BBC Media Player showing subtitles and playback controls with BBC on-demand video content

We want people to have the best experience possible when they're watching BBC TV programmes or listening to BBC radio programmes. This means, amongst other things, making them available on as many devices as is practical.

I want to reassure you that Android is an important platform for us. And I know (not least from the comments on David Madden's recent post) that this platform is an important one for many of our users. We've supported iPlayer on Android since June 2010 .

The Android operating system is constantly evolving and has been upgraded several times in the last two years. Back then version 2.2 (FroYo) was the latest OS. Today the latest version is 4.1 (JellyBean) and in between we've had Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and Ice Cream Sandwich.

As many of you are aware, we chose Adobe Flash as the media format to stream to Android devices. Doing so provided us with a number of cross platform efficiencies as the same infrastructure can be used for delivery on PCs, Android phones, and set-top boxes.

Adobe's strategic decision to remove support for the Flash Player plug-in meant that we had to change the way that we play back this content.

We looked at a number of solutions, but there were a few key points we had to keep in mind:

1. We needed a solution that would work on the newer Android devices running the JellyBean operating system.

2. We also had to cater for the all the devices which are still on earlier OS versions. The diagram below shows that vast majority of Android users are on Gingerbread and FroYo.

3. We needed a solution which would work both for our websites and for our native Android applications.

4. We needed a solution which would meet the security obligations we had agreed with our rights holders.

5. We needed a solution which would not require a significant and costly change to our current infrastructure.

Platform version information from developer.android.com for the 14 day period prior to 4 September 2012

In the end, Flash was still the best choice of media format for us to use. And the only practical technology for us to play this format back on Android is Adobe Air.

We are keenly aware that mobile development is a fast-changing environment and that this approach may have to adapt in the future. We also wanted a generic simple application that would be as transparent as possible, both for users of our websites and users of our native applications like BBC iPlayer.

For these reasons, we decided to go with a separate application that we've called BBC Media player. This approach allows us to focus on solving all of our media playback challenges in one place and in one app. Any improvements that we make will benefit everything in the BBC that uses the Android platform.

We are making this change with our eyes open. No technology is perfect. We've seen some of the challenges that other Adobe Air based apps have had in the marketplace and so we have worked hard, both internally and with our technology partners to build the best application we can.

Adobe have been a long-standing collaborator with the BBC and have been excellent throughout this process, working closely with our teams to ensure continuity and a great experience throughout the London 2012 Olympic Games and then thereafter to support our requirements around this project.

We have put a lot of work into BBC Media Player and we think it will improve your experience of watching BBC TV and listening to BBC Radio on your Android phones and tablets.

We will continue to work on this application and on improving media playback and mobile experience on Android smartphones and tablets. The team and I would love to hear what you think about this approach and how well this new application works on your device.

Chris Yanda is Executive Product Manager, POD Mobile Management, BBC Future Media

Update, Thursday 13 December 2012: Dave Price has written an update post on Android.

Using your eyes to scan a big display of information is very fast. Using your fingers and a hierarchy of lists to find information is less so.

For the most part, in designing a desktop web page, people focus primarily on geographic rather than temporal layout. With a screen that's 13 inches or larger, you can afford to put a bunch of content in front of the user at one time and you can count on their eyes to navigate to it.

With mobile, however, you've got a lot less real estate to deal with. You can't put everything on one screen. The simple solution is to just break apart the desktop page and stack the resulting pages in a hierarchy. This addresses the smallness issue, but now we run up against the lazy and impatient issue. Chances are many people aren't going to get past the first page of your mobile site if they don't find what they're looking for.

Fortunately, you've got more than space to play with; you've also got time. As a broadcaster, time is important to the BBC. Services like iPlayer make it a little less important, but we know that most people still watch TV programmes at the time they are scheduled.

We also know that they tend to access the mobile site for a particular show when it is on. So, when we build a site, we try to pay attention to what they might be looking for and put it in front of them. A case in point is the Eurovision site. On the night we changed the "Latest News" page. We knew that if people were accessing the site when the show was on, they would be most interested in what was happening on screen right then. We built a simple system that ensured that the first links on the page were to the country that had just performed, the one that was on now, and the next two after that.

And we added a feed of the three most recent tweets from the BBC production Twitter feed. Rather than wasting time with the timestamp of each tweet, we just put the timestamp of the most recent one.

Below this, we kept the standard content that was on the page to make sure our users could still find content they had been looking for before.

The technique worked well, and this page got by far the most traffic of any of our television support sites that night. It would have been even better if we had been able to pull in the information for the actual country that was performing at the time, but we have to balance the amount of work we do for a site and the cost of that work against the likely traffic the site will get and the value to the public.

As traffic to our mobile offering grows and thus becomes of greater value, we hope to do more work of this kind to ensure we can anticipate better what users are looking for when they are looking for it.

Chris Yanda is Portfolio Executive, Mobile