dale lane

At the BBC hackday “Mashed” earlier this year, I went to a talk explaining how to write applications that can be delivered to televisions through Freeview set-top boxes. For our CurrentCost-themed hack, we reused (that is to say, shamelessly stole!) some code from a colleague to get CurrentCost notifications onto a TV channel. The idea was that it’d be a ‘press the red button’ kind of thing where you could have results of CurrentCost challenges from you and your friends pop up as text overlaid onto the bottom of the screen while you watch TV.

I loved this idea, and it’s been bouncing around at the back of my head since. There is a lot of social network data on the web that I think would be well suited to notifications via a TV. Rather than needing to have a separate computer on, or send stuff to mobile phones, or use stand-alone ambient type devices like Nabaztags or Chumbys, why not have stuff popping up while you watch TV?

The problem with the approach we took at Mashed was that it requires you to put your code at the TV signal source, and it’ll only work on the TV channels you add it to.

What I’ve been wanting to do is find a way to do this locally – code that could run on a device that you have at home, that grabs notifications from the web, and overlays it over whatever you are watching on TV, regardless of what channel or prerecorded programme you ware watching.

I came across a device last week that looks like it should make this possible – Topfield PVRs.

I’ve just started reading about it, so I’m starting to get my head around it’s capabilities. But it’s a Linux-based Freeview set-top box with even more flexibility than a Media Centre PC. It looks very hackable: for example, you can rewrite and replace the Electronic Programme Guide if you don’t like the one that you get on the PVR. And you can write applications that will run on the PVR and which can draw to the TV screen.

I think that it should be possible, for example, to write an app that takes a subset of your Twitter friends, and pops up their tweets on the screen. Or an app which pops up where your friends are when they change location in something like Brightkite.

You could have a scrolling ticker like you get on TV news channels – only on any channel you want, and made up of feeds that you are interested in.

I love the sound of this, and it’s enough to make me want to replace my BT Home Hub (gah!) with one of these.

The only downside is that these PVRs cost about £170 (on eBay, at any rate), which is sadly more than I can afford at the moment.

But I can dream… 😉

Tags: bbc, freeview, hackday, mashed, pvr, television, topfield

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.