Technology + Creativity at the BBC Feed

Round up: September 2018

2018-09-21T13:13:29+00:00

It's been a busy few weeks both within Design + Engineering and across the BBC as a whole, so it's worth one of my occasional round-ups to bring everyone upto date....

The DG Tony Hall has announced both internally and externally about a major reshaping of our online services. There will be more on this on these pages over the coming weeks
News has launched the first ever bulletin for a mobile audience in India, as part of the expansion of the World Service
The BBC VR documentary Damming the Nile has won a Rose D'Or award at a ceremony in Berlin. Meanwhile ‘1943 Berlin Blitz’ will be on show at the RAF’s Battle of Britain Air Show at Duxford this coming weekend
A new 3D audio drama Vostok-K Incident has been launched by R&D on Taster. Listeners can use mobile phones or tablets as extra speakers in this lastest experiment in Spatial sound
R&D has also resolved the "lag" issues that viewers experience during live internet sports streams
And we've had two schemes launch to encourage more women to get into technology roles at the BBC

So a busy time and there's plenty more to come over the next few months as more services and launches are in the pipeline.

A round up of sound

2018-05-08T11:51:19+00:00

The theme so far this month in the world of BBC technology has been Sound, with a showcase event last week at the New Broadcasting House Radio Theatre. Sounds Amazing was a joint production by BBC R&D and BBC Academy bringing together lots of ideas and demonstrations from the world of audio. Much of it has been written up elsewhere, so here's a brief round-up of some of those highlights and other news.

We learnt more about how spatial audio works and the difference between binaural and object-based sound. And as the summer approaches, soon it will be the Proms with more binaural experiences such as these
There was a demonstration from the Blue Planet 2 sound production team about the scale of sound editing. Each episode has around 170 sound tracks and takes roughly 15 days to edit and mix. There's more on the underwater soundscape here
We heard about BBC Radio's ambitions around podcasting, following the recent appointment of a podcast commissioning editor. It's now estimated that 10% of the population are listening to podcasts
Zillah Watson, head of the newly created VR Hub, spoke about some of their recent commissions including the 360 video documentary Damming the Nile. More here on how it was made.
For VR fans, there's also a new immersive tour of the old Alexandra Palace studios, which takes you back to the early days of television
And finally, a sound treat. My colleagues in Archive Development have just released a library of 16,000 sound effects. While still BBC copyright, they've available for personal, education or research purposes.

Time for a change

2018-03-01T11:02:39+00:00

Welcome to our new look. Yes this is still what was called the Internet Blog and you'll find the back catalogue of blogs still here, but from today we're changing the name to make it more descriptive of what the BBC is doing in the digital space - combining the ingenuity of its engineers and designers here in BBC Design & Engineering with the skills of its content makers across News, Sport, TV and Radio. Where Technology meets Creativity.

This blog recently celebrated its 10th birthday. During that period it's covered huge technological advances, from the launch of BBC iPlayer, through the evolution of apps and small screen technology, the first truly digital Olympics in 2012, through to the growth of personalisation. But the blog itself has evolved to become more than just a view of the Internet. We're reporting on innovative ways of working, how machines are changing everyone's lives (connected or not) and what the future of TV may bring. Over the coming months I'll be aiming to reach out to a greater variety of industry voices from both within the BBC and outside.

For technical reasons the URL of this blog will stay the same (for now) so no bookmarks or deep links will break, but the Twitter page has also changed its name, so feel free to retweet.

Round up: BBC Red Button+

2015-03-30T15:07:31+00:00

David Loder on the About The BBC blog writes: "Red Button is evolving".

"This April sees the next step in Red Button evolution – the Connected Red Button gets a new name, Red Button+, and this will become the primary experience when you press Red on a wide range of internet connected TVs... Red Button+ lets you:

Access BBC iPlayer to catch up on your favourite shows and discover more from all BBC channels
Enjoy wider coverage including live streaming of sporting events from BBC Sport plus the latest headlines, highlights and results
Catch up on the latest news stories without leaving the channel you are watching, including video highlights
Check the local weather for your area and more"

BBC TWO on Red Button+

The new BBC News website continues to stimulate a lively conversation. Ryan O'Connor explained some of the UX&D work on the new BBC News app last week. Neil Barraclough at Techmark gave his opinion on "Why the switch to a responsive website was long overdue for BBC News", while the Daily Express's view was "incomplete and amateurish".

BBC Research and Development's "Walls Have Eyes" installation is at the Design Museum until August.

And Dan Taylor Watt, head of BBCiPlayer tweeted a picture of 20 ways to get it.

Open Post: January 2015

2015-01-16T10:46:17+00:00

iSite and iBroadcast are the internal BBC systems used to publish the blog

The Internet blog migrated to a new content management system on Tuesday of last week. Hopefully you won't have noticed too many changes. The look and feel of the blog is pretty much the same.

The main change is in comments where the blog now uses the BBC wide version of comments. The technical team have identified a few bugs with RSS feeds and should be fixing them this week. The blog has also gone responsive, which means it should look different (and hopefully nicer) on mobiles and tablets.

The new CMS is called iSite Version 2, and if you're interested you can read a post about the user experience and design involved.

So as I grapple with a new CMS, it feels like a good time for one of our regular "open" posts.

As always, you can discuss any subject or ask any question as long as it's about the work of BBC Online.

1. Comments need to abide by the BBC’s House Rules. Keep the conversation civil please.

2. If you want to make a specific complaint about the BBC use the Complaints website.

3. If you want to have a general discussion about the BBC, try the Points of View message board. Information about the BBC can also be found on the About the BBC blog, the BBC News Editors blog and BBC iPlayer FAQs.

I can't promise to respond to every single comment but I will do my best and encourage others to answer as well.

Thanks

Round up: BBC iPlayer RSS feeds and the Ethical Dilemma Cafe

2014-11-11T13:56:46+00:00

Terms and conditions of entry to the Ethical Dilemma Café

“BBC clamps down on ILLICIT iPlayer watchers” was the Register’s colourful headline about the decision to switch off BBC iPlayer RSS feeds. Some unhappy users of the feeds found Jon Billings’s post introducing Platform API and made their objections known. Jon (who is Head of Platform API) explained:

"The iPlayer RSS feeds were a legacy part of older versions of the iPlayer website which we’ve finally had to shut down with the end of a larger hosting contract for those legacy sites..."

jk asked:

"can you confirm that Nitro will be available and useful to open-source developers?"

And Jon responded:

"Yes, it will be available to developers of both open-source projects and closed ones... Nitro has an explicit public licence which will govern usage. To be certain whether your use case is enabled or not, please have a read of the Licence..."

If you’re interested in this subject you can read the BBC’s guidelines on syndication of on demand content.

Yesterday the Radio 1 channel arrived on BBC iPlayer. Ben Cooper, Controller of Radio 1, tells you about it on the About The BBC blog:

"Even the most passionate radio advocates know that we need to continue to evolve our offering and ensure we give our young audience a reason to forsake Minecraft and GTA and spend their precious screen time with us instead."

Over on the BBC R&D blog I was intrigued and amused by an experiment Jasmine Cox and Ian Forrester carried out at Mozilla Festival 2014 called the Ethical Dilemma café:

“Before entering the café, visitors were confronted with a notice, warning them that by crossing an arbitrary boundary they were giving away all of their personal data to the 'café', and potentially malevolent 3rd parties... For allowing us to liberate personal data we offered free smoothies and popcorn… One particular pair of visitors, a father and young son, were split in their decisions to embrace free smoothies. The father was wary of the risks and refrained from crossing the line, however his son immediately placed an order for a smoothie. After a short disussion, with the father explaining the dilemma, his son rejected the smoothie."

Also on the R&D blog the IRFS team's latest in their series of weeknotes gives a flavour of what their team have been doing:

Libby has been monitoring people. She made a network of stalker bots (built from Radiodans) that track people by mac address and take their photos... James has been monitoring Comma systems - rsyslog TLS log shipping and a per-stack Kibana/Elasticsearch/Logstash setup... I also saw Zillah type a letter of thanks on Alistair Cook's own portable typewriter (see top). You don't hear that sound much anymore..."

Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, BBC Online (and enjoyed watching Royal Blood on the Radio One channel on BBC iPlayer).

College of Technology round up: Lean analytics, Nitro, Cloud and Storytime

2014-10-30T10:25:10+00:00

Over the last few weeks we’ve published a variety of material on the College of Technology website with a software engineering theme.

Lean Analytics: making products better

How much can you glean from the amount of hits a webpage gets? According to data analyst Alistair Croll not very much at all. This is, he explains, an example of a vanity metric – a statistic that can be very appealing to focus on, but that doesn’t entirely help you improve your website or web product. In our new film Alistair describes the Lean Analytics cycle as a way of making meaningful decisions using data.

Instead of concentrating on a potentially ambiguous headline figure like page views, you seek out metrics that can help build a better picture of how users interact with your product. Do they scroll to the bottom of the page? Do they share the content with other people? Do they click through to other content on the site? You choose the one metric that most needs improving, you make a small change in your product and then you see whether there is an improvement in the data. The short film also features Cait O’Riordan from Shazam, as well as Adam Bailin, Amanda Dahl and Jessica Siegel from the BBC who explain how we’re currently taking a Lean approach to data.

A fast and easy way to access the entire BBC catalogue

Since making programmes and clips available online almost a decade ago, the BBC has published more than half a million clips and almost two million episodes to watch or listen to online. In this article Allan Donald, senior product manager, BBC Platform API team, outlines the systems that the BBC uses to store and index all of a programme’s associated information (like its title, genre, availability or whether it’s in HD or can be downloaded).

In particular he explains the new API called Nitro that allows clients to get access to this metadata. By comparing the now/next feeds for Nitro and the old system, Dynamite, you can clearly see the difference the new API makes. In fact many of the announcements made earlier this year – including the 30 day catch-up window and BBC Store – all depend on Nitro.

Cloud technology and the BBC

What do CBBC games and the BBC’s presidential election coverage have in common? They both rely on cloud technology – essentially the ability to use someone else’s computing resources across the Internet.

Over the last few years ‘the cloud’ has become a ubiquitous term, though the actual meaning of something being ‘in the cloud’ is not always made clear. This article, courtesy of Mark Ransby, technical architect for BBC Children’s, explains what exactly cloud computing is, why it’s important and what benefits it presents. He then goes over particular examples of how the BBC is currently using the cloud and raises the question of how it might revolutionise our approach in the future.

Making CBeebies Storytime

Finally, last week we put up the first in a series of two articles about the development process for CBeebies Storytime. Dan Hett, senior games developer, walks through the challenges and requirements faced by the team in constructing the interactive storybook app. Given the sheer variety of different aspects ratios and resolutions on mobile devices, how do you create an app that is optimised for all screens? And how do you build a game structure that allows indie developers to contribute new content? Keep an eye out for the second part of the article, in which Dan will explain how they animated a pop-up book that behaves realistically and how they made the Storytime app as accessible as possible.

Frederick Botham is a researcher at the BBC College of Technology

Round up: Continuous delivery, Genome and The Doctor

2014-10-24T05:29:11+00:00

Chris Northwood on his personal blog, gave some insights into “How we applied Continuous Delivery for iWonder Timelines”:

"One thing we didn’t want to do is continuously deliver low quality code… so we took a step back and came up with a few ideas of what that means in a Continuous Delivery world. One key practice was to tackle bugs as soon as we find them. With monthly release cycles, you could leave them until later, but with a continuous flow, there’s no “later” to leave them to. We want to get a single feature through our pipeline quickly, rather than batching up multiple features or improvements into bigger, monthly, releases."

The BBC’s Genome project went live last week. As well as Andy Armstrong’s post you can read this overview from Hilary Bishop on the About the BBC blog.

The Guardian’s angle on Genome was “What was on TV on the day you were born?”

Andy Mabbut via Twitter:

A tweet about Genome from Andy Mabbett

Here's the link to the Wikidata page.

The BBC Research and Development blog featured some work on binaural effects: “Tommies in 3D”:

"...it aims to recreate the complex effect that the human body has on a sound reaching the auditory system to create a more realistic spatial impression for the listener. This effect can be created in recordings with dummy head microphone techniques and also in post-production using digital signal processing, which is the approach we have taken here."

The R&D team have also been running experiments with surround sound on Radio 4’s production last weekend of Under Milk Wood:

“The new headphone surround sound feature is possible thanks to a web technology called the Web Audio API. This client-side script API introduces capabilities for audio signal processing in web applications. It has a range of applications, such as music creation and games, or even recreating the sounds of the Radiophonic Workshop. BBC R&D's Matthew Paradis is co-chairing with the W3C's Audio Working Group, which is working on the specification.”

Doctor and the Dalek poster

If you want to know more about “The Doctor and the Dalek” CBBC game after Paul Bennun's post, you can read a Q&A with Ralph Rivera and Danny Cohen on the About the BBC blog.

There's also a story on the BBC News website and an interview on YouTube with games producer Richard Jenkins and John Howard of Make It Digital.

The Register gave the game a good review, sensibly testing it on a ten year old:

He had no problem driving it, saying “It was surprisingly good, despite my dad’s warnings about the BBC – though it did crash twice... Since it was aimed at people below the Scratch mark I thought they would do more programming,” continued Alexander, “though you could skip all the blowing up stuff to just the programming and it had basic variables in it. It would be better at the end if you could copy the programs you made so that you learnt that you could use it like a proper programming language.”

Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, BBC Online

College of Technology round up: File delivery

2014-10-01T12:01:45+00:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, the television industry is currently gearing up for a big change in the way programmes are delivered to broadcasters. For many producers, tape was previously the only way of delivering a TV programme. However, as most productions are now shot and edited digitally, it is clear that programmes need to make the transition to digital delivery too.

The BBC Academy has been preparing useful content around this shift to provide a central resource for producers and technical operators alike. From 29th September to 5th October, the Academy is hosting a file delivery takeover week, to coincide with the new AS-11 DPP standard being rolled out today (‘File Delivery day’ as some are calling it). We will be dedicating our homepages to articles and videos to help those in the television industry with this big transition.

File delivery in one graphic

For those new to the subject, our "File delivery demystified" short film gives an overview of what exactly the switch to tapeless delivery means and the sort of changes it spells out. In the words of Andy Quested, head of technology for BBC HD and UHD, the move to file delivery represents “one of the biggest changes we’ve seen in television since colour”.

One of file delivery’s big headlines for producers is a reconfiguring of the ‘quality control’ (QC) process. A final quality control check needs to be carried out before the programme is delivered to make sure it is editorially and technically ready to go to air. As broadcasters will only be carrying out spot checks, the ultimate responsibility for sign-off lies with the producer. This review process is two-fold, and requires both an ‘eyeball QC’ and an automatic quality control (AQC) check. The former involves watching back the final version of the programme, checking the overall quality and consistency by eye and ear, whilst the latter uses software to check for technical issues which would otherwise be hard to spot manually.

For readers eager to try their hand at an eyeball QC test, we have uploaded a real One Show clip which has had editorial and technical faults deliberately added. You can watch this and test your QC prowess. See how many errors you can pick up on and tweet @TheBBCAcademy to let us know how you get on.

Before, programme tapes were often physically sent off by courier to the broadcaster. Now programmes will be sent from computer to computer, from the edit facility to the broadcaster. The Digital Production Partnership (DPP) has outlined a standard for delivering a programme as a file. This involves wrapping the programme and its corresponding metadata as something called an AS-11 DPP file. When it’s ready to go, the packaged file needs to be sent via a secure link to the broadcaster. This will ideally have a fast upload speed to cope with the large file sizes. An hour-long AS-11 DPP file could be around 50 gigabytes in size. That’s a bit too large for a domestic broadband connection if you want to send your file quickly.

For more in-depth details about the file-delivery process we have a series of instructional films based on the File Delivery Made Real tour of events that we organised around the country. In these, you can see the particular processes and tools in action. Our ‘5 things you need to know’ overview summarises each of these videos, which include: finishing your edit, performing an eyeball review, wrapping a file, carrying out an AQC check and delivering your file.

You can also read this post on the BBC R&D blog: "Delivering File Based Delivery".

Finally, today the College of Production hosted a live Q&A session on Twitter with post-production consultant Neil Hatton and the DPP’s Production Technology Lead, Rowan de Pomerai. Catch up on tweets here.

Frederick Botham is a researcher at the BBC College of Technology

Round up: designing a URL structure for BBC programmes

2014-09-29T10:14:49+00:00

Michael Smethurst of BBC R&D has written a long, comprehensive and well recieved post on his personal blog: “Designing a URL structure for BBC programmes”. It's a history of how systems like the BBC's Programme Information database (PIPs) and /programme pages work together:

"PIPs version 1 was designed to automate programme pages for Radio 3. PIPs version 2 took the same model and attempted to roll it out over the rest of the national radio networks. Both versions were a single system with 3 parts: data storage, management and publishing. Both predated any BBC dynamic publishing infrastructure by several years and relied on “compiling” pages and parts of pages offline to be FTPed to the live servers..."

And an explanation of the tricky conceptual problems around organising the BBC's programmes in a digital world:

The core of the PIPs data model is the episode. As explained above this is not the broadcast or the media asset but the more platonic grouping of media assets. I’ve heard this described in many ways from assets / broadcasts with the same “editorial intent” to assets / broadcasts telling the same “story”. So for example the Today Programme is a 3 hour broadcast on FM but a 2.5 hour broadcast on LW (the last 30 minutes make way for Yesterday in Parliament) but they’re recognisably the same episode. Or an episode of Casualty might have a BSL version and a non-BSL version but they’re recognisably the same episode...

Over on the official R&D blog Rosie Campbell reports back on “A Weekend of Javascript in Berlin”:

"What really struck me about the conference was how many women were speaking. When I counted up afterwards I realised I had seen equal numbers of men and women, which is almost unheard of at a technology event!"

Also on the R&D blog Libby Miller has an update about "MediaScape: Prototyping Techniques".

Alia Sheikh (also of BBC R&D and author of this recent post "The Challenges of High Frame Rate Video") showed, in a tweet how R&D get a perfect blue screen:

3D model capture for the BBC R&D RE@CT research project with Dancer Caroline Crawley

Just in case you missed them, Gavin James has left some comments on Robin Murphy’s post about BBC Things...

...and John Barratt has responded to some of your comments about the new BBC search engine.

"@Guv-nor – With regards the Freedom Fries search the search engine searched for the words ‘Freedom’, ‘Fries’ and ‘Freedom Fries’. On that particular day when you searched the Sir Richard Attenborough result was appearing due to his Filmography that included the film ‘Cry Freedom’. It was also gaining a boost from that article being recently published.

Now that time has progressed the result has now moved down the search results ranking and is currently at position 31 for the search term ‘Freedom Fries’ with the number 1 result coming from 13/06/2005 referencing an earlier story from 2003 when the US congress renamed ‘French Fries’ to Freedom Fries’"

Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, BBC Online

Open Post: September 2014

2014-09-03T08:21:42+00:00

Detail from image by mag3737 on flickr

The BBC Internet blog was set up in 2007.

Over the years the subjects discussed on the blog have, naturally, changed. Most recently alongside regular updates about developments like the new Travel website and the roll out of the new BBC iPlayer on connected TVs, the blog has also published detailed posts on the work of the testing team based in Salford, the BBC’s user experience and design teams, and featured more of the work of BBC R&D.

What other aspects of the work of the BBC’s technology and digital teams you would like to know more about?

As always with an "open" post you can leave a comment about any subject, subject to the usual caveats and as long as you abide by the House Rules.

And as always, while I can’t promise to get a response to every comment, I’ll try.

Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, Central Editorial Team, BBC Online

Round up: BBC Research & Development at the Commonwealth Games 2014

2014-08-07T13:06:50+00:00

The boxing finals viewed from the BBC Research & Development IP Production Gallery

The Commonwealth Games gave the BBC’s Research & Development team a chance to try out Ultra High Definition TV and showcase some of their other projects. Just in case you missed them, there were posts on the R&D blog and pictures on their Twitter account, including:

"The network behind the R&D Commonwealth Games 2014 Showcase" by Martin Nicholson

"Instead of sending large teams and vast quantities of kit to event locations, what if broadcasters used IP cameras?"

"How to deliver UHD over DTT and IP" by Phil Layton

"UHD to the Home - Delivering Ultra High Definition TV over the Internet" by Brendan Crowther and Alia Sheikh.

"How the Commonwealth Games is helping define the future of broadcasting" by Brendan Crowther

“Virtual Reality’s Back!” says Brendan in a post that includes information about Venue Explorer, Augmented Video Player and 360 degree video.

"TV White Spaces at the CommonWealth Games" by Tim Harrod

Michael Sparks of R&D added a personal take: “Why I’m watching the Commonweath Games”:

"...we're not working with traditional broadcast kit - kit that's designed from the ground up with realtime constraints in mind and broadcast networks with realtime constraints in mind and systems with tight signalling for synchronisation. We're doing this with commodity computing kit over IP networks - albeit with ISP/carrier grade networking kit. The 4K cameras we use are connected to high end capture cards, and then the data is encoded using software encoders into something tractable (1.2Gbit/s data rate) to send around the network - to get the data into the IP world as quickly as possible."

BBC Click talked to BBC R&D about the experiments: “Commonwealth Games enters virtual reality”

The BBC Academy website featured another BBC R&D project: Comma.

“BBC R&D decided to develop these automatic meta-data extraction technologies in a way that would allow large-scale audio processing.”

BBC R&D are also running a survey on “Television Viewing Conditions”

“We have created a survey which is open for anyone with internet access to complete, which asks questions about screen sizes and viewing distances, as well as the individual viewer's personal preferences.”

(You’ll need a tape measure…)

Follow BBC R&D on Twitter @BBCRD.

Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, Central Editorial Team, BBC Online

College of Technology round up: lean UX, codecs, file delivery

2014-06-25T06:21:35+00:00

The BBC College of Technology website provides useful films and articles around broadcast technology, software engineering and business systems. Here I’m going to give you a quick round-up of some of the features we’ve added to the site in the last week or so.

Moving towards Lean UX – Jeff Gothelf

In May we had a visit from Jeff Gothelf, a highly sought-after speaker and authority figure on the subject of Lean UX. Jeff gave a presentation in the Media Café at New Broadcasting House, detailing the principles of this radical approach to user experience (UX) design.

Jeff Gothelf speaking at New Broadcasting House in May

In plain terms (and with slightly less finesse than Jeff’s explanations), Lean UX is a way of incorporating a more ‘Agile’ approach into the UX design process. For some time now, many software development and engineering teams both inside the BBC and outside, have adopted an Agile-oriented approach. Amongst other things, this boils down to working in short regular cycles, or ‘iterations’, with a team comprised of various different, complementary disciplines. In essence this approach has been refined to allow software teams to respond swiftly to changes in the demands of their audience. Instead of labouring over a product for a long time only to eventually release it and find that customer needs have changed or moved on, Agile methodology encourages teams to release software regularly, get feedback and make improvements in a continuing cycle.

Lean UX takes many of these core principles and adapts them specifically to the design process. As Jeff explained, the focus should be on building a close dialogue between the product team and their customer base. The aim, ultimately is to build a better, more efficient online product, and in less time.

Not ones to pass up a good opportunity, we grabbed Jeff after the event for a spot of filming and he discussed Lean UX in more depth. This short film also features Sacha Sedriks and Wai Tai Li from BBC Future Media UX&D, explaining how and why they adopted some of these ‘Lean principles’ in designing the BBC Playlister platform. You can also read Wai Tai Li’s recent blog post here about building Playlister.

Wrapping up codecs

A source of near-constant frustration for internet users seems to be non-functioning or otherwise absent codecs. Media found online can often prompt a dreaded error message when put through our playback devices. What’s more, the exact reasons why we can’t open or play our media can often be unclear. Andy Jones, a principal technologist at BBC Academy, has written a two-part, non-technical guide aimed at helping people understand codecs.

We recently published the second part. In this article Andy provides some detail around why codecs exist, why there seem to be so many of them about, and what you can try when they let you down. Like footwear or summer fashion, Andy explains, one size does not necessarily fit all.

Soon we will also be publishing another article from Andy that goes into detail about the process of bit-rate reduction, or compression – essential for streaming bits of media online.

File Delivery Made Real

The television industry is currently limbering up in anticipation of what has been described as one of the biggest changes in television since colour. 1 October 2014, aka ‘File Delivery Day’, marks the date by which all UK broadcasters will begin to receive file-based programme deliveries. The traditional process for handing over your programme has generally involved physically sending off a tape. Now, in the increasingly virtual world, these tapes are being phased out in favour of digital files.

This change spells out adjustments to the delivery workflow, including the introduction of new software quality control systems to ensure programmes are safe to broadcast. File Delivery Made Real is a series of events organised by BBC Academy in partnership with Creative Skillset, UK Screen and the IABM, aimed at readying the industry for these changes. Over June and July, these events will take place in Salford, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff and London. This page includes links for booking your free place.

In the build up to FD Day, we will be publishing lots more about file-based delivery, including some useful videos for producers in the next couple of weeks.

Frederick Botham is a researcher at the BBC College of Technology

Round up: Comments on the new BBC iPlayer

2014-06-03T08:56:15+00:00

This blog has published five posts about the new BBC iPlayer since Dan Taylor's post about the launch and feedback from the preview three weeks ago.

There have been lots of comments from you and responses from Dan and the BBC iPlayer team. Comments can be a little hard to find so I though it would be useful to gather some of the key points together.

You can find Dan's comments on his post here, here and here. In this comment he outlines some of the independent research done before launch:

"Averaged across all of these criteria, 5% of respondents said they felt the new BBC iPlayer was worse than the old BBC iPlayer, 58% felt it was better, 33% felt it was the same and 5% said they didn't know."

A word cloud of feedback on the new iPlayer from the independent user research

Marcus Parnwell in his post about the new BBC iPlayer on TVs responded to people who are unhappy that radio is no longer available:

"The data we used for making this decision was entirely usage based. We have been monitoring the number of plays for radio on demand content on a monthly basis for the last 6 months. In terms of figures, taking the month of April 2014, we saw that radio usage on TVs made up 1% of the total radio usage across devices. Similarly, when compared to all audio and video usage on TVs, that figure drops below 1%. I understand this does not give any comfort but this decision was not taken lightly..."

Andrew Scott (General Manager, BBC iPlayer Radio) also commented:

"...we are currently evaluating how best to bring Radio to connected TV devices in a way that will be more widely used, probably as a combination of an application on the TV itself (which is a fairly expensive business when you take into account the testing across different TV manufacturers and models) and devices like Google Chromecast integrated with the iPlayer Radio mobile application in a similar way to how we integrated support for Apple Airplay.

We've read all of your comments here and I'd be really interested to hear more of your thoughts on this – please email radiofeedback@bbc.co.uk..."

The new BBC iPlayer came to Windows Phone 8 last week. Navin Nair commented on his post:

"We are currently in the process of consolidating the number of separate iPlayer codebases we develop and maintain in order to provide the best value for money from our fixed funding. For example, prior to the launch of the new iPlayer, we were maintaining 3 separate codebases for computer browsers, tablet browsers and mobile browsers – we now have a single responsive codebase that serves all browsers. Similarly, in the TV domain, we are consolidating around a single HTML codebase. In the mobile apps domain, we have 2 codebases – one for Android devices, one for iOS devices. The market share of Windows Phone 8 doesn’t yet justify the cost of a developing and maintaining a full native app (as @DBOne mentions this isn’t just about current share of handset sales). We have however, been able to update the previous Windows Phone 8 wrapper app..."

You can still give feedback on the new BBC iPlayer in this survey, and the BBC iplayer Radio feedback page.

Nick Reynolds is Editor, BBC Internet blog

Open Post: April 2014

2014-04-28T06:30:10+00:00

The last "open" post on this blog was in January.

Since then Dan Taylor introduced you to the new BBC iPlayer, Niko Vijayaratnam gave some background on responsive design in BBC News and Chris Yanda blogged about on BBC iPlayer apps on Chromecast. And David Berlin announced some welcome news for users of Android devices.

So you could leave comments about those topics, or something new. That's the point of an open post. You can discuss any subject or ask any question as long as it's about the work of BBC Online.

The usual caveats apply:

1. Comments need to abide by the BBC’s House Rules. Keep the conversation civil please.

2. If you want to make a specific complaint about the BBC use the Complaints website.

As always I will do my best to answer any questions you have and encourage others to answer as well.

The blog has published a few posts lately on the work of the testing team in BBC Future Media. Do you like these posts? Are you other subjects you'd like the blog to cover?

Comments will be open for a month.

Nick Reynolds is Editor, BBC Internet blog