BBC's Kamaelia Macro

Nat at O'Rielly Radar writes about a R&D effort underway at the BBC.

From Nat:

"When I visited BBC R&D labs last year after EuroOSCON, I saw an absolutely astonishing system. Macro is a few PCs with video capture cards recording a pile of domestic British channels and storing the encoded files for later playback.

Macro is gorgeous. It consumes the BBC's electronic program guide to determine when shows begin and end, who's in them, etc. There was a way sexy PHP interface (written, I think, by the fantastic Phil Gyford) to the archived programs that let you subscribe to shows, actors, keywords, etc. (I don't recognize the current UI, so I think the cool social software is still inside the R&D firewall). It's social software, so you can see what your friends are watching, your friends can recommend shows, and shows can simply bubble up to your attention because a lot of your friends are watching them. When I saw it I immediately thought, "this is the way my TiVo should be."