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Today I'm delighted to announce the launch of .

Radioplayer is the culmination of a successful partnership between the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and Commercial radio to provide consumers with an attractive proposition for easy online radio listening and an easy-to-use application that allows quick navigation between stations and search function across radio stations online.

I've been asked many times about the future ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ plans for online Radio, on this topic it is worth referencing Daniel Danker's previous post.

So what does Radioplayer mean for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ online radio listeners? Quite simply whether you navigate from the Radio network sites or from ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer if you use the existing pop up console, you'll have a new console with some great enhancements! There are no changes to how you consume Radio in ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer, so if you prefer to listen in page you'll be pleased to hear that option remains.

The Radioplayer console

The previous version of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ radio console was designed against three key principles;

simplicity, discoverability and personalisation.

Throughout the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's relationship with the Radioplayer partners it has been hugely important to ensure we built upon these principles.

We thought the best way to do that was by delivering a consistent user experience across ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and Commercial stations, yet ensuring we have a framework for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, and indeed Commercial, stations to innovate and express their unique identity. This has been realised through enabling:

• Industry wide UK radio station presets

• Simple and consistent player controls

• Pan industry search allowing audiences to discover and switch between stations

• Establishing a framework for presenting supporting content

The Radioplayer preset

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and Commercial radio station presets

The Radioplayer partnership has enabled the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to extend its existing Station preset functionality, as of today you can now discover and save your favourite radio stations and programmes and seamlessly switch between ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and Commercial networks. Over the coming weeks numerous new stations will be joining the partnership.

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Same size, same media player...

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ UX&D team led the Radioplayer partnership in defining an agreed set of design guidelines, that outlined the size of the console, interactions and the simple media player controls. For the user this means whether they are using a Radioplayer console to listen to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 1, Xfm, Absolute Radio or Juice 107.2 they will have a familiar experience.

A single place to discover UK radio

In February Paul Clark wrote about partner linking in iPlayer for TV broadcasters , with the launch of the Radioplayer, online listeners can similarly discover and switch to radio stations and programmes from across the UK. The common metadata and search functionality mean regardless of whether you are listening to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 4, Capital or Smooth the results returned will be consistent.

Radioplayer search

Search is a feature that will experience continued refinement, as partner metadata improves and algorithms evolve the accuracy of results. By its very nature a degree of serendipitous content will also surface offering audiences the ability to quickly discover unfamiliar and new content.

For those interested Radioplayer search has been built upon the new Radioplayer metadata specification a result of the collaboration of industry metadata experts

Supporting content and innovation

While it was important for Radioplayer to offer a consistent user experience, none of the partners wanted to stifle innovation or restrict brand identity. As such ¾ of the real estate is available for stations to customise.

Our audience research clearly highlights that first and foremost online radio audiences want to listen. However, they consistently expressed the need to discover more about ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ programmes and quickly find and share content.

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The team delivering the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radioplayer console have continued to keep this in mind, and as such focused on improving how we surface supporting information, including improvements to the favouriting and recommending interactions, plus we've added track now playing information.

The latter has been the top feature request, and it's great to be able to display the track information (and associated links to /music page) for live broadcasts on Radio 1, Radio 1 Extra, Radio 2 and Radio 6 Music.

I look forward to your feedback, and observing the usage of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radioplayer console.

Dave Price is Product Lead, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer, Programmes and On Demand, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media.

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As many of you (and ) the whole of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online was down last night for an hour from 22:40 due to a major network incident. We would like to apologise to everyone that was unable to access ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online during this outage.

Our systems are designed to be sufficiently resilient (multiple systems, and multiple data centres) to make an outage like this extremely unlikely.Ìý However, I'm afraid that last night we suffered multiple failures, with the result that the whole site went down. Enough of the systems were restored to bring ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online pretty well back to normal by 23:45, and we were fully resilient again by 04:00 this morning.

For the more technically minded, this was a failure in the systems that perform two functions.Ìý The first is the aggregation of network traffic from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's hosting centres to the internet.Ìý The second is the announcement of 'routes' onto the internet that allows ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online to be 'found.'Ìý With both of these having failed, we really were down!

We'll be taking a very hard look at what we need to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

Richard Cooper is Controller, Digital Distribution, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media.

I'm a developer of the Audience Publishing Services team in Programmes and On Demand in ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media. As Jessica has explained last week we rolled out a new comments product to all ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blogs.

As a recent addition to the APS team I was tasked with revamping the commenting system and bringing it onto the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Dynamic Web Application Platform (the Platform - PHP with ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ flavoured ).

The old system comprised of a set of 's which would allow developers to interact with the APS backend system. This would allow them to retrieve a list of comments (we call it a comment forum), and post comments back to it.

For ease of use, with products such as blogs, there was a set of SSI includes which would be embedded within a page which would pull in the necessary assets, forms etc and do all the API calls necessary to make it all work.

So why change?

The old architecture was basically a set of API's to the APS backend (which is tried & trusted), but the frontend implementation was difficult to implement and was totally geared towards working on the older SSI based servers, not the Platform.

We needed an easy way of adding comments to pages on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online which would work on the Platform, would be backwards compatible with the older servers, and one that would stand up to the high traffic demands of clients such as ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Sport.

So what did we do?

Firstly, whatever system we built, it had to interface with the APS API (our source of comments and comment forums). We needed something on the Platform which would act as a wrapper for these API calls, so we build the Comments Service. The Comments Service is the bridge between the Platform and APS. Functions are called on the Platform using the Comments Service, which in turn calls the relevant APS API calls, which then returns back to the Comments Service, to return it back to the application which called it initially.

It's not unusual for us to see peak levels of traffic of up to 500 transactions a second for News pages using Comments, so the Comments Service makes use of , this enables us to cache the response from APS for a short while, to relieve pressure on the APS Service at times of heavy load.

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An important thing to note in the diagram above (taken from our trial of Comments on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Stories), is the scale of the y-axis for each of the graphs. Even though the requests per second from the Comments Module to the Comments Service peaks at nearly 120 requests/second (requests for a list of comments), the requests to the Comments Service to the APS Service never goes above 10 requests a second. This enables us to cope with the large spikes in traffic and scale the module to meet the demanding needs of the bbc.co.uk domain.

The next thing we needed was something to handle the presentation of comments, the forms needed to interact with comment forums (posting a comment) and deliver the assets and javascript to enable a rich user experience for the whole thing. This, is called the Comments Module.

The Comments Module is a small application, which follows the design pattern of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Module (others ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Modules include Barlesque - the masthead and footer on all ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ pages). This allows it to be included in any of our Platform pages with only a few lines of code. To include the Comments Module on the old based servers, we use the Comments Module as a full application, and call it via a dedicated URL using SSI. When the Comments Module is called in this way, it returns all the HTML, images and javascript needed to embed it into a page, so wherever the developer adds the SSI call to the URL of the Comments Module in their web page, the Comments Module will appear in all it's glory, already styled (in it's default appearance - which can be overridden with CSS), ready for use (including integration with our login system BBD iD).

The Comments Module uses the Comments Service to retrieve the comment forums from APS, and then renders them using the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖs templating system - Spectrum. This takes care of rending the correct HTML, script, CSS tags etc.

So whats new in the new ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Comments Module?

So, aside from a refresh (which at the moment is mainly visible on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News), we've added a few things which you might notice:

Speed Bumping

When this is enabled on a site, or comment forum, it enforces a minimum time interval between posts to the same comment forum by the same user. This is like a cooling off period between posts.

Ajax Pagination

When paginating between different pages of comments, if you have a javascript enabled browser with javascript turned on, all pagination happens using, making it load faster and increasing bandwidth efficiency.

Ajax Comment Posting

As with the Ajax pagination, posting comments can now occur using Ajax (specifically the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ javascript framework Glow), meaning a faster response for users, and again a more efficient use of bandwidth.

Comment Highlighting

We found the old way of linking to a comment could be confusing, as in a long list of comments, it wasn't always obvious which one had been linked to, so we've introduced highlighting for linked comments. See here and here.

Comments Per Page

We've reduced the number of comments per page to 100 for all blogs (from 500). This reduces page size, which is better for bandwidth and page delivery times.

HTML in Comments

We allow a small set of tags to be used to style your comments on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Blogs. These are: <blockquote>, <em>, <li>, <p>, <pre>, <q>, <strong>, <ul>, <ol> and <b> These are not currently available for use on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News comments.

The Future

We've got a full roadmap for new features to be introduced in the coming months, i'm looking forward to telling you all about them, as we introduce them.

We're always interested to hear your thoughts, please use the comment box below!

Richard Summers is lead developer, User Publishing Services, Programmes and On Demand, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media.

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Filthy Cities Scratch and Sniff

Viewers can press red at the start of the programme for the Filthy Cities red button experience with extra filthy footage and fun facts. Viewers with a scratch and sniff card, and a strong stomach can scratch and sniff the filthy cities when prompted in the show.
Episode one explores filthy Medieval London, and episode two Revolutionary Paris.

If you haven't got your cards already they are available for free at your local library from April 1st 2011 while stocks last - please ask at the main enquiry desk.

Find out more at bbc.co.uk/filthycities

Sky/ Freesat/ Virgin Media:

Tue 5th April, 9:00pm-10:05pm
Thu 7th April, 11:20pm-12:25am

Freeview:
Tue 5th April, 9:00pm-10:05pm

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Last week we rolled out the new comments module across all ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ blogs. This is following a trial run on ten blogs including Robert Peston, Dan Walker and this one which have had the new module since November.

There have been several tweaks made during the trial period in response to your feedback and it is now ready for wider release.

What is changing?

• Moderation links will be pointing to the correct pages (i.e. on blogs rather than message boards)

• Improved caching for better response and faster page loads

• The comment box is now slightly shallower initially and only gets deeper when you click into it and start typing,

• When you leave a new comment this will be highlighted until you leave or refresh the page.

• Number of comments on a blog post has been reduced to 100 per page. This reduces load time and is better for search engine optimisation of blog posts.

Richard Summers, the lead developer for the comments module, will provide further insight into how this was delivered in a blog post to be published later today.

Jessica Shiel is Product Manager for Blogs, User Services, Programmes and On-Demand, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media & Technology

As General Manager for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖpage, News, Sport, Weather, Knowledge & Learning, Children's, and Search products on the web and mobile, I've an increasing interest in emerging IP platforms.

It was in this capacity I talked to industry at IPTV World Forum today, building on Executive Editor of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online Roly Keating's address to the DTG earlier this month, by exploring how core ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online products could be re-imagined for connected TV.

Like Mobile, IPTV will be an expression of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online. You'll be familiar with the headlines of our recent Putting Quality First announcements and the impact on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online: a 25% reduction in budget, but for the first time a single strategic vision for the service comprising ten distinctive 'products', aligned to our editorial priorities. We've adopted a collaborative Product Management culture which unites tech and editorial to enable delivery of these distinctive, quality interactive propositions, whatever the platform - online, portable devices, and increasingly connected TVs.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is interested in IPTV for a number of reasons. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's sixth Public Purpose is to deliver to the public the benefits of emerging technologies, so we're constantly innovating to drive digital adoption. For instance, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Text launched in 1999 and evolved into today's ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Red Button service, used by over 12 million users per week. And, quality digital propositions in turn drive demand. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer has been a great catalyst in bringing video-on-demand to the mainstream. Launched in 2007 when the market for online 'catch-up' was negligible, in January we received 162 million requests for programmes. So we've a commitment to keep pace with innovation to fulfil our sixth Public Purpose, and respond to our audiences' demand - this is why we're backing .

IPTV is arguably the platform of the future. Screen Digest reports that by 2014 90% of TV sets sold in Europe will be internet enabled. And of course, connected TVs are only part of the story; around three quarters of major brand consoles purchased in 2011 will be browser enabled so this is a huge area of growth.

That said, the IPTV market is in its infancy and we don't know what mainstream audience reaction will be. An agreed editorial strategy and defined product roadmap from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ are still a way off, but in the meantime we're keen to prototype and pilot within the market, glean audience feedback, and iterate quickly.

By looking at the strengths of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News on the web we can start to see how the service could be re-imagined for IPTV. When ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Online was refreshed last year we introduced 'live pages', housing up-to-the-minute AV content and real-time updates. Major events continue to demonstrate that traditional, 'lean-back' consumption isn't enough for audiences. During the recent disaster in Japan over 79,996 users 'shared' the live page; the live event experience on the web is strong.

Imagine a browser-based ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News experience on your TV. With closer proximity between the live broadcast and ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online you can envisage users dipping out of a London 2012 linear broadcast to access details of an athlete, event, or location online - a context enriched by our advances in dynamic semantic publishing, which my colleague Jem Rayfield blogged about last year.

In comparison, apps optimised to a platform standard could deliver a more focused type of utility. You can imagine a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News app for connected TV that unites digital journalism with the AV of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Channel, improved by on-demand, allowing users to navigate through bulletins and to drive their own consumption. There's huge potential here, and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's role is the same as ever: expressing the full, creative potential of the medium.

I ended my talk by pointing to complexity of the infant IPTV market. Our aim is to take our content and services where our audiences are, but it's impossible for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ - funded by the licence fee - to support the multitude of specifications emerging. By standardising our product definitions we aim to minimise complexity for the market and reduce re-versioning costs: this is the case with Mobile, and is a principle I hope to apply to our IPTV endeavours.

Lastly, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is committed to delivering a common and consistent ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ IPTV experience across a variety of platforms and devices. Future interactive services will need to appeal to early digital adopters and more mainstream audiences. Services like Ceefax and its Digital Text replacement are so successful because they're so easy to use. A simple, intuitive navigational platform standard - seamlessly integrating linear and on-demand worlds - is what we ask of industry.

Phil Fearnley is General Manager News & Knowledge, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media

Editor's note - extracts from a blog post from Alex Gubbay, social media editor, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News, published on The Editors blog:

"The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed us trying out our comments module across different stories in recent months. The full functionality (including rating and promotional modules showing numbers of comments) is not yet implemented, but should be within a matter of weeks... Even at this point, we will still only enable it on a selection of content each day, determined by our editors and the news agenda - as is currently the case with Have Your Say... However, once we have rolled out, we intend to close Have Your Say in its current form - most likely in early April. Though World Have Your Say - the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's global interactive news discussion show - will continue across ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service, World News TV and online."

Read more and comment at The Editors at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News

Editor's note - extracts from a blog post from Steve Herrmann, editor of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website, published on The Editors blog at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News:

Your comments: One development which we have already tried out in a few places around the site is the addition of comments to stories, part of a wider move towards making the site feel more, well, "social"... we are planning to introduce the HTML5 video format soon for video clips on platforms that do not support Flash... Under the heading of "metadata" we are working on a system to label and categorise every piece of content we make so that each story, video and audio clip is tagged and easy to find and sort...

Read more and comment at The Editors at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News

The pack of information about ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer performance in February is now available. Click here to access a PDF.

Here are some headlines selected by my colleagues in the Communications team:

February was another very strong month for average daily requests. A new record of 4.5 million online requests per day was set, 5.3 million including ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer requests on Virgin Media; however purely because the month had 28 days compared with January's 31 days, the monthly total was correspondingly lower... The new ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer Apps helped Apple's iPad total requests increase +22% month on month, now delivering 2 million requests for TV programmes per month, up from 1.6 million in January, on that device alone. Since launch on Feb 10th, the Android and iPad apps have been downloaded a combined total of over 460k times.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online

Chris Moyles Show for Comic Relief

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On 16th March Chris and Dave will attempt to break the record for the longest show ever broadcast on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 1 – and they’re doing it for Comic Relief.

They’ll be broadcasting from the studio and from 10 O’clock The Chris Moyles Show will keep going with each of the DJs coming in to help them present their shows and support Chris & Dave throughout.
And on top of all that – you’ll be able to see the WHOLE thing on your TV via the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Red Button or online at bbc.co.uk/radio1!!

So, that’s Chris & Dave on Wednesday 16th March - for at least 37 hours, on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 1, online and on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Red Button!!!

Find out more at bbc.co.uk/radio1

Sky/ Freesat/ Virgin Media/ Freeview:
Wed 16th March, 6:30am-10:00am Fri 18th March

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Spencer Piggot's blog post about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's technology strategy earlier in the week has provoked some interest. Most of it focuses on 3D:

From The Register: . A comment on the Reg Hardware story from :

Good ol' Auntie for realising 3D is a gimmick that is more about the Cinema's being able to generate more money per seat...

From The Telegraph: :

...the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's more cautious approach will frustrate television manufacturers, who know more programming will be needed to boost sales...

From TechEYE: .

From Broadband TV News: .

From Computer Weekly:.

From Broadband TV News: .

From the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Research and Development blog: "Universal Control":

Given the trend for home media devices to gain connections to the home network, we believe that the best way to gain the advantages listed above is via a standardised API: a way for devices to communicate with one another over the home network to share information about and control the presentation of media to the user.

Also from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D blog: "R&D and Blue Peter- Ski Rossendale Free-viewpoint visualisation".

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Tom Scott needs your help to build a "science domain model": (from Tom's personal blog). Thanks to Tom.

Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online

It's been a while since my last blog on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's technology strategy and I wanted to give an update on what we've done and observed.

The paper published last year was the first step towards sharing the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's technology direction and ambitions. Publishing detail about what we hope to achieve, we believe, will lead to much more fruitful conversations with our technology partners and suppliers over the coming years. Innovation needs to be at the heart of what we do in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and that means harnessing good ideas that are generated both internally and from our partners.

The technology strategy describes the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's intent to leverage technologies such as virtualisation, and consumer technologies but the next step was to translate those ambitions into specific areas of technology to start achieving them. We identified 35 different areas of technology and set out to create an individual roadmap or strategy for each. The roadmaps cover all major areas from core infrastructure such as networks and data centres through to content production technology and audience facing such as Red Button and online search.

The roadmaps are being used as a guide to inform the technology decisions that are made throughout the corporation and as a way to align all the projects into the same direction. They are not a commitment to spend and are not linked to the organisational changes and cuts the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has committed to make. However, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has to invest in these technologies to remain efficient and meet our targets such as the reduction in overheads to be no more than 10% of public service budget.

What's been really interesting is the movement in technology over the past year and how important it is to make sure that the strategies are regularly reviewed. For example, we expected consumerisation to have a big impact and it hasn't disappointed. The iPad has changed the way a lot of people want to work and people with their privately owned devices want to be able to use it in the workplace as much as at home, with all the extra IT security considerations this brings.

The growth of online consumer services and the capabilities we take for granted as a home user are now being expected within the enterprise too. Central storage for our documents which is accessible anywhere, multi device support for our smart phone, tablet, PC and fast connection speeds are all enjoyed at home so why not at the office?

The nature of production and broadcasting lends itself to working outside the normal office environment and so identifying the tools and services that can bridge the consumer and enterprise space presents a real opportunity.

There are no doubt going to be even more new consumer services and rival tablet devices coming through this year and corporations have a difficult balancing act between supporting consumer devices and maintaining effective data management, IT security and resilience.

An observation that came from developing the strategies is the importance of The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is at a tipping point where integration is the focus for both our content production and our enterprise systems. Integration will enable the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to deliver efficiencies and better ways of working but it's not trivial to deliver. For the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to achieve its goals the role of architectural frameworks, interoperability standards (such as minimal metadata standards) and shared services are vital.

Attached to this blog is a summary of all the individual strategy roadmaps. It should provide you with a view of where the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ would like to focus its efforts across each area of technology. Achieving many of these ambitions is dependant on the relationship the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has with technology partners and the innovation and creativity that exists in the market.

I hope you find them interesting.

Click here for a PowerPoint of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's technology strategy as of March 2011

Update: 6 p.m. Click here for a PDF of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's technology strategy as of March 2011.

Spencer Piggott is Head of Technology Direction, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Technology

Earlier this week, Mark Thompson spoke of a common tendency to overestimate the impact technologies can have in the short term, and underestimate the impact they can have in the long-term. That's certainly true in internet-connected TV.

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer has brought time-shifted viewing on demand to the mainstream, but rather than ushering in the 'death of TV' many forecast, linear TV broadcasting has prospered. The challenge now lies in evolving TV to add the interactive richness that will make TV better, but keep it simple and seamless.

It's an issue close to my heart. In addition to my role as Director of Archive Content, I also represent the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's editorial interests in TV on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online Direction Group, and it's in that capacity I gave a keynote speech at the Digital Television Group's Annual Summit earlier today.

The brings together broadcasters, consumer electronics companies and platform operators to set standards in digital TV through standard-setting initiatives such as the . The DBook provided the standard upon which Freeview (now bringing free to air TV to 15 million households) and Freeview HD (a further 1m households) was built, and will form the basis of YouView's technical specification. With the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ a partner shareholder in both ventures, the DTG remains an important shareholder partner as we seek to ensure that subscription-free TV continues to prosper in the internet age.

Connected TV, whether on Pay-TV platforms or free-to-air, remains relatively niche. It's a fragmented, complicated market for licence-fee payers. Pay-TV platforms continue to innovate, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ continues to make ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer available on a wide range of connected devices and big innovations such as YouView will certainly play a positive role in boosting take-up in the future, but for the most part, video on demand remains largely out of reach for free-to-air homes. And in broadband connected homes, many of the next-generation TVs that can deliver online services to the big screen remain unconnected.

I believe that as an industry, we can do more to make connected TV more attractive and accessible for mainstream audiences. It means working in partnership with the DTG and others to develop innovative gateways into IPTV and on-demand, whether it's the Red Button, 'go-back' EPGs or others.

But above all for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ it means continued innovation in online products - like the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer - that will encourage audiences to connect their TVs. Having refocused our online editorial agenda for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online around a product model we're now thinking about which of these products should be repurposed for the big screen - and how we can do this in a way that's both cost-effective and simple for mainstream audiences. Partnership will be the key to delivering on this, and we look forward to tacking the challenges ahead.

You can access my presentation here.

Roly Keating is Director of Archive Content and Executive Editor, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online

I am pleased to announce that after months of hard work by the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Media Playout Team we've completely rewritten the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Media Player and released it onto the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News, and sites. In coming weeks we'll be rolling the player out across the whole of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online to enable smoother, better quality playback experience for users.

We've been keeping you informed along the way with our progress. James Hewines's original post (LSO ("Flash Cookies") and Media Player) explained that work was in progress to improve the Media Player and was later followed by a post from Paul Clark to update users on the progress of this (LSO ("Flash Cookies") and Media Player: Update). I am pleased to say that all LSO issues are now resolved with this release.

Although the new Media Player has broadly similar functionality to the current version, the design has changed significantly, as has the codebase, and this is a good opportunity to explain our decision for taking time to rewrite the Media Player and highlight the improvements made.

The benefits of converting the Media Player to the most recent version of are many, but our primary reason is to provide the end-user with a better experience when viewing or listening to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ content online. The new Media Player is written specifically to take advantage of the wealth of new features only supported by Flash Player 10 and above. These include:

• Better performance: smoother and faster content playout;

• A significantly smaller Media Player than the previous version used by News, Sport and Weather;

• Introduction of video streams which automatically adjust to changing network conditions, to ensure that the best stream is delivered to the client;

• The ability to display right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew;

• The option to deliver streamed video content using standard HTTP in order to increase the scale, reach and performance;

• Improved support for mobile platforms.

Additional benefits include:

• Improved onward journeys: the new media player has a better in-screen related media experience;

• A new design which incorporates the GEL standards that are being rolled out across ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Online.

I hope you enjoy using the new Media Player, it's a big step forward for us and brings clear benefits to audiences. We hope you like it as much as we do.

Samantha Grant is Technical Product Manager, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media