Interesting Stuff 08-09-30
Audio & Music tech chief James Cridland has been preaching the good word in Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen, agreeing with his commercial colleagues on technology and competing on content. The talk he gave with GCap's Nick Piggott, Radio For The Facebook Generation, is evidently too involved for a straight embed, so here's the PDF:
Quite a few people asked for a copy of the presentation Nick and I gave. It's 38 meg, and given that I was demonstrating Olinda (our rather nice prototype connected radio) and a rather neat webcam-based piece of software that got a spontaneous round of applause (when it worked!), it's a bit hard to simply forward a PPT file to someone.
[N]ote that the speech doesn't make it clear who's speaking at any one time, so don't take anything in here as official BBC policy, because it isn't.
And Nick Piggott's complementary post is called Three Countries, Two People, One Message.
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Back here in the BBC bloggery, James tells Radio Labs that "iPlayer's teething problems have got substantially better since my last report, but here are a few open issues we're aware of":
- A problem with the satellite receivers we use meant that some programmes had gaps in them recently. We switched to an alternative feed for a bit, which had the effect of putting BBC7 in mono among other things, but the satellite receivers now seem happy. We're sorry about that. Coyopa will fix that.
- Generation of Real Audio files for a small amount of programmes has sometimes failed. We think we've got to the bottom of why this happens, and issues are rather fewer of late. Again, apologies to you - particularly PM fans - if this has spoilt your enjoyment. In the majority of cases, Coyopa will fix that too.
- [Update 2008-09-30 1630: now fixed] Listeners in live Windows Media format within iPlayer might notice, in a minority of cases, that they get kicked off at precisely 15 minutes after they start listening. A fix is on the way shortly; it would appear from preliminary tests that it might be related to Internet Explorer, and that it's potentially related to the recent Windows XP SP3 update, or similar for Vista. It's early days, so we might be wrong here - but we're working on it; latest information I have is that we might have a fix next week. Coyopa will, eventually, fix that as we add AAC-family flash streaming.
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Chris Williams talks to BBC Technical Architect Andy Smith under a very The Register-flavoured headline in The Register, BBC Fixes BT Home Hub Auto-Vomit Bug:
BBC engineers have solved a mysterious, long-running bug that has meant iPlayer and live TV streams have frequently prompted the BT Home Hub, UK's most common router, to reset itself.
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Ex-BBCer Martin Belam's thoroughgoing review of how news sites use social media includes a post called Measuring The BBC's Success With Social Media:
Although it did not generate as many social bookmarking links as The New York Times or CNN, overall the BBC was the third most successful of the 50+ media sites I was monitoring, with 341 popular links across the 8 services during the month. The BBC was the most successful British media site, with The Telegraph and The Guardian being the closest UK competitors.
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At BarCampLondon5, BBC Backstage's Ian Forrester talked about social media centres XBMC Media Center and Boxee and blogs about
the attention to ui detail xbmc always had. It's almost unlike any other open source project I know of - the technical and interface attentions have been equally catered for.
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And BBC Innovation Executive Lucy Hooberman has been looking at Ofcom's proposals for Stage 2 of the PSB review:
Just catching up on Ofcom's proposals for stage two of the PSB review and noticed, apart from the proposals themselves, this "experimental" page where you can leave your comments alongside the proposals.
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Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf visited the Guardian and said: "The BBC is about television; what it really should be about it video and distributing that video."
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And finally, Are Wold is writing a series of posts about the requirements for his next mobile phone, which begins:
Thanks to its FM tuner and the 3,5 mm audio jack, I can hook the N82 up to the stereo in the living room, sit back and listen to the BBC World Service (broadcast on "Alltid Nyheter" in the evening). No fuss, no software, no plugins, no radio, just the amplifier and a 3,5mm cable.
Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.
Comment number 1.
At 16:25 30th Sep 2008, James Cridland wrote:I should point out that the Windows live issue (as mentioned in my quote above) has already been fixed. Hurray.
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