14 posts tagged “bbc”

Wow, the BBC Sound Index is cool. It trawls through social music sites to get a top 1000 chart of artists and tracks.

"The Sound Index is a massive index of the hottest bands and tracks that are being talked about on the internet right now.

Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public."

ITunes and YouTube seems to dominate, but you can make your own chart, picking the services you like.

From Fame Academy to Carrie And David's Pop Shop

There was an excellent documentary on BBC4 last night about the physicist Hugh Everett, who invented the Many Worlds Theory, he also happened to be the father of E from Eels, who is discovering more about his father. More about them both here.

Physics, history and cool music.

Even though it was repeat it's on the iPlayer until next week here.

Ooh, the Extras Christmas Special looks brilliant.

I've been using the beta of the BBC iPlayer. It was promised to be a TV version of the fantastic Listen Again radio service. Unfortunately it's not as good.

Good points

• The quality is great. Watched full screen on a 1900x1200 screen with no blockiness or pixellation

• Even when exit the iPlayer a service, called KService, keeps running. This is the p2p service that uses your bandwidth whether you like it or not.
• Transfer time was slow. I have a low bandwidth connection but bittorrent seems to cope better than iPlayer.
• Low detail on transfer. No extra stats on speed or peers or anything you'd expect from a bittorrent client.
• Limited programmes available. No of the American shows (no Heroes) and some of the shows mysteriously weren't available despite being listed.
• The website is a horrible black design.
• Only works on Windows, using Internet Explorer and Media Player.
  
• All the DRM restrictions:

• You have to start downloading it within 7 days of it being broadcast.
• You have to start watching it within a month of downloading it.
• Once you've started watching it, it expires in a week.

Lots of cool clips from the BBC on YouTube. Here's one of the craziest stunts.

What's your favorite radio station, past or present?

The radio station that I have probably listened to the most over my life is BBC Radio 1. It still has some great new music shows on it. When I was young I used to listen to the Radio 1 rock show (with Tommy Vance) on Friday nights, in bed. Recently I've been listening to 3C (for some country music), BBC Radio Five Live Sports Extra for the cricket, BBC Radio Five Live for Simon Mayo's show and Radio 4 now and again for some serious news.

I really, really hate radio stations with adverts, but fortunately the BBC caters for everything I want to listen to anyway (and 3C doesn't have adverts at the moment).

Here's a link to video of my father-in-law, John, being interviewed by the BBC. He was at the opening of a World War 1 memorial in France.

Extras

Another great episode.

Lots of laugh out-loud bits (I actually think I'm beggining to like "When The Whistle Blows") mixed with excruciatingly cringey moments. It is still following the "Ricky Gervais' life if stuff had gone bad" route, which makes it all the more funny to me.