It must be frustrating if you can't play your favourite programme on BBC iPlayer. That's why Anthony Rose, who looks after the service, has answered some common concerns and invites you to let us know your problems.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Butterworth is King Technologist down in leafy Kingswood Warren and is something of a hero even if he's not aware of it. [...]
I use Redux nearly every day in my work. It's reliable. It's thorough. It's simple. And, most important of all, it's interface belies what I perceive to be the complex processes and systems required to deliver such an invaluable resource for those of who scan the BBC's output looking for ideas and checking to see which of those ideas have already been executed. It's the kind of thing - especially the interface - which is so utterly perfect (for me, at least) that I don't want anyone to tinker with it.
In short, BBC Redux is VERY BBC.
We like.

The Backstage mailing list denizens also give praise - with the usual caveats.

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Staying with BBC Backstage, Ian Forrester says:

Things at Backstage have been quite hectic but also quiet to the public.
So what's been going on?
Well, here's a list which I think you will find interesting.
 1. New BBC Backstage Blog with comments
 2. New BBC Backstage Logo Competition
 3. PA Press Event API via Backstage
 4. New ideas store application
 5. Thinking Digital Audio via IT Conversations
 6. BBC Backstage Christmas party
 7. BBC Backstage and Geekup events
So that's the highlights, now some details.

Those details are here. Keep a beady eye on the Backstage Blog and/or here.

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If you've been following the convoluted story of BBC Jam, you may be interested in a piece in Broadcast where Katherine Rushton writes that "[b]y exploiting some of it commercially, the BBC aims to stop all of the £96m already spent on BBC Jam from being wasted.":

BBC controller of learning and factual interactive Liz Cleaver told Broadcast: "We are agreeing with the Trust what content we might follow up - what might be available for public service and what might be available for commercial exploitation. We're talking about asset-stripping Jam.

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The Radio 2 website has gone all different, exploiting that API goodness in /programmes - but then, if you're a regular user of the site, you'll know that already. Ryan Morrison explains why this is so and James Cridland explains why this is a good thing.

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Finally, today is BeeBCamp Day in White City. What is BeeBCamp? Allow Tom Van Aardt and Roo Reynolds to explain:

Think of it as a user generated conference, an "un-conference", or you can think of it as "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment". It's a place where BBC staff can get together, meet one another and talk about the exciting stuff we're working on.

The BBC's blogger-in-residence is in attendance - so watch Steve's Common Platform blog / here / Twitter / Yammer (if staff) / Roo's blog / any other social media as appropriate (runes, graffiti etc).

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Radio 4's Feedback programme had a discussion about some of the issues surrounding the BBC's News blogs. You can listen to the discussion below.

Leave a comment at The Editors. Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Over at the MIP blog, there's a "big interview video":

In the context of MIPCOM 2008's Broadband Video Summit, Erik Huggers, the BBC's director of future media and technology, spoke to journalist Kate Bukley. He notably revealed a kids' iPlayer was in the pipeline.

On this subject, the Guardian's Leigh Holmwood reckons that the interview adds little to another Erik interview - last week's one with the Guardian.

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On the 17 Oct edition of Radio 4's Feedback, Roger Boulton says:

It's still the BBC's most popular digital station, but have you been struggling with Radio 7's redesigned website? Some of Feedback's correspondents have and we put their complaints to Radio 7's interactive editor.

The programme is here in iPlayer.

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Jane Black, a user of the Freedom Of Information site What Do They Know?, has had a reply [pdf] to her request:

Based on the precedent set by your release of the cost of BBC Action Network (see link below), please send me the annual cost of the recently-closed BBC Holiday website from 2003 onwards.

FoI fans can get more BBC responses regarding "the status of the Creative Archive Licence" here [pdf 1 | pdf 2].

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Vision multiplatform exec Dan Taylor blogs on his personal site about programme sites:

As previously posted, my job requires me to have an overview of the whole of BBC Vision's online portfolio. Until recently, my record of new site launches comprised a TextEdit document on my laptop (edited on a daily basis) and an Excel spreadsheet on a shared drive (updated, er, less frequently). A couple of weeks back I decided that a far better tool for maintaining and sharing this information would be a simple blog.

And so BBC Vision Site Launches [rss] is now in BBC Internet Blog's Pageflake.

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A post at Mapperz ("The Mapping News Blog") calls Ollie Williams' BBC Olympic and Paralympic Heroes Parade Map a "BBC first to report a live event using mapping tools"; Ollie explains all at the Olympics Blog:

It's clever stuff, and it allows us to tell the story of events in a complex, live, graphic environment for the first time. In the future, mobile technology like this could help us cover big sporting events (for example, Wimbledon or the Open golf) in new ways.
 
Along with geo-located Twitter updates on the Beijing map in August (read more about that map here), this map marks the debut for this geo-locating lark in BBC Sport's coverage.
 
It remains very much a developing technology, and isn't 100% reliable. If you've ever used satellite navigation devices in your car, and found yourself frantically pointing upwards when it suggests it "cannot locate satellite", you'll know what I mean.

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Hot new "Use Our Stuff To Build Your Stuff" action over at BBC Backstage's mailing list: Dominic Burns presents Have Your Say Too ("the idea is for it to be a modified "Have Your Say", allowing users to comment on all BBC news items (emphasis on 'all')") and Andy of iPlayerlist ("making the unmissable, browsable") fame says:

Bereft of any real ideas I asked myself "if you took all the BBC TV shows that are currently on iPlayer and plotted them on a map would it be any use what so ever?"
The result: http://iplayerlist.mibly.com/map/

Internet Blog readers will doubtless also be wanting to read the thread [backstage] BBC DRM iplayer mobiles etc.

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From the Partnerships Which Rhyme Dept, a "joint press release from BBC and BSkyB":

The BBC and Sky have announced that BBC iPlayer can now be accessed via Sky Player, Sky's online TV service.
The new version of Sky Player includes a series of BBC branded sections, with listings information and links to all TV programmes on the BBC iPlayer service.
Sky Player, which offers users access to live and on-demand content from a range of channel providers, will now also offer access to content from all BBC television channels.

And staying with telly-not-(necessarily)-on-the-telly, Robert Andrews at paidContent asks Ashley Highfield, formerly of this parish about Project Kangaroo (which is looking at a closed beta) and what he's been doing since leaving the Beeb, given the Competition Commission's interest:

Highfield jokingly told me: "I've brought my golf handicap down to eight." In seriousness, he's been "making the case", working with the regulator: "I spent the day with the Competition Commission yesterday, going through the proposal." Despite the holding pattern, "with the Competition Commission's blessing we, are building the offering... and we expect to have a closed beta around Christmas time... they don't want the regulatory procedure to hold up innovation."

Combining Freeview with HD, Mark Sweeney writes a Guardian piece headlined ITV, Channel 4 & BBC To Launch HD Channels On Freeview Next Year:

Football fans in some areas of the UK will be able to watch the 2010 World Cup in high definition on Freeview after Ofcom announced that ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC will launch channels next year.
 
The media regulator today revealed the results of a competitive tender process to launch the first three HD channels in "late autumn" next year, with a fourth expected to launch by 2010.

You can join the lively discussion at the Join Freesat Blog.

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At the time of typing, 544 BBC employees are using Yammer, a workplace Twitter-like service.

Our blogger-in-residence Steve Bowbrick attributes a recent surge of signups to the head of FM&T Erik Huggers using the service; James Cridland, the Audio & Music FM&T boss, likes it ("I can talk about stuff we're doing without worrying whether I'm irritating anyone outside the BBC with my talk of HWH, W12, BC5 D2 M1, etc etc. It's rather fine."); Backstage's Ian Forrester says "where's the API, people? Come on, this is becoming unacceptable already".

And over on her personal blog, Innovation Executive Lucy Hooberman puts all this Yammering into context, talking about how we talk about what we do - for example, on personal blogs:

In the past you would have said the BBC really communicates what it is about to the public only via its programmes as well as via press releases, annual reports, consultations and complaints the historic tools of corporate communications.
 
But now many staff on official blogs and personal blogs offer additional insight into what is going on behind the scenes in terms of how we do our jobs, how the BBC works, how we make decisions and importantly who we are. That's incredibly important for collaborations and partnerships of any kind - knowing who you are doing business with, or talking to and being able to talk to them creates a virtual circle of information leading to understanding and participation being able to be used effectively

And, in the interests of balance, if you want to see what people are twittering about the BBC's use of Yammer, go here.

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Finally, over in the Commons, MP Richard Younger-Ross (Shadow Minister, Culture, Media & Sport; Liberal Democrat) has told his fellow members debating the Broadcasting (Television Licence Fee Abolition) Bill [iPlayer]:

The BBC website is the most trusted in the world for news and current affairs programmes that are authoritative, accurate and, above all, impartial.

Nice to see it on the permanent record.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

We've got almost all the devices the iPlayer is compatible with in our capacious desk drawers, so we thought it'd be awfully charitable of us to load up some BBC content and take our favourite players for a spin.

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Dianne See Morrison of mocoNews blogs here at the Washington Post about the Beeb's work with Open DRM, remarking that "[a]s for downloading TV programs with the iPhone, that might take awhile":

Why? Because Apple doesn't license its DRM to third party users, and so far, unlike Nokia and several other handset makers, doesn't support the OMA DRM 2 specification.

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Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht from Diggnation have left a message for BBC Backstage.

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Over at our sister blog in News, The Editors, Assistant Editor of Interactivity Matthew Eltringham has news from the UGC Hub - "we've decided to try out a reporter whose beat is simply all the content you've been sending in to us - our first Interactive Reporter":

Siobhan Courtney has been with us for a fortnight now and has already scored two major successes - last week she revealed the extent of the initiation rites that students at some British universities undergo. [...]
This week she has spoken to some of the thousands of students who e-mailed us because they have yet to receive their educational maintenance allowances worth up to £30 a week [...]
She's got lots more stories already in the pipeline

As they say, read on and comment at The Editors. Also, ex-BBC News Alf Hermida gives some context at Reportr.net and Peter Brantley at O'Reilly TOC says "this deserves to be pondered."

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Ex-Beeber and sometime Internet Blog guest contributor Martin Belam continues his research into how broadcasters and news organisations use social bookmarks with a comparison of how often BBC News content is bookmarked as compared to material from the rest of the BBC website:

Now, of course, the content on the BBC News site is the most likely to lend itself to the kind of social sharing site like Reddit or Newsvine, but it is astonishingly dominant over content appearing on www.bbc.co.uk - by a factor of 67 to 1.

Which means that if you're the kind of person who "does" Digg, you can have a tremendous effect on Internet Blog if you and your Digg buddies hammer that Digg link below and guarantee the team here kudos, adulation and the respect of our peers. Game that system! (More seriously, there are some caveats regarding the profile of social bookmarking users and non-UK access to content in this comment by David Thair.)

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Red button wizard Andrew Bowden says "so long" to What's On:

I was always really happy with what we produced. Bar the fact that we didn't bother changing the dreadfully brown colour scheme.
Still, all good things must come to an end. But not before a toast.
To What's On.
Cheers!

Andrew also, of course, posts at the BBCi Labs blog.

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Finally, Internet Blog was going to provide a summary of the responses to Erik's post about the BBC's use of AIR, but it seems that Irregular Shed has already provided one in a tweet:

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

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Matt Asay responds enthusiastically at cnet's Open Road to the possibilites conjured up by the idea of openness:

The BBC is now considering making that content available to the world, not merely to be seen but also to be modified and re-distributed in new and exciting ways. Think about that. The BBC has helped to create some of the world's most iconic programming, from Monty Python to Pride and Prejudice.
Remixing Mr. Darcy? I can't wait.

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New Department Time at FM&T! It's a technical group "to ensure that audiences receive the best service possible when taking part in BBC programmes":

The creation of the Interactive Technical Advice and Contracts Unit (ITACU) is part of the BBC's comprehensive plan to address important issues which arose from serious editorial breaches on the BBC last year, many involving interactive votes, competitions and the use of Premium Rate Telephony.

More from Alex Farber at New Media Age and James Welsh at Digital Spy.

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Rain Ashford of BBC Backstage blogs Ian Forrester's presentation about the Future of Technology Conference and the Google Code Jam.

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Dan Taylor plays around with the refreshed BBC search, as does Ryan Morrison.

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And finally, if you missed Audio & Music tech chief James Cridland's breakfast-time spot on BBC South Yorkshire's Radio Sheffield talking to Toby Foster about targeted online advertising - and if you haven't read the notes he prepared - you can listen to the piece here [5.3Mb mp3 | 07min37sec].

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Polly Toynbee gives an overview; Owen Gibson and Maggie Brown look at regulation and the BBC Trust; Owen Gibson and Richard Wray look at co-operation; Emily Bell looks at an aggregational platform and, most pertinent to BBC Internet Blog, Jemima Kiss has a piece called The BBC Can Be An Open Source For All Of UK plc which quotes our blogger-in-residence Steve Bowbrick and current BBC internet controller Tony Ageh on the BBC's twin roles as programme maker and distributor:

There must be a way to achieve both of these outcomes, without harming the BBC, that would massively increase the viability of some SMEs and invigorate the entire UK ecosystem. Given what's going on in the world, this would be a very good time for such an injection of resources and support.

Stephen Brook also seeks your views.

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Image by James Enck from Flickr

Telecom analyst James Enck went to "HD Online: Can it be a Commercial Reality?" at Bafta:

There followed two very interesting presentations, by Anthony Rose and Andy Quested from the BBC. Anthony Rose seemed to express fatigue with the iPlayer bandwidth debate, and stated his hope that the industry could now move on to consider issues around ISP incentivization and monetization.

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Mike at SocialRovr crunches some BBC subscriber numbers and asks whether YouTube is "atrocious at serving news content in an intelligible way":

Yet it's equally certain that what is presented through YouTube, the de facto leader in varietal Web video, is not grabbing much traction. At least not the sort of traction and recognition that stalwarts like the BBC and AP and others tend to register in the minds of consumers.

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Charlotte McEleny writes at New Media Age about "an online teaser to promote a documentary to be shown at the BBC Electric Proms":

The BBC Electric Proms aims to support new music filmmaking and this year has also commissioned three short films inspired by music tracks from Wild Beasts, XX Teens and Roots Manuva.

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Journalism student Rob Wells discerns a direct tone in one of the Beeb's redirect URLs:

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Internet Blog would like to wish a happy birthday to the Beeb's Indian Ocean relay station:

Launched in October 1988, and currently run on behalf of BBC World Service by VT Communications, the station is transmitting BBC World Service programmes on shortwave to an estimated audience of up to nine million listeners across East Africa.

[For more detail, the BBC press office has a handy list called BBC In The Seychelles: Noteworthy Dates.]

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Finally, a plea from Folie A Deux:

Please people, don't try and fill your time reading the BBCs Internet Blog. Its boring, and to read it I'd need a grey suit and a desk with files on it.

Well, it's a big internet and other technology-focused accountability weblogs are available. Are you still here?

Not that we're caving into these demands, but as a public service, here is the Electric Proms video referred to above:

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.]]> Alan Connor Alan Connor https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/interesting_stuff_20081006.html https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/interesting_stuff_20081006.html round up Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:42:54 +0000
More on Olinda here and here.

Audio & Music tech chief James Cridland has been preaching the good word in Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen, agreeing with his commercial colleagues on technology and competing on content. The talk he gave with GCap's Nick Piggott, Radio For The Facebook Generation, is evidently too involved for a straight embed, so here's the PDF:

Quite a few people asked for a copy of the presentation Nick and I gave. It's 38 meg, and given that I was demonstrating Olinda (our rather nice prototype connected radio) and a rather neat webcam-based piece of software that got a spontaneous round of applause (when it worked!), it's a bit hard to simply forward a PPT file to someone.
[N]ote that the speech doesn't make it clear who's speaking at any one time, so don't take anything in here as official BBC policy, because it isn't.

And Nick Piggott's complementary post is called Three Countries, Two People, One Message.

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Back here in the BBC bloggery, James tells Radio Labs that "iPlayer's teething problems have got substantially better since my last report, but here are a few open issues we're aware of":

• A problem with the satellite receivers we use meant that some programmes had gaps in them recently. We switched to an alternative feed for a bit, which had the effect of putting BBC7 in mono among other things, but the satellite receivers now seem happy. We're sorry about that. Coyopa will fix that.
• Generation of Real Audio files for a small amount of programmes has sometimes failed. We think we've got to the bottom of why this happens, and issues are rather fewer of late. Again, apologies to you - particularly PM fans - if this has spoilt your enjoyment. In the majority of cases, Coyopa will fix that too.
• [Update 2008-09-30 1630: now fixed] Listeners in live Windows Media format within iPlayer might notice, in a minority of cases, that they get kicked off at precisely 15 minutes after they start listening. A fix is on the way shortly; it would appear from preliminary tests that it might be related to Internet Explorer, and that it's potentially related to the recent Windows XP SP3 update, or similar for Vista. It's early days, so we might be wrong here - but we're working on it; latest information I have is that we might have a fix next week. Coyopa will, eventually, fix that as we add AAC-family flash streaming.

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Chris Williams talks to BBC Technical Architect Andy Smith under a very The Register-flavoured headline in The Register, BBC Fixes BT Home Hub Auto-Vomit Bug:

BBC engineers have solved a mysterious, long-running bug that has meant iPlayer and live TV streams have frequently prompted the BT Home Hub, UK's most common router, to reset itself.

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Ex-BBCer Martin Belam's thoroughgoing review of how news sites use social media includes a post called Measuring The BBC's Success With Social Media:

Although it did not generate as many social bookmarking links as The New York Times or CNN, overall the BBC was the third most successful of the 50+ media sites I was monitoring, with 341 popular links across the 8 services during the month. The BBC was the most successful British media site, with The Telegraph and The Guardian being the closest UK competitors.

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At BarCampLondon5, BBC Backstage's Ian Forrester talked about social media centres XBMC Media Center and Boxee and blogs about

the attention to ui detail xbmc always had. It's almost unlike any other open source project I know of - the technical and interface attentions have been equally catered for.

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And BBC Innovation Executive Lucy Hooberman has been looking at Ofcom's proposals for Stage 2 of the PSB review:

Just catching up on Ofcom's proposals for stage two of the PSB review and noticed, apart from the proposals themselves, this "experimental" page where you can leave your comments alongside the proposals.

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Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf visited the Guardian and said: "The BBC is about television; what it really should be about it video and distributing that video."

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And finally, Are Wold is writing a series of posts about the requirements for his next mobile phone, which begins:

Thanks to its FM tuner and the 3,5 mm audio jack, I can hook the N82 up to the stereo in the living room, sit back and listen to the BBC World Service (broadcast on "Alltid Nyheter" in the evening). No fuss, no software, no plugins, no radio, just the amplifier and a 3,5mm cable.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

At the blog for Scripting Enabled ("a two day conference and workshop aimed at making the web a more accessible place"), some slides from a talk from the Beeb:

Jonathan Hassell of the BBC did a joint presentation with Phil Teare on the impacts and symptoms of dyslexia on web design and usability. Jonathan goes through the results of a BBC research and gives some tips on how to not block out dyslexic users completely.

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Security writer Graham Cluley picks up on this Telegraph piece about spam received by subscibers to the mailing list for Electric Proms and adds:

Long time followers of news on the Sophos website will know that this is not the first time that a BBC mailing list has sent an unauthorised message. Five years ago, ardent fans of The Archers, the world's longest running drama serial, were accidentally sent a copy of the Sobig worm.

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Another Interesting Stuff; another interesting conference write-up from Backstage's Rain Ashford [see previous]. This one's from the Google Developer Day at Wembley Stadium, with notes and pics at the Backstage Blog.

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From the abstracts for PyCon UK, two talks by BBC Research's Michael Sparks:

Kamaelia is designed as a toolkit for making concurrent software systems that are maintainable using a component based approach very similar to Unix pipelines. It was originally designed for use in a network systems environment and so is designed with systems that are naturally highly concurrent in mind - mainly from the perspective of trying to make it simple to comprehend unknown systems.

Update 2008-09-24: After some Yammering with Michael, we can now see the slides:

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Finally, now that everything the BBC broadcasts gets its own permanent page, which ones are people twittering about?

• Excellent play on BBC R3: https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00dkvqt (mflavin)
• wishes we could get more BBC programmes in Canada, especially this one about Stonehenge - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7625145.stm (paul_henman)
• Brecht-Weill "Mahagonny" on Radio 3: https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00dk49w (defjaf)
• Listening to Psmith in the City on the BBC: https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00djjpn (seabright)
• BBC Four今晚要放Roxy Music紀錄片，要錄影。https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00djn0s (shihlun)
• Katy Perry covered MGMT Electric Feel acoustic. https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00dcqnm fast forward the player to 2:26. LOVES it. (gurj)
• https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00df61v Listen again here to my debate with Anthony Grayling last night on Radio 3, on 'humanism'. (RupertRead)
• just watched this https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00dmpd2 Gawd bless humph :-( (squaccs)
• one more day to watch the manc music fest on iplayer https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00d9g2x (dangermain)
• Watching episode 1 of Earth: The Climate Wars (https://meleleh.pages.dev/programmes/b00djvq9) thanks to Usenet since I don't have an actual TV (deepthinking)

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

But over the last 10 months, the iPlayer has seen major upgrades to the way it can deliver video, video quality and compatibility with an ever-expanding number of mobile devices, putting the iPlayer on the forefront of Internet video delivery. The BBC is solving many of the problems with online video delivery that have vexed other services around the world.

There's also a paean to iPlayer from Audit Bureau of Circulations chief exec Chris Boyd in Media Guardian:

I love the iPlayer; I just think it's amazing. About two years ago I tried to use the ITV equivalent, which would never download, and then over Christmas my daughter and I wanted to watch separate programmes at the same time and a friend of hers told her that the iPlayer was very good. Since then I've used it pretty much every week.

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If your bag is reasonably-expressed complaints, quibbles and feature requests around BBC stuff, the place to go is the Beeb section of Get Satisfaction. One user, Gids, asks:

Any idea why All Bar Luke is listed as being by "BBC Null" in the iPlayer radio player?

The iPlayer team is dissecting this bug right now; meanwhile, critical friend of the BBC Frankie Roberto is frustrated that the "search box on the BBC News website should default to searching news, not random BBC stuff" - also onpassed.

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There's more detail on the BBC's involvement in BarcampBrighton3 [as described below] at the BBC Backstage Blog, with more detailed notes on Ant Miller's talk A BBC Micro For the 21st Century?.

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Also via Backstage, Chris Riley has been responding to feedback and adding features to his Track Playing prototype:

Chris has added integration with the BBC's Radio Pop beta, using the Radio Pop API. So now you can Pop your trackplaying habits to Radiopop. Chris is using OAuth to pass the users information back and forth smoothly.

Shane Richmond [see below] will be delighted to learn that the first track brought up when BBC Internet Blog launched the service was...

(During the time it took to type that, we've moved onto Rihanna's "Disturbia".)

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Finally, you can enjoy the slightly uneasy and voyeuristic experience of seeing what people are twittering about iPlayer in the new iPlayer/ Twitter feed on Internet Blog's Pageflake:

• Watching Humphrey Littleton's last I'm Sorry I Haven't Clue on iPlayer (publicenergy)
• Watching the BBC iplayer on my Mac while doing my Sunday family duties. Cooking for 8 today. Pork is in. (royski)
• I'm impressed they managed to get Dara O'Briain Live at the Theatre Royal on iPlayer. (aJanuary)
• Surprised to see some films listed on bbc iplayer (diceliving76)
• Has anyone else noticed that the volume control on the BBC iPlayer goes "all the way to eleven". (Braziel)
• Didn't feel up to Thomas Hardy tonight so will catch Tess of the D'Urbervilles on iPlayer another night. It looks good. (squatbetty)
• Nice iplayer error message - 'This doesn't seem to be working. Try again later'. Not even a please! (ianbarber)
• the bbc could do with some of those +1 channels that itv and c4 have. Iplayer, whilst good, looks crap on my lounge TV (via the wii). (guyweb)
• @guyweb I don't think the wii iPlayer supports the high-quality feeds that the main iPlayers has, does it? (JeFurry)
• πολύ ενδιαφέρον και αυτό. Και το bbc να βλέπαμε καλά θα'ταν :) Στο FAQ του iplayer εξεηγεί κάποιους λογους που είναι μόνο στο uk (internetakias)
• BBC iplayer offered on Nokia N96 - That is really cool but do u need to pay TV license fee to receive TV programs on mobile?? (vidyavi)

vidyavi is clearly not an avid Internet Blog reader (how odd!), as the answer ("it depends if you're watching live or on demand") is here.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Lots of snap and crackle about the social radio software prototype Radio Pop [see post below | also see: social radio hardware]. Blog posts by creators Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley have been joined by more from former colleague Dan Taylor and boss (gulp!) James Cridland. Dan even has a feature wishlist, which he concedes is a little unfair for a week-old prototype.

Other comments include Donald Kelly ("in a way, the last.fm of radio listening"); the Beeb's Ryan Morrison, who also has feature requests and who links to the API; Ian Forrester of Backstage ("shows the type of thing we are thinking and building inside the BBC but can't really make public easily") and Ian Hughes:

Nice to see that our license fee isn't being frittered away on pointless exercises too.
(Mind you, if it helps to get rid of Chris Moyles, it can't be all bad.)

Bad news, Ian Hughes:

(Also from Ryan Morrison, a quality contest for iPlayer, too much of a pageload to include in Internet Blog - click, compare and contrast!)

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Ex-Beeboid Ben Metcalfe has met frustration trying to watch John McCain's acceptance speech:

one has to ask why the BBC doesn't secure worldwide distribution for 'general news', esp like in this case where it's probably recording the broadcast live from the convention... it's BBC copyright end-to-end.

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In The Independent, Ian Burrell talks to Stephen Mitchell (Head of Multimedia Programmes, Radio News) about repurposing material like Evan Davis' piece on the demise of hitch-hiking:

He was able to do a nice piece of radio journalism for the Today programme, a witty piece for the online audience and then join breakfast television on the same story. None of that felt forced.

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The imminent appearance of iPlayer on the Nokia N96 phone [see post below] is featured in (deep breath) The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Tech Digest, All About Symbian, Mobile-Ent, CNet, Pocket-lint, Electrig Pig, The Inquirer, Mobile Computer Mag, The Washington Post, Stuff TV and IntoMobile. Read them all! Make notes! Keep for reference when iPlayer comes to a new platform - like, according to Stephen Fry, the fridge!

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Greenwich Time Signal and tuning note appararus, Savoy Hill 1927

If you've ever wondered what kind of backup is in place for the pips, Stuart Pinfold will tell you about a pips pipe.

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Malcolm Clarke, assistant, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, c1985

Good news from Audio Scribbler for fans of very early electronica made by stitching and stretching tape (and that includes BBC Internet Blog):

Mute have announced that they will release a 50th anniversary retrospective double CD from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which will feature 100 classic, rare and previously unavailable pieces of music and sound effects from various BBC TV and Radio shows from 1958 through to 1997, including work by the likes of John Baker, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Elizabeth Parker, Desmond Briscoe, Paddy Kingsland, Peter Howell and Malcolm Clarke, amongst others.

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The BBC Micro, which is in the photo above and the one above that, and which gave our banner its owl, was the talk of BarCampBrighton3 - or at least of one of its talks. BBC technology manager Ant Miller gave "an exploration of whether and what the BBC could or ought to do along the same lines some 25 years later" but blogs that Backstage's Rain Ashford has written a post that's "rather more structured and complete than anything I had written down about it!" Rain's notes begin:

What is the BBC Micro? It wasn't a BBC machine; it wasn't for kids; it wasn't for schools...

And the Barcamp also featured a session called Ask The BBC Anything at which Rain and Ant were joined by Ian Forrester, and one of the questions was:

should staff members have their own blogs aggregated publicly for everyone to read?

Hmmm. Interesting stuff...

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Above is Kirrily Robert who came to the Broadcast Centre late in August to talk about Freebase, "an open, shared database of the world's knowledge". She gave FM&T and anyone else interested an overview on how it works and some of its applications and APIs. And here are the slides:

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Now, you'll be able to join a series half way through following a friend's recommendation and catch up on all the previous episodes - or watch them all in one go over a weekend.
Series stacking marks a key development in our strategy to let audiences view our programmes whenever and wherever they want.

Simon is also quoted in this release about adding BBC Four, CBBC and CBeebies to the official live streams offered for BBC Three, the BBC News Channel and BBC Radio, as reported by Oliver Luft in The Guardian.

"The BBC faces strike action at its research and development centre at Kingswood Warren", reports Media Guardian.

There's been a lot of response to the post here by iPlayer chief Anthony Rose, BBC iPlayer Goes H.264. Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia blogs about inaccuracies in the coverage:

Bottom line, journalists need to do a much better job of fact checking and not run a story just for the headline or because they feel since other bloggers ran it, they have to also.

So who's been saying what, aside from The Register and Slashdot? There's some speculation about the BBC and ISPs with eye-catching images [click on the thumbnail for more] at Telco 2.0, and a response from Internet Blog's editor Nick Reynolds on his personal blog.

"Despite Team GB's massive medal haul," reckons WebUser magazine, "it is the BBC's website that is the star of the Beijing Olympics." All the details are in John O'Donovan's post below.

Over at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh TV Festival, Ashley Highfield, formerly of this parish, has been talking about what Video On Demand means for multichannel TV, and those of us not in Auld Reekie can watch sessions including the Public Service Broadcasting Review, Armando Iannucci's call for the BBC to go HBO and Peter Fincham's MacTaggart Lecture. [Apologies for the lack of direct links to the video - the site doesn't work that way and instead offers you .FLV files to save - clearly this online video malarkey is never going to catch on!]

And from Beeboid bloggers, the new "Portfolio Executive, Social Media - BBC Vision", Roo Reynolds, blogs his first week and BBC Jersey's Ryan Morrison is Thinking About A Future BBC.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

Thilo Horstmann at The Twibble Blog is excited about BBC Sport's Matt Slater using Twibble ("a location aware twitter client for smartphones") in Beijing:

Matt of BBC Sport is using twibble mobile to tweet the latests and greatest of the Olympic Summer Games in Beijing. He is even sending his GPS coordinates along with his tweets!
Even more impressive are Matt's tweets in Google Earth. Add 'http://api.twibble.de/statuses/user_timeline/bbcsport_matt.kml' as a network link and click on a tweet to fly to China.

§

Back in Blighty, Jon Jacob is giving the Proms the online video treatment on the Beeb site and at YouTube:

§

Olivier Amato considers the latest news from Erik and Anthony and looks to the future:

We should eventually be able to download programmes in high-definition, at which point the distinction between broadcast and broadband video will be irrelevant as far as the user is concerned.

§

In a long-running thread on the BT Community Forums about watching iPlayer on broadband, Alison Craighead suggests the Home Hub issues may be a thing of the past:

So all seems well with iplayer and HH 1.5 now after a couple of days watching olympics etc in Firefox and Safari OS X 10.4.11 and intel mac book pro.
Thank goodness...
It would be great to get a post on what the problem was.

§

Over on the Backstage mailing list, FOAF fan Dan Brickley has been hacking away at the bbc.co.uk/music data to generate "music preference profile based on a list of artists", would like to see others developing the hack, and has some questions:

Mashed remote contrib: BBC music genres meet last.fm (meets OAuth)
I'd like to do some more with this, but the license terms aren't specified. Can it be used commercially? Is attribution required? Does it inherit any constraints from MusicBrainz? Is use in UK vs rest-of-world treated the same, etc etc.

§

The Observer asks various luminaries for their impressions of a Google World, including Beeb documentary-maker Adam Curtis and our former head honcho Ashley Highfield, who says [mildly spicy language ahead - Eds]:

The future's going to be in layering on top of Google more understanding of the context of the user and the question - the "semantic web", without getting too cyberbollocks about the whole thing.

§

While The Telegraph's Michael Deacon discusses the absence of Match Of The Day on iPlayer, Janet Silvera at The Jamaica Gleaner writes of ex-pat Jamaicans hungry for Olympic coverage: "some have gotten fancy by using hacker techniques to 'break' into BBC video".

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If you want to see images of transmitters in Iceland or hear about the days when BBC employees used BBC Micros as their personal computers, take a trip to 625-line land in David Birt's reminiscenes at BBCeng.info:

I had found in industry something of a culture of mistrust. Engineers were useful to have "on tap", as long as they weren't "on top", and were reminded of their lowly station. Let me give an example.

§

If you're already picking your panels for the SXSW Interactive 09 festival and your key criterion is a BBC connection, then David Dunkley Gyimah, formerly of this parish, is talking video journalism: "ex-BBC David talks technique, workflow, and swift turnaround factual feature-making" and Dan Hon of Six To Start is describing "how Six To Start worked with the BBC and Kudos to create an online experience for [Spooks]".

§

And it's goodbye to Karen Loasby and Matthew Cashmore, both of whom have blogged about leaving the Beeb. Toodle, and moreover, pip.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.

...the BBC Music artist pages beta. [If you're not already up to speed, you can start with Matthew Shorter's post below, Tom Scott's post on his personal blog and more hardcore detail at Radio Labs from Guy Strelitz.]

In a rare instance of a critic of the BBC assuming an excess of agility in the Corporation, "I have no idea," writes TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher, "if my campaign to try and get the BBC to open up more of its data to outside developers" influenced the beta, and offers congratulations either way. Matt Cox has some suggestions (which those of you without a blog could also stick up on Get Satisfaction - see below):

it would be nice to see Last.fm incorporated in future - and obviously a method of searching artists wouldn't go amiss (also, would a BBC radio data open API be viable?)

"Semantic Web evangelist" Juan Sequeda yelps: BBC Music Just Got On The Semantic Web Boat! and Shane Richmond of The Telegraph notes on his personal blog that "I'm now able to see that they don't actually play any of the music I listen to."

The Beeb's Patrick Sinclair offers "a little something to make [it] a touch easier: a BBC Music/MusicBrainz bookmarklet":

Drag this BBC Music/MusicBrainz link to your bookmarks bar in your browser. Now, when you're on an artist page (e.g. Coldplay) click on the bookmarklet to switch between BBC Music and MusicBrainz artist page.
Enjoy!

Patrick's bookmarklet is also available from the BBC Radio Labs blog.

And a satirical image at Flickr wonders What bbc.co.uk/music/beta would look like if Virgin Radio was doing it.

On another topic, Audio & Music honcho James Cridland tells the Backstage mailing list:

So, I did a BBC Weather iGoogle gadget last year. It was kind of nice, but sadly people are actually, um, using it - with over 20,000 impressions a day. Yikes. Think of the bandwidth and hassle that's causing my little server.

Poor little server. Happily, Google's kit has a tad more capacity than James', so his freshly-rewritten weather gadget now sits, as it were, in the cloud [click here or here for explanation of weak pun] over here [Update 2008-08-05: now over here - see James' latest post]. James would appreciate your feedback:

(add this to your iGoogle by hitting "add gadgets" (top right), then "Add feed or gadget" at the bottom of the left-hand menu, and finally pasting that in). Use the change settings button to choose a town near you.
If people don't see any hideous bugs (I can't test this in MSIE yet), then I'll do some redirection shortly to the many users of my current gadget. And add a BBC News one. And possibly even a BBC Music one! ;)

Come on, what are you waiting for? Encourage the man!

BBC is here!
12 employees are listening and participating

reads the top of the Get Satisfaction page for the product BBC /programmes, part of a network which purports to "provide help for products and services from thousands of companies". Some BBC employees who work on that project are listening to the suggestions for improvements, and BBC Internet Blog is eagerly signing up for RSS feeds for other services within our wide purview, including BBC blogs, BBC national radio websites and the aforementioned BBC music pages. If you have other accountability feeds you think we should be adding to our Mission Control Pageflake and personal RSS clients, let us know in the comments. We can handle it!

BBC's Mobile TV trial doesn't win public support writes Katie Scott at Pocket-lint; BBC: mobile viewing figures are fine reports Gareth Beavis at techradar.

Leigh Holmwood writes in Media Guardian about BBC3's first multiplatform comedy drama, Mouth To Mouth, about a girl pop group:

Mouth to Mouth is be made available first through web 2.0 communities, mobile phones, and the show's own BBC website before airing on BBC3.

--which means that, according to another Guardian article, it won't be viewable in Beijing.

Finally, at the BBCi Labs blog, Rob Hardy explains burndown charts and shares some of the Beeb's:

Burndown charts are one of the artefacts used in agile software development; we've been doing agile development since at least before I joined, and we've found it works tremendously well.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.