But the deepest motivation behind the rebuild was philosophical. Chris Anderson, TED's curator, encouraged the team to think about the challenge thusly: "How do we create a living archive for ideas worthy of the future? Something that can stand the test of time?" To that end, the team improved the transcripts to make them more discoverable to search engines and, as a result, more useful for researchers, and built the video player with an adaptive bit rate feature, so you'll automatically see a talk in high-def if you have a fast enough connection. As always, all talks are downloadable, too.
See the full story here: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3020839/innovation-by-design/ted-rebuilds-its-site-for-the-future-of-online-video