Live Highlights in BBC iPlayer

Talk given at PyCon UK 2023

Transcript

1. LIVE HIGHLIGHTS IN BBC IPLAYER BEN NUTTALL BBC NEWS LABS
2. • Multi-disciplinary innovation team • Part of the applied research area of BBC R&D • Prototypes of new audience experiences • Solutions to help journalists • Research and trying out ideas • bbcnewslabs.co.uk • twitter.com/bbc_news_labs • social.bbc/@BBC_News_Labs BBC News Labs
3. • Watching news channel live on iPlayer • Can access last 2 hours • How do you find that important moment? • Rewind 20 seconds at a time? • Drag the scrub bar back? • Start from the beginning? • How would you even know what to look for? The problem
4. • What if we surfaced markers to all key moments within the last 2 hours? Idea: highlight markers on the news channel
5. “Bringing audiences directly to key moments in our live video and audio news coverage would be utterly transformational” Jonny McGuigan – Streaming Editor, BBC News News need
6. • Chapters • Structural • Block - start and end • Usually contiguous • Highlights • Momentary SMP – chapters and highlights
7. • Chapters • Structural • Block - start and end • Usually contiguous • Highlights • Momentary SMP – chapters and highlights
8. Live Highlights proof of concept
9. Live Highlights proof of concept
10. Live Highlights proof of concept
11. Live Highlights proof of concept – web app
12. • Support all TV and radio services – and live streams too • SMP plugin to show highlights to audiences • Add highlight markers to the player • Highlights data publishing pipeline • Static asset for our SMP plugin to fetch as JSON (rather than clients making requests to our API) • Update JSON file as highlights change • Preserve highlights for on-demand • Look up episode info from TV schedule • Calculate offset Live Highlights MVP
13. Live Highlights MVP
14. Live Highlights MVP
15. • Standard way of adding functionality to BBC’s media player • JavaScript or TypeScript SMP plugin
16. • Allow BBC staff to enable the SMP plugin to see highlights created by the tool • The extension loads the plugin for all BBC pages - a simulation of what audiences would see if it were live Chrome extension
17. Lots of interest
18. PMQs
19. Eurovision mock ups
20. New UI - React
21. New UI - React
22. • Draft/published/deleted status • Provide links to highlight for approval prior to publishing • Audit trail to record all changes changed_at | email_address | change ---------------------------+--------------------------+------------------------------------------------------- 2023-01-10 17:40:53.768344 | john.smith@bbc.co.uk | Created 2023-01-10 17:40:53.771699 | john.smith@bbc.co.uk | Set title to 'interview with dominic raaab' 2023-01-10 17:40:53.774916 | john.smith@bbc.co.uk | Set in_time to '2023-01-10T17:40:40.374000' 2023-01-10 17:43:28.300589 | jane.doe@bbc.co.uk | Changed title to 'Interview with Dominic Raab' 2023-01-10 17:43:28.303151 | jane.doe@bbc.co.uk | Changed in_time to '2023-01-10 17:41:03.708000+00:00' 2023-01-10 17:43:41.566967 | jane.doe@bbc.co.uk | Published 2023-01-11 11:23:46.982445 | carl.bernstein@bbc.co.uk | Deleted ---------------------------+--------------------------+------------------------------------------------------- Editorial oversight
23. Eurovision semi-finals
24. Springwatch
25. Springwatch audience feedback Question Median rating The feature improves my viewing experience Strongly agree I would like to see this feature available for more BBC content Strongly agree Highlights were added for all the moments I was interested in Slightly agree I find the Highlights feature easy to use Strongly agree
26. Wimbledon • Data driven highlights • Filtered data fed into the highlights API • Created as drafts, approved by editors
27. Glastonbury – on iPlayer • A/B test on iPlayer web • No plugin – implemented by iPlayer team • Used as chapter markers to each act
28. Radio 2 in the Park - on TV • A/B test on iPlayer TV app
29. More technical detail • See my PyCon UK 2022 talk "Rapid prototyping in BBC News with Python and AWS" • youtube.com/watch?v=LIy964OVRKw
30. • Hiring for a software engineer role soon! • careers.bbc.co.uk • bbcnewslabs.co.uk • twitter.com/bbc_news_labs • social.bbc/@BBC_News_Labs BBC News Labs – we are hiring
31. LIVE HIGHLIGHTS IN BBC IPLAYER BEN NUTTALL BBC NEWS LABS