5 Interesting Stories: Olympic Plans, Prototypes, Privacy, and iPlayer stats
Post categories: 大象传媒 Sport,听iPlayer Press Pack,听innovation,听round up
| 11:43 UK time, Friday, 1 June 2012
Preparing the Palace of Arts for broadcasting the 1948 London Olympics
It's been a fortnight of long-laid plans.听It's been听the first fortnight of the torch relay, kicking off the 大象传媒's digital听coverage of the Olympics; the Connected Studio have had their first "build studio", and we've caught up with four months of iPlayer stats.
1. Olympics Plans
On Sunday May 20, about his ambitious plans for the Olympics. Owen wondered how the audience will find their way through so much content.
The Olympics will all but take over 大象传媒1 and an extended-hours 大象传媒3 for 17 days this summer, and 24 new dedicated channels besides on cable and satellite. Mosey promises "every event from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night", offering 2,500 hours of sports coverage alone 鈥 1,000 more than from Beijing.
The huge choice, including a new digital dashboard that will allow viewers to build their own schedule of live and recorded events, could lead to paralysis or diminish the ability to tell the "story" of the Games. Mosey concedes navigation is "a major challenge" but thinks his team have got the balance right.
Staff have blogged here about those 24 live streams听(补苍诲 how capacity is being increased), the Sports product on web (update) and on Connected TV, and given听an inside look at the semantic logic that underpins both.
Bloggers and online magazines听shared a preview of what the 大象传媒's digital plans will look like on different devices.
Pocket Lint鈥檚 Hunter Skipworth :
At the moment the application is going to be running on Sony smart TVs, Virgin Media TiVo via the red button and the PlayStation 3 via an app. No Xbox sadly.
PaidContent's听Robert Andrews听:
But the 大象传媒 News & Knowledge general manager is promising a buzzword right on-message with London games organisers themselves 鈥 鈥渓egacy鈥.
Robert :
Much of the 大象传媒鈥檚 digital Olympics offering is merely the result of the continuous iterative product development that the corporation undergoes. The platforms that have been built are also expected to be redeployed for upcoming live events including Euro 2012 and Wimbledon.
2. The Connected Studio's first "build studio"
On May听21st and听22nd, the successful participants from the first day came to Salford for two days to work on the next stage of their homepage and search proposals.
The team tweeted from the build studio:听
Muffled voices and furious fingers scurrying across keyboards as the final preparations are made for the pitches in 10 min
鈥 大象传媒 Connected Studio (@大象传媒_Connected)
The Connected Studio aims to fund innovative projects and prototypes that might become part of 大象传媒 Online's ten products.
If you are interested in the next connected studio, for Weather and Travel News on June 12th, have a look at Adrian Woolard's听latest blog post, which has more information including how to register your interest.
:
I should emphasise that while the day took something from the hack day idea, it wasn't strictly one. Rather it was a "concept hack day", if you like; the hope was that by the end of the day teams would have ideas which, if approved (more of this in a moment) might move on to the early development phase.
I particularly liked the fact that ideas in any state of preparation were welcomed, from the vaguest notion through to fully fledged paper prototypes.
Chocolate chip cookies. by , used under
3. Cookies and Privacy
Last Saturday (May 26th),.听
Ian Hunter, Managing Editor 大象传媒 Online, blogged ahead of time about changes to how Cookies were handled on bbc.co.uk:
From today users of 大象传媒 Online will be presented with a banner telling them about the use of cookies and how they can change their settings at any time, on first use of their chosen browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, FireFox etc).听
Several commentators compared how different sites had tried to say within the law, including the 大象传媒.
:
Crucially, it doesn't impact the user experience. Even after turning all cookies off, the site still functioned reasonably well.
The 大象传媒 possibly feels it has to set an example here, and it has gone further than other sites have so far. Still, it has managed to do so while not interrupting the user experience
Claudiu Morariu of PadiCode听subtitled his summary听"":听
What I love about 大象传媒 is that they went a step further. For those users who do care about their privacy they have created a dedicated privacy page, in plain language, where they can learn details about all the cookies and they can control which ones are setup and which not.
But Christie McMonagle of Attacat noticed a cookie to which :
BUT during an Attacat test before getting consent the 大象传媒 website had already set the S1 鈥渁nalytic鈥 cookie on the main page 鈥 so maybe not as clean as they seem (but in lines with revised guidance)听
Commenters on Ian's blog post queried whether the 大象传媒 had implemented the rules correctly; one criticised the classification of log analytics cookies as "strictly necessary":
Now, I see completely why you'd find that useful information to have, but it's flat out untrue to say that your ability to get good log analysis is strictly necessary to a user's browsing of the site.
Ian Hunter responded to comments:
Our approach seems to us, and of course we have taken legal advice, to meet the terms of the new regulations in a sensible way.
First, we believe that our approach would have been compliant even before the ICO issued their revised guidance on 25 May ...
Second, to Ewan's comment, we have designated these cookies as "strictly necessary" because they are sometimes used in conjunction with other cookies to provide a service that has been explicitly requested by users. However, their use for log analysis would not be enough to make them "strictly necessary" and we'll amend the wording here to make that clear.
4. Four Months of 大象传媒 iPlayer Performance
On Tuesday, the Media Centre released the听iPlayer听statistics for the first four months of 2012.
They showed growth in alternatives to desktop - from connected TVs to mobiles, :
During that time, smartphone and tablet devices accounted for 15% of total programme views, with Internet-connected devices 鈥 including your Smart TV, games console and Blu-ray player 鈥 contributed a further 11%.
The figures are impressive when you factor in that mobile device use almost doubled (94%) in one year and Internet-connected devices saw 57% growth from April 2011.
Alex Francis of Plugged听In :听
Traditional TV viewing is actually at a ten-year high, according to Ofcom, but that doesn鈥檛 seem to have stopped us from catching up on missed programmes, or simply enjoying them a second time around. Long live 大象传媒 iPlayer!
Even more听excited were the Daily Mail and听the Sun, who听noticed that the most听popular show on 大象传媒 iPlayer was the听episode of Sherlock in which actress听Lara Pulver was naked (bar shoes), giving them an excuse to illustrate a story about iPlayer stats with pictures of a naked woman.
declaimed the Sun. The Daily Mail, despite including two听stills,听听for the plot (spoiler):
It is thought thousands watched the series back to try to uncover clues as to how Holmes was able to fake his own death.
5. Echoes of the Radiophonic Workshop听
On Wednesday,听Olivier Thereaux听of 大象传媒 Research and Development blogged about his team's work on audio metadata and听researching the Radiophonic Workshop. As well as recovering plans for the devices they used to create their unique sounds, they tried to track down a Radiophonic Workshop听journal mentioned :
We looked everywhere we could for the mythical journals, even enlisting the help of our R&D librarian Louise Martin, to no avail. Louise helped us find plenty of material such as articles and books on the workshop, but the journals were nowhere to be found. It eventually took a conversation with radiophonic workshop veteran Dick Mills to dispel our dreams of poring through a pile of workshop journals: the workshop team did not publish its own journals, but had, through the years, contributed a number of articles to magazines such as Practical Electronics, Studio Sound and the Dr. Who Magazine听
Remember that , and enjoy the Jubilee weekend.
Ian McDonald is Content Producer, 大象传媒 Internet Blog
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