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Â鶹ԼÅÄ Research & Development and the Commonwealth Games 2014

For the duration of the 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Glasgow Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D . 

At the Glasgow Science Centre we had a public exhibition which screened the first ever UHD multi-cam sports production, live from the Games and delivered entirely over IT-based infrastructure, IP end to end from camera to broadcast.

The coverage of the CWG2014 was an important step along the journey to an IP-based TV production system. It allowed us to test a live distributed production infrastructure - cameras, video mixing, audio mixing & commentary - all in different locations hundreds of miles apart and all synchronised wherever it was needed for viewing and broadcast distribution. For more details of all the projects the department took to the games please take a look at

The department's Commonwealth Games exhibition also included the UK’s – brought about by a collaboration between Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D and external partners Mobile is an increasingly important platform for the Â鶹ԼÅÄ and this work ensures that the organisation will be able to scale its mobile delivery appropriately as demand increases.

White Spaces

TV White Spaces are gaps between the channels currently used by transmitters. With careful planning other services can be fitted into these gaps. Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D have worked in partnership with Arqiva on a 3-month test programme to assess the suitability of the regulatory framework proposed by the regulator Ofcom, to ensure existing TV transmitters are protected from interference by the TV White Space devices. . 

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D is also very interested in how the new spectrum provided by White Spaces might be used - delivering broadband to rural areas, providing more room to expand Wi-Fi in your home and many other applications. , we showed where the White Spaces are and gave a demonstration that used TV White Space to deliver multimedia content around a home.

Object Based Broadcasting

The term ‘object-based broadcasting’ is used to describe the creation and delivery of TV and radio programmes over IP by creating a set of individual assets together with metadata describing their relationships and associations. Through this method we are able to create content that can result in a programme that adapts to the audience’s needs and wishes.

Object-Based Broadcasting is a hugely important research area for Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D. It opens up new storytelling possibilities and will fundamentally change how content is made, delivered and consumed by our audiences. At IBC this year Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D’s stand focussed on Object-Based Broadcasting and you can watch a series of short videos .

Also at IBC Frank Melchior delivered a paper on Object-based broadcasting – curation, responsiveness and user experience. It was a very successful session at the conference and we hope to have the paper available for download soon. In the meantime you can read further details on the session it was presented at . 

Hybrid Distribution

In much the same way the move to HD broadcasting required new technology both at the distribution and consumption ends of the broadcast chain, the growing number of ultra-high definition television sets in people’s homes requires another rethink on how we deliver television to audiences and what experiences they expect from the Â鶹ԼÅÄ. 

The football World Cup in the summer of 2014 gave the department the opportunity to test out the

An Audio Revolution

is a partnership project between Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D and a number of external collaborators. The research aims to develop a platform that enables users to experience live events which are spatially spread out, such as festivals, parades, marathons or bike races in an immersive way by combining high-quality spatial video and audio and user generated content. Over the course of this year the ICoSOLE partners have been working with Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D engineers from the Audio Research Team on and .

Enhanced Subtitles

It has been a busy year for accessibility, taking our work out to the wider Â鶹ԼÅÄ and industry. At the beginning of the year we contributed a presentation on speech audibility to the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Academy Loudness tour and were .

As a public service broadcaster the Â鶹ԼÅÄ has an obligation to make its content available to the widest possible section of its audiences. Subtitles are one of the technologies that allow us to reach many people that would otherwise find it difficult to follow television programmes.

With the advent of internet delivered video there is huge scope for improving our subtitle provision and at the our work on subtitles was presented in three short papers. One on subtitle monitoring looked at , a second looked at  and the third examined the .

Accessibility also featured in our IBC2014 paper and demonstration on Object Based Broadcasting . Meantime back in the lab, has resulted in the filing of a patent application on a technique to find subtitles for web videos by matching the video clip to broadcast content and extracting the subtitles from the broadcast. We have also been exploring how subtitles should be presented for video content displayed within a web page, and carried out an extensive round of research with subtitle users which has resulted in a wealth of new knowledge about how people watch subtitled content. This work will be published as a number of papers at conferences in the new year.

Internet-connected devices and authentication

The Internet Research & Future Services team have been working on standards for internet-connected radios and TVs and in February wrote a .

, which we have been developing for several years, was deployed to live on the Â鶹ԼÅÄ website in July, enabling internet-connected radios to add songs to the for the first time. Over time this work could open up a whole new set of opportunities for viewers and listeners to connect their devices together and allow the Â鶹ԼÅÄ to help create cross-device experiences. Early in the new year we will be carrying out a public trial of a one button device that can add tracks through a simple click.

We also chaired the , developed a reference implementation and published a specification in September . CPA provides a standard way of securely associating an internet-connected device with an online user account, to enable personalised services on the device like recommendations, bookmarking and cross-device pause/resume. 

New Content Experiences

The department’s main research strands can run for many years. However, on a day to day basis we also get the chance to feed the results of our research directly into Â鶹ԼÅÄ Production to help create innovative new content experiences that give our audiences a glimpse into the direction the Â鶹ԼÅÄ is heading.

Tommies, Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4's World War One drama, followed the lives of signallers on the battlefront. Working with sound designer Caleb Knightley the Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D Audio Research Team remixed the 21st October 1914 episode using binaural effects . 

Binaural audio is a technique that aims to recreate the complex effect that the human body has on sound resulting in an effect that feels more three dimensional. Designed to be listened to over headphones binaural audio can make sounds appear to come from behind or even above or below leading to a much more immersive experience. You can listen to the 3D audio version of the episode on .

RADIO AROUND THE WORLD – Sport Relief

For a small team from Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D worked with Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio to make a piece of software to allow a runner on a treadmill to be immersed in the view along any street captured by Google's Street View cameras.

Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio’s aim was to accumulate enough miles run, cycled, and swum to travel all the way around the world. Using an HDTV screen, sensors attached to a treadmill, images from Google maps and software components developed in-house we were able to help Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio realise their idea of connecting a treadmill to Google Street View so that the runners who were clocking up the miles could see themselves running through various exotic parts of the world.

Twenty Years and Counting!

In 2014 Â鶹ԼÅÄ Online turned 20 years old and who better to help celebrate that milestone than Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D, the department responsible for getting the Â鶹ԼÅÄ online in the first place? You can read about how we contributed to the celebrations .

With research into internet technologies so important to Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D engineers no round up of our work would be complete without a mention of cats and following a successful earlier collaboration Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D once again teamed up with Horizon for Cat Watch, .

Variable Length Radio Content

Recently we’ve been experimenting with variable-length programmes that can shrink or expand to fit the time you have available, or your interest level. We split up a radio documentary into about 100 story elements, and brought them back together in a narrative graph, which enables us to tell the same story at different levels of detail.

The music, sound effects and dialog are all separate objects, and it’s your device that creates a path through the story in response to how long you want the programme to be, and reassembles all the elements needed to create YOUR programme.

Above and Beyond

A special mention must be made for those people within R&D who give up their time outside of office hours to continually evangelize about the work we do and the transformative effect of technology in general.

Our continuing presence at events like and recently a ensures that Â鶹ԼÅÄ Research & Development continue to be bywords for excellence in broadcast and internet research while exposing our work to as many outside of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ as possible. 

Ever Onwards

Finally, while we’ve had a lot of new joiners this year we’ve also had a very significant departure. After six years Matthew Postgate left his post as the Controller of R&D to take up a new position as Chief Technology Officer for the Â鶹ԼÅÄ. We wish Matthew well and look forward to introducing you to our new controller once they are appointed.

2015 will be a big year for the Â鶹ԼÅÄ. There is a General Election coming and our charter is up for renewal the following year. It will be a challenging and rewarding time for the whole organisation and Â鶹ԼÅÄ Research & Development will be at the forefront of continuing to keep the organisation as relevant to its audiences as possible. 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!