Technology + Creativity at the BBC
Featured Post
Refreshed interface, extra features: new BBC Media Player launched for web browsers
Oli Freke, Executive Product Manager
Creating a new player for BBC audio and video content has allowed us to drop the old code, rebuild a player in a more efficient way and be able to add up-to-date features and technologies to the player in the future.
Posts
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Expanding Our Horizons With ChatGPT
Bill Thompson
Head of Future Value Research
I was a sceptic about the impact of the new tranche of generative AI tools until this week when two of my friends demonstrated how they could be used in genuinely transformative ways that go far beyond faking essays or acting as a search interface with poor boundaries and a tendency to invent things that look plausible.
Last week in his regular Exponential View newsletter Azeem Azhar described in detail how he had used ChatGPT to design a new board game that combined the characteristics of Ticket to Ride and Azul, shaping it around the idea of discovering elements, and designing selection of game characters based around historical chemists.
It's a subscriber-only post but you can get a sense of the dialogue.
Then another friend, Matt Webb, posted about how he’d used the code-generating capabilities of GPT-3, via GitHub Copilot, to write the code he needed to scrape a website as part of a project to build a podcast interface. As he wrote:
"Using GitHub Copilot to write code and calling…
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BBC pages removed from Google search results: 2023
Clare Hudson
Managing Editor, BBC Online
In 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that individuals can ask search engines to remove certain web pages from their results. Those pages usually contain personal information.
Google subsequently removed links from specific searches and continues to delist pages for some results. This includes some BBC pages. These pages are not removed from the Google index entirely, nor from BBC Online. The latest removals are listed below.
Read more on the BBC's archive policies and find lists of earlier removals.
One important caveat when looking through this list: we are not told who has requested the delisting. We should not leap to conclusions as to who is responsible. The request may not be from the apparent subject of a story.
February 2024
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5181326.stm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-45116064
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-45952162
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23493106
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-12251572
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-11998491
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8439854.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news… -
The future of searching the past: Transitioning from BBC Redux to Archive Search
Mary McCarthy
Senior Product Manager
Tagged with:
If you're relatively new to the BBC, you may not have heard of BBC Redux. However, for those of us who have been around for a while, Redux is legendary. The brainchild of BBC Research & Development's Chief Scientist, Brandon Butterworth, Redux recorded and stored all programmes broadcast on our national TV channels and radio stations since 2007. These programmes could be found and played back via the Redux website.
Archive Search is now the place to go to find archive content. From next week Archive Search will no longer use Redux to source content. More on that later.
Uses of BBC Redux
In 2007 it was difficult to get hold of audio and video content from the BBC archive in a digital format. Accessing archive content for research generally meant ordering and waiting for VHS tapes or DVDs to be delivered by a BBC mail van. BBC Redux allowed programme-makers to view a growing set of content immediately. It proved extremely popular.
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BBC pages removed from Google search results: 2022
Clare Hudson
Managing Editor, BBC Online
In 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that individuals can ask search engines to remove certain web pages from their results. Those pages usually contain personal information.
Google subsequently removed links from specific searches and continues to delist pages for some results. This includes some BBC pages. These pages are not removed from the Google index entirely, nor from BBC Online. The latest removals are listed below.
Read more on the BBC's archive policies and find lists of earlier removals.
One important caveat when looking through this list: we are not told who has requested…
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HTTPS is easy, just turn it on…
Neil Craig
Lead Technical Architect, D&E
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The HTTPS padlock icon on bbc.co.uk
Back in early 2015, I'd just started working at the BBC and whilst getting to know who's who and what's what, I discovered to my surprise that large parts of our main websites (www.bbc.co.uk and www.bbc.com) were only available over plaintext HTTP. My immediate thought was, "Well, here's something I can get stuck into immediately - how hard can it be to get to 100% HTTPS?".
We're now about six…
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Fighting misinformation: An embedded media provenance specification
Charlie Halford
Lead Architect - Content
For the last few years, the BBC has had a project running in its technology division looking at technology solutions to various problems in the domain of news disinformation. Part of that effort, called Project Origin, is working to make it easier to understand where the news you consume online really comes from so that you can decide how credible it is. You can find some history on this in Laura …
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Streaming Euro 2020 live at a record new scale
Pierre-Yves Bigourdan
Software Engineering Team Lead
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Summer 2021 offered a rich selection of events to sports enthusiasts: Euro 2020, Wimbledon and the Tokyo Olympics, to name but a few. An ever-increasing proportion of the BBC’s audience has been moving from traditional broadcast to online consumption - the Euro 2020 Final, where Italy played England, set a new record for BBC iPlayer, with 7.1 million viewers streaming the match online.
In…
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Introducing machine-based video recommendations in BBC Sport
Robert Heap
Executive Product Manager, BBC Sport
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From this week we are adding a new feature to our short form video pages on the BBC Sport website.
Related clips
On every video page in BBC Sport you’ll see a related links section. This is usually put together by our editorial colleagues, a routine task which can be time consuming. They have good knowledge about related content, but cannot know about everything, which means that the audience do not see some content that might be relevant.
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Refreshed interface, extra features: new BBC Media Player launched for web browsers
Oli Freke
Executive Product Manager
We are pleased to announce the launch of our new web media player, codenamed Project Toucan. We have been working on the player over the last year, and it brings many benefits for audiences, including a refreshed user interface and additional features. The new player is already live on BBC Weather, BBC Food and BBC Motorsport for most browsers as it begins to incrementally roll out over the coming months – Safari and iPhones will be supported in due course.
New playback and skip forward and back controls in the new version of the media player.
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Hacking the future
Bill Thompson
Head of Future Value Research
Tagged with:
The BBC is, famously, a creative organisation, and there has been no shortage of imaginative ways to help people feel connected to each other while many of us have been largely working from home. Online team meetings, social events including quizzes, pet shows, yoga and even cookalong sessions have all helped to bring us together, even if it's been via Zoom, Teams or Slack, and working practices for teams have adapted and continue to adapt to ensure that we can be effective.
One challenge has been to provide spaces to meet and collaborate with new people outside our usual teams when we're not…
