mobile (archive)
- Richard Titus
- 10 Dec 08, 3:31 PM
Hello all,
As you may have read in the press by now I've been promoted to a new role at the BBC; Future Media Controller, Audio & Music and Mobile.
My new remit includes a lot of the products and services I worked on extensively in my old role running User Experience. One of the most exciting projects I collaborated on with Matthew Postgate (former Controller of Mobile, now Controller Research & Innovation) was the BBC iPlayer on mobile. We launched the 1st version of this on the iPhone back in June; the second version was on the Nokia N96 which launched on 1 October.
We have just launched a new portal for BBC iPlayer on mobile which includes live TV and radio alongside our catch up services. This work was done with design agency Fjord collaborating with our internal design and technology teams. The portal is initially available on the Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 with the Sony Ericsson C905 by the end of next week. We will be extending the portal out to other compatible devices in the coming weeks.
Jon Billings, Head of Technology for Mobile for the BBC and a member of my new management team has written the blog below.
Richard Titus is Future Media Controller, Audio and Music & Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology
December Mobile BBC iPlayer update - our new browser service.
We have just released a new mobile BBC iPlayer website in Beta.
The existing iPhone site and Nokia application will continue and the new site will complement them by providing a platform to support a wider range of mobile phones. The URL is still going to be www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer and our system will figure out which device you are on and will redirect you accordingly.
The new site has a familiar look, but actually introduces a new navigation and a few new features. It is organised in three main tabs - 'Catchup', 'TV' and 'Radio'. Catchup is where all the on demand content from the last 7 days can be found with sections for: featured, most popular, by genre and by channel; which is similar to the existing offering. The TV and Radio tabs offer access to 'Live' BBC TV & Radio, with a simple 'now and next' view of all channels.
Initially the new site will only support a couple of additional handsets - the Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 but this will continue to grow with the Sony Ericsson C905 due next week and more in the coming months (stay tuned for details). The Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 are Windows Mobile based - but this is a coincidence!
These phones have been selected as they hit our requirements of Wi-Fi and 3G support with great browsing and media playback experience (i.e. the video and audio look and sound good), and its also great to broaden our platform support out to Windows Mobile smartphones as well as our first feature phone offering on the C905.
The new site is built on the BBC's new PHP based dynamic web publishing platform.
This gives us more flexibility with respect to customising content to specific devices and so should allow us to reach a broader range of phone platforms than we can with the system we use for the iPhone & Nokia N96 offerings.
Here are some more technical details.
The new site uses the existing simulcast audio and video encodings from the Live TV & Radio site launched in October, and will use the existing TV on-demand encodings produced for the Nokia N96 widget. This brings me to a temporary deficiency in the new offering - the existing radio on-demand encodings aren't compatible with the devices we're supporting in the new site. We're working on producing new Radio on-demand encodings and we'll be adding them in just as soon as we can.
This month we have also added a parental guidance and protection facility which works by setting a PIN code. This feature builds on the content labelling/tick box for over sixteen's capabilities which were already in place.
Lastly, a brief update on the Nokia application - we're adding support immediately for the Nokia N85 and we're looking at one or two more future Nokia devices too. Feature wise, it'll be largely as for the existing N96 offering, with a few minor additions. Of course we won't just be restricting ourselves to just one manufacturer's devices; we are very keen to roll out further BBC iPlayer applications and widgets with other partners and we will continue to keep you informed on our progress.
It's been a busy month already and we are only half way through!
Jon Billings is Head of Technology, Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology.
- John O'Donovan
- 4 Nov 08, 12:34 PM
We are working hard to ensure the US Election will be as hard to avoid as a dull and rainy New Year's Eve, so you may as well join us and watch it. Even better, stay up all night and go crazy with cookies and hot chocolate in your own election party, but make sure you research some US Presidential Trivia to annoy your friends and family.
The web site on election night should feel more dynamic than it has ever done before, thanks to a host of Flash, AJAX and JSON features updating results, tickers and maps in real time. You can see an example of how the homepage will look on the night below. It has all been put together by an extensive team too numerous to list here, but you know who you are.
Over on the Editors Blog, Steve Herrmann has outlined some of the features we will have running for the US election. In particular you may be wondering how the new "single" results system works and how the BBC calls the results as it gets them.
Firstly, all the BBC Election results are driven off the Election Production System (EPS, right) being operated in Washington by the staff on the BBC Washington Results Desk along with the Interactive team running the EPS and other systems in Washington and the UK. This is the first time a single coordinated system has driven all outputs TV, Internet, Radio, etc... and it ensures that all outputs get the same information form the same source.
I've worked in the studio on election nights and the combination of adrenaline, coffee, fear of results or graphics not working and sheer exhaustion after 12 hours in a studio overnight mean it's one of the most satisfying and stressful experiences you can go through. In particular I remember being terrorised by a Floor Manager with an angry outlook on life as I kept trying to get in front of the cameras "by mistake". Anyway back to this century.
First I would recommend a review of how the BBC views elections US style. It's pretty straightforward, but there are a few surprises about how the US Electoral College works and especially how the BBC results are validated because some of the early results you will see are predictions rather than results.
OK - so you've read the background info and frankly now you know as much as me about how elections work in the US.
As results are gathered by the BBC from Associated Press and other sources, the Results Desk will use the EPS input client to view the data and make a call about the result for any state. This client is more complicated than ones we have used before and allows viewing, editing and declaring of results. The Results Desk can also use the client to send messages and prepare for results coming in, sharing their insider information with journalists across the BBC. This service (called Newswire) is a crucial part of the intelligence and reporting on the night. Everyone working on the output will be monitoring it.
What does the results desk look like? It's a forest of screens with some human beings scattered between them looking busy and stressed. A bit like a bunch of frenzied stockbrokers (below).
Take particular note of the screen in the middle with the horizontal stripes on. This is the Presenter and Producer Dashboard and is one of the elements at the heart of our coverage. As results are entered and information is shared by the Results Desk, the producers and presenters around the BBC will watch this screen to receive this information.
Once the results desk decide to publish results, then a number of things happen. The TV output generates a graphic with the results or predictions published. The results on the web update, including the maps and tickers across the site showing latest results and information. Data and calculations are made so that the TV high end graphics can analyse the results - when you see David Dimbleby and Jeremy Vine playing with their graphics, the data has all come through the EPS.
Gareth Owen who developed the Results system and is running it on the night:
This is the first time the BBC has come together to manage election results output centrally, with state-by-state winners declared directly into our system's desktop client by the team in Washington, live raw vote figures coming into our system from the AP in New York, and fast, bespoke output produced for every single BBC outlet via our systems in London"
And when we say every platform we really mean it, including TV, Radio, the web, Mobile services, Interactive TV and even Ceefax (right). World Service sites in different languages and Arabic TV are also all working off the same results. The typo has never had so much potential for speedy multi-platform evil.
On the night we are hoping to cater for engagement at many levels. From simple scoreboards and tickers on the Homepage and across the BBC News site, through to detailed analysis on interactive services and TV / Radio.
An interesting development is further enhancing our live multi-stream player which was used for the Olympics. Through this, you will be able to engage with a BBC "Stream Of Consciousness" as events unfold. Multiple AV streams, results data, journalistic comment and anything else of interest will be squeezed into a vibrant page updating dynamically. You can send us comments and tell us your predictions through this as well.
The live experience around AV is something we are exploring more and more, and I hope the combination of outputs will give you all the access you desire to information about this important event.
See you on the other side...
John O'Donovan is Chief Technical Architect, FM&T Journalism.
- James Simcock
- 27 Oct 08, 5:30 PM
The Electric Proms is an event that focuses on doing things differently. This year, we did something new to innovate for mobile.
Rather than sticking with our usual, one-size-fits-all model for mobile browser pages, we implemented a level of device detection to serve different versions of the site optimised for specific devices.
We'd like to have been able to do this for all devices, but there are so many of them, with vast differences in terms of what they can support technically. So we did some analysis of the handsets which most often visit our mobile pages for radio and music to find which devices we should focus our efforts on.
What we discovered was quite surprising.
High-end phones such as the iPhone and Nokia NSeries made up almost half of all our mobile web traffic (quite different to what we see when looking at top pan-BBC devices).
The iPhone and Nokia NSeries are capable of supporting some enhanced services within the browser and have screens large enough to render some nice graphics too - not to mention the BBC iPlayer service which is available on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Breaking out of our usual templates for these devices gave us the opportunity to find new ways to make a mobile site easy to use, and to take steps to reduce end-user costs when paying per MB for data access. To this end we implemented some javascript elements which allow the user to pull information into a page template, without having to reload the surrounding graphical elements.
We were also able to incorporate information pulled dynamically from our programmes database. This shows "next up" schedule information (for TV, radio and red button), automatically updated throughout the event. Most importantly, we've been analysing usage from these pages and dynamic elements in detail to inform our future plans for mobile.
The designers (Sacha Sedriks and Stephen Robertson) and the developer (Daniel Moll) who produced these pages have never worked specifically on mobile before, but they've done a tremendous job. The work they've done, with support from some the BBC's mobile veterans from the FM&T Mobile Group, will benefit all our future work for mobile platforms. While I'm naming those that have contributed, a special mention to Mobile Producer Jo Bellingham who put together the standard pages for other devices and has been updating JSON feeds, SSSIs, image galleries and more throughout the event.
To see what we've created, point your mobile browser to http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/eproms and if you're using an iPhone, iPod Touch, NSeries or ESeries Nokia, you'll see the site optimised for your device.
James Simcock is Executive Producer, Mobile, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.
- Matthew Postgate
- 13 Oct 08, 1:10 PM
Mobile BBC iPlayer has been around in various forms since March on the iPhone and iPod touch.
It's proved very popular, yet we've always been aware that by only offering streaming, it misses out on one of the key use cases of mobile and portable devices - offline playback of programmes on planes, trains etc.
The Nokia N96 is the first device we've come across that really ticks all the boxes in terms of having all the features and capabilities we need to offer this: it's got a powerful browser, 3G and WLAN support and, crucially, it supports the OMA DRM 2 specification.
The BBC only has rights to make TV programmes available in iPlayer for a limited number of days after the original broadcast - so, when we provide downloadable programmes, we have to use DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology which ensures that the programme is only available to users on the phone for the allowed number of days.
OMA DRM 2 is such a DRM solution. It was designed a few years ago by the Open Mobile Alliance (the main mobile industry group that creates such things) and has been emerging in phones for the last year or so, now including the Nokia N96.
Until now, it's largely only the mobile operators that have been using it, but in order to provide the download experience we want to offer, we've decided to license the technology and build the server systems necessary to package and distribute our programmes in the OMA DRM 2 format.
As well as enabling us to provide downloadable programmes to the N96, the OMA DRM 2 system is available on a growing number of handsets, and so we expect our investment here to help enable us to provide mobile BBC iPlayer on a range of mobiles.
In order to build the necessary DRM servers, the BBC has taken licenses from three companies: CoreMedia, who provided us with a software development kit which allowed us to build the system in a few short weeks; Intertrust, which is a leading inventor and patent owner of technology in the OMA DRM 2 specification and CMLA (Content Management License Administrator), which is the leading Certificate Authority (CA) and "Root Of Trust" for the OMA DRM 2 system. I think this last one warrants a little more explanation.
On a technical level, the OMA DRM 2 system uses a certificate system similar to that used in SSL and other secure communication systems to identify the various parties involved in the download of DRM content to a phone (device model, device manufacturer, content distributor, CA etc).
The certificates provided by CMLA are preinstalled on the phones and integrated with our server system, and this allows each party to identify each other and confirm that the certificate is genuine and issued by CMLA - and, crucially, the server and phone are able to check the other party's certificates status with CMLA to determine whether the certificate is still trusted. This is the essence of "trust" in a DRM system.
The content creators and owners "trust" CMLA to manage the certificate status of devices and service providers like us so that, should a device implementation become compromised, or a service provider go "bad", they can be taken out of the system easily and without any explicit action by any other party (e.g. the BBC).
There is a lot more subtlety, complexity and technical detail underneath the surface in this topic. Interested readers will find more detail on the internet.
Matthew Postgate is Controller, BBC Mobile.
- Matthew Postgate
- 10 Oct 08, 4:20 PM
Since we launched BBC iPlayer on the N96, I've seen a number of blog posts describing how the widget can be used on other Symbian series 60 devices (like the N95). At the moment, using the widget on devices other than the N96 is not supported - something we have been very clear about.
I can reassure andibeeb that this is not because the BBC has any kind of deal with Nokia to promote some types of phones over others. It is because we have not yet got the user experience on other devices to a point we are happy with.
While the mobile version of bbc.co.uk is a service that works across the broadest possible range of devices (even down to WML 1.0 browsers), Mobile BBC iPlayer is designed to be a much richer proposition. We have had to work very hard to get the level of user experience we are happy with and at the moment we have only been able to create that level of experience on the Nokia N96 and the Apple iPhone. The N96 improves on previous S60 devices in a number of ways like screen size and memory capacity, but one of the most important upgrades is with the way it integrates the browser and media player applications.
Photo of N96 advertising hoading courtsey of Jason DaPonte
Previous handsets do not automatically carry the browser's current network connection settings over to the phone's media player. As a result, you could select Wi-Fi on the browser, but without knowing it end up watching streams over 3G connections. This could lead to you getting bigger bills than you were expecting.
Looking at how we could support legacy devices is one of the things that the team is working on at the moment and was something we have been looking at for a while but we have not cracked it yet. As I said in my original post, we want to introduce support for other devices as soon as we can and I will post more when we have some news.
Mathew Postgate is Controller, Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology
- Anthony Rose
- 8 Oct 08, 2:45 PM
As part of our ongoing mission to make BBC iPlayer available on more devices, I'm pleased to announce that BBC iPlayer TV programmes can now be downloaded to portable media players that are able to support Windows Media-protected content.
Of course, BBC radio downloads and podcasts have been portable to different devices for sometime - just point your device to bbc.co.uk/podcasts and you'll get a version for iPod/iPhone, for Sony PSP and for some Nokia phones. But this is the first time that you can play BBC iPlayer TV programmes on a range of portable media devices.
Supported devices
So far, we've tested BBC iPlayer on:
• Sony Walkman E and S series
• Archos 605 WIFI and Internet Media Tablet
• Philips GoGear 52xx series
• Samsung YP-P2 and YP-Q1
• Nokia N96
See full list of devices on which iPlayer is available.
The new Walkman is tiny - which could be useful if you watch programmes on public transport, while the larger GoGear has a big, bright display.
These devices do not have internet connectivity, so we're talking about a download rather than a streaming experience. What both these devices have in common is that they support Windows Media Protected playback - that is, they support Windows DRM for portable devices, which allows us to make our programmes available for download on them.
These devices are not the only devices that support Windows Media Protected playback - others do as well, but we've tested BBC iPlayer on these devices and are happy with the user experience.
As an aside, working out whether a device supports Windows Media Protected playback may require some research on the part of the consumer. There's a bewildering number of similar-looking devices with different capabilities available in shops, and it can be hard to tell which formats are supported by any given portable media player. The packaging usually has some vague wording like "Plays your music and video downloads, including MP3 and WMV", but often doesn't specify whether the device supports Windows DRM, which is required for playing back BBC iPlayer programmes.
If you're buying a portable media player and would like a model that allows you to play BBC iPlayer programmes on it, we have made a web page, Where To Get BBC iPlayer, where you can get a list of the model numbers of tested BBC iPlayer-compatible devices. Those on this list have been tested by the BBC iPlayer team. BBC iPlayer may work on devices which are not on the list - if the device packaging mentions "PlaysForSure", that's a good sign. We'll update the list as we test more devices.
If you're a device manufacturer and you don't see your device listed, please contact us - we'll then test your device and if compatible, add it to the list.
Downloading programmes to your portable media player
Downloading BBC iPlayer programmes to your portable media player is easy: simply go to bbc.co.uk/iplayer on your PC, find your programme, and select the Download for Media Players option.
Save the downloaded programme to your desktop (or any other suitable location), plug your media player into your PC, and drag the programme to your media player. Easy.
This process is known as "sideloading" - you download the content to your computer, then sideload it to a device plugged into a USB port.
We've worked hard to make the process as easy as possible - there's no software to install; you just download the file and copy it to your media player. It should be no more difficult than copying photos from your digital camera to your computer. You can also use Windows Media Player to automatically sync downloaded files to your media player for you.
Currently, sideloading is available for Window Media DRM-compatible devices only, which also means that you'll need to do the download from a Windows PC. For our Mac and Linux users, don't despair: we have another release coming up very soon, aimed at improving your BBC iPlayer options - stay tuned for updates...
Technical details
For those interested in the technical details, we now encode all BBC iPlayer programmes in an additional file format (320x180 pixels 500Kbps video, 128Kbps 48KHz sampling audio, WMV file format) suitable for this class of portable media players.
Continue reading "BBC iPlayer goes portable"
- Mark Friend
- 26 Sep 08, 6:42 PM
Thanks for all your questions and comments on my earlier post about audio-on-demand for the iPhone.
Rather than answer them all independently, here are answers to some common questions:
Is audio-on-demand only available on the iPhone?
iPlayer video and audio-on-demand will also be available on the Nokia N96, which Nokia is due to release on October 1st (see Matthew Postgate's previous post). We initially launched this service on the iPhone as it's a very popular device amongst our audio and music audiences, but the BBC's new media teams are working hard to bring audio-on-demand to other mobile devices in the very near future.
Can I stream live BBC radio on the iPhone?
The iPhone is currently only available on the O2 network in the UK and continuous streaming of audio and video content is not permitted under the terms of O2's flat-rate packages. We're currently working on supporting live streaming when you're connected via wifi.
Can I stream live BBC radio on other mobile devices?
I would love to make iPlayer available on all mobile devices but as the media support and browser functionalities vary so widely, this may take some time. Where we can be certain that a wifi connection is being used, and that this connection is also used by the device's media player software, then it's already possible to access live streams. For more details see here.
Unfortunately, many mobile devices swap to 3G or GPRS connections without informing their users - which can be very expensive. The BBC is in discussions with network operators on this issue and hopes that consumer demand will help to drive this change.
Why doesn't BBC radio podcast all their programmes?
The BBC negotiates rights with collective bodies and artists' representatives to make streamed material available for up to seven days after broadcast. Where rights allow, we also make BBC programmes available to download as podcasts. We currently make over 170 titles available as podcasts and this number will continue to grow. The limits we place on this growth are largely down to cost.
Why have on-demand mobile services been prioritised before improving on-line audio quality?
Improving the audio quality of live internet radio streams remains a key priority. This is a much larger piece of work and will take a little longer to complete. There'll be a post later tonight on the Radio Labs blog detailing progress towards this.
Why do some programmes appear as 'currently unavailable'?
The audio-on-demand facility for iPhone, giving people the chance to listen to programmes from "the past seven days", only launched on Monday. So, the complete list of programmes is being built up over this week. All listed BBC radio shows should be available by Monday September 29th.
Once again, please feel free to leave me your comments about how this service affects how you listen to BBC radio.
Mark Friend is Controller, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.
- Mark Friend
- 23 Sep 08, 12:50 PM
One of the secrets of radio's success has been the ability to listen to it while you're on the move.
Half a century ago, the transistor radio helped to start a revolution in the way people consume media and it's estimated that there are several billion of them being used around the world.
So it's not surprising that lots of people have been asking when they'll be able to listen to the BBC's digital radio services on mp3 players and mobiles.
From today, you'll be able to listen to BBC radio programmes on demand on an iPhone or iPod Touch for up to seven days after broadcast.
You'll need to be online via a wifi connection and will be able to listen to our radio shows in mp3 format (at 128kbps).
This launch is thanks to the hard work of the BBC's future media teams who have had to adapt audio (and image) formats to suit the iPhone and iPod Touch, change the way audio files are delivered and redesign the service to include the wealth of new content available.
On October 1st, the BBC iPlayer goes live on the Nokia N96 (see Matthew Postgate's post below). We anticipate rolling out audio on demand to other portable devices soon.
Will this change where and when you listen to radio? Do let me know by leaving a comment.
Image by John Ousby of Regency TR-1 transistor radios from 1954 and iPod Minis from 2005 as featured in this BBC News Magazine article - neither piece of kit has wifi connectivity
Mark Friend is Controller, Multiplatform & Interactive, Audio & Music Interactive.
- John Ousby
- 17 Sep 08, 12:20 PM
Editors' note: This is a post based on an article in this week's edition of Ariel, the BBC's in-house weekly magazine, by Audio & Music Interactive's Head Of Distribution Technology John Ousby. It includes John's images from the International Broadcasting Convention, as blogged at pressred.org.
Dr Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder of MPEG, was unfortunately upstaged at his own keynote address at IBC in Amsterdam last Friday.
Google and YouTube are parasites. It's all about content; the rest is just railway lines.
This was the message given by ITV boss Michael Grade in his recorded interview included in the session. A few people in the audience started clapping until they realised they were outnumbered by the growing army of raised eyebrows.
Were we in a conference from the late '90s? Or did this have anything to do with the fact that ITV is due to be relegated from the FTSE 100 later this month?
The idea that content can be easily separated from technology and distribution is plain wrong. One has been informing the other since the start of broadcasting, through the production technology available at the time or the way audiences find, share, discuss and consume it.
The biggest mistakes I have seen in the broadcast world are when interactivity is slapped on once the paint is dry in the production process or when a technology application is created without consideration of the audience it is intended for.
DAB slideshow showing some of the output from the olympics twitter feed from 5live
You can't spend much time at IBC without hearing about convergence and the ever-redrawn battle lines between content owners, broadcasters, internet service providers and telcos.
One of the debates at this year's event was around mobile TV [mp3], which on the broadcast side hasn't had the most prestigious start after several years of hype, trials and struggling commercial services.
Mobile operators have struggled with small volumes of low quality video clips in walled gardens that are expensive to consume and unreliable in reception. With mobile services, context is everything - not just the web (or telly) bundled across to a smaller screen, but content which takes account of where and how it is consumed, and by whom.
You could draw the conclusion that video on the move just isn't as important as was thought. I believe it's just a question of when.
We are in a transitionary phase where we are just starting to see the possibilities for mobile video once it's made easy to consume and the pricing structure is relatively understood, as with the iPhone.
Let's just start to think about mobile video and audio, of which TV is a subset rather than a starting point - both broadcast- and internet-delivered video have a part to play in the future of mobile TV.
p2p-next looks like anything else on display at IBC until you understand what it's doing. Live p2p video streaming based on the tribler infrastructure - a potential solution to iPlayer success... Great project involving BBC's George Wright, Pioneer and the EBU among others. Of course, not just video can use this. Nice work.
Walking the halls at IBC proffered the usual mix of landmark moments, promising new technology and the next biggest, brightest display screens, some of which can be seen in this IBC set on Flickr.
It made me proud to see that the BBC were involved in a lot of the best of show - DVB-T2 (next generation digital terrestrial TV delivery), Super High Vision (HD on steroids) and p2p-next (live peer to peer streaming), to name a few.
Let's just hope that next year can see a keynote fit for 2009 not 1999.
DVB-T2 - rotated constellations (256 QAM): BBC has been leading the work of the DVB group in its next generation DVB-T work. DVB-T2 gives about 50% extra capacity than DVB-T and will be essential for Freeview HDTV services - currently planned for the end of 2009. More detail here:
dvb-t2
John Ousby is head of distribution technologies, Audio & Music Interactive.
- Matthew Postgate
- 8 Sep 08, 10:45 AM
We're taking the next step in bringing BBC iPlayer to mobile audiences, or as The Times puts it:
Lying in bed watching the latest episode of Strictly Come Dancing on a mobile phone will become possible from next month after a tie-up between the BBC and Nokia.
All BBC programmes transmitted in the past seven days will be available to download to the new Nokia N96 multimedia handset, in a first for the broadcaster and phone maker.
N.B. BBC News also has the story here (ed)
Mobile can be a complex environment and there is a great deal of fragmentation to contend with.
I have always wanted to take BBC iPlayer to mobile but we have been waiting for devices to arrive which mean we can create the kind of experience that audiences have come to expect from the service.
The iPhone and iPod Touch gave us something to work with and we launched a beta for those devices earlier in the year. Some aspects of the experience were fantastic but there were still compromises. The Nokia N96 was always gong to be a contender, as we knew it would be optimised for video and audio. The success of the N95 also meant there was a good chance of it becoming a mainstream device.
Nokia were keen to work with us on the project and together we looked into what it would take to launch something. It proved to be the first platform where we could fully realise the ambition that we had for mobile iPlayer. Naturally, we will want to introduce other devices as they become available - and we're already working on the next group.
It will be interesting to see how people use BBC iPlayer on mobile rather than over a set-top box or a computer. I think that the ratio of download to streams might be more, even compared to the PC; I also think that BBC radio programmes will perform well. No doubt there will be some surprises that we will be able to feed into the next version.
As ever, any launch is only the beginning of the journey and now we have the core functions of iPlayer available we will begin to see what the mobile version can do uniquely well. Social features seem an obvious choice but there is a possibility for something around location. Ultimately, we want the mobile version to make a contribution to a BBC iPlayer that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Matthew Postgate is Controller, Mobile, BBC Future Media & Technology.
- Jason DaPonte
- 25 Jul 08, 4:06 PM
Whether you've got a sparkly new 3G iPhone or not, more and more of people are watching video on their mobiles. Here's some of the work the BBC Mobile team has been doing to try to bring more of the BBC's video to you.
Between January and May 2008 our video (and audio) downloads have almost doubled and the length of time people are spending consuming audio visual content has nearly quadrupled. We're not sure exactly why the change has happened so suddenly, but I reckon it has to do with more devices being wifi-enabled and/or having larger screens.
We're in the middle of a summer full of sports video that you can watch on the go. And we're experimenting with how mobiles can be used to capture media and tell stories in new ways.
One of the more original video projects we're working on is the Liverpool Tall Ships Race.
Our team worked with BBC Liverpool on this year's Tall Ships race to capture the first-hand experiences of five crew members - with videos taken on their mobiles and viewable on yours.
We selected a range of crew members on different ships that would give us a good spread of stories and shots from this dramatic event, especially since using the mobiles would allow us to tell the stories of the journeys as they unfolded instead of having to wait for traditional cameras to come back to shore.
Lovely picture "Tall Ships at Liverpool" courtesy of John Kennan on Flickr. There's also a Tall Ships Races 2008 Flickr group
We then kitted them out with Nokia N95s (with fingers crossed that none of them would go overboard!).
Some News Online reporters used them to report from this year's Game Developers Conference, but this was the first time that we've put them in the hands of the subjects of a story to understand it from their perspective.
We offered them some light directorial and filming advice, but the decisions were theirs and we didn't edit the clips (some were stiched together for the web to make pieces that were longer than would be digestable on mobile).
We used ShoZu, commerically available media upload software, to make sure that it was easy to send videos back from sea and hope dthat the ships would be within range of a decent 3G signal to transmit the videos back over. ShoZu worked well for us, but our team had to do a lot of re-encoding of MPEG-4 to AVI to MPEG-1 before we could put it onto our mobile video portal. The option to record in 3GP was also available but we weren't happy with the picture quality that the N95s gave using this standard. If anyone knows of a media loader that will let us go direct from phone to MPEG-1 (and give us good picture quality), let us know, as we're looking for one.
We're still waiting for the final videos to come in - one camera is still at sea and will complete the trip to Norway before the phone comes back to BBC Mobile HQ - so I hope you'll take some time to watch them and let us know what you think of our experiment (positive or negative). The feedback will help us to figure out whether to do more like this in the future - and ways of doing it better.
Other video highlights this summer included UEFA Euro 2008, which featured more video than we've ever provided for a major sporting event and the Olympics On Mobile will have even more. If you sign up for Olympic Mobile alerts, they will warn you shortly before the biggest events are on in Beijing so that you can tune in and watch on your mobile and never miss a thing - even if you're at work. (Or you could be boring and tune in on telly - but I would say that, being the mobile editor, wouldn't I?).
To promote the Olympics, we've got exclusive videos and wallpapers of Monkey created by the men behind Gorillaz - Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett.
If you're not sure of how to access BBC Mobile, Kate Silverton will be happy to give you a lesson.
Jason DaPonte is Managing Editor, Mobile Platforms, BBC Future Media & Technology.
- Matthew Postgate
- 10 Apr 08, 2:05 PM
So, as many of you will be aware, we supported the Over The Air festival on Friday and Saturday. It was a great event and I'm really pleased that we were able to be involved.
For the BBC, supporting this type of event is really important to what we are trying to achieve on mobile. We wanted to help to create an environment where developers and designers who are passionate about mobile could exchange ideas. I think that - as grassroots development is beginning to scale and as the ideas it generates emerge - we will see some of the fragmentation that has dogged mobile for so long also begin to disappear. One of the most encouraging aspects for me was the tangible sense that mobile is happening right now, in front of us.
I gave a presentation at the beginning of the event which covered the "where we've been, where we are and where we are going" with mobile at the BBC. One of the themes I spoke about is the evolution of our mobile browser site. I think that our mobile site is great but I also think that it's in the process of fundamentally changing.
Increasingly, we need to understand how it relates to the fixed line version of bbc.co.uk. Bringing the web together is one of the real challenges that "mobile" becoming mainstream presents all of us, whether you maintain mobile versions of your website or not.
Audiences who are increasingly accessing the web on portable devices naturally have expectations that services will work and relate to the experiences they have become used to on their computers. The developers that were at OTA and the ideas they are coming up with are also increasingly creating an expectation that the mobile web will offer even more: an experience that plays to the strength of the medium, of an integration with other platforms that is more sophisticated than just straight repurposing.
The talks and the prototypes that were developed over the two days hinted at the opportunities being created. It was all stimulating but three of the category winners in particular pointed towards this future.
Continue reading "Over The Air: Mobile Going Mainstream"
- Ashley Highfield
- 7 Apr 08, 1:56 PM
The launch of BBC iPlayer onto the iPhone, and the relaunch of our mobile services more generally, raises some critical questions that remain unanswered, such as:
"do people want to consume a lot of information on a 3"x2" screen?".
If TV is to become mobile, or people are to stop buying the morning newspaper (or paperbacks) to read on the train and use the wireless internet instead, then must we believe that the next generation of mobile phones/MP3 players will become a usable device for consuming half an hour plus of media? The jury is out on this one.
It may be an issue less of technology and more of biology: is the screen of an easily pocketable device too small to comfortably stare at for an hour-long commute? The larger-screened laptop, with its high cost, low battery life, steal/breakability, and screen glare is probably not the mass market solution either. Is there a market for a large screen, cheap, reliable, non-eye-straining device?
Elonex thinks so, and is the latest manufacturer to enter the market with their £99 wifi-connected laptop. (Their secret to low-price success? They're betting on open source software: the machine runs Linux). Amazon also thinks there is a market between iTouch and a full-blown laptop, with the book-reader Kindle apparently being the first step towards a more functionally rich (e.g. open internet access) device. And Sony too is soon to be relaunching its eBook (early incarnations of e-books have signally failed to inspire the blogosphere, for example this from Cory Doctorow).
Making the right call here, and correctly forecasting demand for mobile-IP rich media, may well be the difference between success and failure for UK media companies, especially the print industry. (And just to illustrate how complex this market is, in Japan, downloads of books to standard mobile screens has actually been quite a success, as has TV to mobile in Korea.)
Recently, Guardian MD Tim Brooks kindly came along to BBC Future Media & Technology (FM&T) Towers over here to talk to our senior management group about the challenges we all face in the media industry. He stated that as long as we stuck to our guns - providing original, distinctive, quality (and in our case impartial) news, education and entertainment - we would survive the audience shifts away from newspapers and TV to the internet.
Newspaper circulation has been falling for years (and with it, advertising revenues), but the decline appears to be levelling out. Clearly, the advantages of the print newspaper when on the move, (whether in the house or on the train) are key. The advantages of the newspaper over trying to obtain the same information over your Nokia N95 are obvious. Could the Elonex/Open-Kindle change this?
We have seen the false dawn of mass media consumption on mobile devices a number of times. Last year, I made a speech where I forsaw that all the factors that would enable mobile to start being a viable data provider were starting to come into alignment. More recently, our News FM&T head Nic Newman has echoed these sentiments.
Vodaphone CEO Arun Sarin declared recently: "If we have to look at the whole chain of things that have to be right before mobile internet takes off, I feel we are there".
And Vodafone should know what it's talking about, sitting on £2bn of annual data revenues. Yet this growth is not for the most part coming from mobile phones. Data is still a tiny part of the volume going over the mobile phones, if you exclude SMS. What's driving mobile data is laptop computers with high-speed data cards (HSPA) being used predominantly for work emails. 3UK data "dongles" for laptops have been flying off the shelves faster than iPhones.
But if the tide is starting to turn to mobile-IP, what devices will win? Mobile phone, e-readers, £100 Linux laptops, or full blown notebooks?
For the BBC, already the number one provider of content to mobile devices in the UK, what is our role in helping to drive the market for those devices that are open, inexpensive, and can help provide a quality experience and start a new relationship with audiences who may not consume that much of our output through traditional means?
As the founders of the BBC Micro gathered two weeks ago to mark the immensely positive impact this machine had on kickstarting the home computer revolution 26 years ago, I wonder whether there is a similar role we could play now?
Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology.
- Ian Forrester
- 7 Apr 08, 11:27 AM
This is an ten year old in a lightsaber fight with two adults live on stage at the Over The Air mobile development event [as mentioned previously]. All of them are armed with nothing more than Nokia N95s which are working like Wii controllers.
There's more and a roundup of the feedback in the latest post on the BBC Backstage blog.
Ian Forrester is Senior Producer, FM&T bbc.co.uk Projects. Photo by Christian Scholz.
- Ashley Highfield
- 18 Mar 08, 12:17 PM
Easy For Legitimate Users, Hard For Hackers
Sorry to be posting this a few days after all the fun, but I've been on paternity leave and yesterday was my first full day back in the office.
So, the BBC iPlayer service on the iPhone got hacked. A way was found to take the iPhone streams and turn them into download files to your desktop. This was obviously not our intention.
We want to get iPlayer onto as many devices and platforms as we can (and as many as makes economic sense, given that we have fixed funding).
The launch on the iPhone/iPod touch platform has increased traffic to iPlayer by 10% (7% from general increased awareness and 3% specifically accessing iPlayer from their iPhone/touch). The team led by Anthony Rose has done a fantastic job: the iPhone implementation of iPlayer looks great, and neither Anthony, nor his boss Erik Huggers, nor I, have any intention of taking down the service.
We know that with each new platform comes more complexity and issues. We know that some platforms are going to be easier to break than others.
But we know that by offering a legitimate service to as many users as possible, most people, most of the time, will respect that rights holders want the BBC to only let their content be available for free at the time of transmission, and now with iPlayer, for a week post-transmission, and that therefore most users will use the legitimate iPlayer product in a legitimate manner.
In fact, more than most: the vast majority. Something like just one twentieth of one percent have accessed a BBC iPlayer programme via a hack.
Clearly, anything more than zero is not ideal, but we live in the real world, and at this level the hack does not undermine the trust we've built with our contributors, rights holders, and on-screen talent, particularly as it does not appear to be a malicious or commercially motivated attack.
As some commentators have pointed out, the reason the volume of iPlayer hacks is this low is probably because if you want to keep a permanent copy of a BBC programme for your personal use, there are easier ways to do it than hacking the iPhone implementation (which we've made considerably harder, if not impossible). You can simply tape/PVR your desired programme from air. If you really want to illegally distribute BBC programmes, then this is possible too. PVR BBC programmes off-air, and then upload the files to a file-sharing site. Most people don't want to break the law. And we do have legal redress, but have needed to use it, or even to threaten to use it, extremely rarely.
We'll try and ensure that it's easy for legitimate users and hard for hackers, and I think the team here is doing a great job at both - but no service (whether the beta of iPlayer last summer or the beta on the iPhone a couple of weeks ago) will necessarily work perfectly out of the box.
I hope that the vastly improved dialogue we now have with the various interested communities out there (developers, Linux users, etc., via this blog among other channels) will enable us to build the services that everyone wants, and that the vast majority of people can get to enjoy BBC programmes on demand... which is the point of all this.
Ashley Highfield is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology. Main image by Benjamin Watt.
- Simon Cross
- 17 Mar 08, 10:27 AM
I'm starting to sound like a stuck record. All my posts seem to be about podcasting; specifically, making our podcasts available on other platforms. Annoyingly, this post is no different, but I think it's still worth mentioning some more cool work we've done to optimise our mini audio on-demand service for new mobile devices.
First, we did the iPhone, which was swish, and very zeitgeisty. But we always said we'd be doing the same for other devices, so here's our first simple-but-elegant iteration of this.
Read more and comment at the Radio Labs blog.
Simon Cross is Senior Client Side Developer, Audio & Music.
- Ian Forrester
- 12 Mar 08, 10:22 AM
