New BBC Academy website unveils the College of Technology

Tony Hall recently announced a vision for the future of the BBC; a more personalised BBC, new developments to BBC iPlayer, the launch of Playlister - a new digital music product from the BBC, Open Minds a radio application to showcase the best BBC speech radio output globally, and a new initiative to inspire the next generation to get creative with digital technology and computer coding, which will start to make an impact from 2015 and beyond.

Although some of these developments may need approval from the BBC Trust, they represent huge steps in the development of new services and content for all BBC audiences, but to deliver these innovations as well as continuing to evolve existing services like the BBC News, Weather and Sport websites, we have to ensure that BBC staff have cutting edge engineering skills.

The BBC Academy is the BBC's centre of training and development. It exists to ensure BBC staff, have the skills, knowledge and ability to develop the best content and services. It delivers these skills via four Colleges; Leadership, Technology, Production and Journalism. In addition to this, it shares our skills and experience and offers training to the wider media industry.

I run the College of Technology, the newest of the BBC’s training and development endeavours. My team’s role is to ensure that we have high quality software engineering, broadcast technology and I.T. skills training available to staff.

Since the Academy was created over three years ago, we have been working to ensure that new state-of-the-art broadcast facilities in MediaCity in Salford, and at New Broadcasting House in London, are well supported. We have provided in-depth training on a range of new technologies including robotic cameras, new systems for displaying the weather, new sound desks for television and radio, a new networked radio production system, new vision mixers, in addition to automation technologies for use in BBC News TV galleries.

This has resulted in one of the largest training programmes the BBC has ever seen. In total over 5,500 staff moved into New Broadcasting House earlier this year, with a team of around 300 engineers supporting both Broadcasting House and MediaCity, ensuring that all our output stays on-air and is of the highest possible quality.

The College of Technology also helped in the development of software engineering skills for the BBC’s Olympics coverage. In doing so, we’ve helped grow a culture of ‘Engineering Excellence’, working to ensure that we follow the industry’s best practices in software development techniques and craftsmanship. We’ve also helped introduce ‘Product Management’ as a new discipline into online development. This has supported the BBC’s commitment to rationalise its online presence into 10 distinct offerings. We believe that being part of the community is vitally important for our staff, so we regularly host industry seminars to learn from other organisations experiences of Product Management

Until recently the College of Technology was an internal- department, working within the organisation to build skills, and working with partners to run events. Today marks a change in direction to open up our approach to sharing skills and experience in technology and engineering.

The new Technology section of the Academy site launches with a focus on Archive Digitisation (see video above), Linked Data, a new approach to sound measurement for programmes via Loudness meters and Unmanned Aircraft Systems. We want to share how the BBC is approaching technology challenges, what we do, as well as how other organisations across the wider industry are developing services. Working with partners across the industry is still central to our work, however. For instance, our current work in Loudness has been developed in partnership with the Digital Production Partnership. Bringing together insights from Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV, Sky and the BBC.

The aim is to make broadcast and software engineering subjects accessible and to explain key technology topics that are developing across the media sector. But additionally, we want to encourage more people to think about careers in technology and broadcast engineering. For example, we’ve recently launched the BBC Technology Apprenticeship and Traineeship schemes which we hope will increase the amount of talent across the industry. The new College of Technology website will help to highlight job profiles from a range of engineering roles across the BBC, illustrating what it’s like to work at the BBC and providing an overview of some of the challenges we are exploring.

Where next for the College of Technology? If there is a certainty, it is that technologies will continue to evolve and that standards will change. We are already looking towards AS-11 and how production and technical workflows will evolve as a result of the new file-based delivery format. In addition we are focusing on virtualising radio services, examining the use of fast connections to remote networked production systems.

In the coming months, we will grow our resources and help to represent cutting edge engineering topics. But at this point, what we’d really like to make sure is that we are a place for the industry to share it’s skills and that the new College of Technology website acts as a hub where some of those discussions and developments can originate.

Andy Wilson is Head of College of Technology

• Visit the College of Technology website
• Read the BBC Internet blog Creating the BBC Academy website