So we're finally at the very end of a era. There's a few more things to sort out but generally its all come to an end. This blog will be mothballed for the future.

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to get involved with Backstage.bbc.co.uk, be it to rave about what we were doing or shout at us about the DRM stance of the BBC. Without people like yourselves giving up your time to get involved, hack, tweak and scrape the BBC of its data, it wouldn't have been anywhere near the success it turned out to be. All this will go down in history as a breath taking project with many fingers in many pies which out performanced its very humble start and drove the way the BBC will move forward in the future.

Everyone I speak to since the announcement has asked in there own way, "so what next?" Well it would be a disrespectful to say something like backstage. There is almost nothing like the phenomenon which was BBC Backstage. As you might have heard many times, it was of its own time and to be frank it was put together by some of the smartest people in the UK net scene at the time.

R&D use to have a department called Imagineering which then became Creative R&D. That department was a magnet for talented people with wild imaginations and creative solutions. This is where Backstage came from along with projects for the creative archive, innovation labs, etc. Now Creative R&D is just R&D and the traditional research has been turned on its head forever more.

I've witness the backstage methodology just spread like wildfire. Every single day I hear some down right zainy ideas being talked about between engineers and researchers. Ideas that 5 years ago would have been shot down before they even get a chance to stretch their wings. The "Backstage approach" is common in the lanaguage between engineers, researchers, programme makers, etc. The legacy of Backstage is transfixed on the BBC and will never be forgotten.

In a economic environment like we are in now, making things happen will be all important. We won't stop taking risks, its what we do, but its important to be extremly cost effective with the ones we do.

"...Come on what's next?!" I hear you all shout...

Well we all have ideas about what areas could do with some creativity but its the combination of the ideas which will make up the replacement. I can tell you the core activity of watching and engaging with the hackers will prevail in some form. Data will be a large part of what happens next but maybe not at the level we were at before. Others have taken that fight onwards and its our time to look to the next 5 years.

Alan Kay once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." And you'd be hard pressed to find anyone to disagree with him. Rather that talk about what would replace Backstage, we will be inventing together with yourselves, the future. We can't wait...

But before we leap too far into the future, theres one more thing to do. This was personally one of the best times of my life to date and I'm proud to be able to see it through right to a respectable end. I wish I could name everyone who was involved in Backstage but that list would be almost endless and the ebooks have done a fantastic job doing some of that. (you can also buy it in written form now)

So in Backstage fashion, thanks for all the tags... you were all truly inspiring and together we inspired.

Ian Forrester - Senior "Backstage" Producer

On behalf of everyone who collaborated and helped make backstage what it was over the last 5+ years - Thanks for all the tags!

We commisioned Suw Charman-Anderson to create the eBook retrospective of the whole project, quite a challenge as you can imagine. But she's done a excellent job with help from editor Jim McClennan and designer Nicola Rowlands. Its an fantastic piece of work I think you will agree.It also serves as a very fitting tribute to the endless efforts of the many staff, friends, hackers, developers, designers, critics, etc, etc of the project over the last half decade.

There is plenty of background information in the ebook including those playground servers, the amazing array of prototypes and some real interesting points about the nature hacking... maybe someone should update wikipedia with some of the information?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm really happy to present the Backstage Ebook:Hacking the BBC, a backstage retrospective. From us to you, for making backstage what it became.

Download in [PDF] [print ready PDF] [EPUB] [MOBI] [RTF]

(The Amazon Kindle will read MOBI files, the Apple iPad makes great work of the PDF, while most others readers will accept epub. If you're in any doubt try the PDF on which is full colour or the RTF which is just the content.)

You can also read more on the Guardian's PDA blog,  the BBC R&D blog (which will be the place to find out what happens post backstage), the BBC internet blog and of course my own personal blog.

I think its safe to say the ebook is licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. So please do share it and tells us what bits you loved or hated. In actual fact, tells us what bits you loved or hated generally about the whole project. We really value your feedback and of course everything you all did to make backstage your place to influence the BBC as a whole.

thank's for all the tags

.... end line :)

Infosthetics.com is the place online for all types of data visual inspiration. Great to see the guys from Data Art getting a well deserved mention. Also worth noting there is also a BBC programme called The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartography, which is wonderful in HD.

Based on the developer network BBC Backstage, the learning project titled "DataArt" [bbc.co.uk] aims to introduce people to the power of information visualisation as a contemporary media form of increasing importance (somehow sounds familiar?). The project will publish a series of data visualizations, focused principally on BBC data sources but potentially cross-referenced with other publicly available data. In practice, this means the BBC will provide tools, tutorials, example computer code one can download and modify, and access to copyright free data sources.

BBC Learning recognises that the interpretation of open data is an increasingly important skill for us all and expects the site will appeal to audiences interested in data visualization in general, digital art and design, those interested in the BBC and those looking at data visualization from an educational perspective.

So the first project is image-based: We are looking for your favourite photos and images of Backstage and the stories behind them. The images might be a photo from a Backstage event that you really enjoyed, or a screenshot of a prototype you developed or a visualisation of BBC data that you put together. We don't mind what type of image it is, just so long as it's online and you can tell us a bit about it.

The second project is map-based: We'd like you to tell us what your favourite experiences of Backstage were. Perhaps a prototype you put together, an event you went to, or something else completely. We'd also like to know where you are based (at whatever level of detail you feel comfortable) so that we can see how far Backstage reached. When Backstage first launched it was mainly for the UK only but the internationalisation of Backstage was overwelming, so it would be great to see how far we're really talking.

Both mash-ups are based on Google Docs so the two forms are embedded in the page after the last link, or you can go straight to the pages directly by following... Mapping Your BBC Backstage Memories or Images of BBC Backstage. In both cases, if you add info to the spreadsheets we take that to mean that you're happy for us to reuse your contribution.

Publishes links to relevant data.gov.uk datasets next to news articles on the BBC website. Provides important context for those articles and increased visibility for the datasets. Implemented as a simple greasemonkey Firefox script connecting to a simple search service built with Google's ajax search api.

The project is running on a C# app I wrote to correctly screen capture the page (harder than you'd of thought) and then using a local webserver it FTP's (via PHP) the resulting 3 images (thumb, medium and large) to the live server.  The comparison tool (a link at the bottom of each image which is easily missed at the moment)  is written and runs on the live server to compare the visual changes, written in PHP/GD.  Obviously I haven't spent any time on the front-end site so that would be the next logical step.

In my head I'd see this as being the ultimate tool for archive.org.  If you go "way back" using their tool you can see that resources are missing and indeed as the browser changes rapidly the result you see in newer browsers doesn't represent the look and feel the user got at the time which is an important point if you trying to look back at the way it was.  Loading Netscape.com in Mosaic back in the mid 90's would have been an altogether different experience than in today's "Chrome's and Firefox's"

The Wildlife Ontology was originally designed to support the publishing of data from the BBC Wildlife Finder application. This application provides access to a rich set of information and data about biological species, as well as pointers to BBC broadcast output that relate to these topics. The ontology should therefore complement the existing Programmes Ontology for describing TV programmes.

Whilst it originates in a specific BBC use case, the Wildlife Ontology should be applicable to a wide range of biological data publishing use cases. Care has been taken to try and ensure interoperability with more specialised ontologies used in scientific domains such as taxonomy, ecology, environmental science, and bioinformatics

BBC Backstage was back at Maker Faire 2010 with BBC R&D to showcase a few of the experiments we've been working on.

Maker Faire 2010 took place at the Centre for Life in Newcastle this weekend just gone. The event, on the opening weekend of the Newcastle Science festival, and the National Science week, brought together hackers, makers and engineering hobbyists and creators from across UK and europe, and the wider world, for a 2 day festival of making stuff.

There's lots more coverage on the R&D Blog of each prototype but there's also a lovely video which you can watch which covers most of the weekend in Newcastle.

Thanks to everyone who helped pull the whole thing together and made it a great weekend. I expect by now, you may have seen we were giving away special edition coloured backstage tshirts to people who came to the stand. Look out there will be more chances to grab yourself a special edition tshirt.

It was a pleasant surprise to see Boxee over in London. There was a large turn out for the demo section of the talk but when we got into the nitty gritty of what could we do together, things got a little more intimate. Six creative people throwing ideas around, hopefully some of them will stick and even become full BBC projects. Keep your eyes peeled...

Data.gov.uk, BBC Backstage and Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA) will be running an 'unconference' focussing on data visualisations. The unconference will team up 100 developers and 100 designers to create diverse and imaginative data visualisations from open data.

The aim of the event is to facilitate an unusual opportunity allowing the diversity of the two traditional job roles to bring together imaginative use of open data sources.

Richard Stirling, Head of Making Public Data Public and data.gov.uk said, "To bring together teams of developers and designers in this way, with each adding to the other's skill set is an exciting proposition. We're extremely interested to see the results, and see what great data re-use will come from the weekend."

By combining the networks, data and experience of the three public bodies, the Data Visualisation Weekend has a vast resource to draw on, making it one of the most exciting and joined up unconferences for 2010.

Interested designers and developers can find out more and apply for an invitation via the DVWM website.

Comments

We also implement a range of technologies that attempt to check that our content is being played out in iPlayer, and not in an unauthorised 3rd-party application. This is because we need to be as certain as we can be that our content rights restrictions are being respected.

This is the key to the concerns being expressed at the moment: before we allow a device to access our content we need to check that it is iPlayer and not an application which might break our rules - for example, by storing programmes beyond the 30 day limit, or playing them outside the UK.

We know that a number of applications have been making unauthorised use of some media types and we have tightened security accordingly - this was done for several of the formats and content delivery types, not just for Flash. The result was that some applications that 'deep link' to our content may no longer work.

It's important to note that this has nothing to do with Flash, and it's nothing to do with support for open-source. In fact we continue to make our content available as H.264 or SSL, both of them open standards that have nothing to do with Flash or with Adobe. It's simply that the first people to be affected by this change happened to be linking to our Flash streams, which now have similar protection levels to our open-source streams.

unfortunately one of the applications that stopped working was XBMC, an open-source media player.

The BBC has quietly updated its hugely popular iPlayer with a verification layer that closes the door on open source implementations of RTMP (real-time messaging protocol) streaming, The Register has learned.

The Beeb applied the update to its online video catch-up service on 18 February, just four days after Adobe Systems penned a corporate blog post about its "content protection offerings".

The tweak means that free RTMP plugins offered by the likes of the XBMC community - whose code is based on the GNU General Public Licence v2 - can no longer stream iPlayer content. The latest iteration of XBMC's plugin was created in May last year and was being used by UK viewers to play TV and radio catch-up content from the BBC's iPlayer service.

This obviously means if your using an Adobe Flash plugin, iplayer streaming works like nothing has changed. However for the rest of us, this means no more open streaming via our XBMC set top box to the nice big TV. This also puts plugins for mobile clients and Boxee at risk.

Whats the BBC's official line on all this?

Since launch in 2007, BBC iPlayer has always used content protection in order to provide UK audiences with the most compelling content. We periodically review the level of security to protect BBC programmes, brands and trademarks.

So what have people been saying about this? Starting with the Backstage mailing list...

From Glyn Wintle

Technically easy to beat, but given that by passing "copyright protection mechanisms" is illegal in the EU and America it means it can not be rolled out to the general population.

Bonkers idea BBC.

Steff adds...

The writeup here: http://lkcl.net/rtmp/RTMPE.txt of the "protection"
offered by this mechanism would be hilarious if it weren't so sad (skip to the "Analysis" paragraph at the bottom). "When lawyers do crypto" :-(

Mo McRoberts brings up the neutrality perspective

Given there's a Trust consultation running on iPlayer, including provision for neutrality, it's possibly the worst time for the BBC to decide to implement this:

https://consultations.external.bbc.co.uk/departments/bbc/bbc-on-demand-offerings/consultation/consult_view

The XBMC thread on the iPlayer message board is out of control with people wondering why this has happened.

David Allonby who's a developer for XBMC had this to say about everything

I'm an XBMC developer who works on librtmp, upon which the iplayer plugin relies. It'd fall on my (or other people giving their time freely and without reward) shoulders to implement the SWFVerification feature.

Given Adobe's stance against rtmpdump (www.chillingeffects.... an open source tool which forked librtmp and added an implementation of the SWFVerification feature, I think it's fair to say that we'd rather not add this feature to our codebase, just to support iplayer.

The iPlayer XBMC plugin has a long history, following the 'spirit' of the iplayer rules to the letter (no recording, no geoloc evasion), gaining plenty of press attention and generally painting the BBC in a very positive light on a multitude of platforms. The plugin attracted the attention of BBC employees, and indeed was showcased on backstage.bbc.co.uk.

Perhaps i'm being naive, but I just don't see what implementing SWFVerification has accomplished here. If you *really* wanted to break the OSS community, you'd switch to rtmpe. All I can guess is that this was a misdirected 'ticked the wrong box' upgrade, and can hopefully be resolved swiftly.

The rest of the comments are pretty much complaints about the changes and asking why this was done over and over again. No one seems capable of replying which is causing even more upset. 

Petermcf wrote.

And still the tumbleweed rolls along the corridors of the BBC,
It looks like they cannot or will not provide a reply.
Shameful.

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