For me, BBC Comedy is one of the strongest departments of the corporation. They produce some of the finest comedy shows in the World and, arguably, set the benchmark for quality comedy and introducing some of the greatest comedians to date.
Since the rise of BBC iPlayer, it’s not been easier to access the regularly produced content, either on TV (often on BBC2 and BBC Three) or radio (notably, BBC Radio 4 and BBC 7 BBC Radio 4 Extra).
However, I often found that I would miss some of my favourite shows or, even, one-off shows that would whet my appetite. I started thinking about how I could get short updates of new shows available on the website with minimum effort.
Enter ComediPlayer.
Using the BBC Comedy Radio RSS feed and a great service called Twitter Feed, I put together a “twitbot” which automatically tweeted new shows straight to Twitter, allowing anyone following @comediplayer to be notified of new shows instantly.
The service has been running for nine months now. It has recently seen popularity grow thanks to retweets from hosts of featured shows, proving even the littlest ideas have potential.
It’ll be interesting to see how the service can evolve. Ideally, I’d like to automatically link to Twitter accounts of show hosts or guests to improve engagement with the audience. Maybe I’ll find some time to look into that at some point.
(Thanks to Paul Robert Lloyd for the simple-but-effective avatar he put together shortly after launch.)