RSS feedsJohn Varney, chief technology officer at the BBC, knows what is needed to prepare the corporation for a technophile audience in a digital age.
‘The challenge for the broadcasting industry is transformation from an industry that has not been high-tech, regardless of what people may have thought,’ he says.
‘Audiences are displaying a whole new set of behaviours in how they access content; they are unpredictable and there is a lot of churn. We need to consider all platforms and all devices on those platforms.’
Varney outlines the need for 360-degree commissioning of content across different platforms and devices. To reach this point, the BBC is abandoning its technological past. ‘Broadcasting has been a collection of creative cottage industries run on a batch production process because of the linear nature of radio and television,’ he says.
‘The transformation has required us to start with a blank sheet, but the advantage we have had is being able to look at other sectors, such as retail and banking, to see what they did right and wrong.’
Rather than start with changing output technology, Varney says the BBC is operating on the heart of its business: the enterprise architecture.
The corporation wants an interoperable IT infrastructure to lay the foundations for its transformation to a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
With the £2bn contract to operate the BBC’s technology, Siemens Business Services is implementing the Digital Fabric plan to introduce an enterprise architecture integration layer that will allow legacy and future applications to work together.
The implementation will not be quick – it will take place over the next nine years. But it will facilitate the distribution of digital content over many media, such as on-demand TV and radio, and the BBC’s increasingly interactive web site.
‘The SOA is invisible, but it is there,’ says Varney. ‘We are laying the foundations and [BBC director general] Mark Thompson understands the need to ensure the foundations are right.
‘It is like Canary Wharf: it took years before you saw the towers. We need to smooth the cost of creating the collaborative towers of production with a global-scale partner over a long period.’
The digital TV switchover programme – the project to replace the analogue terrestrial transmissions network – will need an infrastructure with enormous scaling of bandwidth and storage.
Cable & Wireless will provide distribution feeds to broadcast company Arqiva’s transmitter sites for the BBC’s two digital TV multiplexes over a 25-year period, starting in 2008 when region-by-region rollout of the new high-power network begins.
The open infrastructure, MediaStorage, created by Siemens with partner HP, will give the BBC more than 16 petabytes of storage over the next decade, and will enable many groups to share, transport and store digital content freely and efficiently.
Varney says the BBC will ultimately have a 2.4TB per second optical network by 2008. ‘The success of a digital storage solution depends on the network’s access to storage,’ he says.
‘What we can’t have is something that works slower than the existing process.’
Varney says that as the BBC moves to an IP-based environment, it must understand content and resilience needs – and make sure that it does not move too quickly.
‘We have the most exacting real-time environment in any industry, and we have to be absolutely certain that it works. The BBC News at 10pm is expected to start at 10pm,’ he says.
To ensure a smooth switch to IP, Varney says there will be a robust, quality assurance cycle, overseen by a programme management office – see box, page 42.
And he says that inevitable audience-facing services in the digital age will fall into three categories: find, play and share.
‘The ability for audiences to search the archives and find and use content in a way that suits them personally, whether via a 50-inch high-definition screen or a portable device such as an iPod, is the customer-facing piece,’ says Varney.
When it comes to customers, Varney highlights the importance of versatility. ‘It is not a linear evolutionary process. User-generated content feeds back and helps to create communities,’ he says.
‘Podcasts appear almost spontaneously and our internal infrastructure needs to be able to adapt quickly. We need to stay on our toes, but one of the advantages of outsourcing is that it has lifted a great deal of the process activity to our partner.’
The BBC, meanwhile, can prepare for changes such as the continuing uptake of broadband, which has generated the biggest technological response from the organisation so far.
‘In 10 years’ time we will have an environment in the UK where everyone has broadband even if they don’t realise it,’ says Varney. ‘The telephone system and devices will connect to it. Content and television will be delivered over it. Broadband is something we must embrace.’
Broadband is the backbone of many BBC projects and
the corporation is consolidating all media
players into one device, iPlayer (Integrated Media Player).
The technology will offer downloadable programmes on a catch-up basis through a
PC and is due to launch in October, subject to
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
approval.
‘The public value test is a comprehensive process to judge the suitability of the service for the BBC,’ says Varney.
The broadcaster also plans to continue opening its archive for public access, and is running the Creative Archive Licence pilot, where people can watch, download, edit and share footage for non-commercial purposes.
‘We have a core set of assets that are digitised, but it will take more than five years to make all the content available. Putting archives online is a complex issue,’ says Varney.
‘Until we work out how to deal with rights clearances and negotiations with rights owners, it is a project about a project, because there is the commercial access and the public service aspect to consider.’
A similar rights issue applies to audio podcasts, where audiences subscribe to episodes of specific programmes.
But when it comes to letting users download BBC radio and TV programmes, Varney says the underlying storage technology will prove critical.
‘With more than 800,000 hours of archive material to push into on-demand delivery, online storage mechanisms must be up to scratch,’ he says.
‘Currently, digitised content is stored on linear tape but this is no good for on-demand delivery.’
The BBC aims to be a tapeless organisation by 2010. Key to the success of on-demand delivery is the application of metadata that will enable effective search by programme or theme.
‘The biggest challenge is how to define the metadata required,’ says Varney. ‘In the past, we have not needed much information to broadcast, but now that broadcasting is more complex we need information about the content so we can build a picture of what it is, how to search for it and deliver it to the user.’
Varney says the BBC’s experience with iPlayer has highlighted the importance of metadata.
‘Everything accessed through the system has the metadata applied, but adding the metadata is a manual process,’ he says.
‘The technology to extract metadata is being developed and when it is cracked, on-demand content will be available faster.’
And as it makes its archive available, Varney says the BBC is investigating search technology.
‘We are looking at what we need to do to make search of the BBC effective. If we require partnering, we will do that,’ he says.
Public perception of the BBC as a trusted source of information also puts pressure on the organisation to get things right.
During a crisis – such as last year’s London bombings – people turn to the BBC for information. The organisation’s web site then feels the full force of expectation. But Varney says the broadcaster has developed a strategy for coping.
‘We degrade the site gracefully when demand peaks,’ he says. ‘The goal is to deliver information, so we strip out complex graphics and content, which slow down servers, and take some of the pictures off the front page, but in a way that people will hardly notice.’
While the BBC is busy creating its digital infrastructure to serve the public with flexibility, it must also know where to channel resources.
New technologies open up possibilities, but ideas need to be tested. For example, WiFi can be used for the delivery of content.
‘A wireless environment would enable someone to sit at a laptop and edit a programme from stored content, but we would need to look at wireless capacity and the scale of transfer,’ says Varney.
‘Trial phases are important. In the consumer world, we cannot be everywhere at once. So we need to work out our investment priorities.’
Core processes
As the BBC migrates to an IP environment, the organisation’s chief technology officer John Varney knows there is no room for error.
To deliver a successful project, the BBC is using a programme management office (PMO) to manage IT for the first time.
‘It will be the biggest change in broadcasting – a move from standalone proprietary technologies to an enterprise approach,’ he says.
‘We have put management processes under the umbrella of the PMO to ensure strong project discipline and technical governance, to understand the benefits of the technology, and to get corporate buy-in.’
Varney says it will be the first project to include the whole business.
‘It will affect what output looks like and the speed of commissioning. Before, the technology was straightforward: we put content in an edit suite and that was it. The output tape was ring-fenced in a siloed process,’ he says.
‘With a new integrated enterprise architecture, we must look at dependencies between elements such as network functionality, storage, portability and the creative desktop.’
Collaboration is key to success. A collaborative environment, Core, will be launched in one month – initially for the BBC technical community – where documents will be posted for collaborative access.
‘We will extend Core to programme makers and across the BBC after teething difficulties have been dealt with,’ says Varney. ‘We need to understand how cycles and processes work first.’
Further reading:
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