Technology + Creativity at the BBC Feed

Update on ICY streams for manufacturers

2020-12-16T12:15:34+00:00

This blog post is intended to ensure that we have reached all of the vendors necessary for an upcoming change to a legacy way the BBC distributes live radio online. There is no action for listeners to take at this time and we do not anticipate any impact to your service.

We’re making some changes to our ICY (sometimes referred to as “shoutcast” or “icecast”) streams, and some vendors may need to update.

We are not turning off these streams, or making any changes to the technical requirements of the devices that receive them. However, the URLs that some devices need to connect to in order to receive them will be changing as part of us moving the delivery of these streams in-house.

This also enables us to offer these streams securely over TLS, something which is increasingly requested by radio manufacturers and aggregators.

When will the changes happen?

We will be spending the rest of the calendar year setting up the new streams and aim to be ready to move devices to the new URLs in January, starting with devices that the BBC is able to directly control.

After that we will be reaching out to the organisations we know about asking them to update. Once the majority of devices are using the new system, we will add in-stream messaging on the old streams warning of the move in early to mid-March if there is still significant legitimate usage on the old platform.

The old URLs will then stop working completely by 31st March 2021.

What do I need to do?

If you use an Internet Radio to listen to BBC Radio as it is being broadcast, there is no action required and we are confident at this time that your service will continue uninterrupted.

If you are a device manufacturer, station aggregator or other vendor that offers access to our live streams using the ICY protocol, this depends on how your system is configured. By looking at the playback URLs that you connect to you will be able to confirm if any action is required.

Systems that use our Media Selector APIs on the domain 'open.live.bbc.co.uk', we will be updating these APIs and so no action is required by you.

If you directly use URLs from either of the following hostnames:

1. bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net
2. bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net

Then you will need to update to prevent impact to your customers as these endpoints will not work after March 2021.

Many vendors should have already heard from our Distribution team about this change. If you have not and need more information on this change, businesses can get in touch by emailing icy-changes@bbc.co.uk.

Going forward, the BBC considers its use of the ICY protocol deprecated and will keep it operating as long as legitimate usage levels remain high enough to justify doing so. We will continue to track usage and review our strategy regularly.

Technology weapons in the disinformation war

2020-11-17T09:46:16+00:00

Photo by Camilo Jimenez on Unsplash

You’re browsing social media and you see something that doesn’t look right. What do you do? You can search for information about the source or the material itself but you may not find the answer. What if there was a technology-based solution that could help – some kind of signal that would reassure you that what you’re seeing hasn’t been tampered with or misdirected?

This question has been posed by many organisations and individuals in the last couple of years as the scourge of disinformation has grown. Now Project Origin, a collaboration involving the BBC, the CBC/Radio Canada, Microsoft and The New York Times is working on a solution.

Essentially, we are seeking to repair the link in news provenance that has been broken by large-scale third-party content hosting. What do we mean by broken provenance? Most large social media platforms have features such as verified pages or accounts but outside of these, there are countless re-posts of content that was originally published by another person or organisation. In some cases, this content is simply re-uploaded and shared. In others, a re-upload is accompanied by some new context. Users also modify the content - for humour, for brevity, and in some cases, with malicious intent.

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

Our objective is to derive signals with respect to content coming from publishers or originators to allow consumers to be reassured about its source and the fact that it has not been manipulated. It’s a huge task and we’re very much aware that others are doing excellent work in this space, as well as in the wider disinformation sphere. The Content Authenticity Initiative, for example, has carried out some excellent work, focusing, in the first instance, on securing the provenance of images from the point of capture.

We’ve divided the problem into three main areas - giving the content item an identifier, finding a way to allow it to take that identifier with it on its journey and safely storing the information that will allow it to be checked.

Firstly, each digital image, video or audio file is represented by a very specific sequence of bits, so specific that we can safely identify even the smallest differences from the content that was originally produced. These sequences of bits are, understandably, enormous, but thankfully, we can lean on a concept called cryptographic hashing as a way of allowing us to represent them as a short string through secure hash algorithms. We can be confident that there is effectively a zero probability that two pieces of content share the same hash.

To know who generated the content hash, we need another tool – a key. Public-private asymmetric keys are in common use on today’s internet – helping us carry out e-commerce amongst other things. They allow a publisher to digitally sign a document which is linked to a piece of content – containing for example data about the content and the hashes that represent it - by creating something we call a manifest. Again, maths is our hero here with some complex cryptography ensuring that only the person with the private key could have signed the manifest and this can be verified using the corresponding public key.

The way a browser on a PC knows that this signature is bona fide is via a piece of standard internet functionality provided by a Certificate Authority – a trusted third party that checks the public key it’s being offered belongs to the right party.

Finally, at the heart of a provenance system we need a way of maintaining a reliable and consistent database of manifests. For Origin we plan to use the Microsoft Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) as the heart of the manifest and receipt storage. The Provenance System built around this to deal with the various media registration and queries will be based on Microsoft’s AMP (Aether Media Provenance)

Unlike the permissionless blockchain solutions made famous by cryptocurrency, CCF is a ‘permissioned’ system. These are sometimes called ‘green blockchains’ since they do not need to consume large amounts of energy to determine consensus – there is enough trust between parties controlling the system to allow the nodes to act on a much simpler basis.

To sum up, we are developing a machine-readable way of representing data about a content item in a way that allows a publisher to tie or ‘bind’ the specific content item to the data and have it stored safely for future retrieval by a user.

So what’s next? On the technology front we’re determining how to ensure that the content, its manifest and the cryptographic binding – the signed hashes and certificates that link the content you have to the details - are all conveyed together. We're also working on what to do when data is not present or has been altered. What happens for example if content has been clipped or transcoded in a useful and legitimate way?

We’re also keen to determine how this kind of technology can help in a wider media and technology community where there are many tools operated by a range of different organisations. An important element of our work has been trying to understand the APIs or common interfaces that might be standardised so a single device can discover and query different systems - including those used for content creation. And we’re launching a formal standards effort to define APIs and systems specifications for media provenance across the whole media ecosystem.

The future of in car listening: opportunities and choices

2020-02-26T10:32:36+00:00

Eleanor van Heyningen, Chief of Staff to the Chief Technology and Product Officer and Asha Knight, Distribution Manager in Digital Partnerships, explain how in-car radio listening is evolving and the BBC's approaches to this.

Earlier this month at the European Broadcasting Union Digital Radio Summit in Geneva, we spoke about the future of listening in cars. As one of the hottest topics in the radio world at the moment it seems like a good moment to set out how the BBC is thinking about this. In summary:

Radio listening in-car is really important for the BBC and it’s audiences;
We are completely committed to maintaining it for the next generation; and
It’s absolutely critical to work in partnership to achieve this aim.

Radio is at the heart of the BBC’s offer. We have 10 network radio channels, 6 Nations radio channels and 40 local channels listened to by a total of 33.5m people in the UK every week. In 2018, we launched BBC Sounds – the digital home for all audio from the BBC. Sounds now has over 3m weekly users and making sure Sounds is widely available and easily accessible at home, on the go and in cars is a top priority.

A lot to play for...

A large proportion of the time audiences spend with the BBC is in the car. Roughly a third of all radio listening takes place in the car, which represents around 13% of all time spent with the BBC by our UK audiences.

Encouragingly, since 2012 there has been a 17% growth in UK in-car radio listening, with other types of audio like streaming music and podcasts also seeing similar growth. For about half the time spent in cars, we’re not listening to anything. Of course some of this will always remain ‘silent’ because of very short journeys or the difficulty of reaching agreement between parents and children about what to listen to! But it shows that this is not a saturated space – there is a lot to play for.

We can’t take these conditions for granted. From the significant gaps between the time younger audiences spend with live radio compared to others, to the connected car and big tech’s role in it – the market is changing. Although the enduring popularity of radio in car gives us reason to believe that there is still a lot we can do to retain and grow our audiences, the changing market means that broadcasters are not the only ones in the game.

Eleanor and Asha presenting at the Digital Radio summit (courtesy EBU)

Strength in-cooperation

We’re constantly talking to audiences and learning from other broadcasters and car companies about how in car listening habits are developing. But, however much we know about audiences, it‘s clear that no broadcaster alone can do everything to meet modern audiences’ needs when it comes to in car listening.

Without some protection, broadcasters will lose the essential benefits that provided the foundation for the pre-digital market: prominence for radio in the infotainment space; editorial control over what and how content is delivered; direct attribution back to the content makers’ brand and – for commercial broadcasters – the ability to receive revenue directly from advertising.

In addition, in the emerging, fractured market broadcasters are at risk of losing probably the most important key to success in the digital world: the ability to gather and use audience data.

The best way to counter these risks is to work together as an industry in delivering high quality hybrid radio experiences into cars, direct to a fully connected dashboard.

Hybrid radio moves seamlessly from broadcast to IP, allowing the listener to enjoy the best available signal quality and stay tuned-in whether they are receiving DAB, FM or IP. It has the potential to allow listeners to enjoy on demand content as easily as live by providing easy links into apps like BBC Sounds. As we transition gradually to all IP-world, we need to take audiences with us.

Radioplayer

The BBC is a shareholder in a joint venture, Radioplayer UK, that aims to do just that. Radioplayer has been around since 2010. There are four UK shareholders, including the BBC and since 2014 it has licensed its technology to consortia of broadcasters in other territories.

Investing in Radioplayer is key in our aim to preserve radio in cars and build on demand in addition to linear while maintaining a direct relationship with our audience. Every country and every broadcaster is different, but we believe that we are all united by three core needs that Radioplayer meets:

Providing a flexible, easy to scale, easy to customise metadata delivery system that has the potential to deliver the best API for radio, making it a unique one-stop-shop for car companies who want to offer their customers a great radio experience
Complementing, not competing with broadcaster apps with a simple listening and discovery service that will develop to support our long-term strategies
Offering the chance to work together to secure the future of radio in car, in turn bringing a better chance of preserving the essential benefits mentioned above: prominence, attribution, data.

We are actively encouraging our fellow broadcasters to talk to Radioplayer about how they can get involved.

Working together for listeners

We want to cater for people whether they are long-time radio devotees, first-time digitally-native car-owners or even very young passengers in the back seat. Whatever avenues we explore, we want to do it in co-operation with our fellow European broadcasters. We’re confident that linear radio remains a strong force, but we also know that we need great digital products that have amazing content and are intuitive to use.

Voice assistants, for example, have huge potential in the car, and the BBC recently announced plans to launch a digital voice assistant this year. We’re incredibly excited about the potential of this and other technologies, but we understand that consumers will only get the benefit of them if we work in close partnership with companies all along the supply chain.

We can provide more choice which is free from commercial and political influences in a way that respects listeners’ privacy and protects their data. These are characteristics that we want to preserve in-car, but we’ll struggle to do so if we are blocked from managing our own audience data, prevented from playing back our content within our own product or forced only to use voice assistants that don’t given prominence to our content.

We are encouraged by signs that tech companies are thinking about inter-operability. We also want to open up more conversations with car manufacturers to understand their needs and ensure that, however they develop, accessible radio in a connected dashboard will be central to their offer.

Of course, our resources aren’t limitless – far from it. There are more pressures on the licence fee than ever before and we face tough choices about where we can invest and grow. We intend to work pragmatically with our broadcasting colleagues, car and technology partners, striving for standardisation and seeking a level-playing field for cooperation.

There should be no doubt that ensuring a thriving, innovative future for radio is a high priority for the BBC, and making sure people can listen in cars in both traditional and new ways is a big part of that. The only way we can achieve that long-term success is to work together as a united radio industry, in close cooperation with both tech and car companies, guided – always – by the best interests of audiences.

Feeling the weather: the future of the forecast?

2020-02-01T06:00:12+00:00

It’s well known that the UK loves talking about the weather. According to some anthropological studies, it is thought that over 90% of Brits have talked about the weather in the past six hours, with about 38% having talked about the weather in the last hour alone!

At the BBC, we have been delivering the weather for over 65 years. In that time, audiences have gone from radio and TV weather forecasts, to accessing weather forecasts online and via mobile apps, and most recently have even started receiving personalised weather forecasts by speaking to their smart speakers.

Part of what we do at the BBC is looking at how we can innovate by using new and emerging technologies and working with digital and technology companies to experiment with new types of audience experience. As new technologies continue to emerge, we wanted to see how they might enable our audiences to receive their weather forecasts in a completely new way.

For our most recent project, we have used haptic (touch) technologies and created an experimental device that lets you use your sense of touch to ‘feel’ the weather forecast. Imagine a situation where when you wake up in the morning and before you leave the house, instead of reaching for your phone to check the weather for the day, you place your hand in an alarm clock type device, ‘feel’ the weather forecast, and then know whether or not you need to take an umbrella with you for the day ahead.

The device that we created uses ultrasound waves to simulate - by touch - different weather conditions, ranging from the feeling of rain falling on your hand to the glow of sunshine on your skin and the sensation of snow falling on a winter’s day. We designed an internal prototype to give us an idea of how haptic technology like this might be used in the future to enable audiences to use their sense of touch to experience BBC content, such as a weather forecast, in a completely new way.

Working with my colleague Spencer in R&D, who helped design and build the device, we put it to the test by showing it to a few people around our offices. Here is some footage of some of my colleagues (including some of our BBC weather presenters) trying it out for the first time and an explanation of how it works:

Our 'feel the weather forecast' experiment

What is haptic technology?

Haptic technology is anything that uses the sense of touch to communicate. Haptics, in it its simplest form, has been with us for a while: almost all of us are now used to feeling our phone vibrate in our pockets to let us know that someone is trying to call or send us a message. Vibrating games controllers have also been used for many years to enhance the experience of computer games – for example, the controller vibrating against your hands as something explodes around you or to give you the sensation of being hit in a battle.

Our 'feel the weather forecast' haptics prototype device

Ultrasound waves

As haptics technology advances, so does the range of possible ways that it could be used in our daily lives.

The haptic touch technology that we experimented with was developed by the company Ultraleap and uses ultrasound, sound frequencies that the human ear can’t detect, to project sensations directly onto someone’s hands.

A picture that shows the ultrasound waves coming from our device impacting water

The feeling that these ultrasound waves deliver is similar to what you might imagine your hand would feel like if you had very focused and precise tiny jets of air being blown onto your skin. The result is that you can create a range of very accurate touch sensations.

Hand tracking technology in our device also enabled us to detect when a person had their hand under the device and the exact position of their hand as they moved it around, all of which enabled us to create a precise sensation of touch.

The underside of our device, with 256 small ultrasound speakers that help simulate the feeling of different weather conditions and a hand tracker to determine exactly where a user’s hand is

We combined this feeling of touch with some visuals (3D holographic type animated images of BBC weather forecast symbols, such as the sun shining or rain falling) to make the experience more immersive.

Using the sense of touch to enhance TV, films and radio

Whether it is the ultra-high definition footage of nature documentaries on a big screen TV, cinema style surround sound speakers at home or the rich digital worlds that virtual reality (VR) headsets can now deliver, new technologies are making our media experiences far more immersive and realistic than ever before.

To date, much of this increased immersion and realism has relied on two of our five senses: sight and hearing. However, with the advances in haptics touch technology, we might start to see completely new ways for us to interact with and experience media content on our digital devices.

Touch sensations could be delivered by using existing devices (whether that is a vibrating remote control in the living room or the mobile phones that we carry everywhere); new devices using the type of ultrasound technology that we experimented with or vibrating Minority Report style gloves could become common place. Haptics technology could also become crucial in an augmented reality world, allowing us to feel and control virtual holographic objects that appear floating in front of us - you might interact with a news article that floats in front of you as you walk to work, or press the virtual play button and get a feeling of haptic feedback on a holographic version of BBC iPlayer.

Who knows, perhaps in the future, haptic touch technology might be a way to make your favourite drama, sporting event, nature programme or documentary an even more immersive experience than it is today. For sporting events, imagine being able to feel the power behind a tennis serve at Wimbledon, the sensation of a football being kicked in the FA Cup final, or the impact that a competitor feels when being hit in an Olympics Taekwondo fight. Imagine being drawn into the tension of a drama such as Bodyguard by feeling David Budd’s car skid round a corner during a car chase. The technology could also be used in nature documentaries, perhaps to help give you a feeling of what it might be like to brush up against the leaves in a rainforest or feel an exotic animal whilst you see it on screen in high definition.

Another potential benefit of haptic touch technology is the ability to improve the accessibility of media content for people with visual or hearing impairments. Being able to feel the weather forecast or other content and experiences via touch could potentially open up a useful and powerful way for them to access important information.

The applications for haptics technology and media content are wide ranging – with our experiment, we have only just touched the surface of what might be possible in the future.

Getting VR to mainstream audiences: what we learnt from our partnership with local libraries

2019-12-04T10:59:42+00:00

Anyone who has tried an ‘immersive experience’ (XR – Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality) can attest to its incredible potential.

With our content here at the BBC, we’ve seen first-hand audiences’ responses. Teenagers inspired by tales of Universal Suffrage; audiences who are unable to travel enthralled as they come face to face with primates in the Congo; veterans (and those decades removed from conflict) humbled by the bravery and sacrifice in the two World Wars; and the sheer unadulterated delight of Whovians as they’re hurtled across the universe with The Doctor.

The promise of XR is immense. But the challenges of delivering it at scale are equally large.

In light of that, earlier this year we announced that we would be wrapping up the production and commissioning of our centralised team, the VR Hub, recognising that now the focus needs to be on helping the audience access content.

As part of our effort to share our learnings with as many people as possible, in this blog we reflect on the challenges and successes of getting our content into audiences’ hands, and how some unusual partnerships have helped us in that journey. We hope it’s useful!

The BBC is always on the hunt for better ways to inform, educate and entertain our audiences. That’s why we’re interested in XR. XR can be more memorable, emotionally resonant, and impactful than other media.

With the industry pouring billions into XR, new waves of creativity have been unleashed. However, key questions about the audience are often ignored.

What content would audiences like? In what moments? On what devices?

For VR, why strap a headset to your face, rather than binge your favourite TV show? For mobile AR, beyond a filter or game, what would make you hold up your arm and peer through a screen to see an augmented world around you?

In our 2017 research, we found that whilst audiences loved their first VR, the barriers were too great and quality content too scarce to form a habit. After three months, research participants returned headsets, with little intention of buying their own.

Sad, but not surprising for a technology and content market which was so young. Creating a new media behaviour is hard: it must be easier and more attractive than the incumbent one (which for most was watching TV or browsing social media). We wanted to understand if we could do more to make XR more compelling.

What we did: a small team focussed on the audience

We decided to focus on understanding what experiences audiences would respond to; and then, how to get it into audiences’ hands.

Our small centralised team coordinated a small number of pieces exploring audience preferences, learning how to distribute and promote, finding what worked, and what didn’t. Our reflections are published here.

What we learnt about where to put our content

We experimented with a range of distribution – on mobile, in-home VR headsets, and out of home. Here we summarise our findings on mobile and in-home, and share in more depth our thoughts on out-of-home.

Distribution – mobile (360 video, VR, AR)

Whilst mobile experiences clearly have a large potential audience, reach was still challenging. Not only were we reliant on the curatorial algorithms of third party platforms, but the range of occasions where audiences would engage with XR on mobile were very limited.

Distribution – in-home headsets (360 video & VR, via VR stores and other platforms)

We knew our audience would be limited, and given the fragmented landscape of headsets, that each individual platform would only generate a small amount of consumption. However, even with that caveat, reach was challenging. Consumption on VR stores required significant marketing, comms, negotiated prominence, and association with existing potent brands.

Distribution – out of home, location-based experiences

This is where it gets interesting. Location-based VR experiences have grown significantly in last year – 1.4m more people claimed to have experienced VR out of home compared to a year ago. So, we wanted to explore whether this could be a low-cost and scalable way to help audiences get access to our VR content.

In 2018/19, in partnership with Libraries Connected, we put pop-up VR installations in 175 local libraries where visitors could try BBC VR experiences. The pop-ups ranged from a couple of hours to a couple of days, and were promoted and managed by library staff. More details about the partnership can be found in this blog.

We asked visitors to fill out a short survey after the experience (>1200 responses) and we followed up 3 months later with 20 telephone interviews.

The feedback was overwhelming.

Of the 1200 people surveyed, 96% told us they found the experience enjoyable; 92% wanted to try more VR and also said they would talk about their experience to other people; 70% were inspired to learn more about the subject they’d seen.

Crucially, we found that the idea of ‘presence’ (a key driver behind the impact of XR – the feeling you’re ‘there’ in the experience) did not appear to be inhibited by audiences trying the experience in an out of home context.

There were also encouraging signs for the industry. For headset manufacturers: most audiences had never used VR before, and so libraries were an effective way of introducing the technology; 37% of respondents said they’d consider buying a headset as a result of their VR library experience.

For traditional content makers / marketers, 75% of the respondents said they were encouraged to watch a full-length TV programme about the experience’s subject.

We also found VR experiences in libraries tended to rate higher than other VR out of home locations: 8.6 out of 10 vs 6.9. Visitors were also 3x more likely to recommend the library experiences compared to other spaces. (It’s worth noting that there are other factors at play here. For example, visitors of other VR experiences may have had higher expectations if they had to pay for the experience, and if they had prior experience of VR).

Happily, we also found that this positive impact was sustained.

Three months later interviewees were able to recall the experiences in intricate detail. All said they had spoken to friends and family about the experience; many had shared their experiences on social media – including those from harder to reach (and harder to impress) younger audiences.

With regards to libraries as event spaces for VR, we found that:

They were ideal for introducing new audiences to VR. For audiences who were perhaps skeptical, less familiar with technology, or even nervous, they were put at ease as the libraries were safe and trusted spaces
There was enough space for the installations to be set up, and that the relative quiet of the library was helpful; and,
We were able to reach audiences from a wide range of backgrounds, not just communities of early adopters.

With regards to the opportunities VR presents to libraries, we found that the pop-ups had a positive impact on perceptions.

We also found the events drove visits from less frequent users, particularly when libraries had done some light touch promotion (e.g. community Facebook pages, coverage in local newspapers or newsletters).

Given the VR pop-ups were one-off events, we didn’t see any significant shift in claimed usage of libraries amongst those we interviewed a few months’ later. However, respondents’ perceptions of libraries had shifted – regarding them more as community hubs rather than quiet places for study, a place for trialing new tech, and generally future thinking rather than old fashioned.

There were of course challenges. Occasionally the technology didn’t work, some respondents found the headsets uncomfortable, some were conscious of being watched by other people whilst having the experience, and some were concerned with coming out of it somewhat disheveled (the ‘hair and make-up’ problem).

We hope form factor problems will abate as the technology improves.

We also found that the on-boarding could be better. Ahead of going into the trial we knew that the moments when visitors were waiting for the VR experiences, and indeed the moments immediately after the experience, could be key for ensuring they got the most out of it; and this was substantiated in the feedback.

The moments ahead of experiencing VR (particularly if for the first time) are crucial in framing the experience for the user, setting their expectations, putting them at ease, and helping them understand what is about to happen. This part of the ‘on-boarding’ could also be made an enjoyable element of the entire experience. Think of how queuing for a ride at a theme park can end up being part of the experience, if planned properly.

Similarly, immediately after the visitors take the headset off, there is an opportunity to help them get more out of the experience by giving them a chance to process what they’ve seen, talk about it, and share. This enhances the experience for the visitor, and helps the creator land additional messages and calls-to-action.

Our friends over at organisations like Limina Immersive and Diversion Cinema who have spent the last few years finessing out of home experiences, have developed sophisticated insights on the intricacies of ensuring audiences have a positive experience.

Conclusion

There is potentially a fruitful symbiotic relationship for libraries and the XR industry (and possibly wider technology). As community hubs with high footfall, and close trusted relationships with their users, libraries represent a useful gateway for mainstream audiences to have their first experiences of VR in safe spaces.

Equally, whilst libraries seek to remain central parts of their community, introducing their visitors to exciting new technologies could be part of remaining relevant, and reaching new users.

As for the BBC, we’ll continue assessing whether there are ways we can deliver immersive experiences in a scalable way to better inform, educate and entertain our audiences.

To find out more about BBC VR go to bbc.co.uk/vr

EBU creates Media Capability Map

2019-11-26T14:20:37+00:00

Back in July 2018 Andy Leigh and I published a blogpost on the BBC Capability Framework we developed following a strategic analysis conducted by the Technology Strategy and Architecture team.

The article concluded with a call to open up the debate and get people talking about what are the significant capabilities that a modern media organisation needs to be successful. By sharing this capability model more widely, we hoped to prompt feedback and suggestions for improvements.

During our Enterprise Architecture discussions with other EBU members (IRT, SRG, WDR, BR and SWR) a desire was expressed for integrated enterprise architecture products that are media industry specific and these EBU members requested that we share the BBC capability framework to support the creation of an EBU owned model which could be adopted by its members.

In July of this year the EBU technical committee formally approved the work to create an EBU media industry capability model. I now co-chair a small working project within the EBU which comes under the infrastructure and security group chaired by the BBC’s Phil Tudor. We have been working on developing the EBU’s business capability map since May of this year.

An EBU media industry capability framework could then be integrated into other EBU models like the business object and process model (TR041) further increasing the value that the EBU can provide to members’ architecture practitioners. We also see these benefits extending to the external market providing a mechanism that the EBU can use to articulate the needs of its members to suppliers of technology.

The discussions that we have had as a part of developing the EBU model has challenged Andy’s and my thinking on certain areas of the BBC model and the working group has had to create new more formal definitions for key concepts that have been used to describe capabilities. This knowledge will be used to improve and update our own BBC Technology Capability framework once the work is complete.

Could smartglasses and holograms transform TV, news and education?

2019-09-05T06:50:59+00:00

As global technology companies start to invest in smartglasses technology as a possible replacement for smartphones, the BBC has experimented with how audiences might watch TV, access the news and learn about new topics using new augmented reality technology, holograms and smartglasses. Cyrus Saihan is Head of Digital Partnerships, Distribution & Business Development and explains more on this exciting project.

Whether it is in films such as The Avengers, The Terminator or Kingsman, augmented reality headsets – devices that overlay holographic digital images onto the real-world – have been portrayed in science fiction as a type of cutting edge technology for many years. However, with recent advances and heavy investment in smartglasses from well-funded companies, there is now a chance that these types of heads-up digital display experiences could go mainstream.

New augmented reality smartglasses could end up being a replacement for our smartphones and becoming an integral part of our daily lives. The immersive nature of augmented reality, effectively projecting holograms into your eyes and enabling you to physically interact with those holograms, could offer exciting new ways to watch TV, access the news and learn about subjects in a far more effective way than has ever been possible before. We therefore wanted to see how smartglasses, holograms and augmented reality technology could be used now and in the future for TV and news. The BBC also has a long history of producing content for learning, so we wanted to experiment to see how these types of holograms and devices might help pupils and teachers in the classrooms of the future.

Our augmented reality smartglasses experiment

For our experiment, we worked with the UK digital agency Inition and some of our R&D team. We created holographic examples for learning content, such as animations of the solar system, a strand of DNA and a brain neuron; we also experimented with a version of BBC News that floats in mid-air and a holographic big TV screen experience that lets you choose what to watch from a range of different performers at Glastonbury, or select which tennis match you want to watch at Wimbledon.

Our moving solar system hologram

Our augmented reality BBC News experience

What is augmented reality and what are smartglasses?

Augmented reality is a technology that enables your digital world and your real-world to merge. Digital objects can appear as if they physically exist. So a digital video, news article or object can appear as if it is floating right in front of you, like a hologram. You can even interact with these digital floating objects like you do with objects in the real-world. For example, you can press a “virtual” digital button in thin air in the same way that you might press a button on a touch screen or TV remote control.

A multi-screen holographic TV experience that lets you watch sporting events such as Wimbledon

A virtual music festival at home – imagine choosing which stage to watch at Glastonbury whilst sitting in your garden

A pupil and teacher interacting with a holographic neuron in the classroom

The latest augmented reality technologies, such as the Magic Leap device that we used, are also capable of 3D scanning and mapping the real-world around you. Once a space, such as a living room, has been scanned and mapped, the technology is able to understand in detail the layout of the immediate environment (for example, how big the room is, where the walls are, what furniture is in the room and where the furniture is positioned).

The technology can then apply the rules of physics to enable that digital object to interact with your real-world environment. So you can bounce a virtual digital ball off the real coffee table in your living room, or as in our experience, hang several huge virtual TV screens on your living room wall or have them floating in mid-air in your garden.

Augmented reality has existed on phones and tablets for some time now, but the introduction of augmented reality smartglasses introduces a completely new form factor to the market that lends itself to a different and potentially far more natural interaction with virtual digital objects. Instead of staring head down at your phone, with a pair of smartglasses, you might be able to walk around and see the digital objects float like holograms right in front of you as move around.

Did it work?

Quite simply, yes. When you put on the smartglasses and walked around, the digital objects felt so realistic that you wanted to reach out and touch them, believing that they are actually in the room with you. What made the experience even more realistic is that, as in the real-world, the closer that you get to a digital object, the more detail you could see on it. We are generally used to digital objects pixilating as you zoom in or get closer to them, so seeing this extra detail as you got closer to the object adds to the realism.

Smartglasses are not widely available at the moment and our experiment was just an internal prototype, but we tested out our experiences with a few pupils, teachers and colleagues to see what they thought. Reactions to the experience were generally very positive, with people saying that it was “really beautiful…I’m quite awe-inspired” and that they felt that “it could really help different types of learners”.

What does the future hold for smartglasses?

Whilst our experiment with augmented reality and smartglasses worked very well, it was far from perfect.

The glasses are still quite bulky (closer in size to a pair of ski goggles than to a standard pair of glasses) and the complicated computing power means that, for the device that we experimented with, you have to carry with you a small palm sized computer. Another key limitation of the current smart glasses technology is the limited field of view – the device that we used gave you a field of view of the digital objects of around 40 degrees (which is considerably less than an average human field of view), meaning that if you looked too far to the left or right, you started to lose some of the ability to view the holograms, which in turn made the experience less realistic and less practically useful.

However, it is very early days for smartglasses and it is likely that the technology will improve and progress – if you were to compare the mobile phones of the late 1990s to the smartphones of today, the jump in terms of their capabilities is huge, and that is very likely to be the case with the smartglasses of today compared to those that we will see in the coming years.

The smartglasses that we experimented with let us see into a possible future, one in which we might be watching TV, accessing the news and learning about new subjects in a far more immersive way than has ever been possible before. If smartglasses do take off, our digital world and our real-world could combine in a way that has never been possible before, potentially transforming the future of media.

Taking BBC VR to new audiences - in libraries

2019-07-19T08:54:04+00:00

Over the last few months, the BBC – with huge support from librarians – has brought some of our favourite virtual reality experiences to new audiences in over 150 libraries.

Our research has shown us that viewers find virtual reality experiences uniquely memorable. Yet VR has still to find its place in the home entertainment market. Much like early TV and radio, for now, there’s no habit amongst our audiences for viewing VR at home.

VR is, however, already firmly establishing itself in the professional sector – offering corporate opportunities for training, change management and production amongst many other uses. Along with hardcore VR gaming, this market looks like it’s here to stay.

Location-based VR is the future – for now

The other area of growth in VR so far is in location-based experiences. In VR arcades, museums, art installations, people are more than happy to strap on a headset and immerse themselves in quality VR experiences, and to pay for the privilege. Examples include ‘The Antarctica Experience’ which began life at the Museum of Western Australia, and has moved to Australia’s National Museum for paying audiences, or something like ‘We Live in an Ocean of Air’ which had its run extended at the Saatchi Gallery twice.

But most location-based activity is in highly populated areas, rarely reaching smaller or more remote areas.

For the BBC, location-based experiences need to sit comfortably with the BBC’s public service goals. The VR Hub wanted to show our latest VR in locations with shared public values that cater to people the BBC might not otherwise reach. Locations spread across a huge geographical area with the space, staff and commitment to run multiple VR events. It was a tall ask.

UK public libraries score high on all these metrics. They’re an ideal low-cost opportunity for audiences to engage with BBC VR, and for the BBC to learn about its impact.

After a successful small trial, working with a group of BBC departments (BBC Rewind (NI), BBC Nations & Regions, BBC Marketing & Audiences) with the help of Libraries Connected, the BBC VR Hub set up a series of library VR pop-ups to run over three months across the widest selection of libraries we could manage.

We’ll be following this up by looking at the results of the online survey visitors to the libraries were asked to complete, which was designed by colleagues in BBC Marketing and Audiences, so that we can learn more about reactions to VR, how our audience interacts with it and whether there’s an appetite for VR - BBC VR in particular.

When we first set out on this journey, we were aiming to put pop-ups in around 20-30 libraries. But the tour rapidly grew as librarians pushed VR out to as many of their branches as they could, and now we’ve popped-up in more than 150 libraries so far.

It’s been amazing to see this growth, and even more amazing that it’s all happened organically. It started through contact with individual librarians facilitated by Libraries Connected. As it’s taken hold, more libraries have heard about it and come on board. Coupling high quality BBC VR with the library set-up has enabled the BBC to reach deep into communities all across the country, engaging new audiences in a huge spread of libraries to give them an extraordinary experience.

The model is simple. The BBC loans a handful of headsets to a library (a few have their own), licenses some content and supplies a pack of marketing materials, short training videos and the phone numbers for our team so we can troubleshoot on the hoof. The librarians run the pop-ups and when they’re done they send headsets on to the next location on the tour.

Season 1 began in April and featured Congo VR, season 2 was Doctor Who: The Runaway and we’re now showing 1943 Berlin Blitz for season 3. Once each season is done the headsets return to the start location and the next season begins.

The logistics have mostly worked smoothly but there have been a few challenges.

Organisationally it’s a mammoth task. (Lurking on VR Hub desktops is a migraine-inducing coloured grid tracking the headsets’ movements around the country)
The tech is new and new tech has plenty of glitches
Sometimes the route planning has gone a little awry or the turnaround has been very tight

Despite this, throughout, the can-do attitude and commitment of the network of library staff has made this project work. And it really has worked. The feedback has been incredible.

Participants are really enjoying BBC VR. So far, a staggering 96% of those who filled in the online survey found it enjoyable, 91% immersive and 93% original.

Our interim results show that people who visited our VR pop-ups in the libraries are three times more likely to recommend it to a friend or family member than any other out-of-home experience. 92% said they would talk about it with other people. The social media amplification has been huge. So far, the tour has featured in around 600 tweets, reaching nearly 800,000 users.

BBC content plus libraries is a winning combination

Great content in an unintimidating, safe, familiar environment with attentive helpers has been a huge draw. With the gentle, guiding hand of librarians, we’ve been able to encourage those who would not normally have tried VR to give it a go. For over half of our library VR users, this was their first chance to try VR.

We know that people don’t get how great VR can be until they try it. Persuading audiences to take that first step and put on a headset has been the big challenge for VR makers. Library VR experiences may be helping to break down this barrier. Even those who are otherwise hard to reach, have engaged with VR.

And librarians are getting a lot out of the tour too. Some of these services have been hard pressed in recent years – and this has given them the chance to reaffirm and strengthen their community role around high-quality content. It’s also been a highly visible way for libraries to demonstrate their developing digital skills and expertise.

VR is acting as a springboard for learning. After seeing Congo VR 83% of viewers wanted to learn more about the subject.

And people want more. 85% of people said they would go to more BBC VR events. Those who visited BBC VR library pop-up events were three times more likely to try VR again compared with those who’ve tried other out-of-home VR experiences.

The BBC has a history of democratising new technology, opening up opportunities for many. The BBC Micro played a key role in the home computer boom in the early 80s. Few other organisations have the potential to offer such a wide scale of opportunities for people to experience new forms of media. And radical new media like virtual reality needs that kind of boost.

It’s not over yet

There are two more weeks of the pilot to go and libraries are still joining the scheme. Across the country there’s a tangible wave of energy, excitement and expectation. We’ve offered three seasons and librarians are asking what’s season 4? There’s a real opportunity to build from this fabulously successful, organic project and reach many communities, particularly those for whom new technology or immersive installations are hard to access.

New BBC Digital Design Research Roster: Call for entries

2019-01-21T10:55:26+00:00

We are excited to announce that the opportunity to join our new BBC Digital Design Research Framework is now live. This will replace our existing roster this year.

We want to build strong and productive working relationships with agencies of all sizes, capabilities and research specialisms to support our user experience and design processes.

The new roster aims to help the BBC:

Improve the quality of our design research, and of the products and services we make.
Provide value for money.
Bring diversity to our research.
Drive the innovation and creativity of our design research.

We intend to select 5 to 10 agencies to join the roster with a life of 2 to 4 years, effective from July 2019. Over that time we expect to reward £2.4 to £3.6 million in contracts (approximately £600,000 to £900,000 per year).

If your agency is successful, you will have the opportunity to work across our digital products and services, including the BBC Homepage, News, Sport, Weather, CBeebies and CBBC, Bitesize, Sounds, iPlayer, Interactive TV, and the systems and services that power these products.

More than that though, the agencies will help inform our understanding of our users to help us create new products and innovations.

What kinds of agencies will we select?

We’re looking for a diversity of types of research agency. To be selected you must be able to carry out excellent task-based user research, and then communicate your findings with clarity and creativity to inspire and galvanise our teams to take action. We want to see great research generalists and specialists on the roster — agencies that have pet passions, unique offerings and a strong focus on quality in their practice, agencies that can encourage us to try a broader range of methods and approaches to research.

We also care about your staff development, and contribution to strengthening the research industry in the UK. We hope to select agencies based in many different locations, since our projects will be based in Salford, London, Glasgow and Cardiff and we need to represent the needs of users from all over the country, and all over the globe.

What will it be like on our new roster?

We want to build strong and creative working relationships with our research agencies, and we want to be a great client.

Instead of commissioning each project separately, we’ll be creating longer-lasting Work Packages that are based either around a research methodology (e.g. contextual and ethnographic research) or around a particular theme (e.g. children and youth audiences, or Voice and XR), with input from both sides contributing to create the best research possible for our User Experience and Design teams.

We intend to award Work Packages to the successful agencies roughly once a year. In order to match agencies capabilities with the packages available we’ll be utilising the information submitted throughout the tender process, alongside other considerations such as pricing. More information can be found in the Framework Agreement (Section 2, available via Bravo Solutions).

What is the selection process?

Joining the roster is a two-stage process. Firstly there is the Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ), which assesses the technical capability and experience of each agency. Following this, successful suppliers will be invited to participate in the second stage; Invitation to Tender (ITT).

PQQ stage

First you’ll need to complete a few Pre-Qualification Questions. These are mandatory pass/fail questions about your company and questions relating to the minimum capabilities and experience suppliers are required to have.

We do the rest of the PQQ assessment with two A3-sized posters, which need to illustrate your capabilities and experience. One poster should showcase your qualitative research work, with the other showcasing a research specialism of your choosing.

These posters are the main way for you to shine — it’s your chance to differentiate your offering and skills, so please think carefully about what examples you use and how you communicate them to us.

We’ll then be using the Selection Criteria to shortlist a minimum of the 10 highest scoring agencies to participate in the Invitation to Tender.

ITT stage

The ITT gets into what you could do for us with practical exercises and a visit to your agency. It will consist of three assessed parts; written response, presentation/research challenge and a facilitation exercise.

The BBC will be visiting supplier offices for this part of the process. The facilitation exercise will take place prior to the visit to your premises as part of the research challenge.

A week prior to visiting your agency, we will send you a research challenge brief. On the day, you will give a credentials presentation, answering a few pre-defined questions we have (e.g. how you approach projects with clients), and you will deliver your response to our brief. We will pay you a small fee in recognition of the work you’ve undertaken for the challenge. As part of this brief, we will also ask you to facilitate research with participants (that we will recruit for you), and to send us a video file of this facilitation.

We want to give you as much opportunity as possible to show what you can offer us, and we hope our process will do this, whilst keeping the amount of work you and we need to do to humane levels!

After evaluation of each ITT response, agencies will be advised of the outcome by late June 2019.

How to get started

Firstly, take a look through the document below for a more detailed overview of the process.

This external content is available at its source: https://www.slideshare.net/GemmaNewell/bbc-design-research-roster-supporting-document-128663495

You’ll need to make sure that you’re registered on the BBC’s e-tendering portal Bravo Solutions, where you can find all the tender documentation. Please ensure you carefully review all of the published material. Please note that the ITT and Framework Agreement are provided for information only at this stage.

You can then throw your hat in the ring by submitting your response to the Design Research Roster PQQ by Monday 18th February 2019.

The BBC will be hosting a Webinar to discuss the procurement on 24th January 2019 at 2pm where you’ll be able to raise any questions regarding the BBC’s requirements, or the process itself. You can register here.

If you have any questions and are unable to make the Webinar then the PQQ document gives you guidance on how they can be raised, and the deadline to submit them. A recording of the webinar will also be made available after the event.

Good luck!

IBC 2018: The little exhibition that forgot

2018-10-10T10:06:49+00:00

I first visited IBC in the Eighties. It was in Brighton, much of it to be found in the latterly infamous Grand Hotel. I had recently graduated and begun my engineering career building sound desks. There were very few desks at IBC that year mainly because IBC at that time was a TV event and there were very few British TV Sound Control Desk specialists. The exhibition was dominated by the giants of the era: Ampex, Philips, Marconi, Link, and Thorn-EMI, famous TV names all now faded away. Sony and Panasonic were present but their products had yet to dominate. IBC was quite a genteel affair and I, along with my college friends, walked away with bags full of information on the latest tech - C-Format VTR’s, auto line-up cameras, Ambisonics and 1125 line MAC broadcasting - eager to inflict our new found knowledge on unsuspecting colleagues. As I recall, each of the stands we visited had spoken to us politely and in some depth.

I found myself reflecting nostalgically on that first visit as I started to write this summary of my time at IBC 2018, and I don’t think the comparison throws a flattering light on our times. To explain why, I first need to detail my goals at this year’s exhibition.

Goal one was to discuss with all the vendors who had contributed to the BBC’s 2015 proof of concept for IP technology in Production (an event that took place at BBC Wales in Llandaff) their understanding of IP concepts at that time; and benchmark each vendor’s enthusiasm for the concepts against the reality of their products three years on. I was also interested in road-mapping future progress beyond IBC.

Goal two was to debate four headline concepts - Lateralisation, Virtualisation, Content from a Catalogue, and Value Added Data - which is my attempt at summarising the technical challenge set in September by BBC Director General Lord Hall and Matthew Postgate, BBC Chief Technology & Product Officer to reinvent the BBC online. I expected debate to vary, as many vendors only contribute in areas where one or maybe two headlines apply.

On day one, I visited most of the traditional vendors of sound technology and found that while some were still adhering to proprietary IETF technology - despite being made aware of an open specifications approach during the Llandaff PoC – others were beginning an open specification approach.

On day two, I expanded my coverage - tackling mainly content capture devices. While the larger companies had made some progress towards lateralisation, the vast majority stayed locked to their traditional methods of interconnect, necessitating the fitting of adaptor devices before their capture technology can be fully integrated into an IP studio. Many of the smaller companies were still unaware of the approaching change, but readily confessed to the possibilities - seeking only guidance on what the exact BBC requirements would be.

On day three, I approached a number of integration companies and was surprised to find a degree of indifference about the changes on the horizon. Generally speaking, knowledge in this community seems to centre on the few companies involved in new install projects across Europe, such as the BBC’s Cardiff Central Square. Explaining to these companies that the BBC needs to push its innovation pipeline faster than the fifteen year SMPTE/AES standards cycles to which they’ve become accustomed was difficult, and met with a deal of scepticism.

Worn down a little by the intellectual treacle of the previous day, I began day four by picking up with the companies who chose not to visit us in Llandaff, and some of the reasoning for their absence was particularly intriguing. Suitably chastened, I thought I’d treat myself by checking progress on a technology that seems unlikely to be mainstream until the end of the next business cycle – Solid Photography – and found evidence of two companies, both German, already working hard in this area. Apparently the BBC have contributed to the research work already. I look forward to following this up, although the render farm needed to drive the capture process did seem impracticably large at present.

IBC takes its toll on Andrew's shoes

For my final day, I followed up on some meetings promised earlier in the week. Some of the larger IT vendors are now offering machine learning that may assist in tagging our content such that it will carry valuable data for processes further along the production workflow. Hopefully we can schedule some trials to test the efficacy of this assumption in the near future. I also tried to catch-up with all the talkback system vendors, an area of particular interest as many of these systems within the BBC are now reaching the end of their useful life.

In summary, although the message I had to deliver was brief enough, there wasn’t really enough time to get around all the vendors I needed to visit, especially as a number of them didn’t stay for the entire convention. Apart from a few select areas, the atmosphere was badgering rather than co-operative and my initial trip into the Amsterdam RAI and final journey away from our hotel were both marred by a completely disjointed city ticketing system. Much of the charm and genial conversation of IBC at its original seaside location seemed to have evaporated in Amsterdam. IBC seems to have forgotten why it was created in the first place, lost in a giant fairground of tech that, literally wore a hole in my shoes.

Taking to the skies - in VR

2018-08-13T12:50:16+00:00

As summer temperatures soared to record-breaking highs, the BBC VR Hub staged an ambitious event to launch a new interactive VR experience on four HTC Vive headsets in a small tent in a field at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford.

Created by BBC Northern Ireland's Rewind team and VR production company, Immersive VR Education, 1943: Berlin Blitz is based on actual BBC sound archive recorded during WW2 on a Lancaster bomber raid over Berlin. Viewers share the cockpit with the brave crew and courageous team of war reporter, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and sound recordist, Reg Pidsley as they document their flight on a terrifying mission over Berlin. The sense of danger is real, and justified - just four months after this flight, their plane, F for Freddie, was shot down over Stettin.

Less than a year into the BBCǯs new VR venture, the BBC VR Hub has so far produced four ground-breaking projects. Both 1943: Berlin Blitz and Make Noise – a voice-activated experience celebrating the suffragette movement – will officially premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Damming the Nile, which takes viewers on assignment with BBC News Africa correspondent, Alastair Leithead, to investigate the impact of a huge new dam, has been nominated for a Rose d'Or and last week the BBC announced its first Virtual Reality Prom: Nothing to be Written.

BBC VR Hub's intended audience for these experiences extends beyond the VR community. In order to fully explore the appetite for VR, the Hub is aiming to get high quality pieces out to audiences who might not otherwise have encountered virtual reality - like the 185,000 families, veterans and teenage groups who converged on RAF Fairford for the Air Tattoo in July.

With a skeletal crew, the usual tech gremlins and a thunderstorm it seemed unlikely that our ambitious set-up – screening across four headsets simultaneously in a small tent in the middle of a field – would stand the test.

Mostly, it did.

In four seats ripped out of a 747, inside a vintage RAF tent accompanied by rumbling vibrations of F16s and other aircraft streaking overhead, over 500 people watched 1943: Berlin Blitz during the three day event. With the help of Chris Long, from Immersive VR Education and Warren Bell from BBC Rewind, the BBC VR Hub team put a constant flow of visitors through the 14 minute VR experience.

The response was incredible. Despite challenges due to the heat and location,Men, women, teenagers, veterans and civilians all went up in F For Freddie,and their feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Some came back two or three times, despite queues of up to 45 minutes. There were tears, congratulations and plenty of awe. Many had never experienced any VR before.

Comments included: "...if there was one thing worth coming to the show for today it was this!"

"We want more of this from the BBC"

"We saw it on BBC Points West so we got up this morning, walked 5 miles over the fields from our house and came straight here" (0730 Sunday)

"Wow"

"Best thing here"

"Best thing I’ve ever seen""

So convinced by the 'real' computer graphics, one older man asked: 'Did you make the film in 1943?'

Such a project would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. VR kit and expertise is growing rapidly. Whether the audience will match that growth is still a big unknown.

Over the next few months, the BBC VR Hub will be running a series of VR Pop-Ups in libraries to bring quality VR to a wider audience so they can decide if it's something they'd like to see more of. The BBC VR Hub will also continue to work closely with the BBC Blue Room to show VR at various events throughout the summer and autumn. As a result of the Air Tattoo multiple museums have expressed interest in showing 1943: Berlin Blitz. They see it as a valuable tool to introduce new, younger audiences to history.

That comes with its own challenges. Most VR headset makers recommend children under 13 should not use VR. Even those over 13 are unlikely to have access to a headset or to easily find good content. And, as the team at the Hub knows, it's got to be very good content to convince viewers to put on what are still quite clunky headsets, tolerate occasional technical glitches - common to new kit - and surrender to up to 15 minutes in the virtual world.

The 360 (non interactive) version of 1943: Berlin Blitz was shown by the BBC Blue Room earlier this month at the Turing Festival – again to great acclaim. Despite a lack of a VR-viewing habit among the audience and associated kit and quality issues, the team at the BBC VR Hub is cautiously optimistic that these projects might be indicating the audience wants good, and appropriate VR. There are a clutch of similarly ambitious, exciting projects in production. As these are released, over the next year or so, the BBC VR Hub – and the BBC as a whole - will have a much better understanding of what the virtual future might look like.

Other BBC VR Hub projects have included AR prototypes with BBC News Labs and support for in-house 360 and VR ventures including Crossing the Sky, BBC News’ Is Anna Okay? and Bloodhound, a 360 ride in the world’s fastest land vehicle.

To see much of this content for yourself, visit https://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualreality or download the BBC VR App: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/gear-vr/1834522029951979.

BBC experiments with speed reading technologies

2018-08-09T23:01:06+00:00

To help navigate a world of ever increasing information, the BBC has worked with a start-up to experiment with new technologies that could enable audiences to read BBC content faster than they ever have before. Cyrus Saihan is Head of Digital Partnerships and explains more on this exciting project.

The number of emails, messages and news stories that we read is increasing at a phenomenal rate: the average UK adult now spends more time online and consuming media each day than they do sleeping. We wanted to see what new technologies could be applied to make this overload of information easier for our audiences to manage.

Sherlock Holmes and Spock from Star Trek might be fictional characters, but the idea of having a superhuman ability to process information quickly is an exciting one.

For this experiment, we worked with the start-up Spritz to see how science and speed reading technologies might be able to help us make our day-to-day lives that little bit easier.

How does it work?

The standard way of presenting and reading text is by putting text in horizontal lines and then moving your eyes across a page as you read each sentence from left to right. Each time that you read a word, your eyes look for a certain point within the word. After your eyes have found that point in the word, your brain starts to process and interpret the meaning of the word that you are looking at, before moving on to the next one. It is thought that the eye movement required when you move your eyes across a line in a sentence can take up as much as 80% of your time spent reading.

In our experiment, each word shown on screen has one letter that is highlighted red, to draw your attention to that point in the word. That letter is the optimal recognition point in the word and helps your brain quickly process the word, with as little eye movement as possible.

The technology that we have used in our experiment works on the theory that, by showing you only one word at a time, your eyes can stay in a fixed position and so don’t have to be constantly moving whilst you read. As a result, the rate at which you can read can be dramatically increased.

Does it work?

Having only one word appear on a page at a time when reading takes some getting used to, but from my experience and from testing it out with a few colleagues in the office, the general feeling is that after a few minutes of trying this new style of reading, it becomes relatively easy.

The average person reads at a rate of about 200 words per minute, but reading in this way appears to enable you to go well above this average speed.

We have put a few different videos in this blog post, showing you what it is like to read one word at a time at a variety of speeds (ranging from 300 words per minute to 800 words per minute). Try them out and see how easy you find it. To get used to the concept, it might help you if you first practice a bit on the slower speeds.

Can you read four times faster than the average person (800 words per minute)? Have a go on the videos below and see for yourself.

A BBC News article presented at 300 words per minute (50% faster than the average reading speed)

A BBC News article presented at 400 words per minute (twice as fast as the average reading speed)

A BBC News article presented at 800 words per minute (four times as fast as the average reading speed)

Reading more on screens

We are reading more and more on mobile phones, but the screen sizes and text sizes of mobiles are smaller than what we have traditionally been used to with books and magazines. Technologies such as this therefore have the potential to make it much easier for us to read on mobile phones. This way of reading could also possibly be useful on devices such as smart watches, which have even smaller screen sizes.

Speed reading technology like this might make it much easier for you to read the latest news story on your phone (or watch) when jam packed on a bus or train on your way into work.

With the increasing amount of emails, messages and news stories that we see every day, the amount of information that we are consuming on digital devices is constantly increasing. Anything that we can do to make this easier for our audiences is a plus.

As well as making it easier, enlarging text in this way also has accessibility benefits as it could help people with poor vision, enabling them to read websites on their phones with a much larger text size than is usually possible.

Speed reading on a smartphone

Speed reading on a smartwatch

Will we all be speed reading in the future?

This is just an experiment, looking at how we might be able to offer a different experience for users of BBC websites, it isn’t something that we are planning on rolling out, it is simply an internal test to see what might be possible.

Mobile phones are now able to identify our face and track the movement of our eyes. As that continues to become common place, could we see a situation where every single word that you see on your mobile phone screen moves position depending on exactly where and how you are looking at your screen?

Many experts are predicting that augmented and mixed reality devices (which superimpose digital images on your view of the real world) could one day replace mobile phones – if that happens, we might need to completely adapt the way that we read – reading large blocks of text in mid-air might not be possible. Perhaps speed reading text floating in the air, one word at a time, might become something that the children of the future consider to be the norm.

Connecting the community - highlights from the 4th Technology Strategy & Architecture conference

2018-07-18T11:20:46+00:00

Samantha Chadwick, Head of Partnerships and Judy Parnall, Head of Standards & Industry for BBC Design & Engineering give their account of the 4th Technology Strategy & Architecture Community event (5/6 July 2018), which saw over 130 technical strategists, architects and engineers come together from across the division.

Full house for TS&A Bingo

So as ice-breaking, games-driven, networking events go, the latest Technology Strategy & Architecture (TS&A) community get together was a memorable success! I’m not sure whether the mingling of hot sweaty bodies on the glass-surrounded top floor of a hotel with no air-con actually helped or hindered the ‘getting-to-know-you’ game of ‘human bingo, but for some ‘big reveals’ it worked a treat!

Pre-conceptions about our nearest and dearest colleagues were laid to rest and even better, those quiet ones out-trumped us all with their ‘famous facts’ about themselves.

Human bingo card at the ready

Among us we’ve breakfasted and funeralled with Heads of State - Presidents Mubarak and Mandela - ticked off nicely for a line. We’ve danced, dived, drummed and devoured roasted bullrush roots with the stars - another shout for two lines! And for a full house we found that one of us has designed a sewage treatment plant - we knew it all along!

The multitude of fans (electric ones, not Colin’s groupies following his very own directed indie film) didn’t drown out the laughter. It was a thoroughly good do. And the curry, nice choice in the 35 degree glasshouse, actually worked very well.

Even better was our opportunity to cavort a bit with our wider community outside TS&A. Friends and colleagues from Cardiff, Glasgow, Salford and London shared stories and tactics about how together we can re-invent the BBC! I for one was inspired by the collective buzz and enthusiasm for this quest.

All in all, an excellent tee-up for the next day’s 4th TS&A community event and a hard one at that to follow!

Google Friday

Then on Friday, we turned up nice and early at Google’s headquarters in King’s Cross who were hosting us for the day. As well as the TS&A core team, we were joined by the embedded architects who work in the BBC’s divisions on their architecture. They were wonderful hosts, with the food and drinks flowing liberally.

The theme for the day was “Connecting the Community: What’s Your Story?” and it was a time to hear from a range of speakers from inside and outside the BBC.

Culture & Innovation@Google

We started with a speaker from our hosts. Anaïs Hayes, Google’s Head of Brand Innovation, spoke about Culture & Innovation at Google. We all think of them as being a very innovative organisation, but the question was how to maintain that once they grew from garage start-up to over 85,000 ‘Googlers’. The key challenge to me was to encourage 10 times thinking – ideas that could have a 10 times change. It’s all too easy to do the 10% projects, but this is the way to make a big change; but in tandem, be prepared to fail fast and keep exploring alternative solutions.

My favourite story was that Google Cardboard came from a group of engineers who were talking about how to make cheaper VR systems and decided to make use of some empty pizza boxes they had under their desks to create the fold-out cardboard viewer!

Anaïs Hayes, Google’s Head of Brand Innovation

Lukewarm is no good

Anaïs was followed by Ken Banks, who is the Head of Social Impact at Yoti. He has journeyed from growing up in Jersey to a life of an entrepreneur. But after being emotionally challenged by Live Aid, he has innovated to make a real difference to communities; for instance a text messaging platform which could be used where there is no internet to connect groups. The idea came from living in the communities in Africa who actually had the need. Ken challenged us to use our energy and enthusiasm to make something that fixes things. You need to understand, empathise, aim high for the big picture and aim low so that it can be used in the community where it can make an impact. He’s now working on Yoti – a digital identity on a fob which is trusted and opens doors. Having spent 15 years living in the communities he wants to help, he really can make a difference.

The global media challenge

Anne Bulford, the BBC’s Deputy Director General, challenged us to help the BBC innovate in a changing world. UK originated programming is far the most popular in the UK, but audiences continue to fall. The BBC needs to be fleet of foot whilst respecting the vast audiences watching the traditional platforms. She spoke of the increased respect and value of Design & Engineering to the senior leadership of the BBC to keep us innovating. We need to bring up the best new ideas and be prepared to try new things.

Anne Bulford, BBC Deputy Director General

The Power of “We”

With the same theme, Alan Coad, the Managing Director of Google Cloud (UK & Ireland), challenged us to keep innovating. We should be spinning up innovations more quickly, expecting that many won’t work first time and will need course correcting. But by operationalising the data underneath we can be quick to try things and adjust. You transform work by the power of “we” – a culture of trust and collaboration.

Over lunch we finished off our table top quiz – could we remember the obscure flags of some World Cup teams or recognise the opening credits of TV programme titles (Dads’ Army and Grange Hill took me straight back to my childhood) or guess the TV channel logo?

Just as we were preparing to re-join the afternoon session, having been well fed and watered, an ominous siren led us to all walk down the fire exit stairs (from the top floor) for an unexpected extended networking session in the sunshine until the fire alarm stopped! The quote of the day, “Will all from the BBC follow Major Tom to Hunky Dory”, led some of us to wonder if we’d accidentally stumbled into an episode of W1A!

Think big, fail fast

In a somewhat shorter address than planned, Matthew Postgate (BBC Chief Technology & Product Officer) introduced the BBC’s new Chief Customer Officer, Kerris Bright who is challenging us to keep being the voice of the audience in this time of change. We need to keep having a positive social impact but in new ways. We should always think of the audience, putting them at the heart of the experience, rather than offering them the BBC’s organisation. We are there to bring more of our programmes and services to them. But we must do so in a way that people trust, that we won’t exploit them or their data.

So what did I take away from the speakers and their discussions? The BBC is respected globally and has had huge social impact. But to keep that in the rapidly changing world we need to keep innovating. To do this we need to think big, be less risk averse and be prepared to fail fast and change course. And at all times, keep the audiences at the centre of what we do.

Kerris Bright in discussion with Matthew Postgate

Building a Network

But it wasn’t all a day of listening to talks. Video intermissions had 30 second profiles of different members of staff and what we do. Not only did we learn about each other, but the huge variation in the way in which they create films from a talking head to more of an artwork! And talking of art, we ended up rebuilding a network diagram of the BBC with people and services out of Plasticine – with a number of aliens and daleks appearing as well as characters of all shapes and sizes.

The day ended with prizes, praise and canapes and time for more networking drinks, and an overall sense of feeling more connected to the team and knowing our colleagues that bit better.

And none of this would have happened without the organising team behind the day – so a massive thanks to Ross Kemp, Head of Connectivity Architecture and his team, Alison Kelly, Technology Engagement Manager, Business Co-ordinator, Nzinga Gardner and Team Assistant Diane Richard.

The interactive game training the next generation of news reporters

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BBC News, BBC Design + Engineering and Aardman Animations have teamed up to produce an interactive game, giving children a taste of newsroom decisions and pressures. Senior product manager Andrew Leimdorfer explains how it's evolved.

The iReporter game aims to give players the chance to take on the role of a journalist in the BBC newsroom. The game was commissioned by the BBC News School Report team, who's mission is to help 11-18 year olds develop their media literacy skills, and is part of a set of resources to use in classrooms across the UK.

The "choose your own adventure" game challenges you to make your own decisions on which sources, political claims, social media comments and pictures should be trusted as you contribute to the day's news output.

The game features video interviews in social media type environments

The idea to use the vehicle of a game to develop these skills first surfaced in Autumn 2017 and, after a competitive tender process, Aardman Animatons were selected as the right partner for the project. Although the basic structure of the game and the key learning points were defined from the outset, the script and gameplay were developed throughout the creative process and user-tested with groups from schools in Bristol and Coventry. The feedback from the youngsters was then incorporated into the design.

Players are presented with a series of editorial choices

While setting out to deliver key editorial learning points, such as the importance of thinking twice before sharing, working out the motives of your sources and spotting obvious fakes and mistakes, the brief was to keep the game engaging and fun for the target audience. The use of social media style interfaces as the main way of delivering the content helped ensure the interactions felt familiar. Aardman also did a great job to keep humour in the story, while delivering the educational points.

Players are under pressure to meet different deadlines

We know from feedback on School Report Day that the initial response has been great. It takes around 20 minutes to complete the game, which is a significant commitment for online content, but we're already seeing high levels of engagement and significant numbers of users playing through the whole game.

However, the success of the project will be judged over the longer term as schools across the UK use the game in the classroom and new cohorts of School Reporters are educated about the pitfalls of fake news, but also inspired by the fast-pace challenge of working in a newsroom.

Innovation, start-ups and the future of music

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The BBC recently held its 3rd annual ‘Future of Music’ industry conference. As part of the event, we invited along start-ups to demo their products and music experiences to the attendees. Cyrus Saihan is Head of Digital Partnerships and explains more about how technology is continuing to transform the music industry.

If someone had told you 10 years ago that they could have a conversation with their hi-fi speaker, be virtually teleported to a music festival from their living room and carry millions of songs with them wherever they went, it is unlikely that you would have believed them.

Today, experiencing music in such ways is increasingly commonplace. Advances in technology have brought about dramatic changes to the way that we listen to, buy and interact with music and radio. Driven by the rapid growth of devices such as smartphones and tablets, new digital music services and formats have emerged, with innovation taking place across the music and radio industry.

Future of Music Conference 2016

On Friday 4th November we held a half-day ‘Future of Music’ conference, bringing together industry experts from across the sector to discuss and debate how digital music and innovation is likely to impact the music and radio industry in the coming years.

A panel discussion at our Future of Music 2016 conference

From Guglielmo Marconi transmitting the first radio waves across the earth (from the Isle of Wight to Cornwall) to the music of some of the world’s biggest selling acts such as the Beatles and Adele, the UK has always been a major influencer and innovator when it comes to music.

It is exciting to consider what could come next from the UK’s music industry.

With that in mind, as part of our Future of Music conference, we invited along some interesting start-ups to demo their products and services to the attendees. We had a variety of start-ups at the event, ranging from one that uses artificial intelligence to write new songs, to one that has created a ‘3D’ music controller that allows you to manipulate sounds just by moving your hand around in thin air.

An attendee trying out a ‘mixed reality’ experience

Artificial intelligence and music

Jukedeck demoing their artificial intelligence music creator

Set up in 2014 by two Cambridge University graduates, Jukedeck is training ‘neural networks’ (computer systems modelled on the way that the human brain solves problems) to create new and unique tracks in a matter of seconds. As well as individual content creators looking for some customised music (that they will then own the exclusive copyright to), Jukedeck’s technology is also being used by Google, the Natural History Museum and even the Royal Family.

Virtual reality – inviting artists into your living room

Attendees trying out a virtual reality music experience created by the team at Visualise

With the increasing capabilities of virtual reality headsets, the last couple of years have seen the emergence of production companies focussing on virtual reality and immersive experiences. Visualise is a UK based company that has produced a variety of 360 degree videos and virtual reality content across a range of genres ranging from sport to entertainment.

The new medium of virtual reality holds great potential for the music industry. Technologies like this will bring fans closer to the artist and allow them to experience music in a unique and incredibly immersive way – imagine sitting in your living room and being able to feel as if you had been teleported to the front row of a stadium concert in another part of the world or feel as if your favourite artist was singing just for you.

3D music controllers

The Titan Reality ‘3D sensing’ device in action

Titan Reality has created a ‘3D sensing’ device that uses artificial intelligence and gives individuals a whole new way to manipulate sound and lighting. We were lucky enough to have one of only a handful of Titan Reality devices in the world at the event. By simply floating and moving your hand above the device, it is possible to change the tone and pitch of sounds, switch instruments and add in effects. It was exciting to see the device in action and how it offers a user with little musical instrument training the ability to create unique soundscapes. As well as the music industry, the company is also looking at how the device can be used in other areas such as controlling industrial robots by using machine vision technology.

Broadcast your own radio station from your phone

A simple Mixlr set up

Artists, DJs and bands are increasingly using new technologies and online platforms to reach audiences around the world and Mixlr is looking to capitalise on that trend. Founded in 2010, the company has built an app that allows users to live stream their performances to fans around the world (for example via a band’s own website) and at the same time share that broadcast on social media outlets and on-demand music platforms. As you can see from the image above, the set-up is simple, making what has traditionally been a complex operational challenge accessible to a much wider audience.

The start-ups and technologies that demoed at our Future of Music 2016 event give us a glimpse into how digital technology will change the future of the music and radio industry.

Not that long ago, a portable cassette player seemed to be the cutting edge of technology – now they are considered retro collectible antiques. Today, smartphones are the driving forces of change in the music industry. And who knows, in years to come we might look back nostalgically on the smartphone era as we walk around with chips implanted into our brains and have our music beamed directly to us!

We are always looking out for ways to bring third party innovation into the BBC to help us explore how we can use new technologies to create new types of content and experiences for our audiences. If you have any innovation ideas or technologies that you think our audiences could potentially benefit from, do get in touch in the comments section below or contact me on Twitter @cyrussaihan.