Declaring the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) IBC event to be a shareholders’ meeting, chair Mark Harrison first celebrated the successful take up of AS-11 by UK broadcasters, before laying out plans for 2015.
“File-based delivery: 16 days to go and we are going to hit that deadline with the BBC, ITV, C4 and C5,” he said. “We were not ready for what it was going to mean as a change piece. This move is probably the fastest, most highly coordinated change in a broadcast process that has ever happened.”
The AS-11 project will require an effort to join up metadata right from the start of the production process. The compliance program that DPP developed and shares with AMWA, and required the creation of a centralised testing facility, produced its first four pass mark vendors – Cinegy, Dalet, Telestream and root6 – and the DPP launched the cleverly edited booklet
‘10 Things You Need To Know About Digital Storage’ for independent producers.
This is a handy taster for one of the upcoming attractions – an ultimate guide to storage accompanied by specifications, standards and associated policies for cloud. Also in the pipeline are efforts in the areas of international distribution, connectivity as a business opportunity, and UHD file delivery. This will require workflow and process changes, and the DPP is looking hard at new specs for delivering commercials and music promos. Music clips may match with an interstitials spec.
Harrison admitted that the DPP effort so far – based on producing and delivering in an efficient way, as encompassed in the Producer’s Guide to File Delivery – will have to grow if ambitions like the storage standards are to be set.
“We could do a bit more,” he said. “People want more from us and faster, which means increasing capacity. Thinking on this is advanced and an announcement will come in two months.”
