News & Sport Embedded Media
Yesterday we launched embedded media (see an example here) across the BBC News and Sport sites.
We are starting with just a few stories, but over the next few weeks, we will be converting most of our video and audio to be embedded.
We're using an embedded media player which, within the BBC, is known by the secret code name of the Embedded Media Player - or EMP. This is a new site-wide media player built by the Journalism and iPlayer teams. More about this further down.
"So what does this change on the site?", you may ask.
Currently, our audio and video appears in popup windows using Real or Windows Media formats, which you get to by clicking on the Watch / Video or Listen / Audio links that you see in stories. You can see some examples in this story underneath the main picture.
This approach has served us well, but it was apparent from trials we ran in the middle of last year [for example, here], that in general, people find embedded media easier to engage with. No surprise there, as the unstoppable march of sites such as YouTube has proven. However, Pete Clifton also talked about how this may change the way we make video and provide added value to the stories it is associated with.
It has taken some time to put all the pieces in place to make this change, but there are a lot of moving parts to adapt without breaking anything that is being used on the live site.
For those who are interested, these media are created as clips (30sec - 3min long) and are submitted from all around the UK (and beyond) to a system called the MPS (Media Publishing System), which routes this media to the correct destination, transcoding it to the correct output format on the way.
Previously, this would be Windows and Real in both narrowband and nroadband versions for both formats. We also keep a higher quality copy so we can make further versions if required. Now we will only be making a Flash version for most video and audio, along with the archive copy. Life has just got a little simpler for us making the video and for the audience in engaging with it.
Once media are made available by the MPS, the CPS (Content Production System) is made aware of this and allows this video to be linked to stories. A big change here is that previously, the media were "hidden" in a popup console and not integrated with the site. With embedded media, each piece of media will have its own page (called a Media Asset Page or MAP - here's an example).
Apart from our obvious Talent In Creating Acronyms (TICA), you will notice that the MAP will then act as a permalink to the video or audio and is the destination to use when linking back to media items in general, especially to display video at its full size of 512 pixels wide. This media can then be linked to one or more stories, where it is placed in context within the story and will be displayed at either 400 or 256 pixels wide sizes, depending on where it is placed.
Bearing in mind that there are hundreds of users of the MPS and CPS systems generating hundreds of media clips each week, it has taken time to adapt these substantial systems and start to train users in the changes that embedded media will bring.
Putting that little embedded player onto the site has sent ripples of change through all of BBC Journalism.
On top of this, we have built the EMP in collaboration with the iPlayer team to be a unified player for all video and audio. This has meant decommissioning some other players, but over time there is little reason to have multiple players with different technical approaches. This is all about creating a consistent and familiar user experience for as much of our audience as possible. The EMP is not the same as the one currently used in iPlayer though it may look similar. It is a new application and will support a variety of new features.
A significant change for our international users will be that they will now also have higher quality Flash-based media akin to that served in the UK, rather than lower quality streams of Real or Windows Media. If you are interested in how this all works, then let us know and we will explain in a future blog post.
So the EMP is a small but feature rich and complex little application. Once it is rolled out across the Journalism sites, it will then be rolled out across the iPlayer and other BBC sites, and so needs to support lots of features and scenarios. There will be more information on this soon. Note, you will eventually be able to syndicate and embed BBC video in your own sites.
There will be some exceptions to using the EMP for now, generally where the media experience is heavily stylised or embedded within interactive games. We are also not moving live streams over to Flash yet, but aim to do so by the summer.
So, embedded media at last: it may look like just a small lonely video on this page, but it is the start of something big. The Technology and Sport sections is where we are rolling out the first changes to include embedded video over the next few weeks, so have a look and do let us know if you have any ideas about how you would like this to develop.
Cheers...
John O'Donovan is Chief Architect, BBC FM&T Journalism
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~29~RS~)
Comments
I noticed that player on the news page for the wacky Google office - it was a nice video and I actually prefer it over the RealPlayer/WMP combo that is currently being offered.
I hope that this is the start of things to come - maybe a redesign of the BBC News player? A Flash stream of BBC News 24 like you did with [most of] BBC Three would be great.
I also noticed that Blip.TV is used on another BBC blog I can't remember the name of right now. I'm glad to see you've closely matched the quality of the iPlayer and the new News video with this site.
One suggestion - the MAP should include a list of story pages that utilise the video.
I like the new embedded video, however I think you should keep live streams as Real Player/Windows Media content - since a lot of people such as myself access it once from BBC.Co.uk, and then bookmark it from within our media player. We can then have the window any size and floating on top of other windows while we do other things. Much better than a flash web page.
Sadly this doesn't work with the iPhone it seems. Is simultaneous transcoding (as in the superb iPlayer) on the cards?
While I applaud the BBC's attempts to improve access to multi-media
items this I'm afraid is a backwards step for people running
non-Windows/Mac machines. The swapping of one proprietary technology
for another doesn't improve the lot of the growing number of people
running FLOSS systems. Realplayer was an ugly hack but with
mplayer and various binary codecs I could just about coax a radio or
tv stream out of the BBC website (although you still needed to dig
around for the URL, despite many requests for a direct link).
Given the fact the BBC has obviously put a lot of work into it's
content generation system is it not possible to provide a direct link
to the video file the Flash player loads for people who don't have
Flash installed? You'll find that FLOSS systems actually support a
wide range of video codecs as long as they are not hidden away by
whizzy Flash interfaces.
All good but you don't say why you can't give the embed code which other big media players are starting to allow. See clip reuse in US Primaries.
This seems a bit daft when you aren't policing the reuse of your clips via YouTube/LiveLeak etc.
You don't seem to mind your clips being reused/promoted (two sides of the same coin) but you're not going to make it easy. Am I right?
I assume the behemoths are behind that decision ....
Do these embedded players automatically start buffering / loading content when you visit the page? it would be very intensive on bandwidth and pointless if you don't actually watch the video but just read the item.
Thanks for your comments.
Regarding formats and being able to link directly to videos then I agree with the comments above as we did not want to move to another proprietary format.
Moving to Flash has allowed us to progress towards supporting h.264 for video and MP3 / AAC(+) for audio, which are formats which can be used on a variety of platforms easily. One of the reasons we have held off on moving to Flash previously, was that we wanted to establish the commitment to h.264 and AAC+.
Another reason why embedded media has taken time to roll out, is that the BBC was one of the first to support online media on a large scale for both live and on demand content, so there is a lot of invested infrastructure in existing formats. It takes time to justify re-purposing this infrastructure to other formats and more time to make it happen.
I'll put up some more details on the roadmap of formats and devices we will be supporting in a follow up post soon.
Paul/Alex/Marc - I mentioned above you will be able to embed video on other sites but we need to work out some issues with how this will work. In particular, you may not be aware that the player has to support advertising when someone is using it outside the UK and also has to restrict some content to UK users only. This causes a few complications, but rest assured, it will be possible to link to and embed video directly. We will take on feedback about how this user journey works to ensure it is as seamless as possible based on your comments.
Robert and others, the suggestions on new features have been noted. Keep them coming.
Generally the player should be working on Macs and with Firefox, so if you are experiencing problems then please send us some more details through the feedback form here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_3990000/newsid_3993900/3993913.stm
Finally, the other blog you mentioned BeHe is this one I think...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/
Cheers,
jod
Have Sky News' site not been using this feature for almost a year?
Not working on this Mac/Firefox combination - "Sorry, this content isn't available at the moment" - though it works on on an XP PC with IE.
I'm pleased the BBC have made this move. I also love the fact Flash now supports standard h264/aac mp4 files - even for my little private gallery I was finding it hard to select a format that was both accessible to most users and non-proprietary. Now I can just have a single file that people can view in their choice of Flash/VLC plugin/Quicktime and download and play on their computer too in any decent modern player.
I realise the BBC may be more tied in to flash in order to have a rich enough client to support the different behavior from different locations, and deal with potential rights issues, but if you could come up with a system to do this using something server-side or javascript-based that just allowed you to provide a standard mp4 that would be a great boost for those pushing for open standards.
It's unfortunate that there are no nice open-source cross-platform players for standard mp4 (VLC lacks decent controls although it can play the stuff well) but I believe the provision of more standards-based media online will drive their development.
John
thanks for your response. I kept getting the 502 and assumed 'failure'. So I hadn't come back to check responses - and there's my comment. As I've just blogged 'oh, yey of little faith .. ' so my apologies and a little bow.
With reference to 'standards', I think YouTube has established this through mass experience - so I hope you don't hide the share/embed option. I understand why people want you to lead in this area and don't like FlashVideo but this can be a monastical dead-end, rather than something which gets serious take-up.
I expect that once this is widely rolled out it will be a big, key moment for the BBC, especially internationally. But you already know that :}
Yet another, probably very costly, change to how you present your video. How do you manage it? Just one year ago you made a "new look player" that was apparently the best thing since sliced bread. There was a long list of reasons why Flash wasn't chosen (none of which tally with your reasons for launching Flash video one year later) and now here we are, more money down the drain, the beeb desperately trying to keep up with the rest of the pack, throwing more money at it. Oh, but there had to be a Flash video "trial" that would just tell you what everyone knew already, more money gone. Where does it all come from? ooh yes...
trial : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6684381.stm
new player :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/01/in_response_to_site_changes.html
You have aligned yourselves with the proprietary Real Video, and Microsoft WMV, and now Adobe's Flash.
When will yu finally wake up to using industry standards? Future TV (fron HD TV through to mobile phone video) will all be based around MPEG-4/H264. So why not choese this now and get into the future.
A 'few' PC users may have to upgrade to view it, but this is progress.
I have just played the example video (3D TV). I have also given some feedback (Do away with the centre screen logo "Play" as this spoilds the picture for people that do not want to view the video)
Now I have found a bug. At the end of the video the screen says "PLAY AGAIN" this creates a hot spot over the small picture which, sure enough, plays it again.
BUT if you want to use the controls under the video (Play/Pause) they don't work and you cannot pay the video again using them.
I storngly suggest to remove the "PLAY" plogo, and the hot spot for play again, and enable correct functionality for the PLAY/PAUSE button, making this the only control users have to use.
well done, dropping Re..[buffering]..al media is the best news I've heard from the BBC in a long time.
All I need to know is- can I still watch the snooker live?
Thanks. BBC provides great content online. The web video technical solution though has been poor. This will be a great improvement.
Dropping realmedia was good, but you've hardly moved to a better platform.
I do not install flash because it is used nearly exclusively for distracting annoying adverts online, and I am not alone in doing this. It it also a major security risk, as it is a proprietry product that the end user cannot check to see if it does just what adobe says it does.
By using flash over real media and WM, you are lowering the amount of choice to the end user.
But in reality you should just provide nice open streams that the end user can decide what to do with. Seeing as we pay over a hundred pounds each a year, the user's access to programming should be the number one priority for the BBC.
And whoever keeps approving these projects where the BBC jumps into bed with major corps. needs a good slap as they are very naive to the ways of the corporate world. I should imagine that working for a non-profit org for years will mean you don't really get to see just how greedy businesses are, and how they will try to get as much money from their customers for the least effort, with no regard for any consequences of their actions: like the whole BBC userbase not getting the best tech available for the them.
Unfortunately, your embedded videos in Sport does not recognise me as a UK resident, even though I live in Devon.
iPlayer works for me though, so I don't understand how I could possibly be being blocked.
I like Flash, and understand why you've held out to the .115 (h264) version and kept WMP and Real going for so long.
But where are these new videos? I thought there would be more with the BBC News revamp, but I'm still getting [buffering.....] Real videos everywhere.
Hi Dan - more will start appearing from the middle of this week.
Before we could roll out beyond Technology and Sport we had to implement the functionality to support advertising when viewing outside the UK, which is currently supported by the pop-up player.
So you will see most of the media switch to embedded media over the next week or two.
Live video streams will swap over later in the year n legacy video will stay as it is for now.
Cheers,
Thankyou! This is a HUGE improvement and one I have been hopefor for ages! Awesome!
I am sure that the BBC media is very good. Its just a shame that its not available to people (like myself) who live outside of the UK.
I may be thick or soemthing but I cant get my round the reasoning for not streaming your programming. (example BBC news 24)