Projects

Online Delivery

Production Gateway

In the context of the BBC’s desire to be a tapeless organisation by 2010, the BBC initiated the Production Gateway project in January 2005, to obtain better clarity on the benefits, costs and risks of developing and implementing a solution to enable digital content exchange with external partners.

After successful completion of technical trials of the Production Gateway infrastructure in May 2006, the project began an operational trial with six post production houses and a sample of live productions, including Dragons’ Den in Manchester and Rogue Traders in White City, focussing on enabling and assessing workflows, largely using standard FTP tools.

This paper details the findings and suggests an approach for a Secure Collaboration Network for the industry going forward.

Further info: Production Gateway Final Report (pdf: 1.7 Mb)

Demand for the services the BBC provides online is growing all the time. Large scale media delivery systems need to be optimised for efficient delivery. We are looking at new protocols using Kamaelia, a testbed for network experimentation using a component architecture which helps to simplify the creation and testing of new protocols.

Further info: Kamaelia website

Researchers from the PRISM project are working on a trading infrastructure for content creation and access that could change the face of broadcasting and the way people receive content on their PCs, television and mobile device.

Further info: Prism website

Multimedia

Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced. It uses wavelets, motion compensation and arithmetic coding and aims to be competitive with other state of the art codecs.

Further info: Dirac website

Digital Television

The Digital Television Project

Further info: Digital TV web pages on BBC Research

Arena is a project which aims to provide tools to measure use of new television formats, including their interactive elements.

It will help us carry out audience research in areas such as mobile telephones, video on demand, and the new digital television broadcast systems now in operation.

Further info: Arena web pages on BBC Research

Enabling Content Acquisition gives an in-depth introduction to the topics of navigation and supply of schedule metadata, both of which are strong work areas within BBC Research & Development.

Further info: Enabling Content Acquisition web pages on BBC Research

BBC R&D is a member of DVB and actively participates in the technical, commercial and IPR modules.

Further info: single chip for digital terrestrial TV - L64781.

Further info: - DVB-T.

MOTIVATE is investigating mobile reception of digital terrestrial TV.

Further info: MOTIVATE web pages on BBC Research

BBC R&D has been a long time supporter and participant in the Audio, Systems and Video standardisation activities of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 WG11, better known in the industry as MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group. This Group has been responsible for the standards on video and audio compression that have provided DAB and sound and image capabilities on PCs, and are now leading to digital television broadcasting.

Further info: MPEG website

The Pro-MPEG Forum is an association of broadcasters and programme makers, equipment manufacturers and component suppliers with interests in realising the full potential offered by MPEG-2 as an open, international standard for compressed digital content.

Further info: Pro-MPEG website

The main objective of Share it! is to develop an end-to-end system that enables easy access to, and transfer of, personal content between local storage devices using home-to-home networks and that enables innovative services through a seamless combination of on-line, broadcast, and stored content.

Another important objective is the contribution and adherence to standards. This enables true interoperability across different content providers, service providers, and equipment manufacturers.

Further info: Share it! website

The TV Anytime Forum is an association of organisations which seeks to develop specifications to enable audio-visual and other services based on mass-market high volume digital storage.

Further info: TV Anytime website

Studios

Automated tapeless production.

Further info: automated tapeless production web pages on BBC Research

Currently, the processes involved in music production planning are inflexible and time-consuming. Our new system uses automation to allow the Director and Script Supervisor to work more creatively and effectively.

Further info: Music Production Planning web pages on BBC Research

The Media Dispatch project aims to promote a standard way of exchanging media files and their metadata between loosely coupled storage systems.

Further info:Media Dispatch web pages on BBC Research

Production Magic encompasses a range of technological developments for the inclusion of synthetic 3D elements in TV production, as well as techniques for extracting 3D information from images to assist the production process or create new forms of content.

Further info:Production Magic web pages on BBC Research. Some Production Magic projects also have their own web pages: iview, MATRIS, MixTV, MetaVision, Origami, Prometheus

(part of the Production Magic project)

The goal of the iview project is to develop a free-viewpoint system that allows the capture and interactive replay of live events using multiple cameras.

Further info:iview web pages on BBC Research

(part of the Production Magic project)

MATRIS is a project in the EC's 6th Framework programme which is developing a real-time markerless camera tracking system. This will allow virtual production techniques to be used in situations where it is not practical to use a marker-based system, for example outdoors.

Further info:MATRIS website

THISL is a project developing the retrieval of multimedia information (primarily written or spoken text) using a spoken language interface. We are applying this technology to the archiving and retrieval of news.

Further info:THISL website

Digital Radio

Digital Audio Broadcasting

Further info: DAB web pages on BBC Research

DRM is an organisation producing a specification for implementing digital radio in the AM bands.

Further info: DRM website

The MOT protocol is used in DAB for transferring file oriented data in DAB "data" channels. When used with the "MOT Directory", it can be used as simple data carousel protocol to support file based broadcast data services.

Further info: MOT web pages on BBC Research

The Transport Protocol Experts Group has developed a protocol that provides rich support for Traffic and Travel Information services and is well suited to Digital Radio.

Further info: TPEG web pages on BBC Research