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George starts the week in the only way he knows how, with a telco. Monday was a whole lot better for the rest of the team. Our friends in online news joined us for a work session to kick-off some new projects with them. One (coming from them) is solid; the scope of the other is still eluding us. It was great for the two teams to meet and it has certainly got the news junkies in the team excited. I spent the afternoon with the Digital Service Development section helping them visualise their project work on a whiteboard, and explaining concepts like blockers and work in process limits. Different domain, but the issues are all too familiar.

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Mark Waddell is a lead research engineer here in ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D working on our research into "white space"- the potentially useful bits and pieces of spare radio frequency spectrum that the move from analogue to digital broadcasting might make available. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's position on white space is probably best articulated in our. This post outlines where we are to date with our research in this area, what we plan to do and some of the interesting issues as Mark see's them:

In 2009 my IBC conference paper "Compatibility Challenges for Whitespace Devices and Broadcast Networks" discussed the opportunities and issues with emerging devices that offered the possibility of delivering broadband applications in potentially under utilised TV spectrum known as the white space. The switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting offered the potential of using this spectrum as the digital TV signals are significantly more resilient to interference than their analogue predecessors. The main concern related to the proposed access schemes required to use the fragmented spectrum and the proposals to consider spectrum sensing alone, aka cognitive radio, to detect and avoid the incumbent TV and microphone signals. Issues relating to adjacent channel interference were also expressed requiring location-dependent power limits for the white space devices to prevent interference to TV reception.

Image of Spectrum Analysis for Southwark in 2004 from OfCom's initial

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The on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ2 on Tuesday evening (21st June) featured the first ever use on air of 'Venue Vu' - a new system we've been developing to help visualise live events happening across a wide area.Ìý The system was used to produce a virtual 'flight' from Centre Court to Court 3, created using a pre-generated 3D model of Wimbledon, with live video from these two courts being projected into the model.Ìý

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A snapshot from the first onscreen use of Venue Vu from this year's Wimbledon Coverage. Court 2 is visible on the left of the image, with a real TV camera feed of the court embedded in the 3d model.

The use of live video to 'bring to life' parts of the model allows the generation of a seamless flight that starts and ends with the live camera feeds.Ìý This allows the relationship between the areas visible in the live images and the rest of the 3D model to be seen much more clearly than they would be if the model was shown in isolation. Our colleagues in ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Sport are trialling the system to see how it can help explain to viewers the layout of Wimbledon, and to test its robustness in a live programme, and we expect it to be making appearances throughout this year's coverage.

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Olivier kicks the week off by leading an interesting workshop on the shape of the upcoming project with News. It looks like we're getting closer to what we're not going to do, which is always a start. He spends some of the week researching the ways people consume news content. He discovers the stress that some people feel if they "fall behind" the news and confirms some of the behaviours that we've taken for granted so far - such as the way that people "skim" certain stories and "dig" into others.

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Video eats storage. Lots of it. For breakfast, lunch and dinner. In copious quantities – an hour of professional footage of a quality drama production easily eats a terabyte. We easily need some 10 hours, split over a 1000s shots or so, to just produce one episode. And we work with it fast – we scroll or ‘jog’, frame accurate, at many times real speed. And during the final craft edit phase – this implies accessing some 100’s of very large files, extract a few 10’s of gigabytes and combine it all in fractions of seconds. And multiply this by the 100’s of programmes the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ completes every day – and you can see that there is a little engineering challenge here.

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Now seemingly storage has become a commodity item, available from OEMs, from interchangeable, generic suppliers and specialist suppliers. In our world – reality could not be more different. In fact – we’re not even close to having generic storage perform at the levels needed for SD production, yet alone HD. Right now – our storage is bespoke, heavily tailored for broadcasting and hence expensive.
So this is where our R&D department comes in.

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The Prototyping team is developing a prototype to help you remember TV and radio programmes that you've been meaning to watch and we thought we'd write about the stages of development of the project as we work on it. This is our original project description:

"It gives you one place to keep all those TV and radio programmes you've been meaning to watch. Maybe your friend told you something was good, maybe you saw a trailer on TV or read a review in the paper or maybe someone tweeted about it. This is a cross-platform service that allows you to store those recommendations for a more convenient time.

At its core it is a list of programmes accessed using the web, with a number of easy ways of getting things onto that list and a number of useful ways of viewing or being reminded of the things on that list. It supports viewing and listening by broadcast and on-demand services from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ and elsewhere."

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This week has us in a transition phase. A number of projects are wrapping up now or will soon, and others are in the scoping, thinking and understanding phase.

RadioTAG in one of the more mature projects. Sean and Chris L kept working on the specification this week, and now have a working end-to-end implementation, and even got to try a prototype hardware radio with a working TAG button brought in by Robin from Frontier. Joanne, meanwhile, has been building a paper and cardboard prototype for the TAG interactions, - from what happens out of the box when you buy an IP radio to the sign up and pairing of the device with an online Bookmarking application. User testing this prototype should help improve the signposting and interactions between devices and give insight into how people perceive such a device and the terminology surrounding the service.

Watch Later is making a lot of progress, too. Theo is juggling between photoshop, with which he reviewed some of the look and feel based on the working prototype, and HTML/CSS, with some help from Duncan. He notes that working between HTML, CSS and Media Queries (for targeted platform presentation) , Sinatra and JQuery has been really enlightening. It's clear that it's not a sequential process from one stage of development to next, more so that iterative reviews allow you to improve upon what you create as your competency / knowledge deepens.

More will happen on this project next week, as Chris N returns from his trip to Tromsø, Norway. He is officially there for meetings around P2P-next, but we're really using him as a test subjects on the effects of 24-hours daylight on sleep patterns (or lack thereof).

On thursday, our friends from Live|Work came to review with us the results of the user-centered prototyping sessions. While there was some minor frustration at how fast we had to go from listening to expressing needs and prototyping solutions, the process we went through as a team have definitely inspired us to think more about the user experience, rapid creation and testing of ideas. Everyone seemed fired up, and we are hoping to put what we learned to good use on our upcoming prototypes.

Jonathan from News has been spending a lot of time with us this week - not surprising as we are about to start work on up to 4 (some low-fi, some hi-fi) prototypes related to reading, experiencing, following and publishing news. On Wednesday, he gave us a great overview of the publishing to the online ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News, from its beginning in 1997 to the present day: from flat files to metadata triple stores, from journalists writing HTML to automated term extraction. Let's just say the resulting whiteboard was quite a piece of art! We all left with a lot of new knowledge. In Sean's words: "Never again will I wonder what CPS, MPS, AVDB, Tripod, Pulsar, Plasma, Spice, Graffiti and Zakumi mean."

The application period for the new roles has closed, and I am told we received a really good number of applications. Several of us, such as Vicky or Paul, have started reading the applications. Paul has also spent most of his Friday writing makefiles, which according to him goes to show that nothing really ever changes.

Being the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ in the Information Age - Towards the New Broadcasting System

Matthew Postgate, Controller ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D

Back in March Matthew Postgate, Controller of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ R&D, presented the at .Ìý

Matthew's lecture explored two main issues facing broadcasters in a changing world; firstly looking at the increasing responsibility upon media organisations as the world moves from an industrial to an information society.Ìý And secondly, that in order to discharge this changing responsibility, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ will require a New Broadcasting System.

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There's been a lot packed in to a short week, with some new projects that have been on the horizon for a while finally taking shape. Chris G is in early for a Future Media board presentation of one of our high-profile recent projects, which goes well. Tristan, George and Chris G then get stuck straight in to the EU FI-Content project, sorting out what work is still outstanding, which George follows immediately with a relaxing teleconference with other broadcasters.Ìý

George rushes out Western House, the home of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 2, to scope out a space where R&D will be demoing recent work at a forthcoming Audio & Music day.

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