The Real News

The Real News is a member-supported English language global online video news network. Launched in 2007 by Paul Jay, a former producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation it states it is "focused on providing independent and uncompromising journalism", on "the critical issues of our times".

The Real News relies on supporters' donations, and does not accept funding from advertising, government or corporations. It also receives funding from grants and funds.

The Real News uses internet broadcasting, but it has contracts with satellite and cable television channels which it intends to use for broadcast once it reaches its first sustainability goal of 50,000 supporters. The Real News has bureaus in Washington D.C., and Toronto.

Stated goals

The stated goal of The Real News is to provide "independent and uncompromising" verifiable worldwide coverage of "the critical issues of our times". They aim to avoid what they consider to be pitfalls of mainstream journalism, such as a disproportionate focus on people in high office and reliance on official press releases or wire services to frame debate. Their editorial policies in practice result in focus on issues affecting less powerful people, children, indigenous people, immigrants, women, and laborers. Human rights and environmental issues, topics on religious freedom and freedom of conscience, movements for moral and spiritual values, against war, and against racism usually get daily coverage.

While covering people in high office, The Real News attempts to seek the facts that they feel matter and not limit themselves to reporting what they believe their interlocutors want audiences to hear. In this way, and by bringing in well-informed guests, they hope to trigger debate which covers many aspects of an issue, avoids personal attacks and partisan rhetoric without substance. The Real News also operates forums where their work can be debated and criticized, purportedly to remain aware of their own biases.

The Real News relies exclusively on supporters' donations, and does not accept funding from advertising, government or corporations.

History

On August 10, 2008 The Real News was featured on PBS Foreign Exchange, where host Daljit Dhaliwal interviewed The Real News senior editor Paul Jay.

Staff

The Real News journalist committee includes Lewis H. Lapham, Gore Vidal, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, and Howard Zinn. The most regular political analysts are Aijaz Ahmad, Pepe Escobar and Eric Margolis. The Real News features experienced professional journalists from all over the world. It is planning to host reports from volunteer-based citizen journalism in a dedicated portion of the network's website.

Analysts and correspondents:

* Host and senior editor: Paul Jay.
* Main journalists: Jesse Freeston covers a wide range of topics but specializes in Latin America and resource exploitation. Lia Tarachansky covers Israel and Palestine from the region, and Ania Smolenskaia covers U.S. domestic policy and the health care debate.
* Global senior analysts: Pepe Escobar, Aijaz Ahmad, Minqi Li, and Forrest Hylton
* Other guests: David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Phyllis Bennis, Eric Margolis, Michael Ratner, Gideon Levy, Helen Thomas.

Technical staff:

* Mishuk Munier - Director of News Operations
* Hezvo Mpunga - IT and Website Development
* Taruna Godric - Communications and Volunteer Coordinator
* Elena Perova - Executive Assistant

Other staff:

* Sharmini Peries - Executive Director

Content

The Real News also frequently hosts content by the American News Project, Al Jazeera English, and SleptOn Magazine

http://en.wikipedia.org/

Rabbit Bites

Rabbit Bites is an Internet video series created by Nicholas Quixote in June 2006. It is featured each week on the cover of the online magazine Salon. The show has been airing on the website since January 2007 and stars two rabbits: Buns, a gray male rabbit, and Chou Chou, a black and white female rabbit.

Overview

The internet show stars Buns (a brown dwarf rabbit) and Chou Chou (an English Lop), two rabbits who critique popular culture from the chairs in their living room. Rabbit Bites began as a good-natured, yet harsh critique of the current state of Internet video and vlogging in particular. Rabbit Bites has satirized many of the video creators who were central in popularizing web video, on which it originally focused. After 6 months, Rabbit Bites started to examine popular culture and give opinions in the rabbits' typical "biting" style. Buns and Chou Chou have covered topics ranging from television shows, such as American Idol and To Catch A Predator, to celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and Britney Spears, and general pop culture topics, such as the iPhone. Now, Rabbit Bites continues in this format as a social critique, particularly of celebrity, attitudes about wealth and luxury, and the death of culture.

The show also has two additional components in some episodes. Chou Chou has her own show, called Coffee With Chou. It's a talk show with Chou Chou as the host and Buns as the sidekick. Chou Chou has done real interviews with author Andrew Keen and blogger Robert Scoble, as well as fake interviews, created by editing previous interview footage with celebrities. Chou Chou has done interviews in this style with stars such as Paris Hilton and Eli Roth. Since the show began, real guests include David Alan Grier, William Redpath, Greg Fitzsimmons, Dana Snyder, Bobby Lee, Tom Papa, Michael Ian Black, Jane Lynch, Carbon Silicon, Patton Oswalt, Janeane Garofalo, and the band They Might Be Giants.

The third component of the show is a "man on the street" segment, in which the rabbits ask one of their correspondents to go out and seek responses from the public. The first of these was done by Nalts, who is popular on YouTube, in regards to finding out about Generation Y and its need for praise.

Philosophical and historical references

Although the show is mostly a critique of pop culture, it does contain some hidden meanings and references to art and history:

* Plato's Allegory of the Cave has been referenced in two episodes. An older one about the podcast "Amyville", and a more recent one about horror films, such as Hostel and Saw.
* In an episode about the infamous Alec Baldwin voicemail message, Buns and Chou Chou talk about how the camera obscura is present in life.
* An early episode about Robert Scoble features paintings by Piet Mondrian.
* An early episode about The Long Tail features the Tower of Babel.
* Two episodes feature the idea and significance of mirror images. An episode covering CSI features mirror images in a painting by Vermeer. Also, an episode covering blogger Ryanne Hodson features the rabbits mentioning mirror images when Hodson holds a stained glass piece that is made to look like her.

In the media

In addition to being featured each week on Salon, the show has been featured on the YouTube homepage, as well as the Yahoo! Video homepage. The show has won The 9 on Yahoo! twice and has been featured in the British newspaper The Guardian. Amanda Congdon covered the show and interviewed Buns, Chou Chou, and Quixote on her series Amanda Across America, and the show has also been mentioned in the New York Times as being "twisted and sublime".

http://en.wikipedia.org/

P2PTV

The term P2PTV refers to peer-to-peer (P2P) software applications designed to redistribute video streams in real time on a P2P network; the distributed video streams are typically TV channels from all over the world but may also come from other sources. The draw to these applications is significant because they have the potential to make any TV channel globally available.

Technology and use

In a P2PTV system, each user, while downloading a video stream, is simultaneously also uploading that stream to other users, thus contributing to the overall available bandwidth. The arriving streams are typically a few minutes time-delayed compared to the original sources. The video quality of the channels usually depends on how many users are watching; the video quality is better if there are more users. The architecture of many P2PTV networks can be thought of as real-time versions of BitTorrent: if a user wishes to view a certain channel, the P2PTV software contacts a "tracker server" for that channel in order to obtain addresses of peers who distribute that channel; it then contacts these peers to receive the feed. The tracker records the user's address, so that it can be given to other users who wish to view the same channel. In effect, this creates an overlay network on top of the regular internet for the distribution of real-time video content.

The need for a tracker can also be eliminated by the use of distributed hash table technology.

Some applications allow users to broadcast their own streams, whether self-produced, obtained from a video file, or through a TV tuner card or video capture card.

Many of the commercial P2PTV applications were developed in China (TVUPlayer, PPLive, QQLive, PPStream). The majority of available applications broadcast mainly Asian TV stations, with the exception of TVUPlayer, which carries a number of North American stations including CBS, Spike TV, and Fox News. Some applications distribute TV channels without a legal license to do so; this utilization of P2P technology is particularly popular to view channels that are either not available locally, or only available by paid subscription, as is the case for some sports channels.By January 2009, there were about 14,000 P2P channels on PPStream.

Other commercial P2PTV applications outside China are Abroadcasting (USA), Zattoo (Switzerland/USA), Octoshape (Denmark), LiveStation (UK).

Issues for broadcasters

* Broadcasting via a P2PTV system is usually much cheaper than the alternatives and can be done by private individuals.
* No quality of service (QoS). Compared to unicasting (the standard server-client architecture used in streaming media) no one can guarantee a reliable stream, since every user is a rebroadcaster. Each viewer is a part of a chain of viewers which all can have a negative influence on the reliability of the stream (by having a slow PC, a filled downlink or uplink or an unreliable consumer grade DSL or cable connection).
* Less control. If a broadcaster prefers to limit access to their content based on regions, and would like good data on viewer behaviour, such as volume, trends and viewing time, then a traditional broadcasting solution offers more control.
* Professional broadcasters and distributors have used a hybrid solution for many years. Distribution servers are not centrally installed, but are rolled out in a smart, decentralized way. A central management facility manages content distribution over multiple peer servers (also known as Edge servers, or Caches), strategically located near user swarms (generally popular access ISP networks), manages load balancing, redirection of users, view reporting and QoS. Examples are Akamai.

Notable applications

Branded webtv service for end-users

* Babelgum.com (non-live)
* BBC iPlayer (live and non-live, used peer-to-peer technology until December 2008)
* Joost.com (non-live, live trials)
* LiveStation.com (Windows, Linux, Mac) - based in United Kingdom
* Miro (non-live)
* ReelTime.com (non-live)
* Zattoo.com (Windows, Mac)

Commercial solutions for broadcasters

* Alluvium - based in Texas, USA
* Octoshape (Windows, Linux, Mac)
* Pando
* Rawflow

Unclassified (yet)

* CDNetworks (CDN service)
* CoolStreaming (discontinued service)
* Cybersky-TV - software
* PeerCast (Windows, Linux, Mac)
* PPLive - based in China mainland, chinese only program.
* PPStream - based in China mainland
* Tribler - linked to P2P-Next, relies on BitTorrent protocol
* TVUnetworks - Windows and MacOSX P2PTV Software and Network
* Pulse - (Windows, Linux) LGPL P2PTV engine with announcement portal and unrestricted access

http://en.wikipedia.org/

Multicast

Multicast addressing is a network technology for the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy to deliver the messages over each link of the network only once, creating copies only when the links to the multiple destinations split.

The word "multicast" is typically used to refer to IP multicast which is often employed for streaming media and Internet television applications. In IP multicast the implementation of the multicast concept occurs at the IP routing level, where routers create optimal distribution paths for datagrams sent to a multicast destination address spanning tree in real-time. At the Data Link Layer, multicast describes one-to-many distribution such as Ethernet multicast addressing, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) point-to-multipoint virtual circuits or Infiniband multicast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/

MediaCore

MediaCore Video CMS is an open source media focused content management system. It features: video & audio support, YouTube & Vimeo integration, podcasting, iTunes RSS generation, user-submitted content, embedded media player, wysiwyg editor, search, and is highly customizable. There is both a front-end for users and a back-end for administrators. It is built upon TurboGears, SQLAlchemy, MYSQL and runs with Apache, FastCGI or Mod_WSGI.

Requirements

MediaCore requires a Linux or Unix server that runs Python 2.5.x and MySQL 5.0.x or newer. It should also be noted GCC must be installed and available on the $PATH for certain required Python packages to install properly. Additional requirements can be found on the MediaCore website.

Features

The following is a list of some of the major features in Mediacore:

* Users can browse videos or podcasts
* Users can search for videos by topics and tags
* Users can upload videos to the platform, administrators can moderate newly uploaded videos
* Administrators can add video, audio, or podcasts
* Comment platform and moderation is built-in
* Podcasts can be video or audio
* Automatic iTunes podcast generation
* Automatic RSS generation
* Feedburner support

http://en.wikipedia.org/