Grumbling about the iPlayer

Just a little grumble about the BBC iPlayer interface. Now that it's Flash streaming (well done!) I can actually use it.

But can't I just have a list? I know it's supposed to be TV on the web but if I want to watch something I missed last night I just want to scan a list and click on it. I don't want promo images of the programme and I sure don't want to have to click through grids of images.

And URLs?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b008flpc.shtml?q=spooks&start=1&scope=iplayersearch&go=Find+Programmes&version_pid=b008md6r

That's not good is it? Lucky we've got /programmes, maybe they'll do something with iPlayer content.

UPDATE - Well, looks like they've embedded them already (and on the day after the Christmas party). Go team!

Disclaimer - These are my personal views and not those of the BBC, my employer.

BBC Radio Labs

At work I've just pressed the button to publish the first post on our new blog - BBC Radio Labs.



It's intended as a place where my department, BBC Audio & Music Interactive, can write about what we're working on, look at developments in music and radio in the digital world and show some of our prototypes for new sites and services. The last one is particularly exciting as it finally will give a proper BBC home for the prototypes and betas that my R&D team develops.

The blog is aimed at developers, designers, students, radio and music fans and anyone else who is in interested in our work and I've signed up a number of people in the team to write on it (see the first post for more details). What I really want is for the new blog to be eclectic - we'll be writing about what we do, how we do it, prototypes, betas, technology, design, innovation and all the new things that are happening online with digital music and radio. But one thing it isn't going to be is just another product announcement blog. I hope you like it.

last.fm feeds for BBC Radio

Our last.fm feeds are finally official (you can read about the previous incarnations of the feeds here and here). This means that almost all the tracks that BBC Radio plays are sent/scrobbled to last.fm. That's not quite everything we play (it doesn't cover live sessions, vinyl or some overnight shows) but it's the majority of 6Music and daytime Radio 1, Radio 2 and 1Xtra (sorry, still no Radio 3). So on the last.fm profile pages (below) you can see what the stations have just played, top tracks for the week etc. The current feeds are...

BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 2
BBC 1Xtra
BBC 6Music
Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1
Steve Lamacq on BBC 6Music
Ace and Vis on BBC 1Xtra

Nothing particularly hard here, just some business stuff and Patrick, one of our SEs is currently rewriting my code to make it 100% reliable. And thanks to last.fm for doing some database magic that renamed our "sekrit" feeds.

You'll notice there are some DJs/shows as well, hopefully there will be more soon. The radio networks have started to think about what they could do with these feeds and have some interesting ideas. 1Xtra have already put a recently played widget on their playlist page and there should be some more stuff soon.

Update: User's comment on their compatibility with the Steve Lamacq profile:

"'Very High' YES! *smug*
andrewjackson shouted yesterday afternoon"

This is why we're doing it.

Social networking on your radio

Matt has just posted on the S&W blog about Olinda, a project that they are doing for BBC Radio - building a fully working digital radio with built-in social networking, hardware expandability and some interesting form and interface ideas.

Obviously it's really interesting in itself but we also hope that it will inspire and lead the digital radio industry down some new avenues with their future products. And, as Matt says, to enable this we will be making the IPR of the design and ideas of this radio available under an attribution license for anyone to use - open source hardware.

I went over to see Matt and his circuit boards earlier today and I can assure you that the DAB and wi-fi chipsets are working. Their next stage of work is to put it all together. Very exciting.

Oh, and the social "now listening" site he describes is Radio Pop (see previously), with some specific additions. Which we need to add. Quite soon.

Radio Pop

Update: You might be reading this post because of the Olinda radio. Unfortunately we've had to take down the demo of Radio Pop because it wasn't scaling. The good news is that we've been re-building it and it should be ready for launch very soon.



Allow me to introduce the latest prototype from Audio & Music Interactive and the R&D team...

Radio Pop enhances your radio listening. Enabling you to create a personal record or the programmes you like, and see what your friends and everyone else is listening to.

So if you want to tap into your amigos, let your pulse spread the good vibrations, and feel the buzz from the crowd - register for Radio Pop. The radio service of tomorrow, today!

In this post I'm going to tell the story of how we developed Radio Pop - the idea and the prototype - and where it could go next. Or you could just go straight to the prototype.

BBC Audio & Music Interactive, and bbc.co.uk, has generally focused on quite ‘heavy’ interaction. Things that require a bit of a commitment and effort on behalf of the user, things like tagging, messageboards, comments and submitting content.

At the other side of the spectrum we wanted to look at doing something ‘lighter’ and more implicit. The BBC does some things like this - rating on the BBC Film Network and simple yes/no votes on the BBC Action Network. Something that didn't really require the user to do anything much extra - maybe tracking activity around our site or creating an Amazon-like "Page You Made". And while we were doing that maybe trying to show radio's sense of liveness and community on the web. To emphasise how powerful light-touch participation can be it is worth thinking about the supermarket loyalty card. Just by tracking what we buy supermarkets can use that data in many powerful ways. What might a BBC loyalty card be like?

It worked like all our projects this year, we took the theme of light user interaction and ran with it. Brainstorming and forming ideas for the first week or so before prototyping something in the remaining time, approximately 6 weeks. As usual, I begged and borrowed a team from around the department. We ended up with a team of 8, unfortunately not all at the same time, so this is my attempt to visualise the team over the 6 weeks.



The team featured...
Yasser Rashid and Sean McVeigh on the design.
Chris Bowley on the coding of the application (Rails) and the site (HTML/Javascript/CSS).
Nick Brownlow, Tyrone Samuels and Matt Harvey worked on the idea, its development, the language used and generally helped out. I've also borrowed some of Matt's and Yasser's parts of the final presentation here.
Sacha Sedriks stepped in at the end to help with the Flash.
And I ran the project and learned a bit of ActionScript to build the Flash graphs and charts.

We started by looking at how the user might interact with radio listening and used an OS X widget as a starting point. Widgets, small self-contained applications that are focussed on one task, were particularly practical for us because we could link to the live BBC radio streams for listening but they are quite personal - sitting on a user's desktop - and allow interaction.

We looked at something that had two means of participating, what we called "lean forward" and "lean back". Lean back participation is something which takes place without you having to do something actively, it is implicit and your actions imply a form of choice (eg. if you spend an hour each day looking at business news, it's fair to assume that you are interested in business news). Secondly, more explicit, lean-forward interaction involves some active participation, from something as simple as 'expressing your love' for a track on last.fm, to leaving an album comment on a review. In the case of the widget pressing the “hit” button shows your expression of interest in the current programme or track.



And from that really simple implicit and explicit interaction data we could build many products and services. Diaries of what you’ve listened to, ownership and downloads of your listening history, personal and community data, visualisation of the data and instant feedback all over the web.

To enable these ideas we started work on the Presence Engine - a platform to store information about what radio programmes people are listening to - their "attention data".



Inputs to Radio Pop could include the Radio Player, radio listening widgets, Facebook radio players or even digital and wifi radios. I've divided the possible outputs from Radio Pop into two sections. The presentation of your personal data; member pages, widgets for blogs and items in your Facebook minifeed. And the presentation of public, anonymous, mass data; how many people are listening on Radio Player, aggregate charts and graphs, most popular programmes on a radio station etc.

We defined APIs for input and output, this enables the BBC, third parties and even users to build new ways to input data and new representations of the data. And this helps make Radio Pop loosely-coupled and part of the web of data. The event data (i.e. when a user starts or stops listening) is provided in Atom and in a custom XML format and all the aggregate statistics data is also custom XML - there's more information on the API page. If we develop this further I'd look at implementing support for some standard attention data formats like APML, the Attention Profiling Markup Language. The data is currently restricted to live listening and stores events for people when they start listening, stop listening, continue listening (a "pulse") and when they express interest. All events are time-stamped and associated with a radio network so we can link them to what show was on or what track was playing at the time. All the data is made public by default but can be made private, though obviously that restricts what can be done with the data (no RSS feeds or widgets for example). The database includes a model of “friends” so users can see their friends' listening habits, individually and in aggregate. It was all built by Chris using Rails and runs on Amazon EC2 servers.

Meanwhile Yasser and Sean were looking at how to communicate and visualise the idea. They started by looking at a widget for tracking your listening. Tyrone built up a mood board for a BBC 1Xtra widget and Sean turned this into some original thoughts of how the widget may look. They then turned to developing a language to talk about the system and the actions. Starting with “agora”, a Greek meeting place, they looked at related words, “voxpop”, “diary” and “rendezvouz” before turning to describe the aspects of the service. This led to a vocabulary around pop, bubbles, buzz, hum, pulse and tap and also inspired an initial visual language using circles and bubbles. A key aspect of this was the use of the word "pop" for the action of showing interest in a programme or track and "Radio Pop" to describe the whole site.

This was an initial sketch of part of the interface - live listening statistics for a radio station that animate as you drag the timeline at the bottom. At this point we also decided to incorporate the new BBC radio station logos which have started to be rolled out across the BBC radio websites. They are clean, simple, circular designs that work really well, for example, as bold, simple barcharts and fitted well into the bubble aesthetic. Next up was the site design and structure, based around the language we’d identified. A "you" page showing your data. A "tap" page, letting you tap into your friends’ listening. A "buzz" page showing everybodys’ data and a "pulse" page for downloading the widgets and applications that contribute to the pulse of data in the system.

You can play with the live prototype of Radio Pop here. You do need to sign-up but all we need is a name and email address. If you want to add some friends then you'll to get them signed up too. Or you can add me, tristanf, if you want. Alternatively, let me take you through the site.



This is the homepage which you see if you’re not signed in. The Flash animation at the top shows some statistics from all the users of Radio Pop - the size of the logo is relative to the number of listeners to that network. See how the new logos really work well here?



Having signed in you’re taken to the You page. This is where all the statistics and data we've collected come into their own. A stacked bar chart along the top shows your listening by network for the past week. The overlaid and scaled logos show the same data in a more abstract way. Below this are your most listened to radio programmes, since you registered, and your most listened to networks. Finally there’s a panel showing your most recent “popped” items - remember that's things you particularly liked or wanted to bookmark. You can also go to a page to manage your listening data and subscribe to an RSS feed of your recent events.



From your page you can move on to see the collective data from all your friends in Tap. This shows identical charts but this time based on your friends’ listening data. This page also allows you to manage your friends, adding or removing them. Finally there is the Buzz page showing the collective data for all the users of Radio Pop. In the time we had we weren’t able to integrate Radio Player listening directly into the prototype. Instead there is a Radio page where you can listen to Radio Player live streams while posting attention data and popping the interesting bits.



The Pulse page provides a number of widgets to be downloaded. There is a 1Xtra OS X widget for listening to 1Xtra (including the station's LiveText, a first for our widgets I think). Chris also developed a blog badge which you can embed in your blog, MySpace or other web page that displays in real-time what you are currently listening to. Here's mine (though it won't show anything unless I'm listening right now)...



In our department we've had a really good response to this, I guess this is partly because everyone can see how it is relevant to their bit of BBC radio, but also I suspect it's because it appeals to the inner geek in us all. Whether Radio Pop, or a similar concept, would appeal to the listening public remains to be seen. I suspect it's of more relevance to stations like Radio 4 where the variety of programmes may make it interesting for listeners to see their history. Though it may work well for the bookmarking of "loved" songs on the music stations - a bit like a cut-down version of Phone Tags, which was an internal prototype from my predecessors Matt and Tom a few years ago. In fact we didn't get round to implementing Mobile Pop - register your mobile number and then text “pop” to the network SMS number. “Popping” programmes acts as a kind of social bookmarking for radio programmes, a bit like del.icio.us, it could be very powerful in a future of long-tail audio content. A way of bringing to the fore current and archive programmes that you want to share with your friends and the wider world.

The major hurdle to implementing something like this for real on the BBC site (you'll notice that are prototype is not on bbc.co.uk) is that listeners need to be signed in while listening to the radio. Ideally this would be through the Radio Player, eventually followed by iPlayer. But, like I said, we didn't get time to implement anything using the Radio Player and to be honest that would be a big piece of work (you don't want to know!). And we’ve only tacked live listening but listen again should be easy enough as long as we know what programme is being listened to. Scalability is also an issue as it’s potentially a very large amount of data. The prototype has been build in a loosely-coupled and modular fashion so the APIs allow us and other parties to easily extend Radio Pop. The Flash charts, for example, could be plugged into many other pages, on or off bbc.co.uk.

We've had some thoughts around privacy - users should have control over who sees their data and be able to delete it or download it and take it elsewhere. Maybe even share it with other services like last.fm or Amazon, this is where sites and services like the Attention Trust, APML and Plaxo's Pulse are heading. Radio Pop is just one way to approach light-touch user participation and create a really simple way to engage the audience without expecting them to do much apart from listen to the radio. Throughout the project we have been thinking of Radio Pop as an enabler with potential halos of effect around it...

On bbc.co.uk - Radio Player, iPlayer, member pages, /radio...

On the internet - RSS feeds, blog badges, Facebook applications...

And in the real world - DAB radios, wi-fi radios, mobile phones...

MusicBrainz at the BBC

Tom writes about the upgrade to www.bbc.co.uk/music that now uses MusicBrainz IDs for artists, albums and tracks. Plus the album reviews are now under a Creative Commons license and are microformatted with hReview and hCard. Read his post to find out why this is so important and how it will expand the potential of this information.

Michael's obviously been a busy man - what with this and the prototype clickable tracklistings for Hackday.

Update: More info up on the MusicBrainz site

At hackday

It's hackday at Alexandra Palace and the building's been struck with lightning. We've just got power and wifi back and we're back inside.

We just finished our talk in time - "Things to Make and Do with Radio and Music". It should be online soon. Our hackday box can be found here...

http://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org/

It's got links to all the apps and data feeds we talked about including...

• The Moose 6 music discovery game


• The John Peel and Top of the Pops apps and data


• RadioPlayer data


• Incoming SMS feeds


• etc.

Have fun hacking...

BBC Audio & Music at Hackday

We're frantically getting things ready for Hackday on Saturday. We're pulling together some new apps, data and feeds from BBC Audio & Music for the weekend. I can't say too much right now but there'll be stuff to do with Top of the Pops and John Peel (interesting combination), SMS messages and also a sneak preview of one of our latest projects, code-named Moose 6. We may also have some prizes for the best radio- or music-related hack.

And our session details are now up on the Hackday backnetwork.

Things to Make and Do (with music and radio)

By Chris Bowley and Tristan Ferne

Tristan and Chris will talk about how they build things at BBC Audio & Music Interactive, give some top tips on making prototypes and reveal some new APIs and data you might want to use to hack music and radio. All done using the medium of album titles.

They'll be several of us at Hackday and we hope to see you there.

Hardware hacking at the BBC

Last week we ran a hardware hacking session at BBC Audio & Music Interactive. Two teams of three, formed from across discipines, came together on a Monday morning. At their disposal they had a Phidgets interface kit, a servo kit, a couple of RFID kits, a slightly handicapped Teleo board (the cleaners threw a load of sensors away on Thursday night!) and a Nabaztag wireless bunny.

We were aiming for something that would get people making stuff and having fun, as well as being a good team building exercise and providing a new perspective on interface design. We like the quote from the Arduino booklet...

Physical Computing is about prototyping with electronics, turning sensors, actuators and microcontrollers into materials for designers and artists. It involves the design of interactive objects that can communicate with humans using sensors and actuators controlled by a behaviour implemented as software running inside a microcontroller.

The brief we gave to the teams was to build something to do with discovering new music, but using a physical interface. And preferably involving data from the internet. 10 working hours later they had built an RFID-reading, profile creating, music recommending rabbit and a monster who rates your iTunes tracks.

The first team built Zoltar, the music predicting rabbit. This worked by swiping a number of RFID-enabled objects to build up a musical profile. These objects represented bands or genres of music; Oasis (the popular fruit drink), rock, cheese, a glitterball (disco) and a couple of red hot chilli peppers (kind of). Once the profile was complete, swiping the OK tag caused music recommendations to be generated (via last.fm) and read out by a Nabaztag rabbit.





The second team built iRate - a monster that is used to rate your tracks in iTunes. His LED teeth indicate the rating of the currently playing iTunes track and his arm can then be moved up and down to change the rating in real time. Poking the microswitch in his eye causes iTunes to skip to the next track. There was also a virtual interface showing iRate's current expression on-screen. I love the monster/box - apparently inspired by http://www.readymech.com/; free flat-pack toys to print and build.





Overall I was extremely impressed with what the teams built in such a short time. Particularly as they came to hardware hacking with little or no experience. Ideally we'd have had a day of just tinkering and hacking to get to know what the hardware and the software can do together, then we'd have a couple of days of actually building something. But, I think, everyone had fun and we had a packed demo session at the end of the second day. One of the remits of the R&D team here is to encourage innovation, in both thinking and doing, and I think this was pretty successful in getting people fired up, thinking differently and just doing stuff.

Hack Day

I'll be there and I'll be speaking as well. I hope we'll have some new BBC feeds around radio and music content by then and maybe some special one-off's for the weekend.

Find Listen Label (a.k.a. Annotatable Audio)

Today sees the public launch of the Annotatable Audio prototype, now called "Find Listen Label", which my R&D team has been developing recently. Find Listen Label is basically a wiki for annotating radio programmes. It lets BBC radio listeners go online and mark-up and annotate segments of radio programmes, creating better navigation within the programme by providing segments or chapters and enhancing the findability of the programme by annotating it with descriptions and tags about the content.



Why are we doing this? It's part of our drive to make BBC radio's programmes more navigable and more findable on the internet. We have some basic information on programmes that is used for schedules but it is not usually very rich and often doesn't really describe what is in the programme in any detail. Many of our speech radio programmes on Radio 4 or Five Live contain lots of varied and interesting content and at the moment, without listening to the programme, you just wouldn't know.

We already have a nice framework for individual pages for programmes (from the BBC Programme Information Pages project) ready for extra information and in the forthcoming Radio 4 redesign we will start to see extra metadata to allow more horizontal (topic- or keyword-based) navigation. And some programmes, like the Chris Moyles enhanced podcast, already do some "chapterising". But this particular example takes the best part of a day for a producer to do and most programme teams do not have the dedicated effort to do something like this, so we wanted to try to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of the BBC radio audience to help us. We designed Find Listen Label (Annotatable Audio) to generate metadata that enables two things, internal navigation and findability. Internal navigation is the ability to see what a programme contains and easily move around inside that programme, moving between segments and skipping segments that don't interest you. Findability is the quality of something being locatable or navigable - through search engines, links and keywords - and by adding rich metadata about the contents of a programme we increase its findability.

We're launching the prototype with All In The Mind, a Radio 4 programme "exploring the limits and potential of the mind". We chose this as the initial programme to prototype this on as it is relatively non-controversial, factual and magazine-like with natural segments. Luckily the programme team were happy to allow us to use it as a guinea pig.



The playback interface lets you listen to the programme, skip around the segments, filter by tags and read the annotations. The edit interface lets you edit an existing segment, delete an existing segment or create a new segment. The start and end times of segments are altered in the Flash interface by dragging the left or right edges of the segment. And you can edit the title, description and tags for a programme. It works like a wiki so there is one canonical version of the programme with the most recently edited set of segments and metadata. Like every good wiki there is a history page though at the moment the history page is fairly rudimentary.

To do any editing you must be signed in. We have to follow the BBC's guidelines and for any kind of user-created content we must use the BBC's Single Sign On system. But we're not going to be actively moderating the content, just keeping an eye on it to make sure nothing breaks the BBC Editorial Guidelines too much.

This is the biggest project that the current R&D team at BBC Audio & Music Interactive have worked on. Many thanks to all the people who worked on it including Tom Coates for the initial idea, Graham Beale who created the basis of the current simplified design, Sarah Challis for the lots of work on the final design and the cool little tutorial animation, Joti Brar for project managing it to launch, Lee Goddard for the back-end Perl code and Chris Bowley for all of the lovely front-end interface. The original prototype was built in the Autumn of 2005 and you can read more about the history of the project here and here. The name change came after a number of people complained that "annotatable" wasn't in the dictionary and as an attempt to make it more obvious what it does; "find", "listen" and "label". In particular we wanted to make it clear that it was a tool, something that could be applied to a programme and not a separate application. The ultimate ambition would be to have the Find Listen Label tool available for every BBC radio, and even TV, programme.

How does it work? There's a bespoke Perl back end, written by Lee, which is basically a wiki/cvs system. It's built to run on bbc.co.uk servers, which in itself is not a straightforward task. This then serves a REST-like read and write API - when we get time we will publish the location of this API and its format. The client, built by Flash wizard Chris Bowley, is a mixture of Ajax and Flash. The Flash handles the audio playback and segmentation interface and Ajax does the annotations and the rest of the page. Speaking of the audio - it is just a progressively downloaded MP3 which is not necessarily the best solution but is definitely the simplest. It is also fairly low quality to reduce loading times. I'm sure Chris will write more about the client on his blog shortly.

This is our third or fourth iteration of the tool and it's a while since we built the first internal prototype. It's been a challenge to design a suitable simple interface, to create a common understanding of what the tool should do (it can be many things to many people), to get buy-in from management and from the radio stations, and to deploy it onto the somewhat aged bbc.co.uk infrastructure. I hope you find it interesting or useful. Please go and have a play...

BBC Radio redesign

Now Dan has left (and Matt, Matt and Tom before him) no-one seems to be promoting all the interesting and exciting work that we're doing in BBC Audio & Music Interactive. So in a possibly futile attempt to remedy this I bring you the relaunched BBC Radio homepage.



This may not be most enormously exciting development to you, but bear with me. It's a big improvement on the previous page and is now much cleaner and simpler. It gives a nice overview of all of our radio stations (rollover to see them all), includes space for promos, easy access to all our live streaming and audio-on-demand and has a well designed site infrastructure ready to incorporate new material. Excellent work from Antony, Pete, Antony, Ruediger and Jim. But most importantly it is the start of things to come. We are planning a number of site relaunches this coming year, which will include many features that will be a big step forward for us. Maybe even Annotatable Audio if you're lucky.

* Obviously there are bloggers in the department and I hope I'm not offending any of them here - Duncan, Matt, Chris and Dan for example. And I'm sure there are others hiding out there, apologies if I've missed you off.