On Journalism Labs, Tristram Biggs wrote about the launch of revolving headlines on the 91Èȱ¬ Red Button homepage.
The headlines are supplied to us in the TV Platforms group by our colleagues in Future Media and Technology Journalism - the same team provides the feeds for all the news, sport, business and entertainment content on 91Èȱ¬ Red Button. Bill Michell from the Journalism technical team explains how the content gets there.
The FM&T Journalism team had to do quite a bit of work to assemble the feed for the headlines on the homepage, and had not a lot of time to do it in. We needed the feed to be timely and accurate (so closely synchronised with the content in the main part of the Red Button service). This meant that we needed to re-use existing functionality as far as we could.
The 91Èȱ¬ Red Button homepage is built very differently to the news and sport sections we normally publish content to. So the decision was made to make the homepage publishing system implement the same interface as the publishing process we normally use for the News and Sport sections - meaning we could use the the Journalism delivery system largely unmodified.
While the TV Platforms team worked on allowing this to happen and getting the text supplied to update on a TV screen, we worked on identifying the correct content and publishing it to the correct location.
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This week sees the launch of an important iteration to the 91Èȱ¬'s Digital Text service on Freeview - revolving headlines at the top level. We actually implemented the same update on the Sky platform back in March, but wanted to wait before telling everyone until we had launched it on Freeview - meaning more than 85% of Digital TV users in the UK benefit.
The project really marks another step in our march to (DSO), the government-backed initiative to convert the UK to a digital only TV broadcast infrastructure. DSO will mean the eventual demise of Ceefax for the whole country by 2012, and one of our long term projects is to manage the transition of millions of Ceefax users to the 91Èȱ¬'s Digital Text service.
Read more and comment on Journalism Labs
Every six months, in my role as Managing Editor of TV Platforms, I work through the process of prioritisation. Put simply, I work with the team here to prioritise the development projects for the following six months (or more if we know beyond that!)
Diagram: How TV Platforms interfaces with other 91Èȱ¬ divisions
TV Platforms provide all of the technical development skills led by a team of producers and project managers and ably supported by testers and design (or user experience - UX).
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Here's our fortnightly look at what's coming up under the red button...
George Best Extra
In 1971, George Best was at the top of his game and at the height of his fame, but the demands of his pop-star lifestyle were beginning to tell on the 24-year-old footballer. When Best failed to catch a train for a game at Chelsea he was suspended for a fortnight by Manchester United amid a welter of debate and criticism.
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This is Da Vinci.
No. You're right. This doesn't really look like a famous Italian at all.
In fact this Da Vinci is a room in our office, commonly known internally by a slightly more down to earth name of "The Farm".
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Here's our fortnightly look at what's coming up under the red button...
Doctor Who Commentary
This Easter as the Doctor takes a detour to an alien world, fans of the show can delve deeper behind the scenes with 91Èȱ¬ Red Button.
During the 91Èȱ¬ Three repeats of Planet of the Dead join David Tennant, executive producer Julie Gardner and director James Strong for episode commentary as they reveal the secrets of the seasonal special.
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In a comment to our post, Red Button Arcade, we were asked about services on Windows Media Center. Although we have no plans at this time to launch live services, a member of our team has used our One in Ten innovation programme to investigate the technology behind it.
Traditionally, text services like the 91Èȱ¬'s Red Button and Ceefax, have always been transmitted as part of the TV signal, and extracted by the hardware at the viewer's end.
But what if we were to make use of the viewer's internet connection for interactive content, even if the viewer was still watching a TV channel that's being broadcast over the airwaves? Are there any technical advantages in doing so, and what new things are made possible by transmitting interactive services over the internet instead of over the broadcast signal?
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