Designing a URL structure for BBC programmes | Hacker News Reader

Designing a URL structure for BBC programmes

smethur.st

115 pointsedward28 comments

The BBC is flat out a pioneer in media management and distribution. I had the opportunity to use the iPlayer some during the London Olympics, and the level of automation, and the completeness of coverage, really opened my eyes to how media technology in the US is solely at the mercy of licensing and advertising. PBS is somewhat interesting, but only in a "look we know what the internet playing a video is" sort of way. It was a better experience than YouTube, Netflix, Prime, Roku, etc. BBC's model is the future, today.

Completely agreed. And, to be honest, I'm consistently surprised at the sheer quality of output the BBC manages, not just in terms of content but technologically too. I know they have a lot of smart people working for them, but I'm still surprised bureaucracy and infighting and budget constraints and all the other things that usually hinder progress haven't taken over.

I completely agree with your sentiment. Could it be that in the UK, there is more ingrained sense of collective duty? Or that the prestige of working for the BBC is such that it attracts higher than average talent and work ethic?

Have you not heard Radio 2??

The BBC is in a unique position where not only does it get a massive amount of funding from it's commercial arm [0] it also receives a massive amount on 'tax' in the form of a TV licence [1].

And whilst I am personally proud of some of the technical advances made by the broadcaster I am continually troubled by the commercial advantage the BBC has over it's competitors and the massive waste internally. The later I have personal experience of as I spent some time working for the BBC.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Worldwide#BBC_Worldwide_pro... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...

> The BBC is in a unique position where not only does it get a massive amount of funding from it's commercial arm [0] it also receives a massive amount on 'tax' in the form of a TV licence [1].

It's not entirely unique. The NHK is in a similar position and look what they've done: broadcast satellite research, digital terrestrial broadcasting, a bunch of different kinds of HD resolutions and codecs, infrastructure, and I think they've even funded research on high-definition TVs.

It's pretty cool and makes me wish PBS in the US were more respected and had better funding.

Worth pointing out that Japan's NHK is actually modelled after the BBC. So that is two "wins" for that funding model to my mind.

Exactly. I think it's wonderful that both companies are able to not only innovate and stay modern, but do a really good job of producing quality fiction and non-fiction programming (not that it's ALL great).

NHK in particular always has a bunch of really neat "how it's made" documentaries that explore places that make everyday things, like snacks or umbrellas or what have you. I always enjoy those, even if other people don't. :-/

Might be interesting to know that Swedens SVT (Sveriges Television, Swedish Television) is also modeled after the BBC and the UK television license. I'm sure there's plenty more country broadcasters, like above comments have mentioned - the UK and the BBC are quite the pioneers in this field.

ooo, didn't know that. Is SVT generally well regarded in Sweden?

I'm pretty sure it's standard across most of the EU. Portugal also has its own (RTP - Portuguese Radio and Television). Personally, I don't find it any better than the private channels. Even the more cultural/alternative channel has plenty of crap (e.g. Two and a Half Men).

Most of Europe has some public broadcaster but both the level of funding and the model of funding varies widely. Many public broadcasters rely on advertising.

Also the funding available is also dependent on the population so even with other things being equal (and they probably aren't) the total size of a Portuguese service and its capacity to make programmes would be about 1/6 that of the BBC.

While the content may not be better, I find the non-commercial, state-funded stations to have better online solutions.

Their content is after all licensed for everyone to use as they see fit (it belongs to the people), and thus their main limitation is what technology can do, and not what the license permits them to.

We have the same situation in Norway with NRK, which has a fantastic web-offering, not to mention native apps for Android and iOS. It's at the point where you don't need a TV to watch (their) TV-content.

None of the commercial counterparts are ready to offer that, at least not with an experience at the same level of quality.

Oh, yeah, they have mobile apps as well, but frankly, the content they produce is rarely good enough to bother to even install it.

Besides, nowadays you can get a DVB-T stick the size of a flash drive for less than 10€, so watching without a TV isn't exactly hard even without mobile apps.

Have you ever had personal experience of working for some time at a commercial station?

To anyone who remembers the original post made by Tom Coates over here: http://plasticbag.org/archives/2004/06/developing_a_url_stru...

This new post is a substantial expansion on the reasoning, the implementation, and the depth of the thinking reflected in the URL structure that the BBC uses.

I was contracting at Red Bee Media for a portion of this time, and the project work to support a lot of this moved at an incredible pace (once the BBC had fed the requirements over), worth noting that RBM ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bee_Media ) themselves were spun out of the BBC around this time. So you had substantial organisation change at the same time as these fast moving technical changes.

Probably the most interesting part of this article (and the linked article on developing a URL structure for broadcast radio) is the argument in favor of not making human-readable URLs. A part of me really likes the idea of URLs which can be read and understood by a layman without deep understanding of the system. But technically that's challenging to maintain, and as the article points out, challenging to keep consistent automatically. And arguably it's better to offer users something which you know won't ever break than something more convenient which quite likely will.

This is a fascinating read - and an adventure down the rabbit-hole.

I think they missed an opportunity to make the IDs map 1-1 with human-readable titles though. They use the argument that they have many versions of "pride and prejudice" and don't know which they may have in the future, but that sounds to me like a cop-out. There must be something differentiating those different shows to viewers (else, why make them?) so refer to that, surely? That doesn't mean /prideandprejudice2, but whatever differentiates that series from the first one.

I'm not particularly addressing this from a search perspective (they address that in the post) but more from a UX / readability / shareability perspective.

There's a few other pieces of weirdness to my mind e.g. "And hacking back to /episodes would have returned what? A list of all episodes ever?"

Yes. That's similar to what /programmes is isn't it? Obviously you can segment / add hierarchy.

Interesting read. Amazing how much thought goes into something as simple as a URL. I'll never look at the beeb's website in the same way now!

It is definitely something I forget to think about and when seen at the scale of the BBC it's an amazing thing. Might have to start thinking about URL structure a little more now and this is a great resource to get me going!

> Amazing how much thought goes into something as simple as a URL.

As a rule, a great deal of thought should go into any website's URL structure. It's one of the most painful and costly things to change later, especially if search traffic is significant for the site.

Your url structure is a part of your ui.

I've only just started reading it, but does anyone know what they mean by "In the circumstances it might be more of a eulogy than a birth announcement"?

Perhaps he's referring to something along the lines of URLs potentially being hidden in upcoming browser updates:

>"So [for the] love of god Google, if only to save me from another meeting conversation about this[,] please hide the URL behind a click in Chrome. And hope the marketeers start to think that covering the world in URLs makes as much sense as covering it in ISBNs or catalogue numbers or Amazon product IDs." //

From http://smethur.st/posts/176135843.

There's the fact that a lot of the structure (.xml/.json "data views", things that aren't linked from anywhere, etc) are likely to disappear as the BBC switches from their old programme database to the new "Nitro".

I like URLs with year YYYY . Don't like how they hemmed it on "freethinking2006".

Linking the structure of your site to the organization of your URLs is a terrible idea. Nobody particularly cares what the URL looks like, but for one key feature: do not fucking break links.

So design your URL such that you won't ever break them. Everything else is rather secondary.

does that matter in seo

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