A brief insight into the complexities of creating a new capability at the BBC | Hacker News Reader

A brief insight into the complexities of creating a new capability at the BBC

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28 pointskiyanwang8 comments

Weirdly, IMHO, one of the great advantages of the early BBC website infrastructure was directly because they had no state or need for customisation or dynamic pages.

Some BBC Techs told me, back in the early days (1997?-2004?) when other companies were fighting with Vignette and Bea and IBM etc. and worrying how to balance the database, thread, webserver pool for high scale sites, and falling over at every high traffic moment, the BBC had this monster static Apache estate off loads of servers, with a hand-built Perl scheduler which essentially copied your 'subsite' or changes to a subset of these static servers, from whatever static ingest you gave it. This meant as long as you had a semi-centralised site/ information architecture and a good team on the Perl scheduler and load balancing; any internal content subteam could go off and build what they wanted, with whatever CMS/hand tools they had, as long as it spat out a static staging site the Perl scheduler could handle. This model/process/ org structure way out-performed the rest of the UK internet in uptime/performance/cost, and it let a thousand flowers bloom; but only for a one-way read only system - no custom content/ ads/ offers/ personalisation - probably hard to even do centralised log analysis.

Now if only they'd put a tick next to episodes I've already watched on iPlayer and let me set the default sort order to series/episode rather than RANDOM() or whatever they do now it'd be great.

I love iPlayer, use it daily, but those two things are infuriating.

I wouldn't be surprised if those features actually drive engagement.

Sounds like a great greasemonkey/browser extension project! :)

>The BBC is committed to creating a truly personalised experience for everyone. We believe that a more personal BBC helps us build a deeper connection with our audiences, and helps us to extract more value from online. We have so much to offer across our products and services and one of our challenges is to help our audience discover the content we have.

I had to stop there. Just, why? The BBC is established by a Royal Charter [1] and their operations are funded by license feeds.

I have never read the Charter before, but I found it a moment ago. Here is what Elizabeth II ("by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Our other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith") has ordained because internet provides great value for disseminating "information, education and entertainment":

>4. The BBC’s Object

>The BBC’s Object is the fulfilment of its Mission and the promotion of the Public Purposes.

>5. The BBC’s Mission

>The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.

>6. The Public Purposes

(some explanatory content about the Purposes is skipped)

>The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows.

>(1)To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them.

>(2) To support learning for people of all ages.

>(3) To show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services.

>(4) To reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom.

>(5) To reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world.

Does it need to have a personal recommendation relationship with each one individual in its audience, too?

[1] http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/h...

One of the best ways to destroy any public service is to stop it from innovating. The BBC has always been very good at innovation, they basically invented streaming. So why not let them have a go? If it's all tosh, no one will use it, and we can cancel it. But it could also be the next Netflix/Youtube...

Indeed, the BBC (and before the '90s the enginnering department of IBA (the old regulator of ITV and Channel 4)) has been always at the forefront of innovation. Succesful inventions used widely includes inventing teletext and NICAM, while there are also failed ones like an analog satellite standard called D-MAC and its high-definition sibling called HD-MAC. They also tend to participate into producing standards like DVB, the MPEG video family and MP3. Proably the BBC's underestimated contribution that they have done is on responsive design: while they aren't the only ones who have thought of that, the BBC website has become the model website of responsive design in an era where CSS media queries were uncommon.

> I had to stop there. Just, why?

Because the BBC is growing increasingly desperate to justify its existence and its cushy license-fee funded lifestyle.

Vastly overpaid "talent", Poor programming (most of it repeats), Incessantly toeing the government line on news (so much for being "unbiased") ... the list goes on.

The sooner it looses the license-fee and is forced to fend for itself like all other broadcasters, means it'll be forced to improve.

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