Besides the fact that there are a lot of controversy around this subject, I’ll talk a little bit about it and tell our foreigner friends about this new open source middleware for digital TV content (it will be just an overview as I dont know too much about it yet).

This middleware (Ginga) will be used to produce content for SBTVD (Brazilian System of Digital TV). It uses the NCL, Lua (http://www.lua.org/) and has some features like XML Parsers, XHTML and also a Java Virtual Machine (sick) =P. You can check it’s architecture taking a look at the picture at the end of the page (click on it to view it bigger).

Now, what I think about all this stuff: Brazil developed this “new” SBTVD based on the japanese standard besides using the european or the american ones. As far as I know (and it’s not that far hehe) the european standard would be better in a way that at least we would have a very good hardware compatibility and it would be easy to have a full working hardware in almost all places on earth (ok…just where they use DVB-T hehe). But we can’t change past and as they have already made this decision for the japanese standard, let’s see if we can make it work in the best way it’s possible.

We can start that assuring that we DON’T WANT DRM PROTECTED CONTENT. It just doesn’t make sense to put all this DRM stuff on that and “go back on time”. As we are developing “new technology” we have to make all the stuff right otherwise something like DRM will put all the good work just in the trash. Even Apple is making the stuff on iTunes be DRM-free and there is a big movement on that direction on the whole world and we are just taking the other direction. Bah! Hélio Costa, our Telecomunication minister must think more about this. At least the goverment has some people that fight for open standards there (like Dilma Russef and Gilberto Gil). Note: the goverment can suck at all but at least they use free-software hehe.

So today this middleware will be released at a conference (full source code and GPLed) and let’s hope that we can make a good and free brazilian digital tv.