大象传媒

Episodes

听

Each week on the red button Producer Jimmy Mulville interviews Matt Le Blanc, Tamsin Grieg and Stephen Mangan, discussing the making of Episodes and the cast鈥檚 own real life experiences of the TV industry both here and across the pond in LA.

Sky/ Virgin Media:
Mon 10th January, 10:25pm-4:00am
Tue 11th - Fri 14th January, 9:00pm-4:00am (daily)

Freeview:
Mon 10th January, 11:10pm-1:30am
(Not available on Freesat)

Read the rest of this entry

Editor's note: this weekend sees a special 60th anniversary double episode of The Archers on Radio 4, set to 'shake The Archers to the core'. Jem Stone introduces our planned online activity by reminding us that interacting with listeners is nothing new.

On Sunday mornings, if you're a Radio 4 listener, you know where to look. On Twitter, talking about the station's legendary daily drama The Archers (five million weekly listeners!), you might bump into , a , an or you've never met or (are they real or the product of the fevered imaginations of fans? As someone recently pointed out: "The Archers is real. There is no cast."). For some, listening to the Archers live now seems inconceivable without turning to a screen of some kind (the jargon here is a '', although the phrase makes more sense for TV viewing).

One of our jobs in the social media and interactive teams in 大象传媒 Radio is to take that real-time feedback (not just on Twitter on course) and present it back to scriptwriters, producers, editors and presenters in ways that make sense to them. More importantly how do you visualise it for listeners? Or should the 大象传媒 even try? How would you make it accessible to the (still) millions of online Archers listeners who've never used a message board let alone Twitter?

Zane Lowe reviews tweets

Of course 大象传媒 Radio has been trying to incorporate and reflect listeners' feedback, ideas and opinions into its programming since 1923. For nearly 50 years this was relatively simple given that it was almost entirely by letter. I can still remember the 大象传媒 postcode for Radio 1 - W1A 4WW - so frequently was it used as a 'call out' and it remains embedded in my memory alongside that other 大象传媒 staple: 01 811 8055. It wasn't until the proliferation of local radio and new commercial stations in the 70s that the ubiquity of the phone started to change live radio formats and it was another thirty years again before the mobile phone and SMS, (apart from a very brief moment in the sun for the fax machine) changed everything again. Now of course the blur of noise around any cultural event is fragmented, frequent and crucially very live. For example 大象传媒 radio networks receive over half a million SMS/texts a month, there are over 100,000 posts just to the messageboards for Radio 4, and tens of thousands of replies to our Twitter accounts and likes and comments on our Facebook pages every day.

We've been trying to make sense of this activity and document these links and recommendations publicly via what are often private closed systems online for several years. A few months ago we launched buzz, where on many of our pages now you can see, after an episode, the online discussion; currently an edited selection of the most relevant blog posts about that particular radio programme episode (for example, this episode of Desert Island Discs). The Archers, itself, has a regular blog post that rounds up social media comment a few days after the episodes have been aired.

As anyone who has clicked on the twitter hashtag during a programme will confirm you can sometimes see 1000 messages fly by in a instant. It's virtually impossible to read them all or make sense from them. So trying to do this in real-time, last year, I hosted (with Steve Bowbrick) Something called . We reflected the conversation and online chat about radio programmes while they were on-air. We do this with our music events all the time. See Chris Evans' regular live events or Radio 1's spectacular UCTRLKATY with Katy Perry.

So how do you actually weave this into a programme or onto a screen whilst a programme goes out live? On January 2nd we are having another go using the 60th anniversary episode of The Archers as our excuse. We've already been experimenting through December by tapping into the existing online conversation.

As with The Archers itself, it's easy to think that every new development 'shakes us to the core'. In fact, of course, things are remarkably the same. Join us on the Archers blog from the beginning of Sunday's omnibus episode for the build-up to the big one and, if you're on Twitter, use the hashtag .

Jem Stone is Executive Producer for Social Media at 大象传媒 Audio & Music

• Read how to join in with this weekend's Archers 60th Anniversary celebrations, starting at 1000 on Sunday 2 January and building to the climax of the special double episode at 1900, on the Radio 4 blog.
• The picture shows a sketch for the 'Archers tweetalong' app that will be running on the Archers blog during the double espisode.
• The Radio 1 interactive team visualised feedback (SMS, Twitter and email) for Zane Lowe's Masterpieces.
• MTV used Twitter to do something similar for their (design company Stamen too).
• The Chris Moyles team did some interesting visualisations in 2008:
• And how about some (via SMS).
• Tayler Cresswell rounds up Archers online feedback, quotes and comment for the Archers blog.

Hello,

The Internet blog is closed from today until Tuesday 4 January and is closed to comments because we can't moderate or respond to comments over the Christmas period:

Nick will be back in the new year and will re-open comments then.

Bridget Middleton is the Editor of About the 大象传媒

The 大象传媒 iPlayer stats pack for November 2010 is now available as a PDF.

Nick's been in bed with flu for over a week, so I get to publish the iPlayer stats this month.

Here are the headlines from the Communications Team.

• In total 大象传媒 iPlayer received 141 million requests for TV and radio programmes in November, including both online platforms and devices and 大象传媒 iPlayer on Virgin Media TV, setting another new monthly record for the service. This was a month-on-month increase of 1%, with requests up 32% year-on-year.
• Continuing autumn titles contributed to another record-breaking month for TV requests, with three episodes of The Apprentice topping the list. Comedy continued to perform well, in particular Russell Howard's Good News and The Trip, while Merlin, Spooks and Lip Service contributed to a strong month for drama.
• The Unbelievable Truth was the most requested radio programme, with The News Quiz and The Chris Moyles Show also popular. It was also a strong month for sport coverage on 5 Live with the football Premier League, and the Haye v Harrison boxing match.
• Live TV viewing via the 大象传媒 iPlayer increased in November to make up 13% of all requests, boosted by Children In Need and sport coverage. Live radio also grew slightly.

Bridget Middleton is the Editor of About the 大象传媒

EastEnders Extra Scenes

听

EastEnders viewers are in for a special Christmas treat this year as three special scenes have been filmed exclusively for the Red Button.

In the build up to Stacey鈥檚 final episodes, Janine鈥檚 evil brooding over the discovery of Ryan鈥檚 relationship with Stacey finally culminates in one of the most spectacularly shocking announcements the Queen Vic has ever seen. Stacey is forced to make a life changing decision leading to her departure from the Square but will she wave a fond farewell to Walford or depart in a far darker fashion?

Before viewers find out how Stacey leaves, they are in for an extra Christmas treat as three special scenes have been filmed exclusively for the Red Button. These exclusive scenes will give fans a chance to explore the relationships between the key characters that are at the heart of Walford鈥檚 Christmas drama. With revelations and admissions from Janine, Stacey, Ryan, Max and Lauren, these scenes will provide an added insight into what they are all thinking and feeling as Christmas day approaches.

These special scenes can be seen directly after EastEnders on the red button on the 20th, 23rd and 24th December.

Find out more on the EastEnders blog

Sky & Virgin Media
Mon 20th December, 8:25pm-4:00am
Thu 23rd December, 7:55pm-4:00am
Fri 24th December, 8:25pm-4:00am

Freeview
Mon 20th December, 8:25pm-8:45pm
Mon 20th December, 10:25pm-4:00am
Thu 23rd December, 7:55pm-4:00am
Fri 24th December, 8:25pm-11:15pm
(Not available on Freesat)

Read the rest of this entry

We've recently released the latest addition to the 大象传媒 Music website - The AV Showcase. As a development team we're very proud of the work we've done, and excited about developing the showcase in the future. As we've taken some innovative decisions on the architecture of the Showcase we'd like to share them with you in more detail and welcome comments and ideas from the wider development community.

Technical Overview

The Showcase is a rich Internet application built on the 大象传媒's Platform. It aggregates all of the short form video and audio content that the 大象传媒 produces under the genre "Music". To retrieve the clips a PHP application talks over HTTPS to the same service layer application that powers the iPlayer. This information is then rendered using HTML to provide a semantic and search-engine friendly view of the content. A layer of stateful JavaScript presents this information in an exciting way, allowing, for example our innovative "browse while play" feature. Let's examine some of the layers of technology in more detail.

JavaScript

The JavaScript involved in this project has been a major departure from what has ever been seen at the 大象传媒 before. The main inspiration behind the JavaScript architecture has been a traditional MVC pattern in conjunction with Nicholas C. Zakas' . This in conjunction with has made for an impressive system for building Ajax websites.

One of the key design challenges we face in this project is allowing you to listen to audio or video clips while browsing the showcase to find more content. There were many ways we could have achieved this. Some sites use a pop-up "player" window, while others embed a player in an iframe on the page. As Sacha discusses in his post on the showcase's design, we really wanted the playing interface to feel like part of the whole site, and to be seamlessly integrated into the navigation, while still allowing the focus - the music - to be uninterrupted by exploration of other content.

We decided that the only way to achieve this would be to use an based approach. We fetch the data in from the PHP layer and composite it on the page using JavaScript. This means that, from the point of view of the browser, the actual "page" never changes - and therefore a playing EMP is never reloaded and the listening experience is uninterrupted. When a clip is first played we reveal a <div> at the bottom of the browser window and position our Embedded Media Player (EMP) correctly on the page. If you then decide to click elsewhere within the showcase, to look at another collection for example, we reposition the EMP to the bottom corner of the screen. The content of the new page is loaded in place using Ajax.

One of the traditional weaknesses of an Ajax application is the lack of web pages to back it up. Using the xmlhttprequest header we have been able to vary whether we serve up the full page, or just the content required by an Ajax request, resulting in a full 'static' site to back up the Ajax version.

When you visit the showcase homepage, /music/showcase and then click on a link to another section of the website, for example the "Browse Genres" link, the only thing that happens at this stage is that a hash fragment is appended to the URL using JavaScript. This change in the URL is picked up by a section of the framework we call the dispatcher. The dispatcher is in charge of firing events to our model (Ajax request) and then dispatching them to the appropriate controller. The dispatcher knows which controller to dispatch to by looking at a "routes" object. This means that all back and forward button behaviour is dealt with in the same way as clicking on a link on the page.

We are currently looking at the possibility of open sourcing the framework used to make the showcase. Look out for a more detailed description of how the JavaScript code works at that time.

CSS

As a team, we're excited about the creative opportunities provided by the spec. During development we found that adding JavaScript-based transitions and animations had a negative effect on the site's performance, especially on lower-spec computers. Where possible we have instead used CSS3 to provide these. Examples of these can be found when the 'playbar' initialises or when the 'autoplay' button slides between 'on' and 'off'. We have tested for the JavaScript counterpart of the 'transition' CSS3 property, if this test fails we then fall back to JavaScript animation if it does not impact the performance.

To keep the download weight of our JavaScript and CSS code as small as possible we use Yahoo's .

Metadata

As well as providing an aggregation of all of the exciting music content the 大象传媒 has to offer from across our range of services, one of our intentions for the Showcase was to provide interesting onward journeys from individual clips. This is only possible by having a rich set of metadata for each item of content. From a technical point of view this involved looking for identifiers that were reusable and unique and 'tagging' our content with them.

The individual clips are tagged by editorial staff with identifiers which represent the individual performing artists featured in the clip. Musicbrainz IDs are an example of web-scale identifiers. These are identifiers for things, in this case musicians, that are in common use across the Internet. Our use of them makes it very trivial to, for example, create links to pages on the Music site (our artist page URLs follow the format https://bbc.co.uk/music/artists/) or to retrieve related information for an artist from a 3rd-party API.

We will shortly be adding a "related clips" feature. When viewing a particular clip in our larger "theatre view" we will display clips which relate to the current clip. This is achieved in two ways, firstly by simply searching the available clips for others tagged with the same artists. Secondly we send the musicbrainz identifier to , a music metadata provider, and use their to obtain a list of artists which are similar to the ones featured in the clip. If we have content for those artists we display this too. Using robust and unique Musicbrainz identifiers makes such API calls easy to implement, and also will allow us in future to integrate with other services that adopt musicbrainz.

Clips in our system are also tagged with identifiers. This allows more general metadata to be applied to a clip, for example or . While we're not currently exposing this information through the Showcase, it could allow in the future further aggregations of Music content as well as interesting horizontal journeys to the rest of the 大象传媒's on-line content.

Artist Quick-find

To allow finding content by your favourite artists we have a "quickfind" box in the corner of showcase.

For such quickfind tools to be useful, the response times have to be fast. We use the Glow Autosuggest widget to provide the interaction. Powering the search itself we use , a Lucene-backed search engine that runs on . Periodically, triggered by , we fetch the full list of clips available in the showcase and a list of all the artist pages we publish on /music. We weight the search results for artist pages slightly to reflect the amount of content we have for each artist. When making a search request, the parameters are proxied via a small PHP application which sorts and formats the results from Solr, and also provides a layer of caching for common search terms.

听

Solr and its indexer are running on four Tomcat application servers split between two data centres. One is designated the master; it is write only and is the instance that gets periodically updated. The other three are slaves which poll the master for updates. When an update is detected the slave will then update itself.

The indexer runs on all four of the servers but will only update on the one designated as master. If the master should fail then a new server can be designated as the master and the indexer will switch to updating that one, with the remaining slaves polling this new master.

We have been extremely pleased with the performance of the system. The average request time is around 18ms on our "as-live" system.

The Future

It's great to finally launch something that we've been working on in secret, but for the development team the hard work is just starting. There are still some outstanding performance issues and other bugs to address in the Showcase itself, but on the horizon we have some exciting features planned to improve the integration with other music services, to provide richer journeys to other content around the 大象传媒 and to allow you to share the content you find with other people. One of the main things still be tackled is full accessibility, and we are currently working on implementing full Aria support. Let us know what you think so far, and feel free to ask questions in the comments. We'll do our best to answer them!

Chris Lowis is Software Engineer, FM&T Programmes & On Demand

...and full credit to the rest of the Music development team.

听

This week, we launched our new site search product. This launch听is a big step on our journey to deliver a听single, unified and consistent discovery experience for the 大象传媒.

Try it out听with the search box听in the top right-hand听corner of most pages (or, if you can't think of something to search for, try听Liz Hurley,听Miranda,听Unemployment,听Spain). Let us know your thoughts using the form at the bottom of this page.

The new search is based on the Search+ platform, which I blogged about earlier in the year, and includes many refinements and enhancements.

This new search supersedes both the standard search product and the three-column Search+ product to offer a single site search experience for 大象传媒 users.

Before I go through the new features in detail, I'd like first to give you an insight into our product vision and discuss some of the issues that have shaped it.

To scope or not to scope

When I started in this job, there were hundreds of distinct sites on bbc.co.uk and most of those websites would have their own search "scoped" to their content. Not only was this inefficient and wasteful but also it led to an inconsistent experience in which search boxes in exactly the same position on, say, the Schools website and the History website would produce different results. People were often confused; indeed, I remember analysing the logs for the Gardening website search and discovering that the top result was for [eastenders] and returned no results.

We decided to reduce the number of scoped searches and make the search box in the top right-hand corner of every page return the same results, wherever you were on the site. However, this was not universally popular. People tend to think of bbc.co.uk as only that part of the website that they like to use. Many people only use the News website, or GCSE Bitesize or iPlayer and, not unnaturally, are bemused when they search for something and get results from another area. We get many emails asking for the search box on News to return results from News only.

So, on the one hand, people are finding no matching results in scoped searches, even though relevant content exists elsewhere on the website. On the other hand, people like the convenience of scoped searches, particularly when they only use one of the 大象传媒's services.

The table below further illustrates this problem. It is a log of the top queries coming from different 大象传媒 websites on one day in June 2010. The three columns show where the searches originated (on the iPlayer, News and Sport websites). Those queries in black are the ones for which the best results will come from that website (so, for a search in iPlayer for [luther], we should expect the best content to be from iPlayer). The red ones are the queries for which the best results will come from other parts of the 大象传媒 website (so, for a search in iPlayer for [revision science gcse] we would expect the best results to come from Learning rather than iPlayer).

听

So, as you can see, the picture is pretty mixed, with a closer correlation visible the higher up the search logs one looks between the originating domain of the search and the provenance of the optimal result set.

Clearly, we need to have a search product which recognises that many users want to scope their searches to the domain they are currently in while simultaneously revealing great, relevant content that happens to be in another part of the website.

Product Vision

With this in mind, we created the following Product Vision.

Our aim听for search is:

1. To create a scoped search for each 大象传媒 product听(News, iPlayer,听C大象传媒听and so on)听that "understands" the domain knowledge behind each product and uses that information to create the best possible sorting rules, display and filtering options within search. In this way,听we will provide the richest search experience available anywhere on the web for each of our products.

2. To allow users to search across product scopes to see everything that the 大象传媒 has on a subject.

3. To ensure that, regardless of which scoped search someone uses, they are always exposed to the best relevant content the 大象传媒 has to offer. This will ensure that, for example, a heavy News user gets to know about iPlayer content relating to their query.

4. To offer related results from non-大象传媒 sources.

5. To make it possible for people to discover trending topics on the 大象传媒 site and make feeds of results available to be embedded in other products (on and off the site). To allow search result pages to be recommended from within other 大象传媒 products.

We think Search v2 starts to fulfil a number of these ambitions. Let me run through some of the new features and demonstrate how they relate back to the Product Vision.

1: A scoped search for each 大象传媒 product

This example is a search for [graeme swann]. The results have been scoped to Sport. This shows the main elements of the page design, which I have highlighted with red numerals.

听

听

听

1. The central column will contain the main list of results. The large heading (in this case, Sport) shows that you are searching within the Sport scope.
2. The left-hand column will contain navigation to the other scopes and filtering options such as media type, date range and sorting choices.
3. The right-hand column will contain search results from other parts of the 大象传媒 (Elsewhere on the 大象传媒) or other websites (Elsewhere on the web).

The styling of the new search results uses the 大象传媒's Global Experience Language, which brings it in line with the rest of the website and which Bronwyn comprehensively explains here.

Category-specific filters

In the image above, you can see four sets of filters in the left-hand column. The first is the category filter. It shows you how many results there are for your query within each category. Below this are "scope-specific" filters. For the Sport scope they are:

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

听

1. Allows you to filter your results to show only video, audio or text & pictures. The default setting is All Media.
2. Allows you to set the earliest and latest dates from which you want to find results.
3. Allows you to change the ordering of your results. As I said above, the default order is Newest First, but you can also choose to order by Most Relevant First or Oldest First.

听

听

Over time, all scopes will be given filters best suited to that particular type of content, so Learning, for example, will have filters such as Subject, Syllabus and so on.

Context-driven search results

As discussed above, there is a strong correlation between the part of the website that a user is exploring and the type of content they are searching for.

So, we have set the system to return results automatically from the category that relates to the section of the website you are using - if you are on the News site when you enter a search term, you will get results from the News category in the main, central column. Likewise, if you search from Sport, you'll get sports results.

Over time, we will extend this functionality to other sections of the site - iPlayer, Learning, Food and so on. The eventual aim is that all products on the site will scope to their own search category while staying within a single, consistent design. As this happens, we will remove the old "scoped searches" .

From today, however, if you search from any part of the site other than /news or /sport, you will get combined results on our All Results page. You will know which area you are about to search in from the text inside the search box. On News pages the box looks like this:

听

听

听

On pages where you are searching All Results, the box looks like this:

听

听

听

听

听

2. Allow views across 大象传媒 products

Unscoped searches

When you hit the All Results page, the central column will contain the top results from all the matching categories. The categories are ordered by their relevance to the search query, using an adaptation of the Smart Zones process that I discussed in an earlier post. Here is the [graeme swann] query from above, run on the All Results scope.

听

Note that the page layout is the same as in the earlier example. However, because I haven't scoped my search, I will see results from all areas of the site in the central column. In this case, Sport is rightly deemed most relevant to the cricketer, followed by Blogs, News and then TV & Radio sites. A maximum of three results are shown from each category.

Likewise, the query [christmas cake] returns Food as the top category. (Ignore the Editor's Choice result in each of the next three examples - I deal with this feature in detail later on.)

听

Whereas a search for [iceland] returns News as the top category.

听

And a search for [trigonometry] will put Learning content at the top.

听

You can get to all results for a particular category by clicking the links in the category title (or in the navigation in the left-hand column).

Editor's Choice

Many search result pages will also include a selection of editorially chosen results that we believe are most likely to be what you are looking for. If you search for a programme title, say [miranda], you will see a link to the programme website.

听

If you search for a country, say [burma], we will highlight the 大象传媒 Country Profile (as well as other editorially selected features) and if you search for a British place, say [blackpool], you'll get a link to the nearest 大象传媒 Local website.

听

听

3: Ensure that related content is never hidden

Elsewhere on the 大象传媒

As I said in the Product Vision, our aim is never to hide great, relevant content from users, regardless of the scope within which they are searching. So, whenever you search inside a scope, you will always see the Elsewhere on the 大象传媒 module showing results from other parts of the website.

听

4: Offer related results from non-大象传媒 sources

Elsewhere on the web

Below the Elsewhere on the 大象传媒 module, you will see the Elsewhere on the web module showing related results from around the web. These are a mixture of editorially selected websites and algorithmically driven results.

听

5: Linking to search results

Linking to search results from within the 大象传媒

In the example below, you can see that iPlayer now links to 大象传媒 search. In this case, a programme about Operation Mincemeat links to search result pages for World War II, Adolf Hitler and the show's presenter, Ben Macintyre. This is possible because search produces a controlled vocabulary of around 40,000 topics that are available as links and which I wrote about previously here.

听

Search feeds

These 40,000 topics are also available as RSS feeds. Click on the orange symbol in your browser's address bar to get the feed.

听

How we put this together

For those with a technical inclination, our senior engineer on this project, John Muth, will blog on the technical approach next week and I will add a link from this blog then.

We're hiring!

Finally, a bit of news about the 大象传媒's search team. We are moving to Salford in the summer as part of a 大象传媒-wide relocation. As you can imagine, such a big change has resulted in a fair amount of turnover within the team and so we are now actively hiring software engineers (predominantly Java) and other roles, including my job - Technical Product Manager, Search. You can read about the recruitment process here.

听

Guy Debord, 鈥楾he Naked City鈥�, 1957

大象传媒 Music has recently launched an alpha version of its Music Showcase and as a member of the User Experience & Design (UX&D) team involved in its development, I鈥檝e been asked to offer some additional insights around the rationale of the site design specifically. (Please also refer to blogs by my colleagues Matt Coulson and Andy Puleston).
听
I could talk in detail about the visual design of the site, but I鈥檇 prefer to take this opportunity to discuss the myriad of interaction design challenges we鈥檝e been wrestling with as a team in order to create an ambitious website whose features are, I believe, without precedent on the web, never mind the 大象传媒.

The current version of the site certainly isn鈥檛 without its faults. But better to fail spectacularly rather than continue along the well-trodden path of mediocrity, no? The challenge to establish a cohesive UX and editorial voice is still ongoing and it鈥檚 the little details (i.e. visual cues, seamless transitions from one state to another, clarity of language, etc) that we are focusing on now to make the Showcase shine as a fully polished product. Over the coming sprints 鈥� with the help of experiential insight and input from our users 鈥� we鈥檒l be reiterating, adding some new features and improving the overall UX of the Showcase (as well as integrating other sections of the 大象传媒 Music site) in order to fully realize our overall ambitions.

Mental Models
The main issue we face with the 大象传媒 Music Showcase is establishing an intuitive mental model where none currently exists.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, is a term used in the cognitive sciences to understand how people know, perceive, make decisions and construct behaviour in a variety of environments. These concepts of information processing and cognition can aid interface designers when considering UX and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for websites and software, in general. We try to model interactions and employ interface metaphors in ways familiar to the user, but this can become problematic once the user encounters situations that are unfamiliar to them, resulting in a cognitive dissonance and ergo, confusion.

Continuous Playback
Of all the features of the Showcase, the most ambitious at this point is its 鈥�continuous playback鈥� mechanism, which allows users (via our Playbar) to consume a sequence of audio and video clips, either as the main focal point, or 鈥榠n the background鈥� whilst browsing other areas of the site.

In essence we are attempting to mash-up two types of familiar interface and in doing so we suddenly make the familiar unfamiliar. Hence the initial difficulty in comprehension for many, despite the excitement it may also elicit. You could say it鈥檚 a scenario similar to peeps encountering a for the first time (pardon the advertising in-joke for a child of the 80s).

The continuous playback of AUDIO whilst browsing is a very familiar model to most. It鈥檚 built into your iPod or mp3 player. It鈥檚 the foundation of applications such as iTunes and Spotify. And it can be found to varying degrees in websites like , , , or the ingenious browser plug-in .

Whereas the continuous playback of VIDEO whilst browsing has inherently different qualities and adopts an entirely different interface model found only on certain television-centric devices (i.e. freeview, sky, xbox360).

Yet no one to my knowledge has released a product that offers the continuous playback of both Audio AND Video in the same space. Ambitiously (foolishly?) we鈥檝e done just that. But because people are accustomed to only dealing with these two types of playback in isolation, we face the formidable challenge of creating a UX that can accommodate both.

I won鈥檛 get into the technical details of how we achieved this, but I will just briefly mention that in considering the technical feasibility of continuous A/V playback while browsing other areas of the site we opted to employ a combination of javascript, AJAX, and CSS3.

Same content, different view
The Showcase is composed of several different but interconnect views of its content. Perhaps it might be one view too many, for I鈥檓 a believer in the adage that 鈥渁 design is perfect not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.鈥� Nonetheless, we are experimenting with different ways of exposing a potentially large number of A/V clips to suit the preferences and motivations of a wide range of users.

The main space for the consumption of A/V clips (and their associated details) is what we call the 鈥�Expanded Clip View鈥� 鈥斕� a view that any visitor of YouTube or Vimeo would find familiar 鈥� but with several pathways to get there...

Many users want to just see the full scope of what music clips are currently on offer without any editorial intervention. Thus we offer the ability to Browse By Genre in a List View 鈥� a utilitarian interface familiar to people accustomed to iTunes, Spotify and the like 鈥� with an ability to toggle between the two views. (Incidentally, there is also an Artist Quick Find feature, for those wishing to search for clips by a particular artist).

While the List View is fine for many, it obviously has no narrative around it. It鈥檚 literally just a faceless feed of all that鈥檚 on offer. For those users that crave some sense of curation, we also offer Showcase Collections, which are select set of clips compiled and curated by knowledgeable 大象传媒 talent and staff around a particular theme. (Again, read Andy Puleston鈥檚 blog post about the editorial nuances concerning Collections).

To highlight the special nature of these collections, they are signposted with a different masthead, and offer an alternate Grid View, which gives more prominence to the individual clips by displaying them as distinct 鈥榤odules鈥� within the context of the set. These modules also offer a rather novel feature of optionally allowing clips to be played 鈥榠n situ鈥�, albeit at a smaller size, to provide an alternative to consuming and browsing content quickly. Admittedly, user responses to this feature have been mixed thus far. It鈥檚 a bit like Marmite, you either love it or you don鈥檛. It鈥檚 certainly an unconventional and unexpected interface (for video, in particular) that surprises first time visitors to the site. We still need to improve upon the GUI so that people better understand the two-prong functionality of the clip modules (to consume the A/V either in situ or in expanded clip view), but we still think that there is distinctive value in this scenario for some.

And all the while, there is the ubiquitous Playbar. It鈥檚 GUI mimics the current 鈥榗hrome鈥� controls associated with the 大象传媒 Embeddable Media Player (EMP), but since it鈥檚 autonomous from the clip and attached to the browser window, itself, in some sense you could say the Playbar鈥檚 presence converts the entire 鈥榩age鈥� into a multi-channel EMP, of sorts. It鈥檚 value (and necessity) becomes more apparent to the user once they opt to browse other sections of the site while still playing something else, in which case the media clip minimizes and docks to the controls, to allow a glanceable play-in-the-background experience. Again, unconventional. Again, further refinement is needed. But as a general model we feel it is sound.

As with any unconventional interface, some learned behavior is required in order for the user to fully 鈥榞et it鈥�. That鈥檚 not to say that we don鈥檛 continually strive to create interactive spaces that are as intuitive as possible by adopting familiar metaphors and mental models when we can.

The guitar is perhaps one of the best examples of a perfect interface and one that as interaction designers we can aspire towards. The barrier to entry is low. Anyone encountering it for the first time can strum on it right away and still derive some enjoyment from it. But after a little practice, you can appreciate the instrument on an entirely different level.

I should stress that the 大象传媒 Music Showcase will be continually evolving over the coming months and to help shape its further development we would really value any and all input from our users.

Sacha Sedriks is a Senior Designer, Future Media & Technology for Audio & Music Interactive

听听

The news that 大象传媒 Worldwide plans to launch a version of the iPlayer for iPad in the United States has been recieved with much excitement. "This is huge..." . "Rejoice..." says

reported the Guardian. 大象传媒 Question Time Down The Pub blog

There are many terms about the use of hashtags and Twitter to measure (like "influence" and "amplification" ha ha) - most of them snakeoil and bogus - but the vast majority seem to indicate that The X Factor is significantly more popular than Question Time...

Charles Arthur of the Guardian

If you're of a technical persuasion you'll understand these two:

"More pushing not pulling using XMPP and Strophe.js" from the 大象传媒 Research and Development blog.

from the 大象传媒 Backstage mailing list.

You'll probably also be interested in this FOI request from What Do They Know:

comes from Building an Entertainment Powerhouse.

Finally two things my colleagues have asked me to tell you about;

Growing Knowledge: a project between the 大象传媒 and the British Library with the involvement of Bill Thompson and Aleks Krotoski who presented the 大象传媒 series Virtual Revolution. From the Growing Knowledge website:

The 大象传媒 and the British Library are working together to find out if social media's rise in popularity across all ages and professions has affected research and what this means for libraries... To do so we'd like to . We'll then publish our results with a selection of your comments.

There are data visualisations available online.

And the 大象传媒 Red Button team have

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, 大象传媒 Online

Bollywood Stars on the Red Button

听

Raj&Pablo present a selection of the best Bollywood interviews on the 大象传媒 Asian Network. The highlights package will include interviews filmed at the International Indian Film Acadamy Awards including an up close and personal chat with Hindi cinema's number 1 couple Abhishek and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan to the more recent 'In Conversations鈥�' filmed at 大象传媒's Radio Theatre with Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Karan Johar, Dev Anand and Aamir Khan.

More recently, Raj&Pablo spoke to Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Hrithik Roshan ahead of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's much anticipated release, Guzaarish, while they were on a whistle stop tour of Dubai, London and Mumbai. Find out more about their on screen chemistry, being stars in Bollywood and life at home with the family.

The Bollywood boys guide you through the sparkle of one of the largest centers of film production in the world and introduce you to the who's who on the Bollywood red carpet.

The programme will be produced by Producer/Director team and brothers, Sunandan and Yugesh Walia who set up Endboard Productions in 1985 in order to share their passion for story telling.

Sky/Virgin
Mon 13th, 7:00am-6:00am Sat18th December (continuous)

Freeview:
Mon 13th December, 7:00am-8:45pm
Tue 14th December, 4:10am--10:15pm &11:10pm-6:00am
Wed 15th December, 6:00am-2:00pm & 3:00pm-7:50pm &10:40pm-6:00am
Thu 16th December, 6:00am-10:15pm
Fri 17th December, 4:10am-midday &1:00pm-8:50pm &10:40pm-6:00am
(Not available on Freesat)

Read the rest of this entry

Today is the .

The Day aims to promote a better understanding of disability issues with a focus on the rights of persons with disabilities, and the gains to be derived from the integration of persons with disabilities in every aspect of the political, social, economic and cultural life of their communities.

So it's a good day to write about a step forward in promoting an understanding of disabled people's needs from websites to the owners of those sites.

That step forward is the new web accessibility standard from : BS8878.

BS8878 will be launched on Tuesday December 7th at a in London.

Part of the 大象传媒's job is to contribute where we can to best practice in the UK internet industry. For that reason, as the 大象传媒's Head of Usability &Accessibility, I chaired the committee , and acted as its lead author.

I thought it would be a useful here to give a preview of what the standard is, and how it may help.

I've worked in the field of accessibility for almost 10 years now, working to ensure that the 大象传媒's constantly innovating web products give a consistently good user experience for all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities.

In these 10 years my accessibility colleagues at the 大象传媒 and I have tracked four key aspects of web accessibility:

鈥� the changing drivers and motivations behind web accessibility - the ethical, legal and regulatory, and (for those aspects of the 大象传媒 which are commercial) commercial reasons why web accessibility is important

鈥� the changing nature of the web itself - from simple informational text & image websites, through increasing amounts of interactivity and multimedia (including the specific opportunities and challenges of video-on-demand, web-based apps and games), through the shift from users being anonymous consumers of web content to being active and recognised publishers and collaborators, and through the increasing diversification of the web onto a multiplicity of devices such as mobile phones, tablets and connected TVs and set-top boxes

鈥� the changing understanding of how best to respond to the changing needs of different groups of disabled and older people in their use of the web - from desk research on these needs, through the growing importance of testing products with real disabled users, through to recognising the importance of canvassing disabled and older people's views in earlier stages of web production

鈥� the changing organisational structure and roles in web production teams - from an initial emphasis on accessibility of technology, through to recognising the key importance of ensuring user-experience designers and usability specialists understand accessibility, to the current focus on the web product manager as the key player in making the strategic decisions which most strongly influence the accessibility of a product

While web accessibility has never been simple, the demands it now puts on every member of a web production team can sometimes feel overwhelming. The decisions that they make every day may affect whether or not the products they work on will include or exclude disabled and elderly people.

Internationally recognised web standards such as and BSare immensely helpful in advising these team members on how to make decisions on what they are creating. User-centred design standards such as BS have also provided design teams with standard processes for how to engage users within their design processes.

However, many web product managers have been missing best practice advice on how to ensure their teams are making informed, justifiable decisions on accessibility at each stage of product development. And organisations have been missing best practice advice on how to embed such behaviour within their business as usual practices.

BS8878 provides just such advice. Building on the previous guidelines, which it replaces, it is based on the experience of many accessibility experts from different parts of the UK web industry and disability organisations on its drafting committee IST/45.

While it is a British Standard, it has also been reviewed by over 100 global accessibility experts to make sure it harmonises with international and other countries' national standards.

We've also tried to ensure BS8878 reflects the reality of current web production and the directions it is likely to go in, in the future. So it includes the best the drafting committee could currently say about:

鈥� inclusive design and personalisation - it provides advice on the relationship between inclusive design and user-personalised approaches to web accessibility, including when to consider providing additional accessibility provisions

鈥� accessibility across devices - it provides advice on how to find information on making web product on new platforms such as mobile apps and internet TV (such as ) accessible

鈥� accessibility under new legislation - it provides information on how the recent Equality Act 2010 impacts on web accessibility

鈥� accessibility in web product procurement - it recognises that many organisations contract out their web products to external suppliers to ensure they produce an accessibility product

The 大象传媒 has been using much of the best practice in BS8878 for a while now, and we will soon be training our product managers in web product accessibility using BS8878 as our guide.

By training 大象传媒 product managers in this practice, our aim is to ensure that all 大象传媒 web products are able to provide a consistently good user experience for all our audiences.

By contributing our experience to the standard and making it publicly available, we hope that product managers of other websites, both in the UK and beyond, now have a resource which will help them do the same.

Jonathan Hassell is Head of Usability and Accessibility, 大象传媒 Future Media & Technology