It is said that “fortune favours the prepared mind”, or at least the mildy obsessing one, so when I saw @danbri’s post on Local Video for Local People and realised that it was trivial to get hold of geocoded Youtube videos within a certain distance of a specified location using the following Youtube API call:
it was immediately obviously that this could be used to provide a local (and optionally topical) feed of Youtube videos to populate a hyperlocal DeliTV video channel for watching on Boxee.
So here it is, my DeliTV Local pipe.
And here’s the front end:
To view the channel in Boxee, enter a location, and optionally a topic, and then either:
– run the pipe, and subscribe to the RSS feed directly in Boxee;
– bookmark the URI of the pipe. Enter the URI in you browser location bar according to the following pattern:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/delitv_local?l=required,location&q=optional search terms
hit return, check the location and optional search terms are correct and the pipe is giving a plausible output, and then bookmark that page to a DeliTV tag on delicious. (WHen you bookmark the pag, any spacesin your search terms should be replaced by %20. So the above would be bookmarked containing the characters optional%20search%20terms). If you then subscribe to that DeliTV channel via a DeliTV pipe that you have hooked up to your Boxee account, you will be able to watch the channel through Boxee.
So for example, here’s my ‘Hovercrafts” channel for Ryde on the Isle of WIght:
(Hmm, I wonder, should these be sorted by relevance or recency? I think the default is relevance?)
If you want to define a variety of different topic channels around a particular location, or a set of channels on the same topic from different locations, bookmark each channel to delicious and subscribe to them all through the same DeliTV pipe :-)
See also: Deli TV – Personally Programmed Social Television Channels on Boxee: Prototype