

Building the BBC's Olympic site - aspratley
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/08/building_olympic_website.html

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nemesisj
I was really blown away by how awesome the BBC's coverage was. You could watch
every event, live and delayed, and they would even bookmark the live stream as
you watched it (and preserved for replays) with event markers. This was
particularly useful for track and field where you might want to skip around on
various qualifiers and other events.

We never had a single issue with buffering or playback, and it was truly
better than TV. It definitely felt like the future. I was really sorry our
American friends in the USA couldn't experience the coverage like we had in
the UK (without a VPN).

~~~
aspratley
I agree. When I first thought about watching the Olympics online I was just
expecting to see a version of iplayer with the usual BBC1 and 2 coverage. What
they pulled off was incredible. The people behind it should be very proud for
actually delivering something that pushes beyond just replicating the TV
experience.

My only issue was with Flash. I'm not into bashing Flash just for the sake of
it, but my only frustrations were caused by Flash just not living up to the
rest of the delivery experience. I think it was the hardware acceleration
issue that is already mentioned in their FAQ. Geting the video to play was
sometimes a case of throw a 6 to start.

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brackin
For those of you interested in hearing more about this, there's a great
episode of the podcast Framerate where they talk to Andy Armstrong, who was
behind all of the streaming of the BBC olympics.

There's some really interesting tidbits in there and he offers a candid
perspective of how it went and the future of streaming TV, etc.

<http://twit.tv/show/frame-rate/89>

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citricsquid
The full diagram is available here:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/08/21/2012_Archi...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/08/21/2012_Architecture_Overview_Diagram_20120727.pdf)

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philjohn
The interesting part to me was the fairly heavy use of RDF triple stores. The
BBC have used these to good effect before on the world cup site and waxed
lyrical at the time about what a difference it made modelling the data in this
way. AFAIK they use BigOwlim from Ontotext as their store, run in cluster
mode.

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justincormack
I see they are talking about this at Velocity Europe
[http://velocityconf.com/velocityeu2012/public/schedule/detai...](http://velocityconf.com/velocityeu2012/public/schedule/detail/25792)

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kodisha
PHP - another victory.

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voltagex_
The Paralympics coverage is abysmal by comparison. It's really sad.

