BBC R&D EXPLAINS: How to Make a Personalised Story
[Music] hi there welcome to Urd explains and some fun how to make a personalized story I am a young i work at bc rd we're part of the big sea and we focus on research and development looking at future technologies that might be with you in
the nextfew years so we're engineers here we like to expand and stuff so we thought it would be nice to get together some of my colleagues at BBC R&D on top chavez some of the things we're working on and get your feedback on them okay so with me today
is Matthew Briggs Matthew is elite R&D engineer with their future experiences technologies team Matt how you doing all right thank you my how are you yeah I am getting used to life and lockdown hey how are you you cooking with it okay well I must admit I'm missing
the view we would have had if we the film this is planned up on the sixth floor in doc house looking over the Manchester skyline but you know I'm doing okay yeah and we get to see in each other's houses yes okay so do you want to tell
us a bit about what you do at R&D no max well I'm a lead Rd engineer but I spend a lot of my time actually running a work stream kind of a research area and the research area I'm kind of working in is is object-based media which is
one of the technologies that we're going to talk about today that enables this personalized story turning okay so you've spent last few few years doing a lot of work on personalized stories Matt so why is personalization important why why are we looking at it at BBC R&D well
I suppose it it starts challenging the assumption that one size fits all is a it's kind of appropriate when it comes to media you know we all need something different from what we read from what we read on websites from what we see in the media and this
is about really looking at how I can make a bit of media work better for any particular individual in the audience rather than everybody getting exactly the same content we have made a number of audience experiences recently that we've user tested it's very important for us that we're
personalizing for a reason you know this is not an area that we've got into for the novelty of it we really want to get to the heart of how changing a piece of media for kind of every individual in the audience in some way can offer them more
value so they can get more out of it whether that's more educationally or you know kind of more entertainment wise it doesn't matter really if if personalization offerors offers us a way of you know upping what each individual audience member gets then it's what we want to look
into so we user tested recently a personalized documentary called Instagram efficacious which was personalized by kind of the taste that you might have so do you like tech or not do you like sports you like celebrities and it was also personalized in terms of tones so depending on
the way you answered our questions at the start the documentary you'd even get a different presenter and this test did really quite well with the audience they all felt like the personalization was meaningful to them because I guess the level of personalization that people are maybe used to
or maybe you know a curated playlist on Spotify is that is a type of personalization but this the object based media experiences you're talking about that you've tested out with users is much deeper it's not deeper than that you tell us a bit about the object based nature
and the type of personalization you can achieve with that I think I sort of separate them in terms of what you're talking about with Spotify or maybe iPlayer recommending you something to watch the key for me there is recommendation and recommendation and personalization they get a little bit
mixed up and I can see why so when we talk recommendation that's very much about saying well you've consumed you've watched some piece of media you've read something we think that you might like something else based on what you've just read or what you just watched of course
so that's very much recomendation you know you've listened to a bunch of tracks Spotify recommends you some new tracks and you could say that's about personalizing a sort of service at the level of individual bits of content you know whole programs but when we talk about personalization and
when we're talking about personalization today we're talking about getting into those individual programs and changing their content so this is about having maybe a personalized news bulletin or a personalized radio show or a personalized drama anything really but we're not talking about saying well you've watched this so
you might like that we're actually paying well in this individual program we think you might want it this way or that way so it's very it's very different from recommendation I would say and you're the kind of aim at the moment is really supporting creatives and been able
to make personalized experiences so how are you going about you know getting tools into the hands of those creatives into production teams absolutely yeah that's something that me and the team have been working on for a number of years now we started off in R&D a few years
ago working on what we call object based media and this is just the idea that you can split content up into chunks and send all of those bits separately to the audience devices and then the ordnance devices can kind of recombine them in some way and once you've
sort of worked at that kind of level it's a technology that enables this sort of personalization because you're not sending a whole movie file to someone anymore you're maybe sending all of seen separately and the subtitle separately and maybe even the music so all those items can kind
of be swapped around so we did a number of years of kind of prototyping these approaches our R&D but after a while we realized that you know we as you said at the top we are we're at we're a bunch of engineers you know we have some content
is an R&D but to really kind of scale the discovery of where we can personalize within content we needed to get content creators involved and you can't get content creators involved without tools so we've been working on a kind of suite of tools called story kit which have
just reached they're kind of one point not release milestone and these these tools main authoring to a story former allows you as someone who's got an idea for how you might personalize a bit of content or make a bit of content interactive you can actually kind of execute
these ideas with the tool you don't need programming skills it's kind of drag-and-drop interface and we've had several production teams both within and outside the BBC using these tools to build a number of audience experiences so it's by kind of getting these tools into people's hands as you
say we're in a phase now where we want to get the tools into as many people's hands as possible because it is it's the creative people that are going to help discover where the value of this personalization is so get back to the tools of story former that's
now available for crates use that's not in a minute the first thing you tell us some about some of the experiences that are already being built both fame some experimentations within rd and also its some third-party creatives other parts of you can see there's a number of experiences
to try on taster and I believe due to current lockdown situation the whole mood of Em's went back on they cannot expire it's hunter Ron of user test and another back on their people to try out so I guess maybe the first thing before creatures go to use
the tool they might want to check out what is already on there the kind of things new experimental yeah so there's there's a few experiments that I think are still up on on BBC taster some of those were built with the story format all that I've been talking
about and there are other experiments into personalization that used this object based media approach that aren't built with story informer we started off actually in in this area by actually personalizing a live football broadcast that was one of the first things we did a very simple personalization which
end of the pitch do you want to sit in which stand are you who do you support basically and that was a really simple experiment that made you feel like you were sitting you know with the rest of your supporters because all of the crowd noise nor of
the applause went along with how well your team was doing so very simple basic experiment that one's not out there anymore but it gives you an idea of how interesting and how how meaningful this personalization could be using story format one of the first things we built was
an origami frog make along and that's been put back on taster because you know there are people at home and you might want something crafty to do so that was our kind of first output of the tool that we've that we've been building that's a step by step
tutorial so unlike say a youtube video it doesn't run away from you it waits at the end of each step for you to kind of complete your folds and using our kind of object based technology you can you view the the guy Sam who's teaching you you can
view what he's doing from different angles which can help you get your folds right you can even flip through the whole thing as a series of diagrams if you wanted to so that was that was very exciting for us that was our first release probably over a couple
of years ago now I think the next the next really big thing we got we persuaded the click team so BBC you've got a tech segment called click it goes out regularly on news 24 News as it's called now I should say and for their 1,000th show they
decided to use story format to build a fully interactive version of the show so they normally put out a 30 minute show every week but for this I think there's ever two hours of content it's all interactive you can dive around the new stories you can get more
detailed you can choose in what order you kind of hear the tech news so that was a really big forum for us that was the first time we had quite a major BBC production taking upon basically all those tools maximum here because matter how I viewed it I
interacted with that I thought was fantastic with a branch and narrative type thing I think that someone not get in touch a mathematician wanting to work out exactly how many roots through the story they're wrong oh they were they're a crazy amount of roots through there as ever
watch it lots of times Anderson experienced everything but yeah I really liked it [Music] and that's something that you really looked at in detail and believed you produced a report for the Instagram equation expedience for you're looking at how people interact the branching narrative story and Kinshasa Bank
instagram plication yeah so Instagram vacation so unlike clique which was an idea that came from the collecting themselves Instagram efficacious was cutting R&D really setting out to make some content that we could use to kind of test our ideas you know so it's very deliberate the way we
set up the functionality there so we wanted to make a piece of interactive content you know kind of targeting younger thirty fives to see how well this personalization might work for them to see if it makes our content more engaging so we decided to we decided to obviously
pick a topic that was pretty relevant for the age group Instagram looking at the good the bad and evil image of Instagram and it's kind of like a magazine sort of show so there's a number of articles about different Instagram instagramers they called Instagram as I don't even
know yeah so yeah the gram on the gram the grammars we've got a number of those talking about their experiences of of Instagram but we really wanted to test out the idea of of that personalization so obviously social networks are great in terms of personalization because you can
follow tech you can follow select you can follow sports you know everyone's used to those feeds being personalized they personalize them themselves by who they follow so I suppose we were kind of taking that idea on into you know into a kind of into a video based interactive
media piece allowing you to tailor that so the documentary would focus on different different aspects of interest through that lens of Instagram I suppose and different from the click where you are continually making choices as this you will please act and you setup your utility area students at
the beginning and then it plays out yeah absolutely yes that's so that's a really important point to make yes yes so we talked about well I talked about upfront personalization and kind of lean forward interaction and I'll try and put a bit of meat on those so in
in click and I'll click experience you start the show it looks like a normal bit of video right and then some options appear at the bottom of the screen and you choose what you want to happen and the entire show proceeds in that manner so every time there's
a kind of point of interaction or a point of personalization we say to you how do you want this personalized now you want to go this way do you want to go that way so that's kind of we call those choices in kind of story format terminology you
lean forwards as a viewer and you make a choice where you want things to go now Instagram work Instagram efficacious in a different way we have something that we call variable panels a bit of a dry bit of terminology but this is basically like a form that you
can put in front of the viewer at any point in the program or in the experience as we call them and they can personalize in that panel so Instagram ofin starts and it says well do you like sport or not yeah you're interested in celebrities yet what's your
view on tech do you want to be informed or entertained right there's a number of questions and we asked those all before Instagram efficacious starts so we've got that personalization from you right at the start and then the Instagram if occation plays out not like click at all
because almost all the way through you lean back you don't have to interact again for that personalization to happen because we picked it up from you from the start and which is really interesting I think the the choices mechanism of leaning forward is quite fun and engaging but
the idea that we might be able to personalize something upfront without you needing to interact so much that really lends itself to an ID sort of personalization that doesn't really take too much effort from you as an audience member and one of the things that we're interested in
in the future maybe we're looking at how we can connect kind of new services to your personal data but at the same time we're looking at how we can keep that personal data safe take it back essentially so you own it now if you will let future BBC
per services into some of your personal data for some of your likes and dislikes maybe it's just giving access to your Facebook or Instagram feed to work out whether you like celebrities or technology without having to ask you we can imagine some experiences then that are personalized actually
without you having to do anything so lots of great experiences to try out on teeth sir so hopefully you can check out some of those but man I wonder can you tell us if you can do any research on the accessibility use cases yeah well there's been a
number of bits of work around R&D I should say at this point OPM is and this personalization isn't just something that the my team dearie kind of crops up all around R&D and one of the most interesting accessibility pieces of work we've done is is is a piece
called casualty loud and clear so this was kind of a an accessibility trial for casualty that was looking at how well people can hear the dialogue and how well people can kind of understand what goes on so you can imagine like a lot of videogames you can balance
your music against your dialogue and your sound effects and stuff but this work kind of goes way beyond that it looks at what the kind of relative narrative importance of all the bits of audio in something are in one of our earlier experiments actually we made a variable
length radio program and that had a music control and a dialogue control and we made the assumption that all of the all of the narrative was in the dialogue without really thinking sometimes music as a storytelling function or a sound effect might have a storytelling function so this
idea of say if you want to hear if you want to understand better at what goes on of just punching the dialogue up in audio 11 terms it doesn't really always hold so we worked with the University of Salford and Lauryn Ward to put together a kind of
demo of a much more kind of nuanced and intelligent sort of audio balance control for the audience so Lauren talked to a bunch of producers about what the function of kind of a sound effect in casualty is music and the dialogue and was able to kind of assign
a narrative importance to every bit of audio that they're used in the production and then as an audience member you can kind of decide well do I want to kind of really get into the story here if I've got kind of a hearing impairment do I want to
kind of lose anything that's not the storytelling elements of casualty or maybe if you're at home listening on a fantastic surround system you can go all the you can basically go the other way and turn up all the immersion so you're kind of immersed in all of the
sound effects of of casualty but you're still getting the dialogue in the middle so we think this is a I think it's an absolutely fascinating and really useful thing to be doing and it can only be done really through this object based media approach of delivering all of
those bits of audio separately and of course it's not just things on screen that can be adapted to suit your context to your environment your preferences it also be things around us like in a smart home environments oh yeah some even foresters work on a living room in
the future with colleagues at Lancaster University we're looking at that to how things can be adapted how your smart lights can can you know be in tune with what you're seeing on screen yes yes so we've had some involvement with kind of various living room with the future
setups that are looking about I suppose spreading that experience of media across any device that might be able to represent some aspect of it whether it's light bulbs or fans or you know all sorts of really interesting kind of immersive stuff there and we also have work in
orchestrating content across multiple screens so we have a multiple device orchestration project and we've worked in the past with the BT and other partners on to immerse and they're all about with the multiple device orchestration imagine a radio play but you've kind of got multiple speakers around your
house so you can have the little portable speaker in front of you for the dialogue but the atmosphere is coming out of maybe a couple of mobile phones in the background you know really really interesting stuff that looks at using the devices we've got around the house in
new ways to kind of make these experiences more immersive [Music] so moving on how how can creators get their hands on these tools that you built well the first port of call to get hold of some of our tools is its maker box so maker box is a
website and a team that are there to kind of get these creative tools into into into your hands I suppose and support you in using those tools so there's many tools on their story formers just one of them but that's how vehicle really fur kind of engaging with
this community of practice it allows us as the story former team to make it as good as possible and then Laura and her team in maker box can get out there they can promote it they can support users they make sure that we've all got the right stuff
to support the users so it's really fantastic to have that have this kind of function that they exist to engage with these communities find these communities and kind of stimulate them with these tools so using SIF a creative wants to use story former via BBC maker box they
just go to the websites they can then download the tool to the download the tool to their own machine well no first things first you you're gonna send thank-you box an email saying who you are why you want it what you might do with it this is not
just for BBC people so we are trying to spread it wider than that and it's a cloud-based tool so really you don't have to download anything it's all done in the browser you ingest your media through the browser you arrange it in a story format aller and add
interactivity and then we have a player that can play those experiences out well that's great and how do you think these experiences will be hosted in the future there's something we can see on BBC iPlayer in the future do you think well I would love to see that
obviously so we're we we would we have our own player at the moment but I think to to kind of widen I suppose there we want to make object based media and these personalized experiences a bit more normal really a bit more regular bit more business as usual
so we're working on a number of leads that would help us get our player into all the places that you might find a video player around the BBC website and does production have to change much if you want to make your your a new experience object beast I
mean how much does it diverge from normal you know planning out our shoot and filming it well it really is that's a function of the ideas that you have so a personalized object based media experience could be as simple as a pre or post watershed moment in fact
if we go back to casualty imagine you can personalize casualty if you're a bit squeamish right so the only things you might change in casualty are maybe cutting away from a knife going in or something like that really really minor edits and you can imagine that building an
experience like that that's got that little level of personalization will be quite simple whereas if you want to build another click 1000 kind of all-singing all-dancing branching experience that's going to involve more planning what we are finding in general is that the more complex the interactions that you're
imagining are or the more complex the personalization is all of the works in the planning stage by the time you bring your ideas into story format you've kind of gone out and you've captured the footage before that you've structured your ideas you've worked out essentially well they could
go from here to here so we need to make sure we film this version of that and that version of that so yeah my answer really is it depends what you want to do it's it's as complex or as simple as you want it to be ok so
when people are using the tool on story farmer they can communicate with us on maker box we're both registered on there you can talk to us directly on that if you have it any issues if you got feedback on the tool we really encourage you to you know
get on there get on maker box play with the tools they've got lots of tools but particularly with what we're talking about in this episode have a look at story former and see what you can come up with I reached out to us and let us know what
you think Matt is there anything else you'd like to see about that no I mean obviously I care what you're saying please get in touch with us on maker box it's you know there's there's a little bit of emailing to do to get access to the tool but
we are trying to get as many people on as because when it comes down to it we are now going to learn from you creating things with this tool excellent and also there's an article published recently about the our learnings the research we've done and our learnings on
Instagram ofin branching narrative a more like gonna lean back lean back lean forward well you make your decisions at the beginning then it plays out so if anyone wants to learn more about that you know we're really really open about what we do you should definitely check us
out on the Rd website and we've got blog in there we blog very regularly on what we're doing and also you can keep in touch with our follow us on Twitter a lot of tweets cool now I am on current current things that are going on and also
just let us know what you think of this this new format already explains because we'll be back with you we're plan to do it maybe quarterly and talk about the various projects that we've got on so please do less than we think and hopefully children again [Music]
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