Viewers will be able to watch the 2023 Strictly contestants again immediately after broadcast.
The BBC has made a significant ‘under the hood’ update to the BBC iPlayer that will improve the speed at which new programmes are made available.
Previously, if viewers missed the end of a show they would have had to wait for a considerable period of time for the on demand version to become available. Now, those shows will be available much faster, within a matter of a few minutes of the show ending.
The technology, dubbed pseudo VOD, will significantly reduce the wait on live Saturday night staples including Match of the Day and Strictly Come Dancing.
“Rather than processing the whole programme once it’s finished, this pseudo VOD system reuses the live segments of video you see when you’re watching live on iPlayer to create a temporary on demand video instead, which we can publish as soon as the programme ends,” explains Henry Webster, head of product, Media Services. “This plugs the gap, while we work on processing the high quality on demand video as we did before, and once this is ready replace the temporary video.”
Improvements have also been made to reduce the latency of live video, the lag time between the broadcast of live content, and the time it takes to reach the viewer.
“We’ve done this by modernising the systems we use to process live video,” says Webster. “When we prepare video for live streaming, that media is separated into segments of a few seconds each, which make it easier and faster to distribute. However, preparing those separate segments takes time, and the time it takes can vary. That’s why we have latency in the first place, we build in a worst case amount of time so we can be confident the segment of media will definitely have been prepared properly by the time the live stream needs it.
“What we’ve done now is replace these systems with newer ones, which take a shorter and more predictable amount of time to prepare each segment. That means we’ve been able to reduce the latency, while remaining confident viewers will still get a reliable, stable, uninterrupted viewing experience.
The BBC says it has been able to cut the latency by about 20 seconds, though in reality this still means a wait of about 60 seconds after the live broadcast.
