Chatting with Stuart over a pint last week, he mentioned that the Open2 folks had started publishing a programme announcement feed on Twitter that lets you know when a TV programme the OU’s been involved with is about to be shown on one of the BBC channels: open2 programme announcements on Twitter.
By subscribing to the RSS feed from the Open2 twitter account, it’s easy enough to get yourself an alert for upcoming BBC/OU programmes.
The link goes through to the programme page on the open2 website, which is probably a Good Thing, but it strikes me that there’s no obvious way to watch the programme from the Open2 page?
That is, there’s no link to an iplayer or BBC programmes view, such as BBC Programmes > Coast:
If I’m reading the BBC Programmes Developers’ Guide correctly, not all the URL goodness has been switched on for these URLs yet? For example, here’s the guidance:
Programmes
/programmes/:groupPID/episodes/upcoming
/programmes/:groupPID/episodes/upcoming/debut
/programmes/:groupPID/episodes/playerTo access these add .xml, .json or .yaml to the end of the url.
Whilst http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mvlc works as I expect, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mvlc/episodes requires a branch into a year – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mvlc/episodes/2008, and I can’t get the upcoming or format extensions to work at all?
As well as the BBC Programmes page, we can also find iPlayer links from a search on the iPlayer site: Search for “coast” on iPlayer:
Going back to the twitter feed, I wonder whether there’s any point in having a second twitter account that alerts people as to when a programme is available on iplayer? A second alert could give you a day’s notice that a programme is about to disappear from iPlayer?
Just by the by, here are a couple more BBC related things I spotted over the last few days: BBC Top Gear channel on Youtube; and BBC’s Tomorrow’s World to be revived (Telegraph).
Now if the “popular science magazine show” referred to is the one that was mentioned at the BBC/OU science programming brainstorming session I posted about a couple of weeks ago, I’m pretty sure the producer said it wasn’t going to be like Tomorrow’s World… Which I guess means it is – in that it is going to be like Tomorrow’s World in terms of positioning and format, but it isn’t going to be exactly like it in terms of content and delivery… (I have to admit that I got the impression is was going to be more like *** **** for Science… ;-)
OUseful.Info, the blog... 
It seems that the BBC are going to start offering a series catch-up on iPlayer, for first run series:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/08_august/23/iplayer.shtml
After Twittering with Ian Roddis, my guess is iPlayer will be fee based outside UK (with outside chance of ad-based), “free-to-air” (like Freesat) in UK, with a subscription model for content in the UK outside the free periods (7 day catchup, series catchup on first run).
As to whether the OU should rethink the Broadcast strategy with iPlayer a major part of that, who knows?
Thinking back over the above open2 twitter alerts, it struck me that directing people to TV (by implication) and open2 web content might actually be a really clever thing to do, eg in context of people increasingly browsing alongside watching a tv programme… If they browse open2 content while watching OU co-pro, that’s good for us, presumably?