After last week’s launch event, and given the amount of interest Meo Kanal is generating, we thought it would be nice to put up a quick primer on what it is, what’s the backstory. and what it means for the Codebits community, so we asked the team behind it to give you a summary of the whole thing.

A little background

First off, and for those of you who might be dropping in out of the blue, Codebits is a SAPO initiative, and SAPO is in turn part of Portugal Telecom.

Meo is Portugal Telecom‘s IPTV service (built atop the Microsoft Mediaroom platform), and Meo Kanal was developed by SAPO as a turnkey solution for Meo.

Without getting into cumbersome business details, and, again, for the benefit of our international readers, Meo grew over three years to one million subscribers (in a country of 10.6 million people, according to the latest census), and has a sizable channel portfolio, to which it has been adding a number of interactive services – i.e., a growing set of Presentation Framework applications that are invoked from a central menu, or, in some cases, developed for and in partnership with specific TV channels.

Before going into Meo Kanal itself, there’s another little bit of information that you need to know to fully grasp how it works: the Meo set-top-box remote (which, incidentally, is also available as an Android or iOS app) has the usual four color buttons (red, green, yellow and blue), and those buttons are associated with specific interactive features.

For instance, the red button invokes channel-specific interactivity (in a news channel, it will pop up a menu with video thumbnails of current stories, etc.), the blue one invokes Meo Interativo (the customizable launch bar for all Meo apps), etc.

So what is Meo Kanal anyway?

The simplest way to put it is that it is a way for any Meo customer (DSL or fiber – we’re working on addressing variations like satellite service, etc.) to create his/her own TV channel, which is viewable by any other Meo customer by simply pressing the green button followed by the channel number:

our very own Codebits channel

Think about that for a second. Your own TV channel. For free. Actually, you can create up to six (three private, three public), as long as you’re a Meo customer.

Creation is as simple as possible: You record your footage, edit it, upload it to the web site, pick a randomly-generated number, and lay out your video clips in an interactive timeline – all via a fully drag-and-drop UI that looks like this:

The channel editor in playlist mode

The green items are videos, and the blue ones are photo slideshows. Since one of the primary goals of the service was to allow people to easily share their photos with friends and family via private channels, you can also batch upload photos to the site and use the same visual editor to create video slideshows, complete with background music and animated transitions.

But if you have a sizable amount of vide and you’d rather have a full-blown EPG with a weekly, round-the-clock programming schedule, the editor can switch to an “advanced” mode like so:

The channel editor in full-blown weekly schedule mode

Once you’re done, you simply go over to your set-top-box and hit the green button.

That fires up a Mediaroom Presentation Framework app that displays a channel catalogue and lets you search or page through channel categories, top channels, highlights, your saved favorites, etc.:

What you get as you hit the green button – we’ve since added a channel counter to the bottom right

But if you keep tapping out a channel number and hit OK, then you’ll go straight to the channel you want, with an immersive, HD-grade TV experience.

Here’s the promo video, so that you can watch how it works – we’ll probably add some screencasts of the web UX later, and we’ll also arrange for English subtitles in due time, but it’s easy to get the gist of things:

Of course, if your channel is private, viewers will have to know both the channel number and the PIN code. And there is an extensive amount of extra functionality (rating channels, viewing a channel’s program lineup, flagging offensive or unsuitable content, etc.) that would take hours more to describe fully, but it doesn’t get in the way.

The point here is that we’ve taken pains to make everything, from the uploading and scheduling workflows to the channel viewing and discovery process as smooth as possible, and over on the SAPO UX blog (in Portuguese) you can have a glimpse of how things evolved through a relentless (and very iterative) process.

And it seems to have paid off handsomely. We’ve hit 2600 channels in a little more than 3 days (it’s one of the stats we’ve made publicly available), and the number of viewers is simply massive.

As to content, the quantity and quality is overwhelming. We’re seeing indie music bands, amateur photographers, school districts, sports (surf, volleyball, hockey, off-road driving and biking, hang-gliding, you name it), and even… a Nyan Cat channel. A lot of it in glorious HD quality, and most of it stuff you’d never be able to enjoy on “regular” TV.

It will probably take a while yet to fully gauge the impact, but so far it’s nothing short of awesome.

What about the back-end?

Funny you asked that. Of course, none of this works in a vacuum, and even though there are a few bits of proprietary information that we’re not allowed to disclose, it should be obvious that this is not something you can and go buy off the shelf – not if you’re going to make it available on such a massive scale, and especially not with the degree of end-to-end integration and UX polish we’re delivering.

Interested parties poking around the site will soon realize that the web front-ends are based on a LAMP stack (as is most of SAPO), but the truly revolutionary bits are all further behind the scenes.

Even if you’re running Microsoft Mediaroom, everything related to content management, channel control, real-time timeline/EPG editing and the set-top-box application itself were all developed in-house at SAPO, and run atop our existing core services.

The ones we can mention are fairly obvious: the SAPO Videos and Fotos engines supply massive storage, content management, transcoding and streaming services, we run custom advertising and channel statistics engine (yes, you get real-time audience stats, which is something else we’re really excited about…), and the APIs for the whole thing run atop our carrier-grade Service Delivery Broker platform.

APIs, you say?

Yes, this is the bit we think the Codebits community is going to be particularly excited about. Imagine the possibilities of having an API for managing a TV channel. For uploading media, scheduling it, retrieving audience statistics, the works.

Although our current focus is, of course, keeping tabs on things during this initial stage and fixing whatever bugs come up (and there are always bugs and little corner cases that you only come across when you deploy something like this to the masses), we already plan to expose APIs for batch content publishing, EPG management, etc., and we’re looking for feedback – either to make sure we’re on the right track, or to add new and exciting targets to our roadmap.

We’re considering doing a lot of other stuff as well based on the service itself, such as launching community channels to show off your achievements, maybe even a contest or two… Watch this space for more, but do get in touch and give us your feedback.

Paraphrasing the late and great Steve Jobs, do you want to keep watching TV for the rest of your life, or do you want to help change the world?

Good morning, people!

A sizable chunk of the SAPO team has been working around the clock for a year and a half to bring to fruition a ground-breaking project that (we believe) will revolutionize home entertainment as we know it, and we’d like to let you in on the inside track.

it will be a great way for the Codebits community to share even more know-how and expertise, and (later on) is sure to be something you’ll love to use in some of your projects.

So bookmark this link to the press release stream (scheduled to start around 11:30 GMT), and join us in celebrating – it’s green, it’s spicy, and we think it’s going to take our world by storm.

And, no, it’s not really about #wasabi :)

Things move pretty fast around here, and following last month’s announcement regarding the launch of Codebits Labs, we’re very pleased to announce that two days ago, as part of the official unveiling of the Startup Lisboa building by the Mayor of Lisbon, the 11 Codebits winning projects that decided to take up the challenge can now enjoy shared office facilities and broadband connectivity (as well as associated logistics and support, such as fiscal, management and business guidance) in the heart of Lisbon.

And, of course, they get to do it all Codebits style, and one of the things we think they’ll enjoy is the decor done by the SAPO design team – here’s an initial concept render which (to be honest), doesn’t do the end result justice – it’s way cooler in person:

Pretty neat, huh? We’ll be posting some actual photos as we report on the Labs’ progress.

Zeinal Bava, Portugal Telecom’s CEO, joined SAPO’s CTO, Celso Martinho and PT Board member Abílio Martins (pictured, left to right) in celebrating the event, and stressed the importance of technology as a driver for today’s economy.

In case you’re curious, the wall-to-wall print behind them in the picture is part of this amazing panorama, which should be familiar to every recent Codebits attendee.

For further background info, we recommend going through the news coverage of the unveiling and of Codebits Labs’ announcement (in Portuguese).

This year it took us a little longer to work our way through the survey results, but just as last year, there is plenty of useful feedback in there.

First off, survey participation reached an all-time high of 76%, which makes the results doubly significative for us (it shows the participants’ commitment and the importance of the survey itself in providing feedback).

Demographics

In terms of demographics, things seem mostly stable – just like last year, 38% of the respondents seem to be in the 20-25 age band, which is also good – we see that (as well as the slight increases in the upper bands) as confirmation that we’re targeting the right kind of people. Although this year the stats show that we had slightly more developers than in 2010, there is something to be said about the term “developer” in an age where good user experience and polished interaction and visual design have to go hand in hand with coding skills, so we’ll be looking at ways to make it plain where your main skills and interests lie and plan for that.

Overall Appreciation

In terms of overall appreciation, we felt a warm fuzzy feeling as the percentage of people who rated Codebits 2011 as “awesome” rose to an amazing 58% (well over the past year’s 49%) and overall positive satisfaction rose to 95% (a further two points above last year):

Which, of course, only makes it more important to address the remaining 5% of answers – we’ll be looking at the suggestions submitted along with those (many thanks) and see what we can improve.

The Venue

In terms of venue, and once again, the location got an overwhelming 64% of “awesome” and an extra 31% of “pretty cool” ratings. The ratings for the venue itself rose once again, with 52% of “awesome” and 40% of “pretty cool” ratings – rather better than last year, which is very gratifying to everyone who worked on putting everything together:

Looking at the chart above, it’s immediately obvious that we have to fix some things – but, fortunately, quite few.

One of them is the registration process – the ratings were quite a bit down from last year, with only 35% “awesome” and 32% “pretty cool”, and even though only 1% rated it as “awful” we do have 22% “ok” and 10% “could be better”. The truth is that this year we got way more people showing up in the first couple of hours then in any previous edition of Codebits, and we weren’t expecting that.

(At noon, over 500 people had already checked in, an increase of almost 30% against last year.)

So we have a standing action item for upgrading the registration desk for the first morning of the next edition.

And, obviously, food. This is always a tricky subject, but we clearly need to improve this – it might have been due to our moving the food court to the adjacent building (it was kind of chilly, if you’ll pardon the non-taco-related pun) but even assuming this pertains to the food itself, the ratings for  ”could be better”, “ok” and “pretty cool” (respectively, 24%, 33%, 27%) are telling. We’ll see what we can do to improve this as well.

Internet access, on the other hand, was greatly improved, and thus received a 41% “awesome” and 35% “pretty cool”, leaving only 1% “awful” and 6% “could be better” (compare against last year’s 4% “awful”, 19% “could be better”, 28% “ok”, 31% “pretty cool” and only 17% “awesome”).

Working conditions received much better results than last year: 2% “awful”, 11% “pretty good”, 25% “ok”, 41% “pretty good” and 21% “awesome” (last year they got 2%, 18%, 29%, 37% and 13%, respectively). We noticed right from the start that groups were banding together at the tables leaving a lot of spread seats available, which meant that some later groups had trouble finding a table for their own.

Another point worth mentioning is the welcome kits. The backpack filled with headphones, laptop sleeves, Yubikeys, jugs, LEGO pieces, O’Reilly ebook vouchers, transistors and the likes got an amazing 56% “awesome” and 35% “pretty cool”!

Satellite Activities

Our satellite activities are gaining more and more ground every year, and they all seem to gather mostly positive feedback (“no opinion” above means, in most cases, that people didn’t take part in the activities – after all, you can’t do everything during those 3 days…).

The most successful this year seem to be the Panoramas SAPO (40% “awesome” + 40% “pretty cool”), the LEGO stand (33% “awesome” + 39% “pretty cool”) and the Nuclear Tacos (32% “awesome” + 24% “pretty cool”). Close follow-ups are the Quiz Show and the DIY area, but none of the satellite activities got strong bad feedback this year, and for that we are very pleased.

48h competition

The feedback for the 48h competition was very similar to last year’s, almost down to the decimals, so we’ll look at what was new this year:

We did add a section regarding the project interviews and their format; we had 8% suggesting that the interviews shouldn’t have been held through Skype and another 8% (not necessarily the same 8%) suggesting the format used (anonymous interviews) wasn’t a good choice. That leaves us with 92% positive feedback, which means we may improve on this, but it shouldn’t take many adjustments.

The Language “Issue”

Among the remaining stats (it would be hard to post charts for every single question), we’d like to highlight an interesting result that validates our current strategy of increasing the reach of the Codebits community: The vast majority of people expressed a preference for Codebits being held in both English and Portuguese (74% against last year’s 70%, with 20% voting for English only).

To make it plain: The percentage of people voting for a Portuguese-only event was 5%, below last year’s 8%.

And we’re talking about a larger survey sample, too.

This is a recurring issue that crops up now and then due to cultural issues, and we’d like to make it plain that language has never been an issue for us – our focus is on the technology (and the best way to communicate it), and we’ve always been driven by our passion towards globalization and the Internet.

Just to quote one oft-misunderstood (but copiously explained) example: speakers don’t have to deliver their talks in English – that’s completely optional.

But, of course, it helps a lot if what you have to say can be easily understood by everyone, especially in technology, and all Portuguese staff members with a technical background wish we could simply get over the language hang-up and focus on making that happen.

And the final question: would you go to Codebits 2012?

90% said yes, 9% used to text field to reply (mostly to say a bigger yes) and 1% said no. It made for a lovely (but ultimately rather pointless) chart, but we’re not just interested in numbers here, so we’ll skip that one.

On all that lovely extra feedback

But that’s not all, of course. Several questions throughout the survey had text fields for your detailed feedback, and we’ve been looking through them and making copious notes for the next edition, because there are some brilliant and simple ideas in there – some of them facepalm-grade, making us go “duh! why didn’t we think about that?”

It’s great to see such positive feedback and it’s warming that the criticism is mostly constructive, as usual.

We’re very proud of the community that we’ve built around Codebits and hope to live up to your expectations again this year.

And, of course, feel free to send in even more feedback – we may not be able to reply individually (we always try, but it’s getting harder and harder with each passing year as we gain more attendees), but rest assured that we’re paying attention and will try to take everything into account.

Again, thanks. You make us proud.

To get the year rolling, we’d like to welcome the former readership of the SAPO Developers Blog (which is being folded into this site), and to let you know that we’re busily gearing up to make Codebits a year-round initiative.

That’s right, we’re going to turn Codebits into your single destination for all sorts of interesting information regarding developer initiatives in Portugal (and just about everywhere else the Codebits community resides).

Not to worry, there will still be a major yearly event (and we hope to keep each new one even bigger and better than before), but we’ll be doing even more stuff all throughout the year.

To kick things off, yesterday we launched Codebits Labs, a programme that will provide office space, connectivity and computing resources to 20 hand-picked projects from last year’s Codebits in partnership with Startup Lisboa:

But, most importantly of all, the participants will have access to SAPO mentorship and technical resources in bringing their ideas to fruition, and we’ll be able to follow each project’s progress online throughout the year.

As to this site, we’ll be making quite a few changes – and athough we haven’t yet settled on a format, we’ll be keeping the majority of the posts in English (given that a significant part of our new mission is to increase international awareness of technology initiatives in Portugal), with Portuguese content made available whenever applicable.

Once in a while at SAPO we cross our path with extraordinary people with uncommon ideas and unlimited motivation. Ideas to which we just can't say no, those with the right amount of usefulness, awesomeness and uniqueness, you know what I'm talking about.

The Panoramas SAPO project was one of those moments. When Basílio and Pedro came to us and the thought of making a record Tera pixel panoramic photo of Lisbon took shape, we sank our energy and resources into the project and put up an elite team working together in no time.

And what a team and project this was. During the months following, we planed the photos, built and tested bizarre equipments, literally climbed bridges and castles in the hunt for the best spots to use our gear, handled the right authorizations, learned a whole pile of theory about gigantic panoramic photos, developed software and stretched the known computing systems for this sort of projects to new limits in order to meet our goal. And we've done it.

More than 2000 hours of computing processing, 32.000 photo shots, 6TB of data and 5.000 hours of work later, we finally launched the Panoramas SAPO project at SAPO Codebits 2011.

This is the "making of" video. Best seen in full screen. We hope you like it.

Non flash, H.264 iOS/Android friendly versions here: HD and SD.