Fun at Alexandra Palace
Posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 8:15pm. #
In spite of having what I now suspect as hayfever plus a cold plus a hangover, I went to Alexandra Palace today for the BBC’s Mashed, a place where hackers across the UK came to play with some of the BBC’s content and other bits.
Alexandra Palace has an interesting link to the BBC, and broadcasting in general. It was in 1936 when the first, ever, television broadcasts came out of here - and the BBC used Alexandra Palace as broadcast studios and a transmitter site until 1956. BBC broadcasts still come from the building: it runs a low-power analogue television relay, two commercial radio FM broadcasts, and also broadcasts the BBC’s DAB multiplex (and Digital One, and all the local London muxes too). And this weekend, it was also broadcasting two more channels - this time, digital terrestrial television, as the BBC let people play with MHEG.
For reasons associated with my hayfever/cold/hangover combination, I arrived in the middle of the presentation of the hacks - still in time to see some of my team’s work (which includes a way to punch in your lastfm profile and be told what kind of programmes you might like on the BBC, which is rather marvellous).
I saw many others, too - including a rather splendid automatic translator for television. Here’s roughly how it worked: it watched live BBC television, got the subtitles off Freeview (which are sent as bitmaps, by the way, not text); OCRd the bitmaps to turn them into text; popped off to Babelfish to translate them into German, got the German text into a speech synthesiser, and added that audio over the top of the (delayed) video. Bloody clever. And it worked using a Mac and a PC (”to keep everyone happy”, said the team).
I’d have liked to have taken part a little longer; but I was mightily impressed at what I saw. Wonderfully organised, and a real credit to the BBC. Many congratulations, Matt and Ian.
