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Feb
12

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SeeSaw TV on demand now in CI and Isle of Man

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I wrote a blog post two weeks ago about SeeSaw, the new television on demand service – mainly for archive content.

This service, currently in a limited invite only beta, is born out of the ashes of the rejected Project Kangaroo – planned by BBC, ITV & C4 but rejected by the BBC Trust.

When I first got my invite I was very excited by it, but I was instantly confronted by a message telling me it wasn’t available in the Channel Islands (well I think it said my location).

This was down to rights reasons, they didn’t have permission from the various rights holders (even though all the same shows were available through 4OD and Demand five for the islands) to make it available in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man – independent territories that have to be negotiated separately.

Then I got a message this morning to tell me that they’ve now managed to negotiate rights to make their shows available to the islands – which was a nice thing to read after a day flying to and from London.

It said: “We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve recently acquired the rights to show programmes in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

“You should now be able to join in the fun and watch your favourite programmes on SeeSaw.”

Which more than made my day and – I’ve tried it and it works brilliantly. This puts SeeSaw, even though it is still in invite only beta – well ahead of all the rest as it is the ONLY multi-network service available in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man.

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Jul
6

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Tagged with the UK

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There are a lot of differences between Bing (Microsoft) and Google maps – I won’t list them all here but lets say Bing has a bit of catching up to do.

But there is one particular difference that annoys me, the others just mildly irritate – they put (U.K.) after Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

OK so you’re probably thinking – but I thought they were in the UK – well if you’re thinking that you’d be wrong.

Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are British Crown Dependencies – not part of the UK, not part of Great Britain, but autonomous juristictions that pass legislation through the Crown.

So seeing (U.K.) under Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man on the Bing Maps was a bit of a red rag and bull scenario.

Normally I would have just let it go though – it didn’t bother me THAT much, or at least not enough to stir me into action.

But, as you probably already know I’m working on an interactive map of my own for the BBC and as the BBC uses Bing Maps, and as my interactive map had Jersey as a focus – I needed to find a solution.

So I did a search for more details on Bing Maps and found a blog post by Chris Pendleton, the Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation.

He was raving about the number of interactive maps on the BBC using Bing – and they are fairly impressive.

So I left a comment saying:

I’m working on an interactive map for BBC Jersey that should go live in August looking at the islands beaches.

My only concern is that they label Jersey and Guernsey as UK and I KNOW I’ll get complaints about that from islanders as Jersey isn’t in the UK.

I can’t say I REALLY expected a response but to his credit I DID get this in reply – not a solution but at least an explanation.

Ryan – good eye. Guernsey is not part of the UK, but it is controlled by it, since Guernsey is a dependency of the UK and not an independent nation state. We currently label dependencies with a parenthetical “controlling power” suffix, so that is why you see the “(UK)” after the name.

It seems this may cause confusion. In our data model, that island is not part of the UK, but I can see how that subtle distinction might be lost given the way it is labeled. We’ll have have to investigate how to make this more clear, but at least you’ll have an answer for your customers if/when they ask.

CP

So I took that response and spoke to people that work around creating the maps for the BBC and was able to get a fault ticket raised with Microsoft over the issue.

An e-mail came back hours later saying that they agree with my analysis – that it shouldn’t have UK at all – and will contact the third parties responsible for the maps and data to see if it can be changed in the next update cycle.

So in the next few months Bing maps should no longer say (U.K.).

And they even found a solution for third party uses of Bing maps – so the BBC uses – that involves replacing the tiles in question and scrubbing out (U.K.).

Wonderful!

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Jan
6

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Mapping down to your house

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An idea was posted on the BBC Backstage Idea Store asking whether it was possible to search for stories that happened around the posters house – basically to get as local as possible.

It was posted by www.richardsprojects.co.uk and basically said:

Sometimes I would like to find news that is happening in a certain area. This area might be quite small and I might be less interested in how recent the news is.

I may for example want to find all news that happened near my house in the last year.

The original author suggested a few solutions to the problem – these including providing a location based search, making sure location data is available within the news feeds and metadata and creating an algorithm to search through the content on pages to look for place names and adding location data where necessary.

Manx triskelion.
Image via Wikipedia

But there may be a solution in the offering from the BBC in the not to distant future – and it will come in the form of an enhance (albeit original video free) BBC Local.

As BBC Local moves into the News & Sport CPS and towards the new look service I think you’ll be able to do something along these lines from within your BBC Local site.

Mapping will probably play a fairly big part of these sites as they develop (without original video) over the next year or two.

Expect to see an interactive map of the region the site covers (so for example Bristol) with wide reaching stories created by the Bristol team (as well as TV/radio teams for the area).

Then as you zoom further in you’ll be able to see more locally relevant stories – eventually down as far as your own street – although I doubt they’ll be many at that level from the BBC.

Obviously I don’t know for certain this is what will happen – it is what I’d like to see happen but I’m also not convinced BBC Local content gets local enough to make it worthwhile.

I mean its ok for Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man – local is island wide here and there – but for someone like BBC Three Counties – local is an interesting issue.

Looking across Castle Park in central Bristol,...
Image via Wikipedia

Ideally local would go down to the street level – in fact it would go down to house level – but life isn’t ideal and the BBC Local content is a long way from being THAT local.

You might get the odd story you can tie to the odd street – but if you looked at a full detailed map of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire – the number of pins would still be pretty sparse – even after nearly a decade of being am active site.

Maybe if a partnership agreement could be struck between the BBC and local newspapers you’d get the level of localness you’re looking for.

The BBC has the big regional stuff, local newspapers cover a town and then if you pulled in parish newsletters (giving them a blog or a way of publishing online and encouraged residents associations to blog as well – you could create a fully detailed map with a mass of truly local content.

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