Really enjoyed the Liverpool Nativity performance shown on BBC THREE a few days back, really well told, some great music, and thought the ‘asylum seeker’ twist on it was really interesting. If you missed it, it’s available to watch for a couple more days on iPlayer

Interesting article in Wired this week with David Byrne interviewing Thom Yorke - getting his thoughts on the current state of the music industry, as well as talking about the recent ‘pay-what-you-want’ release of the last Radiohead album:

Byrne: What about bands that are just getting started?

Yorke: Well, first and foremost, you don’t sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority. If you’re an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don’t see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.

Byrne: It should be a load off their minds.

Yorke: Exactly.

Read the rest of the article

This is interesting: Alfonso Cuarón, director of “Children of Men”, and Naomi Klein, author of “No Logo”, present a short film from Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Watch the film here (warning: contains some disturbing imagery) or find out more info at http://www.shockdoctrine.com

The other big product that’s come out of the BBC User Experience Design team recently is a redesign on the homepage of bbc.co.uk. The key features include:

The page is still in beta, but you can see what you think here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/

It’s been interesting reading some of the initial feedback after the first day of the flash-based iPlayer, generally it seems pretty postitive - my favourite review so far is from the Inquirer:

“Unlike the Windows Media / DRM-infested train wreck that was the initial incarnation of the player, this one uses the altogether-simpler Flash for web-based streaming of the last seven days of TV. The cross-platform Flash technology enables Mac and Linux fans to get in on the action, as well as reducing the barrier to entry for Windows fans, who previously had to jump through more hoops that a show dog in order to get the dodgy quality video.

This nullifies one of the major complaints about the original Iplayer - that Mac and Linux computer users didn’t get a discount on their licence fee, despite being treated as second class citizens by the online service. The new player appears to work quickly and simply, with no downloading of anything required as long as you have an up to date version of the Adobe software. We couldn’t find any bugs either, besides the ones on the Beeb’s nature shows.”

Although still in beta, a new version of BBC iPlayer which we’ve been working on for the last few months has been released this evening. The big changes on the previous version are that it now offers streaming flash video which will work across platforms, the sign in process has been removed so anyone in the UK can easily access it, the first step towards radio integration has been taken and the download manager has been significantly redesigned to make it simpler and easier to use.

There are still a couple of bugs, but I’m really proud of it and think the design and development team have done a really great job. So if you’re in the UK click on the link below and catch up on the last 7 days of BBC TV!

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

I was quite pleased this morning as I got emailed my invite to get on to the trial of the new video hosting site, Hulu. It’s one of the many new IPTV sites, this time a joint venture of NBC and Newscorp (featuring shows like Heroes, Simpsons, Family Guy etc).

However the Hulu strapline “Watch your favourites. Anytime. Anywhere” seems to only be true if by ‘anywhere’ you mean ‘anywhere in the US’. Anyway it just got me thinking how irritating GeoIP is (i.e only showing you stuff if your in the correct area of the world). I know BBC uses it quite a lot, but when your actually on the recieving end of not being able to access content it’s really annoying - it also feels very counter to the whole “global village” concept?

My new tee’s from threadless got delivered yesterday, this is my favourite one of the bunch by Glenn Jones - there’s some brilliant illustration work on his website

Last Saturday’s episode of Click was interesting - all about the concept of visualising radio, how it might work, pro’s and con’s etc. The argument seems to of come around due to the fact that most new devices for listening to radio these days will come with a small colour screen which will enable extra information to be broadcast alongside the audio.

On the minus side it has been claimed that this will just mean for cheap tv, but I like Andy Parfitt’s idea (head of Radio 1) of “glanceability” in that “it can’t be content that you must look at in order to get the picture” (so things that nicely supplement the audio - EPG’s, visualisations, track lists etc)

Read the article / Watch again

The second link I’m nicking from the Creative Review blog today, but this is absolutely amazing - made by the Glue Society, four images that recreate key Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth:

The Crucifixition

Moses parting the Red Sea

Noah’s Ark

The Garden of Eden

Some graphic design students at Salford uni have produced these wicked Christmas card designs, go check ‘em out: http://cardboardsu.blogspot.com/

Our team is currently working on the new design for the BBC homepage which will be released for public beta soon. In the meantime someone sent me this great link showing the various designs from over the years - am loving the 1997 version pictured below! Link

Ha! There’s a great post on Noisy Decent Graphics all about meaningless copy. A great example is in this advertisement for Vicks which finishes with the strapline “We start with solutions, not problems” … At first it sounds like a clever line until you start to wonder how exactly that’s possible?!

We’re currently working on a redesign for the iPlayer Library to make it simpler and easier to use, so I’ve been doing some research into other video manager applications and stumbled into this application called Miro. It’s basically the latest version of what used to called ‘Democracy’ and is all cross platform and open source – it also uses the open source VLC player which seems to play just about every video file under the sun (MPEG2, WMV, Quicktime etc) …

It allows you to download and keep videos from many video-hosting sites such as YouTube, Daily Motion and has a great guide of video podcasts including lots of HD content. Download it here