An Investigation of New Distribution Forms for Traditional Media Online

For decades watching the news, movies or television series has been something you do in front of your TV. But things are changing, more and more TV-channels make parts of their playlists available online. But exacly how much broadcast material is available online? And is it possible to collect all available broadcast material on a single web portal and enable users not only to watch but also to record this material? The objectives of this thesis were to investigate how much and in which form different TV-channels make their broadcast material available online. The investigation results was used in constructing an online web portal prototype. This portal contains TV-channel playlists with available broadcast material as well as the ability to record this material, if possible. The investigation gave that most Swedish TV-channels has very little broadcastmaterial available online. Swedish TV-channels that had enough material available to be considered for the prototype were SVT1, SVT2, SVT24, ZTV and The Voice. A few foreign TV-channels where also investigated and included in the prototype. These were RUV TV, BBC 24, Direct8, Sky News, and Bloomberg UK. Investigation on the recordability of the available broadcast material gave that VideoLAN Client was to be used. Since it worked well with Windows Media Video streams, which was the format most commonly used. The prototype was developed using the open source tools Python, Django, MySQL, Apache, at, xmltv tv-grab and VideoLAN Client. The prototype implements the ideas of the thesis for the following TV-channels: SVT1 SVT2SVT24, Direct8, Bloomberg UK, RUV TV, Sky News, BBC24, The Voice and ZTV. A recording feature is in place in all cases where the stream is playable in VideoLAN Client