The greatest car chase in the world
The first is over and the wires have been burning with emails flying back and forth late at night between developers, product managers and editorial on the weekends action. A few late nights for everyone but we feel it has been worth it to get the live experience as smooth as possible for users of the site.
'Live on the web' is an important part of Sport and we wanted to develop some of the work that was around the last year for the new .
Rolling out our dynamic text updates was a crucial part of the project (no need to manually refresh the page and helps save all those f5 buttonsand prevent RSI) and we will be looking at rolling this out across the rest of our live sport coverage.
Live Video (for the UK user) now means multiple streams and Higher Quality Video. From our intial stats for video usage can see that:
• Users watched our new high quality live streams for much longer than standard quality streams - with an average of 37 mins for main race coverage
• Sport video and audio (excl. live streams) got as many unique users as the opening day of the Olympics (incl. live streams)
• Live coverage for the race grabbed approx. 183,000 AV requests - higher than the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain (approx. 169,000)
• Hiqh quality video accounted for 1 in 5 AV requests in practice and qualifying and 1 in 7 on race day
which is pretty good for a first weekend. Hopefully people will give them a go and I am expecting some offices to come to a standstill on Friday afternoons when the F1 circus hits the . Live practice over lunch. Excellent.
Around most sporting events there are a massive number of feeds that have to be dealt with - mostly around - and we wanted to push them a little bit more this time. The leaderboard is updated regularly by the sport editorial team and further enhances the live page - data, text and video.
From the rest of the Beeb we are using feeds from (a crucial part of a Grand Prix weekend), iplayer, programmes and search terms to try and reflect all of the content the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ are doing on race weekends.
The have been a real collaborative effort with an external company - concentrating on the 3D anaimations and in-car video synched with Mark Webber's commentary. We will add a more in depth blog covering technical and product issues on this.
As a small trial we also wanted to look at making broadcast data available in formats that users may find useful (ical, Outlook, google calendar etc). One of my colleagues, Tom Scott, trialled some feeds around programme info and it is something we will be looking at around sport.
Our trial seems to have gone well, with hundreds of feedback emails asking for the whole season (we just trialled Australia) suggesting other events we could look at (! Football!) and on which browsers / apps it didn't work.
There was also some immediate feedback on the presentation of the F1 coverage overall on Twitter - amazing how many people in the UK seem to follow sport on laptop and TV at the same time.
We will be making ongoing changes to the Sport site in the next few months looking specifically around navigation and the build up to the new football league season that will present some other challenges around video.
Today we have launched the first stage of this with a footer on the site which displays an A-Z list of all the sports that are covered on the Sport website. We will be making additions and changes to the navigation as we move towards a more flexible model.
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