Summer 2021 offered a rich selection of events to sports enthusiasts: , and the , to name but a few. An ever-increasing proportion of the 主播大秀’s audience has been moving from traditional broadcast to online consumption - the Euro 2020 Final, where Italy played England, set a new record for 主播大秀 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 主播大秀’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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀 iPlayer and 主播大秀 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 主播大秀’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 主播大秀 iPlayer and simply press play on one of our live streams!

• 主播大秀 R&D - Designing UHD HDR for Euro 2020
• 主播大秀 Media Centre - Record-breaking first half of 2020 on 主播大秀 iPlayer
• 主播大秀 R&D - Low Latency Live Streaming with MPEG DASH
• 主播大秀 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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀. 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 主播大秀 Sport videos. After that we will begin to roll out the same engine for 主播大秀 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.

• 主播大秀 Taster - Play Beat the Bot

The 主播大秀'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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀, 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 主播大秀 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 主播大秀.

As we enter the concluding stages of the European Championships and the dust begins to settle on a phenomenal summer of sport, this post explores some of the approaches 主播大秀 Sport and 主播大秀 Live use to serve rich digital experiences at scale to our audience as the action unfolds.

This summer tens of millions of us found ourselves entranced by the beautiful game, action from the courts of Wimbledon, and the best in Europe competing across a variety of sports in Glasgow and Berlin. For many this meant a trip to the local pub, fan festival, or just the living room sofa. However for those with immovable commitments 主播大秀 Live was vital for staying in the loop while the boss was looking away or before the soon-to-be exchanged vows.

主播大秀 Live  as part of 主播大秀 Sport's digital offering for the Sochi Winter Olympics and Brazil World Cup. It has since been used across the 主播大秀 to provide coverage on everything from the results of the EU Referendum to Glastonbury. This widespread adoption meant developing 主播大秀 Live to have suitable flexibility and reusability to cover the range of use cases for the brands using Live.

主播大秀 Live is built on top of Morph, . Morph leverages Node.js for backend services and React.js for frontend HTML views. Crucially Morph is built to utilise a modular approach, building templates that can import and call other templates, serviced by an interconnected series of small, stateless nanoservice components (for more details, .

The widely varied nature of Live is a brilliant fit for Morph’s modular approach. There are modules specific to sports, such as particular score displays for football or cricket, event-specific modules such as tables for Olympic medals and the World Cup groups, and more standard, multi-purpose modules such as the component used to provide the live-updating stream of text and media posts that is a fundamental feature of all live pages.

Maintaining separate versions of the page for individual sports, tournaments, or even TV shows such as Springwatch would be a burden in development terms as well as in terms of serving these pages reliably at scale. Being able to assemble pages flexibly through the use of appropriate modules served as and when provides the requisite adaptability without compromising on reliability or performance.

Morph Templates

These modular components, Morph 'templates’, can either serve data or a view. View templates assemble React.js views, collating data returned from data templates, child view templates, and standard React.js components. These view templates can be served to the audience to be rendered or instead be consumed by higher-order view templates to produce more complex views.

Data templates will transform data from one or more sources (such as scores, possession statistics, live standings, and so on), either from other data templates or external suppliers, for consumption by view templates (but are never consumed directly by the audience). These data templates are able to consume multiple other data templates in order to transform data for specific tasks or features.

These templates are cached individually, from a top-level template that is served to the audience, to some template serving data to a parent template. Crucially, for a dynamically updating page this caching reduces the amount of data surfacing through the network, isolating the fetch of data to only that which is fresh, and rapidly serving a cached version of a page at the point at which someone navigates to the page.

With our live pages peaking at over 4.4m unique browsers for the Colombia vs England knockout match, Morph's highly performant and scalable nature was imperative to our capacity to deliver a successful World Cup. With these browsers listening for updates every thirty seconds this compounded approach to caching ensures an efficient and effective way of delivering timely updates to a massive audience.

New and improved Live reporting

In the opening stages of the World Cup we completely re-engineered the crucial component of our live page that is responsible for serving the stream of text and multimedia posts, rebuilt from the ground-up to enhance performance and improve reliability. The old endless stream of posts (fetched via the 'show more' button) gave way to a new ‘paginated’ text stream (where groups of posts are separated across pages within the main page). Paginating the stream of posts allows more comprehensive caching and more exhaustive search engine optimisation. Most crucially, it supports a more efficient data flow both internally between templates as well as a reduction in volume of the live push data consumed by clients. This reduction in data volume means reduced operational costs and, for our audience, decreased data usage. With millions of browsers using Live pages, every bit of superfluous data served translates to unnecessary cost and load so improvements in this area are of significant benefit.

Many of these major events present challenges of scale, but one slightly different challenge of scale was surfacing live video streams of up to 16 courts from Wimbledon to our audience elegantly and effectively. UX improvements to our promotional components that better surfaced this range of live content were developed and shipped during the World Cup in time for Wimbledon to open its gates. Another UX improvement was the expedited release of an upgrade to our 'reactions' feature. In normal circumstances reactions allow our audience to like and dislike individual posts on a page, and the upgrade tweaked this to allow the audience to react in agreement to football 'coming home' or eventually to lament the fact that England would have to wait four more years for its return.

Player Rater

Introducing the Player Rater for the World Cup provided a new, live, in-play service that enabled the audience to award every player in a particular match a rating between one and ten. Traditionally, content for Live pages is built for consumption by audiences. The Player Rater takes an alternative approach with its primary purpose being for the audience to interact and participate, as much as the resulting ratings are for consumption during and after matches. Despite being a fundamentally different product to Live pages, however, the Player Rater has a very familiar structure to our Live pages, being built from Morph templates and even reusing many of the same components and backend services.

The Player Rater exists primarily as two Morph templates; a view template (the front end component that is embedded into articles on the 主播大秀 Sport website) and a data template. The data template takes detailed data from 主播大秀 Sport's data partners and raw ratings from the backend store tracking these ratings. This data is then reduced and transformed to provide details of the players that play (and substitutes), ratings, player images, and other metadata such as whether the match is ongoing.

The view template then calls this data template and presents the result as a React.js view to be rendered as part of a higher level template (an article) before being served to the audience. Again, Morph caches these templates separately to reduce internal traffic and to optimise response times for clients.

With the knowledge that the Player Rater would be promoted on programmes that would draw audiences in the region of eight figures, the backend solutions responsible for handling this traffic had to be able to count submitted ratings reliably and in near real-time, while scaling to accommodate sudden dramatic traffic spikes. Teams across 主播大秀 Design & Engineering have, for some time, already been tracking counts in near real-time, such as for reactions on 主播大秀 Live and video play counts on 主播大秀 Ideas. These counts have been powered by the Counting Service.

The Counting Service

From the inception of the Counting Service it was built to be highly scalable. The Counting Service has offered suitable performance and reliability to accurately track and return, in a timely manner, reactions to a volume of concurrent commentary posts across multiple live text streams. When viewing Live pages, there are typically 20 different posts to react to. Scaling the range of interactions to 22-30 players was a straightforward task allowing the confidence to reuse the Counting Service, as an already well-proven system.

As with Morph, the Counting Service deliberately avoids a monolithic architecture. The approach in this instance is a pipeline of serverless and stateless components pointing to a store of JSON documents. Or rather two separate pipelines, one for reading and one for writing.

Reading of the Counting Service is relatively low demand. A data template within Morph makes requests to the Counting Service at intervals. This data template then provides cached responses to parent templates/components. These requests from Morph are met by the Counting Service using a serverless compute function to read the appropriate JSON document. The response of read function is surfaced through the network back to the template in Morph. Morph's caching means that no matter the demand for the ratings for a match, the read requests to the counting services are reasonably consistent, with Morph absorbing the bulk of the load for read requests.

Submitted counts, however, are entirely variable. During a football match, events in play such as goals, fouls, and full time can cause huge spikes in submissions. Calls-to-action promoting the Player Rater as part of our television coverage also compound the volume of submissions. With more than 2 million ratings submitted during England's opening match against Tunisia, these spikes were a substantial challenge.

The Counting Service was able to scale to meet this demand by using an event-driven serverless approach. This approach ensures that components that could present bottlenecks if monolithic, particularly the write functions, can easily and rapidly be scaled out to reactively process submissions in parallel.

Data is queried from a firehose (a massive non-stop stream of data) of counts from 主播大秀 iD (specifically the User Activity Service, which records a variety of user interactions across the 主播大秀). This queried data is then streamed to a serverless compute function, the ‘paralleliser’. The 'paralleliser' distributes the streaming data to several more parallel serverless compute functions. These parallel functions in turn update corresponding JSON documents in storage to reflect the updating count. It’s this highly parallel approach that enables millions of ratings to serve a sizeable barometer for our audience's opinions on the player's performance during the tournament.

Conclusion

Both Wimbledon and the World Cup draw substantial national interest, even before England's best men’s football performance in 28 years. The football hysteria that swept England may have been exceptional, but the scope of the 主播大秀 and of Live means that our products are engineered from the ground up to be able to scale and support exceptional demand, whether that be from a major sporting event or a major breaking news event, which can rarely, if ever, be meticulously planned for.

While such a number of eyes are on our pages it can never truly be 'business as usual', but a tried and tested product means that our audience are able to be as close to the action of unpredictable major events as they are to any other.

So this year the 主播大秀 has done something exciting for the 2018 FIFA World Cup: for the first time all the games we broadcast on 主播大秀 One have been available in virtual reality.

For the 主播大秀 it’s important to innovate and explore new experiences for audiences now and in the future. We saw this as the perfect time and opportunity to test what our audience expects from a virtual reality sport app. There were a number of areas we were keen to learn more about including audience expectations, device preferences, the amount of time people spend using VR, how popular the platform is and what the demographic of a typical VR user is.

To take a look into this we have partnered with FIFA and its official VR suppliers in and to create stunning immersive environments our users can dive into and watch the action. Partnering with these companies allowed us to learn a lot whilst providing a great new platform for our users and so far nearly 350,000 people have taken advantage of this opportunity.

In this post we are aiming to show the work that has gone into launching this app and what we have learnt along the way.

How we delivered the apps: by Rebecca Heapy — 主播大秀 Sport Apps Project Manager

Six months to customise an out of the box solution鈥�—鈥奺asy right? Then as the weeks tick over you realise there is much more to it than a collection of posters and a couple of end-to-end tests. You’re now working with more suppliers based in multiple geographical locations. Internally the number of teams / departments involved has also grown as you’re…

• setting up CDN networks
• settling contracts and agreements
• ensuring security standards meet our levels
• prepping editorial team on the new content interfaces

All this on top of supporting and developing the , one the biggest Sport apps in the market.

So how can you ensure successful delivery when so many elements are out of your control? Without sounding cliché, communication was key.

Initially, direct contact with the teams building the interfaces was limited and irregular. The first obstacle we had to overcome was establishing governance and routines with all parties, fostering transparency and collaboration. Forging a strong direct relationship with the development team was key and helped us gain a better understanding of our role in this project and get closer to the product itself.

When equipped with more knowledge we were able to efficiently customise the environments, promotional elements and (probably the biggest of all our tasks) test the app. It was paramount that before releasing, before even announcing the apps, that we were 100% confident in the application and the services that feed in to it so that it meets the standards our audience expect.

How we made sure they worked: by Vinny Sebastian — 鈥娭鞑ゴ笮� Sport Apps Senior Test Analyst

Whilst we have a lot of experience testing the 主播大秀 Sport app, we do not have much experience testing in VR. Testing a VR app from a third party, not only involves looking at the app but also ensuring the mobile and console hardware (cardboards, headsets etc..) each display the app correctly to the user and checking the stream and on demand video quality is acceptable and plays. During this experience many lessons were learnt from our testing as the VR app was delivered.

We had to base our testing on specifications, unlike working hand-in-hand with the development team like we are used to. After analysing the spec, we needed some clarification before we were happy to start our testing. We were also given a document with acceptance tests which were based on user journeys that we used for our testing.

The end-to-end test sessions lasted for approximately two hours and covered testing the stream, branding, video on demand, data and camera angles in the stadium.

In our first end-to-end session we had eight people independently testing the app across a selection of devices. People were going through the test scenarios at their own pace, some were filling out spreadsheets while others were shouting out the issues they found, which resulted in a disorganised round of testing.

As a result, we decided that we would go through each user journey together and with one person scribing the issues that were found.

From then on the test sessions ran more smoothly, however, we took part in a further six tests rather than two tests due to issue found along the way. This extra vigilance ensured we delivered a product of the highest quality.

Learnings

The game’s changed!

Two years ago for the 2016 Rio Olympics we first dipped our toe into immersive / VR technology. In the two years since, not only the headsets but the software / environments have improved dramatically. This is also reflected in the usage with over four times more people downloading the World Cup app compared to the Olympic app. The quality of the lounge, which is central to the app and how users navigate, is fantastic across all platforms and something our users have picked up on.

The camera angles available are great, but there could be more…

As the tournament progresses we have been conducting user testing and monitoring feedback. The users of the app love the multiple camera angles but some would like even more control. We currently have cameras set up in the stand and behind both goals but users would like to see this expanded along with the ability to have more control over the live feed.

Same app different users

The app has been a great success in terms of downloads and one area we have seen significant growth is in smartphone users. However these users have the lowest average session time. When looking at users who invested in headsets like the Oculus Go, PlayStation VR and Samsung Gear VR they spend far more time watching than smartphone users.

When thinking about VR in the future we need to take this into account e.g. should a smartphone VR experience be based around a second screen or highlights and headset users around live games?

Same app different users

People don’t want to be left out, ever

Whilst working with our partners we supported all devices available to us so we could learn as much as possible. Unfortunately not every VR device or headset was supported as this was very much a trail, and the findings taken from this will feed into the decisions we make around device support in the future.

What next…

At the moment the experiment continues until the World Cup finishes on July 15th. After that we will take the learnings from this already successful experiment and factor those into whatever might be next. But we know, there is certainly an appetite for VR and Sport to work together.

If you haven't had the change to make the most of the World Cup experience yet, you can download the app from the below locations:

The World Cup is up and running and our online teams are in tournament mode as England enter the fray this evening with their opener against Tunisia live and exclusive across the 主播大秀.

Major events like this on 主播大秀 Sport are always hugely popular with our audiences, and this year we’re offering more ways to follow the action than ever before.

We want to give people the best-possible World Cup experience and our online efforts focus on two main areas – enhancing our own 主播大秀 Sport digital service, including the website and apps, and engaging audiences via social media to raise awareness of our coverage and drive them to our digital and broadcast platforms.

We have some brilliant new features on our own service (alongside all the fan favourites we know people love) and some exciting tie-ins with social platforms, so I wanted to give an overview of all the key things here.

On the 主播大秀

Our live HD coverage is the main event and all 33 matches live on 主播大秀 TV are available to watch online through 主播大秀 Sport and 主播大秀 iPlayer, while people can also listen to Five Live Radio commentary from all games. We recently announced , giving people the chance to watch in Ultra HD and High Dynamic Range and even from the stands in Russia, through our new VR app, live for the first time.

Regular users will know that on match days our live pages kick in, featuring all the build-up, breaking news, live-text commentary and the best comments from fans across social media. These pages are at the centre of our coverage again, especially on mobile devices. We have made some big changes under-the-hood, including getting in-game goal clips published more quickly and rebuilding the live text stream to enhance its performance through better speed and reliability.

We have also refreshed our connected TV app to give greater prominence to live content, this makes it easy for viewers to watch the games live with alternative match commentary from Radio 5 Live and access alternative camera angles of the action, like the tactical camera view.

We have broadened the range of live video we can offer through a trial that makes it possible for our correspondents like Phil McNulty and David Ornstein to stream live directly from Russia into these live pages from their mobile phones for the first time. We hope it’ll help bring fans closer to the action on-the-ground, which is exactly what our live pages are designed to do.

And of course, we’ve got those who can’t watch live covered too. We have video highlights for every game and goal scored at the World Cup available at the final whistle through our 主播大秀 Sport products, with a daily catch-up offering also available across 主播大秀 iPlayer.

Personalisation has been a big focus for us over the last few years and, through the 主播大秀 Sport mobile app, people can set a wide range of alerts (including line-ups, kick-off, goals, half-time and full-time scores) for their favourite team… or for all 32 teams if they really want to. We also have image and video alerts for those not watching live, so they can see the key moments as soon as they happen right on their lock screen. And our focus on performance across mobile devices has seen us upgrade the ‘My Sport’ area of the app to make it load much faster.

We have three interactive features that have proven to be really popular, especially with younger audiences. The Team Selector lets people take control of the hot seat and show the likes of Southgate and Deschamps how it should be done. And our new Player Rater lets fans become pundits as they give their own ratings of player performance. The scale of the audience participating with these features is large enough that we can represent the nation’s view on the selections and ratings, providing great content and talking points across our online and broadcast services. While audiences can also take part in quizzes against the clock thanks to ‘Quizimodo’, our new in-house quiz engine.

We’ll also have exclusive audio content available through smart speakers for the first time too provided by Radio 5 Live, so listen out for this if you are chatting to Alexa or using your Apple 主播大秀Pod device - just ask your speaker to ‘Take me to the World Cup’, or ask for the “Take me to the World Cup 主播大秀 podcast”.

Not only are these innovations going to be in action over the next month or so, but they enhance our day-to-day offer as we work to build on our position as the UK’s leading digital sport service and strengthen our engagement with younger audiences beyond the tournament.

Across social media

主播大秀 Sport’s social accounts provide a wide range of content for the World Cup, bringing the audience closer to the action, the personalities and the pundits. We also work with all the major platforms to make the most of their unique features, giving their users some exclusive content while helping drive people back to the 主播大秀’s live matches and comprehensive online coverage.

Twitter will be where our in-match updates and breaking news are posted throughout the tournament, with the best video moments also available to watch on our accounts. And we will deliver broadcast clips into approximately 15-20 editions of Snapchat’s daily World Cup Stories to reach out to the younger teenagers who use that service.

On Facebook we’ll continue to deliver a mix of news stories, images and video to our followers, including a World Cup catch-up video at the end of each day. And our rapidly growing Match of the Day Instagram account (@bbcmotd) will feature World Cup archive and 2018 action direct to our followers. We’ll also produce daily Instagram Stories featuring 主播大秀 pundits and presenters, including former England Women’s star, Alex Scott, alongside the best highlights from the day. And finally, our YouTube channel will show video highlights – putting our coverage to the front of Google for those users searching for the latest action.

Needless to say, we’re all really excited by England’s game tonight and are looking forward to delivering world-class coverage online as the tournament builds over the coming weeks. We hope audiences love it, and that even more people are encouraged to enjoy it across our digital and broadcast services because of our social media content.

The first of 主播大秀 Sport’s 2018 major events gets underway this morning as the Winter Olympics opens in Pyeongchang.

The even numbered years are always huge for 主播大秀 Sport, and this one is no different as a packed sporting calendar that includes a Commonwealth Games, World Cup and Wimbledon will see a surge in usage of our digital service and right across 主播大秀 Online.

Winter Olympics proposition

As the UK’s leading digital Sport service with over 20m browsers a week, we are providing comprehensive coverage from the Games across our digital, TV and radio services over the next two weeks. 

The Olympics take place from around midnight until 2pm each day with 主播大秀 Live at the heart of our digital offer as we live stream all the key moments of the Winter Olympics in HD to desktops, tablets, mobiles and Connected TVs, alongside our industry-leading live reporting and analysis as all the action and reaction unfolds. Audiences are also able to watch live on 主播大秀 iPlayer or via the Red Button.

During the Games we will also be MVT-testing different designs in 主播大秀 Live aimed at increasing consumption of short-form highlights clips in the page.

Performance and discovery of our content is key so we have recently improved our 主播大秀 Live page performance to make it load faster and made it more discoverable via search engines.  We’ve seen encouraging results from our recent SEO work and the AMP pages we delivered last Autumn in partnership with our colleagues in News.

We’ll be offering a handy ‘Winters Playlist’ catch-up video for audiences across both Sport and iPlayer each day of the Games. While the 主播大秀 Sport website will be the go-to destination to catch-up on all the action from Korea at any point in the day.

Our core proposition re-uses many of the components that were at the heart of our successful Rio 2016 offer – , schedule, medal table and results pages all available.

Personalisation

As part of our , we have begun moving 主播大秀 Live video and audio content on Sport behind dismissible sign-in ready for the Winters. It means if someone who isn’t signed in to the 主播大秀 goes onto the Live pages and tries to watch live action they’ll get a prompt asking them to sign in. From here we will gradually reduce the number of times people can dismiss the sign-in prompt, like we did with 主播大秀 iPlayer, and we’ll require everyone to sign in ahead of the World Cup.

While in our mobile app, users can personalise their offering by following the Winters in My Sport or signing up for our medal alerts.

We have recently upgraded the app to provide a new bottom navigation bar that makes it faster for people to get to My Sport and also gives greater prominence to our Live Guide, which provides access to all of our live streaming - everything from Pyeongchang, Six Nations rugby and FA Cup football to the 1,000 extra hours of live video content we announced at the end of last year.

In the last week we have started to roll out rich media notifications starting with images and from next week we’ll be adding video – making it simple for audiences to access great moments from sporting events right on their phone’s lock screen.

Content on non-主播大秀 platforms

We are also providing non-exclusive content away from the 主播大秀. This gives audiences a chance to catch-up on short-form video, highlights and human interest content through various social media networks and search engines. And of course, they can join us on back 主播大秀 Sport for all the live action, breaking news and analysis.

New studio space

As ever, our Engineering team have a vital role to play in delivering 主播大秀 Sport’s output and their efforts mean the coverage will be presented live from our new great looking studio space in Salford. This allows 主播大秀 Sport to make substantial production savings by minimising the staff and technology required on site in South Korea. The technical work has been delivered in a way that will allow any 主播大秀 production team to create this sort of pop up studio quickly and easily in the future.

What’s next?

All this is just the start of a busy year for us in Sport and we have plenty of exciting developments in progress now as we build towards the summer.

We want people to experience the World Cup like never before. And with a focus on personalisation, we’ll be bringing people closer to the action with an enhanced ‘My Sport’ offer in our mobile app and a trial of a new stream-based discovery format for Football content.

While our 主播大秀 Live team are focussing on participation, where alongside new voting capabilities, we will create new ways for audiences to engage with major events and and generate great content across digital, TV and radio.

Phase 2 - Beta

Sometimes what users say and what users do are very different! With this in mind, once we had a design in place we created a working prototype to further test a couple of things with our beta group of around 2000 people.

The first question: what impacts will this navigation pattern have on how people currently use the app?

We gathered anonymous data on how long people used the app for, how much content they would read/watch and we were happy that users seemed to be getting more out of the app as a result of the bottom navigation. We also got some firm pushback on the amount of space we were taking up on people’s screens that influenced the future steps we would take.

The second question we had was: do people hate it?!

The user tests and survey were great to validate that it's not a bad idea but we didn’t get any really negative feedback. Putting it in front of our larger beta audience, who are certainly not afraid to speak up, really put the bottom navigation under the spotlight. From our beta users, only 3 out of almost 2000 expressed any negative feedback about the bottom navigation, which really gave us confidence before any large-scale experimentation could happen.

Examples of the feedback we received and incorporated into the next phase:

Phase 3 - Experimentation

This time round we built a bottom navigation that wasn’t too far away from production ready. However, before we could fully invest the time to make the bottom navigation fit for purpose we had to answer the following questions:

1. Do people consume more content as a result of the bottom navigation? A successful experiment would show that people consume more as a result of the bottom navigation.

2. What should go into the bottom navigation? For this experiment there would be 2 options surfaced to a percentage of our users: one variant contained video content and the other Live content. The variant that led users to view more content compared to the current production app would be considered a success.

3. What impact does this have on the amount of time people spend in the app? A hypothesis we had going into this project was that a bottom navigation bar might increase the speed in which people can access content. Taking this into account, a reduction in the amount of time people spend using the app isn’t something we would normally aim for but would be improving user experience.

To answer these questions we set up a couple of different variants of the bottom navigation and put them in a multi-variant test to compare their performance against production (no navigation bar) for 4 weeks.

Decision

Once the 4 week test had finished we looked at the results. We could see from the data that as a result of the bottom navigation people would consume 7.4% more content using the Video variant and 8.5% more content using the Live variant.

We also saw that time spent in the app was reduced by an average of 4% because of the bottom navigation.

Overall these results made great reading and gave us the confidence that proceeding with the ‘Live’ variant of the experiment was a good thing for our users.

After some weeks making the prototype fit for purpose we have now released the bottom navigation to our audience. Since the release we have seen the same pattern where people are reading/watching more in the 主播大秀 Sport App. People are also spending less time in the app as expected. We love the thought that our users are getting more of what they want, when they want it and are glad we took the time to get this right.

So far we have seen over 350 reviews of the latest release. From this only 6 people have expressed any negative feedback about the bottom navigation with an average review of 4.4. It's a good start for the bottom navigation but not the end. We will be listening to our users, doing more with navigation in the app, implementing improvements and making tweaks for as long as we need to.

We hope you enjoy the new update.

We’ve just announced the 主播大秀’s biggest increase in live sport in a generation - aiming to bring an additional 1,000 hours of coverage from around 30 additional sports and events each year. The extra coverage will all be broadcast online on 主播大秀 Sport and 主播大秀 iPlayer, which means you can watch it on PCs, tablets, mobiles and connected TVs. It also means you can personalise those services to make sure you don’t miss any of your favourite sports whenever they’re on the 主播大秀.

For the last six months we’ve been putting this idea through its paces. We’ve made around 500 hundred hours of content available to test audience appetite, and to make any adjustments we might need to tweak under the hood, before making a commitment as big as this.

It’s worth highlighting that these extra hours will be on top of all the major sport we’re bringing you over the next few years – like the Olympic Games to 2024, the Wimbledon Championships to 2024, the World Cup to 2022, Euro 2020,plus the 6 Nations and FA Cup to 2021. It is all part of our ambition to provide more sport for more people – in partnership with the industry.

We’re working closely with a wide range of sporting bodies to showcase more of these sports to help them grow their audience. And it means we can give our audiences even more choice. We’re giving sports bodies access to our live-streaming technology so they have the means, and access to two of the most popular digital services in the UK – 主播大秀 Sport and 主播大秀 iPlayer – so they have a platform.

We’re also providing training and expertise from our world-class programme makers to ensure a consistent quality of coverage across the service.

Time well spent with 主播大秀 Sport

So what did we learn? Well, there certainly is demand! We have had millions of requests to view this live content.

We streamed a match live from every qualifying round of the FA Cup (a first in the prestigious tournament’s history), shown live Women’s Super League football matches for the first time this season and used new technology to deliver live coverage of the Rugby League Challenge Cup. Plus much more from a diverse range of sports that includes British Basketball League matches, British Athletics events, wheelchair tennis, netball, ice hockey and badminton.

Not to mention all the excitement of England’s under-17s World Cup victory over Spain last weekend when nearly 400,000 watched the match live online.

Where are people watching?

Our strategy is to make this content available across the 主播大秀’s digital services, via 主播大秀 Sport and 主播大秀 iPlayer products on mobile, desktop, streaming devices and connected TV - and enabling simple and swift discovery on those devices via the Red Button from any 主播大秀 linear channel.

For decades, the 主播大秀's traditional and ‘unconnected’ Red Button service has provided an easy way for audiences to find and watch additional live sports coverage on free-to-air television for many of the UK’s sports fans. Our connected service for such events has additional functionality, such as the ability to watch from the start, clips and highlights up to HD quality and - where rights allow - access to more coverage, which isn't constrained by broadcast capacity.

For 主播大秀 Sport's biggest events, like Wimbledon, this approach is already delivering record audience numbers, with 24.1m live stream requests. It is also paying dividends for smaller events too. The early signs are that our new live sport offering builds on this, with many users opting to watch the action on their TVs.

For recent Ice Hockey and Badminton streams we tested, 13% and 20% of the audience respectively viewed the action on Connected TV - a higher percentage of viewers than we’d normally see accessing content on those devices.

And the audience is very engaged. Our average watch time for each event across all devices is 15 minutes and much higher on connected TV. This is way above what we have observed on social platforms and is comparable to the numbers we see for the big moments from an Olympics or SW19.

The next chapter in our live coverage journey

This service has its roots in  where we promised the audience they would ‘never miss a moment’. From there we created ‘主播大秀 Live’ - an internal technology product-platform that allows us to deliver a range of live events. We first rolled this out as  – as part of an initiative to re-invent the way the 主播大秀 covers live events online.

主播大秀 Live has rapidly evolved over the last four years from its initial incarnation to the version we use today. One of the key achievements in this period has been our creation of a cloud-based isomorphic javascript platform. This allows us to transform and aggregate data into templates that power our audience-facing products and create shareable web components. Essentially, it has made it simpler for us to share live content across the 主播大秀’s full range of products and significantly improved the speed of download of our mobile offering.

For example, we were able to efficiently integrate 主播大秀 Live into our Connected Red Button and 主播大秀 Sport app on Connected TVs as a result of this, helping people discover and watch our live content where they want it most – on the biggest screen in house.

This platform has gone on to be used widely across 主播大秀 Online, from all of our major events including Glastonbury and the General Election through to underpinning the 主播大秀 News website homepage. Head of Technical Architecture Matthew Clark explains how it works in more detail .

Alongside the core 主播大秀 Live platform, we continue to benefit from the 主播大秀’s cloud-based ‘Video Factory’ – the same technology that is behind 主播大秀 iPlayer – and the development of web-based TV production tools that make it possible for us to produce low-cost live event coverage over IP.

All of this combined means we have more capability than ever before to offer a broader range of live events online. And these innovations will be used right across the 主播大秀 too. We have already begun rolling out this partnership approach to live coverage with arts events like the Hay Festival and Manchester International Festival.

Overall, the developments we’ve made to our digital technology and the evolution of our editorial practices means the entire 主播大秀 can start to reimagine what a public service broadcaster can do.

This new live sport offering is a great example of that. We can collaborate with partners to help them build reach and give audiences more of what they want at the same time – reinventing free-to-air sport in the UK for a digital age.

Your Personal Sport Service

Sport fans are hugely passionate about sport and it creates a wide range of positive and negative emotions. Of all the 主播大秀 genres, sport is one of the most divisive where users might love a sport but then hate others with a passion! Our editorial teams do a great job of curating the homepage of the Sport App but in order to meet the needs of each individual user we need to understand their interests and then create an experience unique to their individual needs.

At the end of last year we made some big changes towards delivering ‘A more personal 主播大秀’ including the launch of My Sport which I about when we launched. Since then the team has expanded our range of personalised services to provide valuable experiences outside of the app destination:

1. Personalised News alerts – News alerts for your favourite sports
2. Event Reminders - Reminders for live sporting events covered by 主播大秀 Sport
3. Euro Football Alerts – Match alerts for all 24 teams taking part in the Euros
4. Spotlight Search – Search & navigate to 主播大秀 Sport content from iOS search
5. iOS 3D Touch – Link to sections by applying pressure on the App icon on iPhone 6S

Within the app we have also improved discovery and navigation to My Sport with a new tabbed navigation providing one click access to your personal My Sport page. The new personalised services have been well received by our audience with Alerts accounting for the largest proportion (34%) of positive feedback comments in the App Stores. This range of services has also contributed to significant growth with a 50% year-on-year increase in browsers during May even before the big summer of sport kicked off! And, in the last few weeks we also broke our weekly record with over 4.4M unique users. Through A/B testing of in-app prompts to encourage discovery of our personalised services we have also seen a significant adoption of these features including:

1. 2.3M overall active push alert users
2. 800,000 subscribers to Euro 2016 Match alerts
3. 750,000 signed-in users
4. 100-150K weekly My Sport users

These new more personal and relevant services resonate well with the audience and we plan to deliver further innovations in this area in the future including for the next big major event around the corner…

The Personalised Olympics

The last 18 months have been leading up to the biggest show on earth – the Rio 2016 Olympic Games!! We expect our personalised features to provide a great Olympics experience for our audience and along with 24 live streams of coverage and all the latest news, analysis and highlights 主播大秀 Sport app users can:

1. Curate their personal My Sport page with their favourite Olympic disciplines e.g. cycling
2. Add Top Stories Alerts for the latest news stories from the Olympics
3. Add gold, silver and bronze medals alerts for instant alerts when their team wins a medal at Rio
4. Add event reminders in the schedule for any of the 100+ live events taking place each day
5. Navigate quickly to Rio 2016 from the new link at the top of the Menu

To find out what’s coming up and set event reminders for your favourite Olympic events visit the whilst in the Sport App.

Olympic Games Virtual Reality Trial

In addition to the 主播大秀 Sport App we have just released a virtual reality trial app for the Olympics – 主播大秀 Sport 360. This app has been developed in conjunction with the Olympic Broadcasting Service to offer 360-degree coverage of the Olympic Games. 主播大秀 Sport have taken part in this trial to learn more about the technology and to better understand audience needs to help shape our future Virtual Reality plans. This is an emerging and exciting area, which we will explore further after the games.

The 主播大秀 Sport 360 app will offer live 360 video footage of an event each day with around 100 hours in total. Users can choose from four different camera angles during the live event and can access a daily five minute highlights package from around 4pm the next day.

The 主播大秀 Sport 360 service can be viewed on a Samsung Note 5, S6 or S7 mobile phone using a Samsung Gear VR headset. It can also be viewed using a low cost mobile VR headset such as Google Cardboard on either Android or iOS smartphones. Simply download the 主播大秀 Sport 360 trial app and slot the phone into the headset to watch live and on-demand coverage.

The 主播大秀 Sport 360 app is available from Google Play, the Apple App Store and Samsung Gear VR. The full schedule of live 主播大秀 Sport 360 coverage is available . The 360 video content can also be viewed on your desktop PC on the 主播大秀 Taster website without a headset, where you can manually scroll around the video for a full 360 view . Please try out the service and provide feedback on the web or app experience via the Taster website.

We hope you enjoy the Olympics and look forward to hearing your feedback on our new services and how we can improve these in the future.

Your feedback

We have received thousands of responses to the survey since it launched in December. We have also been keeping track of users’ comments on the .

The positives

Many of the survey responses and user comments on the new designs continue to be really positive, with many of you saying that the new designs are easy to use, clear, well laid out and easy to scan. Many of you like the wider layouts for the Sport homepage and Football page, and over half of you say that the new layouts are better than the current versions.

Carrying on from , two thirds of you gave the updated beta pages 7, 8, 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of overall quality.

The not so positive

We also received some less positive feedback about the new design. Tablet users found the layout of the headlines on the new Sport homepage and Football page confusing and also felt that this design offered them less when they arrived on the pages. Some users mentioned that images were slow to load. Some users also mentioned that areas like the “League by League” area on the Football page needed more work to make it easier to find content within them.

We also received feedback from some tablet users saying that they would prefer to have the option to view the more detailed, full-width version of these pages on tablet devices and pinch and zoom, swiping across as well as down to view the pages.

Changes we’ve made to the homepage betas

We’ve listened to your feedback and made some changes to the beta pages in recent weeks.

We’ve updated the headlines layout on the Sport homepage and Football page for tablet users, bringing more headlines higher up the page on these devices and making the layout less complicated.

We’ve also updated the “League by League” area on the Football page to show each league above the headline rather than below it. This change is now available on all similar areas of the 主播大秀 Sport website, for example on the “Team by Team” areas on the Cricket and Rugby Union pages.

For those that would like to view the widest version of the page on a smaller screen, we’ve adapted the “Switch to desktop” option we introduced in the earlier betas to make it available on tablets as well as on mobiles. If you scroll to the bottom of the beta pages on a tablet device, you’ll see a button that allows you to switch to a “desktop” view, giving you the widest layout for the page you are viewing.

We’re also working on a change to the way images load, meaning the visible part of the page will load more quickly on all our homepages. This change should be available soon.

What’s next?

You can now view these changes and tell us what you think. Take a look on:

Thanks for all the feedback and comments so far. Due to the positive feedback we’ve received about these pages, we’ll be launching them soon.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think of the updates.

Today, we’re inviting you to view new versions of the 主播大秀 Sport homepage, Football homepage and the sport homepages for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I want to share some information about why and how we’re introducing new versions of these pages.

Why?

We want to give you the best possible experience - no matter where you are or which devices you’re using. That means building a 主播大秀 Sport website that offers the same high quality of service on all of the devices you use to go online today, and that doesn’t offer a reduced service just because your screen of choice is smaller.

We’ve seen that you are using mobile and tablet devices to access our website more and more - on average people are now accessing the 主播大秀 Sport website on two or three different devices each week.

Traffic on mobiles and tablets has increased massively over the last two years. Mobiles and tablets now consistently make up the majority of devices used to access 主播大秀 Sport throughout the week. At weekends, these devices make up three quarters of traffic to 主播大秀 Sport.

As well as the increase in mobiles and tablets, we’ve also noticed that those of you who use desktop and laptop devices to visit 主播大秀 Sport are doing so on wider screens than ever before.

These are some of the reasons why we’ve been running betas of new responsive versions of the 主播大秀 Sport website and rolling these out since the summer .

The new responsive site also means that when we bring new features and functionality to you in the future, we can do this across all parts of 主播大秀 Sport online in a quick, cost-effective way.

To make the changes to these pages as easy as we can for you, we’ve been introducing our new website gradually over the last few months and asking for your feedback along the way.

Close to two thirds of you gave the final beta versions of our Cricket and Rugby Union pages 7, 8, 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of overall quality. We saw similar scores for the betas of Formula 1, Rugby League, Tennis and Golf. These pages are now fully available in the new design.

Next – what’s happening to the Sport homepage, Football page and national sport pages?

We’ve taken all of the feedback we’ve received since the summer and used it to create new versions of the Sport homepage, Football homepage and sport homepages for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales for you try over the next few weeks.

On the new versions you’ll still get all the stories, features, live coverage, video, scores and tables you’re used to from the old site. All of this popular content is available with a new look and feel.

We know that football scores and tables are important to you, so we’ve included these with a new design that works on all devices, making football scores easier to find on mobile. These features have been designed and built in a way that means we can adapt them for other sports in future too - something that many of you often ask us about.

New wider layout on the Sport homepage beta and Football beta

For the first time on 主播大秀 Sport, we’re trying a new layout that takes advantage of the space available on the wider desktop and laptop screens that we’ve noticed you’re using. The new wider layout is available initially on the Sport homepage beta and Football beta.

On our previous beta surveys and blogs, some of you asked us when we would start to design our pages to take advantage of the space available on these wider screens, so we’d love to hear what you think of the new wider layout. If it proves popular, it will be introduced across the rest of the sport website gradually during 2016.

Tell us what you think

We want to hear from you about what you like and dislike about these pages, and also what you think needs some more work before we launch them in 2016. We’ve set up a survey for you to provide us with feedback. You can access the survey from each of our beta pages:

As the feedback comes in over the next few weeks we’ll review it and update the betas, keeping you informed as we make changes.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think about these new pages.

A More Personal 主播大秀

At the beginning of 2015 Tony Hall set out the 主播大秀’s ambitions for serving audiences better in the internet age by creating ‘a more personal 主播大秀’. Across the 主播大秀 we are developing personalised services so that our audiences can tailor their experience based on their own unique interests.

We believe personalisation will help our sports fans to easily discover content on the teams and sports they love whenever they want, wherever they are. With this in mind, from today we are rolling out a new My Sport section in our iOS and Android 主播大秀 Sport App’s ahead of making this available on our responsive website in the coming months. A similar feature has recently been rolled out in iPlayer, called My Programmes; if you want to find out more.

Your Personalised Sport App

Over the last 12 months, 主播大秀 Sport Mobile users have increased by 33% and Tablet users by 25%. The 主播大秀 Sport App has been key to this growth with weekly reach increasing from 2M at the beginning of 2015 to just over 3M in recent weeks.

A key driver to this growth has been the expansion of our data alerts that can be personalised to your favourite sports and teams. With over 1.2M active users of our data alerts it was clear that there was a big appetite for personalised features in the Sport App. Our initial focus has been to develop these services in the app and then, with the benefit of audience feedback, evolve and extend these features to our website.

Use of the Sport App is growing rapidly so we know that the current design and functionality works well for the audience. Today we are releasing major underlying changes to the app - however where possible we have limited changes to the familiar navigation and design. The first change you will notice is an update to the Menu to support the launch of My Sport as follows:

1. 主播大秀iD Sign-in – To personalise the app with your favourite teams and sports you will need to sign-in. We require just your e-mail address and a password to get started.

2. My Sport – This is a link to your new personalised My Sport page – more on this below. Users that have added Quick Links will notice that these are now under the My Sport header. Upon signing-in these teams and sports will form your initial list of Topics.

3. Menu Edit Button – This has been moved down to the same row as My Sport, as editing the sports and teams in the Menu will now also curate your My Sport page

4. Sport links in All Sport – Our 7 most popular sports and the full A-Z are now in All Sport.

Follow Teams, Sports and Competitions

Upon signing-in users can begin choosing the sports, teams and competitions to follow. We have over 300 topics to choose from with over 50 Sports and a wide range of Football, Cricket and Rugby teams. Users can also follow competitions like the Premier League and FA Cup. To edit your topics simply select the edit button in your Menu, then select ‘Add Topics’ to either search through the 300 topics or choose from a list of suggested topics.

My Sport

The new My Sport page is a new personalised page based on the topics that you have added to ‘My Topics’. At the top of the page are the ‘Most Recent’ items, which include the latest headlines and live events from each of the topics you have added. Below is the ‘Your Topics’ section where there will be 6 items for each of the topics you follow.

Users that follow Football teams will also be able to view the result of the last match along with the next upcoming fixture and when a match is taking place a new Live Tab will appear and the live scores will update dynamically. The team have integrated powerful new technologies that will enable millions of unique My Sport pages to be dynamically created and accessed each day.

Below is how the My Sport Page will look on a Tablet plus you can

Our wide coverage of sports make these new personalised experiences possible; however we will continue to curate the Sport 主播大秀page with the best stories and events from across the world of sport.

Access My Sport on your Smartphone or Tablet

By creating a 主播大秀iD account we are able to centrally store your personal list of topics against your iD. This means that by signing into the 主播大秀 Sport App on another Smartphone or Tablet, you will have the same list of topics to navigate to in your Menu and your personalised My Sport page.

Where Next?

These new personalised features and the My Sport page are the first step in our goal of creating ‘A more personal 主播大秀’ for our audience of sports fans. We have a lot of ideas of how we would like to evolve these new services, however I am really keen to hear your feedback on the new features and how we could evolve this further in future, so please do comment below.

With so many different devices in use today, the new responsive 主播大秀 Sport website will help us to offer you a high quality of service whatever screen you are using, with the same content available on all screens. It also means that when we bring new features and functionality to you in the future, we can do this across all parts of 主播大秀 Sport online in a quick, cost-effective way.

Your latest feedback

Since we launched the second version of the Cricket and Rugby Union beta pages, many of your survey responses and comments have continued to be very positive and consistent with version one. Our aim with version two was to keep the best of what you liked about the first version, while improving on the things you said you didn’t like.

Many of you continue to find the pages clear, well laid out and easy to use. The changes we introduced with version two were designed to make it even easier to scan the pages and find things, and we’ve seen more of you giving version two higher scores here.

Following the changes we have seen a steady increase in positive feedback overall, with close to two thirds of you giving the updated beta pages 7, 8, 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of overall quality.

The latest changes to the Cricket and Rugby Union beta pages and a new Cricket scorecard

We’ve continued to listen to your feedback and have been working on some further changes to improve the beta pages. We’ve altered the layout of the headlines area slightly so that the five most important headlines are visible on most desktop and large tablet devices when the pages first load. Some of you said that summaries really help you understand more about a headline, so we’ve added summaries to the second and third headlines when the pages are viewed on larger screens.

We’ve made a further change to the “Team by Team” area of the page, reducing the font size to make it even easier to scan and find content.

Throughout this beta, some of you said that you would like to have the choice to view the desktop layout of these pages on mobile devices. So with this update we’re introducing a new feature that gives you the option of viewing the pages in a desktop layout on mobile devices, swiping across as well as down to find content and pinching to zoom in. If you scroll to the bottom of the beta pages on a mobile device, you’ll see a button that allows you to switch to a desktop view. We’re still working out how and where this feature works best on the new site and we’d love to hear what you think about it.

Some of you have also asked whether we are working on a design that uses the space available on larger screens more effectively. We want to offer users a great experience whatever their screen size. That means windows wider than 1008 pixels as well smaller devices. We’re looking into this, so watch this space.

Some of the benefits of the new single responsive site are evident with the new cricket scorecard page and a new scorecard widget that appears in the cricket live pages. Both update automatically with the latest information and were built in a way that meant we reused a lot of the same work. Some of you have contacted us about the old cricket scorecard design in the past, saying that you were frustrated by the layout on mobile devices, especially later in Test matches when the most current information was harder to find. This is why we introduced tabs in the new version, which focus on the most important information at each stage of a cricket match. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on the new scorecard and the live page widget. We’ve also been listening to some things that cricket fans don’t like about the new design and are looking at ways to improve the new scorecards even more.

What’s next?

You can now view the changes to the Cricket and Rugby Union beta homepages mentioned above and tell us what you think. Take a look on:

Thanks for all the feedback and comments so far. Due to the positive feedback we’ve received about these pages, we’ll be launching them soon.

We’ll also be introducing betas for other pages including the Formula 1, Rugby League, Tennis and Golf homepages, and eventually the Sport homepage. Please keep the feedback coming for the new versions of these pages as we introduce them.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think of the updates.

We launched new responsive beta versions of our Cricket and Rugby Union homepages designed to adapt to the different screen sizes you are using and invited you to complete a short survey letting us know what you think.

We have received thousands of responses to the survey in the month since we launched these betas. We have also been keeping track of users’ comments on Ben’s original blog. Today, I want to update you on the feedback we’ve received and some changes we’ve made as a result. I’ll then mention what happens next.

The positives

Many of the survey responses and user comments were very positive, with many of you saying that the new design is easy to use, clear, well laid out and easy to scan. Many also said that they found content they wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Three quarters of you who completed the survey said you are likely to spend more time, or the same amount of time, on the new pages. Over half of you said that the quality of the content was better than on the existing pages and that you were happy with the level of detail on the new pages.

Over half of you gave the new pages 7, 8, 9 or 10 out of 10 in terms of overall quality.

The not-so-positive

We also received some less positive feedback about the new design, where you said you preferred the existing design and didn’t want the pages to change.

Some of you also said that there was too much white space and that it felt like there was less content. Some also mentioned that certain parts of the pages, like the “Team by Team” area, were harder to scan and use. Live radio commentaries were also harder to find.

These issues contributed to a quarter of users scoring the pages 1-4 out of 10.

We also received feedback from some users saying that they would prefer to keep separate desktop and mobile versions of the site, with the option to choose to view the more detailed desktop version on mobile or small tablet devices and pinch and zoom, swiping across as well as down to view the pages.

Changes in the update to the Cricket and Rugby Union beta pages

We’ve listened to your feedback and made some changes to the beta pages for you to try. These changes should keep the best of what people liked about the first version, while improving on the things people said they didn’t like.

We've introduced a central column list of headlines into the design which is similar to the way we display headlines on the existing pages for desktop users. We’ve added a summary to the first item and added a promo into the top of the right-hand side of the page.

These changes should make the page feel more like what our users are accustomed to, make more headlines visible higher up the page and make the page easier to scan.

Some further changes we had planned to roll-out shortly were also backed up by your feedback, so we’ve prioritised these.

We’ve improved the design of the “Team by Team” area, moving to four columns and aligning the content more. This change should make this area easier to scan and make it easier to find things.

We’ve also brought across the “Live on the 主播大秀” area from the existing pages that lists radio commentaries and other sport related 主播大秀 programmes. This change should make this content easier to find and also help further with making the page easier to scan. We have also simplified the way our live pages are displayed on these pages.

We understand that some of you would prefer to keep the separate desktop and mobile versions of the site we offer now, but this has several drawbacks which make it difficult to offer users a high quality of service across the massive variety of devices available today.

We don’t want to offer you a diminished service just because your screen of choice is smaller. A single, responsive site allows us to offer the same content to our users across all of their devices, including making popular content like scores, schedules and tables more accessible and easier to find on mobile devices.

We will keep an eye on demand for a view that you can zoom in and out on and also continue to explore technology that allows us to offer users more choice regarding how their content is displayed on the different devices they use.

What’s next?

You can now view the changes mentioned above and tell us what you think. Take a look on:

We’ll compare the survey responses and comments about the updates with the feedback we received from the first versions of the betas. We’ll continue to keep you updated about the changes we’re making and the feedback we’ve received.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think of the updates.