BBC Mixital
| BBC Mixital | |
| |
| |
| URL | https://www.mixital.co.uk/ |
| Status | Closing |
| Archiving status | Not saved yet |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) |
BBC Mixital was a site allowing users to create their own games, cartoons, music videos and stories. Often, but not always, these creations would be themed around a BBC television property (for example, the section for Dr Who fan-fiction).
In April 2019 the BBC announced that Mixital was to be closed, citing "We’ve learned a number of valuable lessons that we’ll share internally and with partners, but we feel the time is right to take these lessons and explore how we might apply them in other ways online."[1]
From April 2019 the ability to publish new creations on the website has been removed. New users are also unable to create an account. THe content will remain online until April 2020 when it "will no longer be publicly available".[1]
Discovery and API
In the shutdown announcement, the BBC stated that Mixital contains "more than one million ... creations".[2]
A likely avenue for discovery is the 'search' feature, which uses the following API, returning JSON results:
Content is embedded in an iFrame https://www.mixital.co.uk/dmk/digitalmake/play/731
https://www.mixital.co.uk/api/digitalmake/view/731 seems to return the view count.
Range of Content
The type of content on Mixital varies wildly. Some items, such as fanfiction will likely be fairly simple to archive. Other content, such as the dancing robots will likely require effort to reverse engineer the JavaScript and requests used to make the creation "work".