Today marks the 100th birthday of broadcasting icon Sir David Attenborough.

Born on May 8, 1926, in Isleworth, England, Attenborough is known throughout the world for his work with the BBC Natural History Unit, but he’s also moved with the times and in recent years has fronted shows on streaming services.

The middle of three brothers (older brother Richard was a BAFTA and Oscar-winning actor and director), Attenborough joined the BBC in 1952, despite the fact that he didn’t own a television.

Apparently, he was discouraged from a career in front of the camera because it was thought his teeth were too big! But, after the original presenter fell ill, Attenborough made his on-camera debut in 1954 with “Zoo Quest,” a program about an animal-collecting expedition for the London Zoo.

In the 1960s, he left the BBC to pursue a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, fitting in filming around his studies. However, he failed to finish the course after accepting an invitation to become controller of BBC Two in 1965. Amazingly, he managed to negotiate a clause in his contract that would allow him to still make programmes, travelling to Tanzania later that year to film elephants.

During his time at BBC Two, the channel broadcast some of its most iconic programmes, including The Old Grey Whistle Test and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It also helped showcase the BBC’s new UHF colour television.

In 1969, Attenborough was promoted to director of programmes, making him responsible for the output of both BBC One and Two. When he was touted as a possible BBC director-general in 1972, he told Richard he had no appetite for the job. Early the following year, he left his role to return to full-time programme-making.

This led to Attenborough’s most prolific time as a natural history presenter, educating the nation with the likes of Life on Earth, The Living Planet and The Life of Birds.

Over the past 10 years, Attenborough has spread his wings, working with the likes of Sky, Netflix and Apple TV.

Technology
As a presenter and producer, Attenborough has never been afraid to embrace new technology to help tell a story. For The Life of Mammals in 2002, low-light and infrared cameras were deployed to reveal the behaviour of nocturnal mammals.

In 2011, he discussed how 3D filmmaking (which was a big thing back then) could help bring “transcendental” images to screens, but tended to take a lot longer to film. “3D works under certain circumstances and depends on how you produce it,” said Attenborough. “Right now the technology is limiting, although the results can be liberating. It takes four to five people to lift the cameras and 30 minutes to change a lens, which is no way to react to fast-moving animal behavior. The systems are very temperamental, which means you could be sitting around for an hour and half while the cameras are aligned.”

(Also Read: The Evolution of 3D, According to Sir David Attenborough)

Also that year, IBC presented Attenborough with its International Honour for Excellence, celebrating his then 60-year career for its “significant advancements in filming techniques and bringing groundbreaking documentaries to audiences.”

In 2016, the BBC launched its own Attenborough app. “The Story of Life” app marked his 90th birthday with over 1,000 clips of Attenborough’s most memorable moments. “To keep sharing those stories in a digital age means taking them online, and I hope ‘The Story of Life’ will reach and inspire a whole new generation,” he said.

In more recent years, Attenborough has helped lead the move into augmented reality. At an AR experience based on 2022’s “The Green Planet” in London, visitors were guided through six digitally enhanced worlds—including rainforests, freshwater and saltwater worlds, the changing seasons and desert landscapes—by an AR version of the presenter.

The series itself employed new filming technology to take the audience to the highest branches and the lowest fauna, using a camera rig re-engineered into a field robot christened the Triffid, after John Wyndham’s science fiction book. Using the system, the production team were able to film plants in the field, not only in time lapse, but in real time, exploring their world all the way down to macro scale.

(Also Read: How a Triffid Captured ‘The Green Planet’)

Attenborough has also worked with virtual production, specifically on “Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough,” when producers used the 25.5 meter-by-5 meter curved screen at MARS’ London facility to recreate the series’ background.

All of this shows that Attenborough is one of the most prolific presenters and producers on British television. In fact, he holds a Guinness World Record for the longest career as a natural historian and presenter in television.

With “Wild London” and “Secret Garden” already airing in 2026 and “Tiger Island” awaiting broadcast, it looks like Attenborough’s 60+ year career on screen and off shows no sign of stopping. Long may it continue!

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.

LONDON—Open Broadcast Systems has announced that BBC World Service has selected its decoders for IP television distribution.

Robert Webber, senior distribution manager, BBC International Services explained that they needed "to deliver reliable IP video to BBC World Service partners in various locations across the world. Open Broadcast Systems decoders were flexible enough to deliver and monitor reliable IP video to our global partners, whilst meeting local needs.”

In several regions, the decoders were installed by Open Broadcast Systems’ network of local partners, with local knowledge and skillset, enabling rapid implementation across multiple regions. The decoders support a wide range of IP video protocols including SRT, RIST and Zixi.

The high-quality, low-latency IP decoders are designed with a small form factor, allowing for easy global deployment to deliver flexible, reliable, and cost-effective decoding for distribution across the BBC World Service network to its global rebroadcast partners.

“Delivering content across the globe comes with a number of significant challenges for broadcasters. Software-based solutions provide the flexibility to deliver content reliably over IP,” said Kieran Kunhya, founder and CEO of Open Broadcast Systems. “This, coupled with the local knowledge and expertise to ensure seamless implementation, was a key factor for BBC World Service TV.”

Open Broadcast Systems will be exhibiting at 2026 NAB Show from April 18 to 22 on booth W2217.

For more information, visit https://www.obe.tv/

To help engineers and technical leaders stay ahead, this two-part series, which is now available for on demand viewing, brings together the engineers, innovators, and technical architects defining the next decade of production. If you’re responsible for shaping or supporting your organization’s workflows, this is where the real insight lives.

Session 1, January 21: “MXL Architecture and Its Capabilities: Unlocking the Future of Live Production” Featuring a keynote from Peter Brightwell, Lead R&D Engineer at BBC and moderated by Jenny Priestley of TVBEurope offers a deep dive into the building blocks of #MXL providing broadcasters, content creators, and technology professionals with actionable strategies to streamline production, enhance flexibility, and future-proof their media operations. REGISTER HERE TO WATCH ON DEMAND

Session 2, January 28: "MXL in Action: Real-World Interoperability for the Software-Defined Era." Featuring a keynote from Helio Eufrauzino Media Solution Specialist at TV Globo and moderated by Tom Butts Editor of TV Tech will explore real-world implementations of MXL, demonstrating how interoperability between devices, systems, and workflows enables more agile, scalable, and efficient production operations. REGISTER HERE TO WATCH ON DEMAND

Who Should Attend

• Broadcast engineers
• CTOs and technical managers
• Live event and remote production teams
• Studio operators
• System designers and integrators
• Anyone modernizing workflow and infrastructure

Why Register Now?
Because the future of media workflows isn’t coming “someday” — It's being built today. And this series gives you access to the people designing the blueprints. Registration is free, but spots fill quickly.

Join us and be part of the conversation shaping what’s next.

The event is being held in collaboration with Matrox Video, Lawo, TVU Networks, Appear, Techex, Riedel Communications, Grass Valley and Telos Alliance.

A groundbreaking new study by the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has found serious problems with news summaries generated by AI assistants.

In nearly half (45%) of the AI-generated news summaries, researchers found at least one significant error. In addition, some AI tools performed even worse, though all showed significant problems. Google’s Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.

The finding raise serious doubts about the widespread use of AI-generated news summaries by consumers and plans to use those summaries by news organization.

Tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon have been investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI, in part because AI-generated summaries could potentially replace existing search tools and provide them with the kind of massive advertising revenue currently enjoyed by Google.

The study is also notable for the scale and scope of the research, which was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC.

In arguably the largest study of its kind, the research involved 22 public service media (PSM) organizations in 18 countries working in 14 languages. Professional journalists from participating PSM evaluated more than 3,000 responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity against key criteria, including accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context, the BBC reported.

The study also found that the poor performance of the AI-assistants was in fact a slight improvement over an earlier BBC study. “First – there have been improvements since the earlier BBC study,” the report noted. “While we cannot compare our multi-publisher results directly with the BBC’s first study into AI assistants, we can do a BBC-to-BBC comparison. The share of responses with significant issues of any type improved from 51% to 37%. For Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity, around a third of responses had a significant issue, while for Gemini it was around half.”

In a second major conclusion, the study noted that, “despite the improvement seen in the BBC-to-BBC comparison, the multi-market research shows errors remain at high levels, and that they are systemic, spanning all languages, assistants and organizations involved. Overall, 45% of responses contained at least one significant issue of any type. Sourcing is the single biggest cause of significant issues (31%)."

"Of particular concern for publishers are sourcing errors that misrepresent them, such as when a response misattributes an incorrect claim to them," the study found. "Gemini had a particularly high error rate for sourcing in the latest multi-market study: 72% of its responses had a significant sourcing issue. All other assistants were below 25%.”

The full study can be found here, with additional commentary and tools from the BBC here.

The Television Academy has announced the recipients of the 2025 Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards honoring an individual, company or organization for developments in broadcast technology. The awards ceremony will be held Tuesday, Oct. 14, at the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center in North Hollywood, California.

“Behind every unforgettable moment on screen is a breakthrough in science, technology or engineering,” said Cris Abrego, chair of the Television Academy. “These groundbreaking innovations transform the way stories are created, shared and experienced. We celebrate these Emmy winners for forever changing how we experience the magnificent power of television.”

“This year’s Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards acknowledge the wide range of technologies used in our industry to aid the storytelling process,” said Barry Zegel, co-chair of the Engineering, Science & Technology Committee. “The award recipients represent a remarkable group of cutting-edge technologies that have advanced television production, safety and artistry in ways unfathomable when our industry began. In addition, we are recognizing the innovators responsible for remarkable production tools and setting standards that have revolutionized broadcast production and distribution.”

Added co-chair Wendy Aylsworth, “We also extend our hearty congratulations to Mark Schubin, who is receiving the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, and to BBC Research & Development on receiving the Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award. Both are incredibly deserving of these prestigious legacy awards.”

The Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards are made possible by Television Academy sponsors Decoy, FIJI Water, Franciacorta, Johnnie Walker Blue Label, LG, People, The Ritz-Carlton and United Airlines.

The following is a list of awards and recipients to be recognized:

Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award

This award honors a living individual whose ongoing contributions have significantly affected the state of television technology and engineering.

This year's recipient is Mark Schubin.

Mark Schubin (with a degree in chemical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology) has been in television since 1967, working on every aspect, including design, manufacturing, lighting, sound, camera, editing and distribution. His diverse projects have spanned the world on all seven continents, including Antarctica, from operas to the Olympics. He helped develop the broadcasting of the Metropolitan Opera (The Met) productions to cinemas and television stations around the world and has continued supporting this project for many years since its inception.

Mark refers to himself as an “Engineer and Explainer”: His non-judgmental — but humorous — communication of facts and arcane — but relevant — information is what endears him to creatives, business executives and technologists alike. This is why he has been the program chair of the HPA Tech Retreat since 1998, speaks frequently at events and seminars on a wide array of technical topics and on the history of television, and has been a member of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Engineering Awards committee for more than 30 years.

A prolific engineering historian, educator and professional writer, when Sports Video Group asked him to do so, he changed his more than 33-year-old monthly column on "Video Research" in Videography magazine into SchubinCafe, which is archived by the Library of Congress. Mark’s lifetime of accomplishments in the television industry are noted beyond this archive by his numerous publications, patents and awards.

For more information, visit SchubinCafe.com.

Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award
This award honors an agency, company or institution whose contributions over time have significantly impacted television technology and engineering.

This year's recipient is BBC Research & Development

BBC Research & Development has had a proud history of shaping how we watch and experience television as it focused on its public mission in support of broadcasting. Since its founding in 1930, the team has led the way in breakthroughs that became everyday essentials — like FM radio, stereo sound and the Radio Data System that sends song titles and traffic updates to car radios. Over the decades, they’ve been central to important advancements in television, playing a pivotal role in the development and standardization of High-Definition Television (HDTV), Ultra High-Definition Television (UHDTV), Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) for the carriage of High Dynamic Range (HDR) information and 5G networks.

Looking ahead, their work continues to help define the future of television in its research on Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). BBC Research & Development continues to lead and participate in the important industry collaboration on the impact and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As co-founders of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, BBC Research & Development is also helping to create standards that will allow media creators to understand better human/AI collaboration and copyrightability of AI-generated media. Behind the scenes and screens, BBC R&D remains an important industry force that shapes how television can help us connect with stories and each other, today and in the future.

For more information, visit BBC.co.uk/rd.

Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards
Presented to an individual, company or organization for developments in engineering, science and technology that are either so extensive an improvement on existing methods or so innovative in nature that they materially affect the production, recording, transmission or reception of television and thereby have elevated the storytelling process.

George Dochev and Peter Thompson, LucidLink
LucidLink is a cloud-native storage collaboration platform that streams data on demand, letting creative teams access and edit the same files instantly from anywhere - without syncing, downloading, VPNs, or complex IT. It mounts like a local drive and provides a single source of secure, always-up-to-date files. In media & entertainment, LucidLink powers edit-in-place, VFX, audio, and finishing workflows, supporting growing files and enabling distributed teams to work on large media as if it were local. Widely adopted by leading studios, streamers, and creative houses, LucidLink has become an essential tool for television projects worldwide.

For more information, visit LucidLink.com.

Ian Sampson for the development of Hush Pro
Hush Pro is an AI-powered audio plugin that isolates dialogue from ambient noise, transient sounds, and room reflections. It allows editors and re-recording mixers to clean up production audio with remarkable efficiency, minimal artifacts, and exceptional quality. Since its release, Hush Pro has quickly become an essential tool at post-production studios around the world, delivering pristine dialogue while significantly reducing the need for ADR.

For more information, visit HushAudioApp.com.

Fraunhofer IIS and intoPIX for the development of JPEG XS
JPEG XS is a state-of-the-art image compression format that transmits high-quality images with minimal latency and low-resource consumption, with virtually lossless image quality. JPEG XS is therefore ideal for live, professional video and broadcast applications where bandwidth presents challenges to deliver the highest quality. JPEG XS enables the transmission of high-resolution video streams over standard Ethernet infrastructure. This makes JPEG XS a fundamental game changer for real-time transmission of video for a wide variety of applications in media and studio technology as well as making real-time video processing in data centers practical.

For more information, visit: FraunhoferIIS.com and intoPIX.

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers [SMPTE], European Broadcasting Union [EBU] and Video Services Forum [VSF] for the development of the ST 2110 Suite of Standards
ST 2110 is a suite of standards for transmitting uncompressed video, audio, and data over digital Internet Protocol (IP) networks in professional media environments. It emerged as a replacement for traditional Serial Digital Interface (SDI) infrastructure, offering greater flexibility and scalability. It is now widely adopted, improving flexibility and scalability over the previous generation of Serial Digital Interfaces (SDI) and is foundational to all digital content transmissions.

For more information, visit SMPTE.org, EBU.ch and VSF.tv.

Mark T. Noel, Jesse Noel, Casey D. Noel and J.D. Schwalm for the development of the NACMO series of motion bases
The NACMO series of motion bases are the first of their kind, developed as a mobile motion base built specifically for television and cinema production. These machines provide a safe and streamlined approach to giving six axes of motion (seven with the optional rotator) to any otherwise static prop or set piece be it a boat, helicopter or car. The largest motion base — “Mo” — has a 75,000-pound capacity and can give all levels of motion to provide a real experience that translates on the screen for the environment and the actors involved. NACMO motion bases can be set up on location or on a sound stage. They are often used in conjunction with LED volume stages.

For more information, visit NACeffects.com.

Jayson Dumenigo for the development of Action Factory’s Play’n with Fire Hydrogels
Action Factory’s Play’n with Fire Hydrogels are innovative, high-performance polymers engineered to provide unmatched protection against extreme heat during the performance of fire stunts. Designed for durability and application at 74-76 degrees F; not iced, these gels maintain exceptional stability and require minimal reapplication even under the most intense conditions, significantly cutting down on the time it takes to accomplish a fire stunt on set. In a record-breaking stunt, it withstood direct flame exposure for five minutes and 25 seconds and temperatures upward of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. Its reliability, ease of use and groundbreaking heat-protective technology make Play’n with Fire gels a game-changer for television and stunt professionals, setting a new standard in safety and performance.

For more information, visit AFstunts.com.

Rob Drewett and Andy Nancollis for the development of the AGITO Dolly System
AGITO is a versatile, compact modular robotic dolly system designed to keep cameras steady and in motion for film and television production. Often likened to a “Swiss Army Knife” for camera movement, it folds the work of multiple traditional rigs into a single, reconfigurable platform. With quick-switch modes including free-roaming, track-based, overhead and MagTrax — the latter using a simple strip of magnetic tape to guide the camera with precision, allowing crews to reset quickly and save valuable time on set — AGITO delivers everything from classic tracking shots to complex, repeatable moves all from one adaptable system. This groundbreaking approach represents a leap forward in the art and engineering of camera movement — opening up fresh creative possibilities for both camera operators and cinematographers.

For more information, visit MotionImpossible.com.

Andy Carluccio, Jonathan Kokotajlo, Eyal Hadida and Brendan Ittelson for the development of Zoom for Broadcast
Zoom for Broadcast is a media integration platform that turns Zoom Meetings into broadcast-ready feeds, extracting individual high-quality video and audio from remote participants and routing them into professional live productions as though they were in-studio. It gives producers deep control over each guest’s AV settings, uses Zoom’s global cloud infrastructure to deliver low-latency, reliable streams without costly equipment or complex setups, and elegantly scales from one guest to hundreds in a familiar meeting experience. With robust application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK) support, it plugs into existing production tools, making high-quality remote contributions both accessible and affordable — and eliminating the traditional barriers of expense and technical complexity in live broadcasting.

For more information, visit: Zoom.com

Boris Yamnitsky, Jason Clement, Mike Escola and Peter McAuley for the development of Boris FX Continuum
Boris FX Continuum stands as one of the most enduring plugin collections in post-production history, relied upon for decades by editors, motion graphics designers and VFX artists. Its tools have shaped the look of broadcast television, becoming a defining standard for effects, transitions and image restoration. With a legacy defined by reliability and innovation, Continuum continues to evolve through graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, machine learning–driven effects and a deep library of presets, ensuring its ongoing role as a cornerstone of modern post-production.

LONDON, UK—The BBC World Service is working with Encompass Digital Media and Zixi to transition the global distribution of its content from satellite to IP-based delivery, offering “unparalleled flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness,” according to Encompass.

The first major milestone was reached at the end of March, and delivered the full transition to IP distribution for BBC World Service partners across Europe with the Americas, Pacific, Africa, and Asia to follow.

The BBC World Service allows the British broadcaster to reach a potential worldwide audience of 450 million, delivering news and current affairs in 42 language services including English across a mix of video, audio and online output.

The BBC World Service is using Encompass’ Altitude Connect platform, integrating Zixi’s IP delivery technology with Altitude Media Cloud, Encompass’ global broadcast cloud platform.

Encompass says its strategy towards emphasizing the modernization of broadcast infrastructure, audience resilience, and cost-effective content distribution is "a natural fit" for the BBC’s own distribution roadmap. By moving to IP-based delivery, Encompass expects the BBC World Service will:

• Expand accessibility by delivering content more efficiently across a range of digital and broadcast platforms.
• Enhance flexibility and security, ensuring uninterrupted service in regions where satellite coverage may be unreliable or cost-prohibitive.
• Support sustainability and cost reduction, moving away from legacy satellite technology to a more scalable and adaptable digital framework.
• The shift to IP also enables targeted content delivery, allowing the BBC to respond more effectively to market challenges and changing audience needs.

In migrating hundreds of radio and TV partners globally from satellite to IP delivery, the project aims to transition The BBC World Service from bespoke receiver hardware to commodity, software-based solutions. The BBC World Service is using SCTE 224 to integrate broadcast schedules, delivering precise and seamless channel switching across the global platform, Encompass said.

Nigel Fry, Director Distribution, International Services, BBC News, said: "Transitioning BBC World Service distribution to IP represents a major milestone in our commitment to modernizing how we serve markets worldwide. This shift provides another level of flexibility for our services while aligning with our long-term strategy to adapt to the evolving media landscape. With the support of Encompass and Zixi, we are ensuring that BBC World Service continues to deliver trusted news and information to audiences, wherever they are, with greater reach and security than ever before."

Marc Bruce, CEO of Encompass Digital Media, said: “We are proud to partner with the BBC and Zixi to bring a new era of IP-based content distribution to BBC World Service. This project is a significant step forward in modernizing broadcast infrastructure, allowing for greater flexibility, cost efficiency, and enhanced security. By moving away from satellite, we are enabling the BBC to reach its global audience with unmatched flexibility and precision."

Marc Aldrich, CEO of Zixi, added: "Zixi is thrilled to collaborate with the BBC and Encompass to deliver this groundbreaking transition to IP-based distribution. Our technology ensures the highest level of reliability, security, and scalability, allowing the BBC World Service to expand its reach and maintain its reputation for excellence in global broadcasting. This project is a testament to the future of content delivery, where IP distribution becomes the gold standard for efficiency and innovation."

Contrary to what many believe, virtual studio solutions are not new technology. They have just been neglected. 

CBS tried them at the dizzy heights of the dot-com bubble back in 1999, as did many others. But the combination of expense, complexity, and subpar graphics meant they crashed and burned very quickly. 

As one, the industry quietly turned away and pretended it had never happened.  

But in recent years, we have quietly been helping traditional news broadcasters around the world, from the BBC to NBC experiment with new forms of video production and keep up in the creative arms race that modern media has become.  

Many have found that virtual studio technology offers a significant strategic advantage for modern newsrooms — and can be for yours too. 

Media Consumption Habits Are Driving Change  

Media consumption habits have shifted in the last decade, making the industry more competitive than ever before.  

As audiences are bombarded by the volume and variety of news outlets and media forms available, news broadcasters are rapidly expanding and experimenting with creative elements to keep viewers engaged.

A lower technological barrier to entry and shift of advertising capital towards new advertising platforms (such as social media) has resulted in lower news viewership and budgets — and smaller creative and technical teams for many broadcasters.  

Newsroom directors and their teams must do more with less to produce engaging, accurate content to capture audiences — and are increasingly turning to virtual studio to do that.  

Overcoming the Physical Limits of Traditional Studios 

While the traditional news industry has been reluctant to implement (or even talk about) virtual studio, they have become commonplace in sports broadcasting.  

Their adaptability and ease of redesign make virtual studio a powerful tool for news broadcasters — especially those operating under constrained budgets. That flexibility allows newsroom directors to do more with graphics and creative elements, inject more dynamism and visual intrigue into their broadcasts, and turn the studio into a storytelling tool. It also facilitates much faster set up and tear down times, rapid transitions between segments and shows with a fraction of the budget, time, and resources required by physical sets. 

Virtual Studio in Action – Revolutionizing Broadcast Efficiency 

The advantages of a virtual broadcast studio are threefold: easy set-up, more creative, and reduced broadcasting resources. 

For instance, NBC LX built a virtual set into their new studios, allowing them a lot of flexibility and allowing them to use immersive graphics to grab attention and draw people into the story.  

(See how NBC LX uses their virtual set to tell better stories in this video)

Virtual studios can also make live video production more efficient. They allow for faster transitions between sets and environments, meaning producers can quickly repurpose studio spaces for different programs without having to spend the time and resources building multiple hard studios and sets.

Virtual sets and studio elements are programmed using automated workflows, templates and pre-recorded transitions, meaning they can be used and repurposed for multiple different stories with minor editing. These highly automated workflows are particularly useful for smaller production teams, empowering reporters and creatives to deliver more high-quality content with a fraction of the work involved. 

Elevate Your Newsroom with Ross Video Solutions 

Success in the modern newsroom means doing more with less: more content with less budget, more engagement with less staff, and more “bells and whistles” in less time.  

Modern news broadcasters use Ross Video products like XPression, Voyager, and Lucid to automate and streamline immersive virtual studios. Workflow automation tools, like Overdrive and Streamline Pro, stitch these tools together, accelerating the production process and ensuring brand consistency and quality.  

That frees reporters and creatives to deliver more content, creating and embellishing their own stories — sometimes live on air — without adding to their news directors’ long list of worries.  

To learn more about how Ross Video can help your newsrooms stay competitive in the rapidly changing media landscape, reach out to one of our newsroom production experts here.

Keeping Pace in the Election Race

2024 is a big year for newsrooms with a record number of elections taking place around the globe. For advanced insights on how newsrooms can get ahead in addressing their elections needs with cutting-edge graphics, download our guide. 

LONDON—TVU Network has announced that the BBC’s 2024 U.K. General Election coverage used TVU's cutting-edge cloud platform to manage 369 live feeds from vote counting locations across the UK. 

All the feeds were captured using the TVU Anywhere mobile app. The feeds were streamed on BBC iPlayer, the BBC News website, and transmitted to a giant virtual mosaic screen at the BBC’s London studio headquarters London Broadcasting House, providing audiences across the U.K. and around the world with an unprecedented, immersive experience. The broadcast reached a peak audience of 4.6 million viewers in the U.K.

A BBC custom created tripod and smartphone kit running the TVU Anywhere app for cellular bonded live transmissions was sent to every vote counting location, allowing BBC News to capture real-time video feeds regardless of local pressures on cellular networks. The user-friendly remote production setup was easily configurable, even by staff without a technical background. The compact design of the kit assembled by BBC representatives already attending the count combined with the lack of reliance on broadcast vehicles allowed the corporation to generate more live content in an environmentally friendly way, TVU reported.

“This approach not only upheld the BBC's highest quality standards but also pioneered a new method of election broadcasting that would have been near impossible using traditional methods” said BBC News’ Geraint Thomas, who led the project. “The TVU cloud platform allowed us to scale up a vast number of feeds and handle peak traffic seamlessly without investing in additional hardware. This was both an editorial and technological innovation that transformed the viewing experience, bringing the vote counting process closer to our audience, setting a new benchmark in election coverage.”

TVU also noted that hundreds of live feeds, which would typically require extensive server setups, were ingested and recorded in real-time on the TVU Search cloud platform. These feeds were displayed in a large mosaic view using TVU Partyline, allowing viewers to see all voting locations across the UK simultaneously and access custom mosaics for their local regions.

The BBC managed 21 regional workflows through TVU Partyline, providing tailored coverage for different areas of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. 

“We delivered the most personalized election coverage ever in live video. Across the UK, wherever you looked you could see democracy in action, live” said Jonny McGuigan, BBC News’ streaming editor. “The ability to choose from any one of 369 counts on the night meant we could always be where the story was. When augmented with our traditional broadcast live SNG and bonded connectivity, we could guarantee we’d be where audiences needed us, on digital platforms, TV and radio all night long”.

Viewers could tune into live feeds via BBC News’ website constituency pages, creating a personal connection to the electoral process. The BBC’s London studio featured a massive virtual LED wall connected to all feeds, while the national programmes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also all had access to the live content. The live streams were also used as political commentators provided real-time updates and expert analysis in a split screen, making the coverage as interactive and visually engaging for the audience. The TVU platform was able to output IP for OTT, as well as SDI for the TV and Radio programmes seamlessly integrating into the existing broadcast infrastructure.

"When we started planning this project, many believed the election would be held later in the year” added Geraint. "In a matter of weeks, we managed to achieve what we thought would take months to develop, and integrated the TVU cloud platform with our on-premise workflows in a cost-effective manner."

“It’s about innovating together and redefining the boundaries of broadcast technology,” says Paul Shen, CEO of TVU Networks, praising the BBC for leading the way in blending linear and digital broadcasting across their media supply chain to offer a wider variety of content. “This collaboration is a testament to what’s possible when we combine our strengths. The future of broadcast is now, offering an accessible, sustainable model that opens up endless possibilities for storytelling to audiences everywhere.”

The rise of digital platforms is fundamentally changing the broadcast newsroom and its investment in technology according to Jon Roberts, director of technology, production and innovation at ITN.

During TVBEurope’s webinar looking at the evolution of technology in the newsroom, Roberts said broadcasters are living in a state of ‘perma-change’.

“The old investment cycles of broadcast tech are being run over by this sense of constantly innovating and changing,” explained Roberts.

He added that this need for change is proving a huge challenge on a number of levels as broadcasters’ equipment models and relationships with suppliers continue to change. It also impacts staff, said Roberts.

“Managing people through those changes is a huge challenge, particularly in a newsroom. What we’re trying to do at ITN is move from a project-based approach to a culture of continuous development. We’re identifying the unicorns in newsrooms who are technically savvy enough but editorially strong to help us bridge the gap. We’re trying to narrow the gap between operations and technology.”

Roberts said broadcasters can no longer ‘helicopter in’ a new system but need to have conversations with journalists and production teams who will be using the tech. “It’s not been unusual for us to discover our teams are using something that we didn’t install or know about. That’s very different to where we were 10 years ago in a broadcast environment. It’s changing the nature of the technology department’s relationship with the business. We want to be part of the team rather than a service division.”

Jonny McGuigan, news streaming editor at the BBC, agreed with Roberts about changing the mindset of staff to adopt new technology. “We’ve often worried about digital technology being ‘scary’ and across the BBC, and across the sector more generally, there’s a constant lurch to ‘digital is going to change the way we make television’. It’s become a thing that’s kind of hung over people’s head and they become scared of.

McGuigan added that broadcasters need to find a way to use technology in a ‘smarter way’.One such idea is around ‘eventicising’ news.

“We have a real habit in news of covering the moment and then we’re done,” explained McGuihan. “The question is. how do we build up to that moment, build anticipation? If you watch Match of the Day or any football coverage, the game ends and they give you analysis afterwards. What we’re trying to transition much more to in news is a model of being there before, during the main event, and afterwards too. I think that’s a really exciting space for video on demand.”

Other topics under discussion during the webinar included how newsroom technology has changed in recent years, including the advent of mobile journalism.

“Two or three years ago we’d have laughed somebody out of the technology centre for saying they’d put an iPhone to air,” said McGuigan. “Now it’s become part of the norm, particularly for those live moments. You can’t beat being in that space, however technology gets you there.”

The full webinar, produced in association with Ross Video, is available to watch on-demand here.

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.

Collaboration hasn’t always been a familiar currency in broadcast and pro-AV technology. The inherent competitiveness of such a forward-looking business has frequently meant that vendors and service providers have felt obliged to seek commercial advantage over common ground. But the challenges of moving successfully into the networked media era were so substantial that it’s arguable a sea-change was always destined to occur.

In fact, there are abundant examples of effective collaboration from the last decade or so as IP-based infrastructures have become more prevalent. An important contributory factor here is that broadcast and pro-AV have gradually converged, with an increasing crossover between the technologies and solutions being employed. 

But there are also plenty of industry-changing developments that would not have been possible without meaningful partnership. The AES67 audio interoperability standard and SMPTE ST 2110 media transport standards suite are two prominent examples, and the same applies to AMWA (Advanced Media Workflow Association) and its Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS).

An initiative that both synthesises existing specifications and standards, and expands upon them with extra features and functionality, NMOS draws on work from other well-established technology organisations, namely: the aforementioned SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers), EBU (European Broadcasting Union), AES (Audio Engineering Society) and VSF (Video Services Forum).

In this article we’ll speak to a leading broadcaster and two prominent vendors to find out why they opted to collaborate so openly and contribute their thoughts and ideas to a set of specifications with the potential to benefit not just them, but the industry as a whole.

‘Building a Community’
Like all of the organizations featured here, the BBC has been involved in the development of NMOS since the project’s early days. Peter Brightwell is Lead Engineer at BBC Research and Development, heading up the corporation’s applied research on infrastructure for live video, as well as being a frequent contributor to industry work on interoperability and the transition to hybrid and cloud-based production. He has very good reason to recall the date of the first workshop of the AMWA Networked Media Incubator that went on to inform so many of the developments subsequently encompassed by NMOS.

“It was on Jan. 11 2016, the day after David Bowie died,” he says, although fortunately this sad event did not prove to be portentous for the incubator’s prospects. “In many ways, it was still early days for IP networked media—this was prior to the publication of ST 2110—although within BBC R&D we had already done quite a lot of work, including a show demo at the Commonwealth Games in 2014.”

Nonetheless, it was clear that a collegiate approach to something as monumental as the transition from SDI to IP was always going to be on the cards. Moreover, as time has gone by and the structures underpinning the various working and review groups have solidified, it’s a process that has become increasingly invaluable. "As much as anything else, it's about building a community and getting that cross-fertilisation of ideas. Having different groups coming together, sharing ideas, and realising that the way one group has done something could be useful over here, and so on,” suggests Brightwell.

Presently, there is what Brightwell terms a “two-phase approach” to specification activity. Phase one involves a “fairly light-touch, informal approach to get ideas about what we might want to do next. Using the incubator structure, we schedule informal calls for people who want to work together on a particular problem. They can then discuss the issue and ultimately put together a proposal for an actual specification activity. Once that is in place it can move into the second phase, which is formal agile specification activity incorporating more formal oversight.” As might be expected, regular calls between participants are deemed essential to maintaining progress in both phases.

Whilst a great deal of work is done remotely, physical workshops provide a welcome opportunity to brainstorm in person and strengthen relationships, and Brightwell estimates there have been a dozen of them—in locations as various as London, Montreal and Wuppertal—over the past eight years.

These gatherings can be especially useful in fine-tuning the agenda for a new specification “to focus on the areas that will be most beneficial to the people who are actively engaged. It also provides a space not just for discussion, but for people to demonstrate new ideas and features, so it’s really important on several levels.”

‘A Very Effective Mechanism’
The agility of the NMOS specification structure is also a recurring motif for Jed Deame, who is the founder and CEO of Nextera Video, a leading supplier of IP cores for video-over-IP. 

“We’re a leading provider of NMOS software, and we’ve been doing this for seven or eight years—from before the stage where any of the specs had been ratified,” he explains, adding that the company also provides a full OEM solution for adding ST 2110 to new or existing products. “Our mission in life is essentially to help manufacturers add 2110 and NMOS to their products quickly and easily, enabling them to accelerate development and time to market of their own solutions.”

It was in the late 2010s that Deame first began to take an interest in the NMOS project, having encountered difficulties in moving video packets between 2110 devices. 

“The amount of typing you had to do—answering questions like ‘what’s your port?’ and ‘what’s your video format?’—was immense, which also meant the level of frustration was pretty significant,” he recalls. “But then somebody said that once we have NMOS, all of this typing will go away and it’s going to be a ‘one-button-click’ operation. And that’s really the beauty of NMOS: it brings the simplicity and familiarity of cross-point routing to the IP world, whilst also taking it a step further with the addition of the NMOS registry, which provides plug and play discovery of all devices on the network.”

But it was once he started to attend NMOS ‘interop sessions’ and gain an awareness of the streamlined documentation and publication processes that the full value of the project became apparent. 

“It was all structured intentionally so there was a very agile mechanism for developing the specs,” observes Deame. “Each part was published to the web as soon as it had been discussed and received some initial approval. It wasn’t the longer, six-month-type cycle where you send everything out and wait for feedback from the industry.”

By contrast, the NMOS approach made "for a very iterative process. For example, with IS-04, which is the Discovery and Registration Specification, we were able to get a reference code to multiple vendors, have them review it, and then very quickly and efficiently put a basic set of specifications in place.” 

Deame is sure this phased approach also makes it easier for manufacturers to feel more positive about implementation: “When we eventually publish the final versions, as opposed to the drafts, it isn’t a case of ‘good luck, this should now work.’ Instead, it is more like ‘this has been fully interop tested by multiple vendors and is good to go.’ So that created a lot of confidence for manufacturers to adopt NMOS and build products against the specs because they knew they had already been thoroughly tested.”

Meanwhile, the Nextera commercial NMOS solution continues to evolve; currently, the company’s R&D team is working to add IS-11, which ensures Stream Compatibility Management by reporting supported AV formats to the controller, and IS-13, which facilitates easy identification of nodes and devices through Annotation & Labelling. 

Explaining the benefit of the Nextera solution over open-source code, Deame notes: “While it may be appealing to have a ‘free’ solution, it does require manufacturers to dedicate significant engineering resources to fully understand the code so they can integrate it with their products and maintain and evolve it without being dependent on the open-source developers outside of their control. The Nextera solution is turn-key, particularly when pre-integrated with our ST 2110 and/or IPMX FPGA IP Cores. There is no code to integrate; it works out of the box. We also provide direct, prioritised 24/7 support in case issues arise in development or in the field to ensure customer satisfaction.”

All of which serves to reconfirm Deame’s assertion that his company’s mission is to help manufacturers quickly and easily add NMOS to their own products—thereby freeing them up to “focus their internal resources on their own unique differentiators”.

‘A Community-Driven Forum’
Sony’s association with AMWA long precedes the development of NMOS, stretching back to the early 2010s and the publication of the AS-11 family of specifications devised to help media organizations migrate from linear to file-based workflows. But it was the arrival of IP as a serious force in the industry that led to the company having notable input to the NMOS specs.

Peter Sykes is Strategic Technology Development Manager at Sony Europe. “With the growing interest in the use of IP within live broadcast and media infrastructures from the mid-2010s onwards, Sony started to actively contribute to the development of the NMOS specifications (initially IS-04, IS-05 and IS-06) and hosted an AMWA NMOS interoperability workshop at its Basingstoke facility,” he says. “This was followed by Sony becoming a Principal member of AMWA in 2017.”

Sykes implies that AMWA’s worldwide membership drawn from media companies and their suppliers has provided a foundation for the for the “collaborative spirit” that has propelled NMOS to its current status.

“There are many cases that could be highlighted, but a specific example of the fostering of more open collaboration was the establishment of the AMWA User Group consisting of broadcasters and systems integrators,” he says. “The User Group meets regularly and feeds information into the technical workgroups to identify areas that need changes or additions to make their workflows work better for them. Recently, the User Group asked for better labelling of resources in NMOS and this was addressed by the working groups, including through the publication of BCP-002-02 to ensure manufacturers use IS-04 tags in a consistent way to define manufacturer, product name, serial number, etc, of a media node.”

Another example of partnership, and one in which Sony played a leading role, was the development of the NMOS controller specification and test suite.

“These improved the guidance and testing available to help ensure that controllers are compliant with the NMOS specifications, which in turn helped to ensure better interoperability between solutions from different vendors," Sykes said. "The activity group included several end-users and vendors working collaboratively, and led to a new test badge for controllers at JT-NM Tested events.”

With media technology continuing to evolve at a remarkable rate, the impulse to collaborate in order to successfully address common challenges will remain undimmed. Citing the recent accelerated adoption of cloud, IP, remote and distributed production, Sykes says that technology leaders “face the often-difficult task of evolving and adapting their technical infrastructures to allow real-world business and production requirements to be met. [Therefore] an open, collaborative approach as identified is required, and this is where the NMOS project is set to continue to play a major role.”

Like the other contributors to this article, Sykes believes that effective collaboration and a forward-looking ethos will ensure the NMOS project remains relevant: “Identifying new areas where NMOS can be applied, continuing to gather and address workflow requirements from end-users, and continuing to communicate the benefits and widespread adoption of NMOS are all key to success.”

Freely—the new streaming service backed by Britain’s leading broadcasters BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5—is now available through the next generation of smart TVs now on sale in stores and online in the U.K. Initially announced last fall, the launch was unveiled by Everyone TV—an organization owned by the public broadcasters that advocates for the evolution of free TV in the U.K.

Freely allows U.K. broadband subscribers to stream live TV channels alongside on demand content for free via their smart TVs, removing the need for a dish or aerial. Featuring what Everyone TV calls “world-first innovations for free TV,” viewers can switch seamlessly between live and on demand content from the UK’s leading broadcasters.

The new service marks the first time all four of Britain’s public service broadcasters have partnered to launch a streaming service, according to the broadcasters, who heralded the launch as an example of the kind of cooperation they’ll need to better compete in the streaming market.

Currently about two-thirds (12.8 million) U.K. households subscribe to a streaming service in 2024, according to Finder.com, a decline from 2023, which could be attributed to rising subscription costs. Netflix led the pack at 16.3 million subscribers, followed by Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Paramount. 

Initially the service will be available on new Hisense smart TVs available in stores across the UK and online at retailers such as Currys, Argos, AO and Very. It's also available on smart TVs powered by TiVo and via Vestel smart TVs Powered by TiVo. Vestel was previously announced as a Freely smart TV partner, with Vestel Freely TVs due to launch in the coming weeks.

“The launch of Freely is a historic moment for U.K. television,” said Kieran Clifton, Director, BBC Distribution & Business Development. “Collaboration between the U.K. PSBs is critical to connecting and protecting all audiences as we transition towards the streaming era—and delivering live TV over broadband for free is a ground-breaking innovation that will futureproof public service broadcasting,  

Martin Goswami, ITV Group Strategic Partnerships and Distribution Director, says: "The success and impact of programmes like ITV's Mr Bates vs the Post Office shows the importance of U.K. PSBs and ITV is proud to be part of this exciting new chapter for free TV in this country with Freely. Bringing live streamed channels and on demand content together in Freely gives viewers the opportunity to access the very best in British content as easily as possible, from live and recent programmes to a wealth of on-demand options."

“Freely will deliver the best of Britain’s world-leading public service content seamlessly and for free,” said Grace Boswood, Technology & Distribution Director, Channel 4. “It further supports Channel 4’s Fast Forward strategy as we accelerate our transformation into the streaming age, ensuring our trusted, brand-safe content is available to everyone.”

James Tatam, SVP Business & Revenue for Channel 5, says: "We're delighted to be part of Freely, which will ensure UK audiences can continue to easily discover and enjoy original, high quality British programmes from Channel 5 and the other public service broadcasters - live and on-demand, for free."

Everyone TV has confirmed that STV and S4C will also bring their channels and on demand content to Freely, via broadband. STV and S4C are free-to-air public service broadcasters for Scotland and Wales respectively, whose content can be viewed across the UK.

In addition to being able to switch seamlessly between live and on demand TV from leading UK broadcasters, Freely also allows viewers to pause, restart and access more episodes, without having to pay for the service. Freely TVs can also be placed anywhere in the home where a Wi-Fi connection is available. 

Freely says it will announce more details in the coming weeks, including additional smart TV, operating system and content partners.

The new free TV streaming service backed by U.K. broadcasters, Freely, has announced it will launch in the U.K. in Q2 2024 with a third of smart TV brands now confirmed to be bringing the platform to viewers.

Backed by BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 and developed by Everyone TV, Freely has also released a first glimpse of its user-interface and features.

In launching the new free streaming service, the broadcasters cited that research studies that project more than half of UK homes will watch TV exclusively over broadband by 2030 and said that the new service will future-proof live TV for the streaming age. 

Freely will bring live and on demand content together all in one place for free, ensuring that TV remains relevant and accessible to audiences of all ages, the broadcasters said. 

In announcing the new features, Sarah Milton and Carl Pfeiffer, joint chief product officers, Everyone TV said: “It’s clear the way people are watching TV is changing, with more audiences switching over to a broadband only connection. We’ve built Freely around the needs of British audiences, bringing them the freedom to choose how they want to watch, with all their favorite shows from the UK’s leading broadcasters all in one place for free. We’re really proud of what we’re launching with Freely and are excited about bringing major enhancements like the MiniGuide to viewers as Freely launches in Q2 this year.”

The service’s UI includes features which bring the free TV experience into the streaming age. For the first time on a free service, viewers will be able to switch seamlessly between live and on demand TV from the leading UK broadcasters, and take advantage of features such as pause, restart and access to more episodes, without having to pay. Freely TVs can also be placed anywhere in the home where there is a Wi-Fi connection, removing the need for a dish or aerial. 

Other key features include: 

• MiniGuide – A new feature for the free TV experience, this pop-up interface appears each time users switch channels, creating a seamless browsing experience and enabling viewers to easily discover related live or on demand content. Audiences can also take advantage of features such as restart, pause and access to more episodes from live TV. 
• Browse – Viewers will be able to press the Freely button on their remote to explore recommended live and on demand programming from Britain's leading broadcasters and free-to-air channels, all in one place. 
• TV Guide – Bringing simplicity and familiarity, this 7-day guide provides relevant information and is easily recognisable thanks to its consistency across all Freely TVs and one-touch access via the ‘Guide’ button on the remote. Audiences can also discover more episodes and on demand content linked to the live TV shows they are enjoying, all via the TV Guide.

The service also announced that Vestel, the manufacturer behind more than twenty TV brands including Toshiba, Bush, and JVC, has inked a 5-year deal to become an additional smart TV partner to offer Freely. Vestel will have Freely built into its latest set of smart TVs. 

Freely will be running the native guide on Vestel TVs, giving users the best viewing experience possible. By adopting Freely, Vestel offers its customers an unparalleled level of convenience, personalisation, and innovation. Freely will provide a consistent and recognisable user experience across all Freely-enabled TVs in market regardless of how it is accessed. 

“We are thrilled to announce our further partnership and commitment to the latest innovation in television technology, by offering customers TVs that are compatible with Freely," said Atinc Ogut, vice president of tv product management, Vestel. "Freely offers a seamless and intuitive user interface that aligns perfectly with our mission to elevate the way people experience television. The collaboration not only enhances the functionality of our TVs but also empowers users to freely stream their favourite shows, live and on demand, all from a single, unified platform. As one of the TV manufactures now compatible with Freely, we’re proud to be setting the standard for the future of television.”

Freely is also working with UKTV to bring the broadcaster's portfolio of free channels to the service via broadband. UKTV is a multi-award-winning media company with channels including Dave, Drama, Yesterday and W.

More details around Freely will be announced in the coming weeks, including additional smart TV, operating system, and content partners, the service reported. 

Everyone TV (formerly Digital UK) is a joint venture owned and supported by the UK's leading public service broadcasters - BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

Everyone TV runs the UK’s free-to-view TV platforms–Freeview and Freesat–reaching over 17 million UK households. It is also developing Freely, a new service which will allow viewers to stream the best live and on demand TV for free, all in one place, available in the UK through the next generation of smart TVs.

LONDON—Getty Images and BBC Studios, the commercial subsidiary of the BBC, has announced the launch of a new platform giving its customers unprecedented access to BBC archive video along with new search, purchase and download capabilities.  

Designed to intuitively enable end-users to select and order content, the platform is powered by MAM software specialists VIDA Content OS.

The platform allows easy access to over 57,000 programs from the BBC archive which was previously only available offline by a heavily manual process. Customers can now securely search the entire digitized library, view, annotate, clip, share, and download previews for use within projects. Post clearance, the high-resolution masters are available immediately, providing significant benefits for fast turnaround projects.

It also offers curated collections around upcoming events and commissioning trends as well as the latest Speech to Text tools to enable program makers to ‘transcript search’ all assets, bringing to light previously hidden content from BBC Motion Gallery’s vast archive. 

“The VIDA platform is a significant breakthrough in making BBC content more accessible for our customers around the world,” said Paul Davis, vice president of media and production EMEA at Getty Images said, Our team is increasingly working as a creative partner, able to assist from ideas stage through production and this platform will considerably enable our efforts in supporting producers to derive successful, returnable shows for the global market.” 

“Our partnership with Getty Images is focused on getting BBC content into the hands of program makers around the world,” added Chris Hulse, head of BBC Motion Gallery at BBC Studios added. “This new platform is a game changer for us, surfacing a wealth of previously offline BBC content, now accessible on-demand for the first time ever.” 

“We’re delighted to power the integration of BBC Motion Gallery and Getty Images,” noted Symon Roue, managing director at VIDA. “As the archive footage licensing industry grows year over year, customers expect an integrated and efficient supply chain for servicing of catalogue. Accessibility to the clips that matter, using the latest cloud and AI technology, is where Content OS excels.”

The new platform expands the on-demand offering of BBC content for Getty Images customers who can already access over 200,000 BBC editorial and creative clips on gettyimages.com. 

Getty Images offers an expansive video library of over 25 million video clips, including footage from a range of world-renowned broadcast, studio, film-maker and archive partners. Available to customers are contemporary, archive and creative footage, including more than 12 million clips in 4K and vast offline archives from BBC Motion Gallery and NBC News. 

LONDON—Rise, the award-winning advocacy group for gender diversity in the media technology sector, honored Barbara Slater, Director of Sport for the BBC as its Woman of the Year last night at Troxy in London. More than 300 guests attended the sold-out event to recognize the achievements of this year’s winners and nominees. The ceremony was also streamed globally on Rise’s YouTube channel.  Rise recognized the 2023 winners in 14 categories and also announced a Special Recognition Award in addition to the Rise Woman of the Year Award, which was sponsored by Zixi. 

Barbara Slater competed as an international gymnast and Olympian before joining the BBC as a trainee assistant producer in 1983. Throughout her impressive career at the BBC she worked as Head of Production, Head of General Sports, and was appointed as Director of Sport in April 2009. 

Barbara was awarded the OBE in 2014 for services to sport broadcasting, as well as many other awards during her career, including the Women in TV & Film Inspirational Women Prize in 2012, following the London Olympics which was the biggest sporting TV event in British broadcasting history. In her 14 years as Director of Sport, Barbara transformed BBC Sport and she became one of the most respected figures in the industry. Most notably, she changed attitudes to womens’ sport, generating enthusiasm from fans and enhancing its broadcasting profile, Rise said.

Claire Wilkie, Founder and Managing Director of Limitless Broadcast received the Rise Special Recognition Award.

Over 400 nominations were received from around the globe, citing the talents and achievements of inspirational women working in a variety of media and broadcast technology roles.

The winners of the 2023 Rise Awards, and those shortlisted, are:

Technical Operations Award - Sponsored by NEP
Winner: Morag McIntosh, Design Director, Studio Automation, BBC

Shortlist:

• Ale Gonzalez Galartza, Senior Product Specialist, farmerswife
• Bridget Young, Operations Manager, Evolutions
• Pilar Granados, Global Workflow Operations Manager, DAZN
• Sandy Isnard, Video Solutions Architect, Telstra Broadcast Services
• Sarah Adams, Senior Technical Supervisor, Sky

Product Innovation Award - Sponsored by Clear Com
Winner: Kate Vandy and Anna Holligan, BBC Senior Journalist and BBC Foreign Correspondent, The Bike Bureau

Shortlist:

• Anais Painchault, VP Product Compression & Processing, Ateme
• Hitomi Hamaba, Head of Product, Sony
• Kaia Tufteland, Senior Technical Product Manager, DAZN
• Sabrine Farnes, Product Owner, Bedrock Streaming
• Saskia Hook, Product Manager (Sports), WBD
• Teresa Demel, Principal Product Manager, Adobe

Business Operations Award - Sponsored by Telestream
Winner: Amanda Wall, Director of Operations, VITAC

Shorlist: 

• Crystel Pham, Vice President Operations and Product Management, TPN
• Fauzia Mulla Stanyard, Director of Service Operations, Arqiva
• Joanne Lewis, Production Manager, Ross Video
• Kahleah Webb, Head of Operations, Gravity Media
• Pernilla Wraneus, VP Culture and People, Accedo
• Tami Hoffman, Director of News Distribution and Commercial Innovation, ITN

Student of the Year Award - Sponsored by SMPTE
Winner: Sophie Humphrey, Solent University

Shortlist:

• Esme Murphy, Global Academy
• Jess McMahon, Global Academy
• Nikoleta Kallipoliti, Marketing Intern, Accedo
• Rochelle Karabulut, Global Academy

Marketing and PR Award - Sponsored by Deluxe Media
Winner: Doris Retfalvi, Product Marketing Manager, disguise

Shortlist: 

• Amber Burke, Communications Manager, Clear-Com
• Emily Pryor, Head of Marketing, Base Media Cloud
• Leanne Tomlin, Senior Marketing Manager, Perifery
• Lizzie Lawrence, Head of Marketing, M2A Media
• Zoe Mumba, Senior Manager PR & Communications, Bitmovin

R&D Engineer Award - Sponsored by Ross Video
Winner: Swetha Sridhar, Software Application Engineer, BSI/NEP

Shortlist:

• Caileen Dolan, Software Developer, Ross Video
• Francesca Pieri, DevOps Developer, Red Bee Media
• Manasa Vemulapati, Performance Engineer, Sky UK
• Natalia Lira, Software Engineer, Accedo
• Sailaja Vaddadi, Software Architect, Red Bee Media

The Ally Award - Sponsored by Vizrt
Joint Winners: Adam Tilbury-Eld, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer, Ovyo; and Rich Welsh, Senior Vice President Innovation, Deluxe Media

Shortlist:

• Kieran Farr, Consultant
• Phillip Farinha, Director People and Culture, North America, Accedo
• Rohan Mitchell, ESG Director, EMG

The Influencer Award - Sponsored by disguise
Winner: Carina Schoo, Education Program Manager, Pixotope

Shortlist:

• Anita Erskine, Executive Director, AE Media
• Carolyn Giardina, Technology Editor, Hollywood Reporter
• Chloe Britton, Talent Recruitment Manager, MOOV TV
• Laura Davis, Managing Director, The Crewing Company
• Niki Whittle, Business Development Director, MOOV TV
• Ria Hebden, CEO, Wonder Women

Project Management or Delivery - Sponsored by ES Broadcast
Winner: Rachel Baldwin, Head of Programme & Project Delivery, BBC Technology Group

Shortlist:

• Abi Hemingway, Managing Director, Jackshoot TV
• Amber Barnett, Senior Solutions Specialist (Sports & Live Events) Ross Video
• Meghna Londhe, Project Manager Digital Video Solutions, Magnifi
• Nikki Perugini, UX and Design Director, Accedo
• Rachel Deas, Programme Manager, Red Bee Media
• Sylviane Lecomte, VP Growth and Solutions, Bedrock Streaming

Sales Award
Winner: Melissa Davis, Regional Director of Sales, Evertz

Shortlist:

• Alexandra Giusto, Senior Director, Strategic Accounts & Strategy, Zixi
• Helen Jeffrey, International Sales Director, NEP Connect
• Katri Sillaste, Commercial Director, TV3 Group Estonia
• Stacey Moorcroft, Director of Business Operations, Ross Video

Production Support Engineer Award - Sponsored by Riedel
Winner: Zoe Mendelsön, Technical Supervisor, SKY

Shortlist:

• Anna Masko, Senior Graphics Operator, MOOV TV
• Emily Bergun, Production Support Engineer, Sky
• Kathleen Gray, Senior Broadcast Engineer, NEP
• Suzanne Sharman, Production Artist, Singular.Live

Rising Star Award - Sponsored by Harmonic
Winner: Hollie Keen, Product Professional, BT Media & Broadcast

Shortlist:

• Eileen Kennedy-MacDonald, UX Researcher and Designer, Ross Video
• Emily Bergun, Associate Technical Specialist, Sky
• Jeremina Akrofi-Daniels, Multiskilled Operator, NEP Bow Tie
• Lauryn Fuller, Graphics Operator, MOOV TV
• Ray Kasprzyr, Product Specialist - Routers, Evertz
• Shola Russell, Productions Coordinator, EMG
• Sophie Kneeshaw, Associate Developer, Sky
• Holly Choules, Multi-Skilled Operator and Project Manager, Zest4TV

Business Leader Award - Sponsored by LiveU
Winner: Hannah Barnhardt, COO & Co-Founder, TMT Insights

Shortlist:

• Idunn Sofie Riise, Co- Founder & MD, Zille Media
• Rebekah Wilson, CEO & Technical Co-Founder, Source Elements
• Claire Wilkie, Founder, Limitless Broadcast
• Shannan Louis, Owner and Head of Studios, Fatbelly VFX
• Charlotte Layton, COO, Racoon Post

The Company Award for Investment in Women - Sponsored by Red Bee Media
Pixotope - Winner

Shortlist:

• Accedo
• Adobe
• disguise
• Newsbridge

IRVINE, Calif.—Vizio has announced new deals with BBC Studios, Magnolia Pictures and Paramount Global Content Distribution that dramatically expand the free content on its Vizio WatchFree offering. 

These recent agreements are part of an aggressive free premium content expansion during 2023 for the Vizio service, which now provides over 275 streaming channels and 15,000+ on-demand movies and shows. The expansion more than doubles the number of titles offered just a year ago. 

“Over the past year, we have remained steadfastly committed to enhancing and elevating the WatchFree+ entertainment experience,” said Katherine Pond, group vice president of platform content & partnerships. “With an expansive library featuring more live channels and movies than ever before, enriched personalization with localization, and data-driven content discovery features, WatchFree+ continues to deliver the ultimate free entertainment destination for millions of Vizio consumers.”

The deal deals add to a lineup of more than 20 studios and media companies supplying content, including A24, AMC Networks, Disney Entertainment, Lionsgate, MarVista Entertainment, NFL Media, Relativity Media, Samuel Goldwyn Films and Sony Pictures.

New programming and features include: 

• More than 400 on-demand episodes showcasing 30 unique BBC shows, and a selection of BBC Studios’ free channels including Antiques Roadshow UK, BBC Food, and Top Gear, with Classic Doctor Who coming soon. 
• Select Paramount Pictures titles available every month until the end of the year, with various movies from the Star Trek franchise including Star Trek:  (The Motion Picture, ), Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Insurrection and The Untouchables airing in November. 
• 50 movies and 50 episodes from Magnolia Pictures, including popular titles like Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, Bad Reputation and I Give It a Year. 
• Vizio's Branded Content Studio's latest holiday premiere, Merry & Bright. Hosted by American Idol's Jordin Sparks.
• Newly launched Free Movie Network, Vizio's latest curated channel on WatchFree+. 
• Personalized entertainment with Vizio's new geo-filtering feature that automatically displays live regional news, weather, and sports across 40 local channels from Cox Media Group, FOX, and Gray TV. 

Britain’s biggest broadcasters have announced that they are working on the development of a new free TV service that will deliver live TV over broadband. 

The broadcasters said that the landmark collaboration will mark the first time that British viewers will have free access to live TV channels and on demand content from the U.K.’s most popular broadcasters streamed straight to their smart TV via the internet.

Set for launch in 2024, the new service, called Freely, will be built-in to the next generation of smart TVs and feature a line-up of public service broadcaster content and other free-to-air channels. It will replicate the terrestrial TV experience, building on the heritage and popularity of the Freeview TV platform, currently used in 16 million homes. 

Freely is being developed by Everyone TV, the organization which runs free TV in the UK and is jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

As viewers increasingly consume content online, this next phase for free TV is about the distribution and availability of the public service broadcasters’ live channels for a streaming age. It will help ensure the availability of public service broadcasters (PSB) services into the future and complement the new provisions for on demand and streaming prominence, set out in the draft Media Bill, the broadcasters said. 

"We are delighted to be working with the public service broadcasters on the next phase of free TV’s evolution,” explained Jonathan Thompson, CEO, Everyone TV. “This new development is a reflection of the fact that a growing number of UK viewers are watching content online, but still want easy access to the shared experience of live TV. Our aim is to ensure that all viewers have access to a free, aggregated live TV experience that champions British content and is delivered in a way that suits audience needs and preferences. Every one of us should be able to share in the best of British ideas and creativity on TV."

"Ensuring the universality of public-service television is sustained into the future is of paramount importance to the UK and all its public service broadcasters,” added director general of the BBC, Tim Davie. “We are delighted to be deepening our collaboration in helping viewers access our content, ensuring that, in a digital age, we deliver value for all audiences and that no one is left behind."

"As more and more UK households use internet-connected TVs, it's critical that the public service broadcaster channels remain available and easy for them to find,” said Dame Carolyn McCall, CEO, ITV. “This new collaboration enables the UK public to continue to get all of their favorite British TV channels, for free - just as Freeview did at the advent of digital TV. Alongside the important reforms set out in the draft Media Bill it will help PSBs to continue to thrive for years to come."

OSLO, Norway—Nevion’s VideoIP media orchestration platform was successfully used to demonstrate dynamic prioritization of live media signals over 5G connectivity as a proof of concept (PoC) during the coronation of King Charles III in May, the company said today.

Nevion parent company Sony conducted the test along with private 5G SA Networks developer Neutral Wireless and the research and development arm of BBC, it said.

While there is a lot of interest in using 5G in live production due to its speed, the fact that it is a best-effort technology can make it unusable in applications where there is a high-level of contention for available bandwidth. That situation is particularly acute in public 5G networks; however, it can also be the case for dedicated 5G networks with many pieces of equipment connected, it said.

The PoC aimed to demonstrate that media signals could be prioritized on a standalone non-public network (SNPN) using quality of service (QoS) control, it said.

The test employed elements of Sony and Nevion’s Networked Live offering. Media transport relied on Sony prototype transmitter boxes affixed to each camera. The transmitters provided ultra-low-latency HEVC video encoding. They were connected to the Neutral Wireless 5G SNPN via an Xperia 5G smartphone, the company said.

Nevion VideoIP provided network and resource orchestration and was used to interface with the 5G network’s Network Exposure Function (NEF). It configured the QoS for individual flows based on dynamic information about bandwidth and signal priorities. The video signal from a camera currently transmitting, for example, was assigned a higher priority compared to a non-transmitting camera, it said.

“Our vision of creating a unified hybrid on-prem and cloud-distributed environment requires a network orchestration able to control the flow of signals end-to-end, across various fixed and mobile networks. In recent years, we have built a solid experience in using 5G in production, most notably through the Nevion-led EU-funded 5G VIRTUOSA project. This PoC is one further step in demonstrating the viability of 5G in live production, especially in high demand environments,” said Andy Rayner, chief technologist at Nevion.

More information is available on the Nevion website.

The much anticipated coronation of King Charles on Saturday brought in about 20 million viewers overall, according to the Broadcasters Audience Research Board,  British, an organization jointly owned by U.K. broadcasters that is responsible for audience measurement in the United Kingdom. That’s 9 million fewer than viewed the Queen’s funeral last fall. 

Average viewing figures for the two hour ceremony at Westminster Abbey peaked at 18.8 million. That total peaked at 20.4 million across 11 TV channels and services (i.e. streaming) just after noon, right after the coronation ended. 

The BBC had the highest viewership with BBC One and Two channels peaking at approximately 15 million, according to the broadcaster. 

Astoundingly, that 20 million viewership figure matches the estimated number who watched Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on television in 1953, at a time when it was estimated that only 1.5 million U.K. households actually owned a telly. 

(Also read: To crown a King: Broadcasters prepare for the Coronation of King Charles III)

The numbers probably reflect a more ambivalent attitude towards what was in essence a religious ceremony for someone who had already been King since last September, as well as the plethora of alternative viewing options for today’s royal fans. The peak number of 20 million during the coronation also matched the numbers for Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton in 2011.

None of them though came close to the most viewed royal event of all time: The funeral service for Princess Diana in 1997, which drew 31 million on the BBC and iTV. 

Viewing numbers for U.S. viewers have not yet been released. 

The BBC has revealed it will stream King Charles’ Coronation on 6th May in Ultra High Definition and High Dynamic Range on iPlayer.

The stream will include events from multiple locations, including The King’s Procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. The BBC said it intends to provide an extensive network of cameras to give audiences a front row seat on the ceremonial route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey.

BBC iPlayer’s UHD stream will also use Wide Color Gamut.

The Coronation will also be the BBC’s most accessible live event ever on BBC iPlayer, with viewers able to watch with subtitles, sign language, and an alternative commentary version for people with sight loss – all delivered live on iPlayer.

The alternative commentary version will also be available on red button on broadcast channels, and the subtitled, alternative commentary, and signed versions will be available to viewers by pressing red while watching a BBC channel on an internet-connected TV.

Viewers will also have the option to watch live without BBC commentary.

LONDON—BBC chair Richard Sharp has asked the broadcaster’s board to investigate conflicts of interest regarding his appointment to the role.

In a statement, Sharp said he “has agreed with the BBC board’s senior independent director that the committee shall look at this when it next meets and publish the conclusions.”

“Our work at the BBC is rooted in trust,” added Sharp. “Although the appointment of the BBC chairman is solely a matter for the government, I want to ensue that all the appropriate guidelines have been followed.”

He has subsequently asked the BBC’s nominations committee to investigate.

Over the weekend The Sunday Times reported that Sharp was involved in helping to arrange a guarantor on a loan of up to £800,000 for Mr Johnson in late 2020 before being appointed to the role of BBC chair.

Both men have denied any wrongdoing. Sharp said he “simply connected”: people and there was no conflict of interest.

Labour’s shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell has written to the Public Appointments Commissioner calling on him to investigate the appointment of Richard Sharp as BBC chair following reports he helped former Prime Minister Boris Johnson secure a loan agreement.

Powell has written to the commissioner for public appointments, William Shawcross, “urging” him to investigate the process of Sharp’s appointment at the BBC, to “satisfy the public and parliament of its integrity”.

She added that Sharp’s involvement in securing the loan guarantee was not declared to the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s appointment panel, the BBC or during his pre-appointment hearing before the DCMS select committee.

“The BBC derives its public trust and national standing from its independence and impartiality, something we hear a lot about from the government about the BBC,” added Powell. “It is vital that the public and parliament can have trust in this process and it is free from any real or perceived conflict of interest.”

The Cabinet Office has insisted that Sharp’s appointment followed “a rigorous appointments process including assessment by a panel of experts, constituted according to the public appointments code,” reports BBC News.

“There was additional pre-appointment scrutiny by a House of Commons Select Committee which confirmed Mr Sharp’s appointment. All the correct recruitment processes were followed.”

GENEVA—BBC Studios worked with GlobalM, using its cloud-based SRT distribution platform, and Matrox Video to stream coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, GlobalM said today.

BBC Studios used the GlobalM SRT distribution network to deliver live feeds to international rights holders, enabling the broadcaster to deliver 12 hours of event coverage.

The BBC televised the funeral across the U.K. through its BBC One broadcast television network. BBC Studios also required a cloud-based media distribution workflow to deliver the feeds to its international rights holders with limited or non-existent satellite links.

BBC Studios used the GlobalM network and Matrox Monarch EDGE encoder technologies for an easy-to-use, easy-to-setup solution to launch a same-day, cost-effective IP-based distribution workflow, it said.

The workflow began with the Monarch EDGE multi-channel encoders encoding high-quality, low-latency international and domestic feeds to the GlobalM SRT streaming platform. The GlobalM orchestration network then distributed and transmitted the SRT-enabled feeds, including backup and redundant paths, to international rights holders across the globe, while the master control monitored all streams in real-time with the GlobalM web dashboard. During the 12-hour broadcast, the GlobalM network did not drop a single packet for a seamless SRT distribution experience, it said.

"GlobalM and Matrox Video are honored to have been entrusted to support arguably one of the biggest events in broadcasting history," said Paul Calleja, chief technology officer and co-founder of GlobalM. "Matrox Monarch EDGE's high-quality and low-latency encoding support on the GlobalM private IP backbone provided BBC Studios with complete stability and quality for each stream, ensuring international rights holders near and far with exceptional event coverage."

Distribution via the cloud is a cost-effective alternative to satellite distribution. It also can complement satellite media transport, said Francesco Scartozzi, vice president of sales and business development for Matrox Video’s Broadcast and Media Group (BMG).

"Matrox Video has been working closely with GlobalM so that customers like the BBC can benefit from quick-to-deploy, cloud-native networks that are a fraction of the cost of double-hop satellite delivery models—but with the same broadcast quality and customer viewing experience,” he said.

More information on GlobalM and Matrox Video’s Monarch EDGE is available online.

86 Years Ago - Nov. 2, 1936: Following 18 months of breakneck construction, testing and hiring, the British Broadcasting Corp. launched the world’s first regularly scheduled “high-definition” television service. (Germany started TV broadcasts a year earlier, but with 180 lines.) 

The BBC startup was complicated slightly by a government requirement to give two competing television companies (and standards) an equal opportunity to prove themselves worthy of adoption. An agreement was struck in which the competitors would take turns in providing TV service during an initial trial period. 

Television pioneer John Logie Baird won the toss of a coin, and precisely at 3:00 p.m. the station’s “Vision On” and “Sound On” signs were illuminated, and his 240-line mechanically-scanned signals left the 200-foot “mast” at the Alexandra Palace event venue on its way to the small number of television “aerials” erected by early TV adopters in the greater London area. 

Baird’s competitor, EMI, with its higher-resolution all-electronic television system was ultimately declared the winner. The 405-line/50-field/AM sound standard developed by EMI remained in use—with an interruption caused by WWII—until 1985.  A special “Television Song” was commissioned in connection with the startup of the BBC’s service, with British vocalist Adele Dixon performing the composition in the inaugural broadcast. 

A film of her performance about “the magic rays of light that bring television to you” is available at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Rpfek-F8Rw. In addition to capturing Dixon’s performance, the film also provides a look at the 1936 television facility’s technical operations. 

OTHER NEWS FROM TV’S PAST:

75 Years Ago – November 1947: Just a few weeks after General Electric switched on its private microwave link to connect its WRGB Schenectady television station with the new AT&T Long Lines video switching center in Manhattan, AT&T inaugurated its own eight-hop microwave radio linkage constructed between New York City and Boston. (AT&T deemed their microwave video carriage “experiment” successful and started redrawing plans to augment its planned intercity video coaxial cable linkage with microwave repeaters.) 

In other news, in addition to the postwar interest in television station construction, the FCC has been receiving an increasingly large number of applications for new AM and FM stations. The Commission, concerned that there will not be enough commercial call signs to go around, issued a news release encouraging “economy” in requests for new station call signs, existing AM licensees asked to append their main AM call signs with an “FM” or “TV” suffix instead of requesting totally separate calls. Such suffixes would also be applicable for new “standalone” FM or TV stations, resulting in six-letter calls; i.e., WXXX-TV.

50 Years Ago – November 1972 : A next-gen videotape “format war” is underway, with IVC joining Sony in exhibiting a self-threading videocassette machine at the National Association of Educational Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. IVC’s new VCR-100 series utilizes 1-inch tape, as opposed to the 3/4-inch used by Sony in their U-Matic cassette machines. According to IVC, their machines are intended for “the top end of the closed-circuit television market,” but would also be at home in broadcast and cable TV applications. 

The company stressed that the tapes are backward-compatible with all previous IVC machines as the format is the same—just packaged differently. Meanwhile, Sony announced that it expected to produce at least 100,000 U-Matic machines before year’s end, and had broken ground on a new plant to keep up with the demand. (Sony’s U-Matics cost about half of the $2,700 introductory price announced by IVC for the color version of their VCR-100.)

25 Years Ago – November 1997: Although transitioning to a digital television platform is now “the law of the land,” there is still a lot of uncertainty as to exactly how this will be done and what form it will take. The initial goal was to bring high-definition video to consumers’ homes, but this has morphed a bit as some broadcasters are considering going with a 480-line SD “main” signal and equally standard-definition ancillary programming streams. 

Others are considering going on the air with a “fake” HD signal generated by upconverter devices now reaching the market. Even the networks are in a quandary as to what to do. This “HD uncertainty” is reflected in a recent study from the Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research organization, which found that even though most broadcasters were willing to spend sizeable sums to upgrade to digital and/or HD, they could expect to lose viewers to cable once they commenced transmitting digital signals. According to the study’s 10-year consumer viewing habit projection:

"Local stations will find their antenna and transmitter adjustments go for naught as 71 percent of households in 2007 eschew rabbit ears in favor of cable's broad offerings." 

LONDON—The BBC has launched a dedicated stream of  Queen Elizabeth II lying in state, "for people who want to pay their respects virtually," the public broadcaster has announced. 

The BBC said the service is being offered "globally for those who want to pay their respects but cannot travel to London or are physically unable to queue."

The stream is available on the BBC home page, the BBC News website and app, the iPlayer, BBC Parliament and Red Button. The stream can be seen here until Monday, the morning of the funeral, the BBC said. 

People will be able to file past the coffin in Westminster Hall until 06:30 BST on Monday, the BBC reported.  

Even as she celebrated her 96th birthday in relative good health, the passing of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch had long been anticipated, with well-documented and precise steps in place for everything from the plans for a nationwide memorial to the pealing of church bells. 

Somehow, however, live coverage of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II is being governed by the peculiar sense that her passing is a shock, despite that it has been a long-expected event.

Coverage on major networks in both the United States and the United Kingdom is being governed by that incongruous logic, particularly in the first 48 hours of coverage. Just as many of its citizens are united in grief, major networks across the U.S. and the UK are in-sync in their coverage of the queen’s passing. 

Just before 11 a.m. on Sept. 8 in London, BBC One postponed its programming as the Welsh journalist Huw Edwards gravely announced the passing of Her Majesty. After the announcement, networks in both countries began airing near-continuous, dedicated coverage with American networks from ABC News to PBS anchoring primetime specials and dispatching correspondents to London. David Muir from ABC News hosted World News Tonight from the British capital as did Martha Raddatz and George Stephanopoulos on This Week; Good Morning America aired coverage from Amy Robach in Edinburgh; CNN Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour reported from outside Buckingham Palace; Norah O’Donnell led coverage from London for CBS Evening News.

In the U.K., a series of sporting events, award ceremonies and television programs are being postponed out of respect for the late queen. Many news outlets have prepped streaming programming that worked as a companion to the television broadcast of pre-planned funerial events. Unlike the death of the previous British monarch — Elizabeth’s father George VI in 1952 — profuse amounts of streamed coverage include dozens of well-researched compilation biographies populated with copious library footage from the queen’s many decades of service. 

Newspaper outlets like the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post streamed programs that drew in millions of viewers. The Queen’s Sense of Humor Remembered, for example, is a richly detailed streaming compilation by ABC News Australia that explained in intricate details of the queen’s funeral plans, noting minutiae such as which public figure was the first to be told of the queen’s death (the prime minister), what’s the meaning behind the phrase Spring Tide (referring to King Charles’ ascension to the throne) and how church bells should be rung (they must be muffled). 

Livestreams originating on the websites of news outlets like The Guardian and Channel 4 News also gave viewers the opportunity to watch the live streams of mourning crowds as they stood quietly outside the gates of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

A few networks took the time to directly address the influence that Queen Elizabeth and British society has had on programming, particularly the spate of popular drama anthology television series shown in the United States. One of PBS’s signature programs, Masterpiece, has brought British programming to U.S. audiences for more than five decades, sometimes in partnership with the BBC as well as U.K. channels ITV and Channel 4.  

“As we remember Queen Elizabeth’s achievements, we remain grateful for her long-standing support of our British colleagues and their exemplary work,” said Susanne Simpson, executive producer of Masterpiece. “As admirers of British culture, this is a watershed moment for all of us.”  

From reporting on King Charles III’s new coat of arms to the changing of the lyrics of the national anthem, “this is likely the largest funeral arrangement undertaken in our lifetime,” said the voiceover of the ABC Australia video stream Operation London Bridge, which explained the progression of the queen’s funeral and garnered 2.3 million views in the first 48 hours of its posting. 

Coverage of the 10 days of mourning will cap on Sept. 19, when the queen’s funeral takes place at Westminster Abbey and the cortege heads to her final resting place in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.

In the U.S., networks like Newsy, owned by the E.W. Scripps Co., plans to cover the funeral in its daily newscasts starting at 6 a.m. on Monday. The network will also offer a live stream of the ceremony on Newsy.com and on the network’s OTT channels, with two reporters on the ground in London to cover the events and Britain’s reaction to it, said Eric Ludgood, head of Newsy.

This article has been updated. 

The BBC has announced plans to ax some of its linear channels as it looks to make further savings following the decision to freeze the license fee.

As part of its plans, the broadcaster plans to stop broadcasting smaller linear channels, such as CBBC and BBC Four, “after the next few years”.

It also intends to create a single, 24-hour TV news channel serving UK and international audiences, called BBC News, which it says will offer greater amounts of shared content, but “maintain the ability to offer separate broadcasts depending on what’s happening at home and abroad”.

The corporation has also set out an ambition to reach 75 per cent of BBC viewers through iPlayer each week; and intends to offer viewers new on-demand content and formats for news and current affairs. It will ask Ofcom to remove regulatory restrictions on iPlayer to expand boxsets and archive content.

In a speech to BBC staff, director general Tim Davie said: “This is our moment to build a digital-first BBC. Something genuinely new, a Reithian organization for the digital age, a positive force for the UK and the world.

“Driven by the desire to make life and society better for our license fee payers and customers in every corner of the UK and beyond,” added Davie. “They want us to keep the BBC relevant and fight for something that in 2022 is more important than ever.

“To do that we need to evolve faster and embrace the huge shifts in the market around us.”

Work will start immediately, with further details to be announced in the coming months, including consultations with staff.

Davie added: “I believe in a public service BBC for all, properly funded, relevant for everyone, universally available, and growing in the on-demand age. This plan sets us on that journey.”

This article originally appeared on sister brand TVBEurope.

LONDON—The BBC has announced that it is launching the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow UK channel on Samsung TV Plus, Samsung’s free, ad-supported streaming service.

The move illustrates some of the opportunities that connected TVs are offering international broadcasters in the U.S. 

The launch makes the show, which is now in its 44th season, available to viewers in the U.S., where the Antiques Roadshow UK channel joins over 200 premium channels already available on Samsung TV Plus in U.S. on the millions of Samsung Smart TVs, galaxy devices and on the web.

Samsung TV Plus also offers other BBC channels and other brands like “Tastemade,” “This Old House,” and “Tiny House Nation" in the U.S. 

DENVER—The International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP) has announced that BBC Studios, representing the BBC Group, is joining IBCAP. As part of its membership, IBCAP will play an instrumental role in protecting the BBC’s channels against piracy in the U.S., the group said. 

“Television piracy causes financial harm to the British creative industry, depriving UK producers and broadcasters of income for future investment,” said Diane Hamer, head of business & legal affairs content and brand protection for BBC Studios. “As BBC Studios continues to distribute valuable content in the U.S. and around the world, to return value to its parent company, the British Broadcasting Corporation, it will work with IBCAP to help monitor for infringement and stand as the initial bulwark against piracy. The relationship between IBCAP and BBC Studios enables both parties to collect evidence, share information, enhance detection, and implement comprehensive and coordinated strategies to disrupt piracy in the U.S.”

Representing more than 150 TV channels from around the world, IBCAP is the leading alliance of international broadcasters organized to prevent the unauthorized streaming and illegal distribution of international TV content in the U.S. 

IBCAP’s state-of-the-art anti-piracy lab monitors over 250 different pirate set-top boxes and all major pirate websites, apps and social media platforms. In addition to these distribution platforms, the coalition’s enforcement efforts also effectively remove additional sales channels, including local “brick and mortar” shops and online retailers.

“Leveraging our success to date, IBCAP continues to expand its membership by offering the benefits of our world-class anti-piracy lab and highly successful strategies against pirate services that have significantly impacted our members’ business,” said Chris Kuelling, executive director of IBCAP. “Acting as a coalition, rather than individually, has proven to be not only cost effective, but also highly successful in reducing piracy of our members’ content. We welcome BBC Studios as our newest member and are thrilled to now have them as part of our coalition.”    

NEW YORK—BBC Studios is planning to double the number of journalists working in its digital news teams in the U.S. and Canada and has hired a former News Corp executive Jennie Baird as executive vice president and managing director of Digital News and Streaming. 

Baird will report to Rebecca Glashow, president, BBC Studios Americas, who is responsible for developing and commercializing the BBC’s digital news portfolio outside of the UK. The offering currently consists of the international BBC News app and BBC.com, the global news, sport and features site, which reaches 139 million unique browsers each month.

“Jennie is a digital heavyweight in the constantly evolving news media landscape,” said Glashow. “As record audiences turn to the BBC for news they can trust, the creation of this role and her appointment reflect our ambitions to further reinforce our global news team and double down on our commitment to providing a world-leading digital offering.”

Prior to her new role, Baird was News Corp’s senior vice president and global head of product, where she was responsible for developing digital solutions for News Corp’s range of media companies, including Dow Jones, News UK, News Corp Australia, New York Post, Storyful, Realtor.com, Foxtel and HarperCollins Publishers. 

In her new role, she will lead on the development of the vision and investment plans needed to continue driving growth and audiences for the BBC’s digital news products around the globe, the BBC said. 

Baird will also assume responsibility for the BBC’s recently launched documentary and podcast services - BBC Select and BBC Podcasts.

In addition, the BBC has announced plans to double its digital journalism team in the U.S. and Canada, a move which reflects the increased appetite for its content in the North American market, the BBC said. 

The new roles will further enhance the BBC’s ability to cover major breaking news from the region, providing a global perspective on its biggest stories, the BBC said. 

In announcing the expansion of its digital news teams, the BBC cited audience data showing that BBC News now reaches 456 million people around the world each week.  Digital reach grew by 23% year on year and the U.S. is the BBC’s second biggest non-UK market, with almost 50 million Americans using its services each week.  

In Canada, almost 9 million people (28%) turn to it on a weekly basis.

NEW YORK—North America now has a foreign entry into its streaming market, as BBC Studios has officially launched its ad-free subscription streaming service, BBC Select, in the U.S. and Canada. It is initially available on Amazon Prime Video and the Apple TV app.

BBC Select will feature content that is focused on culture, politics and ideas. This will include a line-up of BBC documentary series and specials, as well as original programming. Some of the programs available at launch include “The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty,” “54 Days: America and the Pandemic,” “TV’s Black Renaissance: Reggie Yates in Hollywood,” “The Trump Show,” “Feasts,” “Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby,” “Extraordinary Places to Eat,” “100 Vaginas” and “Million Dollar Wedding Planner.” Other programs were previously announced in December 2020.

“We’re very excited to introduce BBC Select as a fresh voice in the cultural conversation,” said Louise la Grange, general manager. “The power of British storytelling, combined with the BBC’s unrivalled access to the world’s most original minds and innovative creators, makes BBC Select a unique and compelling destination for audiences in the U.S. and Canada.”

“BBC Select is a powerhouse of ideas, firing off in all directions,” said Jon Farrar, editor-in-chief. “As Select content reveals our world—in these complex times—through the lenses of culture, politics and ideas, I hope we come to understand the forces that shape what it means to be alive in 2021. We hope our shows equally keep our viewers inspired and optimistic.”

BBC Select will be available to U.S. customers for $4.99/month, and $6.99/month in Canada.

For more information, visit www.bbcselect.com.  

LONDON—The BBC’s "Winterwatch" has has become the first outside broadcast to be powered entirely by green hydrogen fuel and energy saving batteries.

The generator is located at the show’s OB hub in Bristol, and uses hydrogen gas made by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen that is generated by solar and wind power. The production team have employed batteries powered by intelligent hybrid generator systems, which use spare energy to charge batteries, significantly minimizing the use of diesel fuel and CO2 emissions.

According to the BBC, using green hydrogen instead of diesel twinset generators at all sites during one live episode of "Winterwatch" avoided 3.6 tons of carbon emissions.

The hydrogen generator will remain at BBC Bristol’s outside broadcasting hub for the duration of the "Winterwatch" series. The production team plan to use the green hydrogen for future series.

Julian Hector, head of BBC Studios Natural History Unit, said: “Everyone at 'Winterwatch' and the BBC Studios Natural History Unit is punching the air at the prospect of finding a way to make our productions more sustainable. This is a superb development for us and the environment, and exactly the kind of thing we want to do more of.”

NEW YORK—Another streaming service is just on the horizon, as BBC Studios has announced it will be launching BBC Select, an ad-free subscription streaming channel,  in early 2021 for U.S. and Canadian consumers. 

BBC Select will offer U.K. programs that cover three main topics: culture, politics and ideas. A good portion of the programs will be exclusive premieres for North American audiences. Among the programs set to be available on the streaming service will be “Grayson Perry: Big American Road Trip,” “Brainwashing Stacey” with Stacey Dooley, “The Romantic Revolution” from Sir Simon Schama and work from filmmaker Louis Theroux.

“BBC Select is for those who crave knowledge, new perspectives and programs that are not your standard fare,” said Louise la Grange, general manager & launch director. “BBC Select will combine a rich line up of never-before-seen shows in the U.S. and Canada with a prized portfolio of thought-provoking, eye-opening programs that provide context and color to the world we all share—all in one place.”

“As we shift our business focus to engaging our fans direct, the digital space offers us the opportunity to bring audiences a portfolio of shows that bring new ideas and perspectives into the conversation,” said Rebecca Glashow, president, BBC Studios—America. “Our research has shown that audiences are looking for an alternative to what is already out there. BBC Select is it.”

BBC Select will initially be available on Amazon Prime Video and the Apple TV app. Other platforms, the full slate of content and the services price will be revealed at launch. For more information, visit www.bbcselect.com.  

LONDON—A group of U.K.-based broadcasters have issued a new set of guidelines for how the TV industry can return to production while attempting to minimize the risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, STV and ITN—along with the Association for Commercial Broadcasters and On-Demand Services, and producers’ body Pact—have released a five-page document that is meant to build on industry guidelines, highlighted by the establishment of what are being called “close contact cohorts.”

When on set, there are often unavoidable interactions that cannot meet social distance requirements. Taking a page from the British Film Commission’s “Working Safely During COVID-19 in Film and High-End TV Drama Production” guide, closed contact cohorts would be pairs and/or small groups that would be permitted to interact in much closer contact. It can include cast and crew, and would include a screening plan—weekly testing alongside other daily screening checks—that the group believes will minimize the likelihood that someone with the virus will be within the cohort.

PLUS: FilmLA: Film and TV Production in L.A. Plummeted 97.8% April to June

“This approach offers a reasonable and sensible level of risk mitigation but it cannot eliminate risk,” the guideline says.

However, the group does say that this approach should only be considered when all other mitigation options are not feasible, and should be used in addition to, not as a replacement of, wider risk mitigation and hygiene measures previously established.

Some Additional elements of the close contact cohorts (CCC) include restricting close contact periods to the shortest time possible; each CCC must be kept to the minimum number of people possible and only interact with their group; CCC members should be easily identifiable (i.e. color groups); CCC members must adhere to all other social distancing guidelines when not with group; and more.

In the event that there is a positive test with a member of the CCC, all members would be required to self-isolate for 14 days and be symptom free before resuming activity on production.

The CCC process currently applies to England and Northern Ireland, and will go into effect in Scotland as of July 30. However, the group does say that local restrictions from government and/or public health institutes already in place must also be considered.

The full CCC guideline is available for review online.  

LONDON—Short-form content is growing in popularity among viewers and content producers, including broadcasters. Ampere Analysis indicates that the U.K.’s BBC and Channel 4 are two of the first major international broadcasters to hop on the short-form bandwagon.

Per a recent report from Ampere Analysis, short-form series make up 9% of all video-on-demand series globally; in addition, 11% of upcoming VoD commissions are short-form. Platforms like Snapchat, Facebook Watch and Quibi are the leading providers of short-form content, but broadcasters are starting to dip their toes into the format, led by the aforementioned BBC and Channel 4.

Specifically, Ampere reports that Channel 4 plans to spend £1 million on new short-form content, most notably in its comedy series. The BBC is also investing in short-form comedy content. The plan will be distribute these series via iPlayer.

Outside of major broadcasters, Ampere found that comedy, reality, news and entertainment were the most popular content for short-form content. Facebook is currently the most popular, but new services like Quibi are quickly on the rise. Also, Asia is the predominant market for short-form content, with 31% of all existing short-form originals coming from South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong or China.

“Short-form content is growing strongly, and we expect to see it boom—both in English speaking markets and Asia where it’s well-established,” said Olivia Deane, an analyst at Ampere. “Attractive to large and small players alike, short-form offers the opportunity to experiment with high production values at a smaller scale. SVoD newcomer Quibi, only producing short-form content, is already the largest commissioner of bite-size television. Quibi, along with other smaller niche platforms, has an exciting opportunity to chase the existing audiences of streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon. This is a market the mainstream broadcasters don’t want to miss out on, and both Channel 4 and the BBC are making forays into the world of short-form shows.”

For more information, visit www.ampereanalysis.com.

LONDON—The BBC has announced plans to launch its own rival to Alexa next year.

The digital voice assistant will not be a hardware device, but is being designed to work on all smart speakers, TVs and mobile phones.

The assistant will wake when users say the word “Beeb,” although that is currently a working title, the Corporation said.

BBC staff around the U.K. are being invited to record their voices to help train the program to recognize different accents.

According to a BBC spokesman, having its own assistant would enable it to “experiment with new programs, features and experiences without someone else’s permission to build it in a certain way.”

“Much like we did with BBC iPlayer, we want to make sure everyone can benefit from this new technology, and bring people exciting new content, programs and services—in a trusted, easy-to-use way.”

“This marks another step in ensuring public service values can be protected in a voice-enabled future.”

LONDON—The BBC is testing new technology that allows hearing impaired viewers to change the levels of the audio on a program.

The technology is available via the BBC’s Taster website where drama "Casualty" is available for viewers to set their own levels in the audio mix.

Viewers can use a slider button in addition to the volume control, which can be moved to reduce background noise, including music, making the dialogue crisper.

According to Lauren Ward, project lead on the A&E Audio Project Team, work on the special episode of "Casualty" began in post production, during the audio mix, when each sound, or group of sounds, was given an importance level (stored in metadata) by the dubbing mixer or producer.

The slider, or Narrative Balancer as the BBC is calling it, is then added to the online media player. “At one end of the slider all the objects are the same level as the original broadcast mix. At the other end is a simplified mix with louder speech and only the most important sounds to the narrative. The viewer is then able to adjust between these two mixes to find the balance of dialogue and other sounds that they prefer,” Ward told the BBC Taster website.

Behind the scenes, the player is looking at where the viewer sets the slider and for every group of sounds, either turns their volume up or down based on its importance.

LONDON—BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon this year is providing viewers something they have not seen before, a series of in-studio augmented reality displays courtesy of sport and event graphics company MOOV.

Based around a three-camera setup (two pedestals and one jib), MOOV is using RT Software’s AR technology and StarTracker camera tracking technology from Mo-Sys to produce the AR graphics. The Mo-Sys system is an optical tracking system that enables studio cameras to be moved when overlaying augmented graphics.

The AR technology provides enhanced graphics not possible in a traditional studio, including virtual life-size cutouts of players on glass plinths and a virtual “Magic Window” that looks onto a 3D render of a tennis court to show results and match data laid out on the court surface.

Each camera feed is passed through RT’s render engine, which drives both the player cutouts and the Magic Window in real time.

LONDON—The BBC is adding a new tool to its arsenal to help deliver content to its viewers with the announcement that it is now using the Bitmovin Encoder to speed content preparation of live programming for video on demand services.

With Bitmovin’s system, BBC can shorten the amount of time it takes for its live shows on BBC TV channels available on satellite provider set-top boxes. This is done with parallel processing for fast encoding, which speeds up the process of converting content to required formats and delivers it with a public cloud-based platform.

The encoder will also be used in UHD and HDR trials, including the BBC’s “Dynasties,” which is on the broadcaster’s on-demand service. 

ALAMEDA, CA.—The BCC has adopted the Clear-Com Communications FreeSpeak II wireless communications system as part of a major replacement project at New Broadcasting House in London, Salford Quays and a dozen other sites.

The BBC issued a request for proposal earlier in 2018 to replace extensive wireless audio systems following regulator Ofcom’s announcement of a reduction of 700 MHz spectrum for Programme Making and Special Event (PMSE) users beginning in May 2020.

First up will be 12 studios at New Broadcasting House, which will be followed by two studios in Salford Quays and 10 English Regions sites. BBC’s Parliament studio at Millbank and Academy facilities at Evesham will also get new equipment.

Every studio will be equipped with its own base station and the necessary number of beltpacks and antennas required at each location. This approach was deemed more cost-effective, easier and better suited to a fast-paced broadcast environment than a matrix system, Clear-Com said.

More information is available on the Clear-Com Communications website.

The BBC is reportedly in talks with Major League Baseball to air matches due to take place in London next year.

According to Sportcal, the pair have been holding talks since June, with a deal expected to be announced soon.

The MLB is also said to be close to renewing its long-term rights deal with BT Sport.

It's thought the deal with the BBC will resemble the NFL's deal with the broadcaster, which broadcasts UK games on free-to-air TV.

LONDON — During the upcoming Wimbledon 2018 Championships — taking place from July 2–15 at the All England Club in Wimbledon, London — the BBC plans to stream select tennis matches in 4K resolution picture quality with high dynamic range (HDR) color. The live and on-demand 4K/HDR streams will be accessible to most U.K. viewers watching the matches via the BBC’s iPlayer streaming service.

When 4K, with four times the pixel count of 1080/60p video, is combined with HDR color space — where millions more colors can be displayed — the results are a brighter, sharper image. Viewers can better discern whether a shot was in or out or recognize famous people in the crowd. And HDR-capable displays handle contrast better, revealing more detail in late-day shadows, while preventing exposure problems in sunlit areas.

As was the case with its recent World Cup Games technology trial, the BBC intends to limit the 4K/HDR service — to roughly the first tens of thousands of people who access the streams — to better manage the bigger bandwidth demands.

“The World Cup streams have suffered a few technical teething problems — stuttering and buffering with some devices,” said John Archer, a TV reviewer for Forbes and Techradar. “[There have also been] a few issues with adapting effectively to broadband speeds that are close to the BBC’ 40 Mbps and 20 Mbps streaming quality ‘tiers.’ When the streams have worked well, though, the results have been spectacular.”

According to a spokesman for the BBC, “The trial has given us valuable feedback allowing us to improve our systems.” And reportedly, few, if any, people found themselves blocked from accessing the World Cup games in 4K.

[Read here about how the BBC used IBM Watson for real-time data analytics of match highlights during last year’s Wimbledon]

TV Reviewer Archer added, “Detail and sharpness have been hugely superior to the HD broadcast streams, making the action feel more immediate and much less tiring to watch. The use of HDR has been quite subtle by comparison but has still undoubtedly enhanced the sense of 'being there' that's so important when you're watching sport.”

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LONDON — The BBC has announced that it will cover the 2018 World Cup in Ultra HD and virtual reality as BCC Sports puts the new technology to the test.

All 33 matches covered by BBC will be available at no charge to viewers on the BBC Sport VR 2018 World Cup app. Those with VR headsets can immerse themselves into a stadium experience in which they feel as if they are seated in a hospitality box, BBC said.

[Read: FIFA to Provide Teams With In-Match Video During World Cup]

BBC also plans to present 29 matches on BBC One in Ultra HD to those with a high-speed internet connection. The UHD coverage will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis, it said. Tens of thousands of fans also will be able to access an HD stream via the BBC iPlayer home screen as soon as coverage begins.

Matthew Postgate, BBC chief technology and product officer, said the UHD and VR trials will give viewers a taste of what is to come in television.

More information is available on the BBC website.

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LONDON, UK–IBC has announced its first confirmed keynotes as well as a series of “Global Gamechanger” sessions that will feature “creative minds and business influencers” to give a big picture view of the M&E industry. IBC will be held at RAI Amsterdam, Sept. 13-17, 2018.

Tim Davie, CEO, BBC Studios, will deliver the opening IBC Conference Keynote on Thursday, Sept. 13 and Jean-Briac ‘JB’ Perrette, President and CEO, Discovery Networks International (DNI), will keynote ahead of the afternoon’s Global Gamechangers stage on the same day. Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer at YouTube, will kick-off the afternoon Conference sessions on Friday, Sept. 14.

Global Gamechangers will take place on Thursday, Sept. 13, immediately after Davie’s keynote and will feature Lindsay Pattison, Chief Transformation Officer, GroupM and WPP Global, Jette , executive vice president, CEO of MTG International Entertainment & MTGx Digital Video Content at Modern Times Group (MTG), Lisa Tobin, Executive Producer, Audio at The New York Times and Mohamed Abuagla, CIO and CTO at Al Jazeera.

[Read: IBC Show Celebrates 50th Anniversary]

Tim Davie became CEO of the newly formed BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide and BBC Studios), on April 1, 2018. The reorganized studio is designed to provide a simplified organizational structure with integrated program production, sales and distribution in a single BBC offering, with a vision to build BBC’s brands, audiences, commercial returns and reputation worldwide.

JB Perrette oversees and sets the strategy for all of Discovery’s business outside the United States. He returns to the IBC Conference Keynote stage to discuss what has happened in the three years since his last appearance, during which time, Discovery has strengthened its presence in key markets through numerous transactions including the acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive (now Discovery Inc), and Eurosport, which led to the ground-breaking agreement with the International Olympic Committee making Discovery and Eurosport the home of the Olympic Games across Europe through to Paris 2024.

Neal Mohan is responsible for all YouTube products globally across every device and platform. He will share insights into the future of entertainment and the ways that technology can help broadcasters reach more people in new ways.

Lindsay Pattison, who will lead off the Business part of the “Global Gamechangers” sessions, is the first Chief Transformation Officer for both GroupM and WPP Global. She will be followed by Jette Nygaard-Andersen, who will deliver the Digital session with a discussion about MTG’s investment in digital platforms and the behavior of the biggest disrupters to the TV industry, the Millennials and Gen Z’s, tracing their consumption patterns and ways of watching video.

Other Global Gamechangers will be on Creative and Transformation and concludes with News, where Lisa Tobin, editor on “The Daily” news podcast will discuss how her show draws on the intellectual resources from The New York Times’s newsroom. She will be joined by Mohamed Abuagla, CIO/CTO and Executive Director for Technology and Operations at Al Jazeera Media Network, where he guides the strategies and support services for the network covering ten channels and over 70 locations worldwide. These speakers will discuss what’s happening in news; the shape and feel for the modern studio, reporting in the field and the opportunities and challenges they face from fake news, start-ups and the consumer reporter.

IBC will announce additional keynoters and sessions closer to the show. 

IBC is offering a special pre-launch conference rate until May 15. Those who register prior to when registration opens on 15 May will be contacted to confirm conference delegate place. You must confirm your delegate place before 21 May to benefit from the significantly reduced conference pass rate.

To register, visit www.ibc.org. 

LONDON—The BBC is launching its first-ever augmented reality app.

“Civilizations AR”hasbeen developed by BBC Research & Development and Nexus Studios to accompany the BBC's new arts and culture series, “Civilizations.” It is available on both Android and iOS and will allow users to explore exhibits from the more than 30 U.K. museums that are collaborating with the BBC on the series.

Virtual exhibits featured in the app include the ancient Egyptian mummy from Torquay Museum, Rodin’s The Kiss from the National Museum of Wales, The Umbrian Madonna and Child from the National Museum of Scotland, and more.

The app has been built by the BBC R&D department using Nexus software, based on ARKit for iOS and ARCore for Android. It is also designed to be used for other applications in future, with AR possibilities to accompany other shows and series.

Eleni Sharp, executive product manager for BBC R&D, said “The Civilisations Festival has opened BBC R&D up in a brand new way. Not only has it brought innovative digital tools and skills to hundreds of museums, galleries, libraries, archives and other arts organisations from all over the U.K., it has enabled us to trial our ideas and technologies on a huge scale which is going to influence and inform our work over the coming months and years.

“The work we’ve done with these organisations will enable fans of the series new ways to engage with art and cultural artifacts from across the country. The BBC’s first ever AR app is a great example of this, offering users the ability to explore a personal, virtual exhibition of fascinating pieces whenever and wherever they want.”

This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe. 

LONDON—BBC Wales will employ Dalet's Galaxy MAM platform at its new HQ in Cardiff. The Dalet Galaxy will be used across production, news, studios and delivery departments. The installation design and multi-year deployment will be managed by Dalet Professional Services.

The BBC will use the BPMN-compliant Dalet Workflow Engine for ingest, transcoding and QC, as well as logging, editing, media packaging and distribution.

Dalet will also supply the BBC with a new Dalet HTML application for simplified management of camera card ingests and its Dalet Brio video server which supports both SDI and IP, the ingest and playout platform also adheres to the SMPTE 2110 standards.

“BBC Wales is pleased to be working with Dalet to provide an asset management system for our new home in Central Square, Cardiff," said Gareth Powell, chief operating officer, BBC Wales.

"Dalet was chosen after a very competitive process, and will provide an important part of the technology solution at Central Square within a state of the art broadcast centre. We are looking forward to the successful delivery of the project."

“We have been working with the BBC on a multitude of projects for more than 15 years,” added Adrian Smith, regional manager, Dalet UK. 

“Dalet Galaxy’s flexible architecture provides a future-proof framework on which the BBC can evolve to meet new requirements and production needs that arise over coming months and even years. The Dalet Professional Services team’s experience in managing such enterprise rollouts will help them navigate the juggernaut of this multi-year, large-scale deployment.”

This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe. 

LONDON—The BBC has launched its own virtual reality studio.

BBC VR Hub will spearhead the BBC's VR production and explore how it can create real audience impact. 

According to a blog post by Zillah Watson, head of content commissioning, VR Hub, it will "act as a hub internally, working closely with our programme makers and digital experts."

Watson continued, "Our research shows that for as long as the quantity of high-quality content remains low, and the experience remains cumbersome, mainstream audiences won’t use VR. That’s why we’re focussing on a small number of high impact pieces that have broad, mainstream appeal."

"We want to excite audiences by creating the most enthralling experiences imaginable using the power of VR. We believe the BBC can bring a unique perspective to VR. We can bring all of this to bear in the creation of VR. Having cracked every new content delivery mechanism since radio in 1922, we are excited about the potential of VR and the ways in which it could enrich the lives of our audiences."

To coincide with the announcement, the BBC has released its VR experience Home - A A VR Spacewalk for the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. It marks the first time the Corporation has launched a VR experience for the HTC Vive.

Tom Burton, head of interactive and virtual reality for BBC Studios and director of Home - A VR Spacewalk, said: “Home represents the very best of the BBC, bringing brilliant creative together with cutting edge technologies to create an experience you wouldn’t get anywhere else. Making this experience available to those who have the devices will give people a taste of what it must be like to visit the International Space Station and walk in space for real.” 

This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe. 

LONDON—The StarTracker from Mo-Sys Engineering is an automatic, real-time optical camera tracking system that has recently been utilized by both the BBC and Canada’s Global News. BBC used the system, along with Vizrt grpahics, during the U.K. general elections; Global News did the same during its election coverage.

This was the first time that Global News used the StarTracker system and paired it with older equipment. With the Mo-Sys system they created a temporary virtual set environment for the election on May 9.

The BBC has been using StarTracker for a while, with the most recent example being its fourth live election event. Coverage of the general election on June 8 featured three StarTracker systems.

Mo-Sys is a London-based company that designs and builds camera robotics and camera tracking for AR and VR for the film and broadcast industry.

Thanks to a steady stream of advances in digital video technology, BBC’s “Planet Earth II” manages to capture wild animal behavior within some of the world’s most exotic environments in ways that would have been cinematically impossible a decade ago, when the original “Planet Earth” wowed viewers around the world.

Cinematographer Rob Drewett and the team were able to put themselves in the flight path of this super-swarm in southwest Madagascar. Drewett used the latest in handheld, gyro-stabilized camera technology to get shots that flew alongside the locusts, as if part of the swarm. (Photo by Ed Charles/BBC

“Planet Earth” (2006) holds the distinction of being the first natural history series to be filmed in HD. Its successor, “Planet Earth II,” was filmed in ultra-high definition (UHD) and features technological innovations including ultra-lightweight and portable camera stabilization technology that can be carried by camera operators and drones, higher-resolution camera traps for filming elusive animals, miniature camera grip equipment such as macro sliders, jibs and scopes, and 4K low-light cameras with greatly increased light sensitivity.

Narrated by David Attenborough, the six-part “Planet Earth II” premieres in the United States on Feb. 18 on BBC America. It debuted on BBC One in the United Kingdom in November. The series is a BBC Studios Natural History Unit production, co-produced with BBC America, ZDF, Tencent and France Télèvisions.

“Planet Earth II” was over three years in the making, with camera crews traveling to 40 different countries on 117 filming trips and 2,089 shooting days, tracking the living unseen world that inhabits the deserts, forests, islands, jungles and major cities of our planet.

Show producers harnessed advanced production technology to deliver an immersive feel to “Planet Earth II.” According to executive producer Mike Gunton, “Visually, where ‘Planet Earth’ took an almost God-like perspective and said, ‘Let’s look down on the Earth and see the scale of the planet,’ what ‘Planet Earth II’ is doing is saying, ‘Let’s get ourselves into the lives of the animals and see it from their perspectives.’ The visual signature of the series is that you feel like the camera is with the animals. It’s very fluid, very active.”

Cameraman Brad Bestelink films carmine bee-eaters while strapped into a safety harness on the front of a vehicle in Botswana. (Photo by Chadden Hunter/BBC)

Mark MacEwan is one of several veteran cinematographers deployed for the project. He was involved in the “Jungles” and “Urban” episodes, and served as primary filmmaker for the “Islands” content, where he captured a battle between two Komodo dragons, as well as a piece about an indri lemur used in the show’s main title sequence.

“From the beginning I was particularly interested in creating as immersive an experience as I could, using gimbal technology, sliders, jibs and such,” MacEwan says. “We used this immersive technology in the hope that—where the environment and the animals allowed—we could take viewers on a journey with the characters, rather than the more traditional long-lens observational style.”

MacEwan says the production crew tried to marry the long lens with the gimbal movements as much as possible. “I’ve always been interested in moving the camera and bringing the action to viewers, and jungle and urban environments are great for that since they’re so multidimensional. There’s so much to move through, layers upon layers, that they keep the eye and mind engaged. You can use movement to reveal characters and find characters, create mood and so much more.

“I worked exclusively with the RED Dragon camera,” MacEwan continues. “I love it. It gives me so many different options in frame rates and resolutions, and its size and form factor mean I can use it for long-lens shots, macro work, or even on my Freefly MoVI M15 [motorized gimbal stabilizer]. It’s incredibly versatile, and the fact that it’s modular is really useful. It proved to be one of the key pieces of equipment for me for the whole series.”

MacEwan’s primary lens during the shoot was a Canon 50-1000mm PL. “It gives me the ability to shoot an entire sequence—from wides to filling the frame with claws and teeth when needed. The glass is beautiful, and optically it’s the best long lens I’ve used. The only downside is that it’s heavy. What you gain in quality, you pay for in weight. But I’m happy to live with that.”

'Planet Earth' drone operator Nick Wolcott piloted a large drone through the narrow walls of this slot canyon in Utah. He succeeded in getting images of these incredible structures in a way that’s never been done before. (Photo by Ed Charles/BBC)

MacEwan deployed a Canon 30-300 PL mount for jungle work, which he used to shoot the indri lemur in Madagascar. “The jungle is very thick. That lens is able to give me beautiful results even in low light. For macro work, the lens I always go to is the incredible ARRI/Zeiss Master Macro. I really wish I owned one of these. The bokeh is stunning and the lens is super-fast.”

Cinematographer John Aitchison worked on the “Jungles” and “Cities” episodes. He helped film the Wilson’s bird of paradise for “Jungles,” as well as hyenas in Ethiopia and catfish in France for “Cities.” Also for “Cities,” he filmed the peregrine falcons that call New York City home.

Like MacEwan, Aitchison says immersion was the name of the game. “The bird I was filming—along with Tim Laman and Edwin Scholes—was Wilson’s bird of paradise. It lives low in the forest; the males make courtship displays on the ground. We used a cable dolly to move the camera at the bird’s eye level to show the tangled nature of their home and the importance of patches of light, where trees have fallen. The camera was mounted on a DJI Ronin [three-axis gimbal], making it possible to pull the dolly along by hand without camera wobble. We could pan, tilt, focus, monitor and record the shot remotely. Tim and Ed also used a drone to show how tree falls create light gaps in the forest, which are useful to the birds,” Aitchison says.

In “Planet Earth II,” the display of the Wilson’s bird of paradise is revealed from its true perspective—from above—as the female would see it. The crucial shot of a male revealing his iridescent plumage to a female bird of paradise was captured using a Canon EOS 1D-C attached to a tree and operated remotely using a CamRanger wireless DSLR remote and an iPad. “This behavior had never been filmed from above before—or even seen, for that matter—and revealed exactly what the female birds see when they watch a male displaying. It was so dark on the forest floor. I shot on a Sony a7S, using a separate recorder to monitor and make the 4K recording, and a Canon Cine-Servo 50-1000mm lens attached by a Metabones Smart Adapter,” says Aitchison.

Aitchison filmed peregrine falcons hunting for prey among the iconic skyscrapers of Manhattan for “Cities.” Peregrines have made their homes in the city’s skyscrapers, which perform the role of cliff edges, the traditional habitat for peregrine falcons. New York City has the highest concentration of nesting peregrine falcons in the world. Aitchison strove to film reflections and abstract views of the city from the birds’ high perspective to show how unnatural and confusing the city could appear to a bird. “The main challenge was not so much to immerse people in the birds’ environment but to film such fast-moving birds before they disappeared between the buildings!”

Cinematographer Jonathan Jones focuses his lens on a harvest mouse climbing grass stems in a wild meadow in Norfolk, England. Filming the smallest rodent in Europe required specialized “scope” lenses that could extend into the grass and away from the bulky 4K camera. (Photo by Chadden Hunter/BBC)

To shoot a massive swarm of locusts in Madagascar for the deserts episode, cinematographer Rob Drewett chose a RED Dragon Carbon Fiber camera package. Much of Drewett’s work, like MacEwan’s, was conducted with a Freefly MoVI M15, which he says allowed him to get stable footage up close to his subjects.

Though locusts are usually solitary, the crew filmed a swarm of several billion. A swarm of this size may only be seen once a decade and is one of the largest ever caught on film. The swarm in “Planet Earth II” stretched over 115 square miles. It could travel up to 62 miles and consume 44,000 tons of vegetation per day.

Drewett continues, “I used Nikon still lenses: 16mm, 20mm, 35mm and 85mm. I have a set of these since they’re all very light, and consistently so. When in the thick of the action, you don’t want to waste time rebalancing the gimbal, so having them nearly the same [weight] allows for a quick swing of the lens. With an RTMotion follow focus that I was able to control with a thumb wheel, I was a completely ‘independent’ cameraman, allowing me to keep up with the [locust] swarm. We also had a Teradek Bolt for wireless video, which allowed the director/producer to watch the footage from afar, and foolcontrol, an iOS app that allowed me to use RED Wi-Fi to access the internal menu for changes in frame rate and other settings,” Drewett says.

Despite the relative dearth of 4K consumers so far, Aitchison believes it’s good to be filming the natural history series at higher resolution “because the quality shines through. Even the least technically equipped audience can recognize it.”

He adds, “I do wish the viewfinders had kept pace with the cameras’ resolutions—especially as the new larger sensors mean depth of field has been halved, more or less, for any given magnification and light level. That makes it hard to follow focus on a hyena, for example, let alone a peregrine diving at 200 miles per hour. But there has been some progress recently. The latest RED viewfinder and those ARRI Amira and VariCam viewfinders are all great improvements.”

LONDON—Holographic technology has long been one of the main fixtures of what the future will look like, but now the BBC is testing just how far away we may be to realizing that idea. The British broadcaster recently experimented with emerging broadcast technologies, including augmented reality, in the creating of a holographic TV device.

“Our experiment was fairly simplistic, but the new technologies on the horizon have the potential to completely change the way that audiences experience media content in the future” said Cyrus Saihan, BBC’s head of digital partnerships.

Read the full article on TVT’s sister publication TVB Europe.

LONDON—Is your broadcasting organization capable of handling more than a million data points every five minutes across your IT infrastructure?

That’s how much network traffic is happening in BBC Online—and BBC Online is just one service our Future Media Group (FM) has to monitor to keep our IT infrastructure up and running. We’re using unified network monitoring to keep tabs on a vast hybrid IT network comprising a network operations center and 60 product groups. That’s 3,000 on-premise devices, and 2,000 in the cloud.

Every second of every day we’re dealing with 3,000 metrics that must be analyzed to make sure our infrastructure is working to deliver online digital services with the flawless performance audiences expect.

ONE MILLION DATA POINTS EVERY FIVE MINUTES

As most of you are probably aware, the BBC has a very wide range of broadcast services. We offer our broadcast and online audiences with nine national television channels, plus regional programming, 10 national radio stations, 40 local radio stations and an extensive web site. Globally, BBC World Service broadcasts on television, radio and online, providing news in 27 languages. BBC Worldwide and other commercial ventures complement our vast media portfolio.

Across that spectrum of services, it’s the BBC Future Media Group’s job to ensure that all digital media services perform without a stumble. (Those digital services include BBC Online, BBC Red Button and BBC iPlayer, as well as digital coverage of important ad hoc and live events, such as the Olympics and elections.)

It’s a tall order. BBC Online generates approximately one million data points every five minutes. As I said at the outset, we monitor 5,000 devices in a hybrid IT infrastructure, half on-premises with the remainder hosted in Amazon Web Services.

Keeping track of all our network activity is an essential part of a broadcast technologist’s job these days. People are consuming more and more of their news and entertainment online, and consumers have extremely high expectations for digital experience delivery. They have very little patience for issues with page loads, streaming media errors, or latency in general.

The BBC is committed to delivering an exceptional customer experience. To that end, the entire organization has been increasingly adopting continuous delivery and DevOps across its groups, as well as moving much of its infrastructure and services to public cloud. 

Our success in that effort, however, meant addressing some old ways of handling network monitoring that weren’t quite meeting modern infrastructure requirements.

THE OLD WAY: FIXED MONITORING BY LOCATION

Like many large media organizations, BBC’s infrastructure is dispersed, and our monitoring systems were set up for specific locations in the infrastructure. That’s far from ideal. Some of these monitoring tools were sitting on individual PCs, which would frequently crash.

Our NOC team was forced to constantly monitor multiple dashboards from different consoles. In this kind of dispersed environment, it can be very difficult for NOC team members to identify action items and act on them quickly.

With more than 60 product teams, the NOC needed a solution that could monitor output across the distinct services, and also easily integrate into DevOps workflows, to ensure maximal monitoring coverage within a single pane of glass.

That was my vision: To have a single dashboard so our NOC team can pick up incidents quickly. Without it, the BBC was susceptible to delivering a degraded customer experience, which would in turn risk damaging our brand’s reputation for reliable service.

The solution was unified network monitoring. Several companies provide flavors of unified network monitoring, and we settled on a system provided by Zenoss. We now have improved and streamlined our monitoring through a single dashboard. As a result, we have contributed direct value to the organization, in terms of both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. In addition, we have moved approximately 50 percent of their operations to the cloud, and network monitoring has definitely helped make the transition smoother and more orderly.

THE BENEFITS OF OPEN SOURCE UNIFIED MONITORING

There are three main reasons to look to a dedicated, open source unified network monitoring solution: Scalability, flexibility, and value.

Scalability:The rapid changes in broadcast technology means we are now monitoring considerably more data than ever before, with a 24/7 feed to our NOC. That requires software-defined IT operations that can scale as data points continue to grow. Unified network monitoring allows us to monitor 3,000 metrics and 20 separate events every second.

Flexibility:At the BBC, we have an agile, dynamic business model. We work quickly, and we innovate frequently. Our centralized NOC team needed a solution that would intrinsically fit within the fast-paced DevOps workflows of each product group. We were able to create custom tools within the network monitoring environment to automate application monitoring and to add dashboarding functionality for specific internal stakeholders. Because of this flexibility the system now enjoys wide adoption and use among our monitoring team, product groups, operations teams and senior management.

Value:The BBC is a public service broadcaster, supported by taxes paid by U.K. households. Financial accountability and consistent quality of service are absolutely essential to our way of doing business.

Unified network monitoring directly benefits the BBC because it makes it easy to capture and analyze network performance data. We can detect incidents in both infrastructure and applications, so we can move quickly to find a root cause and take action to bring the service back up. But we don’t have to pay for analyzing volumes of unnecessary data, because unified network monitoring allows us to “triage” problem situations, focusing on the things we need to fix. That’s an extremely cost-effective way of maintaining our network.

As new technologies enter the broadcast environment, it puts an added burden on your network infrastructure—a burden that cannot affect the reliability of the network or the speed with which you conduct transactions with your audience. Unified network monitoring relieves you of that burden, creating the kind of flawless customer experience that’s essential to any broadcaster’s reputation.

Shani Mashhood is head of monitoring for the BBC. She can be reached atshani.mashhood@bbc.co.uk