedule information (could use hCalendar)

Technical information

• stream URL
• player URL
• bandwidth (could use "measure" microformat)
• codec
• multicast/unicast

Possible approaches

New microformat

Define a broadcast microformat.

As with hAudio we should consider splitting content information from format information. This would suggest a stream-info as well as a broadcast microformat might be necessary.

Extend scope of hAudio and hVideo

Depending on the degree of overlap between the required metadata fields it may be practical to extend the scope of the proposed hAudio and hVideo microformats. However, it would not be beneficial to the development process or to end-users, if this adds additional complexity.

Combining with other microformats

Examples of how a broadcast microformat could be combined with other microformats.

hCalendar

An event or a schedule of events for a channel could be signalled using vEvent or hCalendar as child elements.

hCard

Broadcaster / station details could be marked up with hCard, as above

Measure

A proposed measurement microformat could be used for the frequency.

Comments

The fields listed under technical information are common to the proposed but moribund [hFileFormat].

Related Pages

• broadcast-examples
• audio-info-examples
• video-info-examples
• media-info-examples