Engineering - Update

At the beginning of the week we had a meeting with the Rave Live upper management and the newly commissioned programme makers. Although much of the content was of little relevance to engineering there were a few ideas that had cropped up and needed to be looked into.

The first of these was an idea revolving around the BBC's coverage of last years Wimbledon Tournament. The producer wanted to create an interactive element to their pre-recorded show by taking individual isolated feeds (iso's) of each camera and then providing a red button option so that the viewer could choose which camera iso to watch.

The first thing to consider is building the 'Red Button' platform, usually this is done via an MHEG-5 stream (this is a language that is used to describe interactive TV services). An MHEG platform was built last year by George Alton (Head of OB's) and Alex Govett (Head of Interactivity) and although it was never implemented in our final DTT output we were still able to showcase a fully functional platform. So rebuilding and re-branding this shouldn't be too much of a problem, although the interactive team does have a lot on their plate as it stands. The only other trouble we would have with it would be the play-out and multiplex of this stream for which we would need to obtain some more TX equipment for.

The other problem comes with the output of the two camera iso's over DTT, the only way which we could see in doing this would to be effectively create two more channels, then using the red button service, get users to redirect their STB's receiver to these other channels. After checking with Martin I found out that this was also how the BBC had achieved their services during Wimbledon. However outputting another two channels would be a huge feat for the already overstretched TX department, we would need to obtain new encoders, and the multiplexer would need to be reconfigured. This would also have the detrimental knock-on effect of reducing our output quality; the idea would to be to output all of the channels at once and the two channels that are only needed for a half hour iso's would have slates put on them for the rest of the time. However because in our current situation we cannot achieve statistical multiplexing (where the channel stream Bit-Rates are adjusted according to how busy the video is) all of the channels would suffer a drop in quality.

As such it was decided that we could not feasibly achieve this producers goal over DTT, we didn't want to limit his ideas though, so we presented him with the option of having his iso feeds avaliable and selectable online, so the same kind of effect could be achieved. Maybe during the output of the programme there could be a notice detailing where viewers should click to obtain the iso's (much like at the end of a youtube video). How we achieve this still needs to be talked over with interactivity.

Other major points from talking with the producers revolved around the limitations that had been placed upon them because of budget and physical constraints. As such we tried to portray an open mindset, so instead of just saying no to every difficult idea, we would look into them further to try and achieve the producers goals. If these couldn't be done then we would present a viable work around that could be implemented.

There should be a meeting later on this week or at the beginning of next week to obtain final production requirements from the live shows, another visit to Matter has also been in the pipeline for this Friday but as of yet we are unsure whether or not it will go ahead.

The proposed progamme guide can be found on the wiki.

Engineering - Update

Things have been progressing at a steady pace over the past few weeks. The Transmission equipment has been pulled out and reassembled on the back bench, the OB's have begun putting together system diagrams for the flyaway and the interactive team have built their server rack.

Dave (Head of Engineering), Adam (Logistics Liaison), Richard (Lines) and I went on another site visit on Jan 28th, the main reason was to investigate where the cable runs would go along with speaking again to the Matter technical staff. The main questions that had come out of the past few meetings were:

• What is the bandwidth capabilities within Matter itself, and if we needed to open up some ports who do we need to contact.
• In terms of DTT, what facilities are available and who else do we need to speak to.
• What communications facilities are currently installed, can we make use of them.
  

It turns out that the bandwidth capabilities into and out of Matter range from 2Gb - 60Gb which is perfectly suitable for pushing the live channels onto Narrowstep. However when it comes to opening up a MySQL port, so that the local database and the website database can communicate, we need to get in contact with a higher authority within the O2.

For DTT we had previously been told that there may be some existing facilities within the O2, however the Matter staff didn't know anything about this so again they suggested getting in contact with the O2.

There is already a pre-installed communications architecture within Matter, as it stands we have been given access to one of their radio channels for use on Rave Live along with another channel which can be used to contact the Matter staff directly. This is good news as it now reduces the amount of cable runs that need to be made as hard-wired comms are probably no longer required (a redundant system will still need to be looked into).

The next stage in planning for this event now relies on commissioning, the programs should be commissioned by the end of this week, meaning that next week we can meet up with the producers with Operations and begin to get some technical requirements, once we have these the flyaway and truck engineers can then implement the requirements into their plans.