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jodbod

Listed below are comments made by jodbod between Wednesday, 9th July 2008 and Wednesday, 17th June 2009.

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Issues on News and Sport Video & Audio Playback 09:20am on 17 Jun 2009 christownsend:

Yep - this is along the lines of what I was thinking. A service status or destination page where we can let people know about "significant" service issues which would save you looking for the problem elsewhere.

We could even have a twitter feed...or maybe not :o)

OK - the ball is rolling on this...

Hi grevilleb - I think the issue you are looking for is being discussed here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/06/changes_to_international_pages.html

Some changes have recently been made to the way different editions of the site are served; there is a particular issue with AOL we are addressing and should be fixed soon.

Cheers,

jod
Issues on News and Sport Video & Audio Playback 3:33pm on 15 Jun 2009 The iPlayer team and message board is usually very responsive to service issues so I'm sure any confusion was an anomaly.

Any thoughts on how you would like to see such issues announced are welcome.

Cheers,

jod
Issues on News and Sport Video & Audio Playback 12:13pm on 15 Jun 2009 Hi "Egg on a stilt" / "christownsend", yes, the problem was related. It was difficult to track down because the problem was caused by a combination of issues related to a shared library and changes to server configurations. Many areas of the BBC are dependent on shared products, and News and Sport are no different. We are actively looking at ways to avoid such dependencies from causing problems in the future.

For News and Sport, we often announce service issues on The Editors Blog ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/06/network_problem.html ) but your comments are making me think about how we might do this in the future. We like to be open about service issues when they are affecting services to avoid confusion amongst users.

Fairscunnert, this problem was not related to the changes to the site, so for clairty, this issue was not related to http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/06/change_to_international_pages.html or this http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/06/network_problem.html

Cheers,

John O'Donovan
(Em)Bedding In 10:24pm on 16 Mar 2009 Hi all - on the question of more subtitles for News and Sport content, the biggest probolem is that these programmes are often live and so the subtitles are written on the fly. This creates a problem in re-using them because they are written in real time meaning they are inherently not a precise (as in word for word) representation of the media and would not be an acceptable replacement for a transcript if viewed without the context of the video or audio they are associated with. Watch the subtitles on the News as an example.

They also require a much more complicated process to capture live with the media and this is something we are working on with the iPlayer team this year.

We are developing some ways of processing video, including speech to text and semantic tags but the main issue with this remains the accuracy of these techniques when automated.

Cheers,

jod (John O'Donovan)
BBC iPlayer Local Radio Integration 1:17pm on 05 Dec 2008 Hi.

Briantist: I'll pas that thought onto the iPlayer team as they control the interface.

RobertWilliams76: We are working on how we manage opt outs and other stations. no definite timelines I'm afraid.

barstep: Once we move the transcoding over from the existing hardware based solution to one which uses software based transcoding then we can produce more formats. The other formats will be possible after we deliver the MP£ / Flash format outputs to align with the rest of radio output. We will look at iPhone and other formats early next year...

Cheers,

jod
Knowing When To "Go" 3:25pm on 12 Nov 2008 Hi all - thanks for the comments.

As frankieroberto poiints out there are at least two ways to approach this, and we are looking at the options and testing them out at the moment. We are trying to find the most appropriate approach for the Journalism sites but within the mechanisms used by the whole BBC, and I will let you know when we are rolling out the update. Will be soon.

The conversation seems to have drifted into user stats.

This is a separate discussion but I should point out that the system we use in Journalism for usage statistics is an internal one called LiveStats.

Amongst many things Livestats drives this page:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/map.stm

and also drives the "most popular stories widget" you see on the right hand side of our news and sport web pages.

The Omniture / Visual Science system is used by BBC WorldWide but only if you are outside the UK or on the Homepage. Only BBC staff access the data.
Olympics On All Platforms 12:30pm on 30 Aug 2008 newboldtom:

There have been comparisons but don't have the full summary yet. Over 40 Million, roughly 70% of the population, watched some olympics coverage so there was certainly no drop off in engagement with broadcast services.

grendal100:

We have plans for more video content on mobile and also improving and changing the way we publish the mobile site so that video becomes more integrated into the content pages (at the moment you usually get sent to a video index, with a list of videos on).

We are looking at multicast as well, but there are cost and quality issues for the end user because of the cost of data transferred to phones. If you watch a lot of video you can get a big bill, "Bill Shock" as it commonly referred to.

For Olympics content we arranged for these costs to be capped, but a more long term approach is required and we need to work out an approach which makes sense for the mobile operators as well. Some of the operators also have technical restrictions we need to work through.

We want to get the model and timing right for launching such a service.
Olympics On All Platforms 2:08pm on 26 Aug 2008 jacksonkelsie, SheffTim and Iron_Jack thanks for your positive comments on the coverage. Will have an update on usage hopefully by the end of the week.

Cheers,

John O'Donovan
Olympics On All Platforms 11:21am on 26 Aug 2008 Whisky:

Hi - you will find our news content is generally available worldwide, but the rights for sport and other types of content are often restricted to the UK. We are looking at ways of providing suitable alternative content or funding but we are unable to distribute certain content worldwide for free.

Klbrock:

Hi Klbrock. This has been one of the challenges with distributing video over mobile - identifying which territory users are located in, especially when roaming. Restrictions on using 3G modems will be less tight after the olympics and we are working with the operators to find a way to identify more accurately where users are located.
BBC LiveUpdate 8:42pm on 09 Jul 2008 Thanks for the feedback.

Chris Fleming:

We have noticed the application can get memory hungry if you leave it open in the full story list view. If you leave it in ticker mode it seems to be fine.

If it is eating memory, in the short term while we collate and fix bugs, you can clear any memory hogging by moving between full and ticker view and back.

If leaving it open for a long time, recommend you leave it in Ticker mode.

tomhannen:

we will feed these comments into the next version...

Cheers,

jod
(john o'donovan)

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