Bbc rd preso_southampton

Challenges and opportunities for the
BBC and the Web
Southampton, Dec 6th 2012
Internet Research and Future Services
George Wright, Head of IR&FS

@georgie

Future Media © BBC 2012

Intro

• Background
• Overview of the BBC
• Brief History of the BBC
• R&D at the BBC
• The Internet and the BBC
• What we do on and with the Web
• Questions


Me

George Wright

Head of Internet Research
& Future Services

> 17 years at the BBC


BBC Overview

• Largest Public Broadcaster in Europe
• Not for profit
• Licence fee funded (£154.40/ year)
• Independent of Government
• Incorporated under Royal Charter
• 70 radio stations, 10 TV channels, large content website
• Main domestic UK service
• Worldwide News service
• Commercial subsidiary (for overseas sales/ DVDs etc)
• 27,000 staff
• £4.8 bil annual revenue


Our Charter


Service Overview

• Begun in 1922
• TV broadcasts begun 1936
• Colour TV started 1967
• FM radio 1955
• Website 1993
• Digital Radio 1995
• DTV 1998
• HDTV 2006


BBC R&D

• 160 staff across 3 labs
• Been in existence since 1930
• Incorporated by Royal Charter: “..maintain BBC’s position
as a centre of excellence for research and development in
broadcasting and other means for the electronic
distribution of audio, visual and audiovisual material, and
in related technologies.”
• “The UK's NASA” (House of Lords Select Committee on
the BBC Charter Review 2005-6)


Some highlights of BBC R&D's history


Noise-cancelling microphone (1927)

VHF/FM transmitter(1945)
• Colour TV (1954)
• Digital TV standards proposed (1964)
• Digital audio recorder/playback demonstrated (1971)
• CEEFAX (text service on TV) (1974)
• NICAM stereo (1986)
• BBC Internet service (1989-1995)
• Multicast internet streams (2004)
• Freeview HD (2008)


Who my team are

• Internet Research and Future Services section within BBC
R&D
• Working at the audience end of the broadcast chain
• Full range of skills (Engineers, designers, producers)


What we do

• We build new prototypes, demonstrators and services
across all digital platforms
• To try things out
• To explore things
• To solve problems
• Focus on user-facing things

• Also, protocols and standards for emerging platforms
• Engineering and UX [User Experience] /HCI [Human
Computer Interaction] research

• 5yr time horizon


Who we work with

• BBC programme makers (Dr Who, Springwatch)
• Mobile and TV Platforms product development teams
• Academia
• SMEs
• Collaborative research partners (TSB, European
Commission - EU FP7, EU PPP)
• Standards bodies (W3C, EBU, DVB)


We work in the open

Site http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/prototyping
Blog http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/rd
Code: http://github.com/bbcrd
Weeknotes http://bbc.in/rdweeknotes
White papers http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/
Conferences (IBC, W3C etc)
Standards bodies (W3C, DVB)


Issues and questions

Corporate R&D traditionally has a different pace to it
30 years ago, competition came after 5-25 years of
preparation (Channel 4, BSkyB, commercial radio)
Now, a service can be conceived, developed, tested,
deployed and acquired in <12 months
Many new user-facing services come from the West Coast
Most are either PPU (pay per use) or ad-supported
Where does this leave BBC/ Corporate R&D?


The BBC and the Web

Bbc.co.uk since 1994
First Website 1995
Strong early promoter/
adopter of Web
standards
Now most popular
content site in Europe


R&D approach

●
Standards
●
Usage/HCI
●
Low level plumbing
●
Distribution platform
●
'Web as medium/canvas'
●
ID/personal data
●
Prototyping
●
SemWeb/Big Data
●
Archives
●
Cross-platform work
●
Future


Standards

●
BBC member of, strongly involved in, W3C
●
Chair W3C Audio WG
●
Involved in many other WGs
●
Drive adoption eg SemWeb
●
DVB and EBU
●
Learning by doing
●
Avoid vendor hype
●
Evalute new standards, proposals


HCI and UX

●
Advanced UI research
●
Browser moving target closing
●
Mobile/STB whole new series of challenges
●
Recommendations


Low level plumbing

●
Ipv6
●
Multicast trials
●
P2P work
●
Mobile broadcast/ spectrum/whitespace
●
Future Internet
●
Vista TV


Distribution platform

Requests for programmes
continue to rise: 145m in Dec
2010, 200m in Dec 2011

Available on 20+ devices and
rising

Future Media & Technology © BBC 2012

Web as medium/canvas

●
Whole new 'platform'
●
Can't just reuse old designs
●
Non Web safe palettes
●
Flash was the answer – what was the question?
●
http://futurebroadcasts.com/


ID/personal data

●
Bbc.co.uk always 'worked' without login
●
Commercial rivals drive login (twitter, FB)
●
Strict UK and EU rules on DPA
●
OpenID..
●
Sibyl


Web as toolchain/shopfront

●
Github, wordpress, puppet,AWS
●
Timesheets, document sharing, wikis
●
BBC locked down desktop vs access anywhere
●
R&D website useful recruiting tool, library of our
white papers
●
Production staff using as AV search, playback,
transcode platform


SemWeb/Big Data

●
BBC very early SemWeb adoptor
●
Bbc.co.uk/programmes massive resource
●
Page for every programme
●
Always available
●
70mil triples
●
Each term also in Dbpedia
●
Twitter work – whole of firehose
●
Massive amounts of throughput


Archives

●
BBC huge archive
●
Locked up in leaky warehouse :(
●
Moving to the Web
●
Redux, Snippets, WSA
●
Mood, genre, topic


Cross platform work

●
One service,many devices
●
Universal control API
●
DLNA?
●
RadioDNS as binding control system for new
devices
●
Android – fragmented but nice
Raspberry PI, Little printer
●
IoT


Future

●
Massively big data
●
ID and brokerage
●
Mobile Net and broadcast
●
Handoff and cacheing
●
HCI and UX
●
Increased 'window' for repeat viewing
●
IP end to end for all our content
●
Loads of possibilities, loads of questions...


Thank you – questions?

george.wright@bbc.co.uk

@georgie


Bbc rd preso_southampton

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