´óÏó´«Ã½

I'm Rowan de Pomerai, a technologist at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development. I've recently returned to London having spent around 7 months in our northern lab in Manchester. As Anthony mentioned in his post, the last year has seen ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D's presence in Manchester grow from a handful of engineers to staff numbers in the double digits, with plans to keep that number rising as more staff move north in advance of the move to . Where the first few early movers got by with a small office space and a basic broadband-type connection to the R&D network in the south, that situation was rapidly becoming untenable. Physically we were bursting at the seams, and the lack of facilities was restricting the work we could do to certain types of software development and little else. We needed more space and more facilities if we were to grow a lab which could match the breadth of output provided by the London base.

Clearly we needed more desks and more space, that much I'm sure everyone can understand. But why all the fuss about facilities? What exactly did we need? Well, there's some staff who do just need a relatively 'normal' office setup. That might include those doing certain types of software development, or those that look after our partnerships and external engagements, or some of the people doing audience testing and research. But then there's people working on bigger IT infrastructure testing, who might need racks of noisy and hot-running equipment, or image processing experts, who are writing software but also need cameras, space to film things, and video connections between rooms. There's people who need to test hardware with signal generators and oscilloscopes, or need to build electronic circuits and so need soldering facilities. And of course we're regularly demonstrating our work to others (after all, what use is new technology if nobody outside the lab ever sees or uses it?) so we need space for that.

Shortly before I arrived in Manchester, Adrian Woolard had been working with Michael Sparks to acquire and begin planning the use of some office space on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Manchester site at Oxford Road. I took on managing the fit-out, building on the work that had been started before I arrived and working with ´óÏó´«Ã½ Workplace and the IT folks to get the space ready to meet the needs of Research and Development. The space in question was originally built as the base of operations for Radio Outside Broadcasts, and next to the garages for OB trucks is a little building with some office space on the first floor. That floor has become the home of ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D's North Lab.

The building contains essentials like toilets and a kitchen (meaning we can make our own cups of tea rather than always having to buy them - a big benefit!) as well as two small rooms and a fairly large open plan office. The basic planning of what facilities we would need over the next 2 years led us to a list comprising an apparatus room (where servers and broadcast equipment sit in racks), a laboratory (where hardware work can be undertaken), a space for demonstrations, some meeting and breakout space, and an office area. Some simple maths shows us that there weren't enough rooms for this, but we managed to make it all fit by agreeing that the meeting, demo and breakout space could be one flexible room, and arranging to re-instate a wall which had previously been removed, dividing the large office into a slightly smaller office and a separate laboratory. Thus was born the room plan. Once we finally got the project started, the installation was relatively quick. The new wall went up, a heavy-duty air conditioning system was installed to keep the apparatus room and laboratory cool, the walls were painted and the carpets cleaned.

But the space is only half the story. The other investment was in connectivity. Within the building there were nowhere near enough network ports to support 25 engineers, many of whom use multiple computers for their work. So we has a lot of extra networking put in, as well as extra power sockets to supply the computers, cameras, test equipment and more. Audio and video connections now connect the office, laboratory and apparatus room, so noisy equipment can be used remotely from the office, or signals fed from the new satellite dish into the office. The final piece of the puzzle is connecting the north lab to the south. Until the interim lab was connected, a single connection - much like the one that probably supplies your home broadband - was all that connected the two sites. With more engineers working and high-data applications needed (such as streaming full-quality HD video or moving huge datasets between sites), something better was needed. An interim solution is now in place using existing ´óÏó´«Ã½ networking, providing well over 10 times the bandwidth we had before, with gigabit an option we're perusing if we need it going forwards.

To top it all off we have a few little extras to help us do a broader array of work and have a little fun too. Tony secured use of a disused radio studio in the main New Broadcasting House building, allowing his exciting work on future audio technologies to gather pace. And back in the main office, I was tasked with attempting to divide the space. There is a push in many organisations towards open-plan, and while we like the feeling of openness and community, many of the engineers find this sort of environment too distracting to concentrate on difficult problems. How do you divide the space and reduce distractions without losing openness? Well that's a question I couldn't possibly answer fully, as there is no single answer. I've written a little more about it on , but let's just say we're experimenting... below you'll see our blue sound-absorbing blocks, great for sitting on, a little impromptu wall building, or even fort-building when some of our staff get their hands on them.

All of this is a drop in the ocean compared to MediaCity, where we'll have more engineers doing a wider variety of work. Extra facilities needed there include a , which looks much like a domestic living room and allows us to study user behaviour when interacting with new technology, as well as viewing and listening rooms for critical audio and video work. But that's a whole new chapter in the story of R&D's north lab, and one I don't have time for here. Suffice to say, the future looks exciting!

I'm Anthony Churnside, a Trainee Research Engineer currently working in our 'North Lab', R&D's new home in Manchester. You have probably heard about the , and I probably don't need to tell you that 5 major departments are moving: ´óÏó´«Ã½ Children's, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Learning, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Five Live, and parts of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media and Technology. Research and Development are part of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Future Media and Technology and, like the other departments moving, we will be up and running in the new building in 2012.

R&D hosted over 40 colleagues from across the ´óÏó´«Ã½ on the 3rd of November for an intensive day of invention, innovation and development.Ìý The format was a - we've run them before on a larger scale, often with partners, (such as , and ) but this was a different, more specialised set up.Ìý This time we just pulled in people from within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ who have been working independently on projects, technologies or systems that touch the archive in some way.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ 'Archive' as managed by the Information and Archives dept is a massive and varied collection- it includes video and film, radio broadcasts and recordings from the very earliest days of the corporation, and written archives and sheet music from well before.Ìý Add to that hundreds of thousands of photographs, and you begin to get a picture of the vast collections we hold.Ìý Beyond that though is the 'metadata'!Ìý This is the crucial cataloguing information; the production notes, the cast lists, running orders, music notes, accounts even.Ìý Today every moment of broadcasting is planned, coordinated and tracked by using millions of pieces of information about the programmes, their content, and event the way we deliver it to you, the audiences.

R&D have a core commitment to support the Information & Archives dept in their mission to preserve this heritage into the digital age, and to help the work of Roly Keating and Tony Ageh in developing new ways to deliver access to the archive for all our audiences.



At Archak we tried to bring together all the people who make that metadata, and those archives, tick.Ìý And for seven straight hours we worked at inventing new ways to join these all together.

The Hacks
In the end we had fourteen presentations of various hacks that had been thought up, designed, attempted, and in a few cases actually built!Ìý The aim of the day was to try new stuff, so the occasional noble effort that falls short, but still shows the potential, was well worthwhile.

We had a hack that looked at recent broadcasts of and plotted them on a map- as a programme that's often heavily influenced by local concerns this could add a new and interesting dimension for browsing content of interest.

A number of efforts joined forces in a 'mashup of mashups' to give a second by second breakdown of television content, then allow viewers to 'bookmark' the show at key moments, and then presented a time line with illustrated bookmarks highlighting the most popular sections of the show, with those self same screen-grabs scaled for popularity.

R&D's own staff produced quite a few interesting proof of concepts, including '6-degrees of Bruce Forsyth' which visually linked entries in the programmes catalogue to the eponymous entertainer, and an audio hack which would allow user to mix their own sound for media within a browser.Ìý This latter technology could be invaluable in future services that seek to make programmes more accesible to audiences with diminished hearing.Ìý Some ideas were explored with ambition, and provided some great insights, without actually producing working demos- the 'Image Based Programme Entity Timeline' being one such noble effort.

What Happens Next?
The point of a day like Archak is not necessarily to produce the next user interface that you'll use to find the repeat of a show you enjoyed, or event to produce a prototype of a new tool that will help a programme editor find that perfect clip faster (though those would be nice bonuses).Ìý Rather, it's to get the creative juices flowing, and make the very best use of the collective intelligence of the ´óÏó´«Ã½.Ìý On Tuesday we hacked, and on Wednesday we went back to our day jobs knowing about more data, more content, more tools and more people who can help us do our jobs better and more creatively- that's what Archak was for.

We had developers from London, Manchester, Cardiff and Bristol at Hackday, and at similar events we've had people from further afield.Ìý Later this month we're involved with , a massive dual site event in London and Manchester, where we'll have a barnstorming conference to join up people from all over the ´óÏó´«Ã½ (plus a few guests from outside to stop us being too cosy), and hopefully have a similar effect across a broad spectrum of work areas.

So, watch this space- before too long we could be asking you to join us on one of these strange and magical days.Ìý And of course- we'd be delighted to come along to yours!

I'm John Fletcher, a Senior Engineer working in the Ingex team.Ìý Ingex is a PC-based audio/video recording system that can be used in multi-camera studios instead of video tape recorders.Ìý Tapeless recording systems, such as Ingex, provide a much faster and cheaper means of getting the recordings into the edit.Ìý And having the material in electronic form means you can do lots more with it, for example, putting it on a website for the production team to review.Ìý One of the aims of Ingex is to show that this kind of system can be put together using off-the-shelf IT components and open-source software.

The beginnings of Ingex were back in 2004 on the Children's ´óÏó´«Ã½ programme BAMZOOKi.Ìý The producer wanted to avoid all the re-typing of handwritten timing notes that happens when material is copied from video tape into the editing system.Ìý We put together a system that allowed the notes to be made on a PC in the studio gallery.Ìý The process is called logging and collects information such as: Scene 3, take 2 was a good one and is on tape between these times.Ìý With this we were able to automate the process of getting the right material into the edit (known as ingest) but it still involved a lot of video tapes.

We then worked on adding broadcast-quality video recording to the system and this was used for the next series of BAMZOOKi in 2005.Ìý We also provided new facilities for the programme makers such as DVDs of each day's recordings with a detailed menu allowing them to go straight to a particular scene/take/camera.Ìý The video below was produced in 2006 to showcase the Ingex systems use on BAMZOOKi (it can also be downloaded from )Ìý

Since then, we've used Ingex on programmes including EastEnders and Dragons' Den, continually adding new features and refining the workflow.Ìý Right now we're using the system to help produce The Bottom Line, a business discussion programme with output on radio, TV and the web.Ìý The multi-platform aspect means a variety of file formats are needed and the topical nature of the programme means the edit has to be turned around very quickly.Ìý Add to that the need to rig the equipment in a cramped radio studio and Ingex is the ideal solution.

You might have seen that we recently won an Innovation Award from the Royal Television Society.Ìý The judges said Ingex had "without a doubt raised the bar in a dramatic style by expanding the scope of an already proven industry development that will now bring greater efficiency, flexibility and faster production turnaround times to many programme undertakings - and all at a cost that makes it a really practical proposition."

More technical detail on Ingex is available at the , where you can also download the open source licensed software.
Ìý

My name's Steve Jolly and I'm a Research Engineer here at ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D, working at our "North Lab" in Manchester. I'm one of around fifteen engineers who make up the "Distribution: Application Layer" section, a cluster of projects themed around improving some of the technologies which actually present broadcasters' content to the consumer.

Within the R&D department, the section has something of a heritage of its own: many of my colleagues here have worked together for a number of years on various interactive television projects, such as helping the ´óÏó´«Ã½ reduce the costs of producing interactive TV content. The three biggest digital television platforms in the UK (Freeview, Sky and Virgin Media) use incompatible formats for delivering "red button" interactive TV services, which can lead to inefficient use of developers' time if the same application has to be created separately for each one. The team spent a number of years looking at solutions to this problem, and ended up playing a major part in the development of the DVB Portable Content Format. This is a language for describing interactive TV applications that can be converted automatically into the several different formats required by different platforms. Since the conversion is automatic, each application only has to be written once.

The team also worked on extending MHEG-5, the interactive TV format used on Freeview and Freesat, to allow audio, video and interactive TV applications to be "pushed" by a broadcaster to digital video recorders (DVRs) in consumers' homes. The user could then select from this pre-recorded content in addition to the programmes that they had selected for recording themselves.

In 2006 and 2007 the team helped run a trial of this technology, in which 250 homes were provided with specially modified DVRs. These gave them access to a "catch-up" service, in which programmes selected by the ´óÏó´«Ã½ were automatically downloaded to a reserved area of the DVR's hard disk, and made available to the trialists on demand. The same trial also explored the possibilities of the technology for enhancing interactive applications with rich media components downloaded to the DVR well in advance. For example, an interactive quiz game was written incorporating video clips of the quizmaster asking the questions - something that sounds simple but which is surprisingly hard to do with conventional interactive TV technologies. Feedback from the trial was positive, with participants reporting, amongst other things, that the "´óÏó´«Ã½ recommended" programmes introduced them to things they wouldn't normally have watched.

An interactive quiz incorporating video "pushed" to the DVR in advance using the MHEG-5 extensions developed by ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D.

The work of the section today covers a much wider range of projects. For example, there's a small but enthusiastic team looking at how the ´óÏó´«Ã½ could make better use of mobile phones, and not just as devices to watch television programmes or listen to the radio on. I'm a part of this team, although my current project (described below) is a bit more general. My colleague Jerry Kramskoy wrote a post on the Internet Blog a little while back talking about some of our aspirations in this area.

A couple of us are also involved in the "Wombile" project: mostly in our own time we've written a basic platform for multiplayer mobile games, and a few games on top of it. My colleague Matt Hammond and I also wrote about that on the Internet Blog back in June.

There's another project in the section looking at the energy efficiency of broadcasting. Obviously there are environmental issues here that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ takes very seriously, but saving energy saves money, too. R&D engineers also need to be aware of our impact on consumers. We don't design the devices that people buy in the shops, but we do design some of the technologies and components inside them. Energy efficiency is therefore one of the things we bear in mind when we work on technologies that could find their way into people's homes. Not only does doing so reduce carbon emissions and save consumers money, it also helps the companies that make televisions and set-top boxes meet ever-stricter environmental regulations.

Unsurprisingly, I'm particularly excited by my own work: a colleague and I are designing a web API that would allow network-connected set-top boxes (and similar devices, such as internet radios) to be accessed and controlled by other devices on the home network. The implications of that go far beyond being able to control the telly from your PC or mobile phone, although that alone would be both cool and useful. The most important thing we want to enable is the development of user interfaces that are completely independent of the set-top box's built-in interface, optimised for use by people with specific disabilities or impairments.

Take blind people, for example. They're at a disadvantage when it comes to finding a conventional remote control in the first place, and most televisions and set-top boxes give you only visual feedback when you press the remote control's buttons, which clearly isn't a lot of use if you can't see it. It would be far better if a blind person's remote control was an app running on their mobile phone (which is likely to be within easy reach at all times), and if it could convey information about what the set-top box is doing by speaking to them.

A standard way to access set-top boxes via a local network would allow the development of this and many other innovative applications. Imagine if your mobile phone could find out what was recorded on your DVR, for example. It could then download mobile-size versions of the programmes you hadn't watched (or had only watched part of) for you to catch up with on your way to work, for example.

In addition to these new projects, the team still does important work on interactive television technologies. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer deployment on Freesat announced recently by Rahul Chakkara uses further MHEG extensions developed by the team in partnership with the , for example. The team continues to carry out research in this area, and hopefully television viewers will continue to benefit from it, in terms of useful new services from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and other broadcasters, and cost-effective creation of content.

Over the coming months we'll be bringing you more detail on these projects as they reach important milestones, and we'd love to hear back from you the thoughts and ideas that they inspire.Ìý

[Ed: Our thanks to Steve Jolly for this post- the first of a series of round ups from the various research sections of R&D.Ìý Do let us know which areas you'd like to hear more about and if you have any questions about the subjects raised by Steve just pop them in the comments]

At the (the 10th of November) ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development won two of the key awards for recent technical achievements. R&D has a great history of being recognised at these annual awards, but this is the first time for a few years that we have won, and to do so twice is a real coup, and it proves once again our world class innovation credentials. In the Raising the Bar category, Ingex, R&D's automated tapeless production system triumphed. Developed by a team headed up by Lead Research Engineer David Kirby, Ingex is already used by Dragons' Den and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Children's Bamzooki.

Phil de Nier, Matthew Marks, Phil Tudor and John Fletcher accept the award from Martha Lane Fox.

In the "Under the Bonnet" category our Distribution Core Technology team that developed DVB-T2 was awarded the prize. This is the technology that will enable Freeview HD (due to launch to audiences in 2010), and the work recognised with this prize has included some staggering breakthroughs in the deployment of advanced broadcast technology. The DVB-T2 team is headed up by Principal Research Engineer Nick Wells.

Justin Mitchell, Chris Nokes, Andrew Murphy and Martin Thorp receive their award from Martha Lane Fox

Our FM&T colleagues at ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer won the prestigious Judges Award which was collected on behalf of the team by ´óÏó´«Ã½ Online Controller Seetha Kumar. This award was created by the RTS to celebrate the greatest vision in determining how media might develop in the future.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D High Frame Rate Television Experiment was also shortlisted in the Raising the Bar category but was pipped to the post by Ingex. High Frame Rate (or HFR as it inevitably gets called) is a little known and almost 'blue sky' area of research where we pioneered the use of very very high speed video cameras to produce pictures with breathtaking realism, and which may lead on to the technologies that follow after High Definition, as described in the relevant High Frame Rate white paper.Ìý

I'm Matthew Postgate, the Controller of Research & Development at the ´óÏó´«Ã½, and it's my pleasure to be writing this inaugural post for the new R&D Blog. This blog will form a part of the way we show you how we are working, developing and growing, and will of course offer a place where you can ask us about our work.

is a core principle of how we work and builds on the collaborative traditions the department has worked to throughout its history. We appreciate the best and most creative work comes when we share what we know, and draw on a wide community to build on that knowledge. Many of our projects are collaborative efforts, with research bodies, fellow broadcasters, universities, and companies from around the world.Ìý For several years we have been supporting the program, opening data and resources to independent developers and 'hackers' from across the UK.

There are a couple of existing blogs which are related to this area:

• Our Prototyping team has previously been blogging at RAD lab. From now on their posts will appear on this blog.
• KEP as a knowledge exchange network was set up earlier this year to encourage and develop knowledge exchange between the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and academia, specifically in the arts & humanities area. That effort is now ready to expand into a wider domain, so we felt it was a good opportunity to fit it into a wider R&D blog effort too.

Future posts will give an insight into the work we conduct, giving you key updates as we demonstrate new systems or launch prototypes. We're engaged in over 40 active research projects day to day, and provide technical expertise to the wider ´óÏó´«Ã½ and the international broadcast industry on a whole range of subjects. We hope we'll be able to give you a insight and information across that range of topics through this blog.

The authors who will be posting here come from all across our department, and will tell you about the very latest developments we are moving into the mainstream, and some that lie further ahead. We're often appearing in public at conferences and conventions, so we'll let you know the one's we're heading for and share with you the highlights we pick up from around the world of media technology.

The coming months are an important time for ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D- in February of 2010 we will be moving into our new southern home in the heart of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s West London campus. As I'm sure you can appreciate, the effort of relocating over 100 staff and their facilities from our previous base of 60 years is substantial.

At the same time we are rapidly building up a ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D laboratory in the North; the team has just moved into their interim accommodation in New Broadcasting House in Manchester. In 2012 that team will be on the move again, to take up a core role at the centre of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s . With each stage of these changes we'll keep you up to date, and share some of the trials and triumphs of these challenges.

This is a two way communication of course. If there's any particular area of our work that you'd like to know more about, a project, or a team, or perhaps some area of technology that you think we ought to know about, do let us know. Keep an eye on us- we'll be posting regularly and in some depth.

Thank you, I'm looking forward to the conversation,

Matthew