Free, online video from WGBH’s popular Frontline series on PBS is available on its site, and there’s even an RSS feed to push announcements of new installments. The problem? The feed links back to an HTML page for the show, not a direct media URL, so it’s not something you can feed into iTunes, FireAnt, Miro or myriad other viewers that support video podcasts.
Enter Tailrank’s Kevin Burton, a Frontline fan and feed guru. He created a script to check for updates, and then parse the links to QuickTime media into a new RSS 2.0 feed that’s compatible with iTunes. So now folks can have Frontline fed directly to their iPod, computer or Apple TV for mobile or full-screen viewing.
Though it’s entirely unofficial, since Burton’s not trying to make a claim on or profit from the actual content, it looks legal enough to me. He’s not copying or modifying any content, just providing a new way to interface with deeplinks to video already on the site. To keep it all above board, he took Niall Kennedy‘s advice and made sure all of Frontline’s copyright information traveled along with the video.
RSS feeds happen to be just about my favorite way to get content updates online, and not just from blogs, but from keyword search queries, podcasts, torrent trackers and so on. And there are lots of legacy networks like PBS and other video producers who, for whatever reason, aren’t making updates available via RSS.
And while Burton achieved his results with a 160-line bash script, even punks like me without his coding chops could accomplish similar results with Yahoo Pipes and an HTML scraper — Robin Good has reviews of three such services. It only takes one fan of a show to hack together a solution and blog about it so that everyone can enjoy the new functionality.
But how to deal with sites that don’t publish in a format supported by the player of your choice? For instance, what if the source video is in Flash, Real or Windows media and you want to watch in iTunes? Potentially, you could transcode the video server-side (Burton suggested mplayer for the task).
My worry is that you’d either have to transcode on the fly and potentially overload your server or host it and risk a nastygram from the rightsholder — at least here in the United States. I would suggest to content providers that one way to make your audience happy and preempt any unofficial feed hackery would be to simply provide the feeds for multiple formats themselves.

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