BBC's Blog, page 36

Planet Dinosaurs Ultimate Killers in 3D

Side by Side (SbyS) image

This is a very brief post as it's more a request for comment than an explanation of a process.

On the 19th August at 17:35 the BBC HD Channel will be transmitting "Ulimate Killers".

This single programme has been made from the very successful Planet Dinosaur series.

The programme is only available in 3D so we will be testing the "Watch in 2D" application on Freeview and Freesat.

I'd like you to comment on this blog post to tell me what you think of the "Watch in 2D" application. Unfortunately the application is not available on Cable or the Sky set top boxes yet.

The programme will also be available on BBC iPlayer. There will be several different encoded versions but as we are letting the automation take care of encoding I won't know what will happen until you do on some platforms!

All versions will be side by side so we also know not all devices will be able to convert them to a viewable 3D image.

What I do know is the image via the Freesat, Freeview and Virgin TiVo iPlayer apps will be 1920 x 1080 side by side. This is a new test encoding based on the work the iPlayer team carried out before the Olympics.

If you do want to comment, can you also let me know the:

platform you used and the device e.g. Freeview set top box, PC or Mac via DVB card, PC or Mac via bbc.co.uk/iPlayer...
rough measured speed of your internet connection
make and model of TV and or set top box

I can't guarantee individual replies but we do want to collate as much information as possible to assess our next steps

Many thanks.

Andy Quested is Head of Technology, BBC HD & 3D

The story of the digital Olympics: streams, browsers, most watched, four screens

The first week of the Olympics ended with some record breaking stats for BBC Online.

Since I posted at the end of the first week of the Games, Team GB have broken records of their own, winning the most medals of any British Olympics team since 1908. The once-in-a-lifetime success of our athletes has driven equally incredible engagement from audiences with our Olympics coverage.

With London 2012 at an end, after a spectacular Closing Ceremony last night, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell the story of how the BBC's audiences enjoyed the first truly digital Olympics.

The Olympics in its entirety

Today's sport I never thought I'd watch, shooting. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/live-video/p00w2zwp

- Daniel Thirsk @thirskazoid, 7:12 AM - 2 Aug 12, Twitter

The BBC's promise was to deliver coverage of every sport from every venue, and we certainly achieved this with our digital coverage: from the blue ribbon events like the 100m final all the way to the first taekwondo heats, the multi-faceted entirety of the Olympics was available to watch throughout the day across online and Red Button.

Overall, this comprehensive coverage drove very large amounts of traffic to the Sport website and to Red Button channels.

Daily Reach and Cumulative Total (millions)
BBC Red Button - BARB reach (people aged 4+), with threshold "watched 15 consecutive minutes or more" - in line with BBC TV channel standard metric. Cookie churn means the BBC Online figures will include some unavoidable duplication over this period.

And the peak audiences for Team GB's medal moments were bigger than anything we've ever seen. Over a 24 hour period on the busiest Olympic days, Olympic traffic to bbc.co.uk exceeded that for the entire BBC coverage of FIFA World Cup 2010 games. On the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold and we shifted 700 Gb/s.

BBC Sport Online's most requested live video stream was of the Tennis Singles Finals, where Andy Murray and Serena Williams were victorious. You can see the rest of the top ten below:

Live stream
Day
Requests


1
Tennis Singles Finals - Serena Williams and Andy Murray golds
Sun 05 Aug
820,000


2
Bradley Wiggins winning gold in the Men's Cycling Road Time-Trial
Wed 01 Aug
729,000


3
Tennis Singles Semi-Finals - Serena Williams and Andy Murray
Fri 03 Aug
610,000


4
Mark Cavendish competing in the Men's Cycling Road Race
Sat 28 Jul
531,000


5
Athletics Heats including Jessica Ennis in the Heptathlon
Fri 03 Aug
468,000


6
Rowing gold for Glover and Stanning in Women's Quadruple Sculls
Wed 01 Aug
411,000


7
Team GB winning gold in the Men's Team Pursuit and Victoria Pendleton winning the Women's Keirin Cycling Final
Fri 03 Aug
407,000


8
Cycling golds for Chris Hoy (Keirin) and Laura Trott (Omnium)
Tue 07 Aug
348,000


9
Athletics Heats including Usain Bolt winning the Men's 100m Final
Sun 05 Aug
344,000


10
The Brownlee Brothers winning gold and bronze in the Men's Triathlon
Tue 07 Aug
336,000

Top ten most-requested events from Olympic live video streams on BBC Sport Online

Audiences quickly grew accustomed to being able to switch between up to 24 streams. In between the peaks of Team GB medal moments, our data clearly shows people moving across streams to check out a whole host of different events. For example, around 6pm on Saturday 4th, audiences finished watching GB Gold in Women's Team Pursuit Cycling on stream 7 to take a look at the end of Brazil v Honduras in the football on stream 6, before switching back to stream 7 as the cycling action kicked off again.

And while team GB's medal moments drove huge traffic, at the same time less flagship events were getting attention on other streams: at lunchtime on Monday 30th, while a lot of people were watching swimming on stream 1, more people were concurrently watching weightlifting on stream 12.

Below is a snapshot of the action across a select six Red Button streams on Wednesday 1st August, the day Bradley Wiggins won his record-breaking Gold.

Number of people watching individual streams (millions, BARB, 4+), stacked totals, for six streams with highest peaks on Wednesday 1st Aug.

We wanted to offer the whole breadth of the Games to audiences.

It's been hugely gratifying to see from our data that they embraced our comprehensive coverage: we saw over 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content across all online platforms

The Olympics wherever and whenever you want it

I've now sampled all of BBC's Olympic coverage BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC1HD, BBCHD, Red Button, Website, App and Radio 5live...

- Kevin Ormiston @lacksorginality, 11:47 AM - 9 Aug 12, Twitter

Offering everything isn't enough in the age of multiple devices: our further ambition was to ensure audiences could access our coverage wherever they were, and whenever they wanted it. For a lot of our audience, that place was, of course, on television: overall our Olympics TV coverage (TV channels and Red Button streams) reached 51.9m people.

As I've previously observed, this has really been the multi-platform Games, where audiences have consumed our content across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV at different times of the day.

Our data below splits out the four screens across 24 hours, to reveal some key insights:

PC usage maxes out during the week at lunchtime and during mid-afternoon peak Team GB moments

Mobile takes over around 6pm as people leave the office but still want to keep up to date with the latest action

Tablet usage reaches a peak at around 9pm: people using them as a second screen experience as they watch the Games on their TVs, and also as they continue to watch in bed

Usage by hour across the day by device - for 28 July to 9 Aug

Millions of unique browsers daily, stacked, by device type

Consumption of video content on mobile has been perhaps the key takeaway from the two weeks: we saw 12 million requests for video on mobile across the whole of the Games.

We've had 9.2 million browsers to our mobile site and Olympics app over the course of the Games (and over 2.3 million browsers on tablet). While PC and tablet usage has generally peaked and dipped at different times of the day, mobile consumption has increased steadily from the morning to a plateau in the early afternoon, before dipping away in conjunction with TV viewing in the evening. It's obvious: people have their mobiles with them 24/7, and have been using our app and mobile site to keep up to date with the action wherever they are.

The Olympics on your terms

@arealthomastse Too late, he stole the Gold medal. Skip to Chapter 5, Gold Medal point for the over the top reaction. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/live-video/p00w3151

- Aaron Chai @aaron_chai, 10:18 AM - 5 Aug 12, Twitter

With so much content available across multiple devices, our final challenge was to ensure that audiences could find the things they wanted to watch. Our aim was to put audiences in control of their Olympics experience, transforming the way they could navigate through the huge breadth of coverage using the extra features of the interactive video player.

The chapter marking feature, enabling audiences to go back to key event moments instantly, received an average 1.5 million clicks per day. The chapter marker for Bolt's 100m Final win was clicked on more than 13,000 times.

Looking to the future

We invested in delivering the first truly digital Olympics to ensure that our audience had a fantastic experience during the two weeks of the games.

But we also wanted to ensure that the BBC was in the best position to continue to deliver great experiences for years to come. The infrastructure and video delivery systems we have put in for the games will be used for future coverage for both BBC Sport and the rest of the BBC. And all our Olympics video content will be able to watch online on the BBC Sport website until January 13th.

We also hope to leave a lasting legacy in terms of audiences to BBC online. Over the course of the Olympics we attracted huge numbers of new users to our BBC Sport interactive services and we hope that having enjoyed our digital video coverage they will be back for other events the BBC cover in the future.

The digital development teams in London and Salford as well as our commercial partners have worked incredibly hard for months to ensure that we delivered what we set out to do for 2012. Our editorial colleagues have worked around the clock delivering the video and text coverage that our audience loves. I am so glad all that work has paid off with massive audiences enjoying the games across a multitude of devices. The feedback via email, social networks and on the blogs has been genuinely overwhelming.

But no one has worked harder than the athletes in the Olympic venues. Without them rowing faster, pedalling harder, running quicker and boxing better than their competitors, Team GB wouldn't have delivered so many gold medals. And it is those gold medals that people have come to our digital coverage to watch in their millions.

Cait O'Riordan is Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

What's On Red Button 11th - 18th August

London 2012 Olympics

Britain has been gripped by Olympics fever and until Sunday 12th August you can watch up to 24 streams of Olympics content on Red Button (satellite and cable) and Connected TV.

Full details are available on the Olympics schedule website.

BBC Sport Multiscreen

From Monday 13th August you can also watch the Olympic highlights via the BBC Sport multiscreen and catch up on all the latest in other sports. Headlines are available around the clock with up to five 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.

Radio 1 at the Edinburgh Fringe

Watch Scott Mills, Nick Grimshaw and Greg James as they broadcast live from this year's Edinburgh Fringe.

If you stay up late enough you can also enjoy some late night frolics with the Fun and Filth Cabaret! Live on the Red Button.

For more details go to Radio 1

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:

Mon 13th August, 1:00pm-4:00pm, 10:00pm-12:00am

Tue 14th August, 1:00pm-4:00pm, 10:00pm-12:00am

Wed 15th August, 1:00pm-4:00pm, 10:00pm-12:00am

Thu 16th August, 1:00pm-7:00pm, 10:00pm-12:00am

BBC Three Comedy Marathon

Comedy At The Fringe is the BBC's all-night comedy marathon, showcasing the best of this year's Edinburgh Festival and featuring some of the biggest names in

comedy alongside the most exciting new talent. MCs Chris Ramsey, Andrew Maxwell and Susan Calman will be joined by our presenter Jameela Jamil and over 40

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, live and on the Red Button.

Available on all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Fri 17th August, 9:00pm-5:00am

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

Freeview:

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

London Collection

The London Collection is an archive collection that celebrates the people and places of London. Highlights are available on the Red Button and the full archive

collection is available online at BBC Four Collections. There will be various programmes on both BBC Two and

BBC Four which are supported by this collection.

Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 11th August, 7:00pm-4:00am

Sun 12th August, 7:00pm-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 18th August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Freeview:

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

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

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 all platforms

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:

Sat 11th August, 7:00am-10:00am

Mon 13th August, 7:00am-10:00am, 3:00pm-6:00pm

Tue 14th August, 7:00am-10:00am, 3:00pm-6:00pm

Wed 15th August, 7:00am-6:00pm

Thu 16th August, 7:00am-10:20am, 3:00pm-6:00pm

Fri 17th August, 7:00am-10:20am, 3:00pm-6:00pm

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

Freeview:

Wed 15th August, 7:00am-12:50pm, 4:10pm-6:00pm

Thu 16th August, 7:00am-10:20am

Fri 17th August, 7:00am-10:20am

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

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

From starting gun to smartphone: delivering the Olympics to your device

In the build-up to the start of London 2012, my colleagues and I talked about it as the first truly digital Olympics.

Now that we're well into the Games, it's thrilling to see that concept become reality, as huge numbers of people watch and interact with events online at the BBC Sport website, on mobile and tablet, and on connected TV. We're breaking digital audiences records every day.

At the end of last week, I talked about the trends in multi-platform viewing behaviour that we're observing as this mass of data flows in. Today I want to explain a bit more about how our interactive coverage gets from the event itself to the device at your fingertips, wherever it is around the country that you are watching.

It's a fascinating process that begins with a camera capturing the action, and finishes with a complex mix of video and data brought together on your device.

The image above illustrates what happens in between, in the background, as audiences watch the final of the Women's Individual Cycling Sprint this afternoon.

Video

The trip from the velodrome to your device is really two parallel processes, which we bring together at the end to deliver our live Olympics streaming experience across multiple platforms. Desktop audiences enjoy the full interactive video offering, but we have ensured all 24 streams of coverage are available to audiences on all four screens (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV) as well as Red Button.

 

The BBC's gallery at the International Broadcast Centre in Stratford

When the event starts, cameras filming trackside send their video coverage via the BBC's gallery at the International Broadcast Centre in Stratford to BBC Sport's new production HQ in Salford, where it is prepared for different devices. This encoded video is then sent to our content distribution network (CDN) ready to be delivered to audiences.

Data

At the same time, a whole host of data about the event is being sent by Olympics Broadcasting Services (OBS) to our database. Key event stats, schedule information, and highlights logged by trackside observers all flow into our content store. We also have a team of loggers in Salford who augment that data to make sure all the key moments are marked - concentrating on the Team GB athletes.

Video and data together

At the end of this process, the video and the data come together to deliver the full BBC Olympics live interactive video experience.

Video is loaded into the player, which figures out which event is playing and displays the appropriate data from the database (brought to audiences in the Extras panel at the bottom right of the player when you watch on desktop).

Schedule information enables us to provide info about which events are live now and who is currently competing (surfaced in the "Olympics Live" data panel of the desktop player).

As the cycling progresses, the logged events sent in from OBS enable us to create chapter markers, so audiences watching on PC can instantly rewind back to the key moments they might have missed, or want to watch again.

This is, of course, a simplified version of the journey from starting gun to smartphone: Oliver Barlett and David Rogers have gone into more technical detail about how we use the OBS data and how it flows through the system. Senior Technical Architect Matthew Clark is also preparing a blog post with more technical detail about the end-to-end delivery chain.

It’s important to emphasise that this is a collaborative endeavour, one that relies on the BBC harnessing the expertise of a number of partners from across the broadcast and technology industry – from OBS to the CDNs, they all play a vital role in this journey.

Hopefully it goes some way to illustrating how many incredible processes have occurred in the background, as you press play and prepare to watch Victoria Pendleton go for gold.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

What's on BBC Red Button 4th - 11th August

London 2012 Olympics

Olympic Stadium in Stratford, London

All this week you can watch up to 24 streams of Olympics content on Red Button (satellite and cable) and Connected TV.

Full details are available on the Olympics schedule website.

BBC Sport Multiscreen

During the Olympics you can also catch up on all the latest in other sports via the BBC Sport multiscreen. Headlines are available around the clock

with up to five 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.

Merlin - Join Anytime Quiz

Merlin is back on CBBC! Test your knowledge on the series' magical creatures with our red button Merlin Quiz.

Watch clips from the show and answer the questions asked by Merlin (played by Colin Morgan) on his magical medieval world.

How many questions will you get right?

Find out more about Merlin's world at bbc.co.uk/merlin.

Available on Sky only

Sat 4th August - Fri 10th August, 7:00am-7:00pm


Radio 2 In Concert - Blur

Watch highlights of Blur's exclusive performance from the BBC's historic Maida Vale Studios in London.

The show features many of the band's greatest hits, as well as rare favourites and their latest tracks.
Hosted by Steve Lamacq, the Red Button show is a culmination of a day of live music and archive on Radio 2 and 6 Music,

celebrating one of Britain's greatest bands.

Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media

Sat 4th August, 6:00am - Wed 8th August 4:00am


London Collection

The London Collection is an archive collection that celebrates the people and places of London. Highlights are available on the Red Button and the full archive collection is available online at BBC Four Collections. There will be various programmes on both BBC Two and BBC Four which are supported by this collection.

Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media

Freesat/Sky:

Sat 4th August, - Fri 10th August, 7:30pm-4:00am

Virgin Media:

Wed 8th August - Fri 10th August, 7:30pm-4:00am

CBBC Extra

Press red on the CBBC channel this week and you can read Chris and Dodge's blog, get 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

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

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

Digital Olympics: week one in numbers

It's the end of the first week of London 2012, a week that's seen record numbers of people accessing the BBC's Games coverage online and across mobile, tablet, connected TV and Red-Button. As data flows in, my team and I have been looking at exactly how the Olympics is being consumed by audiences across devices.

There are three key insights we observed:

This is the multi-platform Games : all four screens (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV) are seeing huge growth in usage.
Every event is getting Red Button love : Red Button is proving a hugely popular way for audiences to access any and every event, and we're seeing lots of activity on every one of our 24 streams.
Online mirrors TV : as with TV viewing, online activity has peaked around the big Team GB medal moments.

We promised Games coverage that you could access anywhere, any time, and it looks like you've been taking us up on that offer.

So let's have a closer look at the stats.

Overall statistics

Overall browsers to the BBC Sport website, and the 24 Olympic Red Button streams, have built to huge numbers across the Games so far. A total of 17 million people have accessed the 24 Olympic Red Button streams, and we have recorded 18 million unique browsers to the Sport Olympics webpages - with a daily peak of nearly 8 million (UK) and 10.4 (Global), compared with the previous Sport site record of 5.7m (UK) and 7.4 (Global).

[image error]

Daily reach and cumulative total (millions, 27 Jul to 02 Aug 2012)

We knew before we started that video would be the heart of our Olympics offering, and the data supports our strategy of ensuring every sport from every venue is available to stream: we've seen 29 million total requests for video content across bbc.co.uk/sport since the start of the Games, and the Sport site has seen an uplift of 80% in daily unique browsers.

Usage across different devices

Browsers across each of the online "four screens" (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV) have all seen an uplift in daily unique browsers of 70% or more since the start of the Games. The number of people accessing BBC Olympics content on mobiles is huge - we saw a peak of 2.3m mobile browsers on Wednesday - and as of today over 1.5 million people have downloaded the BBC Olympics smartphone app on Android and iOS.

[image error]

% of Unique Browsers by Device Type (27 Jul to 01 Aug 2012)

We saw interesting differences in platform usage at different times of the week. Audiences tend to watch more on PC during the week, while accessing coverage across mobile, tablet and connected TV more during the weekend.

[image error]

 

% of Unique Browsers By Device Type, split between Weekend and Weekday (legend as above)

 

Peak moments

It's been a thrilling week for Team GB, and there have been a number of large peaks in traffic as audiences switched on to watch the medal wins.

The biggest online video peak we've seen so far was for Bradley Wiggins' win on Wednesday - 729,000 requests online.

Red Button

Wiggins was popular on Red Button too: we saw a peak of 657,200 people watching him win Gold, rather than on the traditional TV channels. However, we get bigger audiences on Red-Button at the weekend when viewers are at home, so the biggest event so far has been the Men's Road Race with Mark Cavendish which drew an audience of 1.3 million.

[image error]

Number of people watching individual streams (minutes, BARB): minute-by-minute data

Red Button data has proved particularly fascinating with every single Red Button stream seeing at least 100,000 viewers at some point. The chart below shows the percentage of viewers accessing each stream. We schedule a variety of sports on all the streams, with the most high-profile on the lower numbered channels. 

[image error]

Percentage of minutes viewed per stream (BARB, 27 Jul to 1 Aug 2012)

In summary

BBC Sport Olympics webpages see 80% uplift in browsers across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV
So far, 1.5m people have downloaded the BBC Olympics smartphone app
BBC Sport website has seen 29m requests for its Olympics interactive video streams
BBC Sport website saw 729,000 requests for video of Wiggin's medal win
Every BBC Red Button stream drew 100,000 viewers at some point during Olympics week one

How have you been watching?

We should, of course, put all these stats in perspective: the majority of you are enjoying the Games via flagship coverage on BBC1 and BBC3 on your televisions, especially in the evenings. Our broadcast coverage has been breaking records too: BBC TV viewing of London 2012 has beaten the whole of Beijing in the first 6 days alone. 45.4m have watched at least 15 mins of the Games.

So how have you been watching? There's been an amazing amount of buzz on social media about the BBC's digital coverage, much of it suggesting that we really are in a multi-device world.

Watching @bbcsport on iPad in car on way to London @j_ennis = AMAZING!!! #TeamGB

— Aly Dixon (@alydixon262) August 3, 2012

Realising you can watch the #olympics on your laptop on the bbc website from the comfort of your own bed. Life made.

— Mitch Turner (@MitchTurner) August 3, 2012

thanks bbc app! can watch the Olympics on the go! everyone's a winner!

— Georgia Taylor-Brown (@georgiatb) August 3, 2012

I love the @bbc2012 Olympic App! So much info AND there's a live feed! Just watched @beckadlington swim on the bus back from Hyde Park

— Keri-anne Payne (@KeriannePayne) August 2, 2012

So much sport! The @bbcsport coverage is amazing! Job well done @rogermosey! Archery on TV, & Rowing on the app! #MultiTasking

— Zac Purchase (@ZacPurchase) July 31, 2012

I'd love to find out how you're enjoying our coverage and what devices you have been using - or if you've had any problems with it. Let me know in the comments.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

Building the Olympic Data Services

[image error]

Monitoring data for badmington and volleyball during the 2012 Olympics

Twelve months ago, there were three of us in the new Olympic Data Team: product manager Oliver Bartlett, developer David Norris, and I, David Rogers, as technical lead. We were tasked with providing data for the BBC's Olympics 2012 project: stats, events, results...

Today, we are a team of 20, we have built five applications, provide 174 endpoints, manage 50 message queues and support ten separate BBC Olympic products - from the sport website to the Interactive Video Player.

Over the course of the games, we expect to process over four million messages, such as athlete profiles, diving events from the Aquatic Centre or the latest medal table for Team GB. Throughout the project, there have been two distinct, but closely-linked objectives.

Two Objectives

Firstly, we needed to build a high-throughput, low latency message processing system, making sure the facts and figures emerging from the Olympic venues were available, throughout the BBC, quickly and accurately.

Secondly, we wanted this data to be part of a wider story, ensuring the wealth of BBC content, such as news, blogs, galleries, video and live commentary could be seen alongside the live data, and presented to suit a range of audiences. This second objective is best exemplified by the 10,490 athlete pages on the BBC sport website, each offering a dynamic and meaningful aggregation of content, all based around an individual Olympian.

1: High-throughput message processing Olympic Data

Receiver, Router, API and the Content Store

The feed we receive from our data provider, DeltaTre, is a high-throughput XML feed.

We needed to build a system that was capable of receiving and processing thousands of messages every minute.

We needed to be able to prioritise the messages, so that we process the real-time data before the bulk updates. For example, when the triathalon finishes, we receive a detailed statistical update for every competitior. These messages can wait, what we really need is the result. To ensure we receive the most timely information first, we split all messages into a set of 50 queues, we then tune the processing rate for each queue to make sure we can show the most up-to-date view of the Olympics where it really matters.

2: Connecting content across the BBC

TRiPOD 2012, DSP and the Triple Store

The second objective of the project was to take the data feed and weave it seamlessly into the rest of the BBC Olympic content, using linked data in our triple store. To achieve this, we have integrated the Olympic data with the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing platform - developed for the FIFA World Cup 2010 and blogged about by my colleague Jem Rayfield. This approach, in the context of the Olympics, can be summarised by the following 3-step process:

Convert the athlete, world record and podium XML data into RDF and publish this into our OWLIM triple store
Journalists, and other creators of BBC content, can now ‘tag’ articles, blogs, galleries or videos with Olympic athletes, venues, sports, events and teams
This results in rich, dynamic aggregations of BBC content

BBC Olympics Data Service

The resulting system fuses these two objectives into a single service, allowing applications to leverage both the real-time XML data, and the richly interconnected semantic data.

[image error]

The BBC Olympic Data Service, showing the high-throughput message processing (left and centre) integrated, using linked data, with content from around the BBC (right)

The Technical Challenges
Racing the video into the IVP

The Interactive Video Player is the most complex, but in my opinion, most exciting online offering from the BBC for the 2012 games.

It shows any one of our 24 high-definition video streams, but also provides an interactive panel showing real-time stats about the events taking place in the video. This behaviour represents a significant challenge.

Our AV teams have invested greatly in reducing the latency for our online video output, crucial for live events during an Olympic Games. Unfortunately, the lower the video latency, the less time we have to provide the accompanying stats.

The diagram below shows how we modelled the various latencies, delays and caching layers involved:

[image error]

Modelling the dataflow, from the venue to the screen

We explored two competing methods of providing stats to the IVP:

Obtain stats in discrete blocks of time. e.g. “Stats for the time period 12:10pm->12:20pm” with each time period a different API URL 
Obtain stats from the same API URL, receiving an updated ‘last X events’ each time

Both methods have been used, the first method for video-on-demand, and the second for live video.

Here, the two methods of obtaining stats are compared.

MethodMethod 1: Blocks of timeMethod 2: Latest X stats


URL
/stats/{datetime} (time period is fixed, so starting time is provided)
/stats/latest


Worst-case scenario
Stats are requested before they have been received
Stats are so frequent, that more than X stats occur between each poll


Caching
Between 10 seconds and 4 hours, depending on how old the stats are
~3 seconds


Used for
Video-on-demand
Live-rewind > 2 mins
Live video
Live-rewind < 2 mins

The trickiest aspect of this two-method approach is to transition between the two methods.

When watching the IVP, it is possible to ‘time-slip’ if the connection is poor. If the user drifts back over two minutes, they will shift from method two to method one. We used a technique of ‘snapshots’ to overcome not just these transitions, but also the times when an audience member moves around the stream, for example, returning to live after watching a goal from 20 minutes ago.

Prior to the games, we did prototype ‘push’ technologies such as long-polling to solve the same problem. Unfortunately, this was too great a technical challenge to solve in time for the games, particularly given our requirement to scale to millions of users.

As the video latency reduces, ‘push’ will become the only viable option for real-time stats.

Building APIs rapidly within a rich domain

The domain of Olympic sport is both deep and broad.

We have had to deal with schedules, video logging, statistics, athlete meta-data, photos, medal tables and more.

Within each type of data, there is a huge variety according to sport.

For example, football schedules are arranged into two distinct phase: league and knock-out, with each match comprising two teams, where each team is comprised of a squad of players. Events within a match include red cards, fouls, half-time and goals.

By comparison, this is how Wikipedia describes ‘Individual Archery’ competitions:

“64 archers compete. The competition begins with the ranking round. Each archer shoots 72 arrows (in six ends, or groups, of 12 arrows). They are then ranked by score to determine their seeding for the single-elimination bracket. After this, final rankings for each archer is determined by the archer's score in the round in which the archer was defeated, with the archers defeated in the first round being ranked 33rd through 64th."

This complexity is represented within the XML, where the the schema for each type of XML we receive can be extremely complex, having to represent varieties between sports, events, and even different phases of the same event.

In addition to this, like most software projects, the requirements were subject to frequent change.

Within this context, we needed to build a system to ingest, process and provide this data.

To achieve this, we adopted two approaches, "light-touch" and "best-effort", and relied on an XML Database:

Light-touch

We chose not to validate or model the content of the XML unless absolutely necessary. For example, take the medal table. If possible, we could receive the XML, identify that it represented a medal table by examining a single element, and from this point onwards, ignore the rest of the contents.

In reality, we needed to verify, route, process or enrich most of the data.

Where this was necessary, we only accessed or manipulated a small proportion of the XML. Using this approach, our data provider could make significant changes to the structure of the XML without any changes to our APIs necessary.

Ultimately, our clients - the systems that created visual representations of the data - would need to use the more complex, domain-specific detail. These clients did not, however, have to wait for us to update our models, schema or validation logic.

Best-effort

Closely associated with the approach above was the idea of ‘best-effort’ responses. This was the idea that, whatever the circumstance, it was better to delivery some content, within a known timescale, rather than nothing at all. This would leave the client the option to gracefully degrade the user-facing content as they saw fit.

Behind this principle is the knowledge that we will not have many options for updating and re-releasing our systems during the two-week window of the games.

MarkLogic XML database

Fundamental to this approach was the use of MarkLogic to store and retrieve data. MarkLogic is an XML database which uses XQuery to store and retrieve data.

Given the timescales, this project would not have been achievable using a SQL database, which would have pushed the design towards more complete modelling of the data.

Using MarkLogic, we could write a complete XML document, and retrieve that document either by reference to its location, a URI, or using XQuery to define criteria about its contents.

For example, all documents matching a particular XPath could be obtained.

Simulating the Olympics

When building a complex software product, the common sense approach is to get the software in front of your customers as soon as you can. We’ve done this where we could - we had pages-per-athlete, venue and event ready early in the year. We used the Interactive Video Player for Euro 2012 and Wimbledon.

The problem is, without an Olympics Games happening, you have neither realistic data, nor the audience levels, to genuinely put the product to the test.

To get around this problem, we have invested a significant proportion of our efforts to simulate the Olympics. The most obvious manifestation of this was the Olympics Simulator application. This allowed people around the business to set up streams of data which could simulate anything from an athlete registering for the games, live stats for different sports, video logging information or medals being won.

The simple interface provided is shown below.

[image error]

BBC Olympic Simulator interface

These streams of data could then be synchronised with video to provide a rich and dynamic user experience on bbc.co.uk, or our test environments, without waiting for the Olympics to begin.

There is no dress rehearsal

Whilst simulations, load testing, stress testing and end-to-end testing have built a lot of confidence, we were still facing a ‘big-bang’ on July 27th when two things happened:

Millions more people started using the BBC Olympics website - using features that were not active before the games, such as medal tables, live stats, live logging events and the ‘Olympics Live’ feed from around the games
Messages are delivered by DeltaTre in much higher volume

To give ourselves flexibility, we have created a number of ‘knobs and levers’ to control our applications in production.

These include the following:

Message flow control: If, for example, the sport of boxing is generating too much statistical data, we could deprioritise these messages in favour of the other sports.
Caching timeouts: If we discover that an endpoint has become resource intensive, we can raise the caching timeouts to reduce the number of times we need provide data each minute or hour.
Keyword whitelists: We have decided in advance what log event information we would like to be displayed in different areas of the the site. For example, for football, we want a ‘red card’ to result in a marked Chapter Point in the video, so our audience can rewind back to this event.

We may discover during the games that the pattern of events is not what we expected; being able to change how we respond to these different events will allow us to fine-tune the user experience in real-time.

Legacy

Creating systems, libraries and techniques that could be used beyond the games was crucial for this project. We wanted this unprecedented investment in the Olympics to have lasting, tangible benefits for the BBC and its audience.

Here are some of them:

Data, fit for reuse: A proportion of the data gathered for the games has been published to our linked data platform using the BBC’s sport ontology. Although still evolving, this ontology will allow us to continue to integrate future sporting events with the past. Athletes, sports, events and venues will all maintain consistent identifiers, and BBC content will be associated with these concepts. Ultimately, we hope to provide access to this data publicly, allowing people to build applications with access to the breadth and depth of BBC content. With the BBC obtaining the rights for the Olympics up to 2020, we can already start to think about how this data will be useful for Rio 2016!
Libraries: For this project we have built a set of software libraries for reuse around the BBC. A RESTful API framework produced for this project is already used in the systems that power the BBC mobile news website, and the football section of the BBC Sport website.
Applications: The TRiPOD 2012 API, built to power the Olympics, will live on as the backbone of the BBC Sport website, showing the competitions, competitors, venues and teams of all the sport covered by the BBC.
Persistent Stores: The Olympics Data projects have pushed both MarkLogic and OWLIM to their limits and we have discovered better ways of working with these stores. This best practice, often captured in software tools, has been established for future projects.

With the Olympics now underway, we’ve had a chance to see these approaches used for real. Whilst we have had to make use of our ‘real-time controls’ to adjust and fine-tune the user experience, I believe we have created something that sets the BBC apart for this first ‘digital Olympics’.

I look forward to reading your comments.

David Rogers is a Senior Techincal Architect, BBC Future Media, News & Knowledge

Olympic Data Services and the Interactive Video Player

[image error]

The Olympic Data Services Team at the Broadcast Centre in White City

Hi, I'm Oli Bartlett and for the last 15 months or so I've been the Product Manager for the BBC's Olympic Data services.

My team have built the systems which provide all of the London 2012 data to the BBC Sport Olympic website, mobile applications, IPTV applications and other BBC websites showing Olympics content.

We provide three main functions:
The Dynamic Semantic Publishing platform (DSP). This is the framework for creating over 10,000 athlete pages, plus a page per event, discipline, country and venue.
A service to receive, process and store data from the Olympic Broadcasters' Data Feed (BDF).
A stats service, the Olympic Data API providing all of the sports data: Schedules, starting lineups, results, records, medal tables and video logging data.

DSP has allowed us to dynamically publish a page per athlete as soon as we receive the information from the BDF. This page is linked in to the BBC sport website - it will link to pages on their events, their discipline and their country team. DSP also then allows us to aggregate relevant stories from BBC News and Sport onto each page on the Olympics website. Journalists simply have to tag the story with the people, sports or events it's about, and a link to that story will be pulled onto the relevant pages. Jem Rayfield has written an in-depth piece on DSP if you're interested in finding out more.

The BBC, like other broadcasters around the world, gets all of its Olympics data via a feed delivered over the internet and the majority of its Olympics video from the host broadcaster, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS). The London 2012 Olympics are the first where a combined video and results data feed (the BDF) has been made available. If you'll excuse the abbreviations: The BDF provides Olympic Data Feed (ODF) results and statistics from Locog, plus video data from OBS. In practical terms, this means that not only do we know the live results for every moment of every event, but we also know which video streams were showing the action at that time.

The BBC subscribes to the BDF and we receive it via our data provider Deltatre Media Ltd. The raw BDF is huge and contains a load more data than the BBC needs. Additionally the feed is stateful, so requires a relatively complex receiving system which knows how to apply updates as they arrive. Deltatre transforms the complex and stateful feed into a simpler, stateless feed which provides the BBC with just the data needed to power the online products. For example, a BDF update for a football match may say that Team GB have scored a goal. If you want to display a scoreboard, this information is of little use without knowing the previous state (score) in the match. The updates we get from Deltatre don't require the BBC to hold state for each unit, so the football update would instead give the current score: GBR 1 - ITA 0. This has allowed the BBC to simplify its processing of the data as we are not required to build the complex business logic required to manage stateful updates of statistics across the 10,000 units of competition. Instead, we can focus on getting the data out to the audience as quickly and reliably as possible.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, if you've used the interactive video player you'll probably have seen the Extras button in the bottom right of the player. One of the options here is the athletes panel. This shows you a list of the athletes competing in the event(s) you're watching. Additionally you'll see a picture of the athlete, a link to their page on BBC Sport, and their vital statistics - height, weight, date of birth. If you drill down further you'll see statistics from the event in which they're currently competing. This all works off our Olympic Data API which can serve up the latest results and statistics from any time during any of the 2,500 hours of video during the games. This means that when you rewind a live diving event, or watch a football match from yesterday, the athlete data and match stats stay relevant to what you're watching. Alex talks more about the interactive video player in his blog post.

In addition to the sports data, the Olympic Data API provides chapter markers and the Olympics Live data to the interactive video player. These features are primarily driven by the video logging messages we receive from OBS. Each time something interesting happens on one of the multitude of video feeds, the event will be logged by a team of people in the International Broadcast Centre, in Media City and at venues around the country. Whether it be a record being broken, the start of a new quarter in a basketball match, or a foul in a football match, we will get a notification. We take these notifications and, according to a set of business rules, create chapter points or Olympics Live alerts. As the games get underway we can monitor the frequency and accuracy of the chapter points and live alerts, and can change these rules dynamically if required. Additionally we have ways to manually add chapter points or live alerts for those moments the logging hasn't captured.

That pretty much summarises the Olympic Data services. Dave Rogers, the technical lead on this project, will be writing a follow-up post which will go into more detail around the architectural and testing challenges we've come up against, and the team's development approach.

Until then, enjoy the games!

Oliver Bartlett is Product Manager, Olympic Data, 2012

Record breaking start to the Olympics for BBC Online

Before the Olympic Games began, the BBC promised to deliver up to 24 simultaneous live streams of coverage to the biggest audience the Sport website has ever seen.

And my team managed that within the first 48 hours of live sporting action.

As the Head of Product for BBC Sport, it’s been a fantastic weekend for me and my team watching the Games unfold. Just after 3pm on Saturday afternoon we had all our encoders in action playing 24 live video streams of sporting action across desktop, mobile tablet, connected TVs and Red Button.

And Sunday was the busiest day ever on the BBC Sport site – with 6.1 million unique browsers in the UK and 8.3 million worldwide.

The first weekend of the Olympics online, in stats:

Saturday - 7.8m global browsers for bbc.co.uk/sport (5.6m UK browsers) – a global record
Sunday - 8.3m global browsers for bbc.co.uk/sport (6.1m UK browsers) – a global and UK record
1.15m downloads for the BBC Sport Olympics app, with 55% of browsers coming from non-desktop devices on Saturday
1.7m requests for the Olympics opening ceremony in BBC iPlayer, with 925k on Saturday alone – a record for a single day
The James Bond Escorts The Queen to the London 2012 Olympic Games clip has been viewed 640k times on the BBC’s YouTube channel.

We have been testing the infrastructure and the sites we have built for the games for months using test data and streams and artificial traffic and we were really confident it would work.

But even so it’s nerve wracking turning it all on and showing it to vast numbers of real users – so we are thrilled that it’s all working so well.

And we’ve been gratified to see such positive feedback, on social networks and via email, about the things we have built.

More than 1.15 million people have now downloaded BBC Sport’s Olympics app for the UK, and we are really pleased that people are staying in touch with the action via the phones while out and about like Mark Ames:

For watching the bits of the Olympic road race happening where you aren't, I heartily recommend the BBC Olympic app:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/18810308 …

 

— ibikelondon blog (@markbikeslondon) 3:18 AM - 25 Jul 2012

 

The reaction to our new interactive video player has been really positive.

All our live and on demand video sessions are split into “chapters” to make it really easy to find the bit you’re interested in. That feature was used more than 2.5 million times on Saturday, including by Rich ‏@richardarnatt:

The BBC interactive Olympics coverage is incredible! Jaw dropped at how easy it is to jump straight to *any* event in moments.

— Rich (@richardarnatt) 12:11 PM - July 28, 2012

 

Our favourites feature on the desktop version of the site is also being exercised with more than a million interactions a day.

Now people are back at work the graphs are going skywards with hundreds of thousands of people sneaking a look at our coverage in the office, like Simon Warren:

We've managed to hook up two spare monitors in the office so far this morning, 22 more and we can stream all the bbc's live content.

— Simon Warren (@100Climbs) 2:55 AM - 30 Jul 2012

At around 3pm today, we will have 24 live streams running again and we’re hopeful today’s going to be another record-breaking day. I’ll keep you up to date with the stats as we get them this week.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

What's on BBC Red Button 28th July - 4th August

London 2012 Olympics

Olympic Stadium in Stratford, London

All this week you can watch up to 24 streams of Olympics content on Red Button (satellite and cable) and Connected TV.

Full details are available on the Olympics schedule website.

BBC Sport Multiscreen**

During the Olympics you can also catch up on all the latest in other sports via the BBC Sport multiscreen. Headlines are available around the clock

with up to five 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.

Radio 2 In Concert - Blur

[image error]

Damon Albarn

British Indie legends Blur perform an exclusive concert from the BBC's historic Maida Vale Studios in London.

The show will feature many of the band's greatest hits, as well as rare favourites and their latest tracks.
Hosted by Steve Lamacq, the Red Button show is a culmination of a day of live music and archive on Radio 2 and 6 Music,

celebrating one of Britain's greatest bands.

Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media

Tue 31st July, 7:55pm-9:00pm

Wed 1st August, 6:55pm ongoing until Sat 4th August

London Collection

The London Collection is an archive collection that celebrates the people and places of London. Highlights are available on the Red Button and the full archive collection is available online at BBC Four Collections. There will be various programmes on both BBC Two and BBC Four which are supported by this collection.

Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media

Freesat/Sky:

Sat 28th July - Sat 4th August 7:30pm-4:00am

Virgin Media:

Sat 28th - Mon 30th July 7:30pm-4:00am

Horrible Histories Karaoke

Fancy testing your singing skills against famous Horrible Histories legends? Press red to sing along with

the Horrible Histories Karaoke! There are seven sensational songs available, including the new

Olympic special song 'Flame!' Not forgetting the heavy metal Luddites, eccentric Queen Mary 1st, Pilgrim

Fathers, Charles Darwin, boy-band Fighter Pilots of World War II, and 'The Thinkers' of ancient Greece. Take

your pick!

The Horrible Histories Karaoke - only here on CBBC, just press red!

Printable song words plus more Horrible Histories goodies are also available on the Horrible Histories website

Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media

Freesat/Sky:

Sat 28th - Mon 30th July, 7:00am-7:00pm

Tue 31st July - Wed 1st August, 7:00am-1:30pm & 4:30pm-7:00pm

Thu 2nd - Fri 3rd August, 7:00am-7:00pm

Virgin Media:

Sat 28th - Mon 30th July, 7:00am-7:00pm

Tue 31st July, 7:00am-1:30pm & 4:30pm-7:00pm

Wed 1st August, 7:00am-1:30pm & 4:30pm-6:25pm

CBBC Extra

Press red on the CBBC channel this week and you can read Chris and Dodge's blog, get 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

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

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