This week marks an important anniversary for the BBC, online. Fifteen years ago bbc.co.uk first went live to the public and BBC Online was born.

I'm Ralph Rivera the Director of Future Media at the BBC and I wanted to look back at history of the BBC's websites and tell you a bit more about what this anniversary means to us.

Innovation is at the heart of the BBC and has been since its inception. From when the BBC opened its first radio station in 1922 and launched the world's first regular television service in 1936 few could have imagined just what impact broadcasting would make on our everyday lives.

Whether it's stereo FM, the BBC online, digital TV, HDTV, or 3DTV innovation has driven the BBC from the start. A few of my colleagues and I tried to sum up how we feel about innovation here at the BBC in the following video.

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Just as radio and TV did before it, the digital revolution has fundamentally changed how our audiences access news, information and programmes.

As one of the first major organisations in the UK to embrace the web the birth of the BBC's websites 15 years ago is an important milestone in that evolution.

Our first web pages were developed from 1994 onwards as chronologued by Brandon Butterworth , but it wasn't until December 1997 that bbc.co.uk was officially launched.

Since this first online gateway in to the BBC we have continued to innovate at the cutting edge of web design and development.

From the BBC News, Sport and Weather sites to the launch of BBC iPlayer on Christmas day in 2007, the vast majority of the BBC's content and programmes are now available for our audiences to access when they want, wherever they are, on four screens - the PC, mobile, tablet and internet connected TV.

We've seen major growth in our online audience over this time going from 3.9 million UK adults per week in September 2002 to 22.7 million UK adults per week a decade later in September 2012 with an ever increasing number accessing our services via non-PC devices.

Last week we surveyed a representative sample of 9,200 BBC website users and asked them to choose from the top moments over the past 15 years of BBC Online.

Of those surveyed 50% said their top moment was the launch of BBC iPlayer, 15% chose the launch of the BBC website in 1997, 8% said the BBC's first truly digital Olympics at the London 2012 Games this summer and 5% the launch of websites for children of all different ages - Cbeebies and CBBC.

In 15 short years our websites are now at the heart of BBC broadcasting and have fundamentally changed news gathering and distribution, programme research and production and how our audiences share, interact, engage and get immersed in BBC content.

The pace of change is rapid - looking back just five years smartphones were in their infancy, there were no apps, tablets or internet-connected TVs - and part of the role of the BBC is to innovate at scale and bring the audience with us as the internet and digital platforms develop.

Just as the Queen's coronation in 1953 brought TV to mainstream audiences, the London 2012 Olympic Games this summer brought digital to audiences across the UK and around the world and set a new benchmark for innovation.

This is now the starting point from which we'll build in 2013 and beyond. We're looking ahead at an extremely exciting future just as we mark a milestone in our past.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and memories from the past 15 years in the comments on this blog and hear about where you think we may go in the future.

More information on the 15th anniversary of the BBC's websites is available at the following links.

- History of the BBC.
- Interview with John Birt on the early days of online, and the decision to launch the BBC's websites.
- A gallery and timeline from BBC News Online with key moments from the history of the site.
- An overview of links and videos marking 15 years of the BBC's websites.

Ralph Rivera is the Director of BBC Future Media.

Sarah Montague asked Roly Keating why the archive wasn't online, and whether the BBC should be more relaxed about allowing people to use its platforms.

Scott Driver of O2 asked when the BBC would refer to consumers rather than audience members.

His colleague picked up a panel discussion about supporting the streaming of the Olympics, and talked about how technology companies are organised for the challenge. His sentiment was tweeted by Paul Barwick:

it is true - this will be the first multi platform and multi media Olympics #bbconline - 2:50PM

Steve Parks from Code Enigma, himself a former BBC Radio journalist, asked what the supplier can do to make sure the relationship between supplier and BBC goes well - and what can be learnt from when projects have gone badly.

Balaji Abbabatulla ‏ (@balaabba) tweeted the heart of Ralph Rivera's answer:

Setting mutual expectations right is the key to successful relationships with suppliers @RalphRivera #bbconline - 2:54PM

Tim Davie talked about removing barriers, as Code Computerlove tweeted:

The BBC are breaking down internal walls to share great ideas and agencies #watchthisspace #bbconline - 2:55PM

Chris Jackson from Metabroadcast asked how quickly the ideas from Connected Studio can be driven into the core of the business.

Tim Davie talked about the drivers behind the move from bespoke systems, but Ralph's comments about the British words he's picked up gathered more social media comment.

Glyn Povah from O2 tweeted:

@ralphrivera thinks "we're on a journey" is code for "it'll take longer than we want". He is right. #code #bbconline - 2:59PM

Lee Thompson from BT Vision asked about Redux, which Sony's Edd Uzzell summed thus:

BBC Redux sounds like a better Usenet. 5+ years retention, all the content transmitted in that timeframe and growing. - 3:05PM

It was a great opportunity to look back on the year since our first Online Briefing at BAFTA.  It was also time well spent looking at the incredible year ahead, and the themes shaping it. 

Here is the video:

Delegates reacted to the reach of mobile and tablet applications - particularly Ralph's comments that the iPlayer on iPad was reaching where the Internet fridge had tried to stake a claim. @GinaFegan of D Media Network tweeted:

#BBCOnline iPlayer for iPad is the No.1 app in the UK - & has made the holy grail of entry to the kitchen! - 11:43AM

Dean Johnson (@ActivRightBrain) retweeted the news, noting:

[It's now a default download!] - 11:52AM

Something Else's Trevor Klein (@TrevorRidge) got nostalgic about the fridge:

Fifteen minutes in to BBC Spring Briefing and we have a mention of the Internet fridge. Love it. #bbconline (cc @rooreynolds) - 11:43AM

Ralph returned to his theme from the first briefing about the intersection of storytelling and technology, as indie "Code Computerlove" summed up: 

How do we combine storytelling and technology to leverage connected experiences? Good stuff #bbconline - 11:54AM

To close the BBC Online Industry Briefing, Mark Harrison from BBC North, Roly Keating, Executive Editor of BBC Online and I sat down together and answered some really good questions.

These included how online businesses can still pitch new ideas now that online commissioning will be more aligned with linear. And what our worst nightmare was.

Here's the video:

Ralph Rivera is the Director of BBC Future Media

Ralph Rivera is the Director, BBC Future Media

@ralphrivera "salmon that successfully managed to swim upstream" & get onto BBC supplier roster - Glad to have made it #bbconline" @fjord

Ralph pointed to a gap between "product evolution" and long-term development. His announcement of an innovation fund drew comment. Paul summed it up as:

BBC to run hackathons next year to drive new product innovation from outside, investing £1m in this #BBCOnline"

Ralph said they had not come for a name for it yet. @TrendShed tweeted an idea:

#BBConline Name Suggestion gap between R&D + Product: "Tomorrow's World" I believe you might have some ownership of that term already ;-)

Alex Farber of Broadcast Now wrote about the innovation fund, giving an example:

A brief might feature a range of interactive API data about a show, before inviting both editorial and technical staff and third parties to develop ideas. Rivera hopes to see editorial and technical staff collaborating, along with those working in separate BBC products such as News and Knowledge & Learning.

Attendees retweeted Ralph's reason for trying to change the BBC's culture:

@Trendshed Culture eats strategy for lunch every day. Ha! How true..... Ralph Rivera #BBCOnline Jun 17 15:07

Two threads ran through many of the questions. 

Some were concerned that there were fewer chances for lower-scale commissions. Ben Fawkes from Sound Cloud asked about empowering folk at a lower level to make products based on BBC content. Paul Goodenough from Aerian talked about how the procurement registration process asked people to have a lot of experience. Ralph agreed this was something the BBC had to get right:

Part of it is working with our Online Advisory Group and saying “How do we get our mix right?”. I mentioned this earlier in terms of the close tenders process and making sure that we’re not always picking the same three entities to do a tender … part of the mix has to be small and entrepeneurial and innovative.

Indies were also keen they if they built an interactive project for the BBC, they were not so tied to the platform that they could not sell elsewhere. Mike Dicks of PACT asked:

Can we make sure it’s easy to sell a complete package? … [it] can be expensive to take the technology play outside the UK

Ralph said that although there were always going to be difficult technologies, the BBC were deliberatly using open APIs that would make it easier for suppliers to "lift and shift":

The key thing for us is, make it open and available, and then the partners have to figure out what does that mean in terms of the executation environment that you’re putting it into. But we’re not going to put barriers to it.

Ralph Rivera and Roly Keating are the Directors of Future Media and Archive Content, respectively.

Doing Business with BBC Online (Ralph and Jane)

Ralph Rivera introduced Jane by talking about the need for a culture of partnership with the digital media industry. He emphasized that external spend reduced from £19.5m to c £18.5m in 11/12, not on the scale of of overall funding cuts.

We actually took more people out of the business, so that's the process that we're going through, rather than external spend.

Jane McCloskey, the head of supplier management, described how the BBC is building this more meaningful engagement - the Advisory Group, the open external events calendar, and the new external supply process. In the new system, work less than £20K will be done direct, for work between £20K and £50K three suppliers will be asked to tender, and work above £50K will go to a technical roster or an editorial open brief.

Product Management and Lifecycle (Chris Russell)

Chris Russell laid out BBC Online's methods of product management. For example, a Product Direction Group will make the big decision for each product, and all products will follow a consistent lifecycle.

The Platform: The BBC's New Technology Stack (Simon Lucy)

Simon Lucy began at the beginning. Andrew Fox tweeted:

AndrewFox Now: history of BBC platform. Was simple HTML with server side includes. Until very recently. 17 Jun 15:39

The system is now a presentation layer (mostly PHP) over a service layer (often Java) over a data layer. Several pan-BBC services (such as logging users in) service the service layer. Simon also described the range of tools used to document (eg Confluence), track issues (eg JIRA), and manage builds.

Simon Lucy joined Ralph Rivera, Chris Russell, and Jane McCloskey to take audience questions. These included:

• William Makower, Panlogic about feedback on tenders
• Chris Kempt from Kempt about when three tenders are invited
• Pari Faramarzi from WTG asking how often the Technical Roster would be refreshed
• Mike Dicks from Pact about how the £18m spend splits between technical and editorial

Jane McCloskey is the Head of Supplier Management, Vision. Chris Russell is the Head of Product Management News and Knowledge, Future Media. Simon Lucy is the Head of Platforms, Future Media. Ralph Rivera is the Director, Future Media.

Delegates noted that BBC's online external spend was mostly protected from the 25% cut. Anderew Fox of Livework reported:

AndrewFox Aiming to work more transparently with digital media industry. Spent £19.5m last year. Expected £18m this year (post cuts).
17 Jun 15:10

Five's Kaustav Bhattacharya enjoyed the idea of media as the meeting of storytelling and technoloy - past, present, and future:

JupiterOrbit #bbconline @ralphrivera reveals that he's a Trekkie and he sees the BBC's storytelling on the holodeck of the future.
17 Jun 14:22  

Drew Wilkins, director of Fish in a Bottle Ltd, might not be an EastEnders fan:

DrewMedia‎ @jupiterorbit @ralphrivera #bbconline Eastenders on the holodeck! #shudder
17 Jun 2011 14:23  

As much as anything, I, along with Matthew Postgate (Controller, BBC R&D), and others from the BBC, attended to affirm our continued support and contribution to the open standards that have fuelled the web's growth since its inception in the early nineties.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee opened the event, talking about HTML5, net neutrality and the role open data can play in driving transparency, while other presentations included Adrian Woolard, head of BBC R&D North Labs, who gave a tour-de-force presentation of BBC innovation focused on accessibility, but reminding us all of the huge positive impact BBC R&D has had in driving innovation across the industry over the years. Today's news that R&D has received a seventh Queen's Award, for the development of Piero, the graphics system that has transformed sports broadcasting, underlines this fact.

For me, Monday was an opportunity to connect the dots between my digital technology journey, the BBC's aims and place in the digital public space, and the W3C mission; my objective being to explicitly call out the philosophical alignment, and thus shared sense of purpose, that underpins our commitment.

At the Guardian Changing Media Summit last month, I used a series of tweets - curated through Flipboard, - as cues. Though technical problems preventing the audience from seeing them, the presentation was uploaded here and an outline (with links to the tweets) is below.

First, a bit about me

Finally, I've been waiting for this since 1983 - Computer Wins on 'Jeopardy!': Trivial, It's Not

As a Star Trek fan and computer science major in the early eighties I was very much into the notion of Artificial Intelligence. At that time we worked on things like domain knowledge and inference engines for expert systems, and believed that computers that would talk, listen and reason were just around the corner. All of this obviously is taking much longer than expected, ergo the tweet about IBM's Watson winning on Jeopardy. But much like the semantic web now, the AI aspiration was about figuring out how to effectively capture, store, analyse and share data to create meaning.

I guess knowing who Gene Amdahl is and why the reference is appropriate, dates me a little

I continued to pursue this aspiration at IBM, where we focused on information processing. It was here that I first encountered the notion of disconnected islands of information and how the lack of standards contributed to fragmentation and the inability to share and combine data. This was exacerbated by the ecosystem wars of the day (e.g. IBM SNA vs TCP/IP ).

The key take away being that "open" wins over time, that standards are critical to making victory possible, and that there is always a new set of open vs closed battles waiting to replace the ones going on now. As such, the effort on behalf of open standards needs to be continuous.

Vision without execution is hallucination - Steve Case AOL-Time Warner 10 Years Later

Nowhere is this more important than in digital media. Starting in 1995 when my team launched internet operations at Simon and Schuster, and continuing through 10 years at AOL, the goal was convergence - old media and new media come together, have a baby and change the world. While the vision was noble, the execution was not. Part of the issue is cultural - organisational change is hard. And part of the issue is that convergence has been accompanied by fragmentation.

The answer to both the cultural issue and the fragmentation issue is the same - getting on the same page. For organisations the same page means shared goals and objectives. To address fragmentation the same page is shared standards that enable heterogeneous devices, transport mechanisms and content creators/consumers to exchange data, information, knowledge.

My media CEO litmus test: Imagine an "Internet off - like it never existed" button. Do you press it?

After leaving AOL, I wasn't keen to join another media company. I came up with an "internet off-button" test, and felt most media companies would fail it as they struggle to reconcile the vast opportunity of the web, with the need to preserve their existing business models.

Proud and privileged to join the BBC and its mission to inform, educate and entertain

And then the BBC shows up. An iconic global brand, with a rich history of great storytelling, world class journalism and technical innovation. A noble mission to inform, educate and entertain. And the pursuit of that mission for the public good. It's clear that the BBC passes my internet off button test, that its mission spans time and platforms and that it has both the editorial capabilities and technical know-how to be a leader in embracing the web.

Execution & innovation: The priorities for BBC future media

"The best strategy is the one you can execute." - Ralph Rivera

Having spent a year setting, and seeking approval for, the BBC's Online strategy - we're now firmly focused on delivering it. London 2012 is firmly in focus here, we think the Olympics will do the same for online that the coronation did for TV. This comparison was as much about bringing many audiences to a new medium for the first time, as much as the scale of our output. We have the vision to take us up to 2012, we have the strategy, and (more and more) we have the culture; my priority now is to bring this together and deliver on it.

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The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?

The BBC iPlayer has been a great example of the power of the internet (as a distribution platform), but really this is just a first step in realising the potential of the internet as a medium in its own right. Now we want to push on and create experiences native to the medium that complement their linear counterparts - such as "second screen" experiences such as this created by ABC - as we move towards the truly immersive storytelling through products that are social, interactive, and non-linear, as outlined here by Frank Rose.

The long view: The BBC, Digital Public Space and the W3C

The BBC and the Public Space - Director General Mark Thompson's introduction to the BBC Strategy review

Mark Thompson's introduction to "Putting Quality First", the strategy review announced in March 2010, spoke of the importance of Digital Public Space. Mark was speaking about an online space for licence fee payers to enjoy public service content from the BBC and other public institutions, a digital equivalent to the public spaces such as museums and galleries that have contributed so much to our culture and collective understanding.

This also says that while the BBC's storytelling and the services that connect those stories with the public will always be the BBC's lifeblood, we mustn't lose sight of the environment in which those services are experienced. We must ensure audiences can continue to enjoy those services in an open environment, free at the point of use.

This overarching sense of inhabiting a digital public space shapes our work. In R&D, we are upgrading our infrastructure for the connected age - a new broadcasting system that brings together internet and broadcast technologies. By nature this system will be more open than the linear networks that preceded it.

The BBC Archive team are developing partnerships and working on projects to knit together the archives of the UK's public institutions through common metadata standards, layer meaning through semantic web technologies and build a portal to give audiences access to it; all within the digital public space. And we expect that open standards evolved in partnerships with the W3C will be the building blocks on which this public space is built.

Tim Berners-Lee Believes Web Access is a Human Right

Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently said that access to the web should be a human right. I believe there is no more important digital public space than the web itself, and the BBC believes that the spirit of openness and collaboration that made the web a success will also safeguard its future.

Ralph Rivera is Director, BBC Future Media