July 2012 www.tvbeurope.com


TVBEurope 15


Keynote presentation & panel discussion


THE SCENE-SETTING panel was chaired by Lesley Marr, senior operations director at ITFC in London, and her first comment was to question her own title. She sees the changes brought about by file-based environments as revolutionary not evolutionary. The days of tape were very


comfortable, she said. Yes, there were a few tape formats, but the same piece of media that came out of the edit suite could be played to air, and could be archived. Workflows are now more complex. Designing workflows is about more than wrappers, codecs and connectivity. Do it right and it is a positive benefit; do it wrong and the operation can grind to a halt.


VTR, usually disguised as a coffee table. Generation Two was brought


about by open platforms. Abstracted workflow engines were well established in other industries, and finally came to broadcast. Because they were more service oriented, using web tools, they finally brought about cost efficiencies. But they still need a fair degree of human intervention, albeit from a new breed of multi-skilled operators. Practical experience shows that content gets stuck in queues, and it requires manual intervention to maintain the output. Her view on the next


generation is that it must start by delivering content to multiple platforms, with all that means for codecs, wrappers and metadata.


Alan Whiston, technology controller, Vision & North & Nations, BBC


processing. We will be able to determine what our income is per stream, and so we will have to know that the incremental cost of providing it is less than that income.


“Suppliers and users need to look at more creative ways of financing. The capex model of three, five or seven years isn’t going to work if the consumption pattern is three to four months” In a point which was


reiterated by speaker after speaker, she said that doing it right critically involved taking the people with you. Generation One workflows


were embedded in proprietary systems, Marr recalled. For a big operation that involved a lot of workarounds and hacks, there was little collaboration between technology suppliers. Her first integrated centre, CTV in Chiswick Park, was supposed to be all file-based but each playout suite had an emergency


That calls for knowledge oriented workflows, based on intelligent automation. It needs to support better discovery and processing technologies, and work towards the complete removal of manual processes, through systems that can learn and adapt their own workflows. Panellist Niall Duffy of Mediasmiths added that we need to focus on business in workflow, on integration beyond video and audio. We know the cost of the factory but we do not know the cost of the


Jon Mobbs, head of Product


Marketing, Deluxe Media Technologies


Niall Duffy, managing director, Mediasmiths


what can be automated is now being automated, and people are now largely confined to the creative and productive tasks. But he agreed we have to understand the processes and then understand the cost of those processes. Whiston also raised the issue


Alan Whiston, BBC He agreed with Marr that we


are focused on static workflows. He suggested that as we humans are adaptive, so our workflows have to become adaptive. We have to move beyond automation to self- learning processes. Jon Mobbs of Deluxe extended the thinking, saying that adaptive systems have to provide real efficiencies in the system, to deliver better content faster and supporting more creativity. From BBC North & Nations, Alan Whiston felt that a lot of


In a point which was reiterated all day, Lesley Marr said that doing it right critically involved taking the people with you


of rights management as a major challenge now and in the future, and Mobbs said that this was a key part of understanding where the costs lie. With legacy workflows costs can be concealed in parts of the


Lesley Marr, senior operations director, ITFC


process, Mobbs said, and part of the evolution is uncovering the true costs. Finally, the panel discussion


returned to the topic of equipment refresh cycles. It is rare, said Whiston, that you have a genuinely clean sheet of paper, so whatever the refresh cycle you are always integrating legacy technology and therefore legacy workflows. And even a three year cycle may not help you when an app can come out of nowhere and be ubiquitous in just a couple of months. — Dick Hobbs


Technical case study on BBC Sport and a migration to its new home at MediaCityUK during 2011/12


THE TRANSFER of the whole BBC Sport operation from its home in London to a completely new centre in Salford, 220 miles to the north, was that rare example of a greenfield file- based project. But, as Technical Executive Charlie Cope explained in a fascinating case study, that did not mean legacy could be completely overlooked. One of the challenges was


that the opportunity was taken to break down the old silo mentality — where television, radio, red button, online and sports news were effectively separate operations — and create a single, shared environment with rationalised


workflows and, hopefully, reduced costs. That in itself was a hearts and minds challenge, but so too was the fact that staff were being asked to uproot their families and their lives by that 220 miles. In the end a little more than half the staff migrated, so there was a major recruitment and thus training layer to the change management. Ultimately, according to Charlie, the message was to “keep it simple” — develop systems that were technologically capable but operationally simple. So the planning phase saw the


creation of workgroups that cut across all the old silos. They


tackled scoping and requirements, developed the workflows, tested it and took it live, in the process becoming the super-users who provided support to the rest of the staff. The new centre is part of the


According to Charlie Cope, the message was to “keep it simple”— develop systems that were technologically capable but operationally simple


Salford Quays development owned and managed by Media City Studios. BBC Sport worked with Media City Studios to develop a common standard, for instance for communications infrastructure, so that when BBC rents a studio in the studio block it can be instantly added to the sport network. The new sports production system has a single central


Continued on page 16


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52