Martin Hawksey, e-Learning Advisor (Higher Education) for JISC RSC Scotland North & East, has an interesting idea which he emailed me:
"Building on the work of Tony Hirst I’ve come up with a tool which allows users to view BBC iPlayer broadcasts with subtitles pulled from twitter. The concept being many users are engaging in online discussion during live broadcasts (for example during The Virtual Revolution series), if the viewer wants to replay the episode and follow the online discussion the two assets are disaggregated, you can’t see the real-time comments as they were originally made. The tool allows the user to use twitter search results to create a subtitle file which is used when replaying the episode in iPlayer. This video demonstrates the twitter iPlayer mash-up in action."
Whilst the tool was designed with the iPlayer in mind the file created is in in W3C Timed Text Authoring Format so it may be used in other applications.
There's more about how this was achieved on Martin's blog posting at MASHe.
Hi Jane,
Thanks for posting this. Hopefully it will give your readers an idea of what is already possible in terms of remixing different media channels.
It's probably worth pointing out that the tool I've created only works for programs available as iPlayer downloads. This unfortunately probably rules out non-UK use, but I've made all my code publicly available if someone wants to use it in another region with a similar on demand service.
An entirely separate development which your readers might be interested in is the BBC's own research into delivering live subtitles over the Internet. The opens up the opportunity of augmenting live broadcasts with a whole spectrum of user generated content. See in action at http://bit.ly/cTh8Rh
Many thanks again,
Martin
Posted by: Mhawksey | 19 February 2010 at 10:34 AM