broadcast-examples

Broadcast Info

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.

General information such as channel name, category (genre), and broadcaster are provided as well as technical information about the streams (URL, bit-rate, codec etc).

The Problem

Directories which list radio and TV stations have to be maintained by hand as the information is not easily collected automatically from web sites. The information these directories provide is not easily extracted by web browsers and devices such as Internet Radios.

Some, but not all of this information is common to audio-info and video-info. However there is an inherent difference between an item of content (e.g. a song) or a collection of items (e.g. an album) and a stream of real-time content.

Consideration needs to be given to whether this problem can be addressed using the proposed hAudio and hVideo microformats, or by combining these with a new stream-info microformat (similar to the proposed file-format or downloads microformats.

A NOTE ABOUT CONTRIBUTING - USE TEMPLATES

A python script has been written to extract statistical information, but for it to work, we need to be careful about how we mark up information.

Please use the following template when adding information about an Internet radio or TV station:

* [ http://www.example.com Website Name]
** [ http://www.example.com/album_example/ Album Example]
*** Information displayed: name (station name), broadcaster, description, language, category (genre), location, logo,
                           homepage, url (direct stream URL), bandwidth, codec, player (media player url), frequency

If you need to add more information that is displayed, please use a common term to describe the information.

Contributors

Copied from audio-info-examples

• Chris Newell, [BBC Research]

Real-World Examples

Radio

Individual Radio Stations

• Internet Radio List
  • Talk radio station example
    • Information displayed: name, broadcaster, description, language, category, location, logo, homepage, url, player (media player url), bandwidth, codec, frequency

Listings of Radio Stations

• Internet Radio List
  • Station list
    • Information displayed: name, description, location, bandwidth, codec

Television

Individual TV Stations

• Freee TV
  • Station list
    • [name, location, description, language, category, location, logo, homepage, bandwidth, codec, player, rating, comment]

Listings of TV Stations

• Freee TV
  • Example TV station
    • [name, location, description, language, category, location, logo, homepage, bandwidth, codec, rating]

Other stream types

• Text?

Existing Practices

Listed below is an overview of the existing patterns and practices found in the wild for Radio and TV stations.

Summary of common patterns discovered

• There are often several streams listed for the same station using different bit-rates or codecs.

Other attempts to solve The Problem

• media-info-examples - Attempted to find an uber-microformat for describing media. Turned out to be too large of a task, thus the problem was split into attempting to create microformats for audio, video and images.

Related Pages

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