NEVER FINISHED BLOG - Vision2022

My 1st of April this year featured no pranks and I barely had any time during the day to check all the crazy stuff that would be going on in the internet. Instead of all of that I woke up close to 4 in the morning to get ready for my train to Manchester. BBC North in MediaCity Manchester were hosting an event called Vision 2022 of which people from colleges near Manchester and universities in the North were invited in small amounts. I wasn't really sure what to expect but I figured it would be fun so why not?

After a decent length ride to Manchester and a pretty cool tram ride to MediaCity a third year Wireless Systems student, our career advisor and myself represented Hull and got our registration pack.

I forgot how to smile.

We first had an introductory talk by the COO of BBC North Alice Webb. She talked about the past a little, mentioning that even eight years ago the scene of consuming media was different. Smartphones weren't common and iPlayer wasn't around. The point is easy to make, things are changing a lot of and changing fast. The BBC still thinks TV is going to be around and manage to keep up with technology. Alice also explained how a lot of what happens in the BBC isn't just in London. A lot happens in Manchester and I quickly lost count of everything listed.

The second speaker came on, Adrian Woolard head of North Lab and Connected Studio, who talked about how BBC research for the future. One interesting thing is how the BBC want the exact same service on any type of screen you interact with. Phone, Tablet, PC, or TV they want you to have the same experience. It's not a service for individual form factors, it's just iPlayer. That's a pretty nice idea and most services might benefit from the same approach. I don't think compromises should be made when porting to a different formfactor. 

They explained that one of the focuses on keeping up with technology is for education. As a slight ad for their career options it was explained their approach is gain new ideas from recent graduates and host hackathons to keep their edge in education.

Next they had someone from their engineering team talk about scaling. This is in terms of scaling the engineering team and scaling the systems. The ideal scenario is having a large system made easy to operate by a small engineering team, or least what I got from it. London 2012 was a big operation for the BBC but because it was a new scope of coverage it was allowed to have a big team. They want that service but with an affordable team. There was again a lot of focus on the service being the same on any device. 

They didn't really talk about where they are going with coverage in the future. They did talk about technology they're interested in and what they might use in the future. An expected movement is into higher resolution broadcast. Really I'd be surprised if they weren't preparing for ridiculously high resolution broadcast. An interesting mention was the Oculus Rift. The BBC are investigating VR technology which was something I wasn't really expecting for them to talk about. I don't think the Rift has really broke into any mainstream attention. Still, it was cool.

One statistic I was surprised with was only 10% of BBC viewers use iPlayer right now. The BBC have been keeping up to date with the latest technology but the general public haven't. It shows that a lot of people still don't just use TV to watch exactly what they want.