BBC RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT 2010/11 at a glance 01/ INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 04/ HIGHLIGHTS 06/ PRODUCTION 08/ The year 2010 to 2011 has seen the MEDIA MANAGEMENT completion of BBC Research & Development’s main property moves; the South Lab is operating fully, and by the time you read this, around 35 staff will be established in the North Lab in 10/ the BBC’s new MediaCityUK campus in DISTRIBUTION Salford. In addition, the Central Lab has new space in the BBC’s Central London campus. These new facilities give a foundation for BBC R&D to continue to 12/ have a signifi cant impact, along with BBC, AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE industrial and academic colleagues, as the BBC evolves into a new kind of broadcasting organisation. Matthew Postgate, Cover Charlatans in the world’s fi rst Controller, Research & Development In March 2010, I was privileged to be live international transmission invited to give the Barlow Memorial 14/ test from London to Tokyo Lecture at University College London. BBC R&D ACHIEVEMENTS using Super Hi-Vision in This gave me the opportunity to OVER THE YEARS collaboration with NHK and several of the world’s academic consider how the BBC is moving into IP networks. the emerging Information Age, and the vision that BBC R&D has for a new Inside cover An iPhone app that 16/ demonstrates simpler and broadcasting system to support MANAGEMENT AND more accessible ways to this transition. LEADERSHIP TEAMS control televisions, using the Universal Control API. 01 “THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE AUDIENCE “ IT IS AN EXCITING TIME FOR THE IS CHANGING, PARTICULARLY WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BROADCAST GROWTH OF SOCIAL MEDIA.” INDUSTRY” In 2005, the BBC identifi ed the key trends alongside new platforms to support is for and retrieve material broadening The whole system is under-pinned by the shaping broadcasters in the new environ- mission to inform educate and entertain. access and allowing new forms of content desire for it to be ‘IP end-to-end’, so that ment as the development of on-demand to be created. each part of the system uses internet and time-shifted consumption, increased In order to be the BBC in the new protocol and can be ‘joined up’. It is a choice for audiences, the advent of user Information Age, we will need to build a Distribution is the process of getting change that has already begun within the generated content and the rise of new new broadcasting system that supports our material to the audiences, and this is being BBC, but we are working to complete the competitors. Since then, we have been reinterpreted role and the new context that changed by the advent of IP distribution. chain so that our programme makers do able to observe how these trends have we operate in. Such a system covers the We are developing a hybrid model, not need to consider how content is moved, developed, some as expected and some whole chain from capture to audience. where broadcast and internet delivery just how to make the very best output. in more surprising directions. technologies sit alongside each other, Production, the capture of content, will making the most of the advantages of As we develop these ideas alongside We have seen an explosion in choice move to increasingly high fi delity capture. each to give a system far more exciting colleagues from across the organisation, of content, but the BBC’s content has There will be multi-sensor arrays capturing than using either in isolation. This raises the department continues to present and remained highly valued and widely used. audio and video, but also other data sets, issues such as synchronising material publish our work. BBC R&D staff presented We are seeing new ways of watching and such as location, camera settings, ambient delivered over different paths and how 27 conference papers in 2010-11, and listening with a proliferation of devices, noise, which can be used later – even years to engineer in a new kind of resilience. published 22 other papers. Naturally a both fi xed and mobile, and with more users in the future – to be manipulated in It also leads us to consider innovative number of these are published on our ‘multi-tasking’ – consuming more than one software further on in the production uses of both RF spectrum and Internet website. In addition we fi led six new patents type of media at a time. The relationship process to create high quality content. infrastructure in the future. in 2010, and continue to maintain a with the audience is changing, particularly portfolio of around 120 patents. with the growth of social media. User- The next element is media management, The fi nal stage of the new broadcasting generated content is becoming more including moving material around inside system is the audience experience – It is an exciting time for the development important, particularly for News, and has and between the BBC and its partners, how the material is presented to and used of the broadcast industry. The term a complimentary relationship with increasingly exploring the use of cloud by the audience. This includes ensuring broadcasting itself is in the process of being traditionally generated content. The BBC technology. We also need to store material accessibility to the whole population and re-interpreted for the Information Age so needs to maintain its quality and breadth for the future in the archives maintaining a the enabling of new editorial formats such that organisations such as the BBC can of output to address all licence fee payers; digital memory for the nation. We not only as the use of dual screens. It also considers continue to offer the social and economic but it also needs to evolve its technology need to be able to store the material, but how to present content which can be used benefi ts we achieved during the industrial systems to integrate traditional technologies to be able to use new techniques to search on such a wide range of devices, from age. Looking forward, BBC R&D will be mobile phones through to 3D and Super working with groups from across the media Hi-Vision. industry and academia to build this future. 02 03 HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YEAR BBC R&D South Lab Interactive Audio-Visual Infax and Redux RadioDNS The BBC R&D South Lab is now fully up Nine BBC R&D engineers, mainly trainees, We deployed a simple system for all BBC We worked on the RadioDNS project with and running, including a research studio in collaborated with artists Charlesworth staff that allowed them to search the rich a number of commercial broadcasters and Television Centre. Lewandowski & Mann to create an internal archive metadata system (Infax) receiver manufacturers to deliver service interactive audio-visual installation named then watch that content from the last four information for hybrd DAB/IP Radios. We IBC Innovation Award ‘The Cut Up’ which was exhibited for the years (from an internal online archive, demonstrated this with RadioTAG where The IBC Innovation Award for Content duration of the 2010 Anti-Design Festival Redux) in the same browser window. we helped devise a protocol by which you Delivery was won by the DVB-T2 study and after this it was nominated and jointly can share information with a broadcaster group led by BBC R&D. won the NEMarts prize. Ingex about what you’re listening to by pushing a Ingex is in use for HD production of button on your IP-enabled radio. IEEE Award Trials of Technologies EastEnders. Our tablet-based portable Dr Nick Wells was awarded the IEEE Trials of technologies which will be used production tool has been tested on a BBC P2P-Next Consumer Electronics Society Engineering for the London 2012 Olympics were held, comedy series. We created key interactive technologies as Excellence Award 2010, on the occasion of including live delivery, via the internet, of part of the P2P-Next collaborative project the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Super Hi-Vision content from our research Production Labs – demonstrated at IBC in Amsterdam. Consumer Electronics (ISCE). studio to NHK in Japan. The new Production Labs facility allows projects to test their work in a realistic Second Screen Per Erik Selemark Award Free-Viewpoint Video production environment. The fi rst labs have We created second screen demonstrators Lindsay Cornell was awarded the Per Erik Our Free-Viewpoint Vdeo system was used focussed on logging and surround video. which were adopted by the Autumnwatch Selemark Award for services to DAB 2010 on air for the fi rst time for Blue Peter’s world TV team, and were trialled around a live at the 16th WorldDMB General Assembly, record ski quarter pipe item. Web Standards broadcast with fans of the show. Belfast, 27 October 2010. We drove new standards as part of various MyMedia key W3C working groups and led the BBC’s Technology Strategy Board Augmented Reality Film The MyMedia collaborative project won input into future Web research. As part of a Technology Strategy Board Augmented reality fi lm was launched in the Context-aware Movie Recommendation funded project, we began research into the Natural History Museum’s David Challenge at RecSys 2010 and the automated tagging of broadcast audio, in Attenborough Studio, in conjunction with Professional Video Tagging Task at order to easily fi nd content within the the BBC’s Natural History Unit. MediaEval 2010. archive by people, places or topics. 04 055 PRODUCTION Our Production research is primarily concerned with delivering benefi ts on screen to the audience. Projects are clustered around the image analysis, computer vision and tracking technology areas.