By Tim Ferguson, 18 February 2009 14:30
COMMENT
But the thing is, this digital age: it's going to happen one way or another. And so these parties - whether together [or] separate - will have to figure out what they are going to do to get media to consumers in new ways besides their current linear distribution capabilities. So on one hand I'm deeply disappointed, on the other hand, I think life goes on and these are all big corporations that have incredibly smart people, and they'll find a way to make it work.
Is there potential for that technology developed for Kangaroo to be adopted by your team?
It's early days. What happens with the technologies, the people, the contracts, whatever is in that venture, remains to be seen. But look, if there are opportunities to generate more public value, then I think that's great. If there aren't, then, so be it but I'm sure we're going to have a look at it.
What internal tech projects are you and your team currently working on?
[On] the production side of the house [there's] a project we call DMI - the digital media initiative. What we're trying to achieve there is to create a complete tapeless production environment for our television production friends. The DMI platform will allow our content makers to shoot content direct to solid state memory cameras. We have a fibre-optic network that connects all of our major production hubs and we're going to start using PCs for cross editing functions. So if you're on our corporate network, you have all that information at your fingertips.
Instead of using a dedicated bit of hardware that costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, we're going to migrate that function to a commodity-based computing environment where it costs maybe a tenth of that. It's a PC/Mac environment where software has become so good that you can do what you did before on a box that costs hundreds of pounds, so we think there's a big creative dividend from these sorts of projects.
We've also made a lot of effort around getting content onto PCs, mobile devices and televisions and I think with DMI it will become much easier to repurpose content and make it available across a wide range of IP-connected devices on the one hand, but also traditional broadcast tuners on the other hand.
The other thing that is quite interesting to us is we're working on a project called BBC Identity. Basically the idea is we've always had a single sign-on system which allowed you to sign into the BBC - user name, password, nothing special there. That system got a bit outdated and didn't do what it was supposed to do so we're building a new system.
Identity I think will form the cornerstone for a lot of our ambitions around personalisation, syndication [and] social media.
Is the BBC's move up to Manchester a big part of your work?
Absolutely. Media City UK [in Salford] is a very important plank of the BBC's strategy in general and of the FM&T strategy as well. My division is going to have over 300 of our employees up in Media City. It's going to be the UK centre for IP television - so the future of red button and our IPTV ambitions are going up there.
What technologies do you personally find exciting and think will be big in the next few years?
I went to CES this year and the one thing I thought was really exciting was the Pre from Palm. It's actually a really sexy device, so I think that's cool.
I'm also quite excited about Sonos [which offers] the ability to get 15,000 radio stations from around the world free of charge onto your stereo system at home via the internet. They do that in a way that is super user friendly, where literally my five-year-old daughter and an 80-year-old can use it. I think it shows the way potentially for where radio and other media will go.
The other thing [that] from a web services perspective caught my attention is [English music service] Spotify. At a time when Apple is reigning strong over music, it's interesting to see start-ups like that, especially in the UK, giving it a shot.
The last thing I find interesting is Google Latitude and I don't know if I like it or not. On the one hand I think, boy it's nice if you're lost, on the other hand it's like, boy I don't want everyone to know where I am all the time. The whole concept of location-based capabilities married to maps [and] media is quite exciting.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
well the thing about television is we watch it, passively ... unless of course it's part of this execrable move to "reality tv" so loved by channel 4
passive viewing is pretty much the definition of web 1.0, select what you want to see and see it on tv or select what you want to see and see it on the web - 1.0 technology nothing wrong with it
plus, and excuse me if I'm misunderstanding, license fee money is going into the development of the iPlayer and some of the ideas include automatically linking into twitter or facebook to tell my friends what I watched last night ?
why can't I tell my friends what I watched last night or is that just too much trouble for me ? I might not want my friends to know what I watched last night is it going to give reviews of these programmes for me as well
if I watch a programme it's because I'm interested in the programme and not the delivery mechanism
so extra bells and whistles on the player won't really do much as it's not the player we are interested in it's the content
and any player that can deliver the content will do
indeed a standardised player that can play any content from any provider would be ideal
the first step on this road would be the definition of a standard for television over the internet
strangely no one seems interested in defining this standard, instead preferring to add bells and whistles to proprietary products that deliver content from single providers forcing the development of lots of different players one for each provider, which at the very least is a huge waste of time money and resources and in the BBC's case our license money
2. Jonathan Day
Karen you are spot on!
3. anonymous
I'm not that impressed. For the guy that has such a key role in determining the future of digital media for the BBC the ideas he hasn't aren't that fantastic and I don't think are particularly well thought out.
There seems to be an obsession with using the internet for tv broadcast.
The bandwidth requirements and demands placed on the ISPs and infrastructure is huge.
The BBC should spend time making HDTV available over FreeView, which it already has proven the technology.
I'm worried about the BBC's strategy, are they going to try and push HDTV over the internet? ! What a mess that would be.
4. anonymous
Such a shame kangaroo was canned. IMO it would have been great for the end-user in the UK.
As it stands, the new iPlayer is superb- great os/platform support, easy to use.
The same cannot be said of itv/c4/5/sky - many of which use the dreadful kontiki app which thankfully the bbc have got rid of.
5. Karen Challinor
Anonymous - can the iPlayer play anything besides BBC content ?
no it can't, so effectively you have a browser that can only look at a single web site or a tv that can only pick up one channel and it will never ever be possible to use it to look at anything else
the reason the web is so successful is because there is a standard for content delivery in HTML which allowed the development of browser technology and the development of web sites by anyone, any browser could see any web site without this initial standard we wouldn't be having this discussion and without it's continuing development we wouldn't be looking at web2.0 and beyond
we need a similar open standard for IPTV delivery over the internet
so any media provider who wants to can make their content available in a standard manner and anyone can build a media viewer that can view any site with such media content
standards make the internet work not individual applications
6. Karen Challinor
actually not having a standard and developing a viewer like the iPlayer (with license payers money) is one way of stifling competition as no one else can use it
and as long as it is perpetuated we won't have multi vendor IPTV as not everyone can afford to develop their own player as they don't have a bottomless pool of license fee money to play with and the competition commission will stamp on any attempted coalition effort