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Diverse Television Delivery Platforms: Delight or Dilemma?


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Delivering Leading Edge Services in A Competitive Market


by Nigel Fry BBC Global News


Introduction


Engineers have a key role to play in delivering innovation that enables revenue growth and maintains the competitive position of our companies. This paper considers both the process through which innovation can support multi-platform delivery and also the need for the predominantly IT based systems to work consistently and reliably. Achieving high levels of availability using commodity IT products and commercial data services is an essential part of delivering media services. Some of the approaches to achieving this are considered.


Innovation


The media industry is dependent upon two key resources, the talent that produces great content and the technology used to produce and deliver that content to the audience. As engineers we are the talent behind the technology and today as ever our role is vital in ensuring that the services we support are delivered efficiently and effectively to the benefit of the businesses’ that employ us. Whether the business is for profit or for public service should make no difference, after all, the audience choose to watch or listen to the channel based on the content and the synopsis, not the channel’s business model.


Competition in the media market comes from many quarters. The rise in consumption of IP delivered services provides an additional dimension for broadcasters to manage. It creates new opportunities for delivery of services to market (the ‘audience’) whilst at the same time threatening more established platforms such as satellite and cable. Total advertising spend remains roughly constant but is now spent across more platforms with potentially less available for the traditional platforms. As Engineers we must provide systems to support this increased diversity of delivery methods with no significant increase in operating costs.


The method by which a consumer accesses content, be it clips, complete programmes, streamed or broadcast services, is likely to be dependent upon their location, be it a shopping mall at lunchtime, or relaxing at home in the evening. In most cases they are likely to be unaware of the means of delivery. To the broadcaster this demand to support many platforms must be serviced with little or no extra resource. The use of automated processes


provides a good way of ensuring the complex processes and the multiplicity of instructions required to support these platforms are executed consistently and reliably.


Through innovation our objective is to deliver more for the same cost or the same for less cost. A simple example of the latter is available in the field of satellite distribution, where new MPEG coding systems can reduce the data rate of the DVB bit-stream required to deliver a TV service. Other examples of innovation can potentially seed many products. In particular the integration of scheduling and automation systems can be exploited to provide a system that can automatically deliver programmes and content to many platforms from a single schedule. Whilst the tools for scheduling have been widely used for 15 or more years, the use of these or similar tools to manage workflow is a more recent innovation. It is the management of workflow that ensures the processes required to support a variety of services, whether defined by language or by platform, can be tracked effectively and efficiently by ‘network managers’. Examples include the preparation of subtitles for programmes being broadcast in other than their native language or the requirement for a programme to be delivered to an On Demand platform after its first airing. The scheduling system is often the tool used to capture the metadata whether relating to the content or to the time and method of broadcast or distribution. Scheduling systems tend to be used up to 24hrs in advance of transmission and other tools may be required to support changes to ‘live’ material or for breaking news events.


The specification process; the mapping of current business processes or constructing a model based on best practice, is critical to achieving the desired system functionality and fit with the business process. The older an organisation (and the more it is set in its ways), the more difficult this can be. With BBC World Service we had a process that had evolved over many decades to be capable of producing the multi-dimensioned schedule needed to produce networks, distribution networks and the transmitter schedules. Considerable investment can be required to complete this specification process, mapping of business processes, use cases and building data models.


The products of the process are the documents needed to configure the business systems. This is incidentally a process and procedure that can be invisible to many colleagues


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