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German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms
- ulrischa 2y agoThese platforms are so bad. Can only be better
- mschuster91 2y agoA large part of that is "thanks" to IP licensing laws. A lot of stuff can be shown on TV with no issues, but not streamed or, in some extreme cases like Cold Case, sold as physical media.
- drewmcarthur 2y agopublic means public, if something is paid for by tax money, it should be licensed for public use
- fsflover 2y agoIf you really think so, you should sign this petition: https://publiccode.eu https://publiccode.eu
- drewmcarthur 2y agosigned, thank you for posting!
- riedel 2y agoThis often a complicated case regarding competition law. In our neoliberal world giving away something for free that was subsidized is often seen as destroying market. The national CIO of Germany at one time recommended public bodies to us copyleft (also the EC opted for EPL) , rather than putting it into public domain. I also like this idea. However, this is fundamentaly different from the US. The German weather service even had to shutdown some functions in their free app due to a court order.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kioleanu 2y agoAs a loophole, they ended up making the app paid as not constitute disloyal competition, which, depending on the angle makes sense: you have a competitor that you can actually never compete because regardless of what they do, their funding never runs out. It’s not a fair battle. On the other hand tho, wetter online were crying like little kids about an app that was doing what a government was supposed to do. https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-Urteil-Staatlicher-Wetterdienst-muss-Gratis-App-beschraenken-4681828.html https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-Urteil-Staatlicher-Wetterdiens...
- freedomben 2y agoThanks, I strongly feel that publicy-funded software should be at least open source if not public domain, but the market impact is a wrinkle I hadn't considered before.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoI would rather have a model where anyone can contribute and can see the code, if they want to, than a model, where there is "competition" of who can make the shittiest but most profitable broadcast system.
- drewmcarthur 2y agothat’s incredibly silly
- constantcrying 2y agoOne would hope so, but they don't even open the shows for public use, they don't even keep them around so people can watch the things they had to pay for.
- blueflow 2y agoI was about to call that the Rundfunkbeitrag is not legally a tax (Steuer), but a tax (Beitrag). For some reason that difference does not seem to exist in English and it translates to the same word??
- Grimeton 2y agobroadcast license fee/tv license fee
- qwertox 2y agoTV license fee. This is how it's named in the UK. Broadcast license is what broadcasters pay for in order to be allowed to broadcast the licensed content.
- usrusr 2y agoThe key difference is that the government never touches the money anywhere between citizen and broadcaster, to avoid unwarranted influence. I assume that people who know the British term know that, as the German one is surely modeled after the BBC. I'm writing for other readers. The downside is that it's a per head (or per household) sum, not coupled to income like taxes would be. This is usually explained away by the fee being separate from the state, but the reality is that Germany actually has it all implemented, in the form of the opt-in "church tax" coupled to taxable income just like regular tax. Handled by the tax office, but not going too government coffers. Would be so easy to extend the implementation to public broadcasting, because you don't pay to consume the media, you pay to live in an environment that is not dominated by profit-driven broadcasting media. There are many negative things to say about our public broadcasting, but when I look at other countries that don't have strong public broadcasting, it's so much the lesser evil, totally worth the fee. (personally, I'd love to see that "church tax implementation" opened up to all kinds of opt-in membership organisations that would see value in income-coupled membership fees, I believe that a lot of good things could work that way, with people of all income levels enjoying an objectively fair way of contributing)
- whalesalad 2y agothe cookie popups are next level on this site
- solarkraft 2y agoThey are possibly illegal or at least against the law's spirit, which is ironic, because Heise is a relatively well respected publisher among German IT professionals.
- moritzruth 2y agoI think they are legal because the requirement is that you have an option to "deny all" which they provide. That you must subscribe to the "Pur-Abo" to use this option doesn't matter.
- yladiz 2y agoI don’t think that’s right. You can’t force someone to pay to not have tracking cookies (or something that infringes on the right to privacy). Facebook tried the same tactic and was forced to stop.
- croes 2y agoPay or Okay is illegal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36720629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36720629
- NekkoDroid 2y agoI am p sure that not too long ago the EU Commission put out a statement regarding Metas "Consent or Pay" and it not being allow and "privacy isn't something you should need to pay for". So I don't think its legal, but I also didn't look too much into it other than some headlines.
- Grimeton 2y agoHeise changed a lot over the last 2-3 years.
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- sambazi 2y agothe article does not say if the public has a stake in the private entity created to do this, which makes me curious why this path was chosen in the first place
- snowpid 2y agoUsually no. But the German public broadcast isn't private at all.
- aeyes 2y agoWhy was the original title changed? They aren't open sourcing anything today. They are planning to develop new tech which they might open source. But all this still has to be approved by the regulator and the government. That said, I have seen some of the tech from the inside ~10 years ago. The ARD player was developed by a third party and there was no budget to bring this in house. Things might have changed but redoing everything just to open source it sounds like a waste of money.
- fweimer 2y agoThe original German article makes it clear it's only about the web front end and some ancillary services, not the video streaming service as such. The latter seems to be mostly Akamai-based.
- aeyes 2y agoExactly, that's why I wrote "the player" which is the most interesting tech. The rest of the system wasn't very interesting back in the day, just an off-the-shelf CMS and internal feeds to pull in all the content from the different channels automatically. Here is an old interview with the technical directors from back then explaining some of the internals: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_2010-Q1_Mediathek.pdf https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_2010-Q1_Mediathek.p... The sites have changed quite a lot since then and they have added subscription content as well. Maybe they now have code which would be more interesting to open source.
- ancorevard 2y ago[flagged]
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoSigh. I know that dunking on the EU is increasingly a HN meme because most of you lot work for companies that feel threatened by governments with teeth, but “governments waste money!!!” in as much as it is an accurate stereotype is not localised to the EU by any means.
- dopa42365 2y agoNot exactly the most ambitious project, is it. Besides the fact that both ARD and ZDF majorly struggle with the content itself in terms of quality and availability (it's not an archive, everything disappears quickly). One day they'll figure out this internet neuland thing ;)
- _tk_ 2y agoUnfortunately, not making archived content available longer is due to the legal obligations that the public broadcasters face and that the German Government and the governments of the federal states themselves have put in place because of anti-competitive fear mongering.
- TomK32 2y agoI wouldn't call it "anti-competitive fear mongering" when one player in the market can rely on a virtually guaranteed income (you'd have to be homeless to avoid the Rundfunktbeitrag) while newspapers, private TV and radio have to fight for survival. ARD and ZDF buying and thus supporting the insane amounts that some sport events cost in license fees doesn't do FIFA and IOC any good as scandals of recent years have shown. Carlos Nuzman who ran the 2016 games got 30 years for his corruption schemes.
- jupp0r 2y agoAre you saying that the German legislature cannot change the law?
- TomK32 2y agoOf course they can and are welcome to, but even though I agree with many things any variations of the past German governments have brought into law it doesn't mean I have to agree on all of them. And let's be honest: The TV and radio landscape has opened a lot over the past nine decades, unlike print media it had a few decades of being shielded from competition but why does it have to continue like this?
- Adverblessly 2y agoHere in Israel they just upload most of their TV content to YT, some if it is really good. They used to also stream (and archive) their news stuff, but for some reason I'm getting a 404. (You can look up Kan11 and Kan11news if you are curious, though I don't think they have translations so probably not useful if you don't speak Hebrew). EDIT: Looks like it is only broken for me in FireFox...
- 082349872349872 2y agoIf I liked סרוגים, is there any recent series you'd recommend?
- ffsm8 2y agoThat was the case in Germany too, at least for a few years. They've since changed their tune and ceased uploading whole episodes, only excerpts go onto YouTube now with links to their own "Mediathek". From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private entity that's headquartered abroad
- odiroot 2y agoFortunately Tagesschau still uploads to YT. Which is great because their website (and the video player) are a bit clunky.
- mschuster91 2y ago> From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private entity that's headquartered abroad That's one thing, but IIRC the larger part was that the private broadcasters whined as they always do.
- Ringz 2y agoJust like they whined about one of the best public funded and free weather apps out there and sued them: DWD https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/20200312_bgh_urteil_news.html https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...
- aszantu 2y agoca. 2000s, I'm getting rid of my TV because if you have one in Germany, you have to pay the fee... ca. 2003, I'm getting rid of my tv-card which has been free until now, or else I have to pay a fee... ca. 2010, They've got a website now, if you have a computer or phone, you gotta pay the fee... great... now I have to pay the fee because I have a github... or what
- _tk_ 2y agoYou have to pay a fee if you live in Germany. It does not matter what kind of technology you have access to in theory. Thank god the German state does not have to check whether or not you have to own a TV.
- throw_pm23 2y agoyes, but it continued: ca. 2015, you have to pay it anyway, with no exemptions ca. 2020, they start randomly sending out delay penalties, even if you are late by days, without ever notifying you of the due dates ca. 2022, they sneakily shift the 3-months fee forward, first you can pay it at the end of the period, then in the middle month, then soon at the beginning meanwhile, the programming gets worse and worse every year. Then they get surprised if people vote for parties which promise to abolish it.
- _tk_ 2y agoIf you vote for fascists - whose lead candidates seem to be spying for Russia and China - because of a 17€ license fee per month, then you should reevaluate your perspective on the public broadcasting system and on money.
- TomK32 2y agoIt's 18,36€ per month, not 17. If you don't want people who don't care for TV or Radio (they do exist) to vote for AfD then you shouldn't have introduced a Rundfunkbeitrag that's very unpopular with many more. Scandals about money being badly spent just adds to the distrust and lack of interest people have in ARD, ZDF etc.
- iso8859-1 2y agoThis is great. It fits with how they're adopting Mastodon. Why isn't NPR officially adopting Mastodon? The fact that Truth Social exists should motivate NPR even more, as it could be accused of being pro-Trump while staying on Twitter. In Germany, no platform is run by any particular candidate, and they still went to Mastodon.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoGerman public broadcaster has enough budget to send humans to the Moon. Still better than nothing, they could simply traditionally increase the fee without anything new in return. Any news from them them is a slap in the face and is assuring me that moving out of Germany was a good decision.
- biosboiii 2y agoThe current streaming service is shit. If you stream via Chromecast, you can see your connection getting dropped by adaptive bitrate streaming in realtime. It's always low quality, medium quality, high quality, ultra high quality, lag, then low quality again. You cannot change it to a fixed level manually too, on the Chromecast.
- deeth_starr_v 2y agoThe Hulu app does this on LG TV also. Public and private sectors are the same sometimes
- DocZet 2y agoThe correct title is: "ARD and ZDF want to offer their streaming code as open source"
- hoc 2y agoTo understand the quality level of their current platforms: they actually manage to recommend the same stream you just watched as the next auto-play entry and even might jump directly into the credits again, giving you a 10 to 20 seconds loop in extreme cases. While a two-stream recommendation loop is quite common in both systems, the loop above only happened twice for me so far. Still, it might just perfectly highlight the lack of passion and user focus plaguing their current platforms. So, whatever they come up with in the new and maybe open one... ah, who am I kidding.
- em1sar 2y ago[dead]