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5 Most Interesting Stories from the Fortnight

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Ian McDonald Ian McDonald | 17:27 UK time, Friday, 5 August 2011

Racing car driver lifting helmet

The Hungarian Grand Prix became another test of HTTP HD streaming last weekend. Pic by, used under

Some stories you might have missed this fortnight:

1. Back on July 5th, little more than a week after the 91Èȱ¬ Online Industry Briefing, 91Èȱ¬ Future Media Director Ralph Rivera expanded on his briefing keynote at the . just put .

Rory Cellan-Jones quizzed him on World of Warcraft and took audience questions.

Matthew Yates from the World Wide Web Consortium asked Ralph to expand on what he meant by fewer, stronger, standards. Ralph offered News on Connected TVs as an example:

And so when you look at our connected TV news product, it's HTML5 based. And what that does for us, it gives us that ability the distribute our product much more widely.

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2. On Wednesday 27th July, Audio & Music Interactive held an event for suppliers to meet commissioners. Barbara Greenway blogged about the content and services delivered in partnership with indies:

This year's Glastonbury site, built by Picture, saw a massive 122% increase in peak weekly traffic, and our new Desert Island Discs site, built by Magnetic North, received critical and audience praise.

Meanwhile, the newly-available archive episodes of Desert Island Discs, reformatted by Loftus, attracted 3.3 million downloads in the first two months.

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3. Also on Wednesday 27th July, the 91Èȱ¬ Trust announced that they have approved the use of longer excerpts from performances in the Specialist Classical Music Chart Podcast. Andrew Caspari, Head of Speech Radio and Classical music, posted at the Radio blog on Tuesday 2nd, the day it rejoined the family of 91Èȱ¬ podcasts:

Last month listeners successfully put 14.8 million downloads on their PCs or mobile devices.

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4. Last weekend two members of Andy Armstrong's team, Richard and Kiran, came into the office to run another HTTP HD trial - of the Hungarian Grand Prix. Andy blogged about his gratitude for your help:

It's also given the programmers who are working on this a great incentive to make it work even better; I think a remark I overheard sums that up: "Isn't it amazing that people are taking so much time to write detailed, accurate feedback - makes it all seem worthwhile". It does indeed. Thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts and comments with us.

So, what next? One of the things that disappointed quite a few people was that we were only able to run the trial during office hours. That was disappointing for us too - we want to know more about how well HTTP adaptive bit rate streaming works on domestic broadband connections. When the trial is run during office hours, unsurprisingly, most of the traffic comes from office networks.

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5. On Wednesday 3rd August, Daniel Danker, head of Programmes and On-Demand, went on Radio 4's You and Yours to answer questions regarding problems over the iPlayer application on the iPad.

He told Shari Vahl that audience members were helping test a potential fix:

Our audiences have been using a version of the product that we believe addresses this problem and validating for us whether it does in fact solve the problem ... My hope is that a fix is right around the corner.

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(This blog is about 91Èȱ¬ Online, the internet services of the domestic 91Èȱ¬. So if you are wondering why I'm not mentioning , or the comments on 91Èȱ¬ Sport's rights agreement with Formula 1, it's because those are off-topic, and if I mentioned them I'd have to moderate myself.)

Ian McDonald is the Content Producer, 91Èȱ¬ Internet Blog

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