Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú

Coming back to the after a few years in new/future media is a bit of an odd experience.

Having lived with the protracted gestation and birth of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer over the last couple of years (something for which I can claim little credit), it is easy to believe the rest of the TV world sees things as we do.

A weekend here in Edinburgh reminds me that's not so. I recognise fewer faces at the festival, but the main themes are horribly familiar. The power of commissioners. Do indies get enough for their product? Is the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú too big/not big enough/too ratings driven/too commercial? (etc).

I guess I was expecting more about the new world of iPlayer and its siblings. Don't get me wrong: it was there, but not in the volume I was expecting. Choosing just the sessions that looked like discussing what's happening to the fabric of TV (as opposed to the colours and patterns programme makers paint upon it) made for a sporadic agenda.

The Festival is not generally considered to have "started" until the MacTaggart lecture has been delivered and delegates have had a chance to digest it over a beer on Friday night. (It actually started with a session on how TV execs could look good naked - a thought you might not want to dwell upon).

As you have probably read elsewhere, most people were buoyed up by , whether at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú or Ofcom and by his call for TV simply to be entertaining.

Interestingly, when giving a couple of days later, Armando Iannucci was on the money - he emphasised the disruption that is about to happen to TV and the challenges it will present to a lot of long-held assumptions.

He highlighted what I guess we have got used to in developing iPlayer - that traditional ways of controlling what gets seen, by whom, how, where and when break down when TV content (or radio, for that matter) gets liberated from linear schedules.

Simon Nelson made a similar point in the session - the new world challenges regulators in a number of ways:

• temporal - you can't control what time the content is available to audiences (what watershed?)
• public service vs commercial - when is the same stuff one and not the other?
• territorial - control on the basis of regions is getting harder as content is either served, or simply flows, globally.

Overall, however, Iannucci was very upbeat about the prospects of these changes for programme makers - "the future is breathtaking", delivering all sorts of new forms and opportunities to produce great content. As he said, "people will watch something on their mobiles not because it has been packaged for the device, but because it's funny, engaging or clever".

He did manage to get through his whole address without saying "Content Is King", but that was at the core of it - and his "Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú should set up its own HBO-style subscription channel" is what .

There was a good session on short-form content, with a "Viral Grand Prix" for some clips placed on YouTube. Based on the number of views they garnered, this was depressingly won (by a mile) by Balls Of Steel - someone being kicked in the nuts over and over again. Patrick Walker from YouTube explained - there's a lot of other stuff like that on YouTube (by God, there is), so it got a lot of automated recommendations when people viewed similar clips.

So much for unleashing creativity online, then. A pity, as a number of other entries showed genuine wit. Maybe my grammar school alumnus Grayson Perry (appearing on a Question Time session) was right, and "democracy has terrible taste" (he was actually having a dig at politicians setting TV content strategies).

In the Video On Demand session, that he thought as much as 50% of all VOD will be archive material within five years, among other things.

He felt that (despite his new role) VOD will be hard to monetise as long as there are pirate alternatives available. Using the broadest interpretation of "VOD", Nigel Walley (Decipher) said that their research showed that by far the bulk of what's stored on people's Sky+ boxes "comes from the first page of the EPG" and argued that as more and more becomes available on demand direct to the TV, the business case for niche channels will get weaker and weaker. "They are only there to extend choice of what's on offer to view at a given time".

In the same session:

• Patrick Walker: "YouTube is not about revenue..." (I think he meant for users) "...people are using it for Reach and Research"
• Bebo funds a lot of its commissioned material through product placement
• A youngster called (18) was on the VOD panel and called broadcasters' programme pages "boring". He started doing vox pops about Hollyoaks and posting them on Bebo pages. They are now commissioning him to do similar stuff for them, as are Disney and Tesco(!).

was good to hear. Plenty of pithy observations about the "Gutenberg economics" of printing/publishing/TV and radio broadcasting versus the "scribal production" that is enabled by current technology. The latter allows anyone (the "scribe") to easily reach a potentially mass audience.

For him, this meant the risk had moved from the publisher, filtering the content on the basis "what sort of return will it generate on my investment?" to the consumer: "is it worth the investment of my time to consume this?". The cost of failure for the new publisher has thereby been reduced. He had a variety of examples of publishers ceding control to active consumers, notably where active communities live on beyond the media itself (Star Trek, Buffy).

He was not arguing for the amateurisation of TV production, but proposing that professionals should think more about producing for an audience of passionate consumers, then working out how to get it to them. The problem with a traditional TV broadcast mindset is that 6m passionate and active fans count less than 7m indifferent viewers. His argument was that with the scribal economics described above, there should be more trying stuff out "to see if it would work", rather than canning ideas early.

He had a great line on DRM (even if you don't agree with him): "Hey - wouldn't it be great if we could make the digital world as inconvenient as the analogue world?" He called it nostalgia - "a missed opportunity to live in the present".

Back in the world of "pure" TV, there was a masterclass by , creator of Heroes. Some stats - 400 people work on the show; it's been sold into 260 territories ("I didn't know there were that many"). They started to generate a fan base before first transmission by showing the Heroes pilot at a comics convention, where it went down a storm. They found it generated 200-odd special interest websites off the back of it. The production team also constructed , carefully separated from NBC . Responding to feedback is tricky as they are always producing several episodes ahead of what the viewers have seen and are commenting upon.

To finish, a couple of nuggets from a (slightly desperate-sounding) flyer from , the marketing body for TV advertising ("Yes, we have a bloody great axe to grind"):

• Average daily TV viewing is up (a bit) on 10 years ago
• Despite the rise of PVRs and ad-skipping, commercial "impacts" (one person viewing an ad at normal speed) are up by 5.4% on last year (homes watch about 14% more TV when they get a PVR)
• So far this year, people in the UK have watched an average 2.4bn ads a day - 42 per person.

Not me - I'm too busy trying to keep up with all the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú programmes stacked up on my Sky+.

Andy Davy is Controller, Portfolio Management, FM&T.

With over 57 different radio stations (and goodness knows how many radio programmes), moving radio over to the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer was always going to be a big piece of work.

By and large, it's working very well - we've a ton of interesting statistics which we're poring over. We'll make some available on this blog at some point in the next few months.

We've successfully delivered a good improvement in audio quality for Listen Again content within the UK, as well as a much more sophisticated user interface, allowing you to view by category, by schedule, or by station.

Radio now comes with pictures (so that's what Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio 5 live's Peter Allen looks like). If the doorbell rings or Windows decides to reboot again, you can start listening again from where you left off.

And the search functionality in iPlayer is really good. It's a tremendous step forward from the old Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio Player.

But inevitably, some things haven't worked perfectly.

Currently, we're seeing two issues which I want to be open about, and wanted to let you know we're working on.

The audio for a small amount of programmes was occasionally unavailable - and the problem was worse if you were outside the UK, or using a wifi radio. We found the problem late last week, related to a few upload problems we've been having, and hope that we have now fixed this issue. Incidentally, almost all of these programmes would still have been missing had we been running the old Radio Player; our fancy new interface isn't to blame.

Secondly, we're getting a some reports of excessive "buffering", where the audio stops while your internet connection catches up.

For those of you in the UK, you'll spot a "modem users" link that we've added, which gives you a version of the feed which is lower bitrate (and thus should cope just fine), but I'd be very interested to hear from people for whom the audio is buffering - particularly if you can watch the TV content within iPlayer without being interrupted by buffering. Feel free to comment here with your, er, comments. Higher bitrate is something many are asking for; but excessive buffering isn't a side-effect anyone wants.

Whether it's the new Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú homepage, last.fm or Facebook, it's clear that there's a small number of people who find changes to the look and feel of familiar websites upsetting. When it doesn't work as perfectly as you'd expect, it's doubly irritating.

I could, accurately, defend iPlayer's radio section for being much more reliable than the old Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio Player which it replaced, not to mention the additional functionality we have been able to introduce - but I know that if you can't get your favourite programme, that's all that really matters.

So instead, please simply accept my apologies if you're one of the few that has been affected, and know that we're working on it.

James Cridland is Head of Future Media & Technology for Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Audio & Music Interactive.

, , and report Simon Nelson's announcement of "series stacking" on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer (of no more than 15% of all television content [explanation from the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Trust]; series to include , , Little Dorrit, Survivors, The History Of Climate Change, Bruce Parry's Amazon, Clone, Walking With Beeching and The Story Of Maths):

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

Simon is also quoted in this release about adding Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Four, CÂ鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú and CBeebies to the official live streams offered for Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Three, the and Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio, as in The Guardian.

"The Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú faces strike action at its research and development centre at Kingswood Warren", reports .

There's been to the post here by iPlayer chief Anthony Rose, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer Goes H.264. Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia :

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

So who's been saying what, aside from and ? There's some speculation about the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú and ISPs with eye-catching images [click on the thumbnail for more] at , and a response from Internet Blog's editor Nick Reynolds on .

"Despite Team GB's massive medal haul," , "it is the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's website that is the star of the Beijing Olympics." All the details are in John O'Donovan's post below.

Over at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh TV Festival, Ashley Highfield, formerly of this parish, has been talking about what , and those of us not in Auld Reekie can including the , Armando Iannucci's call for the and . [Apologies for the lack of direct links to the video - the site doesn't work that way and instead offers you .FLV files to save - clearly this online video malarkey is never going to catch on!]

And from Beeboid bloggers, the new "Portfolio Executive, Social Media - Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Vision", , and Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Jersey's is .

Alan Connor is co-editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog.

You may have noticed over the last few weeks that the has invaded our screens, websites, phones and life as never before.

The access to information and content has been unprecedented, and I thought you might be interested in some of the areas where we used some Olympics special sauce.

First, some (estimated) numbers to give a rough sense of scale. (NB: these figures are UK-only because the relevant media are just UK-available.)

I talked earlier in the year about the launch of embedded video and how this has provided a better platform for our media on the web. This has really come into perspective with the Beijing Olympics.

In Athens, we served about 2.5m video plays for the entire event. For the Beijing Olympics so far, we have served nearly 40m sport video streams via the web - and the games are not over yet, with a few big events still to come.

We have at times been serving nearly 200,000 concurrent streams including live video and video on-demand. Individual clips have regularly reached over 500,000. Over 6.5m hours of Olympics watched so far. Up to 5.5m Olympics videos watched each day, averaging just under 3m.

And this is just on the Sport site on the web - not to mention Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer, interactive TV and mobile platforms. Look out for updates with consolidated details after the games have finished.

Olympics? You love it.

What factors have created such a huge step forward in demand? You may have noticed that . We've double checked the calculations, and this isn't an error or a cunning conspiracy by sporting pundits. So Team GB has been magnificent and many of you have clicked to watch them run off with the GB haul of medals. (Technically speaking, they have in fact have swam, cycled, sailed or rowed away with most of them, but let's not split hairs.)

Certainly, the internet has grown up to support this level of use. Broadband is getting better. The easy accessibility of the embedded player is playing its part. And the time of day has meant that many of you may not have access to a TV and that the web is the only route - but then perhaps the on-demand nature means you prefer the web anyway?

There are no doubt other reasons as well - let me know what you think.

Our services around the Olympics have also seen some interesting developments.

First, the live video streams have been hugely popular and we have been using them extensively across the site including a showing all the streams available in one place. This is an extension of the Embedded Media Player that allows you to choose which live stream the player is connected to and which redirects to this stream without a page refresh.

We have up to seven of these running at a time, based on the available streams of content. Sometimes they are live streams delivered from China; sometimes they are loops of key events or summaries. The video streams are encoded in real time to Flash On 2 VP6 video format by Viewcast Powerstream Pro cards Viewcast's Niagara Pro Encoders at 368Kbps which gives the best compromise for audience reach, delivery reliability, bandwidth usage and quality.

Concurrently, the editorial teams have been picking about 10-20hrs of content for Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer each day which are sent as discreet files and encoded at a slightly higher quality (about 500Kbps). These are unusual because this is the first time we have put "off schedule" content into iPlayer - meaning content which is not in the schedule of the traditional linear TV channels (Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú ONE, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú TWO, etc). These then link up with additional metadata added to the programme and channel information used in iPlayer so that these "off schedule" programmes are linked to programme information in iPlayer. There will be more of this to come over time as we look at which content best supplements the core TV schedule content we have in iPlayer.

Following the chain further back, you can see that we have an extensive guide to . The coverage of events using multiple streams of video is more extensive than we have ever done before and to make this more finadable we have added more information to the TV schedules and Electronic Programme Guides to provide as much information about individual events.

Previously, you would often just see large blocks in the EPG showing "Olympics". Now you can see much more about the individual events. These data are what also drives the information showing what is on in the live streams (you can see an example feed here).

In the longer term, we hope to be able to publish much more accurate running order information and to segment our programme content in News and Sport so that individual sections of programmes can be identified.

Programme pages are available for each sport from the drop down at the top of the EPG page. These show listings of events for events by Sport and allow you to click through to the video. Where available, you can follow these links through to the Olympics content in Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer and the astute will notice the use of the same IDs for the media (the "b00cs7sv/" part at the end of both addresses).

There is a red button sports portal on four platforms (Freesat, Freeview, DSat and DCable) all showing a choice of live action, recorded highlights and integrated text updates. Again, these are benefiting from the improved programme information available, but they are delivered through separate infrastructure dedicated to these platforms. They are using the same streams as available on the web, but they don't all have all seven streams.

On the , underneath the multiscreen player, you will see the Live Text update. This allows journalists to provide a running commentary on the events occurring all around the Olympics while you are watching any one particular video stream. It's hugely addictive, largely down to the entertaining commentary and comments from the audience.

The key change on this feature is that the text updates without needing a page refresh. We have had a hugely positive response on this. It works by polling updates which are added to a file and then placed in an animation queue which adds them to the page. It avoids the issue of how to deal with page refresh when the video is playing on the same page as well.

The map [] has been an interesting experiment using Microsoft Virtual Earth. Interesting, not only because we have been putting updates and blog posts on to it, but also because we have overlayed relevant venue information and enhanced rollovers.

Customising the maps has helped identify how we can manipulate maps more effectively and present a less generic face. There is some more detail on how this was done and a blog post on how it was built here.

in the form of our Adobe AIR-based desktop application and, to be honest, he's been a bit .

We and he has behaved since and been downloaded by over 50,000 of you. Final numbers to be confirmed. If you are interested in why we are using AIR, you can see the start of our strategy here.

Mobile has been a challenge to get working but on those networks where we are able to stream, there has been mobile video available in both live and on-demand forms. Yep: you can watch video on your mobile showing a live stream over 3g and it works, as long as you stand in the right place. It looks pretty good too.

There is more, such as blogs, podcasting, , , the , HD TV, Big Screens coverage around the UK, a China 08 topic page...

I'll stop there, but if you want more detail on the specifics of some of these products, then let me know and enjoy the last few days of coverage.

John O'Donovan is Chief Technical Architect, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú FM&T Journalism

Tristan of Apture Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News' trial of in-text linking, mentioned on this blog yesterday and by Steve Herrmann:

You wouldn't want the contextual or background information to overwhelm the core story. But using, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú can facilitate the discovery of meaningful information...

Details of bbc.co.uk's for 2007/08 have been released after an FOI reguest .

We all love a nice graph, and there are some at about Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer traffic during the Olympics.

is .

And a on the Backstage message board is discussing MusicBrainz data - as used in the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Music beta.

Nick Reynolds is editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog.

A from Michael Lyons (Chairman of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Trust) to Mark Thompson which accompanied the Trust's review of the service licence of bbc.co.uk has now been after a Freedom of Information request. It's available on the .

Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News' experiment with as blogged by Steve Hermann has provoked a reaction. says The Pickards, while :

Clicking on the links within the pop-up then creates more pop-ups until, if you follow this horrible mess to its inevitable conclusion, you can't see the original article because the whole page is covered with little Wikipedia summary boxes

There's a on the mailing list too, where John O'Donovan reassures the Backstagers that .

On the other hand the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's available on all platforms seems to have made people happy including and .

IT Cinema and Digital Cinema has an article [it says it's a blog, but it isn't because you don't seem to be able to comment - ed]: . Quote:

The real significance of using H.264 is that in theory the same encoded streams could be supported by many different devices.

And Technical Markus with the mobile phones in Spooks Code 9.

Nick Reynolds is editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog

( developer and evangelist) recently asked this question on the Semantic Web mailing list . So I ran a workshop last week aimed at answering the question: "What is the state of the Semantic Web in the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú?" Judging by the response to the event, the answer is: pretty good.

am an Information Architect in Future Media & Technology, so I sit somewhere between technology and . This balance was also represented in the choice of speakers at the workshop who came from both a technical and a design background.

Audio & Music Interactive has always been at the forefront of the drive to bring the Semantic Web project to the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú. Michael Smethurst and Matt Wood gave an overview of and talked about some of the things A&M are working on. They have previously blogged in more depth about how /music and /programmes relate to . It also looks like work has started on modelling food and gardening.

Michael Atherton from Search & Navigation presented a very entertaining talk about the future of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Topic Pages and navigation badges. Navigation badges will be powered by a semantic tagging service called the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Metadata Services API (the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú version of , if you like, but with web-scale identifiers).

I followed with a short presentation discussing the work Chris Sizemore and I have been doing regarding and the role of .

Ant Miller talked about the variety of projects coming out of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Research & Innovation and the role the Semantic Web will play in liberating archive content.

Zac Bjelogrlic and talked about the projects coming out of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet team. Zac discussed the issues around .

We were lucky enough to have two distinguished external speakers, and . Dan talked about OpenID's relationship to the Semantic Web and outlined a number of scenarios in which it could be integrated into the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú website.

Finally, Alex introduced his work around making web 2.0 services more semantic in particular social networks () and user tagging ().

The Q&A session at the end raised some interesting questions. One apparent pattern was that the questions regarding the user experience of these projects - as opposed to the technologies involved - were actually harder to answer for the panel.

I think this reinforces the fact that the Semantic Web is not purely a technology-driven project but needs the help of many disciplines to ensure its success. To quote :

They will tell you it's about artificial intelligence, acronyms such as RDF, object-oriented data structures and meta this and hypertext that. The bottom line is this: the Semantic Web is about bringing information to life.

Silver Oliver is an Information Architect in FM&T. Photo of Silver by , from Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence.

Thilo Horstmann at The Twibble Blog about Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Sport's Matt Slater using ("a location aware twitter client for smartphones") in Beijing:

Matt of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Sport is using twibble mobile to tweet the latests and greatest of the Olympic Summer Games in Beijing. He is even sending his GPS coordinates along with his tweets!
Even more impressive are Matt's tweets in Google Earth. Add 'https://api.twibble.de/statuses/user_timeline/bbcsport_matt.kml' as a network link and click on a tweet to fly to China.

§

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

§

Olivier Amato considers the latest news from Erik and Anthony and :

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

§

In about watching iPlayer on broadband, Alison Craighead suggests the Home Hub issues may be a thing of the past:

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

§

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

Mashed remote contrib: Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú music genres meet last.fm (meets OAuth)
I'd like to do some more with this, but the license terms aren't specified. Can it be used commercially? Is attribution required? Does it inherit any constraints from MusicBrainz? Is use in UK vs rest-of-world treated the same, etc etc.

§

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

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

§

While The Telegraph's Michael Deacon of on iPlayer, Janet Silvera at The Jamaica Gleaner ex-pat Jamaicans hungry for coverage: "some have gotten fancy by using hacker techniques to 'break' into Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú video".

§

If you want to see images of transmitters in Iceland or hear about the days when Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú employees used Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Micros as their personal computers, take a trip to 625-line land in David Birt's reminiscenes at :

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

§

If you're already for the and your key criterion is a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú connection, then David Dunkley Gyimah, formerly of this parish, is talking video journalism: "ex-Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú David talks technique, workflow, and swift turnaround factual feature-making" and of is describing "how Six To Start worked with the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú and to create an online experience for [Spooks]".

§

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

Alan Connor is co-editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog.

We started a trial this week on the website of a different way of linking from within the body of news stories to related background material - our own and other people's.

There's an early example on this story:

The trial will last for about four weeks, for technical reasons is confined for now to the UK edition of the site (which you can select from the left hand side navigation) and is designed to gather your feedback and help us work out the editorial and practical implications of linking in this way from stories.

Linking to relevant background obviously isn't anything new on the site - we've always done it, mostly from the right-hand side of story pages, where we put our own related links, external ones and often a "Newstracker" box listing other news sources. We also do it regularly from textboxes within the main story.

Read more and comment at The Editors.

Steve Herrmann is Editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News website.

There have been a bunch of improvements to the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú homepage recently which are worth a mention. Individually, they may not seem like a big deal - but together, they signal our intention to keep up the pace of change.

Since my last post, we've introduced video to the main section of the page.

Our aim is to seek out the best short clips available from around the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú - from news packages to comedy sketches. I hope that visitors to the page start regularly coming across nuggets of interest.

Moreover, we will sometimes 'go live' to big breaking stories. Our first live video stream, of the Olympic opening ceremony, was fired up by 400,000 users. In this sense, the homepage really will be a "portal" - giving users a direct line of sight onto unfurling events.

It's early days yet, and I would be interested in hearing feedback about which types of video work for you and which don't. Are there clips you would like to see which we don't currently provide?

And speaking of the Olympics, we rolled out a special section (or module - see below) dedicated to the Games, with news, live video and a medals table. We also launched the food widget I mentioned in my last post and are already lining up a Learning one - which includes a "phrase of the day" available in four languages.

New content isn't limited to people in the UK. With additional funding from the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's commercial arm (), we are improving the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú homepage for international users as well - this month introducing specially-produced features to pep up our offering.

While working to make the homepage reflect (or even aid) the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's aspiration to become an industrial-strength global media brand, we won't forget about those overseas users who come to the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú site to get a slice of something distinctly British. Forthcoming improvements to the way in which the page can be customised will be key here.

Technical enhancements "under the bonnet" are going on all the time - even if you can't see some of them. One recent upgrade responded to complaints that you couldn't move sections up and down within an individual module. But now if you want to see tennis headlines above football... be our guest! Just use your mouse to drag them up or down.

We aren't going to rest on any laurels though and remain acutely aware of things that users are pushing us to do. Items on our "to do" list include a smaller main promo area, enhanced customisation and more access to non-Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú content. Many people have asked for a webmail module, for example.

I've also had time to reflect on comments made back in April by those who wanted a return to the old Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú homepage. While I thoroughly approve of o_r_i_g_i_n_a_l, referencing one of my favourite Simon and Garfunkel , ultimately I side with Dylan and say: .

Still, I'd be interested to hear from any of you to see if you've since warmed to the new homepage. Or do you still dislike it six months down the line?

James Price is editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Homepage.

The Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer team works hard to release new versions of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer frequently in its bid to make it as widely available as possible across different devices and to come up with the most exciting new features.

Though not as sexy, the team also has to address the [inevitable] bug fixes. Over the past six months we added streaming (Dec), added Most Popular, More Like This, etc. (Jan), and made Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer available on iPhone (Feb) and Wii (April).

We then went quiet for a while as we built an all-new server architecture better suited to powering the types of product propositions that we look forward to releasing over the next six months.

An iceberg seen from off the coast of Graham Land in Antarctica

The first of the releases built on our new platform - the all-new Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer 2.0 site - went live on June 25, just over a month ago.

Like an iceberg, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer 2.0 site is the bit "above the water". The new site is doing well, but to me more important than the site itself is the ability that our new architecture (the invisible mass below the water) gives us to deliver innovative and world-class new features, even faster than we've been shipping them so far.

Okay, now on to the announcement: .

The video you see in Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer today is encoded using the codec, at a bitrate of 500Kbps. The On2 codec (a video compression technology from a company called ) is pretty much the standard for video delivery over the internet today. It's optimised for moderately low data rates (300Kbps to 700Kbps, rather than the 2Mbps to 4Mbps needed for HD content), and low CPU usage, allowing it to work reasonably well on older computers. In short, On2 VP6 is the video workhorse of the internet.

When we went live with streaming in Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer back in December last year, we needed to make some decisions about the streaming technology to use. with On2 VP6 codec was the obvious technology choice (it's also used by and most other video sites), because evryone already had Flash installed, meaning that nobody would need to install anything in order to use Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer - an important criterion.

Choosing a bitrate was more difficult: too low and the resulting video quality would be unacceptably poor; too high (with corresponding higher bandwidth) and people on lower bandwidth connections would experience buffering problems - ie, pauses in playback that reduce your viewing pleasure. I think we chose well, hitting the right spot between quality and bitrate and giving a good quality playback experience, at least when playing back within the playback "window" on the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer web site. However, the full-screen experience was less than optimal. As the majority of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer users watch Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer in full-screen mode, this is clearly something that needs to be addressed.

Enter H.264.

H.264 is a high-performance video compression technology - the new kid on the block, so to speak. It's actually been around for a few years, but only recently have a few things come together to make H.264 usable by us. Compared to On2 VP6, H.264 delivers sharper video quality at a lower data rate, but requires more CPU power to decode, particularly on older machines, and the user needs to have the latest version of Flash installed.

Back in December of last year, relatively few people had installed the Flash player needed to play H.264 content; now almost 80% of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer users have it. More machines now have graphics cards with H.264 hardware acceleration. Additionally, , a content distribution network (CDN) is now able to stream H.264 content to ISPs in the UK, and the content encoding workflows that we use ( and ) are now able to support H.264.

Actually, when I say that our content encoding workflows are now able to support H.264, that's not quite correct yet. Our compression technology suppliers are frantically working on getting the preferred into their software, something they're hoping to complete in the next week or two. In the meantime we're using the QuickTime codec, which produces results that are acceptable, but not as good. So it seems we're really on the leading edge here.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the good news for those looking for video quality improvements in Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer is that, starting this week, we're going to be encoding our content in H.264 format at 800Kbps. Additionally, our media player now supports hardware acceleration in full-screen mode, giving a greatly improved image at lower CPU usage than before.

Along with the change to H.264, the soundtrack in our video programmes is changing to , another new compression technology that delivers better sound at a lower bitrate. The bass is deeper, the treble tighter, the overall effect is a noticeably better listening experience, particularly if you listen with headphones or hook up your computer to your TV or home sound system.

However, given that we're on the (leading) edge here, with our CDN network and video compression partners only now being able to support our requirements, we're going to play it safe and introduce H.264 in two phases:

In the first phase, starting this week, we're going to create our content in both On2 VP6 and H.264 format, and provide a button to let you choose which works best for you and your internet connection, Normal or High:

Initially, the default will continue be On2 VP6, which will remain the choice for users on slower internet connections. However, if your internet connection speed is 1Mbps or higher, try the "HIGH" H.264 version.

In the second phase, we're going to add automatic bitrate detection, so that our media player software automatically chooses the right version for your computer and internet connection speed - we'll likely introduce this auto-detection feature in September. This will make it as easy as possible for all users to get the best quality of service possible with the equipment they have.

Initially the H.264 option will only be offered to people who have the latest version of Flash installed, and will be offered incrementally as new content rolls out through our encoding chain. We'll also be making a number of tweaks and enhancements over the coming weeks as our video compressor suppliers deliver more software updates, so look out for further improvements over the next few weeks.

On a different topic, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer has been shortlisted for three - Best Home Entertainment, Most Indispensable Technology and Best Online Technology. The winners are determined by popular vote . All votes for Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer are much appreciated :)

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Future Media & Technology.

One of the key drivers in making audio and video distribution possible via the internet is the great advances in compression technologies (). Obviously, broadband adoption and ever more capable PCs and mobile devices helped a lot - but in the end, it has been the codecs that have made the real difference.

Looking back over the last decade, the advances in this space were mainly driven by strong competition between software companies. Each had its own motivations for creating codecs and that lock in customers. Besides the obvious downside of that approach, there were some benefits as well: fast innovation and attractive terms and conditions from a licensing perspective.

Having said that, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú has always been a strong advocate and driver of . Without these standards, TV and radio broadcasting would simply not function. I believe that the time has come for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú to start adopting open standards such as and for our audio and video services on the web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions.

The advantage for the audience will be a noticeable improvement in audio and video quality. Furthermore, it should become easier for the media to simply work across a broader range of devices. While it's not a magic bullet, it certainly is a significant step in the right direction. The first service to make content available using these open standards based codecs will be iPlayer. Anthony Rose will have more details of introducing H.264 to the iPlayer later today. It is our intention for other AV services across bbc.co.uk to follow quickly.

Some people may ask: why are you not using your own Dirac codec? I am fully committed to the development and success of Dirac, but for now those efforts are focused on high-end broadcast applications. This autumn, we intend to show the world what can be achieved with these technologies.

Photo of at this year's

This is a rather important moment for me personally. Having been responsible for driving one of those proprietary alternatives, it feels great to be at the forefront in driving the next wave in internet audio and video technologies and services.

Erik Huggers is Director, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Future Media and Technology.

This is a really boring post - no clamour of phone calls at home, no daughter discussing the relevance of the Eurovision Song Contest for Saturday evening viewing in one ear and no chance of anything like reverse karaoke!

So why wasn't the opening of the Olympics on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD television in surround sound?

We had been having problems with the Dolby E stream on the line back from Beijing.

You have to remember we are sending back many video, audio and data streams from the games for all the interactive outputs, so it is a very busy set of circuits - but all seemed well just before the opening.

During a final rehearsal about 20 minuets before transmission, noticed that the surround sound kept "popping"; meanwhile in the Television Centre switching area, they heard one or two pops - but not at the same time as Red Bee.

The problem was looked into at both ends and at about ten minutes before transmission, there were only a couple of options left - as these required a reboot of a large chunk of the system, you would naturally ask a couple of questions:

• 1. would it cure the problem? and
• 2. how long would it take?

As the answers were "maybe" and "more than ten minutes", I think the next step was obvious.

In my last post about the Eurovision Song Contest, I said we were putting in failsafe systems so that we could at least keep the high definition pictures if we had to use the stereo audio. Well, as promised, the infrastructure is in and the "failsafe" worked. ( of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú truck at Helsinki World Athletic Championship in 2006 from on Flickr)

We tried a couple of times during the opening to go back to what looked like a stable surround signal, but along would come another "bump" and in the end it stayed stereo.

Overnight (Beijing time) the systems engineers worked backwards through the chain to find the cause and the report back was during a check of a rack of equipment it stopped - that's it so far.

The next programme went on air in surround and it's been there ever since.

We are still looking into the issue to see if it was equipment failure, a problem with the link back from Beijing or a problem with the incoming audio from the host. Maybe I'll write another full post later!

Just for information, the host broadcaster is distributing 4.0 audio to all broadcasters taking surround. The sections from tape, archive material and the studio are in stereo.

Andy Quested is Principal Technologist, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Future Media & Technology.

Now you can search TV and Radio schedules by genre as well as by channel, writes Tom Scott on his personal blog :

To help you find programmes, no matter which station or channel they are broadcast on, we've started publishing schedules for all our genres (sport, music etc.). These views are being used as part of the - specifically to drive the and individual sport pages. But as you might be able to guess a little bit of URL hacking gives you more....

Meanwhile over on , senior producer Andrew Bowden is with his team's success in getting Freesat Sport Multiscreen onto the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú red button:

I can now breathe a huge sigh of relief as the Freesat Sport Multiscreen arrives on the old Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú red button just in time for the Olympics! Press the old red button on any Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú channel, select Sport Multiscreen, wait a few seconds, and lo, you'll get up to six different sports to chose from at any one time... To say I'm glad to get this one out of the door, is an understatement...

Zoe Kleinman is Features Editor, Ariel.

Hi, and thanks for all the comments - I can guarantee that I have read them all, and I will do my best to respond to as many as I can.

Firstly, on : I can tell that the vast majority of people who left comments feel passionately about the onscreen idents. I am not yet sure what I think on where the balance should lie between identifying the channel, and keeping the screen clear for HD pictures. But I will look at the issue, talk to colleagues, and let you know when I reach a conclusion about what is right for Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD.

Briantist, roryh22 and ropies all ask about the full nine-hour service and when the hours for Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD will be extended. My aim is to ensure that over the autumn, we gradually increase the number of hours we broadcast. I'd like us to be up to the full nine hours, day in day out, by the beginning of April, but I do need to check that that is feasible and that we have enough HD content in the pipeline to ensure that we don't achieve a longer schedule simply by increasing repeats beyond what is acceptable. I'm already working on the plan with the HD channel team, and I'll update you soon.

As for content - the things you would like to see are mostly already on my wish list, and I hope there will be news in the coming months that I can share with you. Chiefmcbeef is one of those who asks about Formula One. I'm already working with our sports team on this - everyone in the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú is keen, but the decision lies to a large extent with the rights holders. Thetruthisoutthere(exceptattheÂ鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú) asks why Doctors is filmed in HD but not available in HD. At the moment, Doctors is not post-produced in HD. It could be, but as many of you are aware, HD post-production still often costs more than SD and so we have to select carefully which programmes we migrate to HD and when.

Cost is the main reason that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's HD content is limited, rather than concerns about spoiling other channel viewing figures as trevorjharris suggests. Roryh22 is right in saying that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú has invested in upgrading the studio TC4. This does mean that we can migrate programmes filmed in there into HD, and I believe that we will see some of those shows moving across to full HD production over the course of the next year.

Kevinw63 asks why we don't premiere programmes on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD. At the moment, we don't have permission for the channel to do that. When the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Trust gave its approval to launch the service it felt that that wasn't the right thing for the channel to do. It is obviously something that merits further discussion as the channel extends its hours and develops its schedule.

And I want to respond also to the point made by Tarbatness about not knowing whether a programme is going to be shown later in the evening in HD. I think we do need to do more to help you make decisions about where you watch programmes and what is available on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD. I'm looking at it already.

That's it for now - I'm writing this having just watched the opening ceremony of . There was a time when I thought that HD was a bit over-hyped, but having seen the spectacle and the colour, and the sheer perfection of the Chinese staging on the channel, and having compared it to the SD Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú One broadcast, I understand what others have been talking about.

It was quite literally breathtaking, and happening in my living room. Enjoy the next few weeks. We're broadcasting all of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's Olympics coverage in HD. On the basis of today, I think it is going to be spectacular.

Danielle Nagler is Head of HDTV, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Vision.

Today's Guardian contains an of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's Research & Development department at Kingswood Warren and a with Andy Bower of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú R&D.

From the piece:

They may not look much like media visionaries, but these people help determine what we listen to, what we view and what we read.

Update: 1.30 p.m. from the Guardian's PDA blog.

Nick Reynolds is editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog.

...You Should See The View From Here!

There's been a lot of buzz online this week about the launch of Britain From Above, our latest big "multiplatform" project, where TV and online producers have worked together to reveal some of the extraordinary unseen stories of how Britain works.

, , , , and others picked up on the pre-release pictures and CGI visualisation video - called "GPS performance art" .

Well, I'm happy to say that the full site goes live today and features full versions of those sequences, more video from the TV shows and exclusive web material, designed and produced by and .

It's one of the first times we've created a series like this with online in mind (and part of the team) from the ground up. That meant that even right at the outset - during scriptwriting and storyboarding - the team was thinking about how every last aspect of what they were capturing would work online.  

One nice new feature is embeddable video: you can click on "SHARE" and host the clips, for example in your blog - like this:

Britain From Above is one of the first Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú sites to enable this function, so it would be great to hear how it works for you in the comments below.

Some of the other features include:

• Photography from Jason Hawkes, one of the world's foremost aerial photographers and key contributor on the project
• A map interface to all the video and photos, latitude/longitude metadata for every item and a list of all the video as a .kml download (coming soon, once all the content is live)
• Information on the expert contributors behind the show

And the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Archive team has also released an online collection to tie in with the project. Aerial Journeys features some real gems including the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's first aerial broadcast and a 1960s series, Bird's Eye View, by none other than John Betjeman. You can see the full selection here.

I hope you enjoy!

Nick Cohen is a Multiplatform Commissioning Executive.

On Tuesday, I had the chance to go on the Radio 4 In Touch programme [factsheet] to listen to the views of a blind person who had contacted us to let us know that he, and a number of others, are finding difficulties with the transition from the old Radio Player "Listen Again" service to the new Radio in Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer.

I'll summarise here what I said on that programme.

In many ways, this kind of transition difficulty is very understandable and not uncommon on the launch of any new service. Due to the much larger amount of programmes available on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer - from TV as well as radio - navigation in iPlayer works in a different way to Listen Again.

Knowing that this might be a challenge to blind users, we consulted and tested iPlayer with two blind accessibility experts all the way through its creation, so we are confident that the site is accessible by blind people.

However, in response to feedback on the programme, we are working on a help document which will enable blind users to understand how to get the best from Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer. I hope to get this onto the iPlayer help site later in the month.

Blind users have also been concerned that they cannot currently jump around within programmes in the way they are used to from Listen Again. This is due to iPlayer's use of a "scrub bar" to enable users to jump to any place within a video clip, in a way which should be familiar users of web streaming video sites such as YouTube.

Unfortunately, the visual way the scrub bar works doesn't make so much sense to blind users, and there are very few examples of sites available which have solved this problem. So we have been working on new ways of making the scrub bar, and the volume control, work well using just the keyboard and speech. We have done a lot of thinking and research with blind people into what the best controls should be. And it does seem that the jump buttons used on Listen Again are among the best solutions available.

We are almost there with our research, and will be including keyboard shortcuts for all of the iPlayer video player's controls (including some form of jump and volume control functionality) by early October.

In the meantime, blind users can still get radio in Real Media (and sometimes Windows Media) formats by using the Text Only version of iPlayer. This, incidentally, uses a much simpler navigation interface than the graphic version - just select the station you want, then the day of the programme, and you can browse through the available programmes in your screenreader's List Links dialogue by pressing P to cycle between all available programmes (each programme's link starts with "Play audio").

This will allow you to select links to play radio programmes in players with transport controls similar to those you may already be familiar with from Listen Again - both will allow you to control the volume, but unfortunately neither yet can manage to rewind or fast-forward streamed clips.

Blind listeners to Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú radio, St Dunstans, May 1st, 1927.

Jonathan Hassell is Head of User Experience & Accessibility, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Future Media & Technology.

The audience feedback presented here was kindly supplied by Alison Button, Research Manager in our Marketing, Communications & Audiences group. Many thanks, Alison for your help in preparing this.

We've just got the results back from our first major piece of audience research among Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer users. It's great to have some solid evidence to back up our ideas on how people were using the service, and I've been delighted to see how positive people are about it.

Obviously, since Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer launched, we've had internal server stats to tell us about levels of use and the most popular programme titles, and we have a number of tracking surveys set up to regularly measure topline opinions (as all Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú services do) from members of the public.

We also monitor our message boards to keep an eye on any problems that people are encountering, and we scan articles and which give us a lot of ideas and feature requests to go into upcoming site updates.

But we wanted to know more detail about the majority of our users and their habits, things that these sources can't tell us, such as:

• Do most people use Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer alone, or do they watch with their family?
• Are parents using the ?
• Where are people using Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer - at home, at work, at school, on the train?
• How did they find Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer in the first place?
• Why did they (or didn't they) go back again?

Image by Jon Jacobs on

So we asked a representative group of people (^* detail at the end if you're interested) to answer a list of questions that we drew up together across the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer team. From their answers, we can make a picture of what the typical Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer user is like. Here's a snapshot:

• The typical Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer user is a man aged about 40, in a full-time job, with a partner but no kids. He uses Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer at home over a fast broadband connection, and accesses it on a desktop PC in the evenings - usually on his own, though sometimes his girlfriend watches something with him.
• He found it through the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú homepage, and was prompted to try it for the first time when he missed something specific on TV. He still tends to go there looking for a particular programme, rather than just to browse what's available. He gets there through the bbc.co.uk homepage.
• When he's found the right programme, he streams it in full-screen mode (he hasn't connected his PC to a TV set), although sometimes he watches within the webpage when he wants to do something else on his PC at the same time. He has downloaded Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer programmes before, but is usually too impatient to wait. He's never had any problems with his ISP because of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer, though. He's never used the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer on a portable device, or on Wii.
• Sometimes, he won't bother watching something on linear TV since he knows he can watch it on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer later. He thinks the rules about what's on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer are fairly clear, but still finds that the programme he wants isn't there sometimes. He'd love the seven-day limit to be longer.
• People really like the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer - they find it easy to use, like the way it looks, and have recommended it to their friends. When asked, people usually couldn't think of anything that could improve it; they like it just the way it is.

I know that many of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer users reading this blog won't fit into this profile - some are likely to be ahead of the curve, and more likely to have tried Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer on their iPhone or Wii, or to have connected their PC or Mac to a TV screen.

While the research said that the "typical Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer user was a male aged 40", only 25% of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer users are actually aged 35-44. We were really happy to find that older people, as well as younger ones, are using Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer, so we're not just attracting the stereotypical younger early adopters who will generally pick up on new technologies and gadgets before the mainstream. The Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer age profile is actually right in line with the profile of the general broadband UK population. But 35-44 is the most commonly selected age range from this survey, with smaller proportions of users in the other age bands.

Outside of the most common behaviour, here are some other facts that I thought were interesting:

• Levels of repeat use of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer are good - only 13% had only used it once, and 17% had watched more than 20 programmes
• 32% always access it on a laptop; 51% always on a desktop computer
• 5% of people were using Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer on a Mac, and 1% on a Linux system
• 18% said they had "ever" connected their computer to a TV screen; 5% "always" do this to watch programmes on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer
• A lot of people stream and download on different occasions - only 18% never stream, 42% never download
• Only 1% had never used Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer at home, but 84% had never used it at work
• Most people were using Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer on a computer they share with other members of their household
• However 60% only ever use Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer on their own - 34% have used with other adults, and 13% have watched with children
• 49% of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer (TV) users have also listened to radio on the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú website

These results are helping to guide decisions going forward for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer service, both developing it as a product, and planning how best we can encourage new people to try it out. We plan to repeat this kind of research in future every so often.

Obviously, this research is only part of the picture, and we continue to read all the other feedback we get directly from users too. For example, I start and end each day checking recent and about Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer - it's great way to get instant feedback on what people like or early warning of any technical or usability problems. It's all invaluable in helping us make Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer your favourite video and audio destination.

^* The sample in this survey was 2027 UK adults, selected from an online market research survey panel to be representative of the UK adult online population in terms of age, gender and UK nation. 901 of them had used Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer, and 794 of these people went on to answer more detailed questions about the service. The survey was conducted independently for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú by in May of this year.

Anthony Rose is Head of Digital Media, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Future Media & Technology.

Two people who work for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú talk about it on their personal blogs.

Dan Taylor on :

"Senior Portfolio Executive, Internet - Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Vision Multiplatform" - there's no denying that I have fairly incomprehensible job title. All of the words kind of make sense on their own but when strung together, not so much. So, mostly for the benefit of my parents and girlfriend (who frequently have to try and explain what I do), here's an attempt to break it down into some semblance of meaning...

And Richard Titus blogs an awayday for his User Experience and Design team :

...our disconnection from business or technology limitations makes us focus 1st on what the audience wants, 2nd on how they will use it - then we manage back the technical and business issues from there.

Photo of Mat Hunter from IDEO at the UXD away day from rxdxtus.

Nick Reynolds is Editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog.

New York, London, Paris, Munich - everyone's talking about...

...the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Music artist pages beta. [If you're not already up to speed, you can start with Matthew Shorter's post below, on his personal blog and more hardcore detail at Radio Labs from Guy Strelitz.]

In a rare instance of a critic of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú assuming an excess of agility in the Corporation, "I have no idea," , "if my campaign to try and get the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú to open up more of its data to outside developers" influenced the beta, and offers congratulations either way. (which those of you without a blog could also stick up on - see below):

it would be nice to see Last.fm incorporated in future - and obviously a method of searching artists wouldn't go amiss (also, would a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú radio data open API be viable?)

"Semantic Web evangelist" Juan Sequeda yelps: and of The Telegraph that "I'm now able to see that they don't actually play any of the music I listen to."

The Beeb's "a little something to make [it] a touch easier: a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Music/MusicBrainz ":

Drag this Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Music/MusicBrainz link to your bookmarks bar in your browser. Now, when you're on an artist page (e.g. Coldplay) click on the bookmarklet to switch between Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Music and MusicBrainz artist page.
Enjoy!

Patrick's bookmarklet is also available from the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio Labs blog.

And a satirical image at Flickr wonders .

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

So, I did a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Weather iGoogle gadget last year. It was kind of nice, but sadly people are actually, um, using it - with over 20,000 impressions a day. Yikes. Think of the bandwidth and hassle that's causing my little server.

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

(add this to your iGoogle by hitting "add gadgets" (top right), then "Add feed or gadget" at the bottom of the left-hand menu, and finally pasting that in). Use the change settings button to choose a town near you.
If people don't see any hideous bugs (I can't test this in MSIE yet), then I'll do some redirection shortly to the many users of my current gadget. And add a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News one. And possibly even a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Music one! ;)

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

Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú is here!
12 employees are listening and participating

reads the top of the , part of a network which purports to "provide help for products and services from thousands of companies". Some Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú employees who work on that project are listening to the suggestions for improvements, and Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog is eagerly signing up for RSS feeds for other services within our wide purview, including , and the aforementioned . If you have other accountability feeds you think we should be adding to our Mission Control and personal RSS clients, let us know in the comments. We can handle it!

writes Katie Scott at Pocket-lint; reports Gareth Beavis at techradar.

Leigh Holmwood about Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú3's first multiplatform comedy drama, Mouth To Mouth, about a girl pop group:

Mouth to Mouth is be made available first through web 2.0 communities, mobile phones, and the show's own Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú website before airing on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú3.

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

Finally, at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Úi Labs blog, Rob Hardy explains burndown charts and shares some of the Beeb's:

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

Alan Connor is co-editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog.

Hi, everyone.

As Skywalker's noticed, I'm the new Head of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD, taking over from Seetha. This is my first job in HD, and my first blog post, but I'll promise you that I'll try to do my best for you with both.

First of all, though: an apology. Turning up the level of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD DOG was not my first act on coming into the job - but it is probably the first thing that I need to apologise for.

Somehow or other, as some new channel branding was introduced last Saturday night, the level of the DOG got turned up from its usual semi-transparent state to 100% white. It wasn't supposed to happen and as soon as I became aware of it, we investigated and ensured the level was adjusted back down.

I agree with those viewers who contacted me - or, like Blake Connolly, - that the white DOG was extremely irritating and obtrusive, and I can promise you that - barring further technical glitches - it won't be reappearing in that form.

What I do want to do is to ask for your help in ensuring that Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD really works for its audiences. I can allay Bill Taylor's concerns - Andrew Marr's Britain from Above will be shown on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú HD, and over the next month we're also giving lots of airtime to the first Olympics and Paralympics to be broadcast in HD, as well as showing the CÂ鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú programme M I High.

Over the coming months, we have a huge range of programming to be shown on the channel, but I'm also keen to hear from you about the kinds of things you'd like to watch and when you'd like to watch them. Also do let me know when you watch something that you love, or hate, that you think works really well in HD, or that you think might just as well have been shown in SD. For the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú, and for me in particular, there's lots to learn about migrating programmes to HD and making an HD channel work. Sometimes I'm going to want to try out new things which may not work. But I'd ask you to bear with me - and although I can't promise to always respond, I will try - let me know what you think.

Danielle Nagler is Head of HDTV, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Vision.

Quiet, isn't it?

Launching a new product like Radio in Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer is bound to raise a few unexpected glitches.

Listeners to Dead Ringers on Radio 4 a few years ago will remember the team's affectionate tribute to Radio 3: "quiet, isn't it?"

Recently, if you listen again to Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio 3 on the iPlayer, you may have noticed occasional programmes which have been really very quiet indeed. Entirely silent, in fact.

This is due to something going wrong (he says, obviously) and we think it's a combination of software and hardware producing these issues on one of our encoders.

Our friends at Siemens hope they've isolated the problem and they're monitoring the issue carefully to ensure that you hear the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Proms in all their glory. This season has been especially good, so we wouldn't want you to miss a note.

Our plans to completely overhaul the system producing Listen Again is still going well behind the scenes, and I hope to report back to you later next month about how the rollout is going. Meanwhile, we're receiving a ton of nice feedback about the improved audio quality for our Listen Again service - so, if you've not tried it yet, please do go and enjoy some of the best that Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio has to offer at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/radio.

Sir Henry Wood conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Symphony Orchestra at the 1944 Proms

James Cridland is Head of Future Media & Technology for Audio & Music Interactive.

The more astute among you will have noticed that for the past few weeks, as well as being the editor of the Internet Blog, I've also been one of the people hosting the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú iPlayer messageboard.

Jonathan Richardson - who is the dedicated message board host and one of the iPlayer operations team that maintains the boards - asked me to keep an eye out while iPlayer version 2.0 was being introduced.

Every morning at 1030, a group of people from across all the different links in the iPlayer chain (including the iPlayer team, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Audio & Music, Capita, Red Bee and Editorial Operations) crowd together in an office called "The Two Ronnies" in the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's Broadcast Centre. They update each other on what bugs and glitches have been reported and how they're being resolved.

No complex project of this type is going to be absolutely perfect as it moves to a new phase. So here's a reminder of some links you may find helpful if you're having the odd problem.

For an overview of what the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú is trying to achieve look at these posts from Anthony Rose and Ben Hanley. For Radio see Mark Friend and James Cridland.

For more specific queries, there's the iPlayer Help and FAQs. Here's one to tell you what you need to . If you use a dial-up internet connection and want to use that to listen to iPlayer radio, there's .

If you're having trouble with your BT Home Hub, you could look at and this (I think it would be fair to say that both BT and people here are scratching their heads a bit).

If you're part of the Reciva community, you may find helpful. And James Cridland has posted a comment on .

I can assure you that the message board is watched and we do follow up your questions (every weekday at 1030!).

Nick Reynolds is editor, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Internet Blog