09-23, 14:00–14:30 (Europe/London), Assembly Room
How we built a prototype to allow journalists to add highlight markers to interesting moments on BBC News in iPlayer, and how we went from idea to prototype to production.
In BBC News Labs, we work closely with journalists and we try to come up with innovative approaches to meeting their needs - either to improve or automate internal processes or to enhance the audience experience.
An idea was born from discussions with a BBC News editor to add markers to indicate to users where the big important moments are on the news channel. We built a minimum viable product, and extended the reach of the prototype over the next few months. We launched our first audience facing trial on news live pages, and then it was used on Eurovision, Springwatch, Glastonbury and Wimbledon.
The project was built using AWS lambda functions (Python), FastAPI and postgres, a React / TypeScript frontend and an iPlayer plugin (also TypeScript).
This talk will cover our rapid prototyping process, the tech stack used, as well as how we managed to deliver a production audience-facing project - and where we go from here.
Ben is a senior software engineer at the BBC, building prototypes in BBC News Labs, part of the applied research area of BBC R&D. Ben loves Python, Linux and all things open source.
Previously, Ben worked at the Raspberry Pi Foundation where he developed the gpiozero and piwheels projects while looking after Raspberry Pis on the international space station.