BBC.co.uk - site cutbacks & beyond

Surely everything on BBC.co.uk is media content?

iPlayer Beta mode on Connected TV now features the ability to access individual profiles with multiple account sign in enabled today.

For some reason, I can only watch The Papers on iPlayer using Flash.

Either the encoding needed for your browser and HTML5 is not yet ready or (less likely), the BBC think flash offers a better experience for you because of your browser or tech specs.

Just noticed there's been a change in the URLs for the schedule pages on the BBC website. For example, http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/programmes/schedules is now https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl6b and http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/programmes/schedules is now https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl65 .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules gives a long list of BBC channels past and present, including several former services at the bottom of the page which have not had schedule pages on the main BBC website before, such as the BBC Television Service, and the Light Programme, though the pages have little or no data on them.

So this would seem to be preparation for the addition of more historical schedule data, possibly coming from Genome, however that data still needs a huge amount of tidying up, three years since the website went online. In fact it's hard to see how the sheer number of OCR errors will ever all be corrected.

I spotted that too. While the old URLs do redirect to the new ones, it goes against the readable/hackable guidelines in the original URL structure documentation.

The inclusion of former services will be because they have programme pages or have clips from programmes which appeared on that service.

For example, this episode of Panorama from one of the last few weeks of the 'Television Service':
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ch7h2

Or this which was originally on Knowledge but was repeated on Four:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00yh2vh

As programmes or clips have been added they've been tagged with their broadcast details

Whoops! It seems some broadcasts from Knowledge were previously entered into the database as BBC Four.

Spotted at the top of the BBC News home page next to the nations there's now a link entitled "Local News" which goes to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/localnews. This uses the location you've set and redirects you, for example to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/localnews/2656046-Bedford/0 if you've chosen 'Bedford' (not my actual location). The new page gives you the option to select the number of miles from the chosen location to display headlines/articles for.

I suspect this page may/will be replacing the existing regional news pages, as there's a link entitled "Local News is changing. Find out how" which goes to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/localnews/faqs. At present though the new 'local news' pages appear to be lacking local sport and weather. They would however be an improvement on the 'local live' news pages (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-41943037 ).

It'll be impressive if it all comes together. Geolocation almost certainly will be used along with the BBC Account logon information.

Also notice that you must use HTTPS for the new Local News pages as modern browsers (lead by Chrome) will only allow access to location over secure connections.

I can see an issue pretty fast with this. It's clearly been devised from an Urban point of view, Restricting to a 20mile radius in Rural Areas is a nonsense.