Last week in his regular Exponential View newsletter Azeem Azhar described in detail how he had used ChatGPT to design a new board game that combined the characteristics of Ticket to Ride and Azul, shaping it around the idea of discovering elements, and designing selection of game characters based around historical chemists.

It's a subscriber-only post but .

Then another friend, , via GitHub Copilot, to write the code he needed to scrape a website as part of a project to build a podcast interface. As he wrote:

"Using GitHub Copilot to write code and calling out to GPT-3 programmatically to dodge days of graft actually brought tears to my eyes. I’ve coded, mostly as a hobby, my whole life – it’s a big creative outlet alongside writing – it’s so rarely felt like this. It feels like flying".

These examples brought home to me the real power of these new tools, not as generators of random boilerplate text for business letters or marketing blurb, or as complex and potentially misleading interfaces to search engines, but as collaborators in our creative activity, supporting idea generating, doing some of the low-level heavy lifting, and sitting on our shoulders like supportive angels. 

One of the things that also occurred to me reading Azeem's piece was that ChatGPT didn’t get tired.   For once, a line from the Terminator felt entirely appropriate to describe a current ML system: "It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you have finished your project!"

That’s not to say that these tools live up to the exaggerated claims being made for them, as the rather embarrassing error about the capabilites of the James Webb Space Telescope that Google made at the announcement of their Bard LLM – and the consequent $100bn drop in Alphabet’s value – demonstrated.

Of course, Bard wasn’t being malicious, or even foolish, because these tools don’t have any capacity for feeling. They can’t lie because lying is saying something false with intent, and – we can’t say this strongly enough – they have no intent. 

Pull the curtain away from GPT or Stable Diffusion and there’s no wizard, just a vast array of weightings running on a power-hungry set of GPUs. When ChatGPT engages with you it’s basically taking a drunkard’s walk through the forest of word frequencies, calling out the names of each tree as it leans on it before staggering onward. Like taking your own wine to an unlicensed restaurant with zero corkage, you bring the meaning – and because we are so good at projecting into the empty eyes of our machines (and pets.. but we can have that argument another time) we find all the profundity we’re looking for.  

Perhaps one day we will develop general AI and the machine will both know what it is saying and – crucially – know that it is a thing that is saying something to us. When that happens we’ll look back on the current fuss over LLMs the way astronomers consider astrology – there was some good data collection and analysis but the fundamental model was so disconnected from reality that it was dangerous.

But even with the current limitations, it’s clear that these tools already have a real role as well-resourced, untiring support for creativity and ideation, with the ability to smash concepts together and produce fascinating results, and that may be enough to change the way we all work, especially in the creative industries.  Just imagine what a hard-pressed producer looking for a new entertainment format could do with them.

February 2024
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5181326.stm
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2843343.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2337425.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7395940.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-12898744.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-13088655.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-48297831
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-11317347
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58467011
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-38983572
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-38175443
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-16276615

Jan 2024
/news/topics/cdnpj59gj1nt?page=7
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8621079.stm
https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-39521454
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-33992110
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-29831224
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ultimas_noticias/2012/04/120426_ultnot_panama_italia_vitola_bd
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38904521
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38969769
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38985265
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38985265.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2254460.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3536600.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/3532060.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/3940581.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/2197143.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57674494
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-61732805
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4956636.stm
/cymrufyw/38981445
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/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38904521
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/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38969769
/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38969769.amp
/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38985265
/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-38985265.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2822209.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/6427183.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7192780.stm
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/lancashire/content/articles/2007/10/12/faith_eid_daniyah_hafiz_explains.shtml
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https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57318424
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-49436377
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-43669950
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/cymrufyw/38168178
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/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-38175443
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December 2023
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https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/222/mcs/media/images/74510000/jpg/_74510508_10b1d6ea-1597-45de-9e94-f4777b3e1354.jpg
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https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-sussex-47674613
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/sussex/7514636.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6918712.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7388519.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6918712.stm
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https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-60700014
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https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-47871463
/news/av/uk-england-birmingham-60946722
/news/av/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-60700014
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/news/av/world-us-canada-47871463
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/8052109.stm
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-29361452
/news/uk-england-berkshire-59943881
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-59871751
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-60001525
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56834722
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-23993139
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-23993139?tblang=english
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-33258564
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4510127.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4091636.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-49757611
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-58632294
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-18186936
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-19561273
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-37717937
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-37957208.amp

November 2023
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7182331.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4084193.stm
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https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18672068
https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-36802927
/news/av/uk-england-hampshire-27532746
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7048304.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2896639.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7663475.stm
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3099108.stm
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3563356.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/sussex/7294499.stm
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-11317347
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-11998491
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https://www.bbc.com/news/10422008
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3166809.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3555396.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3555660.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/3166561.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2260284.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3538816.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3099108.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38254000/jpg/_38254666_policepaedo150.jpg
/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-37108036
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7048304.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-37108036
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-46280539.amp
/news/uk-england-kent-19627049
/news/av/health-61544423
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8421535.stm
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1920x1080/p0c8d854.jpg

October 2023
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/news/uk-england-berkshire-60001525.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-59943881
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/news/20417755
https://www.bbc.com/news/20417755.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6107780.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2254460.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/3166809.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/3538816.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/3555660.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38252000/jpg/_38252171_stevens300.jpg
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-47388359
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-38328490.amp
/news/uk-northern-ireland-47388359
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-11479831
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-19627049
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/leicestershire/4376405.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-47232767
/news/uk-england-manchester-39306738

September 2023
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8079133.stm
/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-47232767
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-22819018

/news/uk-wales-47697807
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7294499.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7514636.stm
/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-31064709
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/3640199.stm
/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-56539901.amp
/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-57442903.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-58656979
/programmes/b00z8hwl/episodes/guide
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23137474.amp
/news/uk-england-london-23137474
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/news/uk-england-essex-58641721
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-58641721
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-32504804
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/mcs/media/images/81804000/jpg/_81804660_waswas.jpg
/news/live/uk-england-kent-45132268/page/2
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/news/uk-northern-ireland-48269441
/news/uk-england-bristol-40113476
/news/uk-england-essex-49757611
/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-28254024
http://news.bbc.co.uk/welsh/low/newsid_3080000/newsid_3087000/3087069.stm
/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-31992069
/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-32504804
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/berkshire/4649948.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-23534373

August 2023
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-30452017
/news/health-51269237.amp
/news/topics/clw2pz3mx17t?page=3
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-55171223
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/news/uk-england-manchester-23534373
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-48439863
/news/uk-england-essex-58927034
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-45144941
/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-45144941
/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-45144941.amp
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/D521/production/_102916545_bedspolice1.jpg.webp
/programmes/p00fffqk
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-20807843
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-57720152
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/1747B/production/_119255359_vanishingindex.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/mcs/media/images/65028000/jpg/_65028055_toryman.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/E168/production/_119240775_nevillepreshohousefrompier.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/mcs/media/images/65028000/jpg/_65028057_torymanagain.jpg
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-13880599
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7625127.stm
/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-19354621
https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2010/04/100422_yoyohtrial
https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2010/11/101106_verdictindonesianmaid
/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-45483960.amp
/news/live/uk-england-merseyside-33827608
/news/uk-england-36054273
/news/uk-england-merseyside-33992110
/news/uk-england-merseyside-34074294
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-34074294
/news/uk-england-london-55355531
/sport/football/60200001
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-19354621
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-48558259
https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2010/04/100422_yoyoh.amp
/news/live/uk-england-sussex-45645720
/news/uk-england-surrey-45764290
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6246595.stm

July 2023

/news/uk-england-london-25320376
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-42382189
/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-37449283
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-20898593
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-21005999
https://www.bbc.com/ukchina/simp/48676842
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/11698/production/_104402317_a7d33515-636e-4dc2-89d5-be97bd3ba0bc.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/A550/production/_104402324_e041f539-1010-43c1-9571-7e61c81deeeb.jpg
/news/uk-wales-56581156
/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-21877747.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-12153788
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6522251.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-19001100
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-19050281
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-19067651
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/mcs/media/images/61831000/jpg/_61831180_dacosta.jpg
/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-37449283.amp
/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-60023868
/news/uk-wales-22819018
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-41917724.amp
/news/uk-england-berkshire-41917724
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-12194168
/news/uk-england-tyne-44521763
/news/uk-england-essex-12153788

June 2023

/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-22399390.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-22399390
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-22399390.amp
/news/uk-england-35574470
https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2010/04/100422_yoyohtrial
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-19055332
/news/uk-england-manchester-37612054
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-30231863
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/mid_/6334815.stm
/news/uk-england-london-65632912
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8433951.stm
/news/live/uk-england-leicestershire-43646963
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4253442.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6293178.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4319942.stm
/news/uk-northern-ireland-19055332
/news/uk-england-london-53185174?intlink_from_url=&link_location=live-reporting-story
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/10F77/production/_112359496_mediaitem112359495.jpg.webp
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-58930085
/news/uk-england-tyne-44521763.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7625127.stm
/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-24901020.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8427790.stm
/news/uk-england-london-52879900
/news/uk-england-london-53185174
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-52727025
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-53185174
/news/uk-england-hampshire-49824786.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6223992.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-48439863.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7960271.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4027033.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7196454.stm
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/mcs/media/images/71585000/jpg/_71585550_troll.jpg
/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-25267902

May 2023

/news/world-europe-42974298
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8433951.stm
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/464/mcs/media/images/51207000/jpg/_51207520_drugscourierscomposite466by.jpg
/news/uk-england-london-48444823.amp
https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-43553566
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8484890.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1938820.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-20626475
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4027033.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4762707.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-31848810
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/8355878.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-20264241
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4938574.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-39459045
http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2006/12/14/child_blogger_feature.shtml
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-22892221
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/eng_conf/9675881.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/uk-england-gloucestershire-13294692
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-13294692
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-13795825
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/7098099.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6906934.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6913725.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/7226819.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/7228722.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/7322579.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1107823.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/4007827.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tees/4007827.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tees/6188934.stm
http://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2010/04/100422_yoyoh
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-10739740
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/10435066
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8037799.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/8479312.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/8037799.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/8479312.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/622199.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/619621.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6644465.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/3610885.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/3697238.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/3701130.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/3172724.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/3175724.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8091028.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7109168.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/4209030.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-13856865
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/4986438.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/6199819.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/6236550.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/business-16509679
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/273824.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-12129231
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-12354790
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-12577581
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-22570334
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/lg/participe/2009/09/090909_entrevista_interactiva_forlan_rg.shtml
http://www.bbc.com/mundo/participe/2009/09/090909_entrevista_interactiva_forlan_rg.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6252007.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/708271.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7385615.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/6199819.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7196454.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7634313.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7047931.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7047931.stm
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-london-29167444/award-winning-george-eliot-primary-school-investigated
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-london-29167444/award-winning-george-eliot-primary-school-investigated
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-29167444/award-winning-george-eliot-primary-school-investigated
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/04/uk_do_you_feel_safe_on_the_tube0/html/1.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/817015.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-28270216
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-28482986
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-33677754
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-33725385
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-10839121
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-10840334
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3206355.stm
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tees-32759584
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4465109.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4465109.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/8251042.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6741159.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6753933.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10230780
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/8531030.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/1948438.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/jersey/4753921.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7398426.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/2339803.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2976592.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3005483.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/3008433.stm
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-27346990
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-guernsey-17287180
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/england/devon/7575533.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-10854820
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12236887
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13962703
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2014/05/140523_espana_tuiteros_indeseables_jgc
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-11702376
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-16709925
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-19050911
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/5278210.stm
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-26821303
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-27315548
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4903556.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4903556.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/norfolk/6731515.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nj737
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-22477166
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-28991271
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-22084732
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2246888.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/4649948.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-35135027.amp
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22050049
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38315793
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7047931.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7634313.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5283630.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34933345
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34933347
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-35744590
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-37288206
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-northamptonshire-34933347/dashcam-captures-lorry-shunting-car-on-m1
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8625446.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/uk_politics_the_hutton_inquiry_queue/html/2.stm
http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-38468488
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-38328490
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-11391906
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35799469
/news/uk-england-london-46099553
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-21433429
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-19886569
/news/uk-england-sussex-19050281
/news/uk-england-sussex-19164904
https://www.bbc.com/igbo/afirika-53256430
/news/uk-england-birmingham-48269501
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-38750125
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-39042586
/news/uk-england-london-51756194
/news/uk-england-london-54384692
/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-38501003.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/4745180.stm
/news/uk-england-sussex-19001100
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-43114674

April 2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18179818
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-46266120
/news/uk-england-london-64942934.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7869695.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7988085.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8033517.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8112798.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/4745180.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8033517.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-england-tyne-56295615/page/27
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-england-tyne-56295615/page/28
/news/live/uk-england-tyne-55102691/page/25
/news/live/uk-england-tyne-55276229/page/28
/news/live/uk-england-tyne-56536403/page/28
/news/uk-northern-ireland-20807843
/news/uk-wales-48749328
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-40050834
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41697913
/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-58930085
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25349240
/news/uk-england-manchester-17853559.amp
/news/uk-northern-ireland-57720152
/news/special/2015/newsspec_10259/content/english/convicted.html?v=7.0.32
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/5C48/production/_85942632_tokyoyork.jpg
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-30178386
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/400/mcs/media/images/79230000/jpg/_79230140_rodley.jpg
/news/technology-37385555
/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-23544913
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-30493708.amp
/news/technology-38879969
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/staffordshire/3945089.stm
/news/uk-england-merseyside-33721010
/news/uk-england-40412399
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-31642075
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-34285598.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/8438561.stm
/news/10371624.amp
/news/uk-england-36393977
/news/uk-england-birmingham-53361549
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-48131922
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/romanian/news/story/2007/09/printable/070909_romania_sua_extradare.shtml
/news/uk-england-birmingham-46280539
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36201713.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5181326.stm
/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-58876169
/news/uk-england-birmingham-46266120
/news/uk-england-birmingham-46280539
/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-31064709.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-20516042
/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-22399390

March 2023

/news/uk-england-birmingham-48131922
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-48113851
/news/topics/cdnpj59gj1nt?page=5
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52553229
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7546810.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-35555465
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1A5B/production/_87774760_orlao'hanlonon.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/3569357.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-30178386.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43808943
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43928158
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43967366
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-35555465.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-39220213
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/1575E/production/_89120978_89120976.jpg
/cymrufyw/36596472
https://www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler/2014/03/140308_rengin_8mart
/news/uk-england-hampshire-24840376.amp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8285370.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4683863.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6214567.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/6216755.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6162327.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6216755.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/6291899.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/7085223.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/6214567.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/6291899.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/7085223.stm
/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36201713
/news/uk-england-kent-23574942
/news/newsbeat-11064589.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-35998732.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-37990652.amp
/news/uk-england-hampshire-22765041
/news/uk-england-cornwall-20516042
/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-59312771
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/3945089.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1621052.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/640499.stm
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/640000/images/_643873_yellowribbon300.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/665000/images/_669989_balloons300.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/690000/images/_694696_sashacameron150.jpg
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/7085223.stm
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-12541987
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-31931370

February 2023 

/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-37930817

/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-37957208

/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-37990652

/news/10422008

/news/uk-england-manchester-12541987

/news/topics/cdl8n2ede8dt?page=11

/1/hi/england/somerset/8205388.stm

/programmes/m000xkyx

/programmes/m000xltx

/programmes/m000xm73

/programmes/m000xmzn

/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-38983572

/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-39339315

/news/topics/c60nnx0mv8xt

/news/topics/c8lvepl65ppt?page=6

/news/topics/clw2pz3mx17t?page=2

/news/uk-northern-ireland-35135027

/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-44889374

/news/uk-wales-23993139

/programmes/articles/1zlpQCXsH01jKYjzCzTYF33/how-can-a-house-just-disappear

/news/10409802

/news/uk-41697913

/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-53961413

/news/uk-england-14078644

/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-39220213

/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-41822428

January 2023

/romanian/news/story/2006/12/061201_hacker_roman.shtml

/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-36597102

/news/live/uk-england-tyne-42459905/page/26

/news/live/uk-england-tyne-42459905/page/30

/news/live/uk-england-tyne-43659741/page/29

/news/uk-england-berkshire-52181734

/news/uk-england-manchester-37768973

/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-49681153.amp

/news/uk-england-berkshire-35746919.amp

/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-54341280

Uses of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux

In 2007 it was difficult to get hold of audio and video content from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã archive in a digital format. Accessing archive content for research generally meant ordering and waiting for VHS tapes or DVDs to be delivered by a Ö÷²¥´óÐã mail van. Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux allowed programme-makers to view a growing set of content immediately. It proved extremely popular.

Ö÷²¥´óÐã Research & Development also built Snippets - a hugely popular tool with programme-makers - which relied on the content held by Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux. Snippets used the programme subtitles to allow users to search across the spoken word of the programme. Want a clip of Delboy saying, "This time next year, we'll be millionaires"? You got it!

"Ö÷²¥´óÐã REDUX has been an invaluable tool, quite revolutionary in its simplicity and comprehensiveness. I really appreciated how the system captured everything, especially the complete coverage of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã News Channel output – this has proved invaluable over the years, especially with the current fashion for using audio of news journalists to carry the narrative of many documentaries. The addition of searchable subtitles via Snippets was another great innovation that made it so much easier to interrogate the huge amount of material in the collection. The innovative and imaginative work of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã R&D team and their willingness to push forward and make REDUX and SNIPPETS available to all Ö÷²¥´óÐã employees is greatly appreciated, and I hope the spirit of that approach will continue to live on in R&D and elsewhere, even as REDUX itself comes to an end."

Stuart Robertson, Archive and Digital Lead, Current Affairs

Over the years, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux has met many and varying needs, including:

• programme research - researching a person or topic as well as finding content suitable to re-use in a new programme
• compliance - reviewing programmes in the event of a query or complaint
• technical review - helping ensure that Ö÷²¥´óÐã broadcasts achieve the expected quality
• content delivery in the required format for iPlayer Beta sites, e.g. Nintendo Wii
• external online access to content - increasingly important as more of our content is made by independent production companies
• education partnerships - enables schools, colleges and universities to make educational use of TV and Radio broadcasts as permitted by copyright law
• research projects including academic partnerships, particularly in the field of machine learning

Why are we moving away from Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux?

Since Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux began, access to our archive has changed enormously. A large and ever-increasing proportion of our 100 years of archive is now digitised and available in broadcast quality to programme-makers inside and outside the Ö÷²¥´óÐã. This includes higher-quality copies of much of the content stored in Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux. Since 2017 all pre-recorded programmes have been delivered for broadcast as digital files and automatically archived. Physical archive loans ceased in February 2021.

We now have  - a single place to search across approximately 75% of our archive. It will cover even more of the archive in future.

• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Internet Blog - History of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux project

What will I do without Ö÷²¥´óÐã Redux?

The unique content recorded by Redux will continue to be available to play and clip in browse quality via Archive Search. New content will be available via Archive Search - just not recorded off-air by Redux.

Archive Search allows users to explore the spoken content of programmes using subtitles and machine-generated transcripts. Users can make clips of relevant parts of a programme, and for some content, they can even make broadcast-quality clips ready for inclusion in a new programme.

Our curators routinely update archive collections to support production teams, particularly in advance of upcoming events, anniversaries and seasons. These collections are shared on the Archive Search homepage.

Archive Search has allowed us to expand archives access for universities and schools. The entire digitised Ö÷²¥´óÐã broadcast archive is now available to students in formal education in the UK.

Ö÷²¥´óÐã staff can find training and information on accessing Archive Search by searching on Gateway. If you are working on a Ö÷²¥´óÐã commission at an independent production company that would benefit from archive access, your Ö÷²¥´óÐã contact can provide this information.

What next for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Archives access?

We will soon make Radio Digital Archive content available via Archive Search, giving access to an extensive archive of high-quality audio. We will also provide more programme information within Archive Search to help programme-makers make more informed choices and make re-use easier.

This year we celebrate the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's centenary. The Archives Technology & Services team look forward to seeing archive content play a key role in our celebration of and reflection on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's first century.

December 2022

/news/topics/cdl8n2ede8dt?page=10

/news/uk-england-norfolk-38743405

/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-48109151

/news/uk-england-manchester-38080102

November 2022

/news/uk-england-bristol-19114784

/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-12580171

/news/uk-england-birmingham-36150727

/news/uk-england-london-13880599

/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-50235439

/news/uk-england-london-13880599.amp

/news/uk-england-hampshire-37726787.amp

/news/uk-england-17371761

/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-39490297

/news/uk-england-14125806

/news/uk-england-17299791

/news/uk-england-17371761

/news/uk-england-london-51737517

/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-40050834

/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-41803700

/news/10604817.amp

/news/uk-england-london-31849320.amp

/news/uk-england-32431361

/news/uk-england-london-544522
/news/uk-england-london-54452252

/news/uk-england-17315142

/news/uk-england-23522195

/news/uk-england-14071133

/news/uk-england-17299791

/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-30178386

/news/uk-england-london-54347145

/news/uk-england-17355379

/news/uk-england-17433814

/news/uk-england-22544419

October 2022

/news/uk-england-cornwall-21286589.amp

/news/uk-england-14125806

/news/uk-england-17355379

/news/uk-england-17464298

/news/uk-england-22544419

/news/uk-england-23522195

/news/uk-england-leeds-52181818

/news/uk-england-14071133

/news/uk-england-17583485

/news/uk-england-17433814

/news/uk-england-17583485

/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-36358547

/news/10224555

/suffolk/content/articles/2004/11/30/four_dancers_sculptures_feature.shtml

/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-13582617

/news/uk-england-tyne-56735937

/news/uk-england-tyne-56749396

/news/uk-england-tyne-56773168

/news/uk-england-tyne-56834392

/news/newsbeat-10073269

/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-10924071

September 2022

/programmes/p00l9dqf
/news/uk-england-tyne-56773168?at_custom4=F9530CEE-9EB8-11EB-ACC4-A0584D484DA4&at_custom1=link&at_campaign=64&at_medium=custom7&at_custom3=Regional+Ö÷²¥´óÐã+North+East+and+Cumbria&at_custom2=twitter
/news/live/uk-england-bristol-43277252/page/11
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-35530739
/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-29899602.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-36711585
/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-35530739
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/6183823.stm
/news/uk-northern-ireland-43519611
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-36652208
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-49209661
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28809134
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-24061550
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/224/mcs/media/images/69813000/jpg/_69813558_abdulchoudhuri.jpg
/news/uk-england-essex-39145271.amp
/news/uk-11359512
/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-24061550
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cxw7q5zm562t?page=29
https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cxw7q5zm562t?page=29
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/live-experience/cps/480/cpsprodpb/104E9/production/_101239766_christopherhenry.jpg

August 2022

/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-49254431
/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-49270570 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3896213.stm /news/uk-england-norfolk-60706535 https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/12560/production/_123640157_5717d15d-8927-4c45-a016-67786bbf121c.jpg /birmingham/content/articles/2005/04/25/student_voters_feature.shtml http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/dorset/7837691.stm /news/uk-england-oxfordshire-11184865.amp /news/uk-england-35161550 /news/uk-england-suffolk-29723777.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-10924071 /news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-38413347 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cambridgeshire/8376918.stm https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-44058417 /news/uk-41697913.amp /news/topics/cdnpj59gj1nt?page=4 /news/uk-england-berkshire-24173948 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/leicestershire/3681580.stm /news/uk-england-birmingham-46536422.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23508749 /news/mobile/uk-england-sussex-11493124 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-10779211 /search?q=farhad+tailor+leicestershire&page=1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/3681580.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6666691.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6228885.stm /news/uk-england-11479831

July 2022

/news/uk-england-hampshire-44058417
/news/uk-17731143
/news/uk-england-london-43127415
/news/uk-england-berkshire-59871751
/news/uk-england-berkshire-59896099
/news/uk-england-berkshire-60001525
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-bristol-30182647
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https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/12EFE/production/_88766577_jamie_cox.jpg
/news/uk-england-tees-27949058
/news/uk-england-merseyside-29208419
/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-22901226.amp
/news/live/world-europe-jersey-39081285
/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-37159021
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/5299758.stm
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-21033906.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-42181453
/news/uk-england-tees-40125272
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/kent/4014681.stm
/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-21830227

June 2022

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-50669012
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-50669012.amp
/news/uk-england-cornwall-43056764
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/news/uk-19409774
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/3776543.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/4014681.stm
/news/uk-england-shropshire-41128838
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/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-59739404
/news/mobile/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-15377454
/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-15377454
/news/av/uk-33641034/anzac-day-terror-plot-blackburn-teenager-admits-terror-charge
/news/av/uk-34426846/blackburn-boy-used-smartphone-to-plan-anzac-terror-plot
/news/av/world-australia-33648097/nurse-s-return-to-australia-provides-first-test-for-terror-laws
/news/av/world-australia-35058732/teenager-and-man-arrested-in-sydney-over-terror-plans
/news/av/world-australia-35058734/sydney-terror-arrests-disturbing-to-see-teenage-children
/news/av/world-australia-40960013/far-right-senator-wears-burka-in-australian-parliament
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/programmes/p00b8p2f
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-18287401
/news/uk-england-kent-18287401

May 2022

/news/uk-england-manchester-22600666
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April 2022

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March 2022

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February 2022

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/programmes/b017ndrh

Back in early 2015, I'd just started working at the Ö÷²¥´óÐã and whilst getting to know who's who and what's what, I discovered to my surprise that large parts of our main websites (www.bbc.co.uk and ) were only available over plaintext HTTP. My immediate thought was, "Well, here's something I can get stuck into immediately - how hard can it be to get to 100% HTTPS?".

We're now about six years on, and we're only just finishing the full migration to HTTPS. All you need for HTTPS is a vaguely modern CDN/traffic manager/server and a TLS cert plus a few changes to your HTML, right? Yeah, wouldn't it be great if things were that simple!

Setting the scene

At this stage, it probably helps to rewind a little to a circa 2015 context. It'd been about two years since the , which had helped to squash any remaining doubts as to the necessity of HTTPS. Around this time, the major web browsers began signalling their intentions to gradually ramp up the pressure on website operators to serve websites over HTTPS by restricting access to sensitive APIs to HTTPS contexts and also via changes in user interface (UI) indicators. Various platforms and services such as  were created or came to prominence, making it cheaper, easier, and faster to get TLS certificates and securely serve web content. The direction of travel for the web was clear - HTTPS was gradually replacing HTTP as the default transport, but we were nowhere near as far along the road as we are now.

The Ö÷²¥´óÐã websites share a common public 'web edge' traffic management service. The web edge is similar to a CDN in that it handles TLS termination (as well as routing, caching and so on), but behind that, there are individual stacks that are managed by our Product teams - these form our , , ,  sites amongst others. It's fair to say in 2015, the number of our Product team's websites served over HTTPS was quite mixed - as was true of much of the internet.

Our web edge already offered HTTPS 'for free' to our Product teams in 2015. To migrate to HTTPS, our Product teams had to do the engineering work for compatibility of their websites and opt-in to an 'HTTPS allowlist' - otherwise, our web edge would force their traffic to HTTP.

Raising the issue

The first formal thing I did towards 100% HTTPS was to present to a forum which most of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Product architects attended to raise the issue and highlight why we should migrate to HTTPS and what was going to change soon in Chrome in terms of UI signals:

 

The web browser UI signalling changes for plaintext HTTP were pretty new at the time and not as widely communicated as they are now. The planned UI changes were a really useful driver for our Product teams since they were a concrete change that would have direct user impact - something to galvanise the need for action and a timeline to work to. Our Product teams were, of course, all more than a little bit aware of HTTPS and those teams who hadn't migrated already intended to migrate as time allowed. However, this helped a few of them with a business case to make the change, and the discussion helped bring HTTPS further into the general conversation.

The h2 carrot

A year or so on from my initial presentation about HTTPS, we began to think in more detail about providing HTTP/2 (h2) on our web edge since the support in web browsers and servers/services was mature enough by then. We did the requisite planning work, the usual comms to our teams and then rolled h2 out. We had a bit of an issue with this, and there was a fair bit of work involved but before long, all our HTTPS web pages were also available over h2 - an added carrot to the teams who'd not yet migrated to HTTPS.

Product migrations

Our Product teams have done the bulk of work in migrating Ö÷²¥´óÐã websites to HTTPS on their individual stacks. As well as in-place updates, there has been some major re-platforming work which is moving our Product websites on to new, HTTPS native platforms such as Web Core for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Public Service, Simorgh for Ö÷²¥´óÐã World Service and new, dedicated platforms for Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer and Sounds.

I didn't get involved specifically in any of these Product migrations, aside from the odd conversation and friendly badgering, so whilst it was a lot of work and absolutely vital, it's relatively well-understood work. So, for the remainder of this blog post, I'll focus more on the aspects of our migration that were perhaps less obvious (and often really quite awkward).

Content retention - 'The Archive'

The Ö÷²¥´óÐã has a content retention mandate which states:

13.3.8 Unless content is specifically made available only for a limited time period, there is a presumption that material published online will become part of a permanently accessible archive and should be preserved in as complete a state as possible.

During a re-platforming in circa 2013-14, the decision was taken to archive (rather than migrate to the new CMS) a lot of the older content, which our retention mandate demands we keep online. The archive was produced via a crawler which saved web pages to online object storage as flat HTML and asset files. We ended up with somewhere in excess of 150 million archived web pages across hundreds of retired Products - all of which were captured as plaintext HTTP.

 

Accurately migrating this many wildly differing static pages to HTTPS is not simple. Some quick maths and thinking-through eliminated the option of writing a crawler to run through the archive and update the HTML, JavaScript and CSS in-place - it's too risky, slow and expensive. Instead, I used our comprehensive access logging/analysis system, , to make sure that clients supported it then trialled allowing HTTPS on a section of the archive whilst adding the header to instruct clients to automagically upgrade HTTP links/asset loads to HTTPS.

The trial worked well, so we gradually rolled this out and monitored the effects via access logs, the CSP and  elements of the .

Robots.txt and friends

The final major hurdle we encountered was in serving global static assets - robots.txt, sitemaps, 3rd party authentication files and the like. We were still using our previous-generation traffic managers to host global static assets, and the configuration was unexpectedly coupled to our HTTPS allowlist logic. That wasn't a problem in itself, but it meant that when I asked one of our ops teams to remove the HTTPS allowlist, the serving of these static assets broke. Time for a rethink.

Our 24/7 support/ops team valiantly stepped in to build and run a new service that solved two problems in one - migrating the routing of global assets to our new traffic managers in a single-scheme fashion.

Removing the HTTPS allowlist

Once the robots.txt (et al.) problem was solved, we could finally remove the HTTPS allowlist, which meant that all content on www.bbc.co.uk was available over HTTPS. That was a really key step in this whole process.

HSTS

Once we had all our content on www.bbc.co.uk available over HTTPS, we began rolling out , which instructs to silently upgrade any plaintext HTTP links they come across for www.bbc.co.uk with HTTPS links. So that we can gain confidence and revert in a reasonable time if there are problems, we'll gradually increase the max-age on our HSTS header as follows:

• Set to 10 seconds, then wait for 1 day (basic test for major issues)
• Set to 600 seconds (10 minutes), then wait for 2 days (covers most page-to-page navigations)
• Set to 3600 seconds (1 hour), then wait for 4 days (also covers most iPlayer/Sounds durations)
• Set to 86400 seconds (1 day), then wait for 14 days (covers frequent users day-to-day)
• Set to 2592000 seconds (30 days), then wait for 6 months (covers most users)
• Set to 31536000 seconds (1 year)

To de-risk HSTS, as well as all the work above, progressing HSTS through our pre-live environments and some theoretical analysis, we used the Chrome net-internals facility to locally add HSTS for www.bbc.co.uk.

Assuming the HSTS rollout goes to plan, we'll look into for www.bbc.co.uk to avoid the ToFU (Trust on First Use) issue.

What's left to do?

Having jumped over most of the hurdles in our way, the last few jobs to do right now are:

1. Use the "force HTTPS" feature in our traffic managers in conjunction with the already deployed CSP "upgrade insecure requests" on our archived web pages to ensure archived pages and their assets are loaded over HTTPS.
2. Inform our Product teams that they can opt in to using the "force HTTPS" feature and therefore remove their own HTTP → HTTPS redirects in their origin services.
3. Migrate the remaining couple of websites on www.bbc.com which are still plaintext HTTP, then roll out HSTS on www.bbc.com as well.

For the last few years, the Ö÷²¥´óÐã has had a project running in its technology division looking at technology solutions to various problems in the domain of news disinformation. Part of that effort, called , is working to make it easier to understand where the news you consume online really comes from so that you can decide how credible it is. You can find some history on this in Laura Ellis' excellent "Project Origin: one year on" blog.

Part of Project Origin has been working in collaboration with major media and tech companies, most recently, with the , which it helped form. This group recently released . This spec tackles the problem of missing, trusted provenance information in images / video / audio consumed on the internet. For example, where a video of elections in one country from 10 years ago is being presented as video from recent elections in another. This is an overview of how that specification is intended to work.

Embedding

The C2PA specification works primarily by defining mechanisms for embedding additional data into media assets to indicate their authentic origin. An essential aspect of this data is "assertions" - statements about when and where media was produced. The embedded information is then digitally signed so that a consumer knows who is making the statements.

While the C2PA specification also includes mechanisms for locating this provenance data remotely (e.g. hosted somewhere on the internet), I'll focus on the use case where all data is embedded directly in the asset itself.

Data model

The C2PA specification uses a few different mechanisms for embedding and storing data. Embedding is done with , a container format, and structured data storage is done with a combination of  and  (which is a binary format based on JSON).

Container - The "Manifest Store"

Similar to , the C2PA specification defines several embedding points in a selection of media formats to place a "Manifest Store" in JUMBF format, which is the container for the various pieces of provenance data. Once you've identified where and how a manifest store is embedded in your favourite media format, most of the specification is format-agnostic.

What is JUMBF?

JUMBF (JPEG universal metadata box format) is a binary container format initially designed for adding metadata to JPEG files, and it’s now used in other file formats too. It is structurally similar to the , an extensible container format that is used for many different types of media files. JUMBF "superboxes" are boxes that only contain other boxes. JUMBF "content type" boxes contain actual payload data, the serialisation of which should match the advertised content type of the box. All boxes have labels, which allow boxes to be addressed and understood when parsing. C2PA uses JUMBF in all the media formats it supports to provide the container format for the Manifest, Claims, Assertions, Verifiable Credentials and Signatures.

Each piece of embedded provenance data is called a “Manifest”. A manifest contains a part of the provenance data about the current asset, or the assets it was made from. Because an asset might have been created from multiple original sources or have been processed multiple times, we will often need to store several manifests to understand the complete history of the current asset.

Manifests are located in the "Manifest Store", which is a JUMBF superbox. The last manifest in the store is the "ActiveManifest", which is the provenance data about the current asset and it's the logical place for validation to start. The other manifests are the data for the "ingredients" of the active manifest - i.e. the assets that were a part of the creation of the active manifest. This is one of the key features of C2PA: each asset provides a graph of the history of editing and composition actions that went into the active asset, exposing as little or as much as the asset publisher wants.

Each manifest within the store is again its own JUMBF superbox. A manifest then consists of: a "Claim", an "AssertionStore", a "" and a "Signature". Manifests are signed by an actor (the “Signer”) whose credential identifies them to the user validating or consuming them.

Assertions

Assertions are the statements being made by the signer of a manifest. They are the bits of provenance data that consumers of that data are being asked to trust, for example, the date of image capture, the geographical location, or the publisher of a video.
In the spec, each assertion has its own data model. Some are published as "Standard Assertions" in the spec, some are adoptions of existing metadata specifications such as ,  and , and it is expected that implementers will extend the spec by defining their own as well.

Media metadata isn't new

For example, the EXIF standard is nearly universal in digital photographs, used to record location and camera settings. The fundamentally new thing that C2PA does is allow you to cryptographically bind that metadata (with hashes) to a particular media asset and then sign it with the identity credential of the origin of that data, ensuring that the result is tamper-proof and provable.

Assertions are contained in their own JUMBF Content Type Box in the assertion store superbox and are serialised in the format defined in the spec for that assertion. The C2PA-defined assertions are stored as CBOR, while most adopted assertions from other standards are JSON-LD.

Here's an example of an "Action" assertion (in ) which tells you what the signer thinks was done in creating the active asset:

{
  "actions": [
    {
    "action": "c2pa.filtered",
    "when": 0("2020-02-11T09:00:00Z"),
    "softwareAgent": "Joe's Photo Editor",
    "changed": "change1,change2",
    "instanceID": 37(h'ed610ae51f604002be3dbf0c589a2f1f')
    }
  ]
}

And here's an EXIF one (in JSON-LD) that contains location data:

{
  "@context" : {
    "exif": "http://ns.adobe.com/exif/1.0/",
  },
  "exif:GPSLatitude": "39,21.102N",
  "exif:GPSLongitude": "74,26.5737W",
  ...
}

The one critical assertion is the binding, something that binds the claim to an asset. In fact, the spec requires one. This ensures that claims are not applied to any asset other than the one they were signed against. This is important in helping to ensure that the consumer can trust that the C2PA data wasn't tampered with between the publisher and the consumer. There are currently two types of "hard bindings" available, a simple hash binding to an area of bytes in a file or a more complex one intended for ISO BMFF-based assets, which can use their box format to reference specific boxes that should be hashed.

Claim

The claim in a manifest exists to pull together the assertions being made, any "redactions" (removals of previous provenance data for privacy reasons), and some extra metadata about the asset, the software that created the claim, and the hashing algorithm used. Assertions are linked by their reference in the assertion store and a hash. The claim itself is another JUMBF box, serialised as a CBOR structure. This is the thing that is signed, and it provides a location to find the signature itself.

Signature

The signature in a manifest is a CBOR structure that signs the contents of the claim box. COSE is the CBOR version of the JOSE framework of specs, which includes JWT/JWS. The signature is produced using the credentials of the signer. The signer is the primary point of trust in the C2PA Trust Model, and consumers are expected to use the signer's identity to help them make a trust decision on the claim's assertions.

The only currently supported credentials for producing the signature are x.509 certs. The specification provides a profile that certificates are expected to adhere to (including key usages such as “id-kp-emailProtection”, which is a placeholder). The specification does not include any requirements on how validators & consumers assemble lists of trusted issuers, as it is expected that an ecosystem of issuers will develop around this specification. Instead, it simply requires that validators maintain or reference such a list of trust anchors. Alternatively, they can put together a trusted list of individual entity certificates provided out-of-band of the trust anchor list.

What now?

This is an overview and omits both the detail required to produce C2PA manifests and the breadth of some of the other components of the specification (e.g. ingredients, the use of Verifiable Credentials, the concept of assertion metadata, timestamping etc). I'd love to produce a worked example of how to extract and validate a C2PA manifest from an asset; watch out for that in the future. I will highlight an , and I know of other implementations in the works, too.

At the Ö÷²¥´óÐã, we can't wait for this specification to develop and gain adoption. We'd love to see it supported in production and distribution tools, web browsers, and on social media and messaging platforms. We really think it can make a difference to some of the harms done by mis- and disinformation.

Summer 2021 offered a rich selection of events to sports enthusiasts: , and the , to name but a few. An ever-increasing proportion of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã’s audience has been moving from traditional broadcast to online consumption - the Euro 2020 Final, where Italy played England, set a new record for Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer, with 7.1 million viewers streaming the match online.

In comparison, the 2018 World Cup Quarter Final, where Sweden opposed England, only attracted 3.1 million online viewers, yet our systems at the time became overwhelmed, leading to . Luckily enough, this happened at the very end of the match when the outcome was already settled. However, this incident did not go unnoticed by our engineers and triggered a significant redesign of our workflows.

How did we scale our live streaming architecture to reliably deliver media and allow audience figures to reach new heights?

From pull to push

To answer that question, let’s first review what happened in 2018. Many streaming platforms, including iPlayer at the time, operate with what is commonly described as a pull model. The player on your TV, phone or computer requests the media from a third-party . This forwards the request to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã’s routing and caching servers, which in turn send it on to the packager. The role of this last system is to transform encoded media by wrapping the raw video and audio into container files that are suitable for distribution to a variety of client devices.

You can view things as a funnel: multiple layers of caching and routing are present along the way to collapse millions of player requests every second down to a trickle of requests back to the origin media packager, each layer pulling the media from the next layer up. All of this occurs while trying to keep as close to the live time of the event as possible.

Even though widely used, this pattern has some significant drawbacks, the best illustration being the major incident that hit the Ö÷²¥´óÐã during the 2018 World Cup quarter-final. Our routing component experienced a temporary wobble which had a knock-on effect and caused the CDN to fail to pull one piece of media content from our packager on time. The CDN increased its request load as part of its retry strategy, making the problem worse, and eventually disabled its internal caches, meaning that instead of collapsing player requests, it started forwarding millions of them directly to our packager. It wasn’t designed to serve several terabits of video data every second and was completely overwhelmed. Although we used more than one CDN, they all connected to the same packager servers, which led to us also being unable to serve the other CDNs. A couple of minutes into extra time, all our streams went down, and angry football fans were cursing the Ö÷²¥´óÐã across the country.

We did fix and mitigate the immediate performance issue. After running several long and deep root cause analysis sessions, we concluded that having our media servers exposed to a request load that was ultimately not in our control was not a safe position to be in.

We decided to re-architect the system by switching from a pull to a push model. The idea is quite simple: produce each piece of media once and publish it to a dedicated live origin storage service per CDN. From where we stand, the CDN acts as a pure ingest point and has no visibility on any of our servers. In other words, we alleviate any risk of the CDN overwhelming our systems: as more people view our streams, the load remains constant. We end up with a much cleaner separation of concerns, with the Ö÷²¥´óÐã accountable for producing all media in time and the CDN now solely responsible for caching it and making it available for download at scale.

Drilling down on the packager

Before they arrive at our packager, video and audio signals are encoded into formats appropriate for distribution to our audiences. The cloud-based encoder is also responsible for generating an adaptive bitrate set of outputs, in other words, a range of picture and sound qualities to cater for different network speeds and device capabilities.

The resulting encoded media is then sent to the packager. Its role is to prepare all the files which will be requested by devices to play a stream over an HTTP connection. The packager produces two types of streams:

- streams: in our case, the encoded media is packaged in fragmented containers. Apple devices and some older TVs use these.
- streams: in our case, the encoded media is packaged in fragmented containers (MPEG-4 part 12), commonly referred to as fragmented MP4. All other devices use these.

At a high level, the revised workflow is composed of four main components, the repackager, the distributor, the manifest generator, and the conductor:

All four components are designed as load-balanced fleets of microservices to support the load of dozens of Ö÷²¥´óÐã streams continuously flowing through them. These streams correspond to all our linear TV channels and their many regional variants, half a dozen World Service streams, and a variable number of event streams. The workflow is run in two independent cloud regions to allow for additional resiliency. Let’s delve into the role of each component.

The repackager

The upstream encoder produces video using and audio using . Both the video and audio are wrapped in TS containers, and the encoder continuously sends small container files which hold roughly 4s of content each. The repackager component receives these chunks of content via HTTP PUT requests. Conveniently, their format is suitable for HLS streaming: to make HLS available, the repackager can simply forward them untouched to the next component in the workflow, the distributor.

However, it additionally needs to transform the TS chunks in a format suitable for our DASH streams. The repackager’s task is to parse the TS container and extract the raw H.264/AAC data. Using information gathered by reading through this media data, it rewraps the pictures and sound in an MP4 container with all required metadata. The generated MP4 files are sent to the distributor alongside their TS counterparts.

The distributor

The distributor component receives the MP4 and TS chunks sent by the repackager over HTTP, and in turn, publishes them to CDN storage locations so that our audiences can access them. Depending on the stream, one file may be published to several CDN endpoints for additional redundancy. The distributor can essentially be viewed as a one-to-many mapper, handling all authentication and retry behaviour when interacting with a CDN.

Additionally, for every TS chunk it receives, the distributor sends an HTTP request to the manifest generator, triggering the generation of a manifest corresponding to that chunk.

The manifest generator

Manifests are text documents. Their primary goal is to guide the player to download the different media chunks within a given stream. When the play button is pressed, the player first downloads the manifest, and using the information it contains, keeps on requesting small media files containing 4s of content. The downloaded files are rendered one after the other, allowing viewers to have a continuous and seamless playback experience. HLS and DASH define different types of manifests, and the manifest generator component is responsible for creating these variants. Generated manifests are sent to the distributor component over HTTP to be published to the CDN alongside the media chunks.

The conductor

The conductor provides several REST API endpoints to configure the behaviour of the other components in the workflow. For example, it is responsible for driving the automatic scaling of the microservices when additional streams are started, adjusting the monitoring, keeping track of start and end time of events, filtering encoder inputs, and a variety of other management tasks.

Paving the way to the future

Driven by a cross-departmental effort involving several teams, our push packager workflow has been successfully running in production since February 2021. Initially trialled with the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Two HD channel, it now continuously carries over 40 streams, with additional event streams soon to be migrated. Over a million new files are produced every hour, and billions of media chunks have successfully been uploaded to CDN storages since its inception. Across all summer 2021 sporting events, the system allowed us to reach a record 253 million play requests on Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer and Ö÷²¥´óÐã Sport.

Even though the numbers shared here fit well within the realm of hyper-scale when it comes to data produced and network traffic, it is worth noting that online streaming is a small proportion of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã’s audience coverage. Linear broadcast TV still makes up the lion’s share. However, online consumption is steadily increasing, reaching about a quarter of all viewers during the summer events, and an IP-only future is fast approaching. With these efforts, we will be better placed to move forward: our new packager gives us the flexibility to adapt our content to take full advantage of improvements in specifications and allows us to reliably and cost-effectively serve millions more online viewers in the coming years.

Want to see our system in action? Open Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer and simply press play on one of our live streams!

• Ö÷²¥´óÐã R&D - Designing UHD HDR for Euro 2020
• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Media Centre - Record-breaking first half of 2020 on Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer
• Ö÷²¥´óÐã R&D - Low Latency Live Streaming with MPEG DASH
• Ö÷²¥´óÐã R&D - Higher quality video streams and improving adaptive bitrate reliability

Short Form Video & Datalab

With this in mind we have worked with Datalab (our in-house Ö÷²¥´óÐã machine learning specialists) to create an algorithm-based video recommendations engine which we hope will help our audience see more of the content they love whilst reducing the editorial overhead of creating a set of relevant links.

Algorithm-based recommendations

The engine works by combining content information about the clip with more information about user journeys from across the Ö÷²¥´óÐã. This combination of multiple sources should provide a more relevant list of videos for our audience to watch next. This is the first cross product engine supporting user journeys across News and Sport, which means that you may see news, sport or a combination of both in the module. This is the first version of the short form video recommender, there will be more improvements to come, as we continue to develop it.

Launching the new recommendations

The plan is to launch this new functionality on all American Football clips the week commencing 13 September to give the engine a trial with freshly published content and to give us the opportunity to measure its impact. Provided all is well, we will gradually release this feature across all Ö÷²¥´óÐã Sport videos. After that we will begin to roll out the same engine for Ö÷²¥´óÐã News. Beyond that we will continue to work with editorial colleagues to improve it over the coming months.

If you have any feedback on this new video experience, please leave your comments below.

Toucan is a significant update to our existing Standard Media Player (SMP) - which has been around in one form or another since the 2012 Olympics. The existing player has been continuously updated since then and is still used across the whole of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã website, from Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer to Ö÷²¥´óÐã Sounds and from the World Service to Weather. Over the last twelve months, the player delivered over three billion streams to web browsers on desktop, tablet, and mobile phones.

Why introduce a new player?

The SMP dates from 2012 and has accumulated support for many older browsers and technologies, which are increasingly being deprecated or even no longer exist. One example is the use of iframes which is used to separate the player code from the embedding page code. This technique still works but is no longer the preferred method in the web development community. Additionally, we wanted to completely redesign the user interface (UI) and take a mobile-first approach. Building a brand new UI on top of an old codebase didn’t make sense due to the incompatible technologies we wanted to use. The advantage of a new player is that we can drop all the old code, rebuild more efficiently and be more able to add up to date features and technologies in the future.

Toucan, therefore, supports many modern features that audiences expect. These include 20-second skip forward/back buttons, variable speed playback, slicker animations, and a cleaner design with mobile use in mind. Accessibility is also vitally important and has been considered from the start of our development. The player now has keyboard control – press space to play and pause, arrow keys to seek forward and back, and F to go full screen.

One major advantage we’ve brought to the new player is a componentised approach. This means that the UI is loaded separately from the main player and enables us to produce different UIs more easily if required and load the most appropriate one. For example, a child-friendly version with larger buttons or additional features could be created and used where necessary (and save download costs by not loading any UI which is not needed). Another advantage of the componentised UI is that we can build-once, use-everywhere, meaning we don’t waste effort building the same UI for multiple use-cases. The new UI that comes with the new player is already being used with the new Chromecast receiver, which has prevented exactly that kind of duplication. This UI can be seen now on your TV if you cast from iPlayer mobile (and shortly, iPlayer web and Sounds mobile).

We have also updated to a more modern version of CSS and JavaScript, and the player continues to be built on , the open-source media playback component, which we contribute back to for the benefit of the Dash.js community. New releases of Dash.js are, of course, always fully tested before making it live in production.

There are performance gains from the smaller size and more efficient build practices of Toucan and benefits from not needing to support as many older browsers as the current player does - and will continue to do so.

It’s built using , which was recently released in browsers as a native way to produce a component that can easily be integrated in diverse situations. We’ve also dropped our use of iframes in favour of Web Components’ – this is leading to a significant decrease in player load times.

Now that we have launched the first version, we will be adding all the other features that audiences need in a modern player. This includes audio on-demand, podcasts, live video, live audio, variable speed playback and much more. This will take time, but keep your eyes peeled as we incrementally develop the player across the Ö÷²¥´óÐã’s digital services.

You will soon see the new player on all our web and mobile services that playback video and audio, including Ö÷²¥´óÐã Sport, Ö÷²¥´óÐã News, Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Sounds, World Service and many more over the coming months as the features that these services require are built and launched into the new player.

While Toucan is exciting and will eventually replace the current player, we won’t rush to switch off the SMP. It will be needed by the audience where they are using browsers that don’t support the necessary features that Toucan requires, and we are committed to making sure that people can enjoy the Ö÷²¥´óÐã wherever they happen to be and on whichever platform they choose to use.

But for browsers that do support Toucan - we hope you enjoy that experience. Do send feedback to us at mediaplayer@bbc.co.uk.

Their tool lets a viewer take an image from a programme, perhaps the thumbnail used in its programme page, and use the Cloud Vision API to extract as much data as possible about who is in the image, where it was taken, as well as any text. This is then used as the basis for a search across the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's collections. This is then used to drive a number of different navigation systems, for example, presenting the material on a timeline to encourage exploration of older material.

So, for example, someone could select a photograph of Stacey Dooley and be offered a range of programmes she has featured in. One possible extension the team discussed was also looking up future programmes and where it includes audience questions – for example, Question Time - letting the user submit questions directly. This connection between archive search, upcoming programmes, and audience interaction was especially imaginative.

As judges, this project impressed us in two ways. First, their idea was simple to describe – though complex to develop, as simple ideas so often are – and second, they had actually built a working end to end solution on top of the cloud services they had available so that we could see it in operation.

The team is now looking at how their idea might work with existing tagging and metadata systems, but the point of a hackathon like this is not to build a working tool but to explore ideas in a creative, stimulating and collaborative way. This certainly seems to have happened with all the teams involved here.

• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Taster - Try Philip 21

The 'fabula' is a literary term used to refer to the raw material of a story, what takes place and the chronology of events. It describes the skeleton of the experience, story beats and the audience journey. The 'syzhuet' describes how the story is organised and presented to audiences. It covers everything from the perspective the story is told from to the arrangement of actors and the cinematography of a scene.

In traditional media, the audience is passive and cannot interact with what is being shown. Storytellers may play with the audience journey and how the story is presented, but they never surrender control of the constituent elements, and they do not offer alternative and equally valid branches. halucid_ have had to wrestle with the challenge of making the fabula and syzhuet work together while also giving up a degree of creative control.

The fabula and syzhuet of the authored experience

In the case of Philip 21, the fabula could be described as being broadly linear. The audience arrives for a date with Philip; they engage in conversation with him and are ultimately asked if they would like a second date or not. However, this simple sequence is not what is received by the audience. What does take place is a fragmented series of scenes where progress can only be made through user choices and engagement. halucid_ plays with the fabula and utilises the narrative setting, the conversational structure and the first-person perspective to drive the experience forward. Philip 21 takes the narrative setting, that of a date, and uses it to establish the boundaries of the world and to inform us on how we should behave. Since many of us will be familiar with this experience from our own lives, halucid_ leans on the understanding of social norms to get audiences to participate in the way that they desire. Building on this, halucid_ uses the codes and conventions of conversations to create an internal metre that demands our engagement. It is only through responding to Philip’s questions and internalising his responses that the narrative can advance. In so doing, it bids the viewer to suspend their disbelief and enter into the story world. Finally, the first-person perspective means that the audience is always focused on the subject, unable to look away, and the fixed camera position creates a sense of intensity, intimacy and immediacy, which is further heightened by the one-to-one interaction enjoyed with Philip.

These creative decisions help move the narrative forward and straddle the line between the fabula and how the authored experienced is presented. This is particularly important to the narrative OBM experience because both content creators and audiences are jointly responsible.

Philip 21 can be navigated in several different ways, with each choice offering a different route through the experience. These routes have been created by halucid_, but audiences have the freedom to select which paths to follow. They can choose a path from the outset or change course at any point, meaning that the syzhuet presented is unique to each viewer. Philip 21 has no primary path, and as a result, all routes through the experience and all outcomes received are equally valid.

The dual narrative

The second interesting element worthy of discussion about Philip 21 is how it goes about creating a dual narrative. On the one hand, Philip 21 is an authored experience, a story that halucid_ is seeking to tell, and on the other, there is the audience experience and what the audience bring and take away from the experience. The audience is integral to delivering Philip 21, and by taking part, they are positioned not as passive watchers but are co-protagonist alongside Philip. The viewer becomes a character in the story and must decide how to approach the situations in the story.

The viewer must decide if they will approach the work sincerely as their authentic self or assume a persona/play a role that goes against type. This choice, whether conscious or unconscious, determines where the story goes. This way, what is presented back to the audience is a reflection of choices made. Philip 21 could be considered as having two narratives. The authored story and one reflected to the audience based on how they interact with the experience.

What comes next

Narrative OBM experiences are still in their infancy, and we are only beginning to understand the impact of content creators giving over control to audiences. Altering the syzhuet of a story presents a wide array of creative opportunities for creators and audiences, but these choices will need to work in tandem with the fabula and not distract from the story. We are unsure of what works best and are eager to see further experiments in this area.

Likewise, the interplay between the authored experience and the one reflected back at audiences is something we are keen to explore in more detail. What would happen if additional choices were offered to audiences? What would occur if a story was told episodically and not in one session? How would audiences experience this? The only way to find out is to build and test these kinds of experiences.

• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Makerbox - StoryFormer
• Ö÷²¥´óÐã R&D - StoryFormer: Building the Next Generation of Storytelling

• Ö÷²¥´óÐã Taster - Play Beat the Bot

The Ö÷²¥´óÐã's brilliant line-up of presenters and on-air talent will always be at the heart of our content. But we think there's also a role for a synthetic voice to augment them. A synthetic voice could power interactive quizzes with almost limitless questions and challenges. It could improve the accessibility of existing content. And it could help create new content individually personalised to our users.

James Fletcher, Editorial Lead, Synthetic Media and Conversational AI

Sports Quizzes

Quizzes are participation experiences in their purest form. And we know our Ö÷²¥´óÐã Sport audiences love doing really obscure and competitive quizzes, the harder the better...

The surge in DIY Zoom quizzes during the pandemic may have fizzled out, but a whole host of TV quiz shows with high production values have taken their place. Amidst quiz fever, we started to think about making a quiz that showcased our new synthetic voice and allowed audiences to participate using their own voice too.

Beat The Bot

So we created Beat the Bot, a web-based voice quiz where you have to guess the names of all the Premier League teams that have ever been relegated. You play in turn against the bot, with no room for error. The bot is never wrong.

Beat the Bot is a testbed for launching the first of many voice-enabled experiences that audiences can engage with through their browser on their desktop or smartphone using their in-built microphones. We also made sure that audience privacy is un-compromised, which is key in creating a safe environment for more experiences like this in the future.

Jamie Chung, Executive Product Manager

Does using your voice make a quiz more engaging?

We wanted to test a hunch that using your voice would give the quiz more jeopardy and deepen engagement. When it works well, using your own voice provides a frictionless experience. By reducing the effort needed to type answers and correct spellings, gameplay can happen at a natural pace. However, if the speech recognition doesn't understand your accent and you are saying the right answer, a voice quiz can be more frustrating than a text-based one. Using your voice to complete a quiz may be a novel experience for many of our users; given that this is the first voice web quiz for the Ö÷²¥´óÐã, we had to overcome some design challenges.

One of the biggest UX challenges when designing Beat The Bot was indicating to the user when it was their turn to speak. If a user isn't sure when the microphone is listening and speaks too soon or too late, it can spoil their chances of winning. So we used visual clues in the interface to alert the user when it's their turn to speak and a circular countdown timer that slows ebbs away, telling the user how much time they have until the microphone will close.

Paul Jackson, UX Designer

What did people think?

After two weeks of being live on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Taster, we had a completion rate of 67%, and 65% of people played it more than once. The mixed success of speech recognition has had an impact on playability for some people; we're aware this is an area that needs improving before voice quizzes can be rolled out on a larger scale. But the numbers of users retrying the game demonstrate that the format works. Once we can improve the speech recognition for a broader range of British accents, the format could be repeated for a wide range of quizzes across the Ö÷²¥´óÐã.

From today, we’re rolling out a new look for Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer’s playback on TVs. It’s a cleaner, sleeker and more pared-back interface, with some changes to how things appear during playback and new, improved subtitles you can customise and control.

The first thing most viewers will notice is the playback bar along the bottom. You will now see a simple, elegant bar that shows how far through the programme you are.

Gone is the play/pause button - play and pause icons are now briefly displayed in the centre of the screen when pausing and resuming, whilst rewinding and fast-forwarding brings up visual stills from the programme, so you can easily see when to press play again.

All the extra controls for more episodes, subtitles and settings and the button to add a programme to your list to watch later have all been moved to the top left of the screen.

As part of these changes, we’ve also made significant improvements to the way viewers can control subtitles on iPlayer. The new position of the subtitles and settings menu makes it easier than ever to turn subtitles on or off, as well as making it easier to choose the audio described and signed versions where available; plus, we’ve also added the ability to change and control the size of the subtitles.

Previously subtitles on iPlayer were automatically displayed as a larger size than we use on broadcast, so as part of these changes, we’ve made the default setting a smaller size. For those who need larger or, indeed, even smaller text, they can now choose from a range of five options. That choice is remembered for other programmes they watch in the future.

These changes follow some other recent improvements we’ve made to subtitles on iPlayer on TV. Previously subtitles would appear as coloured sans serif text with a black outline, always at the bottom-middle of the screen. This was far from ideal as, for example, it could be difficult to read the white text if the video image behind it was also white or was patterned. And if the part of the video image behind the subtitles contained something that viewers needed to see to understand the programme – for example, the clues on Only Connect – they could only see it by switching subtitles off.

The improvements we’ve made recently mean when you’re watching iPlayer on a TV, subtitles are now clearly readable, in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Reith Sans typeface, with a black background behind the text, and the correct colours to show who is talking. They are also now positioned to take account of what’s on-screen, so they will no longer be covering important information, and mean our viewers who use subtitles can play along with Only Connect and enjoy Victoria Coren-Mitchell’s witty and withering jokes at the same time.

Currently, the new size controls are only available on our on-demand content but will be coming to live channels on iPlayer in the coming weeks. Let us know your feedback on the new look playback interface, the new subtitle controls or anything else at bbc.co.uk/contact.

> Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer - Accessibility

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The Ö÷²¥´óÐã is developing a shared platform for building its digital products to reduce development complexity and duplication as much as possible. The aim being to enable quicker and more efficient software development processes resulting in quicker delivery of digital content to our audiences. Read more about the technology changes.

A key aspect of this project has been having a shared repository for the Presentation layer code with different teams working on this platform. This blog will be sharing our experiences so far through the lens of quality engineering by answering three commonly occurring questions that pop up before, during, and after product development — who is going to use the product, how will we ensure quality, and what have we learned so far?

Who will be using the product?

Engineers across different teams working on the platform directly and our digital products consumers are the main product users. We want to keep making great digital products (quality, usability and design), even as we change technology platforms, while also minimising bugs in our software as much as possible.

In order to reduce bugs and issues raised, the testing is integrated into the development workflow, and team members across disciplines have ownership of the product quality. Having a consistent approach to testing features in the platform and having a quick feedback loop for spotting and fixing defects early, helps in minimising the risks and impact across different teams. This is an ongoing process with fine tuning based on feedback from the development teams.

Solution: The users’ needs, (in our case digital products users and engineering teams building on the shared platform) help to define the product requirements that influence the test process.

How do we do the testing?

One of the key things Test engineers and other project stakeholders consider are the risks. The impact of different code merges and changes cascading to different teams was one such risk in the shared repo. Having a shared platform meant sharing other infrastructure (besides a GitHub repo), such as deployment pipelines, communication channels in Slack, documentation, etc.

A consequence of this is that deployments are now visible to multiple teams or stakeholders, with the notifications in our Slack channels flagging failing builds. Bugs get flagged up quickly and when needed, different development team members are able to ‘swarm’ (even while working remotely) to collaboratively debug and resolve these issues. This has led to more frequent and better communication across teams and we think this has been a beneficial and worthwhile project just for getting more people talking and working together more often.

There has been consistency planned into the project as a whole from the start, for example with the . Similarly, it was important to have consistency across teams when it came to testing the features developed in the platform, as we simultaneously worked on this shared code space, in order to minimise bugs, regressions and other product risks. Having an overarching Test strategy considering approaches to manual and automated testing (guided by the and ) has informed our testing.

Automated tests form part of pull request checks and before deployment to Live. We have consistency in the automated test tools we use and engineers across teams are able to know what the expectations for testing are. This is by no means a finished endeavour, but a continuous work in progress so having forums like the Test Guild and team knowledge sharinghelp with communication, continuous learning, and further improvements.

Because of the scale of the project we rely on automated test tooling for regression testing. We also began to use fairly new test tools for visual regression testing like Storybook and Chromatic. Alternatives were Percy, Nightwatchjs and Browserstack. For other types of automated tests we use Puppeteer and formerly Cypress. We had communication channels with the test tool makers to feed back issues encountered and to request new features as we scaled and grappled with using the different test tools.

Solution: Have a test strategy and plan early to mitigate against identified project risks by including quick and early feedback during the development process.

What have we learned?

One of the benefits of a brand-new project is that there is no legacy code or technical debt at the start (this changes pretty quickly though!). Mature products have gone through the growth pains. There are known unknowns and workarounds for known problems or pain points which the development teams, (and Test engineers in particular) come to know and understand fairly well.

The challenge however, with new projects, is that there are lots of unknowns with the new technology stack. As the project has been growing we have also been dealing with and learning from the scaling challenges such as pipeline issues from multiple deployments taking place at the same time, improving monitoring of traffic and website status errors, as well as optimising our stack’s performance as more product features have been built. Being able to identify such issues early on has been important. Manual testing by different team members helps with identifying such issues that may not be covered by the automated processes initially.

Solution: Continuously learn and iterate as issues are identified and fixed.

Conclusion

Building quality engineering into a shared repository requires similar considerations to that of single-team projects but on a bigger scale and with a wider focus. These considerations are; who is the product being made for and by whom; what are the product risks, and what is the test approach or plan to reduce the impact from these risks. The aim is to provide quick feedback and monitoring for regressions during the software development process. Test automation and tooling are important for facilitating this. Continuously learning about our product, (including from our product users) by regular communication, exploring, and working collaboratively. This has helped with iterating on our quality processes based on our findings and has been important for our quality engineering.

At Ö÷²¥´óÐã Research & Development, we are investigating how we evolve our current multimedia applications to move beyond video by using object-based media (OBM). OBM allows us to develop future audience experiences which are immersive, interactive and personalised.

There is an ever-increasing number and range of audience devices capable of playing back OBM experiences. The challenge we now face is universal access - How can we get all members of the audience to enjoy OBM experiences on any device, and how do we do this sustainably and at minimal cost?

Our Render Engine Broadcasting (REB) project is investigating new technologies that will allow the Ö÷²¥´óÐã to deliver these OBM experiences at scale to all of our audiences, no matter what device they use. Our ultimate goal is to deliver real-time and fully rendered experiences on any device or platform and write the software to do it only once. We have been investigating the use of WebAssembly as a cross-platform technology for this.

What is WebAssembly?

(wasm) is a Universal Binary format designed as a sandboxed environment and a portable compilation target, which means that the same wasm module can run securely on multiple platforms. A number of strongly typed languages such as C/C++, Rust or AssemblyScript can compile to WebAssembly, making it language agnostic. This makes it an attractive option for adoption in the industry as it enables developers to use languages they already know to produce wasm binaries.

When WebAssembly was first developed a few years ago, its target platform was the web. The aim was to compile fast and efficient system-level code and have it run in the browser. Compute intensive applications, such as real-time interactive rendered graphics, could be run in a web browser at near-native performance. This also enabled some native applications to be ported to the web, increasing their reach and usage. These include , which renders 3D representations of satellite image in the browser, and , which now offers a WebApp to create and edit CAD drawings.

In the last couple of years, WebAssembly outside of the browser has been gaining traction. A number of native wasm runtimes have been developed, which has enabled the use of WebAssembly for microservices and server applications. In 2018, the website security company announced the use of WebAssembly on their edge workers, allowing users to deploy secure and fast serverless code compiled to wasm. And the edge cloud platform provider  offers new wasm-based edge computation using their native runtime Lucet.

The portability of WebAssembly across multiple platforms and its security model are the key reasons for Ö÷²¥´óÐã R&D’s interest in using this technology as a compilation target for media experiences. As a public service broadcaster, we need to deliver value to all of our audiences, regardless of the device they use. Where traditionally, a codebase for each target platform and a different team to maintain each codebase would be required, the use of WebAssembly potentially allows for a much more sustainable developer ecosystem. It enables media software applications to be created once, from a single codebase, compiled to WebAssembly and deployed on any client or server platform depending on the capabilities required. It also offers numerous advantages compared to previous multimedia or cross-platform technologies (such as Flash or Java Runtime Environment). Indeed, it is language agnostic, security-focused, has predictable performance, and works inside and outside the browser. WebAssembly is also an open standard, which encourages its adoption.

How have we used WebAssembly?

We wanted to demonstrate how we could use WebAssembly to deliver media experiences that can run on many target platforms built from a single codebase. To do that, we implemented an example media application written in C++, which we compile to WebAssembly, giving us a wasm module. We designed this application to look like a version of Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer, allowing users to select content, watch video programmes, AND play OBM experiences. We call this application the Single Service Player (SSP).

To run our SSP wasm module, we needed a wasm runtime. The SSP makes use of some low-level media functionality, which isn’t scoped by the WebAssembly specification. To enable wasm modules to make use of these low-level multimedia capabilities, they need to be implemented in the runtime and made available to the wasm module through a set of imports. Examples of such capabilities include:

• Windowing and rendering — In most cases, a multimedia application will have some graphical elements to it, which requires things to be drawn in a window (such as video frames or a UI screen).
• User inputs — An interactive multimedia experience expects user inputs, such as keyboard or mouse events.
• Media encoding and decoding — To efficiently encode and decode media (such as video frames or audio packets), it is preferable to use the host’s hardware resources where possible.

As there is currently no WebAssembly runtime that offers these media capabilities, we've decided to create our own.

There are already some efforts in specifying ways a wasm module can talk to the host. proposes a set of standardised POSIX-like syscalls (the programmatic way in which a computer programme communicates with the host system) for libc functionality, mainly file handling and networking. These are called from the wasm module and implemented in the runtime.

We decided to use a similar approach to allow our SSP wasm module to communicate with the host, enabling it to have access to low-level media functionality. This involved identifying all the platform-specific media capabilities that could not be compiled to wasm and implementing them in the runtime. These capabilities were then made accessible to the wasm module through a set of platform-independent syscalls passed as imports.

This figure illustrates the whole process, from writing a media experience as software (such as the SSP) to running it as a wasm module on any device. The steps are detailed below.

The first step was to design the multimedia sys-call API behind which we would implement our cross-platform multimedia capabilities in the runtime. It needed careful consideration to ensure it was thread-safe and honoured the wasm security requirements around memory access. In the figure above, we use reb_decode_video() as an example syscall, which our SSP application can use to access low-level multimedia functionality, such as utilising the system’s hardware for video decoding.

Our SSP code was compiled to wasm using the clang compiler and the wasi-sdk toolchain, and the required syscalls are added as imports to the wasm module.

We then built the multimedia wasm runtime, consisting of two parts. The first one is the execution environment for wasm modules, which allows us to load and run a wasm module. For this, we embedded , a project based on , which generates the machine code for the target platform from the wasm binary.

The second part of our runtime is the implementation of the low-level multimedia functionality. For this, we created a cross-platform C++ library with input detection, networking, windowing, graphical rendering, and media decoding, which sits behind our carefully designed syscall APIs. We compiled our library for several target platforms, such as Linux, macOS, Windows, Raspberry Pi and Android. We also wrote some glue code to connect the two parts.

Where do we go from here?

A wasm runtime capable of executing multimedia applications opens a lot of possibilities, principally around flexible compute. Flexible compute allows us to run computationally demanding applications by dividing up the workload between available resources. These resources could be located locally (a laptop, games console or phone in your house), in the edge, or the cloud.

As we move towards delivering fully rendered real-time interactive experiences, the flexible compute approach becomes an attractive solution to the computational demands of such applications. We could, for example, consider segmenting a rendered frame into several tiles or objects, each of those rendered on a separate available compute resource. Many systems approach this problem by running specific compute tasks in containers across the available devices and platforms. We hope to use our work and accrued knowledge in developing the wasm multimedia runtime to investigate a viable alternative to the container approach for distributed media applications. We are looking into using wasm modules to perform secure and fast computation on any remote compute nodes.

Our runtime, capable of performing media services such as rendering and decoding or encoding of rendered video frames, can be used to display the final experience to the user on a client device and to execute the remote computational tasks as wasm modules. Using WebAssembly combined with a flexible compute approach, we hope to develop technology that allows the audience to access any future experience, regardless of their devices at home.