rowan.depomerai

It’s been quite a while now since I started working on BBC R&D’s North Lab. I’ve thoroughly failed to provide any updates, for which I apologise, but I think it falls under the category of “the more is happening, the less time you have to blog about it”! We’ve been ploughing ahead with our interim lab which will tide us over for the next two years or so on the existing BBC Manchester site, and planning for MediaCity:UK at Salford, which is our longer-term solution. My main focus was to be the former, but I’ve increasingly been pulled in to helping plan for MCUK; as you can probably imagine, it’s a very large project requiring a lot of effort. But perhaps we’re starting to work out just what it takes to build an R&D lab…

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BBC iPlayer is a great service, and its recent expansion in the mobile space is impressive, but the line-up has a gaping hole – the iPhone. The iPhone and iPod touch have been able to stream iPlayer content over WiFi for over a year now, and were in fact the first mobile devices to support iPlayer at all. But you can’t download programmes to your iPhone, and so you can’t watch them offline, which is a very large caveat. The issue has been addressed in blogs by people like Anthony Rose, saying:

Unfortunately, Apple keeps its DRM technology close to its chest and has so far not licensed that technology to third parties. This means that as of today, it’s not technically possible for us to make rights-protected BBC iPlayer programmes available for download from the bbc.co.uk/iplayer website in a format compatible with Apple devices.

He promised that the issue has the team’s full attention, which was reassuring. But here’s the problem – I think there’s an obvious solution, and I’ve not heard any progress to making it work. So consider this an open letter to the iPlayer team – here’s my ideas, please take them and run with them if you can, or if not, please engage with users as you’ve done in the past, and point out the flaws you find in my argument.

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I’d like to make an addendum to my Top Ten Videos You Should See post, a postscript, if you will. Check out this video from Playing For Change; it’s Stand By Me, as performed by a variety of street artists from around the world who’ve never met. This is great stuff – it sent a shiver down my spine. Support the project at Playing For Change.

I’ve just spent the day at Futuresonic, the Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas in Manchester. The talks I saw ranged from the unintelligible to the inspiring, but on the whole it was an enjoyable day. I was particularly impressed by Aaron Koblain’s talk on data visualisation. I shan’t relay what he said, but instead will simply suggest you check out some of his amazing work at his website.

What the day also got me thinking about however was the quality of presentations. Every presenter I saw today used some sort of computer presentation, all run on the venue’s Macs running Apple’s Keynote software. However it was clear to see which presenters had written their presentations in Keynote and which had put them together using Microsoft Powerpoint. Reason 1 was that Keynote’s ability to import Powerpoint files isn’t quite perfect, making for some slightly oddly aligned fonts. Reason 2 was that I recognise some of the templates provided by both pieces of software. But reason 3 was that the presentations run on Keynote were – without exception – quite simply better than the Powerpoint ones. I couldn’t help but wonder why – both pieces of software offer similar functionality, so why would users of one program produce better presentations than users of the other?

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Last week I shared with you 5 of my top 10 web videos you should watch. They ranged from the funny to the thought-provoking, and today I shall complete the set with another five.

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