1. R&D BBC MMX
P2P-Next
Experiences from a broadcaster's view
George Wright
Head of Prototyping, BBC Research and Development

2. R&D BBC MMX
Intro
• Background
• P2P-Next overview
• Ingest
• Authoring
• Playout
• Playback
• QoS
• Rendering
• Conclusions
• AOB

3. R&D BBC MMX
Background
• BBC R&D involved in a number of Collaborative Projects
• BBC Future Media delivers production services
• BBC Vision and Radio/ Music large content creators

4. R&D BBC MMX
P2P-Next
• Large FP7 Project
• ~15M Euros
• 20 partners
• VTT, STM, TU Delft, Klagenfurt Uni, Lancaster Uni, BBC
• 4 year project 2008-2012
• BBC leads Content and Metadata WP

5. R&D BBC MMX
Aims
• Fully distributed, P2P, no central server
• MHEG style interaction
• STB, browser
• Open Source
• Standardisation route
• Explore benefits and problems

6. R&D BBC MMX
P2P at BBC
• Early iPlayer used P2P
• Unpopular with users
• Win32 plugin
• Consumed network and CPU resources
• Phased out, moved to Flash based Unicast Player

7. R&D BBC MMX
Why bother with P2P
• Distribution large cost of Iplayer
• More users=More cost
• Technical trial
• Interesting problem space
• Flash not open standard
• Worth attempting to Do It Right

8. R&D BBC MMX
What are we doing?
• Large scale trials across Europe
• Small scale trial in closed environment (ULANC)
• Student network
• ISP to rural areas
• Easy to provision
• Browser based experiments
• LIMO for interaction
• BBC channel suite

9. R&D BBC MMX
Ingest
• Content pulled off DSAT
• FFMPEG chain
• Number of origin servers
• “Real” P2P (no CDN)
• 100M and 1Gb connections

10. R&D BBC MMX
Authoring
• HTML5 based Interaction
• Simple authoring
• Time-synced metadata
• Easy to create content
• Plugin for playback
• Standards compliant modern browser

11. R&D BBC MMX
Playout
• Works behind firewall, NAT puncturing
• 2MB home connection
• Corporate LAN
• Port 80 playback

12. R&D BBC MMX
Playback
• 2s delay
• Comparable quality to Freeview (DTT)
• Channel change time ~3sec
• Buffering handles badly
• Not easy to monitor
• End users confused

13. R&D BBC MMX
QoS
• Not easy to prioritise
• No simple ruleset
• Corporate LAN – worries around network resource
• Home network – easy to consumer all bandwidth
• Need to get ISPs on board

14. R&D BBC MMX
Rendering
• Interaction overlays
• More info (wikipedia, listings guide, actor information
• Pause. resume
• Still not “primetime” ready
• End user feedback not great yet
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15. R&D BBC MMX
Monitoring problems
• Where do we monitor? Cache, CDN, ISP, end user?
• Where do we ingest? Single point of failure if legacy system
• Multiple platforms fragmented
• Is it a browser, plugin, OS, NAT, ISP issue?
• Immature platforms in the home (STB resets)
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16. R&D BBC MMX
Conclusions so far
• Technical PoC works
• Fiddly to test, deploy, monitor
• Has potential
• Takeup strong by external players (wikimedia)
• GeoIP not possible – closed network only
• 14 months of project to refine, develop, decision
• Worth exploring in more detail
• Dissemination (IBC, papers, conferences)

17. R&D BBC MMX
Questions?
• george.wright@bbc.co.uk
• Http://bbc.co.uk/rd
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