I've cross posted the wiki about an open signage solution videohead/Matt posted to the PEGSpace group. I noticed that Daniel and Matt started posting comments at the end of the wiki. Ideally a wiki would also allow comments, but unfortunately that's not how GDO currently rolls.
Rather than continue to try to have a discussion in the wiki, I'm going to move the conversation to a discussion. The big advantage of a discussion is it alert members of new posts.
All of that said, we'd really like to see this move forward can invest a few thousand dollars to make that happen, but only if we can get something in hand by the end of the year. I would really like the focus on the first phase to be on creating a template and enough documentation for other developers to take the template and run with it.
We talked to Chris Charlton after Drupal Camp Colorado about creating a contest to promote developing this type of Drupal driven Flex/Flash content for broadcast applications, but we didn't have our content types defined well enough to start building another layer of services on them... nor did we have the time to manage with everything else on our plate. Before we backed off that idea, Chris passed our contest and they offered us 2 copies of the full Creative Suite. Packt has allow offered us a few copies of Aaron Winborn's Drupal Multimedia.
So if Paul/AMP is interested in matching DOM's contribution to get the ball rolling, we're willing to invest and let AMP drive the first phase of this. Can we get a conference call scheduled this week to start talking details?
Comments
Digital Signage Project Discussion
Thanks for creating a discussion so we could comment. Our site is currently a Joomla site but I'm familiar with Drupal as well. Right now we have an event form that feeds to the channel via RSS (this is using the TRMS system). I also pull ical feeds from google calendar and an rss feed from another local event calendar site. Our government channel utilizes TelVue's webus product. We're just getting started utilizing their service but the benefit of the TelVue product in my opinion is the fact they create announcements for you and provided regular updated content. You can see examples of both announcement feeds on our website at www.portmedia.org. The audio for the channel is provided by podcasts and radio feeds via ITunes. I would be very interested in helping out with this project.
Great Site! But why Joomla?
I see you are embedding Princeton's default schedule and using CiviCRM. BTW, I really like the fact that a $500 donation gets you a Graphic Designer credit while a $100 donation only gets you a Star credit. I've always believed good design was more important than talent, but it's great to see in MA it's 5x as important :)
I also LOVE the way you are embedding the Wikipedia page for the History of Public Access. Every PEG site should be doing that.
Is your equipment reservation system something you developed or is their a working reservation/checkout system in Joomla. I'm not aksing these questions from the perspective of a Joomla hater. It's hard enough for us to keep up with the changes in Drupal, so I'm really curious why Port went with Joomla? And as a follow up, is there any chance we could get you to switch to Drupal... at least for the Digital Signage project?
If you are interested in moving the entire site, you should apply for the Open Media beta grant. If you are picked as one of the 6 grantees, we'd be able to come out to Newburyport and help with the transition and training.
As far as the Digital Signage Project, I think it would be difficult to support both Joomla and Drupal (and even content type beyond what we've defined for the Open Media Project) in the first phase of this. We're already pulling the schedule from Princeton into Drupal using Feed API and Feed Element Mapper. This generates a new node with a Date based start and end time for each airing. Using the Services module, it is relatively trivial to add what's playing next to a calendar view of upcoming events or classes.
Are you willing/have the resources to run Drupal (and the Open Media modules) for the Digital Signage Project or are you hoping to drive content from Joomla to it as well. Again, I don't want to come off as saying this type of thing can't be done in Joomla or in Joomla and Drupal at same time. CiviCRM is a perfect example of a solution that plays nicely with both CMSes. I just think (and I may be wrong) that we have more resources to devote to a Drupal driven solution and not enough time to build for both (at least with the money DOM has to spend).
We're off and running on this
Goals:
Short-term goal: quickly create an open source application using Flex which meets the current requirements of PEG stations for community bulletin board, and serves as an alternative to Scala Infochannel or Tightrope’s messaging system.
Long term goal: Fully meet the requirement of the Knight Foundation grant for open source interstitial content via Drupal . . . assuming that community bulletin boards are the interstitial content requested.
Community bulletin board content is our interstitial here in Gilroy, and is the interstitial in Monterey. (The programming between the programming, as it were.)
Both goals would attract new stations to Drupal, and explicitly to the Open Media project.
Both goals would save PEG money and staffing resources immediately, since they won’t need to spend money on vendor systems.
This will be an open source development project, so involvement and inclusion for students and any other Flex developers is welcomed and encouraged.
Also, let’s put out the word to other PEG stations and find out who is planning on paying for Tightrope or Scala in the current and next capital cycle. If we can access a smidge more funding, we can make the first goal come true right away.
As far as the Drupal/Joomla . . . I've done both and will continue to do both. I'd like to utilize XMLRPC via Flex, since I think we could get to a working solution for both CMS's quickly, since they both operate very similarly at the XML level.
More updates
I’ve updated the wiki at http://groups.drupal.org/node/16198 to reflect the core functionality that I am working on.
The functional spec will become part of this wiki.
There is also a discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/16291
Let’s involve as many people as we can to determine our resources ASAP.
Tightrope's Commitment to Open and some cost information
From: Steve Israelsky [mailto:steve.israelsky@trms.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2008 9:09 AM
To: matthew@mycmap.org
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Digital Signage/Community Information channel project and survey
Matthew,
Have you ever tried to initiate a conversation with anyone at Tightrope? We are almost all former access people, and share the same objectives.
Our software does everything you are looking for...and a lot more, and is already written. It is designed to facilitate group participation, with user definable rights, and we have many customers that assign content creation rights to community organizations that submit their own content.
Did you know that we sell a software version of Carousel for around $1700 that someone can install on their own PC. On your WIKI you talk about saving $5000 per channel, but that would require that they have a dedicated PC, so if you want to compare apples to apple, they would save only $1700 per channel if you are comparing to Carousel.
Lastly, what do you mean by saying we have not agreed to make our systems open. I am not a developer, and am admittedly pretty ignorant in regards to programming and drupal, but we have built in RSS and Atom support, iCal imports, XML and a remote data application. It will even screen scrape from web sites. We need these things for our digital signage business. So in terms of accepting data from a variety of sources, we try to make our systems as open as possible.
Steve
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the email. I wasn’t trying to disrespect Tightrope, I think you have a great signage product. Definitely not trying to question your motives or motivations.
Having worked closely with a number of PEG vendors (although admittedly not Tightrope – my bad), IMO the core challenge of PEG stations in relation to vendors is two-fold:
1. The challenges and dangers of vendor lock
2. Implementation cost and cost for subsequent implementation of “improvements” and customizations.
An open architecture (one in which the implementation code and source code are freely available) would free certain PEG stations from 1 and reduce the effects of 2. Admittedly, there would likely be new limitations which will also need to be overcome.
Import capabilities are not the same as open source. I applaud your support of XML, but XML can be extremely proprietary and lead back to 1 and 2.
$1700 is a perfectly reasonable cost for a single channel signage system, and I think you are on the right track there. Kudos!
The open media framework won’t be ideal for many PEG environments, and I’d be happy to evaluate and recommend your products to stations who weigh the cost/benefits of open media compared to proprietary systems. In many cases, commercially developed and supported systems are the right choice, and I will continue to work with many commercially released and EULA’ed software products.
The goal of our project is to create an open source framework and implementation – distinctly separate goals from utilizing MSDE and EULA released products, as your products do.
Open source is a process as well as an end result.
Please see http://www.opensource.org/ for more information about open source compared to commercial development.
I’d love to have Tightrope’s participation in the development of this project. The OSI model is by definition inclusive and open to all participants, and includes a healthy representation by many of the world’s largest software developers.
Best,
Matthew
Committment to Openness
I have had conversations w/ MaestroVision and Leightronix regarding materials list / library and playlist importing and exporting. I think the questions Matthew raises are good ones.
It seems it might be helpful if there was a letter from some of the the heads of Public Access Centers outlining similar concerns to Playback Systems manufacturers. Or maybe an online email message w/ an open signature list? (Is there a Drupal module to do this?)
The question should be put to Playback System manufacturers: How committed is your company to Openness and open data exchange? It would be interesting for the Public Access Media community to come up with specific questions in this regard. For my work I need to know:
Joe Golden :: www.triangul.us :: People, Ideas, Connections
Joe Golden :: www.triangul.us :: People, Ideas, Connections
Pressure from the PEG Heads
Getting the PEG heads to put pressure on the playback server vendors is an approach that might work, but I'm afraid that will take too long to organize/explain to be useful to the Open Media Project. We really need to focus on the playback servers that have the import/export interfaces now. The ACM has already laid the groundwork for an organization level approach with the ACM sharing project, but I have no idea what the status of actually supporting the standard is beyond what Telvue has demo'ed on their servers.
During tomorrow's Developer call, we will be reviewing the playback servers being used by each of the 6 development partners and the alternates we've selected. We will be asking someone using each server at their location to volunteer to take the lead in getting the documentation about the interfaces and be the point of contact for communicating/putting pressure on those vendors.
We are going to do everything we can to make the system work with all of the playback servers, but if the interfaces we need aren't there and the vendor can't/won't update their system to work with ours, we'll have to drop the partner and move on to an alternate with a server from a vendor that actually supports the open data exchange we need. I doubt having customers complain about missing out on opportunities like this project will help sales.
Vendors supporting open data exchange should be rewarded with sales. IMHO, we will see changes happen much faster by impacting sales than organizing petitions.
More from Tightrope
From: Steve Israelsky [mailto:steve.israelsky@trms.com]
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 12:34 PM
To: Matthew Galvin
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Digital Signage/Community Information channel project and survey
Hi Matthew,
Thanks for getting back to me. No disrespect taken.
On 1 and 2 below. We certainly try to not have any vendor lock (and this is different from most of our competitors). We try to make the systems as open as possible.
On 2, if someone bought the Carousel software for $1700, they get support for life. They get fixes and minor software upgrades for free. They get major feature releases for the cost of what we call Silver assurance which is 10% of the purchase price, or in this case $170. And currently, they can buy it at any time. Here is what it does now: http://www.trms.com/signage/carousel_in_action If a year from now, or 2 years from now a customer decides they can't live without a new feature we released, they can purchase Silver Assurance at that time.
Good luck with your development and implementation.
Steve
Digital Signage alternatives
I am testing an implementation of the digital signage service / system to create a "channel in a box" source for our government channel. The price is right and the features are here. Not sure about reliability / stability yet. There is built in support of video capture / display cards to allow for a pip or pass through from the server so we can have an independent loop through going at the same time..we will see.
http://www.mediasignage.com/
MediaSignage.com - ther are better options out there
This is a pretty basic Flex implementation, without either an API or any real path towards local integration or development. Pretty limited, IMO.
I posted this to ACM West - no responses yet
Hi,
Anyone in ACM West working/experimenting with any open source playout or signage solutions?
I am looking to deploy Xibo and/or CasparCG for a cron/AT based community broadcast solution (having seen CasparCG in action for the World Cup, I am hooked!).
Just wondering if anyone has interest or bandwidth to work through these as a collaborative effort.
I'd be willing to do a collaborative MOU or whatever documentation anyone interested might need to convince their board or ED that this would be beneficial to their organization.
Thanks,
Matthew Galvin
videohead@hotmail.com