“Fluxus have been a pleasure to work with. Their engineers are some of the most talented we’ve come across in the industry, and have been instrumental in the successful delivery of the BBC Store front end.”
Ryan Macleod
Programme Manager, BBC Store
7,000+
hours of BBC content in the catalogue
Architecture · Delivery consulting · Commerce · Content migration
Drupal · BBC ID · iPlayer integration
BBC STORE is a video-on-demand platform, featuring over 7,000 hours of video content from the BBC’s extensive catalogue. It is owned and operated by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation, one of the world’s largest broadcasters with commercial revenues in excess of £1bn per year.
To compete effectively in a crowded media landscape, BBC Worldwide required a direct-to-consumer video on-demand offering. With DVD sales declining across the market, and customer relationships being crucial to long-term positioning, BBC Store was conceived as a web and mobile B2C platform, with Drupal selected as the content management system.
Integration with the BBC’s existing identity platform was also a key objective, as was integration with the BBC’s free-to-watch iPlayer service.
As iPlayer averages over 200m plays per month, bringing existing iPlayer viewers across to BBC Store was a key commercial aim. This necessitated a cross-domain single sign-on solution that enables customers to move between BBC Store and iPlayer seamlessly.
The platform also needed to support a range of e-commerce features, including physical and digital vouchers, discount codes and coupons, and time-limited promotional pricing. Products are individually priced, and pricing can vary by video quality and length.
Another key requirement was to ensure compliance with complex licensing rules, which can restrict the dates between which content is visible in the catalogue, available for purchase, and available for playback. Each individual piece of content has its own licence and availability metadata, which needed to be aggregated and combined for products which contain multiple pieces of content, such as series, collections or brands.
Finally, the platform would also need to provide APIs to allow customers to watch their BBC Store purchases in native mobile applications and via the existing iPlayer interface.
As with all such projects, time-to-market is a critical factor, and launch in time for the Christmas 2015 market was a key aim.
In order to deliver an innovative and effective product, BBC Worldwide engaged Fluxus as delivery consultants, working with the BBC’s in-house technology division to plan and execute the development of an open-source solution based around Drupal.
A key driver for BBC Worldwide’s selection of Drupal as the content management system was their existing successful experiences of Drupal on BBC Good Food and Top Gear brand sites, each serving high volumes of traffic, successfully scaling to larger audiences in past years. Fluxus consultants worked on both sites and were able to bring their experience to BBC Store.
Most Drupal developers create standalone solutions that do not need to integrate with other systems. Fluxus is accustomed to working on big, complex projects in large multinational organisations where a high degree of integration is required.
Fluxus placed a team of consultants with existing expertise in e-commerce, video-on-demand and large scale content migration, and this team was able to use this knowledge to inform both architecture and engineering practices.
Populating the store with content required complex and precise business logic, to ensure that content becomes available to play and purchase only at times when legal rights are available. The system balances editorial control with the need for robust automatic rights management.
Integration with the BBC ID service provides customers with the ability to log in using their existing BBC ID, and manage their key customer details from within BBC Store. Access tokens are required for any protected actions, and customers are automatically prompted to re-authenticate when their tokens expire. This also ensures seamless single sign-on across BBC web properties, including iPlayer.
In order to sustain high traffic volumes, BBC Store makes heavy use of caching, including the serving of some cached pages to authenticated users. By performing some personalisation in the browser, it is possible to serve cached copies of the product catalogue to all users, delivering excellent performance even under heavy load. For this to work efficiently, cache invalidation logic is used to purge content that has been updated, along with any related content or pages.
Drupal’s content management capabilities were leveraged to provide the ability for editors to add content to key landing pages, and alter the display of premium brands to ensure that recent and relevant content can be Featured. Content discovery is enabled via a Solr-powered search capability, as well as a category-driven catalogue that enables filtering by category, genre and name.
Delivering a product with this scope and complexity has many challenges. Fluxus was able to bring a high-communication and collaborative approach to delivery, responsive to product management, business stakeholders & the hard technical requirements of integrating a mix of new & existing technology platforms from across the BBC. Fluxus placed a team of consultants with expertise & domain knowledge of e-commerce & video on demand, as well as agile development techniques & experience of enterprise Drupal delivery.
“Fluxus provided the technical insight we needed to ensure success, and I look forward to working with them again.”
Michael Blake
VP Architecture & Engineering, BBC Worldwide
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