www.tvbeurope.com July2012 BBC Sport has an archive of more than 150,000 tapes
ingest, logging and metadata, with file-based content sharing and archiving. That means that four of the five old silos are now effectively unified, with radio closely linked. There is the capability to ingest up to 36 simultaneous feeds to cope with busy sports days and major projects like the London Olympic Games. 90% of the centre’s output is
live to air. EVS servers at the front end provide high performance fast turnaround production capabilities. A central Harmonic MediaGrid provides the work in progress storage, supporting large numbers of
The IP Browse system serves up to 400 clients across the site. As well as an intuitive interface for reviewing by producers, editors and journalists, it also allows desktop publishing to output platforms such as online on demand.
BBC Sport has an archive
of more than 150,000 tapes. A hit list of 20,000 tapes for digitisation was determined and these were transferred, covering the material likely to be needed. The remainder remains on tape and is pulled in as needed. But while the new
infrastructure performs well, the staff still finds the
“90% of the Centre’s output is live to air”
online editors. Work in progress storage is 120Mbps ProRes 422 in Quicktime, which is an open standard allowing commonly used edit software to access content without transcoding or wrapping. The archive is the BBC standard AVC100.
absence of tapes a challenge. Producers knew that they could not be scooped if they had the master tape of an interview in their hands: no one could get at it before it was transmitted on their programme.
Charlie Cope, BBC Sport
Catch-up time: coffee break in the David Lean Room at BAFTA
The traditional stash of tapes under the desks of producers and journalists may now be replaced by hard disks under the desk, but there is still a desire to have a physical handle on content. “We are still talking about that one,” Cope commented. He also raised another issue
that illustrates the chasm between broadcast and IT industry practices. Talking about the Six Nations rugby competition he said that, as before, the games are covered
live at the weekend, then on Monday all the content from the OBs is ingested for packaging into stories and highlights ready for the following weekend. Except that when you are transferring content over corporate IT infrastructures, in large numbers of files each measuring many gigabytes from an outside source — the OB contractor — the IT security alarms tend to go into overload. The migration project is now largely complete: on the last day
of the English football season in mid-May the centre was transmitting simultaneously on five broadcast networks and 10 red button and online streams. Cope’s conclusion is that the technology is easy (relatively speaking): it is people and process that is tough. Involving end users in as much of the planning and delivery stages as possible is vital. And continuing training of users is essential and should never be underestimated. — Dick Hobbs