For the last few months in BBC News Labs, I’ve been working on various projects involving extracting metadata from running orders for BBC programmes such as Newsnight and the R4 Today programme.
Like many traditional broadcasters, the BBC uses the MOS Protocol for communications between newsroom computers and servers where media files such as audio and video are stored.
Production teams create running orders using OpenMedia, and every time they add details or make changes, MOS XML messages are emitted by the newsroom computer systems. We’ve created a way to process these messages to build up a machine-readable version of the running order.
We developed a general solution for dealing with MOS messages – a Python library called mosromgr. It’s based on open standards and could be useful to other broadcasting organisations, so we’ve released it under an open source licence.
- The source code is available on GitHub
- The documentation for the library is available on readthedocs
- The project is available from the Python Package Index
Read more at bbc.co.uk/opensource and bbc.co.uk/rdnewslabs