BBC Radio Blog Feed

Reading and Leeds 2012: Online, mobile and on demand

Rory Connolly — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:07:48 +0000

All Time Low at Reading 2012

Making a mark with Reading + Leeds 2012 was always going to prove a challenge following the grandeur and celebration of the Olympics. Festival Republic, the organisers who put on Reading and Leeds, had got a giant new main stage and some shiny new branding, while we had a new team and some new tools to help us make the best out of three long days in Reading.

In my five years working on the Reading Festival I’ve seen Rage Against The Machine in their orange jumpsuits in 2008, photographed The XX just weeks after their album launched in 2009 and marvelled at Axel Rose as he refused to leave the stage in 2010.

However, I have to say 2012 was my favourite Reading experience ever. This was one of those times when everything goes to plan. We had live streams online and on mobile every night from 7pm for everyone who didn’t make it there themselves and performance highlights from over 67 artists for 30 days after the festival.

Our world class photographers Steve Barney, Sarah Jeynes and Nick Pickles never failed to impress, ensuring R+L looked epic and exciting and at the same time winning new friends in artists such Rou Reynolds and Hayley Williams.

BBC Three's Greg James, Fearne Cotton and Jen Long guided users to their favourites from over 25 hours of highlights, while the @bbcreadingfest twitter account was a hive of activity, flagging up new videos as they were published, answering users’ questions and providing the first glimpses of the artists appeared on stage.

Don’t forget to call by bbc.co.uk/readingandleeds

Putting Radio 1's Hackney Weekend online

Sam Bailey — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 15:30:11 +0000

Emeli Sande performing at Hackney Weekend

In my last blogpost, I promised to try to update the blog from backstage at Hackney Weekend. Well, it's finally here. And, I keep having to pinch myself a bit, as this event has been so long in the planning. Roughly nine months of my time, and much more for some other people.

I've attached a few photos from the BBC Interactive compound, to show what we're up to. The main thing we're focussed on from here, is live streaming. We have five stages, and a backstage feed, available to watch live on computer and on mobile.

It's not just a case of plugging a wire into a laptop. Before we even encode the streams for the web, we go through a process called Compliance. While we can't always prevent artists from using strong language in their performances, we work hard to warn the audience that it might happen, and to apologise if it does.

On site editing and compliance

The team on the right of this picture are complying, and the team on the left are then editing the performances into packages to publish as on-demand videos, which will be up for 30 days after the event. This video packages are sent back to a team working overnight shifts at Broadcasting House, uploading the videos so they are up as quickly as possible.

In previous years, we've encoded our live streams on site. This year, we're actually beaming the video signals back to BBC Television Centre, and our colleagues in BBC Sport in Salford are encoding them using the live streaming infrastructure that's all poised ready for the Olympics. Like all good boy scouts though, we are prepared for all eventualities, and have our backup laptops here, just in case.

Back up encoding laptops

There's loads of other experimental bits going on alongside our core offer. We have a 'best of' live stream going out on the Radio 1 YouTube channel and on Radio 1's Facebook page. We have a group of young Hackney journalists running a special Tumblr feed from out in the arena on their mobile phones. And Radio 1 TV is providing a backstage view, following the Radio 1 DJs around wherever they go.

I hope you're enjoying the coverage. I better crack on. I'll do another blog post next week, when the dust has settled.

Radio 1's Big Weekend exploration into social 'check ins' gets results

Richard Morland — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Editor's note: A few weeks ago Richard outlined a new mobile project bringing together the social web and live events that the A&Mi team would be testing out at Radio 1's Big Weekend. Here's the promised update on how things went - PM.

'...If you're taking someone who's not your boyfriend or girlfriend and you haven't told them that you have tickets, then don't check in...'
Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills on his show the day before the event.

The concept was to see if the audience at a live broadcast event would want to share their experience of what was happening on the stage in front of them with their social network. To make it even more interesting we'd be doing it in the technically challenging location of an airfield on the outskirts of Carlisle.

The challenge I was set was to find an engaging model for those at the event to link up with those who weren't and in essence to create a conversation around a piece of BBC content, in this case the Radio 1 Big Weekend festival.

As I arrived in Carlisle, my blood pressure rose on finding out that we had no connectivity via 3G at our hotel at all...even when standing on one leg with my phone in the air. Thankfully the coverage on site was much better due to the installation of three mobile operator's 3G boosters.

I then remembered that we had another location quirk to overcome. Temporary 3G boosters do not have any lat/long coordinates associated with them. As we had developed the prototype to detect a user's location firstly via WiFi, then 3G cell triangulation and finally a device's own GPS. I discovered that using 3G placed me over a mile away from my actual location.

As WiFi was not an option due to its limitations of concurrent users, it was down to my device GPS only. From conversations with users later on we realised that many people do not have GPS enabled all of the time due to its high power consumption.

After running some tests on the Friday and Saturday morning I realised that the page load time was a little slow due to the limited connectivity.

On some of the pages the key feature buttons were displaying before the whole page had finished loading which meant that people were pressing the 'check in here' button before all of the background location and sign in checks had been done. This then resulted in an error displaying even though a user had successfully checked in.

One way round this would have been to offer some bespoke content to get the audience to go to the prototype site prior to the event, so that the site could be cached on their phone thus reducing the load time when they got onsite...

The prototype was a 'mash-up' of BBC content feeds from our artist pages and Facebook as the publishing tool which resulted in a more complex technical design than we had originally hoped. The number of background checks to Facebook and the phones location caused some problems with the prototype such as the number of calls to the 'Places' API.

The success of the product early on the Saturday meant that the Facebook system thought we were spamming it. We were innovating with a live service which often has its unexpected challenges. Luckily we had support from Future Platforms and Facebook during the weekend so we did some live hacks, sorry 'updates', to iron out the issues we faced.

After a tense few hours working through some complex issues with the product and Facebook, we were back up and running smoothly. By around 5pm we saw the number of errors reduced and the check ins were on the up.

Thankfully, we had a different audience every day so we could start afresh. This is one reason why we used Radio 1's Big Weekend as a testing ground.

The next challenge was to find out what the audience thought about the product and the check in prototype as a whole. Did they get it? Was the reward of saying "I'm watching Lady Gaga" a good enough reason and could they see the difference in what we were doing to what other location based services did?

A research company carried out some qualitative research on the Sunday and some of the audience used a video diary to feedback what they thought.

Even though we had some initial teething issues, the research from the audience and on site analytics showed that the audience really liked sharing their unique experience with (or bragging to) their friends.

We had large interaction spike from the news story posts from seeing a high number of 'likes' and 'comments' on each of the check ins. This interaction was exactly what we were trying to achieve and it really worked. Interestingly, the stats also showed that more women engaged with the product rather than men - something that needs to be investigated further - does social syndication in this way appeal more to women than men?

The reason for developing this product was that we wanted the audience to share their experience of a live performance rather than just a location they were in. A simple design and simple user journey is a key factor in the success of any mobile product and from the feedback we believe we achieved that objective. It was however difficult to monitor how much of an impact the marketing had with the message that it was a new and exciting feature in comparison to the existing downloadable application.

So the technical challenges were identified, all of the audience surveyed told us that they liked it and the feedback was positive for this type of feature but many people were still very nervous when it comes down to sharing their location.

The BBC roadmap is not yet fixed but I can say that this was a successful experiment which I will be sharing with colleagues and the industry over the next few months. With smartphones overtaking PC purchases globally I am sure we will be seeing more and more location based services being developed, especially towards 2012.

Richard Morland is a Senior Producer for Social Media, Audio & Music Interactive

Glastonbury - covering a major cultural event

Paul Murphy — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:50:00 +0000

Editor's note: On the About the BBC blog Andy Parfitt, the Controller Radio 1, 1Xtra, Popular Music and Asian Network has written about the BBC's coverage of Glastonbury - PM.

Every year we have to counter the charge that the numbers of backstage talent the BBC sends to create Glastonbury is excessive. If the figures were 600, 300 or 100 people I don't think it would make any difference. Last year we sent 274 staff and freelancers and this year it will be less.

Glastonbury is a major cultural event and the UK's most significant popular music festival. Last year our coverage reached nearly 16 million people, was listened to by 5.7 million individuals and the website featured around 170 hours of video. The BBC prides itself on its high-quality coverage of major events like Glastonbury, so I thought I'd give you a glimpse of what I see backstage to give you a better scale to understand why, later this month, the BBC will send 263 of its best people to Somerset to bring a huge amount of content to our audiences across all our platforms.

Read the rest of Glastonbury - covering a major cultural event and comment on the About the BBC blog.