From today, we’re rolling out a new look for 主播大秀 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 主播大秀 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.

> 主播大秀 iPlayer - Accessibility

> 主播大秀 Technology + Creativity - Accessibility

> 主播大秀 R&D - Casualty - Accessible and enhanced audio trial

Here in the UK, 主播大秀 Sounds is now one of the most popular audio apps available, and just had its best quarter ever. We’re seeing around 3.5 million people a week listening to the 主播大秀 on Sounds across the app, website, connected TVs and voice-activated devices – more than we’ve ever seen before.

There are also millions of people who watch, listen and read 主播大秀 content outside the UK – we recently announced the 主播大秀 had reached an all-time record global audience of 468 million. Until now, 主播大秀 Sounds has only been available for those international listeners through the website, and people who’ve wanted to listen to the 主播大秀 through an app have had to use the old international version of the iPlayer Radio app. Now though, the time has come to turn off the old international iPlayer Radio app and transition those users over to 主播大秀 Sounds.

From today, the 主播大秀 Sounds app will begin to be made available to download on international app stores, available for devices capable of running iOS 11, Android 5 or Amazon OS 5 or above. People who currently use the iPlayer Radio app outside the UK will now begin seeing messages encouraging them to download the 主播大秀 Sounds app and switch over. At some point in the near future, the iPlayer Radio app will stop working, and listeners will need to get the 主播大秀 Sounds app to continue listening.

This change won’t affect the content international listeners can enjoy. They’ll still be able to listen to all their favourite 主播大秀 programmes, the wide range of 主播大秀 radio stations will be available to stream live, including the World Service. Popular radio programmes like The Archers, Desert Island Discs, and Radio 5’s Elis James and John Robins show will be available to listen to on-demand, as well as the wide range of hit podcasts from the 主播大秀, including Grounded with Louis Theroux, That Peter Crouch Podcast and George the Poet’s fantastic Have You Heard George’s Podcast?

主播大秀 Sounds will now also offer international listeners a personalised experience they didn’t get with iPlayer Radio, receiving tailored recommendations based on what they’ve been enjoying and the ability to pick up where they left off with their favourite shows. International listeners can also stream 主播大秀 Sounds to their Chromecast device, and enjoy the improved experience for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, which offers a larger choice of content from the dashboard than the old iPlayer Radio app did.

These changes won’t impact people within the UK, and we’re excited that international listeners will now be able to get the much-improved experience 主播大秀 Sounds offers.

Here in the UK, we’re bringing the 主播大秀 Sounds TV app to more devices. Since first launching in March on Virgin Media and YouView, the Sounds TV app has also come to some Sony and Samsung TVs – giving people with those devices another way to listen to their favourite music, radio and podcasts from the 主播大秀. From today, we’ll begin rolling out the TV app on Roku streaming devices, and we’ll be bringing it to more devices in the coming weeks.

We hope you enjoy this update, and that our international listeners enjoy the new Sounds experience. We’ll be bringing more updates in the future to make Sounds even better, and we’ll keep you posted.

Update: Since we last told you about the 主播大秀 Sounds on TV app, we’ve made some updates to the app and launched it on several new devices. The Sounds TV app now has search functionality, and viewers can now access their personalised My Sounds section on the TV app experience as well as on the mobile and web versions of Sounds.

We’ve also launched the 主播大秀 Sounds TV app on a number of new devices, including Now TV, Roku, Freesat, LG, Freeview Play, and Google TV, and as of today we’re bringing it to all Amazon Fire TV devices too, including sticks and smart TVs. Anyone with those devices will be able to find and add the app, and enjoy all of our best live and on-demand radio, music mixes, and fantastic podcasts like the new series of Grounded with Louis Theroux, Bex Smith’s women’s football podcast The Players and iconic rapper Eve’s new podcast Constantly Evolving.

Update #2:  The 主播大秀 Sounds TV app is now also available on Sky Q. You can find the app on the SkyQ screen, or just say “Launch 主播大秀 Sounds” into your Sky Q voice remote, and start easily listening to your favourite music, radio and podcasts from the 主播大秀.

Whilst this feature is already available via Red Button+ and the 主播大秀 iPlayer app, we felt that it could be given more prominence by providing it where the audience needs it most: when they change channels. And we have made this as seamless as possible through the press of one button, the green colour button on the remote control.

When asked, users who hadn’t used our connected services before were delighted when we showed them the feature and said that it would be a key driver for using 主播大秀 iPlayer on their TV.

We found that our audiences tend to restart a programme at different times of the day and for different programmes, but the peaks were usually a few minutes into a programme. We also found that usage increases when we hit a so-called ‘schedule conflict’ - in other words where programmes don’t end at the traditional on-the-hour or half-past-the-hour junctures.

For example when the Great British Bake Off finished on Channel 4 and Doctor Foster on 主播大秀 One had started 15 minutes ago - we saw a huge peak in our audience launching 主播大秀 iPlayer to restart it. So with this knowledge we decided to display the trigger when the user turns to the 主播大秀 channel. That way we display the trigger when the user is most likely to need to restart. After 30 seconds the trigger clears from the screen, but the viewer can press green at any point whilst on the channel.

This feature works for Smart TVs that are connected to the internet and devices that can ‘seek’ to the start. We’ve built a ‘smart’ trigger that will only display if the device is capable of supporting the functionality. This covers many LG, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Vestel, Phillips, Hisense TVs along with Humax and Netgem set top boxes.

Whilst on the surface this is a simple and straightforward feature, under the hood we’ve had to contend with considerable complexity. Working at the 主播大秀 always means you’re building to scale and I love that about my role, but this time it came with a warning. “You might break the whole of 主播大秀 iPlayer”.

The challenge came on two fronts - both concerned with capacity. Firstly, there’s a finite number of simultaneous streams we can safely support and secondly there’s an upper limit to the speed at which we can provide them. First imagine that the entire audience of EastEnders decided they wanted to restart the programme. Second, imagine that they all decided they wanted to restart it within the same 5 second period.

These are unique, scaling problems at a national level and it’s inspiring to work with teams who try to solve them. Mitigating the risk of a reduced audience experience has taken the majority of our time on this project. We’ve built a monitoring service so that we can measure traffic in a more timely fashion, ensuring we protect and maintain quality for the current viewers in the stream. Alongside this we worked with our distribution and media services colleagues to trial the feature on 主播大秀 Two and 主播大秀 One regions to build a traffic profile.

Today we have launched our green button ‘watch from the start’ trigger on 主播大秀 One and Two along with their HD equivalents and 主播大秀 Four, and it’s available via this list of smart TV and set top boxes. We’ll be looking to learn from the data and provide the best quality experience we can, and hopefully, in the future, pressing the green button will become just as much a part of the TV viewing experience as pressing red has become.

The solution

The eventual solution required a few more leaps and innovations from the engineering team; particularly around handling heavy traffic. For big events such as F1, Sports Day, Wimbledon, Glastonbury, and the Olympics, the Red Button service can receive tens-of-thousands of interactions within a very short period of time, usually as a result of on-screen messages or call-to-actions from presenters. To cope with this traffic we opted to host the message passing service in the Cloud so that it could be scaled in advance of large events.

We also focused on maximising cache hits, increasing the number of generic calls to our services, to minimise the load on shared resources, and to help cope with really heavy traffic. The result seems bafflingly simple - there is a Settings page that lets you choose between Red Button, and Red Button+. The next time you press Red, the option you chose is launched.

Send us your feedback

As an engineering team, we're committed to improving the service based on your feedback. If you have a Smart TV or PVR with access to the service, please take a look at the new RB+ service and let us know what you think. I hope you've enjoyed this article, and given you a better idea about what goes on under the hood when pressing Red.

The new continues to stimulate a . Ryan O'Connor some of the UX&D work on the new 主播大秀 News app last week. Neil Barraclough at Techmark gave his opinion on while the Daily Express's was "incomplete and amateurish".

主播大秀 Research and Development's "Walls Have Eyes" installation is at .

And Dan Taylor Watt, head of 主播大秀iPlayer.

 

Team Structure

Testers are embedded within our agile development teams, as Test Engineers or Developers-in-Test. We work very closely with Software Developers, Product Owners, Project Managers and Business analysts to develop and test software to ensure we make a great end product.

Process

The team operates a pull-based workflow where we set a limit on our work in progress (WIP). This is set to four tasks, with each tester supporting two tasks each.

Developers pro-actively identify a tester to pair with who has the capacity to support the work moved to in-progress on the board.听This has helped us regulate work better, to avoid bottlenecks and . It has improved the engagement of testers and has resulted in more testing happening earlier in the workflow. It has also helped to breakdown the old divides of developer and tester ensuring we work collaboratively by developing and testing in parallel. Overall, the quality and the flow of work to "ready to deploy" has improved.

We use (BDD) tools like cucumber to help us organise and automate our acceptance criteria. 听are created collaboratively for the feature to be developed; issues can be detected and even听dealt with听at this early stage. It also helps ensures that everyone has a clear view of what is required and importantly that the product developed and tested relates directly to what the product owner wanted in the first place!

We use as a way of letting us ship releasable software any time we want. Even if we are in the middle of building a new feature that isn't ready for users to see. Whenever we develop a new feature it will be 鈥榝eature toggled鈥� on or off according to its readiness and then a build is created for testing.

We initially test the feature running on a VM (Virtual Machine) and if we find any easily fixable bugs, they are fixed immediately and released in a new build on the VM. We monitor the health of builds using build verification tests running on a browser, as code is continually integrated into trunk and builds are created periodically

If a feature requires issues to be resolved then they will be triaged and added to the product backlog. When a viable VM tested build is ready it is released onto our TEST environment. Here we fully test the new feature that has been developed on a TV device and carry out a regression test of major existing features in the application using a combination of automated and manual testing. This is how we work now but it is constantly evolving as we try to continuously improve.

Automated Testing

Automated test are created as features are developed, using a and framework which includes a message queue that sets up a communication channel between a browser or a device. These message queues are created on the fly whenever they are needed, and messages and responses are sent and received using simple HTTP requests. The test results obtained from the automation execution on devices are pushed automatically into our Test case management tool and from that we can produce a combined and dynamic view of product coverage and automated device execution in our test dashboard.

Our automation tests use a combination of live data and from a static data provider. It is very useful during development of new features when the service layer code that supplies the data in normal operation is still under development.

Regression and Risk based testing

The regression testing of a product is a combination of automated and manual testing. Product coverage is set by prioritising areas of change in the code and key existing features that would cause the greatest impact to the product if broken.

Using a risk based test scope we can reduce our overall product regression effort whilst managing the risk that significant application issues could be introduced. The supported device list keeps increasing and we also take a risk-based approach to our selection of devices by selecting some representative models from each manufacturer to test.

Summary

Previously when we had only a small amount of automation a lot of time was spent manually testing builds on a device. Sometimes we needed to repeat this testing once a build was found to have bugs. With more automation both in validating developed builds and testing on devices, we can find bugs faster and spent less effort and time manual testing. Additionally process experiments across the whole development team have found ways to improve the flow of work, making it possible to increase the number of supported devices and still introduce new features into CRB quickly.

Krishnan听Sambasivan is a Junior Developer-in-Test in Platform Test, 主播大秀 Future Media

听

The eagle-eyed amongst you will see the list above includes a number of devices that are currently using our 鈥楤igscreen鈥� version of 主播大秀 iPlayer - which launched over five years ago and is currently only being used by 0.1% of 主播大秀 iPlayer users.

With this in mind, limited resources, and new 主播大秀 iPlayer rolled out to over 85% users, we鈥檝e had to make the tough call to retire the 鈥楤igscreen鈥� version. This means that from next month (September 2014) some devices that are using this 鈥楤igscreen鈥� version on some TVs, Blu-Ray devices and PCs connected to TVs will no longer have access to 主播大秀 iPlayer. There are lots of other devices that can access 主播大秀 iPlayer and for the full list please refer to the 主播大秀 iPlayer 听听

Please note听that we have a similar looking service based on MHEG technology for Freesat compatible devices. This is not closing in September.

Q. What about the versions of 主播大秀 iPlayer on Virgin Media Tivo, YouView, BT Vision and other devices?

A. We are working with YouView, Virgin Media and BT to bring new 主播大秀 iPlayer to these platforms. Whilst I cannot announce dates, we are targeting this year for these platforms. Similarly, other devices on our legacy version of 主播大秀 iPlayer will be migrated to the new version this year as well.

Q. You said Xbox One was coming soon 鈥� any update there?

A. Yes. I am happy to announce that we鈥檙e aiming to launch new 主播大秀 iPlayer on Xbox One by the end of this year.

We have completed four releases to this product since we launched out of preview in May 鈥� this has included a number of fixes and improvements to performance of the product on all devices. Some of you will have noticed better video playback performance, clearer labeling and a number of other minor improvements that we have made in response to both audience feedback and usage data.

As always, I love hearing your feedback, so please drop me a note below with suggestions for how we can make 主播大秀 iPlayer even better on Connected TVs.

Marcus Parnwell is Executive Product Manager for 主播大秀 iPlayer on TV.

What鈥檚 New?

Ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February we made a number of key changes to deliver an improved experience for this event and also to provide reusable functionality for the upcoming events this summer including:

鈥� Sport Switcher 鈥� A 鈥楥hoose Sport鈥� option to access a dedicated destination for up to 3 major sporting events (including Sochi 2014), 11 sports and each of the 4 UK Nations

鈥� Headlines 鈥� The latest sporting text headlines, analysis and match reports from the 主播大秀

鈥� Medals Table 鈥� A Live medals table highlighting Team GB that will also be used for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in July

Following the Winter Olympics the development and design team began work on delivering 3 further enhancements as follows;

1. Integration with our new Live Event platform 鈥� 主播大秀 Live is a new technical architecture that we are now using to deliver live content as detailed in Neil Hall's . 主播大秀 Live is now powering each of our 4 screens (PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV) and will power many of our future connected TV innovations. Initially it is being used to source medals table data for the Commonwealth Games and to power our new 鈥楥oming Up鈥� promotions that highlight upcoming live streams. Most importantly however it鈥檚 powering our new Live Guide鈥�..

2. Live Guide 鈥� The Live Guide is accessible from the landing page and will provide details of all the available live streams available to watch each day. With up to 17 concurrent streams planned for the Commonwealth Games we expect this to be an invaluable source of information for our audience. Users will be able to access each of the active live streams directly from the Guide and also watch full length Catch-up videos from key events streamed earlier in the day.

3. Football Scores, Fixtures & Tables 鈥� The new Fifa World Cup index will be the home of all our World Cup coverage including all the World Cup Scores, Fixtures and Group Tables. This new feature will also be accessible from our Football index and will include UK, International, European and Women鈥檚 leagues.

These new features have gone live on the 主播大秀 Sport connected TV app this week so take a look or alternatively watch that provides a walkthrough of the app and the new functionality.

What鈥檚 On?

A huge summer of Sport begins next Thursday 12th June with the World Cup. Alongside extensive broadcast coverage the 主播大秀 Sport Connected TV App will offer:

鈥� World Cup 2014 (June 12th 鈥� July 13th) 鈥� matches, Live match coverage including build up and alternative camera angles. Video highlights and 10 minute 鈥榃orld Cup breakfast鈥� clip every morning. All the latest headlines, fixtures, scores and group tables.

鈥� Wimbledon (June 23rd 鈥� July 6th) 鈥揢p to 12 live courts along with all the latest highlights and headlines

鈥� British Grand Prix (July 4th- July 6th) 鈥� Live race coverage including additional driver tracker, pit lane and on-board camera options

鈥� Commonwealth Games (July 23rd 鈥� August 3rd) 鈥� Up to 17 Live Event Streams and all the latest Video Highlights, headlines and medal standings.

It鈥檚 a busy summer of sport this year so we hope that you enjoy the coverage and make use of this new service. We are really keen to hear your feedback about how we could extend and improve the service. Please let me know what you think by adding any comments below.

Justin Barritt is Executive Product Manager for 主播大秀 Sport on Connected TVs

Next is the navigation which, you may notice, is very similar to the that we are currently previewing. The same Channel and Category headings are there, alongside dedicated areas for Most Popular and Collections.

Finally, we have added an 鈥楢ll鈥� area that will provide an A-Z listing of programmes available from 主播大秀 iPlayer. This should make finding a programme by initial letter and browsing the full iPlayer inventory on Sky both much easier and hopefully you鈥檒l find it useful.

Collections

The new interface enables us to increase the number of collections available by providing a dedicated area for you to browse them. So if you are looking for a theme or series to enjoy, please check this area out. We will be updating these regularly so do remember to come back. These have been very successful in the new versions of 主播大秀 iPlayer so it is a natural fit for us to enable them on Sky+ HD as well.

Exclusives and Premieres

I am pleased to announce that iPlayer exclusives and premieres are now available on 主播大秀 iPlayer on this platform. Look out for new and exciting content from 主播大秀 Radio 1鈥檚 Big Weekend and Glastonbury in the coming months. We are bringing this inline with other versions of 主播大秀 iPlayer so you won鈥檛 miss a thing.

Linking from 主播大秀 Red button

You may have noticed that we have added a link to 主播大秀 iPlayer from the Red Button menu, accessible from any 主播大秀 Channel. Simply press red and select 鈥樦鞑ゴ笮� iPlayer鈥� and we will take you direct to the home screen of 主播大秀 iPlayer. We know that many of you love the Red Button service and hope this will further improve the service by providing a nice easy way to get more programmes through 主播大秀 iPlayer.

What about double programme entries?

We are aware that displaying SD and HD copies of an episode next to each other isn鈥檛 the best use of screen space, which is why we are working hard with Sky on an update to improve this. We hope to have this solved in the next few months.

I am听very interested in hearing what you think 鈥� please let me know below in the comments.

Finally, I would like to thank the hard working team at Sky for their work on this update and support.

Marcus Parnwell is听Executive Product Manager for 主播大秀 iPlayer on TV

At the end of each sprint, we demonstrate our completed stories to our Product Owner and any other interested stakeholders including, in this case, Google. In this way they can see what we have done and gain confidence in the progress of the project. It gives them an opportunity to change direction if they decide that what we are producing does not match what they intended. They might also want to change direction due to external influences that have developed while we have been working on the project. At the end of each sprint, our team also holds a retrospective to discuss what went well and what did not, and this guides the direction of the next sprint.

听

Testing is an integral part of the lifecycle of a user story. We sit together with the developers, attend the same morning standup meetings and track our work as another stage in the same process. Once a story has been developed in software it is passed to a tester who immediately sets to work. First we make sure it passes all its acceptance criteria, seeing that it does everything it is supposed to do. Then we crack our knuckles, put on our black hats and try to break it.

If we find a defect or some questionable behaviour, the first action is to check with the developer, who is only a scoot of the chair away. Very often they can just facepalm and fix the problem straight away. If a defect is likely to have a longer lifespan than this, we will raise a bug report describing exactly how to reproduce the problem and what the expected versus actual behaviour is. These are then prioritized and worked on in exactly the same way as the rest of the user stories.

In this project we came up with the idea of portable network environments for developing and testing in. We used tiny Raspberry Pi computers as Wi-Fi access points. These were set up to filter and intercept some of our web traffic, replacing it with local responses specific to development or testing. With this we were able to keep development and test within separate environments while still using all of the real-world content available on 主播大秀 iPlayer. A Raspberry also became our travelling demo environment, enabling us to show the current state of the project to senior stakeholders wherever they were.

One of the challenges that affects mobile testing is the wide range of devices that our apps run on. We select a representative sample of phones and tablets, weighted by the statistics we gather on the current mobile usage of iPlayer. We will never have the time or budget to test all features on all devices. We try to get the best coverage for the greatest number of users without ignoring older or less popular devices. It is always a difficult decision and only time, 听feedback and comments from you, will tell us whether we have got it right this time.

Collections

You will notice some double-height images - these are collections. These may include all the episodes from a series, or all the programmes that from an on-air season, such as our current 主播大秀 FOUR 鈥淏allet Season鈥� programming. When you chose a programme from a collection, we will highlight more from that collection in the play-out area so you can easily go from one episode to another.

More like watching normal TV

With the current version of 主播大秀 iPlayer on TV, it鈥檚 not always easy to find something else to watch. When you finish watching an episode then you have to leave the playback area to start looking for the next show. We want to make watching 主播大秀 iPlayer as easy as normal TV - a seamless experience without breaking playback.

So now you can browse all of 主播大秀 iPlayer without leaving playback. So if the credits are rolling or you are just not that into what鈥檚 on, then pick up the remote and browse our suggestions of other programmes you may also like or else return to the 主播大秀, Channels or Categories areas. And don鈥檛 worry if you change your mind - you can always return to what you were watching.

鈥楩ind tools鈥� and Search

Know what you want to watch? Great. We provide a simple set of 鈥楩ind tools鈥� that are designed to help you quickly locate the programme you鈥檙e looking for. These are found at the front of the stream and allow you to find all the programmes within a given area. On the home screen, you will be able to access new episodes of programmes you鈥檝e recently watched or programmes you have added to your Favourites. In the channel and category areas we provide schedule and A-Z lists. Search is accessible from any page and uses auto-suggest technology to get you to the programme you鈥檙e after as quickly as possible.

What devices?

We are bringing this preview to a range of TVs, games consoles and the Freesat with Freetime box. The list of devices to receive this preview includes:

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Samsung听听听听听听听听听听听听听 TV听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 2012 & 2013

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Freesat听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 Set top Box听听听听听 Freetime

This is only the start 鈥� we are looking to bring this new version to current HTML based big screen devices.

For please go to the .

Where is radio?

We听decided not to include radio within this new version of 主播大秀 iPlayer. The low usage of radio on big-screen devices means it is not cost-effective to develop and support. You can continue to enjoy live radio on all Freeview and Freesat devices and live and on demand radio via 主播大秀 iPlayer Radio on computers, tablets and smart phones .

We are releasing this new version of 主播大秀 iPlayer for TV as a preview so that we can hear your opinions and improve the product. So please let me know what you think 鈥� either via the comments below or using the TV survey we have provided.

Marcus Parnwell is Executive Product Manager, 主播大秀 iPlayer on Connected TVs

To access the new service, viewers withthat are connected to the Internet can press red on a 主播大秀 TV channel such as 主播大秀 One, 主播大秀 Two, 主播大秀 Three, 主播大秀 Four or 主播大秀 News and 主播大秀 Parliament to access the Connected Red Button beta via the 鈥榝eatured鈥� menu.

Viewers of the new beta service can enjoy the following:听

鈥� TV 鈥� including up to 10 featured 主播大秀 iPlayer programmes from the channel you are watching or explore more catch-up TV via the 主播大秀 iPlayer button

鈥� News 鈥� keep up to date with the latest UK news and select headlines to read or news videos to watch along with a link to 鈥楴ews home鈥� for more news coverage

鈥� Sport 鈥� watch live sport and highlights and read the latest sport headlines, with a link to 鈥楽port home鈥� to access the dedicated 主播大秀 Sport application

鈥� Weather 鈥� check the latest 5 day forecast for your location

鈥� C主播大秀 and CBeebies 鈥� easily get to up to 10 featured 主播大秀 iPlayer highlights from C主播大秀 and CBeebies

Right now Connected Red Button beta is available on , with more makes and models coming soon. However, if you bought a Smart TV in the last 2-3 years, you may still be able to access 主播大秀 iPlayer, 主播大秀 News or 主播大秀 Sport when pressing red or via the TV app store. For older TVs or those that are not connected to the Internet, don鈥檛 forget you can still get the existing Red Button service for great digital text and video content from the 主播大秀.

The Connected Red Button is built using HTML and JavaScript and supports standards-based browsers and streaming technologies. It uses a modular, scalable, shared (with Connected Red Button on Virgin TiVo) architecture that enables us to easily add features, modify sections or bring new TV platforms on board. We continue to work closely with the industry to bring Connected Red Button to a broad range of TVs, devices and platforms. Connected Red Button is built using the which simplifies development, porting and certification. For more on the development of Connected Red Button visit Duncan鈥檚 blog post

As Matt mentioned in with up to 13 million people pressing red each week, the existing Red Button service remains very听popular and we continue to support the service.

represents the next step, bringing together the best of Red Button and 主播大秀 online content and services with the advantage of modern design and making the best use of the connected services that internet enabled devices have to offer.

We hope you enjoy this new service and I would like to hear your feedback听in comments. There are also听details on听our . As the name suggests, we鈥檙e still at the 鈥榖eta鈥� stage and I hope to have more updates in 2014 on the progress of Connected Red Button.

Jennifer Lyons is the Product Manager for Connected Red Button.

Update 8th May 2014:听

主播大秀 Connected Red Button is now available on supported LG and Panasonic Smart TVs. Please see听the list of to check if your Smart TV can access this new service.

This year, some of the are being made available in HD on the .

A total of 12 Proms are going to appear on the special Red Button HD stream which is available to viewers with a HD TV or set-top box with , , or .听 Viewers can watch the additional Proms by tuning directly to these channel numbers:

听

Freeview / YouView on channel 303

Virgin Media on channel 994

Freesat on channel 980

听

The 主播大秀 Proms that you will be able to see on Red Button are as follows:

National Youth Orchestra USA - Friday 26 July at 7.30pm

主播大秀 Symphony Orchestra 鈥� Sunday 28July at 7.30pm

Mahler Chamber Orchestra 鈥� Thursday 1 August at 7.30pm

主播大秀 Philharmonic 鈥� Friday 2 August at 7.30pm

主播大秀 National Orchestra of Wales 鈥� Sunday 4 August at 7.30pm

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra 鈥� Thursday 8 August at 7.30pm

主播大秀 Scottish Symphony Orchestra 鈥� Friday 9 August at 7.30pm

Santa Cecilia 鈥� Thursday 15 August at 7.30pm

Bach Oratorios 鈥� Friday 16 August at 7.30pm

Hollywood Rhapsody Prom 鈥� Friday 30 August at 7.30pm

Tristan and Isolde 鈥� Sunday 1 September at 7.30pm

National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain 鈥� Friday 6 September at 7.30pm

Xenon is a brand new embedded media player that was developed specifically for embedded devices such as , to be used by applications like iPlayer, News, Sport and any other such applications that the 主播大秀 develops in future.

The development of a new player was actually driven by . The CRB project was subject to some aggressive performance requirements that were going to be difficult to achieve even with an ideal setup on the modest TiVo hardware, but impossible with the existing media player.

as it was known had been built years before to a different set of requirements and for a different platform, and really wasn鈥檛 optimised for this environment. If we were going to stand a chance of meeting CRB鈥檚 performance requirements then we鈥檇 need to build a new player from scratch.

A new beginning

Xenon is based on an with separate services performing the important tasks of reading playlists, parsing server responses, loading subtitles and streaming the media itself, while dedicated views handle the presentation to the user. It can be used both by standalone applications and those that are based on an AS2 framework of ours: the benefit of the latter being that the host application can then take advantage of the framework鈥檚 underlying automated behavioural testing functionality.

Inbound communications are provided by an that the host application (i.e. iPlayer) can use to control everything from the desired media bitrate to subtitle preferences in real-time, while an events system to which the host can subscribe is used for all outbound communications. This events system provides the host application with around 70 different events, though only 20 of them are required for 鈥渘ormal鈥� use: the others are either used for debugging, were included in order to support possible future requirements or are there simply to provide the host with more specific information on given scenarios.

The project is covered by around 200 unit tests which not only provide confidence in the existing code but will also provide future engineers with a means to test any additions or refactors.

So what鈥檚 new?

Viewers should notice a significant improvement in performance, some of which are covered by the following statistics:

鈥⑻齅edia load times have been halved

鈥⑻齎ideo scrub times are now 3-4 times faster

鈥⑻齌oggling between SD and HD is now 3-4 times faster

鈥⑻齋ubtitles load times are improved tenfold down from 30-40 seconds to just 3-4 seconds.

In order to achieve this kind of performance we had to employ a number of tricks!

One of the things we looked at was the process by which the old player would select and then connect to a server. We were interested in improving this because we鈥檇 noticed that there was a noticeable delay between getting the list of stream locations from the server and the start of playback.

It turns out that EMP would make multiple connection requests to its chosen location using different 鈥� 1935, 80 and 443 鈥� the standard Flash Media Server (FMS) ports. When one connection responded favourably the other two were closed and the stream was requested from the open one.

Trying to avoid the delays associated with working through a list of ports in series by trying them all in parallel would be worthwhile if each port had a shared chance of success, and on a platform like the PC which operates on different types of networks with different routers and firewalls that鈥檚 most probably the case.

On TiVo however, unless there鈥檚 a serious problem with the chosen content delivery network (CDN) the 1935 connection will work 100% of the time and if it doesn鈥檛 work then we鈥檙e better off trying a different CDN than the same one again on a different port.

So that鈥檚 what Xenon does: if the single connection request on port 1935 to its first CDN fails to connect then it moves on to the next and sends another single connection request to that on the same port. If the user is unable to connect to a single CDN then either their internet connection is down or they have bigger problems because each CDN has a lot of failover and redundancy.

This approach means the box only has to allocate enough resources to create and connect a single NetConnection which means more resources are available elsewhere to help deliver a more responsive user experience.

Another thing we looked at was subtitles. The old player took 40-60 seconds to resume playback after subtitles were enabled and we really wanted to bring this figure down.

When we looked at how subtitles were being handled in EMP we discovered that typed objects with verified data were being created as soon as the file was downloaded and parsed. A 60-minute program with lots of talking might contain hundreds of lines of subtitles which would require a fair amount of work to get through. Again such an approach makes sense on a PC but not so much on a set top box.

The way we got round this in Xenon was to download and parse the XML file as before, but to create only basic reference objects at first without typing or validation and to defer such calculations until the reference object was relevant to the stream based on the current playback position. At this point the object鈥檚 data is verified and converted into a more usable format before the subtitle is displayed on-screen.

This approach means a little more work is done by the player for each individual subtitle as playback progresses, but it also means we can spread the necessary calculations over the duration of the program rather than doing them all up-front which allows us to resume playback in just 3-4 seconds.

What it means for us

Some specifications and supported features are as follows:

鈥⑻齌he project weighs in at around 6,000 lines

鈥⑻鼴oth audio and video streams are supported, both live and on-demand

鈥⑻鼳kamai, Limelight and Level3 CDNs are supported

鈥⑻鼶ynamic CDN switching and ABR1 bitrate downswitching are both supported

鈥⑻鼶ynamic connection weighting and prioritisation is supported

The new player also provides a number of benefits for our development teams:

鈥⑻鼳n that allows direct control of every aspect of the player at runtime

鈥⑻鼳 comprehensive and consistent events system which makes debugging quick and easy

鈥⑻鼳 complimentary example application that both provides new teams with an implementation template and a convenient way for us to diagnose issues with the live service

鈥⑻齌he codebase is extensively covered by tests which provides confidence in the robustness of the code.

Although invisible to the average user, Xenon seems to have gone down well with the public with highlighting improved speed and reliability.

If you have any questions about Xenon please leave a comment below.

Gareth Jones is a software engineer in the TV Platforms team, Programmes and On Demand, 主播大秀 Future Media

I hope you鈥檝e found some of the posts I鈥檝e published over this time informative and interesting and that they鈥檝e given you a bit of insight into the workings of 听Here are some of the highlights:

New features for 主播大秀 Sport were covered in depth including the , followed by the android version the following month.听Sport had a andof their mobile site.

Executive product manager Matt Coulson blogged about while we heard from the senior UX designer about how听Technical lead Duncan Fortescue .

was a major theme on the blog over the last few months with posts including 听by Oliver Bartlett, the launch of the and the News along with the release of the

Changes in the 主播大秀's Knowledge and Learning product were well covered including the release of the new Beta site as 听 and we heard in more depth about t from technical architect Rob Lee. Further changes to K&L included the (including the closure of the recipe binder feature).

That鈥檚 just a whistle-stop sample of some of the content we鈥檝e covered, I hope you have found some of it enjoyable and useful.

Thanks and bye!

Eliza Kessler was the content producer on the Internet blog.