DeliTV is a Yahoo Pipe created by Tony Hirst, a lecturer at The Open University in the UK.
This pipe allows anyone to program their own online TV channel from Boxee by bookmarking pages on Delicious with the tag “delitv”.
- Yahoo Pipes is a tool that aggregates and manipulates all sorts of content from the web.
- Boxee is free software that streams content from sites like MLB, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, and Flickr on a laptop or connected to a TV.
DeliTV supports:
- BBC iPlayer category feeds
- podcast feeds
- Youtube videos
- Youtube Playlists
- Youtube channels
- another DeliTV playlist
- an MP3 file
Setting Up
After running the pipe, you can subscribe to the RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates in Boxee as a video feed.
Using Delicious as a curation tool offers flexibility: users can generate multiple playlists, users can subscribe to other people’s playlists and created nested feeds.
To subscribe to other users’ playlists, search for the delitv tag on Delicious to see who has been bookmarking content.
You can also subscribe to other users playlists by rewriting a URL:
Use the name of the user whose Deli TV channel you want to subscribe to in the following URL:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=DELICIOUS_USERNAME
So for example, Tony Hirst’s feed is at:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv?_render=rss&q=psychemedia
You then just copy and paste this RSS URL into Boxee and it will then add new video for you to watch every time you tag a page with deli
User Experience
According to the comments on Hirst’s blog, OUseful.info, (where he writes about “things that I think may be useful in an higher education context, one day”) the setup is working well.
It does take some time for Delicious to propagate links to its RSS feeds, but that seems to be the only delay. Also, users outside of the UK will not be able to use BBC iPlayer links. Boxee has a few bugs of its own, including occasional hang-ups, but for the most part, my experience has been very good.
I’ve been using Boxee to watch TV on my laptop for a few months now, and Deli TV is a great way to add personalized content. I can get all my videos and podcasts in one place, rather than visiting multiple websites each day for updates.
It’s sort of like an RSS reader for multimedia. Although popular RSS readers like Google Reader support multimedia, the experience is not as polished.
If you don’t already have a Delicious account, this might be a good enough reason to get one.
Useful Links
You may also be interested in:
- More about Boxee on WebTVWire
- How to Connect your PC to a HDMI TV – Boxee works great on a TV set.
Books about Yahoo Pipes on eBay
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