Round up: BBC Research & Development at the Commonwealth Games 2014
Nick Reynolds
Assistant Editor
The boxing finals viewed from the BBC Research & Development IP Production Gallery
The Commonwealth Games gave the BBC’s Research & Development team a chance to try out Ultra High Definition TV and showcase some of their other projects. Just in case you missed them, there were posts on the R&D blog and pictures on their Twitter account, including:
"The network behind the R&D Commonwealth Games 2014 Showcase" by Martin Nicholson
"Instead of sending large teams and vast quantities of kit to event locations, what if broadcasters used IP cameras?"
"How to deliver UHD over DTT and IP" by Phil Layton
"UHD to the Home - Delivering Ultra High Definition TV over the Internet" by Brendan Crowther and Alia Sheikh.
"How the Commonwealth Games is helping define the future of broadcasting" by Brendan Crowther
“Virtual Reality’s Back!” says Brendan in a post that includes information about Venue Explorer, Augmented Video Player and 360 degree video.
"TV White Spaces at the CommonWealth Games" by Tim Harrod
Michael Sparks of R&D added a personal take: “Why I’m watching the Commonweath Games”:
"...we're not working with traditional broadcast kit - kit that's designed from the ground up with realtime constraints in mind and broadcast networks with realtime constraints in mind and systems with tight signalling for synchronisation. We're doing this with commodity computing kit over IP networks - albeit with ISP/carrier grade networking kit. The 4K cameras we use are connected to high end capture cards, and then the data is encoded using software encoders into something tractable (1.2Gbit/s data rate) to send around the network - to get the data into the IP world as quickly as possible."
BBC Click talked to BBC R&D about the experiments: “Commonwealth Games enters virtual reality”
The BBC Academy website featured another BBC R&D project: Comma.
“BBC R&D decided to develop these automatic meta-data extraction technologies in a way that would allow large-scale audio processing.”
BBC R&D are also running a survey on “Television Viewing Conditions”
“We have created a survey which is open for anyone with internet access to complete, which asks questions about screen sizes and viewing distances, as well as the individual viewer's personal preferences.”
(You’ll need a tape measure…)
Follow BBC R&D on Twitter @BBCRD.
Nick Reynolds is Assistant Editor, Central Editorial Team, BBC Online
