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On February 10, BBC Technology announced its intention to target media owners, broadcasters, and owner-operated networks in the U.S. with its "solutions for enterprise-wide media lifecycle management." Part of the BBC Ventures Group (BBC's commercial media services group), BBC Technology is wholly owned by the British Broadcasting Corporation. BBC Technology aims to provide media lifecycle management solutions that will enable North American media-driven enterprises to produce high-quality content more efficiently at every stage of the media creation, management, and distribution lifecycle. Promised benefits include a tapeless production environ- ment, reduced facility costs, and accelerated content production. BBC Technology began life two years ago as a spin-off from the BBC's IT services group. "We've taken our large-project, media technology experience as a services-offering group and productized it," says Mitchell Linden, senior vice president, North American operations. "We looked at the enterprise architectures we'd been using in IT and applied them to rich media management. We've merged our experience with traditional content creation and IT technology to create a workflow integration layer." This IT/media production solution evolved out of the BBC's Natural History Unit, which is very similar to the America's Discovery Channel, says Linden. Like the Discovery Channel, this BBC unit shoots lots and lots of material, much of which was sitting on videotapes on shelves going to waste. To make this material more accessible, the BBC created the media management solutions they are now offering to the U.S. market, says Linden. Today, the Natural History Unit is creating "entirely new shows from original footage" that would otherwise gone wasted, says Linden. BBC Technology brings three "Media Lifecycle Management" solutions to the North American market: News and Sports, Broadcast Network Control, and Collaborative Production. These solutions have been created specifically for broadcasters, film companies, and other media-driven organizations who have an immediate need for true collaboration across digital production, media management, and playout. These previously disparate elements are brought together in a single system known as an integrated media platform. The platform includes digital production workflow tools; media and metadata management infrastructure; and playout, archive, routing, and business interfaces. Content and its associated metadata (i.e., information about rights, usage, embargoes, location, etc.) become ubiquitous throughout the entire enterprise. Perhaps the most interesting BBC solution is its Collaborative Production, which is a new class of applications targeted at larger production units. A workgroup solution, it supports ingest, playout, and transcode at production quality with collaborative support. The solution promises to enable broadcasters and production houses to increase productivity and reduce costs throughout the production process, while more effectively managing media assets and tracking usage rights and other pertinent metadata. BBC Technology's Collaborative Production solution also promises to save costs through staff re-assignment and reduction in facility spending. Because this solution makes it easier to access and re-use existing media assets, less original footage needs to be shot, significantly lowering costs. Other key features and benefits include tapeless production workflows; enhanced team-working; reduced production times; real-time field-level metadata collaboration; improved return on investment by intelligent usage tracking; faster ingest via tape, CD, or other sources; enhanced video workflow between users; and support for transcoding between media types. Linden sees his primary target market for the Collaborative Production solution as "segment production and long form." He gives the E! Entertainment channel as an example of an American organization that would benefit from this BBC solution. E! is an organization that shoots a lot of footage that can then be used over and over again. "Our solution makes it easy to repurpose content for several different producers," says Linden. One producer might be creating promos, one might be creating program tags, one might be doing a sort of news capsule show, one might be doing an hour documentary—thanks to the BBC Collaborative Production solution, all of these producers would have quick and easy access to "a common pool of media," according to Linden. This enables an efficient use and re-use of the organization's media assets. It also makes it possible to "produce entirely new shows from original footage" shot for a completely different show. At the heart of BBC Technology solutions is a proprietary knowledge management or digital asset management (DAM) component, says Linden. "Over a period of four years, we deployed almost every commercially available DAM solution," says Linden, "and none of them was really acceptable for rich media workflow." He complains that most commercial DAM solutions started life as publishing tools and need to be retrofitted for use with digital video. The BBC Technology solutions bring all media management tasks together under a single software interface, much in the way the Microsoft Windows operating systems serve as a platform or umbrella for other software applications. Within the BBC solutions, for example, BBC has provided a proprietary video editing tool, but users are not forced to use it. BBC is "committed to open standards," says Linden, and has made it possible for users to use any other editing software within the solution—an Avid system or one from Pinnacle or Adobe, for example. But Linden likes the built-in editor and says it allows teams to work more efficiently. "It pushes staff exposure to media further downstream," he says. An intern can begin the workflow by dropping clips into a bin; then a production assistant can pull clips from the bin and put them on a timeline. And finally, the senior editor can pull clips from the timeline and put them into an Avid NLE system (for example) for final editing. "This creates a whole new way of working," says Linden. "It allows staff broader access to the media. They are no longer just handling a discrete piece of the process, but are more involved in the whole process." This results in more efficient workflow, according to Linden. BBC Technology has already made inroads into America and won some converts. DIRECTV, a leading digital satellite television service in the U.S., is a major BBC Technology customer whose installation is already in progress. BBC Technology is providing the direct broadcast satellite (DBS) provider with a custom version of its Broadcast Network Control solution for remote monitoring and control of DIRECTV's local channel collection facilities. BBC Technology has also won converts among U.S. market analysts. One such fan of BBC Technology's media management solutions is Gerry Kaufhold, principal analyst with In-Stat/MDR, a market research firm based in Scottsdale, Arizona. "In today's tough economic climate, major media-centric companies need to improve the financial return on their ‘content' assets, which means getting more programs, to more market segments, in less time, with better control. However, that's not easy to accomplish," says Kaufhold. "For years, we've been watching the industry to see if someone could actually build an open, standards-based solution that pulls libraries of legacy ‘content,' as well as fresh, real-time footage, into a streamlined, all digital workflow. We believe that the digital product suites from BBC Technologies are a true industry breakthrough, providing solutions that can be adapted to a wide range of real-world business needs," says Kaufhold. Founded March 2001, BBC Technology employees 1,400 specialists in broadcast, new media, and IT. It is based in the UK with U.S. headquarters in San Francisco and additional U.S. offices in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.
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