Recent OU Programmes on the BBC, via iPlayer

As @liamgh will tell you, Coast is getting a quite a few airings at the moment on various BBC channels. And how does @liamgh know this? Because he’s following the open2 openuniversity twitter feed, which sends out alerts when an OU programme is about to be aired on a broadcast BBC channel.

(As well as the feed from the open2 twitter account, you can also find out what’s on from the OU/BBC schedule feed (http://open2.net/feeds/rss_schedule.xml), via the Open2.net schedule page; iCal feeds appear not to be available…)

So to make it easier for him to catch up on any episodes he missed, here’s a quick hack that mines the open2 twitter feed to create a “7 day catch up” site for broadcast OU TV programmes (the page also links through to several video playlists from the OU’s Youtube site).

The page actually displays links to programmes that are currently viewable on BBC iPlayer (either via a desktop web browser, or via a mobile browser – which means you can view this stuff on your iPhone ;-), and a short description of the programme, as pulled from the programme episode‘s web page on the BBC website. You’ll note that the original twitter feed just mentions the programme title; the TinyURLd link goes back to the series web page on the Open2 website.

Thinking about it, I could probably have done the hackery required to get iPlayer URLs from with in the page; but I didn’t… Given the clue that page is put together using a JQuery script I stole from this post on Parsing Yahoo Pipes JSON Feeds with jQuery, you can maybe guess where the glue logic for this site lives?;-)

There are three pipes involved in the hackery – the JSON that is pulled into the page comes from this OU Recent programmes (via BBC iPlayer) pipe.

THe first part grabs the feed, identifies the programme title, and then searches for that programme on the BBC iPlayer site.

The nested BBC Search Results scrape pipe searches the BBC programmes site and filters results that point to an actual iPlayer page (so we can we can watch the result on iPlayer).

Back in the main pipe, we take the list of recently tweeted OU programmes that are available on iPlayer, grab the programme ID (which is used as a key in all manner of BBC URLs :-), and then call another nested pipe that gets the programme description from the actual programme web page.

This second nested pipe just gets the programme description, creates a title and builds the iPlayer URL:

(The logic is all a bit hacked – and could be tidied up – but I was playing through my fingertips and didn’t feel like ‘rearchitecting’ the system once I knew what I wanted it to do… which it is what it does do…;-)

As an afterthought, the items in the main pipe are annotated with a link to the mobile iPlayer version of each programme:

So there you have it: a “7 day catch up” site for broadcast OU TV programmes, with replay via iPlayer or mobile iPlayer.

[18/11/08 – the site that the app runs on is down at the moment, as network security update is carried out; sorry about that – maybe I should use a cloud server?]