We had many positive feedback emails around this - people were planning their weekends around the F1 coverage - and so I did a little digging around to see what other people were up to around the BBC.

Tom Scott and Duncan Robertson wrote about the work that they did over a year ago on schedules. Duncan wrote on the radio labs blog:

"iCalendar is a standard for calendar data exchange. It is most notably used by Apple's iCal application, Microsoft's Outlook and Google Calendar, to import and export calendar information."

The one that caught my eye though was the athletics schedule that has been created - ideal with the world athletics just round the corner.

https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/athletics/schedules/upcoming.ics

As Duncan suggested in his post, I had a play around with the URLs to see what I could get specifically for sport.

This is what I managed to get for football:

https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/football/schedules/upcoming.ics

Be warned, this is all football on the BBC, TV and radio. It's a lot.

Then (with some advice from my colleague Alex) managed to break the feed down by platform:

https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/tv/genres/sport/football/schedules/upcoming.ics

https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/radio/genres/sport/football/schedules/upcoming.ics

which is a lot more manageable

Here are few others I found:

https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/cricket/schedules/upcoming.ics
https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/golf/schedules/upcoming.ics
https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/rugbyleague/schedules/upcoming.ics
https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/rugbyunion/schedules/upcoming.ics
https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/formulaone/schedules/upcoming.ics
https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/genres/sport/motorsport/schedules/upcoming.ics

I subscribed (don't use import!) to these feeds using the 'add by URL' function in Google calender

Other calendars are available! Not every format or bowser is suported at the moment but please feel free to have a play.

BBC schedules are published up to 7 days in advance so these don't show the whole football or F1 season. And it is TV and radio information. No additional red button or online only broadcasts.

The version we did for the F1 site has all the races and sessions that were being broadcast in for the season, which judging by the feedback, was what people wanted.

Let me know if you find this a useful feature. We already have feeds of programme and iplayer information on the sport site but having the broadcast information updated into an online version - and then maybe onto your mobile - seems like a good way to help avoid clashes with other commitments. Like holidays or work.

Major events like the Winter Olympics and the World Cup are ideal opportunities, although maybe the information being available a bit further in advance would be useful.

This is BBC broadcast data and not fixture data - I have already had requests in the office for full 6 nations fixtures and individual files for every football club. Not to mention motoGP and all major golf tournaments.

Maybe next season.

James Howard
Executive Product Manager, Sport

When the deal was signed for BBC Sport to have Football League and Carling Cup highlights on the site, we saw it as an excellent opportunity to revisit the club pages and the divisional indexes - as well as revisiting the way we do live coverage of each match.

Lewis Wiltshire on the sport site has explained some of the restrictions (we only have the highlights for 7 days and can only be put up 24 hours after matches).

There will be goals from every match and a round up of action from the Championship, League 1 and League 2 . Highlights will be on the site for 7 days and available to watch 24 hours after matches finish. The SPL pages have also been updated.

We knew that some of our club pages still hadn't been worked on since or last design iteration of teh Sport site and weren't doing a great job of showing off all the content that we had for fans.

The basic rule of thumb that we are using is that club specific information - stories, video, audio, data - goes into the main central column and information that was more generally about football on the site - The Gossip column, blog posts, broadcast information, iplayer details - goes into the right hand column.

All of these pages (over 100) have now been redesigned to accomodate video and more data that is specific to the clubs. We still have a few more modules to roll out once we have that data.

Our live coverage of all matches in the Premier League, Championship, League 1 and League 2 as well as the SPL also needed looking at. In the past we had a few pages where match data appeared and some of it was overwritten on a weekly basis.

The concept we worked to was known as 'one page/URL per match'. A single, permanent 'match page' for every game in the major league and cup competitions. Hopefully something that fans can use a reference to see who really did get that assist in that crucial midweek match.

As a process we start with the preview of the match, maybe written a couple of days previous to the game, and then the live data - the score, live text, team line ups and substitutions, goal scorers, bookings, possession, corners etc - gets added to the page just before kick off. And finally the match report, reaction and video highlights are added.

Live video will be added when relevant and there will be a "live as it happens" table that allows users to see the latest positions of clubs as goals are scored.

Work has also been done to improve the mobile offering so from today we are offering the option of customising your homepage. You can opt for club News, Results and fixtures on a per club basis (as opposed to divisional). Further roll outs will include the live text per match as well. No video on mobile though.

With fixtures coming thick and fast across these divisions - there are 36 in the Championship in the first 11 days and 30 odd Carling Cup matches - there should be a wealth of goals for you to watch.

Next big event for sport: Winter Olympics from Vancouver.

James Howard
Executive Product Manager, Sport

'Live on the web' is an important part of Sport and we wanted to develop some of the work that was around the Olympics last year for the new F1 season.

Rolling out our dynamic text updates was a crucial part of the project (no need to manually refresh the page and helps save all those f5 buttonsand prevent RSI) and we will be looking at rolling this out across the rest of our live sport coverage.

Live Video (for the UK user) now means multiple streams and Higher Quality Video. From our intial stats for video usage can see that:

• Users watched our new high quality live streams for much longer than standard quality streams - with an average of 37 mins for main race coverage
• Sport video and audio (excl. live streams) got as many unique users as the opening day of the Olympics (incl. live streams)
• Live coverage for the race grabbed approx. 183,000 AV requests - higher than the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain (approx. 169,000)
• Hiqh quality video accounted for 1 in 5 AV requests in practice and qualifying and 1 in 7 on race day

which is pretty good for a first weekend. Hopefully people will give them a go and I am expecting some offices to come to a standstill on Friday afternoons when the F1 circus hits the European time zones. Live practice over lunch. Excellent.

Around most sporting events there are a massive number of feeds that have to be dealt with - mostly around sport statistics - and we wanted to push them a little bit more this time. The leaderboard is updated regularly by the sport editorial team and further enhances the live page - data, text and video.

From the rest of the Beeb we are using feeds from weather (a crucial part of a Grand Prix weekend), iplayer, programmes and search terms to try and reflect all of the content the BBC are doing on race weekends.

The circuit guides have been a real collaborative effort with an external company - concentrating on the 3D anaimations and in-car video synched with Mark Webber's commentary. We will add a more in depth blog covering technical and product issues on this.

As a small trial we also wanted to look at making broadcast data available in formats that users may find useful (ical, Outlook, google calendar etc). One of my colleagues, Tom Scott, trialled some feeds around programme info and it is something we will be looking at around sport.

Our trial seems to have gone well, with hundreds of feedback emails asking for the whole season (we just trialled Australia) suggesting other events we could look at (The Lions! Football!) and on which browsers / apps it didn't work.

There was also some immediate feedback on the presentation of the F1 coverage overall on Twitter - amazing how many people in the UK seem to follow sport on laptop and TV at the same time.

We will be making ongoing changes to the Sport site in the next few months looking specifically around navigation and the build up to the new football league season that will present some other challenges around video.

Today we have launched the first stage of this with a footer on the site which displays an A-Z list of all the sports that are covered on the Sport website. We will be making additions and changes to the navigation as we move towards a more flexible model.