´óÏó´«Ã½

Today, you may have noticed a new section on bbc.co.uk/music named Music Showcase.

The section brings together all of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s audio and video music clips and allows you to browse them in collections compiled by presenters and staff.

You can also search by artist, most popular, recently added choices and last chance to see/hear. You can play clips whilst looking for others, find out more about the artists you are enjoying and explore similar clips.

This is an and we hope to capture your feedback and incorporate improvements as we move towards beta and final production, and as such you may notice a few bugs or issues with the service. Please check out our FAQ for known issues before notifying us of any problems.

This alpha follows extensive user research (interviews & concept testing) conducted in the autumn of 2009 to find out what audiences wanted from a ´óÏó´«Ã½ music site. Key asks were;

more audio/video clips of music sessions and interviews

a highly accessible, immediate and intuitive interface

more control over the playback experience through custom views, and powerful search and recommendation tools

for content to be organised into editorially curated collections to provide ideas, inspiration, context, influences and other facets of good storytelling

By aggregating all ´óÏó´«Ã½ off-schedule short form clip content into a single hub or 'showcase', we hope we've met some of those needs with a new offering also that brings the following benefits:

Use of the new ´óÏó´«Ã½ GEL (Global Experience Language) design that puts the AV centre stage and emphasises accessibility and distinctiveness

Choices around how you view content (grid, expanded and list views)

'Browse while Play' lets you watch/listen continuously while browsing

A Play Bar and Play Queue which manages your playback experience while you browse

A selection of Collections made by our own DJs and Presenters

Powerful 'Artist Quick Find' and Browse tools that enable you to look for interesting content in a number of ways

'More like this' feature provides clips from same and similar artists promoting extended listening

Lots of linking to related ´óÏó´«Ã½ content including news, reviews and blogs as well as relevant info from /programmes and our radio network brand page

Around 2,800 clips at launch with more to come, content is regularly refreshed

This is an early build so we see this alpha as a great opportunity for the development team to get your thoughts, either via the blog or via the feedback form and to us help shape the product you want.

Image: Screenshot of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Music AV Showcase design

Technically speaking, the Music Showcase has a lot going on under the hood. It's built top to toe on the Forge (Zend, Java, PHP, JS, MVC) technology stack and I think it's the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s first all-AJAX site for clip serving

The aggregation and publishing model is also quite sophisticated; music production staff across the UK will use a tool called iBroadcast to tag and encode clips. The website then uses a Java service layer to query central data repositories to acquire, sort and publish clips into the correct views on the website.

Over the next few days some of the team will be posting more details on design choices, technical implementation and content production and workflows behind the product, so come back later in the week if you're interested in getting more technical info. To find out more about the great content and editorial thinking behind the Music Showcase click here.

We're trying to put the music centre stage while providing discovery, search, sharing and participation tools that bring the music to life without being overly distractive or intrusive.

We hope you like it, and whether through posts here or via FAQs we'd love your feedback.

Matt Coulson is Executive Product Manager, Radio & Music Player Services, Programmes & On-demand, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media & Technology

As many of you know, if you have both broadband and a Freesat HD set top box, you can connect your box to the Internet with an Ethernet cable. This allows your box to receive content both via broadcast, and the internet! Recently we upgraded the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button Homepage to link to Internet services such as and we would love to hear what you think of it.

Why was this required?
The Freesat TV and Red Button service is, as the name implies, broadcast to your TV via a satellite. It's broadcast to every Freesat user in the UK simultaneously, which means we can't show video to different people at different times. With the satellite infrastructure, any video we transmit has to be on a continual loop - it's not possible for you to just pick a video to view from the start.

In the current world of Video On Demand and ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer, this just won't do. ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer for example, is streamed to Freesat IP-enabled devices so you can pick and choose which video to watch, whenever you want it to start playing. We wanted to offer more of these services to Freesat users but first we had to provide a gateway, hence we re-designed the Red Button Homepage.

If your box is connected to the internet and you press red from a ´óÏó´«Ã½ channel you'll now be taken to our new Homepage, with links to ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer Beta and other recently launched video based services such as the World Cup, Glastonbury and Comedy.

We've changed the Homepage to include an On Now tab, as well as an Index for all our Freesat content. 'On Now' will focus on highlighting our scheduled video based services, or for pointing you in the direction of our most popular permanently available content. We've also included room here for a short description of the service, as opposed to an ambiguous one word title.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button Connected Homepage: On Now

The 'Index' will continue to list all of our content services; you'll be able to seamlessly access Red Button content delivered by both satellite and the internet.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button Connected Homepage: Index

What's next?
We'll be bringing new video based services to Freesat, who so far have not been able to access scheduled video based services which users of other digital TV platforms are able to enjoy.

We're also beginning to develop the Connected Homepage for the Freeview HD set top boxes which are able to work with an internet connection. We aim to have this available in early 2011.

Meanwhile we'd love to hear what you think of the new look homepage, so if you have any problems or suggestions for future improvements, please leave a comment below.

Merv Hart is Development Producer, ´óÏó´«Ã½ FM&T TV Platforms.

Messageboard search (as mentioned in David's post) has been implemented using the full text search engine that ships with 2005. We have found this engine to be very efficient and reliable and a massive improvement over the offering in SQL Server 2000. We currently use this engine to provide article search on H2G2 and Memoryshare.

We were unable to support messageboard search across all services in the same way we support article search because of the huge amount of posts in our system. We had to tackle the problem in a different way.

The messageboard search system has been architected to use a dedicated "Search" database. Resources dictate that this new database will initially live on the same server as the main messageboard database, but the architecture allows us to easily move the solution to one or more separate servers, as we bring search to more messageboards in the future.

One of the design goals was to make it easy to bring search to messageboards one by one, allowing us to provide effective and fast search without compromising the quality of existing services.

The diagram above shows the two databases. The messageboard database stores all the posts across all messageboards in a single table. The search database fetches the latest posts belonging to the messageboards that have been configured to support search. The posts for each messageboard are stored in dedicated tables in the Search database. We create a separate full text index on each table that allows us to efficiently gather search results on a per-messageboard basis, without having to filter the search results that come back from the engine. We make use of the ranking values the engine provides to order the results by relevance.

In order to provide the fastest and least resource-hungry searches, we've adopted a simple "AND" based search. We take the search term the user gives us, create a list of search words using the space character as the separator, remove any Stop words (i.e. common words that are no use in terms of search, such as "the", "and", etc.), and then ask the search engine to find all the posts that contain all the words in the term.

For example, if the term "Fish and chips" was passed in, we would first create a list of search words using the space character as the separator, yielding "Fish", "and" and "chips". We would then remove the Stop words, causing "and" to be removed, leaving "Fish" and "chips". We then ask the engine to find all posts that contain the words "Fish" and "chips". Incidentally, all searches are case insensitive.

The number of months' worth of posts that are searchable is also configurable, on a per messageboard basis. Again, this is to allow us to control the amount of server resource that messageboard search requires. The number of months of searchable content will be decided on how busy the board is, and the nature of the board. Some boards may be more interested in current posts, whereas other boards may have content that's more historical and therefore still valuable as time passes. Ultimately it is our intention to allow all posts on all messageboards to be searchable.

Mark Neves is lead database engineer, DNA team, Audience Publishing Services, Programmes and On-Demand, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media & Technology

Today we are trialling a search feature for ´óÏó´«Ã½ messageboards.

Initially, we will trial this on the Food messageboard with a three month history, which means that these search results will include comments from the past three months. You can find this on the right hand panel on the board in a box called 'Search recent posts'.

The team will be monitoring the database traces carefully to measure the impact on performance. Once we are confident that search is not affecting the ability to deliver the other services offered by DNA we will start to enable search on other messageboards which have been migrated into the new templates.

I've asked Mark Neves, the lead database engineer on the team, to provide some insight into how we delivered this and you can find Mark's blog post here.

David Williams is Product Lead, DNA, Audience Publishing Services, Programmes and On-Demand, ´óÏó´«Ã½ FM&T.

Daniel Danker (General Manager. Programmes and On-Demand, ´óÏó´«Ã½ FM&T) was interviewed on Radio 4's Feedback on Friday about ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer. Above is the audio of the interview clipped (and embeddable) for your convenience.

Thanks to Steve Bowbrick.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online

• Feedback is Radio 4's weekly accountability programme. It covers all of ´óÏó´«Ã½ radio's output. Listen at 1330 on Friday and at 2000 on Sunday or online.

Erik Huggers' keynote presentation at the FT World Telecoms Conference 2010 "Building A Connected Britain" got a lot of reaction including:

from Digital Spy.

from ZD Net UK.

from Think Broadband.

from Zoe O'Connell at Live Journal.

ia play has a thoughtful blog post:

"I'm annoyed that I told iPlayer what I like and it still insists on telling me that ´óÏó´«Ã½ 3 sitcoms are "for you!". It's started reminding me of my grandad..."

It's back!

Here's one I missed: "Radio 5 and our use of Twitter" from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ 5Live blog.

And the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News refresh from earlier this year (Steve Herrmann blogged about it extensively) has at the .

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online

Following my last post I wanted to share that based on your feedback, two features are now back in ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer. You may have noticed that the A-Z programme list has returned to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer homepage, so if you like discovering titles in this way, just click on a letter. We've also reinstated the TV pop-out option for live TV streaming.

We're really grateful for your feedback and will continue to incorporate your thoughts into product improvements.

Daniel Danker is General Manager, Programmes and On Demand, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media & Technology

Radio 2 Live in the Morning: Kylie

Ìý

Kylie will perform five live tracks on Radio 2's Ken Bruce show on the morning of Wednesday 24th November.

We're filming this event in legendary ´óÏó´«Ã½ Maida Vale Studio 3, in front of a lucky studio audience.

The show will feature classic hits and songs from Kylie's new album 'Aphrodite'. Some songs will be performed with an 8 piece string section, and one track has been newly arranged for the occasion.

Enjoy watching this Kylie delight on red button, from the evening of Wednesday 24th.

Sky:
Wed 24th November, 6:10pm-4:00am Tue 30th November (continuous coverage)

Virgin:
Wed 24th November, 6:10pm-6:00am
Thu 25th November, 6:00am-9:55pm & 11:30pm-6:00am
Fri 26th November, 6:00am-6:00am
Sat 27th November, 6:00am-4:00am Tue 30th November (continuous coverage)

Freeview:
Wed 24th November, 6:10pm-6:00am
Thu 25th November, 6:00am-3:30pm & 6:10pm-7:45pm &11:10pm-5:50am
Fri 26th November, 9:10pm-10:15pm &11:10pm-5:50am
Sat 27th November, 11:40pm-5:50am
Mon 29th November, 12:40am-5:50am & 9:40pm-5:50am
Tue 30th November, 11:10pm-4:00am
(Not available on Freesat)

Read the rest of this entry

During the last 18 months, we've been relaunching parts of the Radio 4 website, redesigning for the wider page template now in use at bbc.co.uk and taking advantage of new technologies on offer.

The last programme website to move across is one of our most popular - The Archers, which consistently receives more 'listen again' requests per month than any other ´óÏó´«Ã½ radio programme. A site tour takes you through the features page-by-page.

Where should you start?

If you're an Archers newbie who has always been intrigued by the happenings in Ambridge but never taken the plunge, then start with our short introduction, kindly read for us by Archers fan Stephen Fry. And then listen and explore the links from the latest episode panel on the homepage, to find out more about the characters and locations in the current storylines.

Read more and comment at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 blog.

This is a summary ofÌýthe keynote presentation that I gave this morning at the FT World Telecoms Conference 2010.

´óÏó´«Ã½'s Six Public Purposes

Today I want to tell you about what the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is doing to help build a 'connected' Britain. The ´óÏó´«Ã½'s sixth public purpose is to deliver to the public the benefits of emerging communications technologies and services. Pioneering technologies and platform innovation is enshrined in the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Charter. Our Research & Development department has been instrumental in the development of digital television, DVBT-2, HD, DAB Radio and much more. I'm proud of the great content and services that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ produces and delivers, and our mission to help get people online. But there are problems that we need to overcome in order to realise the potential of a fully-connected Britain; the state of networks (a lack of investment and demand driving that investment), and device fragmentation (a lack of common standards). We all must work together to confront these challenges and to protect the open, neutral internet.

Ìý

The 2012 Digital Opportunity

London 2012 provides a huge digital opportunity. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ holds digital media rights for the Olympics and is committed to collaborating with internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile networks to ensure the Olympics are the most inclusive and connected yet. What's more, will be complete by the advent of the games so everybody should be able to follow, participate in, and contribute to one of the greatest national celebrations in living memory. However, there are challenges to overcome on the route to a fully-connected Olympics.

Ìý

Building better, and better used networks

While substantial private investment is needed to roll-out out networks that are faster, and more widely available, public investment will make an important contribution. From 2013, there will be a ring-fence in the licence fee of £150 million for broadband, consistent with the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s public purpose to promote the benefits of emerging technologies. The roll-out of superfast broadband is a Government priority. It could help to tackle the UK's 'notspots' where there is currently no internet access and would encourage organisations like the ´óÏó´«Ã½ to develop the services of tomorrow. We believe that new content and services which are unique to the medium - and awareness of those services - will play an equally important role in driving broad consumer adoption.

Helping People Get Online

Building a connected Britain will mean breaking down barriers to involvement. There are 7 million unconnected homes in the UK and 9.2 million people have never been online. It means that many people don't yet have access to ´óÏó´«Ã½ services like ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer, nor to a vast range of other content, such as Government services online. There are a number of reasons for this - these people may be uninterested, but they may also be in need of support and information to help them get started. In common with the population as a whole, they may not have access to superfast networks nor a compelling reason to want to use them.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is already involved in exciting campaigns promoting the benefits of broadband. Take, for example, the recent ´óÏó´«Ã½ First Click campaign which helped people take the first steps to getting connected within the nationwide . We were delighted with the results - we received thousands of calls to the advice line in the first few weeks, and many people booked themselves onto courses to take the first steps to getting connected (you can see one of the on-air trails below). It's great to see the industry pulling together to give people confidence to get online and I hope we see many more initiatives like this in the near future.

Ìý

Creating focused Internet Services

By focusing our digital presence we'll be able to offer more compelling online experiences to new and existing users. In March of this year we announced a new strategy - Putting Quality First. Central to this strategy is a proposal to transform ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online by doing 'fewer things better'. ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online (which receives c.32 million unique users a week and is rated 4th in the UK) started life as a text publishing medium which, as the web matured, continued to grow. To help us rationalise this collection of sites and pages we'll be refining our editorial scope and will focus on five key product portfolios. I have outlined this proposal in more detail elsewhere. Our ambition is to deliver great digital products that drive consumer demand for quality online services. We have a great heritage in doing this. For instance, when ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer was launched in 2007 the market for online catch-up TV was negligible, which is hard to imagine based on record results of October when there were 139 million requests for programmes.

Ìý

Overcoming Fragmentation

Fragmentation and competing technologies threaten to stifle digital innovation and cause higher costs. We live in a crazy world where every manufacturer or software company has their own proprietary system. It's been necessary for us to build more than 40 different variants of ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer for different platforms and devices. It would be a great shame if fragmentation of the mobile and TV market stifled the development of online services for UK audiences, so I'm pleased that by supporting the ´óÏó´«Ã½ can contribute to striking a balance in the market dominated by pay TV options. Open standards are critical to the growth of our creative economy, foster simplicity for the market, and broaden consumer choice.

I've previously talked about HTML5. Let me be clear: the ´óÏó´«Ã½ fully supports HTML5 and we will adopt it where appropriate. We are in the process of appointing a Senior Technologist, Internet Standards to work with the and other standards bodies to move this forward because we believe it can help overcome the fragmentation I talked about earlier.

Ìý

Maintaining an Open, Neutral Internet

Maintaining an open and neutral internet is critical. It's very easy to take the internet for granted but in reality it's transformed the way we communicate and is the lens through which so many of us see the world. So, it's critical that there's continued investment in next-generation networks to cope with the growth of and demand for compelling content and digital services. In the meantime, I'm concerned by whereby ISPs discriminate in favour of certain traffic based on who provides it. In an era of fierce competition, it's understandable that some network operators might look to gain commercial advantage by charging for content distribution. I've blogged previously about my thoughts on traffic management but plainly, an open and neutral internet is crucial to the growth of our digital economy. Further, there is a need for consumers to know what sort of broadband package they are buying - or switching to - and the level of service they can expect. The market is not yet sufficiently competitive to make switching easy.

To this end, our R&D team are developing a prototype meter to show consumers in real-time how efficiently ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer is being delivered by their ISP - with a simple red, amber, green indicator. In addition, we propose to work with the industry to discuss the possibility of a "kitemark" to denote levels of different broadband package capability in simple, easy-to-understand language.

Furthermore, we are ready to engage with ISPs to help reduce network congestion by introducing adaptive bitrate streaming technologies which use the HTTP protocol and can be cached on the ISP networks. We also believe that the industry should embrace and enable multicasting delivery, something we have been championing for many years because it would dramatically reduce congestion for live streaming.

Ìý

A Track Record in Driving Digital Media Adoption

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ can play an important role in driving digital media adoption and working with partners to develop technologies and services that really work and allow fantastic competition. Digital TV has been a huge success. Freeview is found in 18.7 million homes and you can buy a box now for as little as £30. It has brought the benefits of interactivity and paved the way for next-generation IPTV services. It was the open standards which the ´óÏó´«Ã½, in partnership with the industry, helped develop that broadened manufacturing options and hastened adoption of the medium.

I hope that we can bring this experience to bear for broadband.

Ìý

Erik Huggers is Director of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media & Technology

The eagle eyed will have noticed that today the comments box at the bottom of entries on this blog has changed.

This is a new, improved "comments product" which we are trying out. After sucessfully putting it on some smaller blogs e.g. ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research and Development, we're now testing it on blogs which get more traffic.

As Ant Miller on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D blog put it last month:

The changes you'll notice are around the way the page behaves as you submit a comment: it won't reload for one thing. The style of the box is getting an update, and there will be more labels and information in the page to make it clearer what's happened... In the background there is some improved caching which should improve performance and the bandwidth demand should come down a bit.

Additionally when you preview a comment it should look like it will when it's actually published. And the "link to this" link on each comment should now be working correctly when blog comments span multiple pages.

Try it out and let me know in comments.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online

A couple of weeks ago we made a shortcut to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer on mobile website available in App World, Blackberry's App Store for smartphones.

The shortcut is a little downloadable app that places a ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer icon on your Blackberry phone. This icon launches the ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer mobile website in your phone's web browser.

The app is designed to give you convenient access to ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer so you can enjoy ´óÏó´«Ã½ programmes on your Blackberry.

To download the app to your Blackberry phone you can either search for iPlayer in the Blackberry App store or visit this link on your Blackberry to install the app from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ mobile site.

Note that ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer on Mobile is currently available on the Blackberry Bold 2 (9700), Storm 2 (9520/9550) and the Torch (9800).

For more on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer on Mobile and supported device see .

You can also view ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer on Mobile entry in the Blackberry App Store on your PC by .

We are working on other apps and shortcuts which will be launching over the coming months.

The team would really welcome your comments and feedback on apps. When we Tweet about apps we are going to use a #bbcapps hashtag so if you would like to use this too that would be great. We are always keen to know what you think.

David Madden is Executive Product Manager, Mobile Apps, ´óÏó´«Ã½ FM&T

Yesterday we announced that we will start to roll out ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer across the BT Vision platform next month. By April next year, should be able to access our catch-up video on demand (VOD) service at no extra cost.

In order to support ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer, BT Vision will update the software on their boxes, rolling it out gradually across their customer base. Once a box is upgraded, our app can be launched from BT Vision's main menu, giving access to more than 400 hours of new TV programmes and many more hours of ´óÏó´«Ã½ radio each week.

During BT Vision's rollout from December, the selected 50 hours of ´óÏó´«Ã½ programmes available within BT Vision's TV Replay will still be available. Once rollout is complete in April, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer application will replace ´óÏó´«Ã½ programmes in the legacy TV replay service.

Opening ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer on TV to such a large connected audience represents a major advance in our effort to bring the full ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer experience to TVs. Already, nearly a third of all TV programmes enjoyed through ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer are watched using TV-connected devices including games consoles, set-top boxes, disc players and connected TVs. This is all the more enjoyable when the experience is accessed from the same remote as the TV, as is the case with BT Vision.

BT Vision's set-top boxes use the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform to deliver TV on demand alongside TV broadcast over Freeview. Last year Microsoft added a technology to this called (MSPF) to let IPTV network operators add extra services delivered over the Web. We to build the ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer app on BT Vision using this technology. You'll see the experience is pretty slick!

TV programmes are delivered in the WMV format at a total data rate of 1300kbit/sec. BT Vision tell us that all customers should be able to watch this without interruption, whatever their broadband connection speed. Radio is delivered in the WMA format at 128kbit/sec.

Those are the top line technical details. We will let you know how the early users get on, and try to get a more detailed rollout schedule so BT Vision customers can get a better idea of when they'll get ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer on the TV.

Gideon Summerfield is Product Manager, TV iPlayer

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer stats pack for October 2010 is now available as a PDF

My colleagues in the Communications team in ´óÏó´«Ã½ FM&T have got a little excited, as you can see from the highlights they've picked out:

A great month for ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer - receiving 139 million requests for programmes across all platforms in October 2010, including both online platforms and devices and ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer on Virgin Media TV. This is a month-on-month increase of 22%, with requests up 43% year-on-year. The figures set a new monthly record for the service, driven by an all-time-high for TV requests on online platforms and Virgin Media.

Returning autumn titles boosted TV performance, including The Apprentice and Waterloo Road, as well as new drama series Single Father and Lip Service. Comedy also delivered strongly as usual, including Mock the Week and Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow.

The Ryder Cup was the most requested radio programme, with a range of programmes from across Radio 1, 2, 4 and 5Live making up the remainder of the top 20 - including The Unbelievable Truth, The News Quiz, and special Radio 1 programmes ...Presents Mumford & Sons Live and Fearne with Robbie and Gary, performing well.

Live TV viewing via the ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer increased again this month, to make up 11% of all TV programme requests, as also did live radio listening (making up 72%) - influenced primarily by the Ryder Cup.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online

Today the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Trust published its review of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s interactive television service, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ Trust regularly reviews ´óÏó´«Ã½ services, inviting public opinion to assess how well our services are performing and what, if anything, should change.

This review follows a public consultation undertaken in late 2009, which produced over 5,600 responses, and included a study of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s own research into how viewers engage with the service.

I have captured the key points below but the full report can be read on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Trust website.

Wide usage

The review shows that ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button has a large and varied audience. With 12 million people using the service every week, it's the most used interactive TV service in the UK and the only interactive ´óÏó´«Ã½ service available to the UK's 'offline' population. As the digital replacement for our analogue text service Ceefax, it's an important source of instant information for millions of people. It's also a means to deliver a greater choice of programming; near on-demand video from large events such as The ´óÏó´«Ã½ Proms and Glastonbury, as well as minority sports that wouldn't otherwise make it into a crowded schedule. Given ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button's value in delivering what's often niche content we're delighted that the review points to such broad appeal.

Value for money

Digital Text is the most used part of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button service and accounts for only a small proportion of its total cost. By drawing upon news, weather, and sports content already produced for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online we're able to offer audiences great value for money.

Making the most of interactivity

The review points out where there's room for improvement. Generally speaking, features that run on top of live TV viewing like sing-along lyrics during Eurovision or interactive quizzes during shows like In It To Win It are shown to be popular, as is our support for big events like Wimbledon and T in the Park.

Certain content is proven to be more expensive to produce and tends to be less popular, particularly interactive experiences which are not related to live channel broadcasts. Although we've already started to move away from producing this type of content it's helpful to have this confirmed and the Trust has agreed that we should continue to play to our strengths in providing cost-effective services that enhance and complement the live TV experience.

The review suggests that viewers some times struggle to find what is actually being broadcast on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button service. Although this information is available online and inside the Radio Times magazine, we are investigating better ways of making this information more widely accessible.

Clear editorial priorities

The review shows that despite its popularity, audience appreciation of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button is moderate in comparison to what we offer online. Whilst this is true of interactive services from other broadcasters across the board, we'll need to look into why exactly this is. It's also important that we articulate more clearly what the service stands for. For instance, the review suggests provision of information on local politics falls below users' expectations but that they don't feel that this should be a high priority for the service.

It's a tricky balancing act, but the findings will help us to focus on delivering quality core content, and to avoid providing information that users already access elsewhere. In the context of the recent Strategy Review 'Putting Quality First' which places an emphasis on doing fewer things better, it's important we keep in mind audience expectations as we shape our products.

Market fragmentation

The review reflects that, unusually for our services, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button distribution costs account for the majority of service spend. This is partly due to the efficiencies of re-versioning material from ´óÏó´«Ã½ TV, Radio and Online (and so less spend on content), but also because the cost of serving ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button across different platforms is relatively high.

The Trust has asked us to review these distribution costs to ensure better value for money and posed the question whether, in a world of constrained bandwidth, this is the best use of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s broadcast capacity.

That said, despite substantial distribution costs, the sheer number of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button users equates to a relatively low cost per user, of 6.4p per user per week.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button has always been about innovation and as Internet and broadcast technologies converge, we should look to introduce more services via broadband, where capacity is less of an issue.

And, it's clear that as Internet-connected TV develops, standardised products built (as much as possible) on open technologies will enable us to maintain cost-effectiveness and minimise complexity for both users and the industry.

There is huge creative potential for the future of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button. The service currently provides a link between linear TV viewing and interactive features so could prove to be an important gateway into Internet-connected TV experiences.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button could also contribute to the growth of media literacy within the new TV landscape. More than 40% of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button users (five million people each week) don't use ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online, and we believe the service could play an important role in taking these offline audiences online, or by providing digital content to them via broadcast.

Our thinking over what we'll be doing is still evolving and we'll provide more updates on this in due course. In the meantime, we'll continue to post round ups of 'What's On' ´óÏó´«Ã½ Red Button, on the Internet Blog.

John Denton is Managing Editor, TV Platforms, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media & Technology

For those who don't know me, I'm a researcher for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development. For the last fifteen months I've been on attachment with ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland learning about how R&D interfaces with production divisions. Prior to my attachment I worked closely with Ian on Backstage events such as the Edinburgh Un-Festival and Over the Air so now I'm back in the fold I've been asked to work with a small team on the closedown and migration of .

A few weeks have passed since the announcement that Backstage is due to close. It's taken a while to get up to speed but recently we've really started to get a clear idea on what we need to do to close down Backstage in a way that preserves its legacy and continues to support its community. Here's a brief rundown of what we've been up to.

Read more and comment at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Backstage blog

Children in Need Donation

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To support the packed 2010 Children in Need schedule, Sky viewers will be able to press red and donate to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Children in Need via their red button. Last year an impressive £318,417 was donated this way.

The Children in Need application enables viewers to donate to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Children in Need using a debit or credit card. It will be available on the days before and after the TV programme on 19th November as well as the during the main appeal show itself.

You can find out more about Children In Need and donate at bbc.co.uk/Pudsey

Sky:
Mon 15th – after Children In need
(Not available on other platforms)

Read the rest of this entry

We know that the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s podcasts are hugely popular with people who know about them and understand how to get hold of them. A recent example is A History of the World in 100 Objects which has had over 12 million downloads so far, over the course of the series. I like this example, first because it's a big number but also because the content itself is stunning.

I also like this example because we've made every episode of the 100-part series available rather than the normal approach of withdrawing the podcasts 7 days after the original programme was broadcast. This means that if you only discovered the series half-way through its 9-month run, it's easy to download any or all of the previous episodes to listen to whenever it suits you.

In research we've recently conducted listeners have been telling us that we should make more podcast episodes available for longer than seven days. More than 75% of podcast users say they want that.

As a result we're now providing extended availability for all podcasts where it makes editorial sense and where the ´óÏó´«Ã½ has the rights.

Read more and comment at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio blog

Mark Friend is Controller, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Audio & Music Interactive

Danielle Nagler has been about the launch of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ ONE HD Channel. There's also a video going behind the scenes.

From Media Guardian: . Quote from Tony:

"As a nation, we need to decide that we are going to create an environment where every one of our citizens can get value from these technologies,"... "The ´óÏó´«Ã½ should facilitate this, but it is an opportunity for these technologies to remind all our national institutions what they were trying to achieve in the first place."

Vicky Spengler is the latest :

"One project I am working on at the moment explores 'second screen' experiences, whereby a mobile, laptop or tablet device complements TV viewing by displaying information contextual to the programme and synchronised to the broadcast.

Observations of a Nerd takes the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Earth Facebook page to task:

Nic Newman's report on mentioned in Erik Huggers blog post of a couple of week's ago is a good read. Quoted are several contributors to this blog including Tom Scott, James Hewines and Ian Hunter. From Ian:

"I've learnt that all products are essentially a triumvirate. There is the technical means of delivery, there is the stuff being delivered ... and then there is the UX design bit in the middle and each of the those has different constraints and methods of delivery and so on ...you have to be tolerant and make a big effort to understand how the world looks from each of those three angles"

There's also a fascinating "Masterclass Interview" with . Asked the question "When you can't do all the things you want - how do you prioritise?", his answer includes this:

"I think what I do instead is try to create building blocks that help power an unknown future. I focus more on the underlying pieces which I can then assemble flexibly in many ways later. Often the developers won't understand and say 'what is the use case'? I say 'trust me, you'll need this later'."

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online

So... many of you have !

I've also noticed there's been a lot of speculation about what we are up to for the last few days and we thought it would be good idea to let you know what's been happening and will be happening before ´óÏó´«Ã½ One HD launches on Wednesday.

We are, as you may have guessed, in test mode at the moment. Testing is not just about delivery of sound and pictures going through the chain from our playout provider through to the encoders. It is to check the service works on all platforms especially all the DTT transmitters and about testing Subtitles, Audio Description, Audio Channel Continuity, AV sync, Green Button services, Surround/Stereo switching, Up and Down Conversion ...

Our playout service is run by Red Bee Media, Siemens are responsible for managing the encoders and Arqiva manage the DTT transmitters. Virgin Media handle their own encoding so we send an uncompressed HD SDI signal from Red Bee to their coding site. Finally Siemens manage the satellite transmission bundle for Freesat and Sky.

The Red Bee engineers are currently rebuilding the ´óÏó´«Ã½ One playout suite in two stages. Stage 1 goes on air on the 3rd November and once this is up and running the tough job of rebuilding ´óÏó´«Ã½ One's complete playout suite in HD begins! The reason for doing a two stage rebuild is to get the channel on air in time for Christmas.

In the Stage 1 build, the HD service is a separate path that piggy-backs onto ´óÏó´«Ã½ One SD. The SD channel is completely unaffected by the changes in Stage 1. Because it is a piggy-back service some of the functions will be limited, for example some of the junctions between programmes will be simpler on the HD version than the SD. When the Stage 2 build is completed, ´óÏó´«Ã½ One will be HD; the SD channel will be derived from a down conversion of the HD version.

What are we up to then with the tests?

Subtitles - During Stage 1, ´óÏó´«Ã½ One HD will use the subtitling data from the SD service. To make sure this works properly we need to test the link and the timing between the subtitles and the images. This is why you have seen some random subtitles from ´óÏó´«Ã½ One SD over the HD promo!

Audio Description - We have been using Doctors to check how the audio description service works. The timing of AD service is critical as the AD audio MUST be in sync with both the HD and SD services irrespective of the timing difference between the two signals (some HD processing takes longer than SD especially if we have to compensate for Dolby E encoding and decoding.

Audio Channel Continuity - seems obvious but we need to make sure Left Surround comes out of the Left Surround Speaker etc.! We also check Stereo/Surround switching and the Stereo Mix-down (when you listen to a surround sound programme via a TV's stereo speakers).

AV Sync - this is a subject . As many of you know I was an editor for many years and can see AV sync errors very quickly! Some of you may have noticed the sync signal interrupting the HD Channel's promo for long periods. I am using the opportunity to check the HD Channel to find out why we have some small differences between stereo and surround programmes. It's only a few milliseconds but we need to understand what's causing the difference. As a reminder the EBU standards are +10 to -20ms for the equivalent processing and we are well within that.

For ´óÏó´«Ã½ One HD we have the added complication of the delay caused by up-converting SD programmes. This adds a yet another 40ms of video delay to one of the possible paths through playout

A word of warning here; as we are adjusting the AV sync on ´óÏó´«Ã½ One HD, I cannot guarantee the AV sync signal is correct at the moment; we may be adjusting AV delays while it's going out and if you make any changes during the tests you could end up with up to a 40ms (1 frame) error. The signal on ´óÏó´«Ã½ HD is correct and measured at about -4ms in the transmitted transport stream.

Up-conversion - ´óÏó´«Ã½ One HD, just like ITV 1 HD, C4 HD Sky 1 HD etc, will be a simulcast channel so all SD programmes will be up-converted for the HD service. Up-converters don't just change the video from SD to HD; they also have to move timecode from the SD position usually in the vertical sync interval (VITC) to a VANC (Vertical ANCillary) data package. Up-converters may also have to change any embedded subtitle packages and move (shuffle) embedded audio tracks to cope with stereo and surround track positions.

Down-conversion - Viewers of ´óÏó´«Ã½ One SD will see SD programmes up-converted then down-converted. The criteria we set for the up/down converters was based on the quality of an SD source shown on the SD service - in other words, what was the most transparent process!

STB Compatibility - the ´óÏó´«Ã½ HD and ´óÏó´«Ã½ One HD channels must work on all DTT and D-Satellite so quite a lot of testing is about making sure the service is totally compatible and all the additional services work.

Over the next couple of days we will be tidying up and loose ends before the service becomes visible on the EPGs. Please remember to check and re-do any series links as we are changing the channel some programmes are transmitted on (´óÏó´«Ã½ One HD from ´óÏó´«Ã½ HD) and changing the channel number of ´óÏó´«Ã½ HD.

Andy Quested is Head of Technology, ´óÏó´«Ã½ HD & 3D, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media & Technology

N.B: You can also follow Danielle Nagler, Head of ´óÏó´«Ã½ HD on Twitter

In James Hewines' earlier post about Flash LSOs and the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Media Player it was suggested that the work to remove the LSO dependency would be completed in several months time. I thought it would be useful to provide some more detail around progress towards this.

Since the last post we have been working hard to move our code base from the legacy programming language (AS2) to the new one (AS3). In doing so we've examined all of the EMP codebase and realised that we underestimated the original scale of work we had to complete. We still have the following modules of code left to port across:

CDN Redundancy (switch across, failover etc)

Robust connection routine covering multiple port and protocol combinations - rtmp, rtmpe, rtmpt, rtmpte (tunnelling for firewalls)

Javascript API work

CDN services for all supported CDNs for basic streaming

AS3 Dynamic resizing for Console

Streaming for EMP Audio

iStats reporting for AS3

Dynamic streaming for FP 10

Dynamic streaming for FP 10.1

CDN switching & fail-over completed

Security - token auth and swf verification

From having completed much of the EMP work we are now more confident about our timescales. Our best estimate is that we will have a fully transitioned and LSO free EMP by Spring 2011. As well a removing the LSO dependency the EMP will also have a new look and feel, moving to the latest ´óÏó´«Ã½ wide GEL (global experience language) style. I hope this provides more clarity on where we are with our transition work and the impact it has on removing our LSO dependency.

Paul Clark is Executive Product Owner Media Playout, ´óÏó´«Ã½ FM&T

We're coming to the end of the inaugural tour with the Blue Room Live which has taken in a variety of public events around the UK and included ´óÏó´«Ã½ staff and the wider media industry.

The enthusiasm and hunger for knowledge about the consumer technology experience from the perspective of those who produce and also those who consume media seems to grow consistently. Our most popular exhibits have been our two systems and our observations of those who have experienced these are quite intriguing.

Now I must stress that these are purely anecdotal and non-scientific observations.

However it would seem to be the case that there are two sets of demographic preferences at play when it comes to the subjective differences between the and 3D TV systems, both of which are now available on the consumer market.

Firstly, there seemed to be an age related trend with the preference for younger viewers leaning towards the Active Shuttered system; older viewers seem to prefer the Polarised experience.

Secondly, there was a notable preference amongst those who work in TV and Film in a professional capacity towards the Polarised system.

Again I must stress that these are personal observations based on the people who attended the Blue Room events and are not based on any form of systematic research. However given the seeming dominance in the fledgling 3D TV market in the UK of the Active Shuttered system an interesting division seems likely to arise where the Cinema 3D experience will be largely based on the Polarised 3D experience and the home 3D TV market on the Active Shuttered system. Only time will tell...

Watching 3DTV in the Blue Room

I was also been struck by the number of visitors to the Blue Room Live who have already purchased a 3D TV, or have stated that they will in the run up to Christmas. However, musing on the practicalities of 3D TV ownership there are a number of potential pitfalls to overcome in this new stereo vision world. One example: there is no single standard amongst the Active Shuttered 3D TV manufacturers so accidentally sitting on a pair of specs on your sofa won't necessarily be solved by rushing over to your friend's house to borrow a pair of theirs so that you don't miss the big 3D film...

The ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Danielle Nagler, Controller of HD and 3D TV on where we as an organisation are likely to go with 3D TV, and we in the Blue Room will continue to monitor the consumer experience and report back to you.

Roland Allen is Head of Technology Liason, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media & Technology

Follow the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Blue Room on Twiiter at