Points of View hasn't stopped advertising the message board. At the end of each show and often in the body of the programme Jeremy Vine refers to the POV website and the messageboard. They have, however, stopped doing a feature called the 'message board moment' which looked a different messageboard threads. They tell me they found the messageboard comments were much stronger if they were used in the body of the programme.
2. Is there a timescale to phase out POV Television and Radio messageboards?
No there is not. No decision has been taken about any part of the POV boards.
3. As "the Executive in charge of the boards as a whole", why, are you ONLY hosting bbc.co.uk/Digital/BBC messageboards, and somewhat distant from "Television" and "Radio"? And is that YOUR decision or that of your superiors?
Last year we had a situation where there was a danger that no part of the POV boards would be hosted. Not good for the community, or for the quality of the boards.
But I didn't feel that I would have the time or the expertise to host the Television and Radio POV boards. I agreed with BBC Vision that they would host the TV board (and in due course Rowan started hosting that board). Jem Stone of Audio & Music agreed to host the Radio board.
This was my decision although I obviously had to get agreement from Jem and Roo Reynolds.
4. Has a decision been to "marginalise" the Television and Radio messageboards, with the ultimate aim of removing them from BBC?
No. No decision has been taken about any part of the POV boards.
5. Why will you NOT talk to messageboarders on THEIR board? Your liking of blogs/control by author is NOT a reasonable argument to use, IF, you genuinely WANT to reach the largest number of messageboarders and receive the BEST input?
It's untrue that I won't talk to messageboarders on the POV boards. I do. But I find that the quality of comments I get is better on the Internet blog than on the boards. People seem better behaved, and you get a wider range of opinion. Threads on the board seem to slide off topic too easily and seem to end up focussing on my behaviour rather than the questions I am interested in discussing.
6. Will BBC be trying to cut back on messageboards (including Television and Radio)?
I can't speak for the whole BBC but as Jem says here we are trying to improve the functionality of our blogs and message boards across the board.
7. Do BBC want blogs/twitters and technical boards to be encouraged, whilst minimising the "pull" of POV Television and Radio messageboards?
No. The question is "what's the best way of engaging with licence fee payers online?"
Sometimes this will be a twitter feed, sometimes a blog, sometimes a message board.
But all of them stand or fall on how much effort is put into hosting or maintaining them. A poorly hosted message board, a blog where comments are not responded to or a twitter which is never used will not be very useful.
8. Do BBC want to be seen as censoring/marginalising viewers' comments, in preference to asking only the questions THEY WANT to hear the answers to?
No. We don't want to censor or marginalise comments. The questions are "what's the best way to get feedback from viewers about the things they care about?" and, in this instance "are the POV boards a good way of getting feedback?".
9. ITV (as you linked to) don't have a problem with viewers commenting on their programmes, will BBC (in future) be denying THEIR viewers that same freedom?
No. I don't think the BBC has a problem with viewers commenting on programmes.
We provide a lot of places online and on radio and television where they can do so. The question again is what is the best format and place to do this, and how much hosting or engagement is needed.
Or to put it another way - is what you're getting back worth the effort you're putting in?
10. Can you categorically confirm that POV Television and Radio messageboards WILL NOT be closing, and that there is no plan, which has been discussed to close them, or move them further to the edge of BBC, and eventually out/closed?
As I've said already I have no plan so nothing has been discussed. It would obviously be foolish of me to promise you that nothing will change ever.
I do have some ideas for how the POV boards could be improved, and become more focused. I will share these with you in my next blog post.
11. Why do you like blogs - it appears not very many messageboarders like them at all, and we have been vocal about WHY? We still don't know what you see as the pluses to blogging (from the point of view of posters OTHER THAN the original author/blogger)?
In my last post I explained the advantages I think blogs have. To quote myself:
...there's a trade off. People who comment have less freedom on a blog than the blog owner. But in return there's more chance of a useful result, of the blog owner participating and actually giving you answers.
12. Are you genuinely trying to IMPROVE all POV messageboards, or, ONLY the three techie boards - seeing "Television" and "Radio" as frivolous, and serving no purpose, other than a meeting place for posters to meet and "chat"!
I am trying to improve the whole board.
And as I've already said at the moment my opinion is the reverse of what you suggest.
I actually agree with you Niclaramartin when you said the bbc.co.uk board is effectively "moribund". The BBC and Digital parts of the board don't get many posts. The television part of the POV boards is in iny opinion currently the most useful part of the boards.
If you're a regular participant on the BBC iPlayer message board, you may be interested to know that Jonathan Richardson who is in charge of the board is planning some changes.
The full details are here. Jonathan is asking for comments by 11 a.m. on Friday morning.
Please leave any comments on the board rather than on this blog post.
Today sees the official launch of the new Panorama website and I hope you won't mind me saying a few words about it here and seeing whether you think that this is a good use of the web by a TV programme.
So much work goes into a 30 minute Panorama or a one hour special and the website struck me as the perfect platform to showcase the best of our journalism online. Britain's Terror Heartland is a prime example; blog posts from Tom Giles and Jane Corbin provided extra context, while an extended interview with Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik gave those of you interested in the subject an extra perspective. Jane also wrote a feature on the programme and introduced it online in a short video.
It's time for resolutions. For most, it means more exercise, less cake -- but not Anthony Rose. He wants to:
Provide an 'adaptive bitrate' solution in BBC iPlayer so that no matter whether you have a 300Kbps 3G connection or a 50Mbps connection, BBC iPlayer will serve you the best quality video that your personal internet connection can sustain at that instant, including full HD streaming if possible. The video should never stutter or stop, and should smoothly adapt to changing bandwidth conditions. When we and others get this right, then IP-delivered TV will take a leap in quality, reliability and widespread uptake."
Those of you who are a part of the Backstage mailing list may have read about the confusing way some programmes are listed on the BBC website. Why, for example, does the Top of the Pops programme page say there are no episodes coming up? The TV programme, as we know, doesn't run anymore -- but on on the World Service, TOTP is still going strong. Jaime Tetlow, designer at BBC Future Media and Technology, explains:
Getting down to the nitty-gritty of our internal data structure we'd probably say that the International World Service 'Top of the Pops' and the BBC One 'Top of the Pops' ARE different programme 'brands' but belonging to the uber 'franchise' of 'Top of the Pops'... although we don't have 'franchise' in our data structure yet."
Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean it's any less busy. Here's a round-up of some of the things that have caught our eye on the web in the past few days.
The beta version of the BBC iPlayer desktop application, using Adobe AIR and our DRM technology launched last week and has once again shown how the BBC are leading the way here - ITV, Channel 4, Sky and other broadcasters really need to learn from the BBC's experiences and make their content available on platforms other than Windows."
Kontiki's Director of Marketing Bill Wishon declined to comment on the impact the BBC's decision will have on his company, but told us that Kontiki is "adding more customers each quarter". However, the BBC's departure leaves Kontiki with only three major broadcasting customers, and its unclear how long the company will be able to retain them. British broadcaster Sky recently launched its own Silverlight platform, and local competitor Channel 4 actually got offered a chance to adopt the BBC's iPlayer technology, according to the Guardian."
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The Open University's Tony Hirst has been inspired by the recently launched custom CBBC iPlayer. He puts forward an interesting argument for the Open University to have its own custom iPlayer to house its vast (and growing) collection of educational content:
[T]he OU has been co-producing content with the BBC for many years; much of the recent output has been prime-time or early evening content on BBC1 and BBC2; that is, it's quite watchable, general interest programming:-) If the BBC sorts out making archive content available via iPlayer, then we'll have a reasonable amount of back catalogue material across science and technology, the arts, health and so on that could be used to populate an OU iPlayer channel."
It's been an amazing year for iPlayer, as the recent iPlayer day has shown.
As the person responsible for ensuring that iPlayer is giving the best experience it can to disabled audiences, I thought it would be worth looking back at how far we've come this year in the provision of subtitles for the service.
Before I look back on the year, I think it's worth looking at the history of subtitling on TV, just for comparison.
While the BBC Television Service started broadcasting in 1936, the first subtitled BBC programme became available in 1979 - a documentary about deaf children called 'Quietly in Switzerland' via the Ceefax service. It took until 1986 for us to subtitle our first live programme (an episode of Blue Peter), with the subtitling of news programmes following in 1990. And we finally achieved the landmark of having 100% of our programmes across the main BBC TV channels available with subtitles in May 2008.
So that's the story for broadcast TV. What about iPlayer?
Well, back when I started my role in February, the situation didn't look good - subtitles had been suspended from the iPlayer launch in December 2007 because a robust subtitling solution wasn't ready for launch.
However, since then, we have evolved the service immensely.
We introduced subtitles for download in May, and for the streaming service (above) at the end of June. And since then we have been working to get workflows in place to ensure subtitles can be delivered for iPlayer no matter how and when the programme in question is delivered to the Operations team, and for as many of the devices that Alex Nunes mentions in his iPlayer day blog as we can. While this is complex task, we have delivered new workflows to increase the amount of programmes with subtitles progressively since June.
And I'm delighted to announce that, in the last few days, we have launched new workflows to make subtitles available for two more categories of programme: live programmes (except those from BBC News and BBC Parliament channels, which we are still working on); and time-sensitive programmes which tend to change hours before transmission, and so have subtitles produced sometimes minutes before broadcast.
Since the workflows went live, our monitoring has found that they have increased the percentage of programmes with subtitles on iPlayer to over 90% today.
Please note that these new categories of programme will only have subtitles available in Flash Video format, as used in streaming and downloads using the new BBC iPlayer Desktop - downloads of these programmes via the old iPlayer Download Manager will not include subtitles, due to the limitations of the technology used in the Download Manager.
Please also note that, due to the separation between the workflows used to encode the programme and its subtitles on iPlayer, on occasions there can be a small window of time between a programme becoming available and its subtitles becoming available - if you find a programme does not have subtitles available, we'd encourage you to try again an hour later when the subtitles may be available.
I'd like to thank my colleagues in the iPlayer team (especially James Hewines, Alex Nunes, Steve Buttling-Smith, Marcus Box, Mary McCarthy, Ashley Hindmarsh, and Kemi Idowu), Andrew Strachan and David Kirby who did initial R&D, and the Operations Team for all of their hard work in making this possible.
In 2009, our aim is to continue leading the field of accessible video-on-demand services by doing further integration and innovation work to improve the subtitles you get from iPlayer. Key areas of investigation we have planned include:
- Improved live subtitle synchronisation - live subtitles on iPlayer, at present, are based on those from broadcast TV and we are still working on ensuring that the time-lag between speech and subtitles, which is a limitation of the current live subtitling broadcast process and the current online repurposing process, is reduced as much as reasonably possible to improve the experience of watching live subtitles online
- Colour - improving the iPlayer's media player so it can display the colours currently used in broadcast subtitles to indicate different speakers
- Inclusion of subtitles for more regional BBC programmes
- Inclusion of subtitles for live programmes from BBC News and BBC Parliament channels
This time last year the BBC finally responded to demands for the service to be made available to everyone in the UK by offering a Flash-based version of iPlayer.
But it's taken the Corporation 18 months to release a desktop version of iPlayer, which many will doubtless view as a bit of a poor show."
Andrew Bowden points us in the direction of the great new BBC FAQ pages which have now been launched. You can ask anything, with current questions ranging from "Why was One Foot in the Grave not shown on Thursday?" to "Where can I buy the Countryfile 2009 calendar?".
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The folks at BBC Backstage enjoyed much festive cheer this week with their Christmas parties in Manchester and London. They've posted some videos onto their blog. Our favourite is the clip below, in which our cameraman is saved from an awkward "So... you come here often?" moment by an army of invading Santas...
Backstage also announced the winner of its logo competition. Well done to Mark Griffin for coming up with this:
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On that note, it's time for the BBC Internet Blog to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year. For us, 2008 really has been the year of BBC iPlayer, HD and, randomly enough, plenty of Strictly Come Dancing. Who knows what will be the hot topics this time next year. Here's to 2009!
Dave Lee is co-editor, BBC Internet blog, BBC Online, BBC Future Media & Technology.
Records of most major historical events from the last century can be found in the BBC archives, even those that predate the BBC itself. The event will have been recorded in one form or another among the some million hours of film, video and audio, and millions of documents and photographs.
So when the opportunity arose to create a collection on one of these events, that is, the Cuban revolution and missile crisis, it was expected that there would be a wealth of archive on the subject, and this is true; there is. But when it comes to international events, we are confounded by copyright issues which place heavy limitations on what can be released.
As well as being time consuming to clear, copyright material often has a significant price tag too. Although the BBC holds archive of John F. Kennedy's 1962 speech on the Cuban missile crisis, which version is selected can make such a difference. Even in the 1960s many recordings of foreign events were feeds from agencies, over which BBC commentary was added. Some of the feeds originate from archives which are now owned by commercial companies, while others are in the public domain. In the case of the Kennedy speech, two minutes of footage acquired from a commercial source would have cost a significant sum while the shorter version, shot at a different angle from inside the President's office, was in the public domain and available to us for free. The shorter version does not include Kennedy's statement that Soviet missiles based on Cuba could strike most of the eastern United States and beyond within minutes, but it's a fascinating piece of footage nonetheless.
It doesn't stop there. Every photograph, presenter, voice over - almost every component of a programme - may have a cost. One excellent programme on the many attempts by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro, featured voices of actors who had been required to dub over interviews. Interviewees included former CIA agents, who contemplated Bond-esque assassination methods such as exploding cigars, and Castro's lover who almost poisoned him. However, some online broadcasting rights deals for this type of material are not yet in place. Consequently, we could not include this programme. Maybe in the future it can be added.
The rights to photographs that appear within a BBC programme also have to be cleared which again usually involves a cost. A 1971 BBC documentary, 'In Search of the Real Che Guevara' featured some 50 photographs and footage from external sources which also required payment. This documentary is an excellent account of Che's journey to becoming one of the world's most legendary revolutionaries, but due to the high costs we could not include it.
Furthermore this programme and some others considered for the 'Cuba and the Cold War' collection were co-produced or wholly produced by independent broadcasting companies. The BBC may not own the rights to these therefore, which prevents us reshowing them. It's a situation that will become more common in the future as the BBC increasingly commissions independent companies to make BBC programmes, or the BBC acquires complete programmes or series already made, where the BBC is often only granted a limited number of transmissions and/or a short licence period for online use.
To an extent, the rights costs also dictate the use of photographs to illustrate the programme information on the website. Wherever possible we try to use photographs from our own photographic archives, a rich source of the BBC's heritage that dates back to the 1920s. However, occasionally the archives don't have anything suitable; as was the case with early photos of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. In such incidences, we have to approach external photo agencies. Each photograph acquired from an external photo agency is selected to reflect the value of the BBC programme whilst keeping within our budget. Agency photos are also credited so as to distinguish them from the BBC's own photos.
All of these issues make it difficult to cover international news stories but not impossible.
With persistence and careful selection it's possible to retrieve and share these gems from the BBC's rich archive.
Emma Papworth is Assistant Content Producer.
If you use our service on a Sky box you may notice that every now and then you come across a large "Please Wait" screen.
We put one of these up every time a user selects some content that can't be loaded in a few seconds.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need them at all - we don't want you to have to wait ten seconds or so just to get to the News Multiscreen. However due to the way our service has to be structured, it's an unfortunate necessity.
The reason for that is all to do with bandwidth and positioning.
When we launched BBC iPlayer back in Dec 2007, it has been available for streaming on Window, Mac and Linux computers. But if you wanted to download our TV programmes, well, that was PC only. Obviously that wasn't a satisfactory arrangement, and making our downloads available on Mac and Linux has been a major priority for us.
Today, we're really pleased to announce that BBC iPlayer downloads are now available for Mac and Linux as well, thanks to our new Adobe AIR-powered download manager, which we've named BBC iPlayer Desktop.
(click images to enlarge)
To the best of my knowledge we're the first major content provider in the world to offer DRM downloads to PC, Mac and Linux platforms. Getting there has been quite a journey - here's the story...
Why do we need DRM?
In the past we've been criticised for using DRM. Surely a public service broadcaster has a duty to make its content available for free, forever, without rights restrictions, to all UK users. Unfortunately, much as we share those aspirations, the reality is that we have to use DRM, for two reasons:
1. As part of the Public Value Test undertaken by the BBC Trust, a decision was made by the Trust that the BBC could only make iPlayer content available for 7 days after broadcast, or, if you downloaded a programme, that you could keep it for up to 30 days, or 7 days after first playback. This was in response to industry concern that allowing people to keep programmes forever would lead to a reduction in sales of DVDs, etc. The ability to provide this 'timed availability' for downloaded programmes requires Digital Rights Management - i.e. DRM. So, for this reason alone, any download solution that we provide requires DRM.
2. Our rights holders require that we protect their content, at least one reason for which is to allow them to sell that content in other markets. For example, BBC Worldwide generates around one billion pounds in revenue annually, much of which is from sales of BBC programming in other territories, on DVD, etc. Some of that revenue flows back to the BBC public service, offsetting license fee requirements. Additionally, US movie studios often mandate use of particular DRM technologies as a condition for licensing their content. Accordingly, making our content available without any rights restrictions, freely downloadable worldwide, would affect the ability of those rights holders to monetise their content in other markets, hence an additional requirement for DRM.
Which DRM?
The BBC was widely criticised for choosing Microsoft DRM, which we chose for the initial iPlayer launch, and have been using since. Various conspiracy theories abounded, but the simple fact was that at the time Windows Media DRM was the only viable digital rights management solution around. It was sufficiently robust, accepted by rights holders, free (some DRM solutions have hefty license fees), fairly easy to use, and worked on 90% of computers.
Since then, we've embarked on a long and arduous journey to find the perfect DRM solution, one that would work on all computers, would be easy to install, would be supported by a reputable vendor, would be acceptable to rights holders, that wouldn't incur significant costs to us, and that could form the basis for a next-gen download manager platform that will in due course, well, keep reading...
We evaluated a large number of DRM solutions, including some open and open-source solutions. Some offered Mac support but not Linux, others required that we make our content available in their store rather than in our web site, other (sometimes open-source) solutions appeared attractive and low cost, but require extensive development to create a tamper-resistant player and would have incurred hefty MPEG licensing fees for playback of H.264 content.
Ultimately, we chose Adobe AIR and Adobe rights management (FMRMS) as our preferred solution for our next-gen BBC iPlayer Desktop application.
So, have we 'switched' to Adobe DRM? Not quite. We continue to use Windows Media DRM for downloads to Windows Media-compatible portable media players, we Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM for downloads to Nokia mobile phones, we use Adobe DRM for downloads to PC, Mac and Linux computers, and we may support other DRM technologies for playback on set top boxes and future IP-connected TV devices.
Although it would be nice to have to support just a single digital rights technology, the reality is that when you look across mobile, PC and TV platforms there's no 'one size fits all' solution, and so we end up supporting a range of content protection technologies.
Of course none of this is of interest to the user - you just want to watch your favourite programme with as little fuss as possible - and we think that our new BBC iPlayer Desktop has gotten us a huge step closer.
No more P2P
Another big change we made is that our new BBC iPlayer Desktop no longer uses P2P. Downloads now come directly from our servers, as direct HTTP downloads.
Why the move away from P2P?
Three reasons:
1. When the BBC chose P2P for downloads over two years ago, bandwidth was really expensive, and so P2P was seen as the only way of providing a download service at a sustainable distribution cost. But over the past year the cost of bandwidth has decreased by 90%, making direct HTTP downloads a viable alternative.
2. Some users told us that they didn't like P2P - it used their CPU, used their upload bandwidth, slowed their computer. Our new solution should not have those issues.
3. In the UK, some ISPs count both download and upload internet traffic in their usage calculations, which means that some users were hitting their monthly usage caps more quickly because of P2P upload traffic. Our new solution doesn't have that issue (of course if you download lots of stuff you may still hit you monthly ISP limits - but that applies not just to iPlayer content).
It should be noted that in the technology world nothing stays still for long, and by choosing to not use P2P today we're not making a statement that P2P is either good or bad - we're simply saying that the cost/benefit right now is in favour of direct HTTP downloads, perhaps in due course served from edge caching servers deep in ISP networks. However, in the future new requirements and new P2P technologies (e.g. P2P streaming) may lead to a re-evaluation of our preferred delivery options.
The timing
Months ago we promised that we'd have BBC iPlayer programmes available for download to Mac and Linux computers before the end of 2008, and we made it... just.
Getting a solution out that worked on Mac was the easy part... having a solution that worked on Linux as well was somewhat harder. It's no coincidence that BBC iPlayer was released on the same day that AIR 1.5 for Linux was released by Adobe, as this is the first AIR release that provides DRM support on Linux platforms.
Available today to Labs users
The version of BBC iPlayer that's out today is very much a beta product, with a number of known issues that we'll be working hard to fix right after the Christmas break.
For those users who have our existing Download Manager installed, we don't want to break something that's working really well, and so we've introducing our new BBC iPlayer Desktop in Labs first. That means that it's available to anyone who has signed up as a Labs user - to do so, simply head over to BBC iPlayer Labs.
We expect to move BBC iPlayer Desktop out of Labs and make it our mainstream download manager application in February.
Upcoming developments
Right now BBC iPlayer Desktop makes use of the same 800Kbps H.264 content that's used for our High Quality streaming option. We're working on improving that, to provide 1500Kbps H.264 content that should be close to television quality. So, starting around February, we expect to deliver substantially better quality for downloads (these 1500Kbps streams will also be offered for streaming, providing near TV quality in iPlayer).
After that, we plan to use our new Adobe AIR platform to provide a range of features that will, we think, produce a really seamless online/offline, browser/desktop experience. Key features that are coming up include:
- being able to download radio podcasts
- being able to pre-book download of your favourite programmes, including whole series
- getting a popup system tray alert when your favourite programmes become available
- on-demand an live radio streaming, on your desktop.
Basically, we're looking to use this new platform to bring BBC content much closer to your desktop... which is why we called it BBC iPlayer Desktop.
Anthony Rose is Head of Online Media Group, BBC Future Media and Technology.
So the big news today for children across Britain is that we're quietly rolling out their very own customised version of BBC iPlayer for CBBC shows - just in time for Christmas. CBBC fans can now watch their favourite programmes on-demand just like Mum or Dad.
But why this alternative look player just for CBBC?
Well, although the BBC iPlayer has been carrying children's shows since the beginning (with quite significant take up) we've intentionally been cautious about promoting the service directly to children during this first year of the service.
If you take a look at the main BBC iPlayer homepage which is designed to showcase the full range of BBC programme content, you can guess some of the potential pitfalls.
One of the downsides of must-have web 2.0 features, like "most popular", is that you can't always ensure what shows will rise to the surface. (One week it could be Dr Who but the next it's Little Britain).
Therefore, it's impossible to guarantee that the collective viewing preferences of the older BBC iPlayer fan base will always be suitable for the 6-12 year olds CBBC serves. But neither should we compromise the service for the vast number of adults who increasingly use BBC iPlayer to catch up on their favourite shows.
So instead we've focused on coming up with a bespoke version of the BBC iPlayer just for children.
(In fact, the BBC has been a trailblazer amongst the UK terrestrial broadcasters in developing digital methods for signalling when post-watershed TV shows appear online and parents are given the option to set a password protection accordingly. It's an approach that has now been adopted elsewhere and is well supported by the likes of Ofcom, ATVOD and the BSG).
But as Dr Byron reported in her review of children's online safety for the Prime Minister earlier this year, not all parents are completely au fait with what is now possible online and some are oblivious to the benefits of using these safety features.
Whilst it isn't our role at CBBC to intervene in those parental decisions, we do have a duty of care for any child who comes to our site - whether or not their parents are actively involved in what they're consuming.
And from the child's point of view, being encouraged to visit a site where a lot of the "must see" content is out of bounds must feel a bit like going to a digital sweetshop where all the prize candy is visible on the top shelf but just out of reach.
Our solution has been to take a more carrot than stick approach with the new player, with the added incentive that this version is tailored specifically with children in mind.
As of today, we can now direct the CBBC audience to a semi-ring fenced area of BBC iPlayer which shows all their favourite programmes in a specialised interface, without them inadvertently tripping over less suitable content.
We're not actively encouraging children to navigate from CBBC version to the main BBC iPlayer site itself (just as we avoid promoting BBC3 shows on the CBBC channel) but we do want them to enjoy the compelling CBBC content the BBC iPlayer has on offer in a space specifically designed for that age group - with all the best functionality and features the mother brand has to offer.
The "look and feel" is also designed specifically to speak directly to children and dissipate any desire to navigate off piste.
And the overriding response of our user testing with 6-12 year olds backs this up. More than anything, they want safe familiar environments where they can get more of what they like when they want it - without the distractions of grown-up content that they either don't like or is blocked to them.
By customising the designs around their specific needs (with navigation that is more visual than text driven, buttons that are more playful and with new cross-linking across CBBC to other areas like games etc) we hope that this semi-walled garden proposition feels 'optimised' to what kids want rather than a restricted sub-set.
For any new parents who discover this version of BBC iPlayer through their children, we've also added extra notes explaining how to get the most from those all-important Parental Guidance lock features.
Anyone who claims that they can police what children do online with absolute certainty is probably misguided, but we believe that through a combination of increased parental involvement, 'user-centred' solutions like this and good media literacy in schools, children will generally take the sensible option and gravitate to the sites that put their needs first.
As they grow-up, some children will inevitably test these boundaries and find clever ways to subvert the system. That's not a symptom of the technology itself but an age-old dilemma about how much we should intervene when children decide to push the limits of what's allowed.
That point tends to come later as children hit secondary school and, as parents, we tend to be more confident about how to deal with such matters in both the real and virtual worlds.
So the crucial thing for us today at CBBC, and one of the primary aims of the new player, is to make sure that when the younger users amongst our audience go online, they aren't confronted or inadvertently trip over content that isn't age-appropriate, when they're least expecting it and before they're genuinely ready.
Marc Goodchild is Head of Interactive and On Demand, BBC Childrens.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
Welcome to the BBC Internet Blog, a sister blog to the existing Editors' blogs for News and Sport.
A place where we, senior staff from BBC Future Media teams, will discuss issues raised by you about the technology behind bbc.co.uk, our mobile services and the BBC's presence on the internet.
Points of View hasn't stopped advertising the message board. At the end of each show and often in the body of the programme Jeremy Vine refers to the POV website and the messageboard. They have, however, stopped doing a feature called the 'message board moment' which looked a different messageboard threads. They tell me they found the messageboard comments were much stronger if they were used in the body of the programme. 
So much work goes into a 30 minute Panorama or a one hour special and the website struck me as the perfect platform to showcase the best of our journalism online. Britain's Terror Heartland is a prime example; blog posts from 
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