BBC Internet Blog - Tristan Ferne

BBC R&D: a summer of research and development

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:11:15 +0000

The "Little Sun" participatory art experience

I am the lead producer for BBC R&D's Internet Research & Future Services team where we use technology and design to prototype the future of media and the internet. I help develop ideas, run projects and write and talk about what we do.

I regularly write for the BBC Research & Development blog. Nick asked me to round up some of what BBC R&D have been writing about on our blog over the summer.

Out of our North Lab came the concept of Perceptive Media - adapting stories to the audience by using information about that audience and their context. As Ian blogged in July:

"...it takes narrative back to something more aligned to a storyteller and an audience around a campfire ... to create something closer to a personal theatre experience in your living room".

They released their first instantiation of this, a short radio play called "Breaking Out" which you can listen to here.

For the Olympics we released an Augmented Reality application to compare your performance against Olympic athletes. Robert, Bruce and Paul wrote about the technology behind it. We worked with colleagues in Japanese broadcaster NHK to bring 7680x4320 resolution, 22.2 channel sound Super Hi-Vision (SHV) screenings of the Olympics to a number of public viewing sessions. And our splashometer for diving was used during NBC's coverage, even picking up fans such as Samuel L. Jackson no less.

]]>Rosie wrote in depth about her work in simulating networks to optimise adaptive streaming, where media streaming clients switch between different bit-rate streams depending on the quality of connection. Along the way she explains why heating up your dinner might cause your programme to stutter.

We launched a programme recommender prototype using our experimental privacy-preserving client-side recommender engine and introduced our new project on linked open data, recommendations and data mining for TV.

Our work on RadioDNS went live on the BBC's national radio networks giving you complementary images alongside radio programmes when listening on hybrid broadcast & internet radios. And we have been simulating Radiophonic Workshop equipment natively in the browser using the emerging set of standards from the W3C Audio Working Group. Soon, you too will be able to loop, oscillate, wobbulate and modulate from your browser.

Michael wrote a follow up to the Internet blog's series of SEO posts on what R&D have been doing with schema.org and a possible future of search and knowledge on the web.

For something completely different, a crack R&D team joined forces with Studio Olafur Eliasson to create a participatory art experience at the Tate Modern. Ant finished up his series of videos explaining some of the BBC's work in opening up the BBC's archives including work on generating new kinds of programme metadata using machines and people.

We created a new section on our website to showcase the latest prototypes and code on the web from R&D - BBC R&D Labs. Speaking of the website, we're working on refreshing the design, structure and content of it and you could really help us out by answering a few questions.

Finally, some events - the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam has just finished, where we presented many papers and showed our Stagebox, RadioDNS, World Service archive prototypes and more to the many thousands of visitors. And don't forget the upcoming Connected Studio events around CBBC and user experience happening over the coming months - you might get to help shape the future of the BBC online.

Tristan Ferne is lead producer, Internet Research & Future Services, BBC R&D

The BBC Music Trends prototype

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:45:00 +0000

BBC Music Trends is our latest prototype and a spin-off from our previous work on people's music taste. It showcases some of the hottest bands and artists on the web, as identified by a number of independent sources, lets you listen to short clips and shows you where you can find that music on the BBC.

We use data from a number of independent sources to determine what music is trending - the buzz about music on the internet, usually based on what's being talked about, what's being played, what's being sold, what's being written about and more. All our current sources have public APIs. From EchoNest we use the "hottt" artist list, from We Are Hunted we take their main chart of emerging artists and from last.fm we create a combined chart from their up and coming artists for fourteen UK cities.

Read the rest of The BBC Music Trends prototype post on the Research & Development blog and leave your comments.

The Mythology Engine - representing stories on the web

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:14:17 +0000

Ed's note: There's a new post at the R&D blog about a prototype they've built that re-presents TV dramas on the web in a very user-orientated way. It uses Doctor Who and EastEnders and there's a video demo. It's exciting stuff. (PM)

The R&D Prototyping team has recently built an internal prototype for BBC Vision called the Mythology Engine. It's a proof-of-concept for a website that represents BBC drama on the web letting you explore our dramas, catch up on story-lines, discover new characters and share what you find.

Most TV drama on the web is either deep and detailed fan-produced sites or visually rich but shallow sites from the broadcasters. We believe there is a middle way and it seems like there's a space for something here. Something that expresses the richness and depth of the stories that the BBC creates.

Read the rest of the entry and watch the video at the R&D blog.

BBC Radio Waves - exploring what we play

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:09:21 +0000

What kinds of music does BBC radio play? Which bands are played most? Which DJs play 70s music? Radio Waves is a prototype visualisation that takes data about music played recently on BBC Radio and creates a time profile for any individual radio network, musical genre or radio show. The graph shows, year by year, how many albums were released by the artists recently played on BBC Radio.

Click here to explore the visualisation or read on to find out more.

After our recent hackday on music visualisation we ran a quick two week sprint with the R&D Prototyping team to develop a combination of the best and the most feasible of the ideas that came out. Radio Waves is the result of that sprint.

Read more and comment at BBC Radio labs blog

Machine tagging the BBC

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:53:46 +0000

I'd like to propose an experiment. If you ever publish a photograph on Flickr that features, or is otherwise related to, a BBC TV or radio programme you might think about machine tagging it with the programme's unique identifier. First find the programme's unique PID (that's the 8 character ID you find in /programmes or iPlayer URLs; the "b00lj1nc" in https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/b00lj1nc), then add a Flickr tag that looks like this...

bbc:programme=b00lj1nc

That's it, the photo is now machine tagged. Machines can now discover that this photo refers to this programme. This is a rather trivial example; my radio tuned to Any Questions on BBC Radio 4. If you click through and check the tags on Flickr you'll see something that looks like the machine tag above.

Sketches of a hackday

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:26:13 +0000

Last week Radio Labs and RAD held a joint mini-hackday to explore visualising some of our music data. We had several multi-disciplinary teams building quick prototypes and hacks, what I called "sketching with data, designing with code". Here are some snapshots of the results...

Album covers from the charts are laid out as a treemap.

Filtering the charts by weather conditions.

Searching for places on the BBC

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:17:22 +0000

We were wondering the other day how much people search for local information from the BBC, so as a quick hack we got hold of the top 10,000 search terms from the bbc.co.uk search logs for one day, July 9th. Then using the Yahoo! Placemaker API we extracted any UK place names from the search terms, counted them up and plotted them on a map*. It's just a little thing but we thought it might be interesting.

Click to see full-size image

A version of this was originally posted on my personal blog

* though I removed the map from the final rendering, I think it's prettier that way.

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for Audio & Music Interactive.

The Rockterscale!

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:10:19 +0000

An idea popped out of Radio 1 Interactive a while ago. This would be a device that measures 'rock' - how much the band and the crowd are rocking at a gig - called The Rockterscale. It would display the amount of rock at the venue and on the web in real-time, maybe even showing it at other gigs and encouraging bands and crowds to out-rock each other. But, until now, no-one has really tried building it. But we were due another hardware hacking session so we decided to build the Rockterscale. Two intensive days later we had these...

First, we have the Hat of Rock which measures the amount of head thrashing.

Patterns in radio listening - visualising Radio Pop

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:57:43 +0000

Last Friday the BBC's RAD (Rapid Application Development) Unit, led by George Wright, held two days of hacking in a Recommendation Super Sprint - the aim being to get people from around the BBC to play around with recommendations and personalisation. Chris and I from the R&D team at Radio Labs went along for the first day with few concrete ideas but the desire to play with some of the data we've gathered from Radio Pop.

Chris took a dump of the Radio Pop database - we've got around 1400 registered users and 24,000 "listen events", from when we launched in September to now. He removed any personal and extraneous data and then used PHP to process the data and write out text files of the data we needed - basically, a piece of data for every hour in which each user listened to BBC Radio through Radio Pop. I then used Processing to draw some images of this data.

Read more and comment on the Radio Labs blog

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for Audio & Music Interactive.

Fan cultures in radio (3) - TOGs or "This Ordinary Group"

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:50:47 +0000

This week we are publishing a series of short posts from researchers who have been studying the online behaviours of listeners and fans of BBC radio. Today's post comes from Matt Hills and Amy Luther, of Cardiff University, who have been researching the TOGs ("Terry's Old Gals/Geezers")...

TOGs - "This Ordinary Group" - Official and Unofficial Listener Activities around Wake Up to Wogan

Our part of the project looked at online listener engagement of a very specific kind: fans of celebrity DJs. We focused on an off-BBC case study: "Terry's Old Gals/Geezers", or TOGs, the loyal audience contributing (additional) wit and wisdom to Wake Up To Wogan (WUTW).

We analysed material in the public domain at www.togs.org and interviewed a number of TOGs. We rapidly discovered two things...

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for Audio & Music Interactive.

Fan cultures in radio (2)

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:40:29 +0000

As I mentioned yesterday, this week we will be publishing a series of short posts from researchers who have been studying the online behaviours of listeners and fans of BBC radio. The first post comes from Bethany Klein, now of the University of Leeds, who has been researching behaviour on the messageboards of Radio 1 and Radio 2...

Contrasting Interactivities: BBC Radio Message Boards as an Extension of and Break from Radio's History of Listener Participation

A case study of BBC radio message boards was conducted in order to explore the relationship between 'new' interactivity, like online fora, and radio's long history of encouraging listener feedback and participation.

Read more and comment at the BBC Radio Labs blog.

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for Audio & Music Interactive.

Fan cultures in radio (1)

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:00:31 +0000

TOGs, Bourdieu, habitus, mirroring, fan-tagonism, cultural capital, Mustardland and Chuffer Dandridge. Do these mean anything to you? Sound interesting?

This week the Radio Labs blog is going to be leaving the world of technology that we normally write about and will look at another side of the internet. For the past year or so, I have been working with three universities on a study of the online behaviours of listeners and fans of BBC radio and over the rest of this week, we're going to be publishing guest posts from each of the researchers on their case studies: interactivity on the BBC Radio messageboards, the off-BBC activity of fans of Terry Wogan, fan cultures around the Archers and how the BBC serves specialist music fans.

Read more and comment at the BBC Radio Labs blog.

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for Audio & Music Interactive.

Radio Pop - social radio listening

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:25:19 +0000

Today the Radio Labs team launched Radio Pop - a social radio listening site.

Sign up to Radio Pop and we will store your listening to BBC Radio. You can then see graphs, charts and lists of your listening, get recommendations from your friends, share your tastes and browse around to see what other people are hearing right now. Radio Pop is an experimental prototype built by the Radio Labs team - we're doing this to learn things about radio and social software. We don't yet know how long it will remain live and we make no guarantees as to its reliability or performance but we will do our best to make it better over time and welcome your feedback.

Read more, comment and sign up at the BBC Radio Labs blog.

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for Audio & Music Interactive.

Archrs: an everyday story of web development

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:24:06 +0000

The Archers is a radio soap opera - "an everyday story of country folk" - that has been running for more than 15,000 episodes since May 1950. What I find particularly intriguing about The Archers in terms of the future of radio is that it is, in a way, happening in real time.

Every evening on Radio 4, the programme contains events that happened (approximately) "today" in Ambridge - so if it's Easter in real-life then it's Easter in The Archers. It's also very topical - featuring real-life events such as outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease or the World Cup. As a drama, each episode is split into distinct scenes - typically indicated by a fading to silence - a convention for audio drama because of its need for clear signposting. The other interesting aspect is the many distinct facets of each scene - which characters are involved, the time of day, the current location, the storylines that intersect at that moment and even the weather. (Picture of Archers recording from 1981)

So, earlier this year, the Radio Labs team started to design and build a prototype website for The Archers based around the drama's scenes and facets.

Read more and comment at the BBC Radio labs blog.

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

Olinda: A New Radio

Tristan Ferne Tristan Ferne — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:10:43 +0000

Olinda is a new radio that has been built for BBC Audio & Music Interactive. It includes innovative features like modularity and social networking in a physical device. But we normally build websites and other digital media - so why would we want to build a new radio? To actually have a device in the physical world? These are the three reasons I give...

Read more and comment at BBC Radio Labs blog.

Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for BBC Audio & Music Interactive.