+Title: Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web
+Tags: english, video, nuug, frikanalen
+Date: 2013-03-03 07:15
+
+<p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
+broadcast them on the air? Using free software? With video on demand
+support using
+<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
+open standards</a>? Included a web based video stream as well? And
+administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world? A
+few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
+system to do just this. The source code for the solution is licensed
+using the GNU LGPL, and
+<a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The idea is simple. You upload a video file over the web, and
+attach meta information to the file. You select a time slot in the
+program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
+in the web stream. It is also made available in a video on demand
+solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time. All
+you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
+
+<p>There are several parts to this web based solution. I'll mention
+the three most important ones. The first part is the database of
+videos and the schedule. This is written in Django and include a REST
+API. The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
+PostgreSQL. At the moment this system can be tested on
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>. The
+second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
+the database and providing a video stream to broadcast. This is done
+using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
+<a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>. Video
+signal distribution is handled using
+<a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>. The
+third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
+video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
+on demand. It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
+decided what it will end up using. Note that the source of the latter
+two parts are not yet pushed to github. The lead author want to clean
+them up a bit more first.</p>
+
+<p>The development is coordinated on the
+<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
+channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
+<a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
+frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
+(phed on IRC). Anyone is welcome to participate in the
+development.</p>