Tagesschau.de receives Document Freedom Day award from FSFE and FFII

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) have used the occasion of Document Freedom Day 2011 to give an award to German broadcaster ARD's internet platform tagesschau.de for offering broadcast shows in the free Ogg Theora video format. According to the FSFE announcement, the technical manager and vice editorial director will be presented with cakes at separate events in Hamburg and Berlin.

Ogg Theora is supported by most of the media players in Linux distributions and can also be played on Windows and Mac OS X by using the VLC media player. The FSFE pointed out that all regular videos are available on tagesschau.de, but apart from the 24-hour news page, users wanting to view the Ogg Theora content will need to manually select "download the file" and choose the "Medium(Ogg)" option.

"In times of non-free video formats still dominating the internet, tagesschau.de is an example for other broadcasting corporations how to provide unrestricted access to their media," said Matthais Kirschner, the coordinator for FSFE in Germany. Kirschner hoped that Tagesschau.de would make other content, such as the media library and live streams, available in a free format and possibly in higher quality Ogg Theora or WebM formats.

See also:

• Document Freedom Day on 30 March, a report from The H.
• Google open source VP8 as part of the WebM Project, a report from The H.
• Open Video Alliance want Ogg Theora video on Wikipedia, a report from The H.

(djwm)