As noted here: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=49240 the BBC have just launched a major upgrade to their iPlayer service. Although iPlayer itself is a fairly closed environment, there seems to be a genuine effort by the BBC to provide a set of rich, open APIs to their content, with some pretty encouraging responses to questions in this blog entry: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2008/06/under_the_iplayer_hood_for_rad.shtml about the provision of reliable APIs and RSS feeds to higher bandwidth content and richer metadata?
Although they are also promising to maintain the current Real Audio feeds, meaning (I hope...) that the existing AlienBBC services should continue to function, I'm curious as to whether there are any plans by the AlienBBC developers to use these services. My take, based on rooting around in various RadioLab blog entries and http://backstage.bbc.co.uk comments is that it should be possible to transform the navigation, searching, programme listing and in-stream metadata capabilities in Alien through the use of the new APIs. There are certainly some missing bits - for example everyone is being very coy as to exactly which codecs will be opened up for non-iPlayer use and which services will be locked to UK ISPs, but the general outlook looks great. Is this being considered, or is this really better handled via a whole new BBC Radio plugin? Is anyone working on such a beast for the Squeezebox yet? In hope... Phil -- florca ------------------------------------------------------------------------ florca's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7486 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=49344 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
