BBC's Blog, page 35

Search Engine Optimisation: Rebuilding Food

The 'apples' page on BBC Food

Hi, I'm Oli Bartlett and I was the product manager for BBC Food during the rebuild in 2009-10. This post is a follow-on to Duncan's SEO post to provide a little more context and detail on how we tried to maintain our audience reach during the re-launch.

In the BBC we often see temporary drops in audience reach after a major re-working of a website. In situations where a website is given such a significant overhaul that its structure and page URLs change, one major factor in this drop in traffic is the removal of the old URLs from the site.

Put simply, if you remove the pages and those pages were getting views, then you no longer get the views.

However, links to those pages continue exist all over the web, most importantly for us in search engine indexes.

Once search engines discover that their indexed URLs are no longer valid (i.e. they receive a 4xx http response code), they will remove those pages from their indexes. In order to maintain the traffic from search engines it's important to put in place a good http response strategy for those URLs. For example, where content has been moved rather than deleted, use a 301 response code to redirect to the new location.

bbc.co.uk/food

Part of the problem with the old BBC Food website was that there was too much content duplicated in different forms across the website - for example we often had two or more pages displaying the same recipe - which is really bad for users and SEO.

Additionally, a lot of the content was due a refresh in the context of the new product goals - finding recipes and food from your favourite BBC programmes. This led to the decision to cull around 2000 pages from the old website - these included recipes whose rights had expired, duplicate recipes, and articles and other content which simply didn't fit with the objectives for the new product.

Three Kinds of Deleted Page

Each deleted page, or group of deleted pages, required a different approach to http responses:
Expired recipes: 410 - Gone. We present a message explaining the situation regarding rights to BBC recipes, and giving links to similar recipes (where recipe rights have expired we still know the detail of the original recipe so can link to similar recipes - ie for the same dish, by the same chef, using the same ingredients etc.).
Duplicate recipes: 301- Moved permanently. One of the duplicate recipes was kept, the other was deleted from the system and a 301 redirect put in place from the deleted recipe to the new canonical one.
Consolidated articles: We created 'food' pages (e.g. bbc.co.uk/food/apple) which acted as canonical resources containing the typical editorial content found in our old food articles (ie how to prepare, choose, store etc.). Each deleted article was 301 redirected to the most relevant food page, and in the case of articles about diets, occasions, cuisines etc. we had appropriate canonical pages for each.

Sometimes, 404 is the right answer

We tried to minimise the number of URLs that returned "404 Not Found" but invariably there were some which were removed and had no suitable alternative.

In this case it was considered to be better to return a 404 than to redirect to the food homepage.

Simply redirecting all removed pages to the homepage breaks the web. For example, if someone has posted a link to a page that subsequently gets removed, by putting a redirect to the homepage you give the impression (to users and search bots) that the post was about the BBC Food homepage.

Additionally, if a recipe search result links you to the BBC Food homepage, that's not helpful and you're less likely to click on a BBC link next time. We'd prefer those links to be removed from search engine indexes so people don't have that experience.

For the few weeks following the relaunch of BBC Food we were getting significant numbers of 404/410s reported on the site, but these were expected.

As the invalid page links were removed from search indexes, very quickly these errors tailed off.

The new pages were soon indexed and after a brief dip, our audience figures were back and rising healthily. We didn't completely avoid the post-launch dip, but it was predictable and reversible and so much easier to stomach.

Oliver Bartlett is Product Manager, Olympic Data, 2012

What's On Red Button 25th August - 1st September

Doctor Who

Matt Smith as The Doctor

Dr Who returns to our screens on 1st September but fans won't have to wait until then for their first appointment with the Doctor as a brand new mini-adventure is available on BBC Red Button. En route to visit the Ponds the TARDIS' Helmic Regulator malfunctions, leaving the Doctor popping up everywhere in time and space. Will he ever make it back to Amy and Rory?

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 1st September, 4:30am-11:45am, 3:00pm-7:20pm

Freeview:

Sat 1st September, 6:10pm-7:20pm

Reading & Leeds

Watch continued coverage of this year's Reading and Leeds festival over the bank holiday weekend on the BBC Red Button, BBC Three, Radio 1 and online at BBC Reading & Leeds

Coverage on Red Button continues from 7pm on Saturday 25th August, with acts including Kasabian, Florence + the Machine and The Cribs. Sunday starts earlier at 4pm, featuring Foo Fighters, The Horrors and sets from the entire weekend.

Viewers on Sky, Virgin and Freesat will have a choice of bands from the Main Stage and the Radio 1 / NME stage using the Red Button multiscreen. Viewers on Freeview will be able to see a different band about every half hour on Red Button and channel 301. We'll also be bringing you a selection of tracks from up and coming new bands on the BBC Introducing stage.

From Monday 27th to Friday 31st, catch a different 'best band' each and every day (availability varies on Freeview).

Join in the conversation on Twitter all weekend with #bbcreadingfest

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 25th August, 7:00pm-2:00am

Sun 26th August, 4:00pm-2:00am

Mon 27th August, 6:00am-Saturday 1st September, 4:00am

Freeview:

Sat 25th August, 9:30pm-2:00am

Sun 26th August, 4:00pm-2:00am

Mon 27th August, 6:00am-9:50pm

Tue 28th August, 4:10am-10:20am

Wed 29th August, 4:10am-2:50pm & 6:10pm-7:20pm

Thu 30th August, 4:10am-9:50pm

Fri 31st August, 4:10am-6:50am & 11:40pm-4:00am

BBC Three Comedy at The Fringe

Catch up on highlights from BBC Three's all-night Comedy Marathon which showcased the best of this year's Edinburgh Festival and featured some of the biggest names in comedy alongside the most exciting new talent. MCs Chris Ramsey, Andrew Maxwell and Susan Calman were joined by our presenter Jameela Jamil and over forty different performers across the night including Carl Donnelly, Marlon Davis, Cariad Lloyd, Tony Law, Daniel Sloss, Jimeoin, Jason Byrne, Phil Kay, Nina Conti, Ellie Taylor and Totally Tom.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Mon 27th August - Fri 31st August, 10:00pm-4:00am

Freeview:

Mon 27th August, 10:00pm-4:00am

Tue 28th August & Wed 29th August, 10:10pm-4:00am

Thu 30th August, 10:00pm-4:00am

Deadly 60 Quiz

Are you ready to take on the deadliest quiz ever? Steve Backshall is returning with some more deadly round-the-world adventures. Deadly 60 fans can get a whole

lot extra by pressing red to play along with the new Deadly 60 Quiz. Finally you can find out if you've got the world's most deadly mind.

Deadly 60 devotees will get a sneak peek at series 3, through a deadly dozen of quality questions, with Steve helping you along the way. Do you know your Hippos

from your Hyenas? Your Humpbacks from your Hammerheads? See if you can get a deadly dozen correct! You can even play again and improve your score.

The Deadly 60 Quiz - play it now if you dare!

Available on Sky/Freeview

Sky:

Sat 25th August, 7:00am-1:20pm

Sun 26th August, 7:00am-1:10pm

Mon 27th August - Thu 30th August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Fri 31st August, 7:00am-10:00am

Freeview:

Sat 25th August, 7:00am-11:20am

Sun 26th August, 7:00am-9:45am

Wed 29th August, 3:00pm-6:00pm

Fri 31st August, 7:00am-8:45am

Summer of Melas

BBC Asian Network embarks on its seventh year of national Mela coverage and showcasing the biggest acts, key highlights and best performances on the Red Button.

Watch 'A Summer of Melas' by pressing the Red Button from Saturday 1st September to catch highlights from Manchester, London and Newcastle Melas; with exciting and unique performances recorded this summer, all bought to you by presenters Tommy Sandhu and Noreen Khan.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 1st September, 9:10pm-6:00am

Freeview:

Sat 1st September, 9:10pm-5:50am

Tree Fu Tom Spell Along

Get ready for some red button Big World Magic with the Tree Fu Tom Spell Along! Learn the words to the Tree Fu Tom rap and theme tune with words bouncing along the screen in our Tree Fu karaoke, then practice your Tree Fu Spells along with Tom and some CBeebies friends, you can even make your very own Tree Fu Tom magic belt!

ZigZoo has given CBeebies' presenter Alex the magic instructions to make a belt just like Toms, and he will teach you how to make your own. Don't worry if you don't catch the make the first time round - the Spell Along video will play in a loop so you can watch it again!

All you need to make the Tree Fu magic belt is: A long tin foil box, 2 mini cereal boxes, a jam tart case, tin foil, orange tissue paper, brown paint, black tape or a black pen, PVA glue or sticky tape.

The Tree Fu Tom belt make will also be available on the CBeebies website from Monday 3rd September, where you can also find out more about Tree Fu Tom - bbc.co.uk/cbeebies

The Tree Fu Tom Spell Along will be available on all digital TVs between 1st - 7th September, at the times below:

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 1st September, 6:00am-11:45am

Freeview:

Sat 1st September, 6:00am-9:45am

Secret Fortune - Play Along Quiz

The National Lottery: Secret Fortune - The ultra-tense quiz show with lots of twists returns to BBC One,

hosted by Nick Knowles.

Studio contestants compete to win their Secret

Fortune, anything from £100 to £100,000. Press the Red Button during the show to
play along at home with the contestants. What would your Secret Fortune be?

Available on Sky/Freeview:

Sat 25th August, 8:30pm-9:20pm

Sat 1st September, 8:10pm-9:00pm

CBBC Extra

CBBC Extra is the home of exclusives. Watch funny clips, out-takes, star interviews, pop music, backstage previews and episodes from Children's BBC.

Go on, press red... You know you want to!

CBBC Extra website

Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Fri 31st August, 3:00pm-6:00pm

Sat 1st September, 7:00am-10:00am

CBeebies Red Button

BBC Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun

world of CBeebies interactive!

Your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and

digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings
from one another. This has enabled the Red Button team to offer the best games tailored to each system.

CBeebies Red Button is available on the CBeebies channel, and via page 5900 on other channels.

CBeebies website

Available on Freeview and Sky only

BBC Sport Multiscreen**

Catch up on all the latest Sport via the BBC Sport multiscreen. Headlines are available around the clock with up to five additional streams available to cover the best that BBC Sport has

to offer.

Please note that Red Button sport timings are subject to change at short notice.

For the latest information refer to the BBC Sport website.

Highlights


Football: Match of the Day
MotoGP: Brno qualifying and match 2 & 3 races (including post match analysis).
Triathlon: Men's World Cup Series live from Stockholm.

**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice

Turing Festival: Slicing and Dicing the BBC

John Peel, Centre for Creative Arts: an example of a virtual view on the BBC archive

In my role as the BBC's Chief Technical Architect I try to ensure that we can make the best possible use of the latest digital tools and technologies in order to serve our audiences.

That means working with both programme-makers and programmers on internal systems that may never be seen by members of the public, but which are key to our activities - such as the Development Platform or the Digital Media Initiative.

It’s a privileged position, as it lets me see how all aspects of the BBC operate, and offers a unique insight into the creative processes that result in the amazing television and radio shows and online services that audiences treasure.

Time and again I’m reminded of a phrase that the artist Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said: "Good artists copy, great artists steal". It was his way of expressing the deep truth that all creativity in the arts and culture builds on the work of others, even if the tools and techniques of art change over time. Just as a builder needs bricks and mortar to make a house, so artists of all types need raw material to work with, drawn from many different sources.

One of those resources is the BBC’s own archive, which I see used in so many programmes and websites. It is an enormous collection of building blocks for creativity , and it has been used for many years by programme makers inside and outside the BBC to provide inspiration and material.

For some time now I’ve been part of the team driving a move to digital storage and distribution for the archive, and I can see clearly that this creates entirely new opportunities for making the BBC’s history more widely available – where we have the rights to do so – as well as new ways to use it for public benefit.

What is the archive?

If you think about the archive at all you probably think of it as something like a library, with a well-ordered collection of polished and finished works that has every episode of Dr.Who, every Prom and the DVD Box set of Frozen Planet.

While the BBC does indeed have ranks of videocassettes and DVDs all carefully catalogued and kept on shelves in our Perivale Archive Centre, and even has shops both on-line and at some physical sites, the archive is far more than that.

For one thing, it’s a lot more than just television and radio. The BBC archive has twice as many pieces of sheet music and twice as many photographs than we've got pieces of video and film. That is because my colleagues and I in the BBC Archive team believe that one of the archive’s main functions is to help people create new things.

If you want to make something new then you don’t want access to finished, polished and shrink wrapped DVDs.

Instead you want the gory details, the scripts, the original notes or score of some music, unique clips never used. You want basic building materials; the sound of a train passing, an aerial shot of the Pen-y-fan, a shot of a late 19th century gas light being lit. You want the raw building blocks, and as more and more artists get comfortable with digital technology offering the ability to merge footage and to recreate scenes in 3D, this need only increases.

Today the BBC supplies raw materials like these to anyone in the industry through Motion Gallery, which works well for large professional outfits who are primarily focused on creating what those working in the broadcasting world call "linear content" - traditional TV consisting of a single piece of continuous video played to large well defined audiences.

Digital technology and the Internet is changing that.

How demands on the BBC Archive are changing

Experiences on-line and in games are no longer linear.

Augmented reality and modern films call for access to information at a much more granular level.

And the stories told with these resources are not necessarily aimed at an entire well defined audience anymore, as the internet both fragments viewing and creates new opportunities to bring people together.

This poses a lot of challenges, not least when it comes to providing easy access for this sort of volume of material. We don’t want to go about creating the on-line equivalent of a 'tape' (where we pre- and post-fix the video with 90 seconds of black, two frames of pure white, a nice countdown timer, colour bars, test-tones and what not [PDF]) even though that is how it has been done for television clips in the past.

How do we deal with rights, when agreements almost always have assumed you would 'air' an entire episode to a nation?

And, most of all, how do you deal with provenance, so you can later recognise that the period castle used as the background three minutes 'in' was in fact derived from something else?

At the BBC the Archive Development team has been thinking about this for a long time, and I’ve been lucky enough to be part of their discussions. Some of the work has led to the idea of a Digital Public Space, while my colleagues in the BBC Archive and I have started on the cataloguing and provenance too, as without having proper names and labels for things it is hard to even 'think' about these building blocks.

More recently we've been trying to see what happens if you do this for real, collaborating with Arts Council England to create The Space, a new platform for all types of digital art.

But like most people in the BBC I tend to look at and learn from large organisations, from people used to processes such as 'commissioning' and who by and large produce, or have produced, a 'single final product' like a programme or a website. Their concerns and understanding can be very different from a small game developer, someone with a wonderful business idea for a smartphone app, or a remix artist.

At this year’s Turing Festival in Edinburgh I’m going to spend some time talking with smaller businesses to explore and discuss what new technologies and new business ideas could be fuelled by the archives of the BBC and other cultural institutions.

First on Friday, in a panel titled ‘Mashing up the BBC, Slicing and Dicing UCL’, and then with a more hands on design-jam session on Saturday.

It’s part of a broader BBC initiative, captured in projects like the Connected Studio, for me and my colleagues to understand what is needed in terms of interfaces and catalogues, to explore a path through rights issues and, perhaps most of all, to understand how creators and innovators would like to work with the BBC.

With the help of the new digital tools BBC Future Media can start to think about the archive in a different way, as a collection of assets that can be made available to creators from any sector and any size of company. These are early days, and we are all at the very start of a long journey – so I welcome your comments and contributions

Dirk-Willem van Gulik is the Chief Technical Architect, BBC Future Media

A Journey through Search Engine Optimisation

Top search engine terms to BBC Food, by month. See full size version on Duncan Bloor's blog

This is the first of a series of three blog posts about Search Engine Optimisation in the BBC

I’m Duncan Bloor and I’m a producer in the User Building team in Knowledge and Learning in Salford. My job is to make sure that the Knowledge and Learning Product is maximising the opportunities to expose its content across search engines, social platforms and the rest of the web.

My journey with online and in particular with search engine optimisation (SEO) started outside the BBC. I was never really interested in, nor had the patience for, writing lines and lines of code for what I saw as little reward or in the finer aspects of designing a website.

I first became interested in SEO, and in particular how people behaved online, when I was shown the statistics for a small website and asked whether or not I could improve the number of visitors it received.

At the time I was concentrating hard on a becoming a surf bum in Australia after leaving the Royal Navy where I’d worked as a medic for eight years but I love a challenge and SEO seemed like an exciting new frontier and a welcome change from the well charted, highly regimented disciplines of medicine and the military.

When I first looked at the statistics, I was fascinated by the fact that we could find out the what, where, when, how and why of people’s online behaviour without commissioning large scale studies or referring to far flung theory. We had all the data we needed to make decisions about our sites right at our fingertips. What people search for still fascinates me today.

The more I dug into this strange new world, the more it intrigued me. I began to find out exactly why the search engines liked some of our pages and not others, why some people would buy from a site and others leave. I began to see the website as a platform that I could perform countless experiments on. Where using one word over another would increase the chances of someone leaving by 5% or moving an image slightly higher would increase the chances of someone clicking on it.

Part psychology, part copywriting and part science, this new role suited me and I thrived on finding out exactly how users and search engines interacted with online content. I carried on doing this for three years with various marketing agencies, start-ups and multi-nationals until I joined the BBC’s newly formed ‘user building team’ in October 2009.

The BBC was a whole new ball game. In the commercial world that I’d been dealing in, the rules were simple. The more visitors, the better, no questions asked.

In the BBC however, nothing is ever simple. How online content was commissioned often didn’t take into account there being a ‘search audience’ for that content or in many cases, even an audience. Even finding the right person to talk to about a technical issue - such as Learning Zone's Class Clips having 200,000 more URLs than pieces of content - was often a challenge.

After finding and talking to the right person, it turned out that Class Clips generated not one URL for each content or aggregation, but multiple URLs depending on how you navigated there.

This means that search engines have large numbers of URLs to crawl through but a much smaller amount of truly unique content. This results in a bit of a mess in terms of how our content gets surfaced in the search engines and how much it is trusted, linked to and shared around the wider web.

I did find that the people who work for the BBC are naturally enthused about anything that will connect them with their audiences, so the reasoning behind SEO runs with the grain of the BBC’s culture. Search engines are just looking for things that will please the user i.e. readable, reliable and relevant content. At heart, my colleagues are storytellers, and search engines are the start of many people’s online stories.

Pancakes

Working across the range of websites in BBC Vision, my colleagues in the User Building team and I worked to incrementally improve SEO.

For example, we found that by using Google’s webmaster tools, we could track and report on the effectiveness of our meta descriptions in making people click through from the search results pages to our content, which in turn made for a compelling, data driven argument to ‘optimise’ these meta descriptions.

Delia's pancake recipe page had the meta description altered in mid-August 2010. Looking at the proportion of people who clicked on that result (“click through rates”) in the search listings before and after gives us an indication as to the success of the change.

I picked this recipe because it had high volumes of searches and it was in first position; so any changes in click through rates would be more likely to be statistically significant.

The results were very promising:

Around 10,000 people per week search for 'pancake recipe' or similar phrases.

Jul 30 - Aug 6 2010 (old meta description) had a 67% click through rate (the percentage of people who clicked on our result in the search engine results page after seeing it)
Aug 27 - Sep 3 2010 (improved meta description) had a 81% click through rate

This means that through changing the meta description - how our content is ‘sold’ to searchers on the search results page - we increased the number of people clicking on it by 14%

All else being equal, this means an extra 1,400 visitors per week or around 100,000 visitors per year when you take into account the huge rise in searches for pancakes around pancake day.

That’s not bad for just a short amount of extra thought and effort being put into the meta description.

Work like this, along with a training programme, consultations with tech and editorial teams and checks on content being launched have been the mainstay of the User Building team’s work within the BBC.

BBC Values and SEO

What makes SEO unique at the BBC is the editorial slant content producers have to take on it. For example, search engines tend to trust BBC content (because of the number of inbound links to the site and its stability over time) and rank it highly so when BBC staff choose keywords, we need to be as honest as possible. This is so that we don’t inadvertently outperform other content on the web which may be more deserving of that top spot in Google. (This is almost “reverse SEO” if you like!)

Content can also be removed when the budget to maintain and support it has expired, or because rights have expired, or because the site it is part of is being rebuilt. When this happens it’s my job to look at which old content is bringing new visitors to bbc.co.uk, and might be worth resourcing, to help everyone understand the importance of redirecting visitors who’d otherwise be left dangling on a broken link.

For example, when BBC Food re-launched in 2009/10, Oli Bartlett managed the redirect strategy very successfully, and he will blog about that next week.

The positives of working in this organisation far outweigh the negatives. I get the opportunity to do my work in a much deeper and more involved way that I just wouldn’t get to do on the ‘outside’ and although this means working just as hard or harder, I enjoy it far more as it feels more interesting.

For example, at present I’m looking into analysing what people search for online and ways to represent that data to our content teams so that they can use it intuitively. This has resulted in work such as the ‘Wheel of Hunger’ which made it onto the front page of The Guardian.co.uk.

Other examples include analysing what the most asked questions are (JPG)  and a breakdown of search demand in other knowledge areas.

One of the things I like about my job is answering peoples questions about my work, so feel free to ask any you may have in the comments below.

Duncan Bloor is Producer, User Building in BBC Knowledge and Learning

What's On Red Button 18th - 25th August

Reading & Leeds

Catch this year's Reading and Leeds festival over the bank holiday weekend on the BBC Red Button, BBC Three, Radio 1 and online at BBC Reading & Leeds

Coverage on Red Button starts on Friday 24th Aug at 7pm and will feature sets from The Cure, Paramore, Graham Coxon and many more. We return at 7pm on Saturday 25th Aug, including Kasabian, Florence + the Machine and The Cribs. Sunday starts earlier at 4pm, featuring Foo Fighters, The Horrors and sets from the entire weekend.

Viewers on Sky, Virgin and Freesat will have a choice of bands from the Main Stage and the Radio 1 / NME stage using the Red Button multiscreen. Viewers on Freeview will be able to see a different band about every half hour on Red Button and channel 301. We'll also be bringing you a selection of tracks from up and coming new bands on the BBC Introducing stage.

From Monday 27th to Friday 31st, catch a different 'best band' each and every day (availability varies on Freeview).

Join in the conversation on Twitter all weekend with #bbcreadingfest

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Fri 24th August, 7:00pm-2:00am

Sat 25th August, 7:00pm-2:00am

Sat 25th August, 9:50pm-2:00am

Freeview:

Fri 24th August, 7:10pm-2:00am

Sat 25th August, 9:30pm-2:00am

BBC Three Comedy Marathon

Recorded as live on Friday 17th August, BBC Three's all-night Comedy Marathon showcased the best of this year's Edinburgh Festival and featured some of the biggest names in comedy alongside the most exciting new talent. MCs Chris Ramsey, Andrew Maxwell and Susan Calman were joined by our presenter Jameela Jamil and over forty different performers across the night including Carl Donnelly, Marlon Davis, Cariad Lloyd, Tony Law, Daniel Sloss, Jimeoin, Jason Byrne, Phil Kay, Nina Conti, Ellie Taylor and Totally Tom. This is the spirit of the Edinburgh Fringe, brought to you late night on BBC Red Button.

From Monday 20th August, you can press red to enjoy the Comedy Marathon highlights.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 18th August, 9:20pm-5:20am

Sun 19th August, 9:00pm-5:00am

Tue 21st August, 9:00pm-4:00am

Wed 22nd August, 9:00pm-4:00am

Thu 23rd August, 9:00pm-4:00am

Freeview:

Sat 18th August, 9:20pm-5:20am

Sun 19th August, 9:00pm-5:00am

Tue 21st August, 10:10pm-4:00am

Wed 22nd August, 9:00pm-4:00am

Thu 23rd August, 9:00pm-4:00am

Radio 4 at the Edinburgh Fringe

Press red to watch a special edition of Mark Steel's in Town. Mark travels to Leith for this episode of his Sony Gold award-winning Radio 4 series, meeting the locals and discovering the stories of the town.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Mon 20th August, 7:10pm-6:00am

Tue 21st August, 6:00am-6:00am

Wed 22nd August, 6:00am-6:00am

Thu 23rd August, 6:00am-4:00am

Freeview:

Mon 20th August, 7:10pm-6:00am

Tue 21st August, 6:00am-7:25pm

Wed 22nd August, 4:10am-6:00am,6:00am-8:50pm

Thu 23rd August, 4:10am-6:00am, 6:00am-2:50pm, 6:10pm-8:50pm

Deadly 60 Quiz

Are you ready to take on the deadliest quiz ever? Steve Backshall is returning with some more deadly round-the-world adventures. Deadly 60 fans can get a whole

lot extra by pressing red to play along with the new Deadly 60 Quiz. Finally you can find out if you've got the world's most deadly mind.

Deadly 60 devotees will get a sneak peek at series 3, through a deadly dozen of quality questions, with Steve helping you along the way. Do you know your Hippos

from your Hyenas? Your Humpbacks from your Hammerheads? See if you can get a deadly dozen correct! You can even play again and improve your score.

The Deadly 60 Quiz - play it now if you dare!

Available on Sky/Freeview

Sky:

Sat 18th August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Sun 19th August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Mon 20th August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Tue 21st August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Wed 22nd August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Thu 23rd August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Fri 24th August, 7:00am-6:30pm

Sat 25th August, 7:00am-11:20am

Freeview:

Sat 18th August, 7:00am-10:20am

Sun 19th August, 7:00am-10:20am

Mon 20th August, 7:00am-10:20am

Fri 24th August, 7:00am-10:20am

Sat 25th August, 7:00am-11:20am

Secret Fortune - Play Along Quiz

The National Lottery: Secret Fortune - The ultra-tense quiz show with lots of twists returns to BBC One,

hosted by Nick Knowles.

Studio contestants compete to win their Secret

Fortune, anything from £100 to £100,000. Press the Red Button during the show to
play along at home with the contestants. What would your Secret Fortune be?

Available on Sky/Freeview:

Sat 18th August, 8.20pm-9.10pm

Sat 25th August, 8:30pm-9:20pm

CBBC Extra

Press red on the CBBC channel this week and join Chris and Dodge T. Dog as they introduce exclusive clips from a wealth of CBBC goodies including Deadly 60 and Marrying Mum and Dad. Dodge and Hacker also get their dancing grooves on behind-the-scenes of all new Alesha's Street Dance Stars!

You can also read Chris and Dodge's blog, answers to some of your questions, read your horoscopes and see if the jokes that made Chris and Dodge LOL will have the same effect on you.

Go on, press red... You know you want to!

CBBC Extra website

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 18th August, 7:00am-10:00am

Mon 20th August, 7:00am-10:00am,3:00pm-6:00pm

Tue 21st August, 7:00am-10:00am,3:00pm-6:00pm

Wed 22nd August, 7:00am-10:00am,3:00pm-6:00pm

Thu 23rd August, 7:00am-10:00am,3:00pm-6:00pm

Fri 24th August, 7:00am-10:00am

Freeview:

Thu 23rd August, 3:00pm-6:00pm

CBeebies Red Button

BBC Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun

world of CBeebies interactive!

Your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and

digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings
from one another. This has enabled the Red Button team to offer the best games tailored to each system.

CBeebies Red Button is available on the CBeebies channel, and via page 5900 on other channels.

CBeebies website

Available on Freeview and Sky only

BBC Sport Multiscreen**

Catch up on all the latest Sport via the BBC Sport multiscreen. Headlines are available around the clock with up to five additional streams available to cover the best that BBC Sport has

to offer.

Please note that Red Button sport timings are subject to change at short notice.

For the latest information refer to the BBC Sport website.

Highlights


Football: Match of the Day
MotoGP: Indianapolis Moto 2 and 3 races.
Live Athletics - Lausanne Diamond League.

**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice

Desktop BBC iPlayer: Flash Player upgrade

I'm Dave Price and the head of BBC iPlayer.



I wanted to update you on a minor upgrade my team are making to the media player on BBC iPlayer and what this change will mean for some of you.

We're upgrading our media player for two principle reasons. Firstly, so that the BBC can continue to offer the highest quality media playback and new experiences like those used by millions of people during the Olympics on the BBC Sport site.

Secondly, Flash Player 10.1 was released in June 2010, and since then there have been five further major releases (which most people have upgraded to). By focusing the Engineering and Test teams on the most commonly used versions of Flash Player we can maintain confidence in the high quality of BBC iPlayer for the widest audience.



So, from 22 August 2012, you'll need Adobe Flash Player 10.2 or above to continue using BBC iPlayer on your desktop.

We've tried to ensure this change affects the fewest people possible, but appreciate making any changes can be a bit of a pain. As 98.5% of people who use the desktop version of BBC iPlayer already have a version of Flash Player in excess of 10.2, we're confident only a small proportion of you are affected.



For those using Flash Player 10.1 and below, the upgrade is really simple. You can upgrade at the Adobe website in advance (or see the BBC Webwise Guide), or wait for update prompts on BBC iPlayer next Wednesday.

As always happy to receive your feedback.

Dave Price is the Head of BBC iPlayer, Programmes and On Demand, BBC Future Media

Audio and Video Streaming the Olympics

BBC Online operations video monitoring wall

I’m Marina Kalkanis and I head up the Core Services teams in BBC Future Media that are responsible for the BBC live and on demand programming on the internet. My colleague Cait O’Riordan has already outlined how the Olympic content – metadata and AV streams - gets to your device, and David Rogers has blogged in detail about building the Olympic data services.

This blog will give you more detail about how we built the media delivery workflow for the online Olympics.

My team takes the live broadcast feeds and turns them into formats that can be delivered on the internet along with the appropriate metadata. We also deliver the Games catchup media that remain available for the next six months.

Early on we decided to build our own workflow solution as the integration points to our own back-end systems tend to be unique to the BBC. We also decided to use, as much as possible, the same infrastructure and expertise that powers the BBC iPlayer, News, and Sport sites.

With iPlayer, News and Sport we already had services that were very good at Video on Demand (VOD) and live simulcast. What was new for the Olympics was, as Matthew Clark has blogged, the scale of our ambition: 24 simultaneous live streams, thousands of events and more than 2400 hours of content over the two weeks.

Plus we were planning to double or triple any previous streaming peak.

We needed something that could handle the load, allow users to jump to any point in any event stream, and look great on a range of devices.

Live Media

Simplified diagram of the live streaming architecture

So where we’ve innovated is in our use of HTTP adaptive bitrate streaming. 

ABR was tested in the Wimbledon HD HTTP streaming trial (interesting detail in blog post by Andy Armstrong) that laid the groundwork for the Olympics video.

Delivering live video using HTTP – the same way web pages are delivered to your browser - gives us much greater distribution capacity as it uses existing caches and standard HTTP infrastructure. This allows users to receive high quality streaming video even when we’re delivering the peaks around the big Team GB medal moments.

To get very technical,we decided to use eight h.264 profiles ranging from 54 kbps at 224x126 to 3500 kbps at1280x720. We serve these in several different Adaptive Bit Rate sets targeted at different screen resolutions, device capability and network throughput. We are using two flavours of chunked HTTP delivery: Apple HLS and Adobe HDS. We are still delivering RTMP – an older streaming protocol - for some legacy devices.

A flagship feature of the BBC online Olympics is the interactive video player (IVP, blog post by Alex Perry)  with chapter points that allow a user to jump back to key moments in a live video stream. The streaming technology behind this is HTTP Dynamic Streaming from Adobe with timecodes inserted to allow the player to accurately seek a specific second in the stream.

Oliver Bartlett has blogged about how the Olympic Data services supply the chapter markers and other metadata to the IVP.

Catch-Up

As soon as an event is over the clock starts ticking for us to make the content available as catchup.

The live Flash Media Servers write the HTTP chunks for the live events to disk.

Another first for us is that rather than producing a separate encoding of the same media for the catchup version we recombine the live HTTP chunks back into a single mp4 file and deliver that to the origin of the Content Distribution Network to use for on-demand streaming.

Managing the Streams

To manage so many simultaneous live events we’ve built a live stream management tool we call Marvin.

Marvin maintains all the encoders and all the streaming settings through a single interface. This means that with a single console the AV producers can start and stop encoders, connect the sources, bring graphic slates up and down, route the encoded streams to the correct end points and monitor the status of the encoders.

Marvin also sends the messages to our data services to turn on and off links on the pages and create the right connections, and sends the accurate start and end times to the Olympic data services.

To manage the full and dynamic schedule we’ve built an event scheduling tool that sets up webcasts for each event with scheduled start and end times. This tool allows the same AV producers to manage the full schedule for each day.

A really fantastic aspect of working on the Olympics online video service is seeing all the BBC Future Media teams pulling together to meet the challenge and the support we received from the wider streaming media industry.

If you have any questions on how we delivered the video service I'd love to hear from you.

Marina Kalkanis is Head of Core Services in BBC Future Media, Programmes and On-Demand

More traffic, more videos, more screens: building the BBC's Olympic site

BBC Olympics architecture overview. It shows how many components are involved!

Hi, I'm Matthew Clark, the Senior Technical Architect for BBC Online's Olympic website and apps.

Alongside colleagues Mike Brown and David Holroyd, it's been my responsibility to create the technical strategy that has allowed us to produce successful online Olympic products.

We've focused on the design and development to make sure the site and apps stay reliable and can handle high traffic loads, whilst offering more content than ever before. In this technical blog post I'll be looking at some of the challenges we faced and how we overcame them.

More traffic: Handling unprecedented audience levels

We expected the Olympics would drive far more traffic to our site than ever before, and it did. Planning for this load was not easy. There are over 60,000 dynamically generated pages, many with a significant amount of content on them, so efficient page generation is vital.

Content needs to be as 'live' as possible, so long-term caching is not an option. We use a range of caches (including Content Delivery Networks, Varnish, and mod_cache) to offload the bulk of the traffic from our Apache web servers. For content that's dynamic, cache lifespan (max-age) varies between a few seconds and a few minutes, depending on the context. This is particularly true for the new video player, which needs the latest data every few seconds to compliment the live video stream.

Page generation is done using PHP, which is stateless and receives all of its data through calls to a RESTful API. This API is the Java application layer that retrieves its data from a range of data stores (including MySQL databases, triple stores, and XML content stores). It's the most critical layer from a performance point-of-view, as load is high, calls can involve significant processing, potentially multiple data store calls, and limitations on what can be parallelised. Caching (mod_cache and Memcached) is again used to address the bulk of the traffic.

From data stores to screens, sites and apps

We spent considerable time modelling how traffic creates load on the whole stack. This was first done theoretically (through modelling of user behaviour, load balancing, and caching). We then did it for real - we used data centres around the world to place load equivalent to over a million concurrent users on the site, to confirm everything worked during busy Games load.

More video: handling 2,500 hours of coverage

A moment when all 24 streams were running at the same time. Can you identify what they are?

There's been plenty of discussion about the BBC's 24 video streams, and the challenges of creating them at the International Broadcast Centre by the Olympic Park. This is the equivalent to 24 new channels, offered over cable and satellite as well as via IP.

Once the channels are created, the challenge is to direct viewers to the right content at the right times.

Sport schedules have a habit of changing - extra time, delays due to rain, etc - and the sites and apps need to show this. When an event starts, the tools used by (human) controllers to control the video also log the start in our XML content store. This metadata is then picked up by pages and apps (via an API) so that, within a minute of the event starting, there are links to the content throughout the site, app, and red button. A similar process happens when coverage finishes. Olympic sessions can be as short as 45 minutes, so the faster a video stream can be made available, the better.

More screens: coverage on mobiles, tablets, computers and internet connected TV

The BBC has a four screen strategy where we develop for PCs, tablets, mobiles, and internet connected TV. For the Games we've offered an unprecedented amount of content to all four. In addition, there are Olympic apps for iOS and Android smartphones, a Facebook app, foreign language content for World Service sites, and a red button service for satellite and cable TVs.

Our architecture is the classic multi-tier approach - pushing as much logic as possible into shared components, so that the amount of development for each interface is as low as possible. This is DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) at a multi-platform level. For web pages, a single PHP codebase creates both the desktop and mobile versions. This includes the iOS and Android apps, which use PhoneGap to 'wrap' the mobile website for most of its functionality. It has saved us having to rewrite functionality in native code. Certain other applications, such as the Olympic Facebook app, are different enough to warrant their own codebase, but still make the same API calls to the Java application layer, where most of the 'business' logic is held.

More content: Data is power

Video aside, there is a wealth of data required to make the Olympic site. The primary source is the Olympic Data Service, which blog posts from Oli Bartlett and Dave Rogers have already covered in depth. In brief, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) provide a comprehensive data feed that covers all sports, and provides a wealth of data - from latest scores to medal tables. This, combined with stories from journalists, and other sources such as Twitter, creates the content for tens of thousands of results, athletes, country, and event pages.

The Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) model, which understands relationships (triples) between all content and concepts, is the process that ensures everything automatically appears in the right place. All created content, including stories, medals, and world records, are tagged (normally automatically) with the appropriate athletes, sports and countries. This causes the content to appear on the appropriate page without human intervention.

In essence, it's this automatic curation of pages that has allowed us to offer such a broad range of product. The automation has kept maintenance to a minimum, freeing journalists to focus on writing content. It's allowed multiple products and thousands of pages to stay up-to-date without a large operational overhead.

More testing: Simulating an entire Olympics

With all this content, data, video, and technology, comes a huge engineering challenge: how do you test it? All development areas follow Test Driven Development (TDD) so there is no shortage of automated unit and component tests. But what happens when you plug everything together? How can you be sure that the right medals go to the right country, or that video works on all devices, or that results appear correctly for all 36 sports? Unlike, say, the football season, the Olympics only happen once every four years, and only last a couple of weeks.

There are no second chances.

We needed to be 100% sure that on day one of the Games, everything would work as expected.

To tackle this we set up an entire team, as big as any development team, with the job of proving everything would work when the Games started. We took a three-pronged approach:

We used as much of the Olympic technology as we could for other sporting events, such as F1 and Wimbledon. This was often offered as a beta service - and we're grateful to all who gave these a go.
We used the Olympic test events to get video and stats that would be similar to that of the Games. We ran this on our staging environment so that they could be made to look like real Olympic events without appearing on our normal site.
Most importantly, we created fake video and data that let us simulate the Olympics. We picked the most interesting moments of the Games (the opening ceremony, the first big day, etc) and created all the inputs as they would be at that moment. This was run in our staging environment and allowed us to see all sites and apps behave as they would when the Olympics were underway. (You can read more about how we made the simulated data in the post by my colleague Dave Rogers.)

This testing process lasted several months and caught a significant number of bugs and performance problems. Fortunately it paid off - I was a little nervous on the first day of the Games, but it passed without incident.

More for the future

With the end of the Games fast approaching, attention now turns to other areas of the Sport website.

Some features have already been applied throughout - for example, most live video coverage will be in HD from now on. Other services that we've offered for Olympics aren't yet ready for use elsewhere (mobile apps and video chapter points being two). Over the coming months we'll be working on bringing many of these features to the rest of Sport, and perhaps other parts of BBC Online too.

If you've any questions about the technology we've used during the Olympics, please get in touch using the comments below.

Matthew Clark is Senior Technical Architect, Knowledge & Learning, BBC Future Media

Olympics: Red Button

As Executive Product Manager for BBC Future Media I've led the Red Button and Connected TV services for the Olympics. The Red Button service has reached a huge audience and I wanted to share some of the thinking that went into it.

Up to 24 simultaneous live events were available to satellite and cable homes via Red Button , with Freeview homes getting up to two extra channels in SD, and one in HD. Over twenty four million people (42% of the UK population) watched at least 15 minutes of coverage on the BBC Red Button, which is a fantastic uptake. The reaction in the press and on Twitter has been hugely positive - thanks to everyone for their thoughts and feedback.

The home page of the service on Sky and Freesat presented an overview of the most exciting events at that moment in time, using text and still images.

Though BBC Sport has had a Red Button video service for some years now, we needed a new interface for these Olympics.

The existing service carries six channels, but we needed to carry up to 24, via an interface that viewers would understand instantly.

Even though the 24 channels are available on the Sky, Freesat and Virgin Media programme guides as well as via Red Button, Red Button is the main access point for most people.

The Red Button app had to be an easy-to-use tool for those people - and add enough value that people would choose to use it even though the channels were available elsewhere. We also wanted to put HD video at the heart of Red Button – something we’ve never done before.

We focussed on two tasks - help viewers find something to watch now, and help them decide what to watch later.

We rejected other features - such as a full schedule, or news stories - that would have added complexity. During the Olympics there is live video for approximately 16 hours each day, so we focused on the one thing viewers would really want to do - watch it.

The schedule data had to be accurate 100% of the time.

In the past, Red Button applications have had a bespoke production process, separate to that used for BBC Online. Given the complexity of 24 live events, that approach would have led to inefficiency and errors.

On this occasion exactly the same content was going out online and on TV, so we were able to share production tools across both services, and drive the application from the same data services as online (blog post by Oliver Bartlett). This means time and schedule information is created once by BBC Sport staff, and updated simultaneously across Red Button, online, mobile and Connected TV. This saves money and ensures complexity is kept to a minimum.

On all platforms viewers could access an a-z of all sports, which gave an overview of everything that was covered live that day.

We worked closely with our satellite and cable partners throughout to make the application as responsive as possible, and adapt the design to the capabilities of each platform.

For example, Sky and Freesat boxes were able to display still images, so we could incorporate these into the application.

This was not possible on Virgin Media, but we were able to have a quarter-screen view of each channel available as a preview, so we incorporated this into the application.

You can see the similarities and differences in the applications from the images below.

In addition, we took advantage of HD technology to present HD video streams where the viewer’s set-top box supported them – this meant HD was made available seamlessly, and the viewer did not have to press a button to select it.

The Red Button homepage in Virgin Media homes used a mini-video window to showcase the best live events, due to the different capabilities of the cable platform.

Finally, we wanted to ensure that the Red Button service looked like our other Olympics products.

My colleague Nick Haley has previously blogged about the design thinking across 2012. This work was established when we started building Red Button, so there were design elements ready for us to adopt - in particular, the use of blue to represent live, the use of timelines to represent how much of an event had elapsed, and the use of Olympic pictograms. We hope this made it easier for users to adapt quickly to our products as they move from device to device to follow the Games.

[image error]

Early designs for Red Button were based on our Connected TV app, and needed to be simplified to ensure ease-of-use and responsiveness.

We've also had feedback from users with accessibility issues - in particular, those with poor eyesight - that the application has proven easy to use for them, which we are delighted about.

The project team is overwhelmed by the reaction this application has had and we hope it enhanced your experience of the Games.

Aaron Scullion is Executive Product Manager, BBC Future Media

Related:

Cait O’Riordan blog post on the usage of BBC Olympic services on desktop, mobile, tablet and connected TV

Update: "Connected TV" removed from title 17:04 Aug 04. Aaron has blogged about BBC Sport on Connected TV in a previous post.

BBC News on mobile: now with local news and weather

News homepage on a tablet and smartphone customised for a user in Shropshire

Back in March I wrote about the relaunch of the BBC News mobile site.

Since then, my development team has been busy adding new features and functionality. Our latest update is particularly exciting because smartphone users in the UK can now personalise the news homepage with local news and weather. You can search by town or postcode, or if you phone supports it, you can use the "Use my location" button.

From then on, the news homepage will remember your settings and will give you the weather forecast for the next few hours, in three-hourly chunks, as well as the top headlines in your local area. You can easily change your settings to pick up a new location.

I'm really pleased with this new addition as it's something you've particularly been asking us for.

The BBC News development team, based in Broadcasting House in London, works in an iterative development style, using research and data to inform the next priorities. We're always aiming to ensure we are adding real improvements for our users, so your feedback is really important to us.

We've been quietly releasing updates every fortnight or so. This week's update also includes some improvements to the landscape layout for tablets, and you'll see we've added extra pictures to story pages.

Since March we have also:

improved the navigation so you can more easily find news sections such as Business, Technology, Health and so on
made it easier to find related news articles, including analysis from our top correspondents
added the ability to share a story using email, Facebook & Twitter (more improvements still to come)
improved our Live pages so it's even easier to follow the latest and breaking developments on a big story
made layout improvements for portrait and landscape viewing on all mobiles

We're working on further improvements for mobile and tablet users. We're using an innovative approach called responsive design, to offer an optimised experience across a range of devices, from basic mobiles through to the very latest smartphones and tablets. Eventually this approach will also extend to the desktop browser. Our aim is to offer the same BBC News content across devices, while making the most of their multiple screen sizes and capabilities.

If you're interested in finding out more, my boss Chris Russell, has explained the thinking behind the responsive design approach.

I hope you like the changes so far. Please let me know, by commenting on this post or sending an email to mobile@bbc.co.uk.

Kate Milner, Mobile Product Manager for News, Future Media