Live Highlights in BBC iPlayer

Talk given at PyCon UK 2023

Transcript

1. LIVE HIGHLIGHTS
   IN BBC IPLAYER
   BEN NUTTALL
   BBC NEWS LABS
   

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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
   

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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
   

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4. • What if we surfaced markers to all key moments
   within the last 2 hours?
   Idea: highlight markers on the news channel
   

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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
   

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6. • Chapters
   • Structural
   • Block - start and end
   • Usually contiguous
   • Highlights
   • Momentary
   SMP – chapters and highlights
   

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7. • Chapters
   • Structural
   • Block - start and end
   • Usually contiguous
   • Highlights
   • Momentary
   SMP – chapters and highlights
   

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8. Live Highlights proof of concept
   

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9. Live Highlights proof of concept
   

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10. Live Highlights proof of concept
    

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11. Live Highlights proof of concept – web app
    

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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
    

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13. Live Highlights MVP
    

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14. Live Highlights MVP
    

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15. • Standard way of adding functionality to
    BBC’s media player
    • JavaScript or TypeScript
    SMP plugin
    

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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
    

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17. Lots of interest
    

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18. PMQs
    

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19. Eurovision mock ups
    

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20. New UI - React
    

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21. New UI - React
    

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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
    

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23. Eurovision semi-finals
    

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24. Springwatch
    

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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
    

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26. Wimbledon
    • Data driven highlights
    • Filtered data fed into the
    highlights API
    • Created as drafts, approved by
    editors
    

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27. Glastonbury – on iPlayer
    • A/B test on iPlayer web
    • No plugin – implemented by iPlayer team
    • Used as chapter markers to each act
    

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28. Radio 2 in the Park - on TV
    • A/B test on iPlayer TV app
    

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29. More technical detail
    • See my PyCon UK 2022 talk "Rapid prototyping in BBC News with Python and AWS"
    • youtube.com/watch?v=LIy964OVRKw
    

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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
    

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31. LIVE HIGHLIGHTS
    IN BBC IPLAYER
    BEN NUTTALL
    BBC NEWS LABS
    

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