BBC DREAM

Digital, R&D, Engineering And Monitoring

The Team

Mark Langton

Dolan O'Toole

Chrissy Pocock-Nugent

Alex Norton

Graham Lenton

Categories

Our hack has features relevant to :

• Connecting the News, Together
• Using and Sharing Live Video
• Journalism in a Social Age 

The HACK

Catch Up News presents a dynamic news broadcast from the BBC with the most relevant 'slices' of video from the main BBC News programmes.

 For each slice, we display related material

• Other news sources via The Juicer
• Content from BBC Monitoring
• Live Periscope and Meerkat events

What audience need is met ?

Catch Up News allows the audience to discover the main stories covered by BBC News while they have been away, and to find related content from other providers, as well as current live video events from Periscope and Meerkat.

What did we develop ?

DREAM Hack

A react.js application which delivers the audience experience.

DREAM

Hack

What did we develop ?

DREAM Slicer UI

Extensions to the BBC Slicer UI to enable editorial control of the Catch Up News product.

In-browser selection of video keyframe, using HTML5 Canvas screen capture.

DREAM

Slicer UI

What did we develop ?

DREAM Slicer API

The Slicer APIs were extended to include:

• catchup API which returns the dynamic running order.
• related API which orchestrates calls to the underlying APIs.

DREAM

Slicer API

What did we develop ?

BBCM API

A Python/Flask microservice to return related products from BBC Monitoring.

BBCM API

What did we develop ?

MeerScope

A Python/Flask microservice for Periscope and Meerkat live event discovery.

Tweets linking to events are indexed into Elasticsearch, and accessed via rest API.

Meer

Scope

APIs used

Underlying APIS

The underlying APIs used were:

• The Juicer API
• Monitoring Production Suite API
• Twitter API

DREAM

Hack

DREAM

Slicer UI

BBCM API

Meer

Scope

Juicer

API

MPS

API

Twitter

API

DREAM

Slicer API

Dynamic running order

The algorithm for generating catch-up playlist :

• Find slices tagged with the users chosen categories, within the catch-period, where the slice is still "hot" (defined in days).
• Aggregate slices into “story” groupings, using tags.
• The latest slice is the “main slice” for each story.
• The remaining slices are presented as related content for the user to explore.
• Stories are then ordered by “main slice” importance rating.

The Future ?

How could this work on TV and second screen ?

Off-line content for commuter catch up.

Enable social conversations around slices of BBC News programming.

Explore the BBC News archive.

Screenshots

The following slides contain screenshots taken post-hack

News Catch Up displaying the 'FIFA' story, with related content from the Juicer

... related Periscope and Meerkat live video events

... related content from BBC Monitoring

... related slices of BBC News output

The enhancements to the Slicer to allow tagging of content for the News Catch Up product.

Periscope and Meerkat video events are retrieved using the Twitter streaming API and indexed.

A Kibana dashboard is configured to display the number of tweets for each service.