BBC Redux was aBBC Research & Development system that digitally recorded[1]television and radio output in the United Kingdom produced by theBritish Broadcasting Corporation.[2]: 2 It operated from 2007 to 2022[1][3] and contains severalpetabytes of recordings[1] and subtitle data.[1] It is notable for being theproof of concept for theFlash Video streaming version of theBBC iPlayer.[2]: 15
It was an internal research project developed for testing[4][5][6] which acted as a giantvideo on demand orpersonal video recorder (PVR).[4] It contained a complete digital archive, recording both television and radio twenty-four hours a day, of all of the BBC's national and also some regional broadcast output since mid-2007,[7][8] and automatically compiled without human input.[2]: 5 [6] The BBC stated that BBC Redux was one of its major contributions to the field of digital archiving and preservation.[9]
Some accounts for accessing the system on a temporary basis were made available at Mashed 08[10] and again at Culture Hack Day 2011,[11] providing streaming-only access to BBC content broadcast during the weekend of the event.[12] As well as streaming, the system enables high-quality downloads of television and radio content,[13] and has had the option to download subtitles from programmes since 2008.[14]
BBC Redux had originally been developed at the BBC's Kingswood Warren campus,[15] in only two months,[16] and with the investment required being significantly less than the iPlayer.[6] The saved content can be used forbroadcast compliance checking[2]: 16 and by BBC programme researchers.[17] BBC Redux was only available to employees, because existing legal contracts with content producers limited how material could be broadcast, distributed and made available to general consumers.[18][19] TheReadme file for associated API frameworks hosted onGitHub states:
BBC Snippets and BBC Redux are tools designed to allow BBC staff to develop new ways to view and navigate content. As such, they're not open to the public.[20]
In May 2022, in a blog post, the BBC confirmed the sunset and ultimate closure of the Redux service. Redux content was migrated to the new BBC Archive Search, which operates on Amazon Web Services. New programmes are delivered to the BBC Archive automatically as they are ingested for playout.[3]
The system recorded over 100 megabits per second, continuously.[2]: 3 As of August 2011[update], BBC Redux contained 300,000 hours of recorded audio and video.[21]
A series of standard Digital Video Broadcasting terrestrial antennas and satellite dishes, coupled toDVB-T andDVB-STV tuner cards were used to capture the incomingDVB multiplexes[19] transmitted for over-the-airFreesat andFreeviewterrestrial television.[2]: 5 These rawMPEG transport streams are split intosingle-programme MPEG transport streams, encapsulated inRTP, and sent usingUDPIP multicast within the IPv4multicast address range233.122.227.0/24 fromAS31459.[2]: 5 From the multicast streams individualtelevision programmes can be extracted and saved, without requiring any transcoding or conversion of the containedMPEG-2 video data.[2]: 5
As of May 2009[update], racks ofSun Fire T1000 and T2000 machines were used acquiring and storing the incoming programmes respectively; while commodityx86-64 computers were used for database operations and playback transcoding.[2]: 4 The T2000 storage nodes were connected by10 Gigabit Ethernet on the network side,[2]: 7 and then byserial attached SCSI toRAID boxes containing high-capacitycommoditySerial ATAhard disk drives.[2]: 7 The "fsck-free"ZFSfile system was used after experiments withUnix File System (UFS) proved it to be too slow.[2]: 8 Sun Microsystems had to manually repair the filesystems on two occasions usingUnixdd.[2]: 11–13
The software was based onopen source technologies,[6] and used a combination ofmod_perl andC running onOpenSolaris.[2]: 9, 14 A series of "lolcat" images were used for the system'sHTTP 404 and error pages.[22]
Different formats were available for download, including the rawMPEG-TS files and compressedMPEG-4 andFLV versions of the files.
BBC Redux content was migrated to BBC Archive Search after the project was discontinued. All recordings from non-BBC channels were removed shortly after the launch of BBC Archive Search. BBC Redux data is still held by the BBC Archive and is still used for research purposes, including in datasets.
As part of the European Union (EU) "NoTube" project running between 2009–12, a recommendation research system usingLonclass categorisation andTanimoto coefficient matching was tested by the BBC R&D Audience Experience team and integrated with 23,000 recordings delivered from Redux.[23] The matching dataset was gathered over a period of five months.[24]
For a BBC Digital Media Initiative (DMI) demonstration entitled "Million Minutes", files from the BBC'sD-3 video tape archive were imported into the Redux system during 2009–2010.[17] This also used commercial software fromArtesia Digital Media Group and involved creating arepresentational state transfer (REST) interface onto the content stored within Redux.[25]
During 2010,Safari[26] andGoogle Chrome[27]browser extensions were developed to integrate Redux content with the mainwww.bbc.co.uk/programmes directory.[28]
In January 2012, the BBC's Multimedia Classification team announced they were hoping to test and add "mood-based navigation" to the existing BBC Redux interface,[29][30][31] along withaudience measurement and other richmetadata comprising work part-funded by theTechnology Strategy Board.[7] During 2010–2011 BBC Research and Development integrated content archived in BBC Redux with the BBC's existing internal BBCInFax system, allowing finding of metadata and archive content within the same browser window,[32] covering news andsubtitles from over the previous five years.[33]
During March 2012, the Atlas index changed the method of equivalence matching used for indexing against BBC Redux.[34]
an internal version of BBC iPlayer called Redux, which was originally developed for testing
BBC Redux, a playable archive of almost everything broadcast since mid-2007
BBC Research developed a Redux site enabling a high quality download service of some BBC TV products.
Brandon Butterworth explains: 'People thought it would be really difficult to run on all platforms, that it would take years to develop. But I led a team to do a Flash version that would work on Linux and we did it in two months'
BBC Redux is iPlayer on steroids – with an API. It records the whole digital multiplex, … But the rights are complicated- because the BBC doesn't own many of the programmes it broadcasts.
User Evaluation on BBC Redux (by BBC staff) …
Changes to the behaviour of BBC Redux equivalence
