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Live Highlights in BBC iPlayer

Ben Nuttall
September 23, 2023

Live Highlights in BBC iPlayer

Talk given at PyCon UK 2023

Ben Nuttall

September 23, 2023
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  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 | [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

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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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