BBC Research & Development
Hacks and Hackers October 2011
George Wright, Head of R&D Prototyping
@georgie
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What I'll talk about
• Intro to BBC R&D and my team
• How we work
• Who we work with
• What we do
• Some recent projects
• Working with us
• Corporate R&D in the Web era
• Questions
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BBC R&D
• 160 staff across 3 labs
• Been in existence since 1930
• Incorporated by Royal Charter: “..maintain BBC’s position
as a centre of excellence for research and development in
broadcasting and other means for the electronic
distribution of audio, visual and audiovisual material, and
in related technologies.”
• “The UK's NASA” (House of Lords Select Committee on
the BBC Charter Review 2005-6)
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Some highlights of BBC R&D's history

Noise-cancelling mic (1927)

VHF/FM transmitter(1945)
• Colour TV (1954)
• Digital TV standards proposed (1964)
• Digital audio recorder/playback demonstrated (1971)
• CEEFAX (1974)
• NICAM (1986)
• BBC Internet service (1989-1995)
• Multicast internet streams (2004)
• Freeview HD (2008)
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Who my team are
• Prototyping and Audience Experience section within BBC
R&D
• Working at the audience end of the broadcast chain
• Full range of skills (Engineers, designers, producers)
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What we do
• We build new prototypes, demonstrators and services
across all digital platforms
• To try things out
• To explore things
• To solve problems
• Focus on user-facing things
• Also, protocols and standards for emerging platforms
• Engineering and UX/HCI research
• 5yr time horizon
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Who we work with
• BBC programme makers (Dr Who, Springwatch)
• Mobile and TV Platforms product development teams
• Academia
• SMEs
• Collaborative partners (TSB, EU FP7, EU PPP)
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A typical short term project
• Research
Talking, reading, data
• Exploration
Workshops, ideas, sketches, proofs-of-concept
• Build
lo-fi to hi-fi
• Test
Lab studies, remote home trials
• Review
and repeat if necessary
• Average 8 weeks, with exceptions
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Autumnwatch Viewing Companion
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Autumnwatch Viewing Companion
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In-depth: ABC-IP
• Automated Broadcast Content Interlinking Project
• TSB funded
• What can we do with the World Service English language
archive?
• Working with an SME
• Making sense of a massive archive
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ABC
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In depth: Twitter firehose
• Granted access to the Twitter firehose
• Technical opportunity=Open usage question
• Workshops, discussions, existing work in this space
• How can we track Twitter conversations to build
something useful?
• Disaggregate links (bit.ly, bbc.in etc)
• Build service for colleagues and end users
• Massive dataset
• “Needle in haystack”
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P2P-Next: large scale collaborative project
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In depth: multi-broadcaster, device ODM, worldwide
standardisation project: RadioDNS and RadioTAG
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RadioTAG in action
Photo James Cridland james.cridland.net
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We work in the open
Site http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/prototyping
Blog http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/rd
Code: http://github.com/bbcrd
Weeknotes http://bbc.in/rdweeknotes
White papers http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/
Conferences (IBC, W3C etc)
Standards bodies (W3C, DVB)
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Issues and questions
Corporate R&D traditionally has a different pace to it
30 years ago, competition came after 5-25 years of
preparation (Channel 4, BSkyB, commercial radio)
Now, a service can be conceived, developed, tested,
deployed and acquired in <12 months
Many new user-facing services come from the West Coast
Most are either PPU or ad-supported
Where does this leave BBC R&D?
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How do you work with us?
Apply for jobs :) (jobs.bbc.co.uk)
Hack on our stuff (github.com/bbcrd)
Take part in the debate (@bbcprototyping, I am @georgie)
Come to our hackdays
Become a collaborative partner (TSB, FP7, PPP)
Build cool stuff yourself (free software pls) and share with
us – we may hack on it with you
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