Ben Metcalfe: BBC Backstage
Ben’s presentation for download
- backstage.bbc.co.uk
- The BBC’s “Developer Network”
What is backstage.bbc.co.uk?
- Content re-use, with robust licensing, so developers know where they stand
- Peer developer community
- platform to share bbc.co.uk content
- “Mutually beneficial relationship”
Why?
- part of greater “open BBC” push
- support creativity & innovation
- a “public service for the 21st century”
What’s on offer?
- RSS feeds
- travel XML
- (soon) weather data
- TV listings
- message board threads
- more to come. the BBC has loads of data…
What’s the deal?
- Non-commercial use only
- Mashing up with other services (Flickr, Google, Yahoo) is encouraged
- IP: copyright is retained by the creator of what’s built. Content copyright is retained by the BBC.
- Stuff is showcased on backstage.bbc.co.uk
How does the process work?
- Make something, tell backstage.bbc.co.uk, they check it over and if it’s OK they post to their blog about it.
- They help developers of prototypes to improve what they’ve built
- Really compelling work may get folded back into bbc.co.uk itself
It’s possible because…
- Available data: rights cleared and in open formats (RSS, Web 2.0)
- Passionate user base
- Support from the top
Star prototypes
- Travel delay maps / jam cams on maps
- Competition winner: www.mightyv.com
- Site diff tool
Web 2.0 @ BBC
- Mostly RSS; some people don’t think of this as Web 2.0
- Read/Write Web in a traditional read-only environment (Sounds familiar…)
- BBC doesn’t own the rights to all of “its” data
- Much data not in a CMS
- …but the BBC does “get it”
BBC programme catalogue
- First public demo!
- Think IMDB for the BBC’s programme content
- Experimental prototype to launch early next year
- Ruby on Rails, for rapid prototyping ;)
- RDF feeds, FOAF to describe relationships
- There will be a Web 2.0 API (probably REST) on top, to complement the web interface
Audience questions
- Will it link to media, at specific points in streams? No - it’s about metadata, not the content itself. Further plans for content-delivery platform next year though.
- Useful data, but BBC only? We want people to remix the BBC data with other offerings. We don’t have the rights or the data for other channels' content.
- If rights weren’t an issue, could you do more? Definitely: a lot of the problems we face aren’t technical, but IP-related and political
- OT: why use Real for radio content streaming, rather than open formats? Real was the only streaming format in town back in the day (1998, when BBC streaming started). Podcasting is happening in a limited way.