Erik is away on holiday but he's asked me to update you on what else the BBC is doing to further support the development of HTML. (Ed's note: Read Erik Huggers' earlier post HTML5, open standards, and the BBC)

This is a research area that my section, R&D, has been working on for a while, and we really want to embrace and support HTML5. Erik is so serious about the BBC supporting this project that he's already putting extra resources behind it and we are bringing on board a Senior Technologist for Internet Standards, to support increased involvement on the W3C and other standards bodies as needed. This person will work within Future Media & Technology's R&D team, where there is a history of the BBC making significant contributions to standards initiatives.

We hope the person can draw on their existing experience and knowledge of the cutting edge of Web technologies and Internet services, while working closely with colleagues inside and outside the BBC to feed through production area's perspectives. They'll represent the BBC on various standards bodies as well as create experimental interfaces which address some of the issues Erik mentioned with current standards and guidelines.

This role will be advertised on the BBC's external jobs website soon and we look forward to many interesting applications. I'll follow up with a link to this job when it's live (in the next couple of weeks).

George Wright is Head of Prototyping, BBC Research and Development.

It's an experiment in creating an interesting TV show themed around technology, released under a Creative Commons licence, explicitly made available for you as viewers and end users. You can just watch and enjoy the show or do much more with the content using the Asset Bundle.

Read more and comment at the BBC RAD blog.

George Wright is Portfolio Manager, Rapid Application Development, Research & Innovation, BBC Future Media & Technology

It's a pilot show, designed to be sharable, remixable and redistributable. It's released under a Creative Commons Attribution (Non-Commercial) licence, and looks at interesting tech stories inside and outside the BBC.

Read more and comment at the BBC RAD blog.

George Wright is Portfolio Manager, Rapid Application Development, Research & Innovation, BBC Future Media & Technology

RAD's really pleased to announce that we've released some recent work as free/open source software. It's a project called URIplay. The code was produced in collaboration with the BBC by an indie startup called Meta Broadcast who pitched the idea to us some time ago. We've been working on this together over the last few months and are delighted that it can now be shared.

Read more and leave comments on the RAD blog.

George Wright is Portfolio Manager, Rapid Application Development, Research & Innovation.

Hi everyone. You're reading the first post on the new blog from the people working in RAD. We're a new, small team within BBC Future Media and Technology. I'm George Wright and I head up RAD. I have, and will continue to, blog on the main BBC Internet blog ( available here )

RAD works on near term prototypes, products and services across all digital platforms. We're part of a wider group encompassing Mobile, Audio and Music, and are based in London, W1. Our colleagues in Audio and Music already have an excellent blog at Radio Labs, as does the Journalism team, and we hope to emulate their approach to sharing new ideas and gain insight into your thoughts using the Web.

RAD completed recruitment and opened its doors in November 2008. We have a remit which stretches across all digital platforms and content areas, trying to help shape the BBC's thinking, encourage liaision with longer term research (both internally, within the BBC's fantastic R&D department, and externally, be it with academic partners or startups), and release code and output which delivers new ways of tackling problems like distribution for AV content, service discovery, UI and UX for new platforms, and much more.

Read more and comment at the RAD Labs blog

George Wright runs the RAD (Rapid Application Development) team in BBC Future Media & Technology.

In RAD, we've wanted to experiment with non-DRMed content for a while - and managed to assemble some content which was available to access in a number of ways.

One of the complex things about putting content on desktops or OSes (apart from the two closed operating systems) is the number of options available. Free software's all about choice - but for a large corporation like the BBC, sometimes choices take time. So, in my team, RAD, we have made initial discussion about our work with a number of vendors, and selected Canonical (who produce the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux) for this piece of work - other work in a similar vein is currently under discussion with other vendors/distros. Of course, this work is also available for people/vendors to port to the two closed operating systems, should they wish to do so.

We then worked with colleagues around the BBC and selected a list of available, updated, current content which we could make available both in and outside the UK, a feed of this content using the URIplay metadata framework, with our partner MetaBroadcast.

We then worked with Canonical and their software partners Collabra to deliver this feed to the Totem media player, and Gstreamer multimedia platform, to display available content in a simple, browsable window using a free software plugin, where the feed is updated using the Internet, when the user starts the player.

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Lots of this work involved changes to the underlying infrastructure of Gstreamer, as well as developing the plugin for Totem. We then moved on the adding content to the feed, and helping to optimise the playback experience - eg to download suitable codecs if they were available to the end user. As the service develops, we will start supplying content in several different formats - some of these are totally free and open, some aren't - we've reflected the wishes of content owners here, obviously.

We're happy with this first iteration, and are already seeing patches to the upstream software sources, to allow other OSes and distros to use these improvements. Longer term, we'll be looking to improve the content sources, as well as optimise the UI - to show channel or programme icons, for example. Because this is free software, we can make changes to this - and so can you/other users! The whole stack is free software - from URIplay through to Totem, the media player. Some codecs will involve a download, and in some territories (mainly outside the UK) may be restricted, but the underlying framework is free and open.

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This, quite clearly, is not a competitor to BBC iPlayer. It surfaces a lot of BBC content that is already available, but you won't see Doctor Who or Dragons' Den on there anytime soon. What you will see is an increasing list of content, in both audio and video formats, that we can share with you in an experimental way, allowing us to explore and test new ways of viewing and listening to some of our TV and radio shows. Some of the blog posts already online have mentioned that this involves all BBC content - that's incorrect - it's a limited subset designed for us to explore and evaluate how new platforms might need new distribution systems.

I'll be posting more technical information explaining how URIplay fits into the system, and our other plans for it, later this week, as well as sharing some of our plans for work with other free software partners.

George Wright is Portfolio Manager, Rapid Application Development, Research & Innovation, BBC Future Media & Technology.

P2P-Next is running an early trial with around 500 participants to assess client (software application) suitability, to examine whether our plans and work for a full P2P system will deliver useful outputs, and to stick with the "Release Early, Release Often" approach that we're aiming for with this project.

You can take part in the trial, as there are still some spaces left. Head over to trial.p2p-next.org to download the software.

P2P-Next will run across the European Union (the Commission is paying for a hefty chunk of the work, after all), with 21 partner companies, and the BBC is exploring how a UK-facing, licence fee-funded corporation like us can work outside its normal geographic boundaries.

Clearing BBC content for worldwide redistribution without DRM is no mean feat. Thanks go to Richard Chapman and the other folks in the BBC Weather Centre, along with the Met Office, for allowing us to add a four minute bulletin of the European weather forecast to the trial.

One of the main problems that we're trying to solve with this project is the fact that a lot of very interesting P2P projects can't quite cope with live content. This means, for example, that P2P distribution wouldn't work with news, or live sporting events. One of our partners in the project, Fabchannel has contributed a live feed from their Amsterdam office, showing that we have managed to crack live P2P, at least for this small trial.

The content in this trial is, admittedly, not the stuff that keeps online video companies afloat, or makes the BBC's consumer VOD services like iPlayer so popular - but then this technical test isn't hugely about the content. We're examining network performance problems with consumer broadband being rate limited on upload compared to download speed, and how changes to video codec and bitrates affect live video playback. All of this fits into our stated goal with this project - to explore and create next generation Internet distribution systems for TV and radio content.

The code behind the trial is written in Python. We have Windows [6] and Ubuntu/Debian GNU/Linux clients built now - OSX is coming Real Soon Now. Source is also available via our SVN repo. Code is released under OSI approved free software licences, so if your favourite distro isn't featured, you can build your own binary (and redistribute it!).

P2P Next is still rough around the edges in part - it's not consumer-focussed, after all, so READMEs and features are still very much work in progress - but then this is a four year research project and we're only in July of the first year ('M7' in EU language).

There'll be more news on this as we make further releases.

George Wright is Portfolio Manager, Rapid Application and Development, Research & Innovation, BBC Future Media & Technology.

We talked about a number of things to do with GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, its parent company (Canonical), its peers (ie, other distros), free/open source software and building communities. Ashley also reminisced on the time (presumably as a very small child) when he used to programme a PDP-11 in assembly language.

Unix and Unix-alike systems have changed since then, and Ashley was keen to see how, so whilst we were chatting, we had a mini-installfest. We put Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) on a spare laptop that I had in my office. The install was as painless as I'd imagined - and for anyone with a modern distro, relatively sane hardware and a bit of luck, it can be straightforward. We then moved onto the interesting stuff - setting up the system, showing off the features, pointing out the quirks - and filing bugs - easy when you have someone from the distro next to you :) - etc.

We chose Ubuntu for this demo and installfest because it's current, popular, easy to install, and free. These attributes apply to many other GNU/Linux distributions - Ubuntu was just one of our options.

We'll be coming back to Ashley in a week to see how he got on with it at home. This was a useful and interesting hour-or-so for a few reasons. Ashley's going to see some of the benefits and disadvantages to Linux - we haven't held his hand with this, just installed Ubuntu and let him get on with it. It'll also hopefully spark a few questions for him, and us, about how we work with this - and other free OSs - going forward.

We hope to announce some interesting projects over the next few months, e.g. the P2P Next project I posted about previously. More on this later...

George Wright is Executive Producer, Rapid Development Unit, BBC Future Media & Technology. There are more pictures of the installfest here and here.

One of our first projects is something I'm really excited about: it's called P2P Next.

It's a Europe-wide consortium of 21 partners spanning broadcasters, technical universities, content and metadata specialists and hardware vendors. We are building a new, cross-platform, Free/Open Source software-based, legal, peer-to-peer system. It's based on a core technology called Tribler which has been worked on at Delft University of Technology for a few years. The programming language behind Tribler is Python - which was chosen for its portability, cross-platform nature, and speed of development.

Last summer, I and the other members of the P2P Next team successfully pitched for European Union funding as part of the 7th Framework project, which is designed to encourage Europe-wide cooperation and technical excellence. We have funding for the next four years to deliver a number of enhancements to Tribler, covering live P2P streaming, an improved user interface, inbuilt friend/taste recommendations and much more.

We're aiming to build Mac, Windows and GNU/Linux clients, as well as a dedicated hardware Set Top Box client, to allow us to deliver the core technical goals: an open standards-based “next-generation” internet television distribution system, using P2P and social interaction.

It’s early days for this project. Funding, and the work itself, only started on January 1st, but already we've seen the plans take shape. This isn't yet a project that TV viewers will see and it's never going to replace the BBC's consumer offerings (e.g. iPlayer); it's a test bed for new ideas, allowing us to collaborate with colleagues across Europe, and to hone and develop technology which could help shape the TV of tomorrow.

I'll be keeping this blog updated with news on P2P Next as it progresses.

George Wright is Executive Producer, Rapid Development Unit, BBC Future Media & Technology