BBC

Video: How the BBC Built a Massive Media Pipeline Using Microservices

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The BBC iPlayer is the biggest audio and video-on-demand service in the UK. It receives 10 million video playback requests every day and the service publishes over 10,000 hours of media every week.

Moving iPlayer to the cloud has enabled the BBC to shorten the time-to-market of content from 10 hours to 15 minutes.

In this session, the BBC’s lead architect, Stephen Godwin, describes the approach behind creating iPlayer architecture, which uses Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS in several ways to improve elasticity, reliability, and maintainability. You see how BBC uses AWS messaging to choreograph the 200 microservices in the iPlayer pipeline, maintain data consistency as media traverses the pipeline, and refresh caches to ensure timely delivery of media to users.

This is a rare opportunity to see the internal workings and best practices of one of the largest on-demand content delivery systems operating today.
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Webinar: HDR – Bright prospects ahead, but where are we now?

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Time: 15:00 BST, Wednesday June 13th 2018

A review of current technology and real-world deployments

  • The WOW factor: Why HDR?
  • HDR standards: HLG, PQ or HDR10 variants?
  • Content availability: HD or UHD?
  • Consumer displays: Mobile phones or 4K/8K TV?
  • HDR distribution: Broadcast, OTT or 4G/5G?
  • Real world deployments

The competition for viewers’ eyeballs and their disposable income has never been fiercer. Great picture quality is one weapon that service providers – especially broadcasters – can deploy to attract and retain viewers.

It’s true that millions of 4K ready TVs have been sold, but in practice most TVs sold before 2017 don’t have any support for HDR at all. Many different variants of HDR have also emerged in an attempt to offer higher quality coupled with some backwards compatibility with those early TVs, but broadcasters have been perhaps understandably reluctant to commit to producing 4K or HDR content with the costs of the ill-fated 3DTV still on their books.

This webinar looks at HDR in general and the different variants that have emerged. The drive for 4K, or even 8K, content and displays is contrasted with consumers’ willingness to watch full HD with HDR on the latest mobile phone displays…
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Speakers:

David Smith
Technology Manager
Rohde & Schwarz

Andy Quested
Technology Strategy & Architecture
BBC Design + Engineering

Paul Clennell
Chief Technology Officer
dock10

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Webinar: DVB Subtitling Systems

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


On-Demand Webinar
This webinar will provide an overview of the recent revision of bitmap subtitles and the recent specs for UHD Subtitles.

The DVB specification for TTML-based Subtitling Systems, approved in July 2017, has now been complemented by a revision of the existing specification for bitmap subtitles, creating a comprehensive suite of subtitling specifications from DVB. This approval also marks the completion of the current generation of specifications for Ultra High Definition Television – DVB UHD-1.

The agenda for the webinar is:
•Introduction
•Bitmap subtitle specification (EN 300 743) Update (DVB Bluebook A009)
•TTML introduction
•New DVB TTML specification (Bluebook A174)
•Deployment considerations DVB Subtitling

Experts conducting the webinar include:
Dr. Peter Cherriman, Senior R&D Engineer, BBC Research & Development and Chair of the TM-SUB
Paul Szucs, Senior Manager, Technology Standards, Sony Europe
Stefan Pöschel, Engineer, Production Technologies, IRT

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Meeting: AES67 audio over IP within SMPTE ST-2110

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Date:Thursday, November 16, 2017 – 18:00 to 20:30
Location: Universisty of Surrey, Wates House, GU2 7XH, Guildford Map

Peter Stevens (BBC R&D) will cover AES67 and its background development within AES and how it is connected as a audio elements within SMPTE 2110. The basic operational principles of AES67 will be described in relation to its various technology components and history of audio over IP. It will conclude with a brief look at the plugfests that have taken place, along with some examples of use within broadcasting.

There is be an introduction by Tony Orme (Uni of Surrey) covering the structure of ST 2110 and its relationship with ST 2057 PTP and discovery etc. like NMOS and how it differs fundamentally from ST 2022-6 and SDI with embeded audio.

Register