Curation for iPlayer

Scheduling Platform

Curation for iPlayer

BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds are both household names that we know and love. Providing content to millions across the UK is no easy task and requires numerous back-end systems to manage and catalogue the programmes. It cultivates a tool called iBroadcast3, which handles the Broadcast and Digital scheduling.

We were commissioned by the editorial team that handles BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds to turn a manual process of content curation into a tool that would unify two different editorial processes into one, as well as retrofitting a meta-data tagging system called passports.

In the BBC, every brand, series, episode and miscellaneous programme has a PID identifier, and the output of medleys is essentially a list of content in the form of an API. These APIs are published and content fetched if and when it is required.
The main bulk of the medleys piece was attributing metadata to the content, so that iPlayer, on the front end, could interpret a collection’s location and position for a specific purpose.
The complexity arrives when a programme’s length of time is visible and available to the audience.

The end goal of the project was to get a contained, unified area for scheduling and curation.
Previously, the entire curation process was driven by spreadsheets. It was a manual process that cost the public service additional funds for out of hours scheduling. This was ultimately solved by allowing users to automate content changes over time to line-up changes on the BBC website.
This also helped the decommissioning of an older piece of scheduling software.

We then got to work interviewing key stakeholders to understand the different roles in the curation process.
We first needed to understand the department level process and the technical disciplines involved, and produce a reference glossary of terms.
We could begin to work on the archetypes of how the users would like the product to be. We could then conceptually build a concept that went through rounds of initial testing, increasing its fidelity. There were bi-monthly check-ins with the major stakeholders to sign-off sections of the product and move into supporting the agile development process.

Curation across the BBC.

The curation process is split into three disciplines; the curator in charge of bringing the content together, a technical curator in charge of adding the appropriate metadata, and a marketing assistant who issues out subject matter briefs that are taken into account, e.g. one area of responsibility was Sir David Attenborough.

It’s a 24-programme collection split across many series and brands. The composition of the collection is assessed, based on the relevance of the content, based on external BBC factors in popular culture and cross-service promotion.

The content is also evaluated to see if the cover imagery is sufficiently varied, that no duplicates are used, and the imagery is not visually similar.

Aligning to GEL.

Once the concept had been signed off, we went through the process of assessing the components we created and working with the GEL team to audit and see if it aligned with internal brand patterns.
We also worked with the development team to outline the architectural model so that the team was clear between themselves on how the product flowed from a user experience perspective, the terminology the editorial team used and what the established system equivalent was.

Once development had begun, we supported the development team while running a second user testing track alongside so that the development team began to receive feedback on the work that had been brought into Sprint to bring them closer to the process. The rounds of testing continued until the product requirements per phase had been met.
Feedback was gathered and feedback given to the product leadership that added to the future roadmap.

When it came to user testing, whether that be testing as discovery/exploration or with the build, we made it very clear we were creating something ethnical. We wanted the tool to make their job easier and needed to know about discipline-specific problems and how they factored into their job, as well as how their tools didn’t quite meet expectations or could be expanded so greater efforts could be made on more important areas of their role.

Supporting educate, entertain and inform

As with all the work that we’ve done for our clients, it was an absolute pleasure to know that something we’ve created enables the BBC to get better content that seeks to educate, entertain and inform millions of people across the UK.
The pandemic has reaffirmed the important impact of our work as it allows changes and content curation to be made more easily.
We’re glad that the work we’ve done has allowed iBroadcast3 to support the curation of educational content (BBC Bitesize) across iPlayer.

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