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Pilot ended 12th August 2021
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Cook-Along Kitchen Experience trailer
Welcome to a brand new cooking format that revolves around YOU! Follow personalised menus at your own pace using our new 'object-based-technology' and let us know if you want to see more shows like this.
956 ratings 38 shares

The Inside Story

We caught up with Jasmine Cox, the Creative Director and Head Chef behind the Cook-Along Kitchen Experience.

Can you sum up the Cook-Along Kitchen Experience in one sentence?

Cook-Along Kitchen Experience, or CAKE as we like to call it, is a real-time interactive cookery show that changes as you cook along with it, It’s BBC R&D’s first fully baked ‘object-based’ experiment.

What is ‘object-based’?

Traditionally broadcast media takes a collection of assets and packages them into linear edits, these programmes are sent to everyone in the exact same format.


Object-based media is composed of different parts that can be mixed and matched depending on you. It might vary depending on how long do you have to watch a show or what time of day you're watching - this allows us to personalise your experience using computer code. We think this is the future of television!

Does that mean recording endless variations?

Happily, not. We planned our production so that we could record single, step-by-step recipes only once. The variations are created by our code.

It did mean we had to ensure our presenter didn’t refer to other recipes that she is also cooking, so when you choose a combination of recipes the steps interleave without messy continuity.

Likewise, she also doesn't refer to quantities of ingredients so that we can scale if you’re cooking for any number of people.

What is the potential for storytelling using objects?

In its simplest terms, object-based broadcasting is attempting to do for TV and radio what responsive design has already done for the web.

We can produce programmes entirely on IP networks, over the internet, that can be customised to suit different people and environments.

How was it built?

CAKE uses standard web technologies html, css, & javascript. At its core is a scheduling algorithm that takes all the information we know about the recipes as well as some information about you (like what you want to cook and for how many people).

This algorithm then creates a schedule for the programme that is personalised for you.

The choices you make begin to play out when you start cooking, but the application is monitoring your interactions with the show, and it continuously re-schedules the future based on your progress in the moment.

What do you hope to learn from serving CAKE on Taster?

As our first end-to-end object-based execution, CAKE is the next step up.

Through Taster the demonstrator is putting audiences at the centre of a highly personalised, IP-delivered media experience, in an entirely new way. We want to know if people like programmes tailored in this way, and whether they feel their skills are improved
We hope it is a compelling proposition, for producers and budding chefs alike.

Our next challenge is to make production tools and develop workflows that mean making object-based experiences is just as easy as linear broadcast.

There is a lot more information about the CAKE project and how object-based broadcasting works on the BBC R&D website.

 

Cook-Along Kitchen Experience