PyCon UK 2022

Rapid prototyping in BBC News with Python and AWS
09-17, 16:30–17:00 (Europe/London), Assembly Room

BBC News Labs is an innovation team within BBC R&D, working with journalists and production teams to build prototypes to demonstrate and trial new ideas for ways to help journalists or bring new experiences to audiences. We make use of modern cloud technologies to accelerate delivery and reduce friction.


BBC News Labs is an innovation team within BBC R&D, working with journalists and production teams to build prototypes to demonstrate and trial new ideas for ways to help journalists or bring new experiences to audiences.

We work in short project cycles to research and build prototypes. We have worked with the BBC's flagship radio news programme production team to enrich programme timelines with metadata to provide enhanced experiences to the audience. We are currently working with local radio teams around the UK to provide the means to capture highlights in live radio for re-use and for social media, reducing the workload for producers, and getting more mileage from linear broadcast programmes.

Working in short cycles, it's important for us to be able to quickly build processing pipelines connected to BBC services, test and iterate on ideas and demonstrate working prototypes. We make use of modern cloud technologies to accelerate delivery and reduce friction.

In this talk I will share our ways of working, our ideation and research methods, and the tools we use to be able to build, deploy and iterate quickly, the BBC's cloud deployment platform, and our use of serverless AWS services such as Lambda, Step Functions and Serverless Postgres.


Is your proposal suitable for beginners? – yes

Ben is a software engineer building prototypes at BBC News Labs, an innovation team within BBC R&D.

Previously, Ben worked at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.