Meeting: The IET President’s Address – A story of unseen engineering: digital TV compression

11th October 2018, 18:00 BST
Location: IET London, Savoy Place

Whilst many of us in the broadcast industry know current technology well, we would be wrong to overlook learning from the past and few can say we remember it all. This talk Former BT Chief Science Officer, Mike Carr, and current President of the IET promises to be a great reminder of the achievements of the past and why, for better or for worse, they have given us the technological landscape we work in today.

This Presidential address will overview the highlights and evolution of video compression engineering, starting with the relative simple schemes of the late 1970’s through to latest sophisticated techniques demonstrating how digital compression has played such a key part in enabling video as we use it today.

The talk is free to attend at Savoy Place, near Embankment, Central London. To register, you need to sign up for a free IET account. Following the talk is an optional paid dinner. Access to the talk is free and requires only registration!

Speaker:

Mike Carr Mike Carr is the former Chief Science Officer for BT and responsible for the company’s world-leading research and commercial exploitation unit, including patent licensing and corporate venturing activities

During his first 15 years with BT’s Labs his career has focused on the research, development and practical design of real-time audio/visual and multimedia communications systems.

He has several patents to his name in the field of video compression and is the holder of two prestigious BT awards; the Martlesham Medal for R&D (1992) and the BT Gold medal (1994) for leading multimedia product developments.

In 1998 he was elected President of the Digital Audio-Visual Council (DAVIC) a non-profit association based in Switzerland and representing 160 companies in more than 25 countries, focused on developing specifications for audio-visual systems. From 1999 Mike was based in Silicon Valley, California, USA where he established BT’s US Technology office and Corporate Venturing activity.

Mike is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He received an OBE for “services to innovation” in 2017.

Meeting: Video Compression Fundamentals Tech Breakfast


11th July 2018, 09:00 BST
Location: Jigsaw24, 8 Golden Square, Soho, London, W1F 9HY

The Tech Breakfast at Jigsaw24 continue this time with a look at video compression fundamentals. Codecs are a vital part of the industry and almost part of day to day life, so the experts from root6, Phil Crawley and Matt Ward, will help you get a grasp of the basics and understand what’s happening with today’s codecs, be that HEVC, AV1 or trusty MPEG4. All this, plus a pastry and a drink!

Sound good? Then register now!

Video: Choosing B-frame Interval and Reference Frames


Jan Ozer from Streaming Learning Center takes us through the basics and ways to use B-frames in MPEG encoding. Covering:

  • Common B-Frame settings
  • Choosing the right B-Frame interval
  • What reference frames do
  • Understanding quality/encoding-time trade-off
  • Choosing the number of reference frames.

Great for remembering what you once knew or learning MPEG in a bit more depth, anyone who knows a little about MPEG encoding can benefit from this recorded webinar.

Watch now!

Webinar: Foundational Concepts: Video Compression, Processing and Delivery


On demand webinar from AWS Elemental covering some streaming basics.

In this webcast, you will:
• Learn how to create and deliver video over the internet
• Understand video codecs, containers, popular delivery methods and content delivery networks
• Consider methods, including adaptive bitrate streaming, that enable high-quality video to be delivered to a wide range of internet-connected devices
• Learn about the latest trends in video compression and delivery

Increasing smartphone subscriptions and data volumes per subscription are driving rapid growth in mobile data traffic, much of which is video content. According to multiple industry reports, these trends will continue for the near future, and by 2020, 75 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index. Technical and business leaders at organizations that aim to expand offerings using video need to understand the complexities of delivering premium viewing experiences to consumers.

Watch now!