Reprocessed

When Matt Biddulph (R&Mi T&D Architecture Team Gruppenfuhrer) wrote about Moyles-proof code he was talking about processing incoming SMS. The core plumbing of that system was a way of turning an external (to the BBC) store of messages provided by a third-party into an internal feed of messages that applications could be built on top of. That’s how you’re able to build the cool stuff: by having solid, scalable, adaptable plumbing.

The project I was working on recently was making the plumbing work with MMS too. The way our team (Matt Biddulph, Paul Clifford and myself) tries to work is to tie our plumbing work (which is really the core of what we’re supposed to be doing) into something useful. The useful thing that was built on top of the new plumbing was the Mobile Interactive Producer (MIP), which sounds kind of grand but was really a super-simple way of turning incoming picture messages into picture galleries on the BBC web site. When you’re building a system for BBC radio producers to use at two in the morning in a muddy field, super-simple is what you need. Our team’s boss Dan Hill has more on that over at City of sound.

Without going into too much dull technical detail, what the plumbing does is take a feed of incoming MMS messages, process them and (and this is the trick with MMS) make all their component parts accessible. Once everything’s there you announce the message’s arrival over your messaging channel, and anything (things one or many) that’s interested in the message can obtain its components and do something with them.

In our case, the interested party was the MIP system, which took incoming messages, filtered them based on various authentication and categorisation criteria, and then sent the picture and text contained within to one of several stores. The last six pictures in a store were then published on the web site as a gallery.

At no point did someone have to open an email, copy over some files or upload things to the website by hand. This was quite a victory for the system - providing this kind of immediacy ‘in the field’ would normally require someone with a computer and an internet connection, no easy feat in the front row of a Glastonbury performance.

Kudos to Mr. Matt Webb, who built the MIP system (I did some things to it later on, but the good stuff was him). The core of the system was well designed — the switch from supporting stores for one BBC music site to supporting many stores on many sites anywhere on bbc.co.uk was pretty trivial — and we scaled it up, and then scaled it some more. MIP went to Glastonbury (in the company of Radio 1 and 6 Music), the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Hyde Park with Radio 1, Euro 2004 in Portugal, and is currently visiting Ibiza (again in the company of Radio 1).

On the Glastonbury weekend, over 70 messages made it through to the galleries, being sent by six different people on site. This was a pretty phenomenal amount of use, especially given the inherent network-related problems of sending MMS from a site filled with 100,000 people who also have mobiles…

The greatest strength of the system seems to have been in connecting shows with their audiences. The immediacy of the system (immeasurably less faffy than using a digital camera, uploading pictures to a laptop, uploading from there to the site) allows something to happen in the studio (field, in this case) on air, and a picture of the happenings can be on the web within five minutes, which means that a DJ can point people to the gallery right there and then.