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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

It's tremendous that (as far as I can tell) this has all been architected and developed internally at the BBC. So refreshing in the current climate of public entities outsourcing everything. Much better value for money - and more to the point demonstrates that complex projects can be successfully completed internally.

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The generation/serving of the pages is a triviality compared to the delivery of the video. In the past the BBC used to serve all video in house but now they just use the "big three" CDN providers.

I think some of the infrastructure maintenance (and maybe general development too) is outsourced. About a year ago I was on a service management training course in London along with some Siemens staff who were working on the iPlayer project.

Ah yes of course Siemens. They who provided the BBC's £2bn phone network - which apparently barely functions.

Siemens took over the BBC's R+D depts as part of the outsourcing deal which means they now run pretty much all the technical services.

BBC outsources to Siemens,

This includes handing over all it's unique skills

Siemens, then bills the BBC for stuff it already knew how to do.

Management demonstrates with many Powerpoints how this is saving everybody money.

When I worked a summer in a management consultancy we produced powerpoints for the BBC showing that it was a waste of money.

but don't let that trouble you.

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