IBC Conference and Exhibition Reflections

I may have given a bit of a false start to my IBC coverage this year. Sadly, after the enthusiasm of the first day I found the week long event a rather draining, and truth be told, demoralising experience. It wasn't without highlights though, and I think it's only fair I give a potted account of the best and the worst of the conference and the exhibition.

OK, so, highlights: Eric Huggers keynote was really good- in fact the session was excellent with great insights from IBMs Saul Berman and the hugely entertaining Rory Sutherland of Ogilvey- Rory's speech was a master class in erudite education disguised as a joyful ramble, and the image of a McDonald's drive-through full of half naked gluttons will be with me forever! However, these three luminaries, and their able interlocutor Raymond Snoddy, were among the very few in the exhibition who appeared to be prepared down the barrel of the gun of IP delivered content.

Quick sidebar here- The Canvas demonstrations shown (just a mocked up UI in fact, but ratjer a nice one) by Erik seem to have lit a fire under those in the broadcast market who had hitherto let such ideas slide them by. Now at last, some 3 years after the BBC rolled its sleeves up and started to see how a fully joined up IPTV platform could work, the great and good of european broadcast have started the HBB-TV project. This work is good, but it's late, and though the BBC are facing fair criticism for relying on proprietary components (especially from Adobe) it's perhaps salutary to recognise that this lumbering industrial standards approach from the old guard of european broadcast technology is years behind the reinvigourated BBC approach. Having said all that OFCOM and the BBC Trust may yet mandate that an open standards based approach be taken- who knows how that would turn out!?

Across the conference the best attended sessions tended to be those with the most 'conventional' view of broadcast. This is not to say that 'conventional' is bad- I'm thinking here of the excellent in depth DVB-T2 review gave possibly one of the best insights to the incredible engineering work that's gone into developing the next generation of Freeview in High Definition- that's to say FreeviewHD- and slot it into the Digital Switch Over in UK broadcasting. (For more good introductory guides the EBU stand at IBC was excellent). For all this excellent work though, it is worth considering for a moment what wasn't at IBC....

There was a very modest mobile presence- Qualcom had a big stand, which I thought looked very quiet. Nokia had a modest stand, but Apple weren't there at all. Does that matter? It does when you think of the massive impact the iPhone has had on the way we think of people buying content. App Stores were an unseen buzz all over the show, and to think I actually heard someone, a well respected senior engineer from a major broadcaster, say without a flicker of irony that 'There are no new business models'. That sounded a lot like denial to me. (Not to his fellow panelists, who nodded sagely at this mantra.)

What clearly does matter is that this year Sony saw fit to skip the show entirely- usually they'd have had a stand covering several thousand square metres, showing off displays, cameras, broadcast and domestic kit. Their absence left a gaping hole. I think it also matters that there was no Google, no Twitter, no Yahoo, no Nintendo, no Electronic Arts, no Facebook, no computer games publishers at all. The way I see it IBC is a wake for the dominance of linear broadcast- I'll accept that most living rooms have TVs still, and that most people watch most of their TV linearly, but the days when this was the big picture, and all other forms of electronic media were fringe niches, has finally passed.

I'll go next year, briefly, and I really hope there's more of a realisation evident that TV in it's "lean-back" form is a niche in a bigger world of mobile, internet entertainment, social media, games, online movies. And what's more, that TV is better when it does recognise this- better for its engineers, better for its creatives and most importantly better for its audiences. Signs are not good though- a year ago, my esteemed collegue late of this parish, John Ousby, wrote a similar piece for the BBC internet blog, and I doubt he'd have noticed a great improvement.

Still, Amsterdam was nice.

Taking Things Pro

This is almost one of those blog posts one shouldn't write- as in, one that you write because you haven't written one for ages. Kind of a 'contractual obligation' blog post. Except it isn't really, I have no obligation to post. Not yet. Will soon.

Yes, that’s right, I might soon be blogging professionally, and at that point this whole lovely friendly process of punting my thoughts out to be ignored by the world will become a proper millstone. Or a more disciplined and hence efficient process.

The blog we’re talking about is a proposed BBC R&D one, to sit alongside the excellent efforts of the BBC RAD blog, the Radio Labs, Journalism Labs and the Internet blog itself, not to mention the Backstage blog. All this public relaying of information can seem a little overwhelming, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of BBC and even more public, so a profusion of communication is to be expected, and perhaps encouraged.

NOTA BENE: Extensive internal BBC review and approval is required before this goes ahead, so it's far from a done deal.

Right now we are plotting out the first few months of posting and trying to ensure we get a good spread of coverage and aim at the right level for our interested parties. Some people will be generally interested in what we’re up to, but not particularly technically minded, others will be fellow engineers and broadcast specialists fascinated by our work’s most technical elements- pitching at the right level for all will be a challenge. And that’s before we get into the confidentiality/ patent protection/ intellectual property management tangles of what we can and can’t talk about.

The R&D blog will initially sit on its own page like other blogs, but before too long it will form a core element of a refreshed public web presence for the department. We’re finishing up the initial requirements at the moment, with help from the lovely people at Howell Wong Costello, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Rain Ashford for her tremendous efforts to get this up and running. Rain will soon be heading back to BBC Learning after a year on Backstage and in R&D and we’re sorry to be loosing her- Cheers mi dear! Rain also produced much of the R&D TV output, including the whole of the Maker Faire segment in the latest edition, for which we're very grateful.

AAaaaand finally, just because I think a blog post is better with a picture, here’s something I knocked up tonight to stick on our office door, because I was bored with the usual office layout diagrams. Created in Lego Digital Designer. Go play

Meanwhile, Back at the BBC...

Vegas is behind me (best place for it) and I'm writing this from the most wonderfully hospitable coop project cum hostel in San Francisco, but that's not what this is about! While I swan about on jollies my esteemed colleagues Rowena Goldman and Brendan Crowther are putting together a fantastic showcase of research for tomorrow.

The BBC and the AHRC have been co funding a swathe of research projects looking at all manner of areas: community, learning journeys, accessibility, fan behaviour, user generated content and virtual worlds. Mondays event is being promoted on their blog here. There may even be a couple of tickets left so take a look if you're interested (you should be!).

Refocusing on the Future

In the last week or so the R&D department has laid its plans for the future out in some detail, at least internally. The intention is that by the beginning of April we will have a solid 'workplan' for the next year or so, and will begin a new, regular cycle of quarterly review, and twice annual reassesment.

The first cycle of assesment of projects, and the general reorganisation that has followed, has been pretty radical. Overall we have decided to end 51 out of 90 current R&D projects. Over the next three to six months the research effort within the BBC will be wound down, and documentation, software hardware and other materials will be collated, archived and, where suitable, published to our colleagues and in some cases the wider world.

This doesn't mean that the projects come to a dead stop though- for instance the Dirac effort will go through a full certification process, and will continue to be developed for key applications, such as archival file formats, but it looks like the focus will shift away from formal research.

At the same time as some long running efforts have been marked to conclude (or transition into development), five more projects proposed by R&D staff have been given the green light, and another eight requested by the business are to begin- so it's not all about 'endings'. Plus, and for me most importantly, we are shaking up the structure. Now, instead of the traditional 'portfolios' we are having 'sections'- seven of them in four key areas. And one of those sections is explicitly focussed on archive work, and includes all the previously distributed (and slightly 'cinderalla') Archive R&D effort. Whoot!

Futurology?

Yesterday marked the first meeting of the L10 group that I was invited to. L10, or Life plus 10 (I prefer L10, 'cos life plus ten sounds a bit too much like a gaol sentence for child murder, license fee evasion or copyright infringement or something) is a small, informal, off the books, black ops directorate of the BBC's technology division, like Alias except without a Jenifer Garner. Um though actualy we do. And we do have both an Arvin Sloan and a Jack Bristow. And somethig of a surfiet of Marshals. Oops, there, just blown the plausible deniability.

Anyroad up, we sit around, try and figure out what the world will be like ten or fifteen years hence, and determine how, why or whether the BBC fits into it at all. Sit around was what we did this time. But I hope there will be some standing up too. And waving of arms a la Peter Snow. I really enjoyed it- I got to make completely unattributed Plato quotes and throw up some half boiled social psychology ideas about the nature of communities and society and why people starting uni use facebook (it's cos they are scared and positive vetting of your mates online is cheaper and easier than getting utterly shit faced every night for three months so you just don't care). Ah, the old days.....

Now why am I blogging this? Well I just do don't I. I blog and blog and blog and do all our dirty washing in public, and you can all see it. Both of you. So howabout some feedback. How about all you teeming hordes of BBC-ophiles drop me some sparkling feedback on just where you see the world being in 2022?! Why not point out just how hideouly irrelevant the BBC will be, or alternatively how Ofcom and the BBC trust will have seen the light, and turned over to the BBC an exponentialy growing license fee that we can collect worldwide from a fleet of black helicopters, and any and all dabbling in communications by the publicly owned institutions of europe chall be controlled, edited and ultimately owned by the uber BBC! mwahahahaha. Or you know. Not.

I may yet float the occasional flight of fancy here on this very blog, in part to garner your feedback, but mostly to scare my bosses silly that any of my out of the box radical nonsense is leaking into the public domain.

P.S. I once tried to think inside the box. Sadly I become rather flatulent whilst thinking hard, and so almost suffocated.

P.P.S. I really wanted to come up with a cool logo for L10 based upon the Lagrange points idea, but apparently there are only five lagrange points in a two body gravitic system, and in a three body system the maths aren't do able within the lifetime of the universe. So it would be a random scribble. Which I quite like too.