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Young creative developers shine at the NPO Backstage Hackathon

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This blog was written by Kelly Mostert and Themis Karavellas.

On Saturday, November 14th, the last NPO Backstage Hackathon of 2015 took place in the restaurant of BNN/VARA, kindly made available by BNN. The overall organisation was in the hands of the Open State Foundation (OSF). Kelly Mostert and Themis Karavellas of Sound & Vision Research and Development attended the hackathon to find out what concepts were being worked on and what kind of features are possible with the NPO Backstage API.

NPO Backstage API

The NPO Backstage API has been made available earlier in 2015 for developers to experiment with. The API is RESTful and content is in JSON form. It provides access to different information regarding TV content such as metadata, subtitles and type of program while also enabling access to information through TV programme guide searches or program IDs. The following list gives a bit of an indication of what kind of data can be extracted:

All API endpoints as a standard operate within the context of all the data, so a normal /search executes a search across all data sources, whereas /journalistiek/search would only search within the Journalistiek dataset.

Hackathon winners & concepts

There were 11 teams participating in the Hackathon ranging from students to enthusiasts, to companies dealing with media content and broadcasters. Most concepts focused on the news/journalism angle, pairing the NPO API with other APIs from Twitter and Blendle. There were quite some interesting concepts and a lot of enthusiastic (young) developers. There were 5 winners in no particular order, and one honorable mention. These are some of the concepts that were presented by the teams at the hackathon:

Trending Snippets Extracts the interesting points in a show, based on Twitter activity
The Gender Gap Really clever yet simple concept. Using the live stream of NPO1 to analyze audio for the female/male ratio of TV. Also uses LIUM speaker diarization toolkit
1 ingang One app for all TV content, using Apple TV / Skystream
NPO for Apple TV NPO announced it will not invest in an NPO app for Apple TV, so this one developer made it himself
NPOji Replacing some words with Emojis on the teletext and subtitles of TV programmes
StemSlimmer Voting suggestions based on likes over news and topics reportage as seen on TV
MovieLikers Suggestions for consumer products and other TV programmes based on subtitles’ keywords
TV alert Alerts setting for not missing your favourite TV programme or topic
Subject follower Choose a subject/topic and folllow it. This way you will be receiving a notification whenever an update is published
Waar is PINO Choose a theme/item/character and receive a notification whenever this theme/item/character is mentioned or present on TV

(bold = winner)


Take aways from the Hackathon

The objective of our visit was to learn and be inspired, and in this we definitely succeeded! Here’s what we took home of this dynamic and innovative hackathon:

  • All developers seemed to share some main complaints about the technical support that NPO currently offers. The streams are of low quality, and NPO is slow to respond to new modes of viewing, such as Apple TV (which some developers have responded to by making an unofficial Apple TV NPO app).
  • There is a lot of creativity with the different broadcasting organizations experimenting with different modes of watching and different entries into the content. The NPO itself is mainly focused on offering ‘one entrance to all NPO content’.
  • Despite this the NPO is getting less strict about their YouTube policy, some programs are allowed to offer their content in segments online to the YouTube audience.
  • The TT888 dataset was very popular as it provides an important entry point into the content, and it was used to enrich the TV content with data from other (news) sources.

Overall the hackathon had a energetic vibe of young developers willing to sacrifice their free weekend night to work on creative media concepts. There was a lot of demand for the NPO Backstage API key (only a demo key was given to the participants for the duration of the hackathon) and there was a shared ambition to keep the data open and available to the public, an ambition that we at Sound & Vision definitely share.

We are hoping more NPO Backstage events will be organised, and are looking forward to connecting ideas with the NPO data. Until next time!

More information

All photos by the authors