What next for the BBC and its world-beating website?

By tim, on March 3rd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

The UK’s public broadcasting company the BBC is in the spotlight, thanks to a new strategy review and ensuing discussion. I have only just read it, because of other work, but I think it is significant. The BBC’s Director-General Mark Thompson says:

Clearly the BBC needs the space to evolve as audiences and technologies develop, but

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March 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: bbc, internet, media | 4 comments

BBC trying out HTML 5, video element

By tim, on August 18th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

The BBC has an HTML 5 demonstration using the video element. The video itself is encoded in both Ogg and H.264. In the screenshot below I have just clicked on a navigation image to jump to a specific place in the video. The demonstration is meant to work in Firefox, Safari and Chrome, though for

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August 18th, 2009 | Category: adobe, bbc, flash, google, internet, media, multimedia, silverlight, web authoring | 4 comments

Farewell to Personal Computer World: 30 years of personal computing

By tim, on June 8th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Today I learned that Personal Computer World is to cease publication. This is a long-established UK magazine to which I have been a contributor since May 1993. For PCW, that counts as its latter days. Today you might think that the PC in the title means “PC rather than Mac”, and perhaps in a way

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June 8th, 2009 | Category: internet, media | 42 comments

BBC standardizing on Flash for web video

By tim, on March 14th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I’m at Qcon London listening to John O’Donovan, Chief Architect, and Kevin Hinde, Head of Software Development, both from the BBC.

They are talking about video on bbc.co.uk. Previously this has been handled through pop-up pages that give a choice between Windows Media Player and Real Media. The BBC will now be standardising on

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March 14th, 2008 | Category: adobe, bbc, internet, media, web authoring | One comment

Writing for a global readership

By tim, on February 19th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Seeing the Comscore report on British media sites (which confirms the amazing reach of the BBC web site), and the amusing commentary from  Chris Matyszczyk, prompted me to check out my the stats for this site and blog, which I track occasionally through Sitemeter.

I was aware of writing for a global readership, but was

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February 19th, 2008 | Category: media | Leave a comment