State of the Art Media Research

George Wright is Head of Internet Research and Future Services for BBC Research & Development, where he leads a cross discipline team of engineers, researchers, UX designers, production staff and domain experts researching and creating digital products and services to help shape the future output of the media and broadcasting.

He has worked in broadcasting for more than 25 years, the last 20 of which have been in digital and new service research and development. He has been PI on a number of national and EU-funded projects and represents the BBC on various working groups and academic/ industrial partnerships.

He began his career as a schoolboy making radio for a BBC local radio station, and since then has been involved in broadcasting and Internet innovation as well as producing linear programmes and making pop records.

The BBC’s R&D function has been in existence for more than 80 years, and the need for research and development at the British Broadcasting Company was identified almost as soon as UK public service broadcasting was established in 1922. Based in research labs in Salford and in London, our teams continue to pioneer in research, design and engineering for broadcast and IP, collaborating with other parts of the Corporation, other UK broadcasters, startups and companies, alongside other industrial teams and academics around the world.

Résumé :

AV material (video, audio, text, images) forms the backbone of the BBC’s current output, recent storage and historical archives. Our R&D teams work across a number of different domains. One specific problem space involves dealing with huge amounts of data split across sites, spanning many broadcast channels and formats. Our research helps the BBC create, capture, store, and analyse multimedia content.

This talk explains some of our current thinking, looks at some problems we face, and attempts to explain why these problems are an exciting opportunity to use current state of the art thinking about networks, user interface, and image or file retrieval. I will describe three current problems we are involved with, detail the logistical and technical challenges and then walk through our technical approach.

I will also explain why commercial, off the shelf or existing free/ open source solutions are not always suitable, and thus why we ‘roll our own’ technical solutions for a lot of our problems. Finally, I will look at some of the ethical, legal and human factors involving our research and work, especially those surrounding Big Data.