³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

» Main

Archives for November 2012

Parallax Scrolling: James Bond

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý

Helene Sears Helene Sears | 12:00 UK time, Wednesday, 28 November 2012

My name is Helene Sears and I'm an Editorial Designer for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News.

My team produces a huge range of visuals including all of the daily charts, maps and infographics that accompany our online news stories.

We also work on longer interactive features which have ranged from visually explaining the Eurozone crisis to a calculator that tells you where you are on the global pay scale.

Recently developer Steven Atherton and I did a first for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News: we created an infographic using - a technique originally used in 2D video games to create a 3D look and feel.

James Bond: Cars, catchphrases and kisses on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News

James Bond: Cars, catchphrases and kisses on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News

The subject we chose was a feature about the movie franchise reaching its 50 year anniversary - not urgent or the highest priority - but a good place to experiment.

Read the rest of this entry

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer October Performance

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý

Dave Price Dave Price | 09:18 UK time, Tuesday, 27 November 2012

±õ’m Dave Price the head of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer and we’ve just published our monthly iPlayer performance pack for October.

We thought the Olympics was the highlight of the year but ±õ’m delighted to tell you that we have broken the 200-million-requests-per-month mark, with 213 million requests for TV and radio programmes last month across all platforms.

This is an increase of +20% year-on-year boosted as usual by the great new autumn TV schedule delivering fantastic stats for iPlayer.

Choosing programmes by genre on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer

October trends

As we also saw during the Olympics, the way people are watching iPlayer on multiple different platforms and devices is changing.

Read the rest of this entry

Connected Studio: ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer Brief

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý

Adrian Woolard | 16:15 UK time, Monday, 26 November 2012

The ideas wall at a recent Connected Studio

The next couple of weeks are set to be very busy for the Connected Studio team as we prepare for a new year which will involve our back to back Creative Studios - ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer and News.

We are still in the middle of our ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport events which I will be posting a full update on soon but for now I am very happy to say that the has been released today and can be found on the .

The iPlayer product team has focused on three themes:

1. Encouraging users in a continuous experience - what's the easiest and most natural journey from one programme to the next or deeper into related content?

2. Reminding users there's a smart alternative - how could iPlayer remind existing users to return more often? How can iPlayer reach out to users wherever they are? How can existing users help to make the first experience of non-users less overwhelming?

3. Enabling the discovery of hidden treasures - how can we make the browsing experience better, uncovering less obvious gems for new audiences?

A very important thing to note when getting to grips with this Brief is that the iPlayer team are not looking for dual screen/companion ideas or ideas that focus on individual programmes, but rather enhancements that scale across the product.

They will of course consider ideas for specific devices or platforms if they answer the challenges above.

We are now open to applications and details of how to get involved are on our website. The iPlayer Creative Studio does have the potential to fill up quickly - one way to keep right up to date is to join our mailing list, which you can do by emailing connectedstudios@bbc.co.uk

Please find details of our event schedule below:

  • December 18-19: Sport Build Studio - Salford
  • January 22: TV iPlayer Creative Studio - London
  • January 21: News Creative Studio - London
  • February 11-12: TV iPlayer Build Studio - London
  • February 13-14: News Build Studio - London
  • February 21: Knowledge and Learning Creative Studio - Salford
  • March 5: Radio and Music Creative Studio - London
  • March 13-14: Knowledge and Learning Build Studio - Salford
  • April 23-24: Radio and Music Build Studio - London

If you would like to know more about Creative Studio pilots now in development Eleni Sharp, Senior Product Manager for Homepage has been working with on their HPSN pilot Now and has written a great blog on how they are getting on.

Adrian Woolard is Programme Lead, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Connected Studio.

User Experience and Design: Developing ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer Radio

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý

Yasser Rashid Yasser Rashid | 09:45 UK time, Monday, 26 November 2012

I'm Yasser Rashid the Head of User Experience and Design for TV & iPlayer, Radio & Music. My team work across a range of different digital propositions in the TV and Radio space that include improving current experiences and thinking about future ones.

The launch of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer Radio in October was an important step in the evolution of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio online. It's the first time we have been able to think about the future of the radio websites in a holistic way.

For the User Experience and Design team responsible for iPlayer Radio it was more than just a redesign. It was a complete rethink of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio digital portfolio.

We've made a video to give an insight into what we do and who we are. It's only an overview but if you do have any questions about specific user experience topics then it would be great to hear them.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit µþµþ°äÌý°Â±ð²ú·É¾±²õ±ð for full instructions

There will be a blog post soon about the iPlayer Radio design process.

Yasser Rashid is the Head of User Experience and Design for TV & iPlayer, Radio & Music.

What's on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Red Button 24 November - 1 December

Comments

Share this page

Post categories:

Sorcha Clifford Sorcha Clifford | 06:00 UK time, Saturday, 24 November 2012

What's On Red Button banner

Attenborough.jpgDavid Attenborough past and present

David Attenborough - the early years

Delve into David Attenborough's remarkable 60 years of wildlife broadcasting with specially selected clips from ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Four's collection on the Red Button.

Read the rest of this entry

Comments and Cakes

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý

Eliza Kessler Eliza Kessler | 16:00 UK time, Friday, 23 November 2012

Hi, my name's Eliza and I'm the new content producer on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet blog. It's my job to get people from around ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online to write about the work that they and their teams do.

I have been at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ for around five years, have worked across lots of different departments and consider it a big privilege to be able to highlight the innovative and cutting edge work carried out by my colleagues all across the organisation.

The events of the last few weeks have thrown a shadow over all of us, but I continue to believe in both the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ and its values. We are impartial and honest and that means we should be transparent and open about what we do. This blog, like many ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs, is a place to do that.

However, the Internet blog isn't just another forum for us to talk to you. It also gives us a chance to listen to what you have to say to us: to tell us what you think of our online products, to feedback on changes that have been made to them, to tell us about things you don't like or and maybe even occasionally to give some praise.

Read the rest of this entry

Connected Studio: Now pilot

Comments (2)

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý

Eleni Sharp Eleni Sharp | 10:15 UK time, Wednesday, 21 November 2012

In May the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Homepage became the first product to take part in the new initiative.

As product manager for the Homepage I was really looking forward to this and couldn't wait to hear the ideas which were going to be pitched to us.

The Creative Studio Workshop Day

The Creative Studio Workshop Day

Over six months have now passed since the initial creative studio day and the pilots are now well underway. One of these pilots is called Now by creative software team .

As the champion for the Now project I thought I would share my experience so far.

As the name suggests we want to create a time based Homepage to give a real feeling of liveliness.

By offering different levels of manual and automatic personalisation the user gets live information on things that they are most interesting in, be it Strictly or F1.

This 'fast lane' of content, which is relevant to you, sits on the right hand side of the page and updates dynamically.

Read the rest of this entry

What's on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Red Button 17-24 November

Comments

Share this page

Post categories:

Sorcha Clifford Sorcha Clifford | 06:00 UK time, Saturday, 17 November 2012

What's On Red Button banner

Rolling_Stones.jpg

The Rolling Stones ©Rolling Stones Archive


The Rolling Stones

Rock legends The Rolling Stones are 50 this year and we've got some brilliant extras coming up on the Red Button to celebrate. Speaking to Radio 2's Jo Whiley and Huey Morgan just before their 50th anniversary tour, the band reveal the highs and lows of five decades in rock 'n' roll.

Read the rest of this entry

Dick and Dom's Hoopla: Gaming on C³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý

Sophie Bradshaw Sophie Bradshaw | 12:00 UK time, Friday, 16 November 2012

Hello I'm Sophie Bradshaw, Technical Project Manager in Future Media Children's.

When C³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ legends announced that their newest show was going to be a bungalow inspired show taking place in a battered old fairground in Devon, we knew straight away there was a great opportunity for some exciting interactive C³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ content.

Dick and Dom's Hoopla

Dick and Dom's Hoopla

In their latest outing, Dick and Dom's Hoopla, the pair take their version of a carnival to the unsuspecting public.

As ringmasters they host a combination of silly and messy games, circus and music acts and some terrifying clowns to create a show full of mystery, silliness and a good helping of grossness all of which we wanted to re-create online.

With our interactive offering we wanted to bring our audience closer to the fun and mayhem of the carnival atmosphere.

Together with external interactive specialists of Sheffield we spent three months in the Dick and Dom mind-set creating a suite of games to take the Hoopla experience beyond TV and onto the website.

Read the rest of this entry

Barlesque: Going responsive

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý

Dan Forys Dan Forys | 12:15 UK time, Thursday, 15 November 2012

Hello I'm Dan Forys a software engineer in the Future Media Platform team. I work in a small team dedicated to front-end frameworks and libraries used by the rest of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. One of those frameworks is Barlesque.

Ostensibly Barlesque is the header and footer of most ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ web pages. In reality it's a framework providing global templates, styles and modules.

It currently provides three main versions - a 'Legacy' version for older pages, a fixed-width desktop version and a mobile version - 'Mobilesque'.

Mobilesque

Today, delivering two different versions of a page for mobile and desktop is not always desirable. There is a development overhead to creating and maintaining two different codebases and users don't want to learn different interfaces on different devices.

Also, increasingly there is no clear delineation between what constitutes a mobile device and a desktop device. Supplying a 'desktop' experience with a (normally) higher download weight to a netbook on a train with poor connectivity might be a poor experience, even though it is equipped with a desktop-grade browser.

Similarly, a connected TV - whilst not physically mobile - might have poor browser support for a desktop-grade experiences.

As a result there are many teams now working on device-agnostic and Barlesque has to work in a similar way.

Because Barlesque is the 'glue' that binds the page together with every other team's products we need to be one step ahead to deliver optimal experiences, whatever the device.

With this in mind a few months back we started developing a new version of Barlesque - codenamed ORB - or 'One Response Barlesque'. The One Response referring to our goal of having a single, cacheable response that will be quick to load on slow devices and connections.

Read the rest of this entry

New carousel for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Homepage

Comments

Share this page

Post categories:

Eleni Sharp Eleni Sharp | 09:29 UK time, Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Changes to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Homepage carousel high-lighted

Changes to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Homepage highlighted - a new flavour bar and a simplified carousel

Hello, I'm Eleni Sharp, Product Manager of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Homepage.

I'm delighted to tell you about a development on the Homepage which the team and I have been working on and which went live yesterday.

We have been developing the following new features to the carousel which takes up the top half of the page. The changes are based on how we can see the audience have been using the page and also what people have told us about the page during audience feedback sessions.

From today the Homepage has changed in the following ways:

• There's a revised content mix in the carousel

• There's a new flavour bar in the middle of the page

• News and Sport are no longer grouped together

• Carousel rotations are no longer dependant on interaction with the flavour bar, hopefully making it easier for people to see more content

Read the rest of this entry

What's on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Red Button 10 November - 17 November

Comments

Share this page

Post categories:

Tess Foster Tess Foster | 06:00 UK time, Saturday, 10 November 2012

What's On Red Button banner

nca_finalists_blog.jpg

Six New Comedy Award finalists

New Comedy Award Live

Who will be crowned the king, or queen, of comedy at this year's New Comedy Awards? Find out on the Red Button as we host the grand final live from Blackpool. From 800 entrants, six funny hopefuls will battle it out, hoping their killer lines will deliver them the New Comedy Award 2012 title.

Host Patrick Kielty will be joined by a comedy panel including Stephen K Amos, who will give their verdict on the performances before handing over to the public vote. Don't miss your chance to get involved - you can vote for your favourite online or by SMS.

Find out more about the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio New Comedy Award here.

Read the rest of this entry

Connected Studio Sport brief: my take

Comments

Share this page

Post categories: ,Ìý

Matthew Clark | 10:40 UK time, Tuesday, 6 November 2012

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport on many different devices

How can ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport make the best use of new technologies, ever-increasing Internet connectivity, and social media growth, to offer more to audiences?

I'm Matthew Clark, Senior Technical Architect for Future Media Sport.

As I wrote in my last blog post, it's been a busy year, due to a plethora of new features made in time for this summer's Olympics. With the Games now over, it's time to consider what's next: what is the future of online Sport coverage? How can we make the best use of new technologies, ever-increasing Internet connectivity, and social media growth, to offer more to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s audiences? That's a big question, so it's excellent timing that we have the to help.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Connected Studio programme has its own with all the details, but here's a summary:

Over the course of the year the programme works with ten ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online product teams of which ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport is the 6th. You can attend as an individual or a business/organisation, and there's some financial support available for the later stages. (See the for more.) To give you an idea of Connected Studio's ambition and what has happened so far you can have a look at a post from Adrian Woolard, Programme lead on Connected Studio going through all the current pilots.

So, on to the brief for Sport. You can view it , but here's my take.

We're focusing on live sporting events - moments where major sport events are happening and large numbers of people are following it online. What can be done to make this a more rewarding experience? In particular, we're looking at two scenarios:

Read the rest of this entry

Delivering the Digital Olympics: a programme management perspective

Comments

Share this page

Post categories:

Mark Smith | 09:50 UK time, Monday, 5 November 2012

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Olympics programme management chart

Product releases in the run-up to the Digital Olympics

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s digital coverage of this summer's London Olympic Games has been widely recognized as a great success, with audience online viewing figures and feedback exceeding expectations, as detailed in Cait O'Riordan's post "The story of the digital Olympics".

Reporting to Cait, as the L2012 programme manager, I was responsible for the delivery of the product development and in this blog, I'll review some of the challenges we faced in delivering this coverage, how they were met by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Future Media delivery team, the key lessons we learnt along the way and the legacy that remains for the coverage of future major events.

This blog post is aimed at project and programme managers, but will be of interest to anyone facing the challenge of managing large software projects.

Organisation and Development Approach

The complexity of delivering 24 hour live coverage of every event, with up to 24 streams of video, web pages for each of the 30 venues, 204 teams, 10,490 athletes and the results of every event, alongside coverage of the Torch Relay and 2012 cultural events, required a large team of product development staff working alongside key suppliers, over an 18 month period up to the Games.

The team had significant experience in 'agile' website development using and techniques, but had to define how this would work alongside the more traditional 'waterfall' development with an immovable deadline. We were also working with partners to deliver the new technologies needed to deliver the 2500 hours of video and data driving the dynamic creation of thousands of web pages, which added to the complexity of coordinating the programme of work.

Read the rest of this entry

What's On ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Red Button 3rd November - 10th November

Comments

Share this page

Post categories:

Tess Foster Tess Foster | 06:00 UK time, Saturday, 3 November 2012

What's On Red Button banner

florence.jpg

Florence + the Machine live in concert

Radio 2 In Concert: Florence + the Machine

Join us live on the Red Button from the beautiful Rivoli Ballroom in South East London for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 2 In Concert with Florence + the Machine on Thursday 8th November. Florence and the band will be performing classic tracks and songs from their latest album Ceremonials, plus talking to Jo Whiley straight after the show. You can also watch at bbc.co.uk/radio2 or on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Big Screens.

Watch highlights of the concert and interview on the Red Button and online from 9pm on Friday 9th November.

Read the rest of this entry

Developer refreshed

Comments

Share this page

Post categories:

Chris Harrod | 10:29 UK time, Friday, 2 November 2012

a high level view of the development process

A high level view of the development process

Hi, I'm Chris Harrod, and I work within the Online Technology Group of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online.

I have been involved in making some improvements to the look, feel and navigation of Developer the website that provides information about how to develop for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. Developer gives you the first steps towards access to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s back end systems, the platform on which much of our online technology is built, and the tools we use to build our web applications and delivery systems.

While a lot of people know the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ web offerings as a place to consume content - sites such as ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer, Sport and News - we also encourage some coders to interact directly with our systems. Therefore we have had a number of initiatives such as , and the , where developers can use our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to mash up our content into new and pleasing formats.

Read the rest of this entry

« October 2012 | | December 2012 »

Jump to more content from this blog

About this blog

Staff from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s online and technology teams talk about ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer, and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s digital and mobile services. The blog is reactively moderated. Posts are normally closed for comment after three months. Your host is Eliza Kessler.

For the latest updates across ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ blogs,
visit the Blogs homepage.

Subscribe to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet Blog

You can stay up to date with ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet Blog via these feeds.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet Blog Feed(RSS)

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Internet Blog Feed(ATOM)

If you aren't sure what RSS is you'll find useful.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online in the news and blogs

  • ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ weather..

    From ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Points of View Messageboard

  • From Boards IE

  • From Media UK

  • From Nick Reynolds at Work

  • From Digital Spy Forum

Links to conversations and stories about the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s online activities. The links on this blog and its stream are chosen by Eliza Kessler and Nick Reynolds. Follow on Twitter.

Follow on Twitter

















³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Blogs and Boards

Find all ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ bloggers on the

More from this blog...

Topical posts on this blog

Archives

Past twelve months

complete archive

Categories

These are some of the popular topics this blog covers.

Latest contributors

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iD

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ navigation

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ © 2014 The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.