4. British Broadcasting Corporation
• Oldest and largest national
broadcaster in the world, established
in 1922 with over 20,000 staff
• 96% of UK adults use BBC TV, radio
or online each week
• 300 million requests for iPlayer,
Internet streaming catch-up TV, each
month
• BBC Archives is one of the largest
broadcast archives in the world with
over 12 million items
BBC Media & AI
6. BBC Research & Development
• At the forefront of developments in
broadcast technology, from colour TV to
High Definition TV
• 200+ highly specialist research
engineers, scientists, designers and
producers
• Work on every aspect of the broadcast
chain – Audiences, Production,
Distribution, Programmes
• Participate in many successful EC-
funded projects and contribute to the
setting of international standardsBBC Media & AI
7. Our Vision of the Future
• A new broadcasting system
with storytelling and IP at
its core
• Mass audience mobile
services enabled by 4G &
5G broadcasting
• Content tailored for
individual’s circumstances,
preferences and devices
BBC Media & AI
8. Enabling Technologies
• Ultra High Definition TV
(UHDTV) format will enhance
users’ quality of experience
o Spatial resolutions
3840×2160 (4K) and
7680x4320 (8K)
o Frame rate up to 120 fps,
extended colour gamut and
bit depth up to 12 bits per
pixel
BBC Media & AI
UHD
HD
SD
9. Enabling Technologies
• 4K UHD TV shipments exceeded
100m units, an increase by 32% in
2018
• 4K UHD TV market will continue
to grow at a double-digit
compound annual growth rate
(CAGR) throughout its forecasting
period to 20221
• BBC delivered FIFA World Cup
2018, Wimbledon 2018 and the
Royal Wedding in UHD HDR
BBC Media & AI
1Source: Futuresource, 2018
10. Enabling Technologies
• Distribution of high
resolution video content to
a large number of users
requires transmission of
extremely large amounts of
data
• Only made possible by the
application of video codecs
that reduce the size of
content sufficiently to be
stored and distributed on a
mass scale.
BBC Media & AI
12. Video compression standards
• H.265 / HEVC – High Efficiency Video Coding
o Current state-of-the-art ITU-T / MPEG standard for video compression.
o Targets all previous applications (low resolution) right up to UHD
• AV1 – AOMedia Video 1
o Developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia).
o Aims to provide a royalty-free video coding specification
• VVC – Versatile Video Coding
o Since April 2018 - standard under development by ITU-T/MPEG (beyond
HEVC).
o The goal is to reduce the bitrate by 50% compared to HEVC
BBC Media & AI
13. Joint Video Experts Team (JVET)
• Founded in April 2015
• Tasked with developing a
new video coding standard -
VVC
• Contributors:
BBC Media & AI
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
OCT-15
FEB-16
MAY-16
OCT-16
JAN-17
MAR-17
JUL-17
OCT-17
JAN-18
APR-18
JUL-18
OCT-18
JAN-19
MAR-19
Numberofcontributions
VVC Development
14. Versatile Video Coding
• Performance results
o Subjective evaluation on a
UHD sequence
o RD curves used for
comparison (PSNR and
Mean Opinion Score - MOS).
• HM – HEVC test model
• JEM – experimental software,
basis for VVC
BBC Media & AI
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
0 20 40 60
MOS
Bit-rate [Mbps]
Manege, 3840x2160, 60 Hz
HM
JEM
AV1
“An Overview of Recent Video Coding Developments in MPEG
and AOMEDIA” in Proc. IBC 2018, Sept. 2018.
(DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1494930)
15. BBC R&D’s Video Coding team
• Contributes to
development of both
HEVC and VVC
standards
• Performs core
fundamental
research, looking at
new ways of
performing
compression based
on Artificial
Intelligence and
content analytics
BBC Media & AI
Media & AI
Video Coding
Standardisation
BBC R&D
Video Compression Research
16. COGNITUS H2020
• End-to-end platform to
aggregate User Generated
Content (UGC) during
events, enhance to Ultra-
High Definition (UHD)
quality and provide
semantic enrichment to
facilitate the smooth
integration in broadcast
productions
• http://cognitus-h2020.eu/
BBC Media & AI
17. JOLT H2020
• Harnessing digital and
data technology for
journalism
• Optimization of quality of
delivered video
• Advances in ML
application to large video
content databases
• http://joltetn.eu/
BBC Media & AI
19. Compression vs. Complexity
• Raw RGB video, 10 bits per pixel, 2160p60 = 14.93
Gb/s
• Highest average broadband speed in Europe
(2017/18) = 46 Mbit/s (Sweden)1
• Fast implementation can drastically compromise
the compression efficiency
• Advances in ML/AI open numerous new ways to
improve compression further
BBC Media & AI 1Source: Cable.co.uk and M-Lab, 2018
20. CPU Resources
• Video coding is a
CPU-intense process,
parallelizing processes
is a must
• Longest encoding run
time of 1 test point =
4.8 days
• Encoding run time of
all test points = 288.8
days
BBC Media & AI
21. GPU Resources
• Machine learning algorithms see increased use in broadcast
scenarios (video content adaptation, enhancement, production,
quality evaluation, delivery)
• Training 1 shallow neural network with a UHD sequence on 1
consumer GPU = 0.5 days
• Training 1 deep neural network with a UHD sequence on 1
consumer GPU = 0.8 days
• ML is heuristics-based = need for multiple network configuration
testing
BBC Media & AI
22. Our reasons for involvement
• A requirement to create a new broadcasting infrastructure
o Need for a flexible, transparent, provider-independent, auto-
scalable solution, deployed over either private or public
infrastructures
• Dynamic inspection and setup change based on
performance
• Scalability testing
o Large size of digital media libraries makes it very important to
provide guidance as to the level of resources needed
BBC Media & AI
