• 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
• 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
“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
• 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
• 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
• 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 | [email protected] | Created 2023-01-10 17:40:53.771699 | [email protected] | Set title to 'interview with dominic raaab' 2023-01-10 17:40:53.774916 | [email protected] | Set in_time to '2023-01-10T17:40:40.374000' 2023-01-10 17:43:28.300589 | [email protected] | Changed title to 'Interview with Dominic Raab' 2023-01-10 17:43:28.303151 | [email protected] | Changed in_time to '2023-01-10 17:41:03.708000+00:00' 2023-01-10 17:43:41.566967 | [email protected] | Published 2023-01-11 11:23:46.982445 | [email protected] | Deleted ---------------------------+--------------------------+------------------------------------------------------- Editorial oversight
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
• 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