German public broadcasters open source their streaming platforms

[aeyes]

Why 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]

The 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.

[drewmcarthur]

public means public, if something is paid for by tax money, it should be licensed for public use

[blueflow]

I 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??

[riedel]

This 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.

[constantcrying]

One 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.

[fsflover]

If you really think so, you should sign this petition: https://publiccode.eu

[DocZet]

The correct title is:

"ARD and ZDF want to offer their streaming code as open source"

[Adverblessly]

Here 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...

[ffsm8]

That 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

[PurpleRamen]

German TV is doing that too, but there are harsh limitations on what they can make available and how long it can stay online, because private broadcaster sued them 20 something years ago. Since then, the rules change from time to time, and Public Broadcaster are carefully exploring what they really can do.

[zelphirkalt]

Great idea for Europe: Make your publicly paid for content available on a proprietary GDPR violating platform!

They did upload there, but fortunately it was available elsewhere too.

[082349872349872]

If I liked סרוגים, is there any recent series you'd recommend?

[hoc]

To 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.

[biosboiii]

The 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]

The Hulu app does this on LG TV also. Public and private sectors are the same sometimes

[whalesalad]

the cookie popups are next level on this site

[solarkraft]

They 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.

[sambazi]

yea, rather scamish publication style but the content is ok.

use of an adblocker is universally advised though

[lifestyleguru]

German 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.

[dopa42365]

Not 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_]

Unfortunately, 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.

[sambazi]

the 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]

Usually no. But the German public broadcast isn't private at all.

[iso8859-1]

This 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.

[ulrischa]

These platforms are so bad. Can only be better

[mschuster91]

A 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.

[aszantu]

ca. 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_]

You 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]

yes, 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.