BBC Media Widgets
June 20th, 2009 Posted in AS3, FlashJust a quick update on what we’ve been working on in the BBC Media Player – we’ve introduced a new product range called Media Widgets. The first of which (below) is a collection of clips from the recently concluded series of The Apprentice.
For the Media Player this means we’ve built an API into some of our core playback functionality as well as exposing a rich event model. Since our current Media Player is written in AS2 and new products are being written in AS3 we had to create a LocalConnection hook into the API. The Collection widget below written in AS3 (incidently using pureMVC) invokes playlist traversal via the API on the Media Player when clicking on the list selector – pretty cool stuff!
Not only can BBC products consume the API “FLash-in-Flash”, but the API is also exposed to JavaScript. You can see this in action in the latest release of BBC iPlayer. One of the new pieces of functionality is being able to send “clips” to your friend with a short url (similar tinyurl.com or snurl.com). You can opt to send the whole programme or you can chose to select a start point which your friend can watch from (Will we see lots of links through to continuity errors thanks to this feature? 
) – part of this feature is consuming playback progress events from the Media Players event model.
Expect to see lots more uses coming and keep an eye out for some creative uses of the API on many new and existing BBC website pages.
(note: currently the API will only work when the Media Player is embeded on a BBC domain)
The Apprentice collection widget:
One Response to “BBC Media Widgets”
By mattjpoole on Jun 20, 2009
I should add that the point of this type of Media Widget is sydnication so feel free to click on “embed” and copy the embed code into your blog/website.