91Èȱ¬

After the success and frenzy of the Autumnwatch trial last week (blogged about here and here), there's some washing up to do on Monday. George is on leave all this week. Meanwhile, I spend the day at an internal FM&T management conference at Television Centre, soaking up strategy. Tris meets a chap from Worldwide to talk about music links.

On Tuesday, Tris starts research and planning on a new Storytelling project and has meetings with some interested people throughout the week. Chris G, Tris and I have a lengthly session on our net neutrality project that I'm owning, ironing out some kinks in the concept, and I spend some time writing up the current thinking.

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This is a follow up to our recent TV Companion experiment with the 91Èȱ¬ Two show, Autumnwatch. Whilst that post concentrated on the experience, this is an overview of the technologies we used for the experiment, and gives you the opportunity to build your own, by providing .

First, what is Push vs Pull? In a web context, ordinarily, you would request a webpage using your browser and a some data would be returned, Pull. The only way that you would then subsequently see any changes to that data, would be if you requested it again, or if something on that page requested it for you, maybe via . Push is when you create a persistent or long-lasting connection from the browser to the server, wherebye the server can send information to the client, without the client needing to refesh their page. Techniques for doing this include , or .

A common use of Push, is when it's coupled with other technologies to create web based systems–you have one publisher, who can send information to one or many subscribers–and this is exactly what we wanted to do in this experiment. There are many PubSub setups out there, , , , to name but a few. For our setup, we decided to use and the JavaScript library.

Ejabberd is a robust and proven server written in . XMPP (The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is an open technology for real-time communication. It is more commonly used for instant messenger (IM). If you use , you’re already using XMPP. It seemed to fit nicely with what we wanted to do, as it already comes with a , but it also has many more great features: Presence, Multi-User Chat and is fully extensible (It's ). Importantly, it comes with a web API that out of the box can understand XMPP via BOSH.

Strophe.js is a JavaScript library for speaking XMPP via BOSH. Put simply, allows you to do XMPP on the web.

Another win for us, was that due to advances in the way , their amazing JavaScript execution speeds, plus the additional support, we can use just HTML, CSS and JavaScript and no longer have to worry about or performance. It did mean that we could only target some modern browsers, but it was an experiment and this made things much simpler, as in we have needed to take a different approach.

This setup worked really well and meant that we could set it up quickly and concentrate on the UX, and what we would actually be sending to the clients. XMPP was designed to send small bits of XML very fast, to one or many clients. For our purposes, this meant sending enough information to all the connected clients, so that they could go away and fetch the data required to build the page. This involved some key/value configuration information, and a url to a text file containing HTML, CSS and JS which we could inject into the clients display area to create the slides seen in the previous post. With extra caching, this would prove very efficient. More so, if we had adopted a , which was posted a bit too late for us to do anything, but very neat.

Because the basic setup we experimented with was so straight forward, and all the software is free and available, I thought it would be useful to show you how to get up and running with your own little PubSub system, so you can experiment with these technologies. Over on the website . This includes a simple publisher and client, as well as installation instructions for getting you up and running with Ejabberd on the . If you have experience installing this on other systems, then I’d be happy to add the instructions to the repository, using the normal .

Last night we ran an experiment with the 91Èȱ¬ TV programme, Autumnwatch, several hundred viewers and a second screen website that we've built. The Autumnwatch TV Companion website receives additional information on your second screen (probably your laptop) that is synchronised to the programme that you're watching on TV (your first screen!). So while the TV show is showing footage of starlings flocking, your laptop is simultaneously showing background information about swarming behaviour in nature.

Photo by

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As the wind blows the autumn leaves from the trees outside my window our Autumnwatch project is in full flow. On Monday we put up the holding page for the recruitment and the invite emails went out. By Tuesday we'd already hit our limit for volunteers who had passed the browser test and initial survey. We're quite surprised, yet pleased. After a bit of cajoling we manage a couple of run-throughs of the framework and it all works - error screens appear when they should and analytics start getting filled with data. About half the team are working on this project now, this is what is going on at the moment.

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Over on the 91Èȱ¬ Backstage Blog Brendan has posted the first of the series of extracts of the retrospective ebook we have commisioned drawing together the history of the Backstage project.Ìý In this first extract we look at the very beginning of the project, the ideas and personalities who brought these together.Ìý Some familiar names I'm sure.

The SHV trials required audio set ups as complex and sophisticated as the video.Ìý In this short post, Andrew Mason of our audio team outlines how we put together the infrastructure to support a 6 Music live recording session, and local and international 5.1 channel listening.

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The audio team made available and helped set up the monitoring area in TC0's old drum room, now our audio research space, with the 103" plasma screen and 5.1-channel surround sound. We used NHK's loudspeakers for the front three and a pair of ours for the surround channels.

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Mixing desk in the new Radio Outside Broadcast truck used in our sessions.CC Ella Chambers

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This week there's a hive of activity around the Autumnwatch second screen work, with only two weeks to go until the live trial. Tris is wrangling tasks and to-dos, getting some consistent language across the piece and finalising recruitment surveys and invite emails, whilst Vicky, Theo, Jo, Duncan and Chris B beaver away towards the final version, optimising the content for the trial (pages, consoles, templates..) and ironing out inevitable last-minute snags. With quite a lot riding on a successful and stable trial, Chris B successfully load-tests the XMPP-over-BOSH service with and gets some solid results for us to feed into the setup.

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Last week we had the great pleasure of joining with colleagues from , Radio Ulster, , World Service Trust and everyone at 91Èȱ¬ Northern Ireland for the Making Connections Festival of Radio.Ìý Over three days the 91Èȱ¬'s Blackstaff Studios on Great Victoria Street were packed full of displays and demonstrations from all manner of radio industry types, including radio manufacturers and World Service.

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Microphones and radio recieving equipment from the 91Èȱ¬ Heritage collection

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You get some interesting, and sometimes rather annoying, problems as soon as you have more than one device simultaneously presenting the same content or more than one delivery path for separate components of the same content. It gets even worse if you have two separate devices with two separate delivery paths.

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In the last few months there has been considerable progress towards enabling programmatic access to audio data in web browsers.

Mozilla has implemented the , which provides read and write access to audio with JavaScript. To use it you'll need (or later).

The Mozilla API makes available data for audio from an HTML audio or video element: numbers that describe an audio signal.

It's simple to use, but what do the numbers actually mean?

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