Think Different

One of the key goals we set ourselves when we developed the new iPlayer was that it would have to be fast to use. We understand that any delay in getting you to the video is frustrating as the site is just a jumping off point into TV and Radio content. But how do we make things fast? Displaying a web page in the browser contains many steps, some we can control some we can't. Time spent for the request and response travelling over the network we can't control, but we can control how long the pages take to generate and how large they are. We also have a degree of control over how long those pages can take to render in your browser. We had our work cut out for us on the new version of iPlayer. Personalised websites require much more processing power and data storage The current site uses one back-end service that we pull data from to build the pages. The new site uses many more, and we both post and pull data from them. This means that every returning user gets a differ...