Project Baird

Welcome to Project Baird

Project Baird is a collaborative effort to create a set of open-ended, device-agnostic, platform-neutral, cross-broadcaster specifications for delivering different kinds of content to digital TV devices across the Internet.

Project Baird is built upon, wherever possible, existing standards and projects. Anybody is welcome to fork and submit patches to the Project Baird repository.

Focus areas

1. Service discovery: how devices can automatically locate services relating to over-the-air broadcasts, and how users can easily subscribe to new (IP-only) services.
   • TVDNS - allowing automatic discovery of broadcasters' IP-delivered services relating over-the-air broadcasts
   • Advertising and locating IP-delivered services on a local network with Bonjour
   • Subscribing to services manually (i.e., user-initiated subscriptions)
2. IP-delivered applications:
   • Content feeds: describing both linear and on-demand primary and secondary content to devices
   • Service manifests: a mechanism for a collection of related Atom feeds to be bundled together
   • URI resolver: resolving a broadcast URI to a canonical URL
   • Recommendations and sharing across the social graph
   • Remote control and introspection
3. Web application support for TV tuners
4. Device profiles: tailoring content to different classes of device (e.g., mobile, handheld, full HD)
5. Dynamic EPG allocation: integrating linear IP-delivered content and over-the-air broadcasts into a single programme guide

Key standards and related projects

There are a number of key standards and projects upon which Project Baird is built.

• Atom Syndication Format
• RadioDNS
• HTML5
• TV-Anytime
• Programmes Ontology and Music Ontology
• NoTube
• URIplay
• P2P-Next

(Please note that there is no formal affiliation between Project Baird and the above; they are simply those projects which are particularly important to this effort).