
Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand - tswicegood
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/07/scaling_the_bbc_iplayer_to_han.html
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retube
It's tremendous that (as far as I can tell) this has all been architected and
developed internally at the BBC. So refreshing in the current climate of
public entities outsourcing everything. Much better value for money - and more
to the point demonstrates that complex projects can be successfully completed
internally.

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bendtheblock
I think some of the infrastructure maintenance (and maybe general development
too) _is_ outsourced. About a year ago I was on a service management training
course in London along with some Siemens staff who were working on the iPlayer
project.

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kiujygtyujik
Siemens took over the BBC's R+D depts as part of the outsourcing deal which
means they now run pretty much all the technical services.

BBC outsources to Siemens,

This includes handing over all it's unique skills

Siemens, then bills the BBC for stuff it already knew how to do.

Management demonstrates with many Powerpoints how this is saving everybody
money.

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flipbrad
When I worked a summer in a management consultancy we produced powerpoints for
the BBC showing that it was a waste of money.

but don't let that trouble you.

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bruceboughton
I'd be interested to hear why they chose PHP. (It's not exactly the framework-
du-jour, so they must have positively chosen it).

Also, it seems to me that the web page serving would be the most trivial part
of iPlayer. Scaling the video and recommendation database is probably a more
interesting topic.

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points
Shocking to hear that someone has chosen a tool based on its merits rather
than how fashionable it is...

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bruceboughton
Indeed. That's why I was asking for what reasons they chose PHP, i.e. what do
they perceive it's merits to be.

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rquirk
Ironic that this returned the following error when I tried to read it: "Error
500 - Internal Error. This might be because: We are experiencing abnormal
traffic to our network." :-)

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jobeirne
Eww. Excel graphs.

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akadien
I'm thankful that they shared their analysis. Does it really detract from
their work that they used Excel to graph it?

