9 ms·

Moving BBC Online to the Cloud

109 points by LaSombra 6y ago

sgt 6y ago
My gut feel is that they've absolutely overcomplicated it now, justifying large DevOps teams to make sense of and maintain the whole architecture.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  With time will come cost concerns, and it’ll end up back on prem, maybe using Kubernetes, maybe not.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    With time will come cost concerns Especially as cancellations of TV licenses gather steam. This is a classic example of the iron law of bureaucracy, that work expands to meet the number of people to do it.
    - easton 6y ago
      I'm not from the UK, but from reading the warning I used to get when watching Doctor Who over a VPN on iPlayer, you still have to have a TV License even if you only use iPlayer. How they would detect that I'm not sure (maybe the van can sniff https traffic /s), but is there a streaming service that has the BBC's content without the license?
      - garblegarble 6y ago
        >you still have to have a TV License even if you only use iPlayer. Yes, that's correct - they changed the law a few years ago (previously it only applied to Live TV, using iPlayer was exempt from a TV License) >How they would detect that I'm not sure (maybe the van can sniff https traffic /s) I don't think they do anything with it yet, but when they do I'm pretty sure they'll take their log data of IPs accessing programme content from their CDN and ask the corresponding UK ISPs to identify if any of those accesses were from people at (list of addresses without a license) and issue a warning, and then request their details to bring them to court if they keep using it. I'm sure the ISPs will be willing to help them, and even as a privacy advocate I can't say I'd be bothered by this - those people are using a service they have not paid for. It does seem like it'd be easier to simply require that you pay for your TV License through your BBC account, though, since that blocks anybody on a VPN who doesn't hold a license. >but is there a streaming service that has the BBC's content without the license? BBC does license their content worldwide, and there's a strange relationship with BBC America - so if you're wanting to access it legally outside the UK that's your best approach. Within the UK, Netflix certainly has a (limited, but good) number of BBC programmes licensed.
      - cookiescrumbs 6y ago
        Britbox has old bbc content but I don’t think new stuff https://www.britbox.co.uk/ https://www.britbox.co.uk/
  - Angostura 6y ago
    The BBC is facing a massive cash crunch right now they need to do everything they can to save cash right now I suspect this isn't a long term strategy so much as an act of desperation.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  This quote is telling: > The BBC’s site is made up of several services (such as iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport). For them all, we need to ensure they use the latest and best technology. That’s the only way to ensure they’re the best at what they do. "We need to use new shiny because new shiny is the best!"
  - qz2 6y ago
    They've always been like that. I had the misfortune of having to integrate with some of their stuff they'd thrown on to ruby on rails back when it was teetering on the top of hype mountain. Realistically 99% of their back end at the time was bits of sticky tape, perl and ftp. They just changed those components out for modern versions of sticky tape, perl and ftp...
  - iso1631 6y ago
    "We need to use new shiny because we pay peanuts and if we make people still write in perl like the olden days we wouldn't have any staff"
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I mean at least it's honest. If you can't afford to pay well you can probably attract better-than-you-can-afford talent by giving them creative freedom and letting them resume build a bit.
- tiew9Vii 6y ago
  Yes. Previously they mostly used a typical lamp stack in the front end. The php apps pulled data from Java backend services. They had a strict separation policy. The different parts of the bbc where essentially different apps with a proxy in front doing path based routing. You’d generate a RPM with your php app / Java app and that got deployed. That had a few drawbacks mostly around process, it was a pain to get releases out as had to go through a single team who could deploy your rpm. You also had the inflexibility of a fixed sized pool of servers in a dc you manage. When they first started using cloud that mostly remained the same but streamlined process. You provide a rpm using the current lamp/Java stack, a build process baked that in to an ami you could deploy. That made deployments more flexible in you was not constrained by the current physical hardware available and removed the dependency having a specific team do the deployment manually on a shared host. I imagine the hosting started to get expensive with the dedicated hosts per service. Im guessing slowly the more they used aws services and trialing things they ended up where they are which sounds super complex. I’m not familiar with where they are now other than the article but I’d bet going back to an app such as php, Java, ruby whatever on the fronted and binpacking them with kubernetes would be simpler than dealing with thousands of lambdas on a black box runtime. Most of the stuff at the bbc hits the edge proxies/cache anyway so the remotes are fairly idle.
comice 6y ago
I run the News Sniffer[1] project which has to parse BBC News pages and I knew about this rollout a few weeks ago when the HTML all changed format completely and my parsers broke. As a side note, the new HTML is way more complicated and much harder to parse than before - I know the aim isn't to help parsing for content, but I was still saddened to see how it's ended up (a bit of a mess imo - hard to distinguish actual article content from other things). If anyone knows a reliable and public way to access the content before the "web rendering" layer, that'd be very handy! [1] https://www.newssniffer.co.uk https://www.newssniffer.co.uk
- Angostura 6y ago
  They still have a full set of RSS feeds do they not?
  - comice 6y ago
    yes, though the page linking to them hasn't been updated since 2011. And notably, it doesn't have the new HTML: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494 But the RSS feeds are just the headlines. And also don't contain every article ever - only the latest ones with a limit. So not much use to News Sniffer.
    - sails 6y ago
      This looks pretty active, if you have any luck let me know https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- mdaniel 6y ago
  If they have a mobile app, often looking at the requests that it makes can be enlightening, and the same story if the have a mobile version of the site, as it tends to have less "fluff" and more content I also know they have a moderately public Nitro API for their media programming (the iPlayer offerings) so it's possible they have a similar one for their web content
- tiew9Vii 6y ago
ldite 6y ago
I notice that the previous post from the same author, dated 2017, was titled "Powering BBC Online with nanoservices" [0]. Nary a mention of nanoservices now. If I were a cynic, I would say they are going out of fashion. [0] https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/powering-bbc-online-with-nanoservices-727840ba015b https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/powering-bbc-onlin...
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  They're still using Lambda heavily, they've just dropped the buzzword.
graton 6y ago
I wish they would compare the costs switching from their self-hosted system to a cloud based system running on AWS.
- tomgp 6y ago
  Agreed, there’s very little discussion of concrete benefits here just vague assertions that this is the best way to do it (except for lighthouse test results which could surely have been fixed much more cheaply by cleaning up the incredibly woolly markup). Also: they still can’t get two parts of the same page to consistently show the same live football result. This seemed to break about 10 years ago and no one seems to care enough to fix it.
- azalemeth 6y ago
  Me too. The other argument, of course, is that instead of spending 10x on (taxpaying) staff and employees within the UK, in order to create a new technology that may be useful and solve other problems, they are spending 1x on Amazon. Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK, and, moreover, have motives that are arguably aligned to the detriment of the BBC. I'm slightly sad to read about the change. In many ways, I'd rather the perl duck tape & php approach, running on real computers that the BBC owns. Maybe that officially makes me old.
  - ti_ranger 6y ago
    > instead of spending 10x on (taxpaying) staff and employees within the UK, in order to create a new technology that may be useful and solve other problems, they are spending 1x on Amazon. You imply that Amazon/AWS doesn't employ any staff in the UK, which is wrong. > Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK Amazon must certainly pay taxes in the UK, or at least the tax ends up being paid on Amazon share price increases from employees share vesting.
- tiew9Vii 6y ago
  You can submit a freedom of information request https://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/requesting-information https://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/requesting-information . Asking for a yearly spend on AWS and self managed dc’s since 2014 might help as they only started using AWS around then.
crehn 6y ago
BBC still has a frustrating bug on mobile: 1. Tap on Most Read 2. Tap on any story 3. Tap back in the browser It'll go back to the Most Read tab, then after a second switch to the Latest Stories tab.
- jonathanlydall 6y ago
  This. Drives me nuts, it seems to reload the page as you go back into it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ralph87 6y ago
Running a site the size of the BBC on Lambda is nothing short of an exuberant waste of a government-subsidized budget, it's absolutely crazy. Lambda VM time has a massive markup compared to regular compute. It only makes sense where usage does not exceed some threshold the BBC absolutely certainly do. There are plenty of alternative options, even on AWS, that don't suffer from such huge markup without requiring any additional ops input. The thing that runs in Lambda is practically a container image already. Does it really cost tangible budget to have CI build a full image rather than a ZIP file that already contains a few million lines of third party JS/Python deps? IMHO this is the epitome of serverless gone wrong.
- jevgeni 6y ago
  Completely agree. What also irks me is the corpspeak sleigh of hand, where the problem of maintaining your infrastructure is “solved” by using AWS Lambda. It’s not solved, you’re just paying some AWS contractors to do it for you and you assume it’ll be alright.
  - remus 6y ago
    > It’s not solved, you’re just paying some AWS contractors to do it for you and you assume it’ll be alright. In as much as maintaining infrastructure can ever be 'solved', doesn't paying someone else who does a good job of it to provide you with the infra count as solving the problem? Otherwise you'd be down the mines picking ore out of the ground so you can build your chips right, rather than relying on intel/AMD to do it for you and assuming it'll be alright.
    - jevgeni 6y ago
      The problem arises when the infra providers’ setup stops being aligned with yours. Which, given a small organization and a long enough period of time, is guaranteed to happen. The question is then: is it just cheaper in the long run to deal with the hassle of your own infra (we are still talking about the cloud, btw, the thing that supposedly already solved it) or would it be ok to follow the practices and changes in the providers offering?
sudeepj 6y ago
Tangential: Is this official BBC tech blog? If yes, I am surprised they are using medium. I would think that an org of this reputation, history & size would host their own blogs.
- jlelse 6y ago
  Der Spiegel in Germany does the same.
- jonp888 6y ago
  They do host their own blogs, this is a cross-post: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet Possibly it's a sensible way of bringing it to a wider audience, since usually their blog content will be specific to UK-based BBC content consumers.
rozab 6y ago
The BBC has a big problem with cargo cultery right now, copying large social media companies for the hell of it despite having completely different aims. For instance, if I tap the livestream on the homepage it will lie that I need to sign in to watch it, though the popup can just be dismissed. It's shocking that they've adopted useless metrics like conversion to justify user-hostile behaviour.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I don't think you're supposed to be able to dismiss it - it's not about conversion, you're supposed to need an account so that you've had to agree 'I have a television licence'.
  - timthorn 6y ago
    The BBC has been explicit that it is about data collection. You don't need a licence to listen to the BBC radio stations but they have switched to requiring a login: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bbc-iplayer-sign-register-licence-fee-tv-radio-programmes-streaming-a7798691.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
    - mavhc 6y ago
      Pretty sure they're just getting everyone used to logging in for the day that they require evidence of a tv licence
    - gadders 6y ago
      They also pulled their radio stations from TuneIn because TuneIn couldn't or wouldn't share their data with the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/37e4e3f6-fbd2-4c14-8d72-7f7139641582 https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/37e4e3f6-fbd...
  - rozab 6y ago
    Oops, I was slightly wrong here. It says "You will soon need to sign in to watch". Still very misleading imo. https://i.postimg.cc/yNKT82sp/Screenshot-20201104-102848.png https://i.postimg.cc/yNKT82sp/Screenshot-20201104-102848.png This is part of their online news service so shouldn't need TV license.
Jaruzel 6y ago
My main issue with the BBC news site is it's awful Search. There's no option to filter, or sort the results, making non-super-specific searching almost impossible. I know I could do site:bbc.co.uk/news in Google, but uh, it's Google, so I'd rather not.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
  Use Startpage for that. It's basically a proxy to Google.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
I'd like to understand how the team decided to move all of the BBC services entirely to serverless infrastructure. How is serverless the best solution for a heavily used platform? What lead management down this path?
- shinytech 6y ago
  Good question, could it be the cost or at least the illusion of cost saving? I do not know but it will interesting to see how much they are saving, if they do?
  - say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
    Managers don't publicize mistakes and costly lessons learned. There's only going to be this announcement. They made a big mistake riding first class on the hype train.
Traster 6y ago
The BBC seems extremely good at building large, complex websites. They appear to have acheived this ability by chooosing to continuously build new large, complex websites. Obviously as an organisation the BBC isn't actually doing many new things and as a result the BBC's engineering department has been forced into an awkward position where they're continuously building the same new large complex website. It's stunning that the first part of this article wasn't what they wanted to actually acheive by writing a new website beyond the obviously false "For them all, we need to ensure they use the latest and best technology. That’s the only way to ensure they’re the best at what they do." Frankly I giggled a little with the image showing a spot the difference. Well done, you spent tens of millions and the website looks identical.
- p6steve 6y ago
  This is the natural result of building a publicly funded empire of literally hundreds of ex-perl hackers in a room and telling them (i) justify your job and (ii) you are not allowed to do anything different because the BBC must not compete with private sector websites. Looking forward to the next iteration in raku using My::Cro.
SPBS 6y ago
I visited https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54702974 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54702974 to confirm the lighthouse scores in their article, but the Performance consistently scored ~30 instead. Why is there such a large gap between what I'm seeing and what they're seeing?

109 points by LaSombra 6y ago

sgt 6y ago

My gut feel is that they've absolutely overcomplicated it now, justifying large DevOps teams to make sense of and maintain the whole architecture.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
With time will come cost concerns, and it’ll end up back on prem, maybe using Kubernetes, maybe not.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  With time will come cost concerns Especially as cancellations of TV licenses gather steam. This is a classic example of the iron law of bureaucracy, that work expands to meet the number of people to do it.
  - easton 6y ago
    I'm not from the UK, but from reading the warning I used to get when watching Doctor Who over a VPN on iPlayer, you still have to have a TV License even if you only use iPlayer. How they would detect that I'm not sure (maybe the van can sniff https traffic /s), but is there a streaming service that has the BBC's content without the license?
    - garblegarble 6y ago
      >you still have to have a TV License even if you only use iPlayer. Yes, that's correct - they changed the law a few years ago (previously it only applied to Live TV, using iPlayer was exempt from a TV License) >How they would detect that I'm not sure (maybe the van can sniff https traffic /s) I don't think they do anything with it yet, but when they do I'm pretty sure they'll take their log data of IPs accessing programme content from their CDN and ask the corresponding UK ISPs to identify if any of those accesses were from people at (list of addresses without a license) and issue a warning, and then request their details to bring them to court if they keep using it. I'm sure the ISPs will be willing to help them, and even as a privacy advocate I can't say I'd be bothered by this - those people are using a service they have not paid for. It does seem like it'd be easier to simply require that you pay for your TV License through your BBC account, though, since that blocks anybody on a VPN who doesn't hold a license. >but is there a streaming service that has the BBC's content without the license? BBC does license their content worldwide, and there's a strange relationship with BBC America - so if you're wanting to access it legally outside the UK that's your best approach. Within the UK, Netflix certainly has a (limited, but good) number of BBC programmes licensed.
    - cookiescrumbs 6y ago
      Britbox has old bbc content but I don’t think new stuff https://www.britbox.co.uk/ https://www.britbox.co.uk/
- Angostura 6y ago
  The BBC is facing a massive cash crunch right now they need to do everything they can to save cash right now I suspect this isn't a long term strategy so much as an act of desperation.
howlgarnish 6y ago
This quote is telling: > The BBC’s site is made up of several services (such as iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport). For them all, we need to ensure they use the latest and best technology. That’s the only way to ensure they’re the best at what they do. "We need to use new shiny because new shiny is the best!"
- qz2 6y ago
  They've always been like that. I had the misfortune of having to integrate with some of their stuff they'd thrown on to ruby on rails back when it was teetering on the top of hype mountain. Realistically 99% of their back end at the time was bits of sticky tape, perl and ftp. They just changed those components out for modern versions of sticky tape, perl and ftp...
- iso1631 6y ago
  "We need to use new shiny because we pay peanuts and if we make people still write in perl like the olden days we wouldn't have any staff"
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I mean at least it's honest. If you can't afford to pay well you can probably attract better-than-you-can-afford talent by giving them creative freedom and letting them resume build a bit.
tiew9Vii 6y ago
Yes. Previously they mostly used a typical lamp stack in the front end. The php apps pulled data from Java backend services. They had a strict separation policy. The different parts of the bbc where essentially different apps with a proxy in front doing path based routing. You’d generate a RPM with your php app / Java app and that got deployed. That had a few drawbacks mostly around process, it was a pain to get releases out as had to go through a single team who could deploy your rpm. You also had the inflexibility of a fixed sized pool of servers in a dc you manage. When they first started using cloud that mostly remained the same but streamlined process. You provide a rpm using the current lamp/Java stack, a build process baked that in to an ami you could deploy. That made deployments more flexible in you was not constrained by the current physical hardware available and removed the dependency having a specific team do the deployment manually on a shared host. I imagine the hosting started to get expensive with the dedicated hosts per service. Im guessing slowly the more they used aws services and trialing things they ended up where they are which sounds super complex. I’m not familiar with where they are now other than the article but I’d bet going back to an app such as php, Java, ruby whatever on the fronted and binpacking them with kubernetes would be simpler than dealing with thousands of lambdas on a black box runtime. Most of the stuff at the bbc hits the edge proxies/cache anyway so the remotes are fairly idle.

comice 6y ago

I run the News Sniffer[1] project which has to parse BBC News pages and I knew about this rollout a few weeks ago when the HTML all changed format completely and my parsers broke. As a side note, the new HTML is way more complicated and much harder to parse than before - I know the aim isn't to help parsing for content, but I was still saddened to see how it's ended up (a bit of a mess imo - hard to distinguish actual article content from other things). If anyone knows a reliable and public way to access the content before the "web rendering" layer, that'd be very handy! [1] https://www.newssniffer.co.uk https://www.newssniffer.co.uk

Angostura 6y ago
They still have a full set of RSS feeds do they not?
- comice 6y ago
  yes, though the page linking to them hasn't been updated since 2011. And notably, it doesn't have the new HTML: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494 But the RSS feeds are just the headlines. And also don't contain every article ever - only the latest ones with a limit. So not much use to News Sniffer.
  - sails 6y ago
    This looks pretty active, if you have any luck let me know https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://newspaper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
mdaniel 6y ago
If they have a mobile app, often looking at the requests that it makes can be enlightening, and the same story if the have a mobile version of the site, as it tends to have less "fluff" and more content I also know they have a moderately public Nitro API for their media programming (the iPlayer offerings) so it's possible they have a similar one for their web content
tiew9Vii 6y ago

ldite 6y ago

I notice that the previous post from the same author, dated 2017, was titled "Powering BBC Online with nanoservices" [0]. Nary a mention of nanoservices now. If I were a cynic, I would say they are going out of fashion. [0] https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/powering-bbc-online-with-nanoservices-727840ba015b https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/powering-bbc-onlin...

howlgarnish 6y ago
They're still using Lambda heavily, they've just dropped the buzzword.

graton 6y ago

I wish they would compare the costs switching from their self-hosted system to a cloud based system running on AWS.

tomgp 6y ago
Agreed, there’s very little discussion of concrete benefits here just vague assertions that this is the best way to do it (except for lighthouse test results which could surely have been fixed much more cheaply by cleaning up the incredibly woolly markup). Also: they still can’t get two parts of the same page to consistently show the same live football result. This seemed to break about 10 years ago and no one seems to care enough to fix it.
azalemeth 6y ago
Me too. The other argument, of course, is that instead of spending 10x on (taxpaying) staff and employees within the UK, in order to create a new technology that may be useful and solve other problems, they are spending 1x on Amazon. Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK, and, moreover, have motives that are arguably aligned to the detriment of the BBC. I'm slightly sad to read about the change. In many ways, I'd rather the perl duck tape & php approach, running on real computers that the BBC owns. Maybe that officially makes me old.
- ti_ranger 6y ago
  > instead of spending 10x on (taxpaying) staff and employees within the UK, in order to create a new technology that may be useful and solve other problems, they are spending 1x on Amazon. You imply that Amazon/AWS doesn't employ any staff in the UK, which is wrong. > Amazon will not pay any tax within the UK Amazon must certainly pay taxes in the UK, or at least the tax ends up being paid on Amazon share price increases from employees share vesting.
tiew9Vii 6y ago
You can submit a freedom of information request https://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/requesting-information https://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/requesting-information . Asking for a yearly spend on AWS and self managed dc’s since 2014 might help as they only started using AWS around then.

crehn 6y ago

BBC still has a frustrating bug on mobile: 1. Tap on Most Read 2. Tap on any story 3. Tap back in the browser It'll go back to the Most Read tab, then after a second switch to the Latest Stories tab.

jonathanlydall 6y ago
This. Drives me nuts, it seems to reload the page as you go back into it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ralph87 6y ago

Running a site the size of the BBC on Lambda is nothing short of an exuberant waste of a government-subsidized budget, it's absolutely crazy. Lambda VM time has a massive markup compared to regular compute. It only makes sense where usage does not exceed some threshold the BBC absolutely certainly do. There are plenty of alternative options, even on AWS, that don't suffer from such huge markup without requiring any additional ops input. The thing that runs in Lambda is practically a container image already. Does it really cost tangible budget to have CI build a full image rather than a ZIP file that already contains a few million lines of third party JS/Python deps? IMHO this is the epitome of serverless gone wrong.

jevgeni 6y ago
Completely agree. What also irks me is the corpspeak sleigh of hand, where the problem of maintaining your infrastructure is “solved” by using AWS Lambda. It’s not solved, you’re just paying some AWS contractors to do it for you and you assume it’ll be alright.
- remus 6y ago
  > It’s not solved, you’re just paying some AWS contractors to do it for you and you assume it’ll be alright. In as much as maintaining infrastructure can ever be 'solved', doesn't paying someone else who does a good job of it to provide you with the infra count as solving the problem? Otherwise you'd be down the mines picking ore out of the ground so you can build your chips right, rather than relying on intel/AMD to do it for you and assuming it'll be alright.
  - jevgeni 6y ago
    The problem arises when the infra providers’ setup stops being aligned with yours. Which, given a small organization and a long enough period of time, is guaranteed to happen. The question is then: is it just cheaper in the long run to deal with the hassle of your own infra (we are still talking about the cloud, btw, the thing that supposedly already solved it) or would it be ok to follow the practices and changes in the providers offering?

sudeepj 6y ago

Tangential: Is this official BBC tech blog? If yes, I am surprised they are using medium. I would think that an org of this reputation, history & size would host their own blogs.

jlelse 6y ago
Der Spiegel in Germany does the same.
jonp888 6y ago
They do host their own blogs, this is a cross-post: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet Possibly it's a sensible way of bringing it to a wider audience, since usually their blog content will be specific to UK-based BBC content consumers.

rozab 6y ago

The BBC has a big problem with cargo cultery right now, copying large social media companies for the hell of it despite having completely different aims. For instance, if I tap the livestream on the homepage it will lie that I need to sign in to watch it, though the popup can just be dismissed. It's shocking that they've adopted useless metrics like conversion to justify user-hostile behaviour.

OJFord 6y ago
I don't think you're supposed to be able to dismiss it - it's not about conversion, you're supposed to need an account so that you've had to agree 'I have a television licence'.
- timthorn 6y ago
  The BBC has been explicit that it is about data collection. You don't need a licence to listen to the BBC radio stations but they have switched to requiring a login: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bbc-iplayer-sign-register-licence-fee-tv-radio-programmes-streaming-a7798691.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
  - mavhc 6y ago
    Pretty sure they're just getting everyone used to logging in for the day that they require evidence of a tv licence
  - gadders 6y ago
    They also pulled their radio stations from TuneIn because TuneIn couldn't or wouldn't share their data with the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/37e4e3f6-fbd2-4c14-8d72-7f7139641582 https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/37e4e3f6-fbd...
- rozab 6y ago
  Oops, I was slightly wrong here. It says "You will soon need to sign in to watch". Still very misleading imo. https://i.postimg.cc/yNKT82sp/Screenshot-20201104-102848.png https://i.postimg.cc/yNKT82sp/Screenshot-20201104-102848.png This is part of their online news service so shouldn't need TV license.

Jaruzel 6y ago

My main issue with the BBC news site is it's awful Search. There's no option to filter, or sort the results, making non-super-specific searching almost impossible. I know I could do site:bbc.co.uk/news in Google, but uh, it's Google, so I'd rather not.

dna_polymerase 6y ago
Use Startpage for that. It's basically a proxy to Google.

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

I'd like to understand how the team decided to move all of the BBC services entirely to serverless infrastructure. How is serverless the best solution for a heavily used platform? What lead management down this path?

shinytech 6y ago
Good question, could it be the cost or at least the illusion of cost saving? I do not know but it will interesting to see how much they are saving, if they do?
- say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  Managers don't publicize mistakes and costly lessons learned. There's only going to be this announcement. They made a big mistake riding first class on the hype train.

Traster 6y ago

The BBC seems extremely good at building large, complex websites. They appear to have acheived this ability by chooosing to continuously build new large, complex websites. Obviously as an organisation the BBC isn't actually doing many new things and as a result the BBC's engineering department has been forced into an awkward position where they're continuously building the same new large complex website. It's stunning that the first part of this article wasn't what they wanted to actually acheive by writing a new website beyond the obviously false "For them all, we need to ensure they use the latest and best technology. That’s the only way to ensure they’re the best at what they do." Frankly I giggled a little with the image showing a spot the difference. Well done, you spent tens of millions and the website looks identical.

p6steve 6y ago
This is the natural result of building a publicly funded empire of literally hundreds of ex-perl hackers in a room and telling them (i) justify your job and (ii) you are not allowed to do anything different because the BBC must not compete with private sector websites. Looking forward to the next iteration in raku using My::Cro.

SPBS 6y ago

I visited https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54702974 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54702974 to confirm the lighthouse scores in their article, but the Performance consistently scored ~30 instead. Why is there such a large gap between what I'm seeing and what they're seeing?