Arki (http://arki.mlog.taik.fi/) is a multidisciplinary research group that is part of the Media Lab Helsinki (http://mlab.taik.fi/) of the Aalto University’s (http://www.aalto.fi/en/) School of Art and Design (http://www.taik.fi/en). It focuses on the co-evolution of digital technology and the practices of everyday life with a design perspective. Arki’s activities include researching people’s media practices and experimenting with the opportunities provided by new digital tools in the context of audiovisual media. One of Arki’s recent experiments is TestiKaista (http://arki.mlog.taik.fi/2010/05/21/testikaista-boxee-application-prototype/) application prototype, which was built for studying how TV experience could expand to include media from Internet and computers at home. The prototype is built with the Boxee (www.boxee.tv) media center open-source platform, and provides Finnish TV content, using the feed from TVKaista service. As Boxee enables viewing media from a variety of sources from the couch using a remote control, the experiment has enabled studying how more traditional and online media content and practices get mixed in current media ecosystems. The work carried out is part of the FinLab project, co-funded by TEKES.
The TestiKaista source code is published in Google Code (http://code.google.com/p/tvkaista-boxee/) with MIT Open Source license, so you are free to explore it. In case you are interested to know more about TestiKaista, please contact Aapo Rista (aapo.rista[at]taik.fi).
