Media everywhere. But hardly a drop to play.
Podcasts, YouTube, content from broadcasters, movies, art projects, archive materials. In recent years a colossal amount of playable content has been put on the Internet. Much of it is available to use somehow in your product: often you can embed it, sometimes you can resell it, other times you can offer it for download. At a minimum you can link to it. And then, a lot of it is available in formats suitable for mobile devices and even big screen TV.
Many have tried to integrate this diverse content into a single site, but the technical and rights complexities are far too big for a single organisation. The more successful sites and apps tend to integrate with the same few platforms: YouTube, Hulu etc. That's enough to offer the obvious content, but it misses more than it catches:
- The inspiring and thought-provoking Ted Talks
- A range of new clips and features from Reuters
- Art installations from the Saatchi Gallery
- Online shows from cable networks like Comedy Central
- Old movie gems from the Internet Archive
URIplay is a community effort to collaboratively compile the metadata needed to build richer audio and video services. The project has been led by MetaBroadcast, a London-based start-up building a video navigation product, and BBC RAD Labs. The latter are already using URIplay technology to take their content to new platforms and build prototypes of innovative new services. We are now actively seeking to enlarge the community, so take our service for a spin and then join us.
Some things you can do right now
- Access podcasts and YouTube data through the same interface—integrate only once for two sources, with more sources to follow.
- Read data using standard RSS or RDF libraries.
- Get context from Wikipedia, for example a list of everything Aaron Sorkin has made.
- Look items up via their iMDB links (using info from Wikipedia and DBpedia).
- Include data from the live web, via Twitter search. For example, what's hot on YouTube?
- Subscribe to links in iTunes (e.g., this aggregate podcast made from an OPML file of interesting stuff) and in Miro (e.g., this list of the latest YouTube videos discussed on Twitter—paste it into Miro's box titled 'Add Channel').
- Follow links to other sources of data, such as MOAT and Freebase.
- Diagnose the reasons for slow queries—we return a breakdown of what we were doing while your app was waiting.
Or, you can read the source code.
Data, formats, and hacking on them
We currently aggregate data from or link to these sources:
- YouTube
- Podcasts
- Lists of podcasts via OPML
- Wikipedia (via the wonderful DBpedia)
- Twitter search
- iMDB
- The Meaning Of A Tag project (MOAT)
- Freebase
Our API makes data available in a variety of formats:
- In RSS with podcast and Media RSS tags, or in RDF (we love linked data)
- As lists, single items, or deep nested structures
- Filtered by how you can use it—downloadable vs. embeddable vs. linkable
You can test these options using the API explorer.
Next? The sources you deem important
URIplay is designed to be distributed and open. You can download the source code for our Java reference implementation, which is used to run existing URIplay services. It's easy to contribute further data yourself, and we hope to build a community that shares data. You can get involved by:
- Putting missing data on the web: you provide a web service that indexes additional sources of data by URI. We'll pass relevant queries onto you, and aggregate the results. Our Java software can help with this, as can most general web app frameworks.
- Contributing code: we're open to submissions that allow us to integrate with new sources of data. Where possible we'll use this in the uriplay.org service.
