Do you use BBC Mobile?

Next Thursday 11th June will be mobile day on the BBC Internet blog.

Dave and myself are working with the BBC’s mobile teams on a day showcasing their work, and (like BBC iPlayer day) we want you, the people who use it, to get involved.

If there are questions you’d like answered ask them here and we’ll try and answer them on the day. There’ll also be a special session of questions and answers on our Twitter feed (if you want to tweet use a #BBCMobileDay tag).

We also want your photos of you using the BBC’s mobile services - and the more unusual the place you access our mobile site the better. Perhaps you’ve checked the weather at Everest Base Camp, watched iPlayer on top of Big Ben, looked up the football scores at a cricket match, or you just enjoy using it around the home, we want to see you.

If you’ve got photos of yourself using the BBC Mobile site, or pictures of where you use BBC Mobile, post them to Flickr, tag them BBCMobileDay and next Thursday we aim to run a post with a selection of the best.

Jonathan Richardson is Content Producer, BBC Future Media & Technology

From the BBC News Editors blog:

Readers of BBC News blogs might have noticed that they are today unable to leave comments on posts about political matters. This is because of the elections being held for the European Parliament and English local authorities, and it will remain the case until the close of polling in the UK at 2200BST on Thursday. You can find out more about the BBC’s policies on broadcasting during elections from this Editorial Guidelines document [172Kb PDF].

Giles Wilson is the features editor of the BBC News website.

For the last few months there have been a rash of quite ancient comedy parlour games being adapted to Twitter where groups of friends devise, in 140 characters of course, punnery and wordplay around film and tv titles. Just in the last month credit crunch movies (eg: The Italian Jobless), medieval movies (eg: You’ve Got Chain Mail) have had their moment in the sun. In response a small group of Radio 4 fans including a lot of the Twitter regulars working here have had minutes of fun of an evening adapting these memes to our favourite national speech network; CreditCrunchRadio4 spawned for example the rather bleak The Pip. My best attempt at medievalradio4 was You and Your Serf (sorry). However none so far had generated more than a brief flurry of interest.

But then Radio 4 announcer; Kathy Clugston found herself on a train journey home yesterday evening was bored and tweeted this…

Read more and comment at the Radio 4 blog.

Jem Stone is Communities Executive, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

We’ve updated the BBC iPlayer messageboard to make it clearer to you what it’s for and where you can get help on using BBC iPlayer.

We’ve had our searchable help site with a dedicated help team to answer your questions for some time. We’ve also made some behind the scenes improvements, from improving the Contact Us form, to adding RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to a feed updating you whenever we add a new FAQ, or subscribe to individual FAQs for when we update them.

The BBC Internet Blog and the iPlayer section of it have grown. We’ve tried to lead discussion, such as when we made major changes and Anthony Rose wrote about them.

So what’s the messageboard that I host for?

It’s for you - I believe it works alongside the blogs and help site by being your place. If the help site is where we offer help and advice to you, and the blog is where we lead discussion, then the messageboard is where you lead and interact with others.

For some time the board has been a forum led by you so it’s only right that the reorganisation not only recognises this, but makes it clear what you can expect to find there.

When BBC iPlayer only offered downloads for Windows XP users to registered users and it was a beta product, the messageboard was ideal. However now BBC iPlayer is a mainstream service across an ever-growing list of devices the board is not suitable - the amount of information needed to diagnose a problem is too great. That’s why we improved the help site and made these latest changes to the board, making it clear it’s more for discussion and self-help than BBC-provided help.

But what of the future? Well BBC iPlayer is changing all the time - keep a look out on this blog for more information - and the board will change as the improvements come in. But I think there is more we can do to get more of you involved. The commentary on the blogs and messageboards is lively, but many of the people chatting on there are the same people talking elsewhere on the net about iPlayer.

One of the reasons I’ve started to use Twitter (I know, it’s “love it or hate it” to many) is, as I was told recently, because the BBC wants “to be where the conversation is taking place”. So what about where it’s not taking place?

Now I’ve created this clear divide between the help site, blogs and the messageboard, I think it’s time to start thinking about where the conversation isn’t happening and finding out how to stimulate it and get it going, without forgetting our existing audience. That’s my next goal, and one that may mean a shift into new areas. Feedback on the messageboard will of course be welcome.

Jonathan Richardson is Content Producer, BBC iPlayer, BBC Future Media & Technology

The BBC Trust has issued a press release and a statement about the Project Canvas consultation. The press release includes this quote from Trustee Diane Coyle:

As part of our assessment process we have just completed a comprehensive consultation of the industry. A common theme that emerged was that more information was needed from the BBC Executive about the Canvas proposal. So in the interests of making a robust and independent decision we have asked the Executive to look at the issues that stakeholders have raised and report back to us.

See also this story from Media Guardian.

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet blog

Hello Everyone,

I know it has been a few weeks since I’ve been active here. But I’m reluctant to waste your time when there is nothing much to say.

I hope that you’ve been enjoying the channel - aside from Eurovision (fortunately with sound this year), I thought that South Pacific looked truly spectacular and I’ve also been watching some of the late night comedy that we’ve been re-running. For a variety of reasons there has been less new content on BBC HD over the last month than I would like. But that does mean that there is a good range of programmes coming to air over June.

Our summer of live events gets off to a strong start next week with tennis from the Queen’s Club, and Federer, Nadal and Murray all in action. That’s followed by Wimbledon which starts on 22nd June, with more courts than ever before available in HD this year. We are offering coverage of the D-Day celebrations on Saturday 6th June - as the 65th anniversary it is likely to be one of the last commemorations attended by the veterans and a moving tribute to their contribution. And at the end of the month we’ll be at Glastonbury with coverage of the main stages late into the night.

As we all start to lighten up with the summer weather, it seems appropriate that there’s a fair sprinkling of comedy and entertainment coming to BBC HD this month. Michael McIntyre - familiar to some of you through Live at the Apollo - introduces his Comedy Roadshow on Saturday nights, while Thursday nights will see the arrival of a new series of That Mitchell and Webb Look along with Psychoville (a very dark comedy from The League of Gentleman team), and Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (a gladiatorial spoof from BBC Two). For those with more mainstream tastes, Graham Norton is hosting a new family entertainment show - Totally Saturday - there’s a new comedy drama, Hope Springs, on Sunday nights, and Hotel Babylon returns on Fridays. Also new to the channel is BBC Three drama Personal Affairs, Casualty 1909, and documentaries about Henry VIII (Henry VIII - Patron or Plunderer) and Ben Fogle and James Cracknell’s trip to the North Pole (On Thin Ice).

As ever, I’m sure there will be plenty you would like to have that isn’t in HD - we are working on the things that matter to you, and I’ll let you know just as soon as we get there.

Finally, thank you to all of you who - despite the gaps and imperfections - chose BBC HD as Channel of the Year in the Freesat Awards last week. All of us working on the channel really appreciated your vote of confidence in what we’re doing.

Danielle Nagler is Head of BBC HD, BBC Vision.

We’re really pleased that the latest version of our R&DTV show is now available to view, rip, remix, share, etc.

It’s an experiment in creating an interesting TV show themed around technology, released under a Creative Commons licence, explicitly made available for you as viewers and end users. You can just watch and enjoy the show or do much more with the content using the Asset Bundle.

Read more and comment at the BBC RAD blog.

George Wright is Portfolio Manager, Rapid Application Development, Research & Innovation, BBC Future Media & Technology

Rory Cellan-Jones’ news story “BT accused of iPlayer throttling” and post on dot life “iPlayer: BT v BBC” has raised again the question of “traffic shaping“. Natural Yoghort says:

BBC iPlayer uses an awful lot of bandwidth and is an inefficient use of the network that everyone pays for.

Meanwhile The Daily Telegraph reports “BBC and Google in talks to launch international iPlayer site”.

Geek.com speculates:

I can only guess that the BBC want a partner who can provide a solid infrastructure and backbone for the video service in most countries. They also need a simple way to introduce advertising. Google can provide both of those solutions.

paidContent has a thought provoking personal view from Andrew Burke: “Canvas Will Explode UK TV, But BBC Must Stand Back”.

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet blog

One of the most amazing things about working at the BBC is being privileged enough to be involved in ‘firsts’ and the first ever Big Gaming Weekend on Radio 1 (22-25 May) ranks highly amongst my favourites.

Games have become such a huge part of our audiences’ lives and I’ve been looking at how they can fit into what we do in Audio & Music Interactive. A key thing I found is we need to know more about how to talk about gaming on-air.

I’ll be honest, it’s not been easy - there are concerns about isolating the non-gaming audience. But the UK gaming community is huge and hugely popular amongst Radio 1’s target audience. For me, not talking about games is like not talking about what was on TV last night or what films are on in the cinema. It’s a no brainer for Radio 1.

Thankfully recent changes in gaming have allowed DJs to engage the audience in ways that wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. There’s been a dramatic changes in the demographics of gamers due to the rise in casual gaming. The growth in online gaming, UGC and the rise of ’self improvement’ games offer lots of opportunities.

The Big Gaming Weekend was packed with great moments. Edith Bowman challenged Steve Coogan to a few verses of ‘Knowing Me Knowing You’ on SingStar. Vernon got on the Xbox in the Games Lounge and played what seemed like half his listeners online. Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw encouraged their audience to download the assets pack from the website and make a ‘Switch’ level in LittleBIGPlanet. And to finish off the weekend, Fearne Cotton brought the nation together for an online version of ‘Knights of Cydonia’ by Muse on Guitar Hero (listeners without Guitar Hero we invited to join in on air guitar).

We ran an online poll to find the Greatest Game Ever; Radio 1 listeners voted Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare their number one. You could check the leaderboard to see how all our DJs and guests were doing in the Games Challenge, then check out the BBC’s first ever games blog ‘Get Your Game On’ written by 1Xtra’s Rampage.

The long tail of our Big Gaming Weekend has excited me most. The weekend was a great opportunity for us to make our mark in the gaming world and reach out to non-listening game players. The ideas were fairly small scale but did allow us to drop bits of Radio 1 into the online world for players to stumble across via their consoles. We did this by introducing our DJs into the homes of many online gameplayers, creating a Radio 1 round in the game Buzz and encouraging our audience to download assets to create their own levels in LittleBIGPlanet or create machinima. All great stuff.

So what next for games? Well, when I first joined the BBC in 1996 I had to convince our DJs to talk about the first ever Radio 1 website. There were similar concerns then about isolating the non web audience. Rather than look ahead to the next Big Gaming Weekend, I hope the success of this weekend means that productions teams will be inspired to introduce games into the everyday language of their shows.

Hugh Garry is Senior Content Producer, Radio 1 Interactive

A while back I posted about why we use illustrations on iPlayer for key radio programming … In short we want to avoid galleries of largely unknown faces which don’t really hook the listener as much as a well-executed illustration.

When we come to illustrate dramas which feature popular and loved characters we are posed with a dilemma - we want to give depth and feeling to the drama without personifying the character too much. The mind’s eye is a wonderful thing which conjures up its own distinct image of how Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Ruth Archer from The Archers look - it’s not the job of the illustration to give a face to the characters, its job is to nod to their characteristics.

Read the rest of the entry and leave comments on the Radio 4 blog.

Ashley Stewart-Noble is a Senior Content Producer at BBC Future Media & Technology