Last week, students around the world joined forces with the media technology industry to deliver 24 hours of continuous live programming, streamed on YouTube.
On Air is the brainchild of Carrie Wootten, co-founder of the Global Media and Entertainment Manifesto, who brought together members of the industry to work with the students on the ambitious project.
The project’s central hub was based at Ravensbourne University in London. The project was the first live broadcast to use the Time Addressable Media Store (TAMS) based on the open-source API specification from BBC R&D.
TVBEurope headed down to Ravensbourne on Thursday afternoon to hear from some of the students and industry experts about why they got involved in the project and the technology used to get the livestream ‘on air’.
Carrie Wootten
We’ve had 913 people involved, including students and the industry. It is extraordinary. The amount of passion that everyone has for investing in young people is why they’re here. They want to make sure that the door is open, that the students have the opportunity to meet industry, to engage with industry, to know what the latest technology is, and to have those experiences. So, it’s beyond what I imagined in terms of what we could achieve.
What I hadn’t really thought about in depth until today was just how much we’re showcasing different cultures. It’s been really fascinating. We went from Brisbane to Mumbai, and the content can’t be more different, it’s a celebration of all the different cultures as we go across the globe. I hadn’t really thought about what that might mean in terms of the stories the students might want to tell. And then we’ve had children as young as 11 taking part, working at CNN Academy, presenting their own slot and working behind the scenes. We’ve also had Rise Academy join in as well with their primary schools. So it’s not just about the university students. It’s about that inspiration reaching further and further.
I’m delighted with the support we’ve had from the industry. We started with the concept that we needed to make it in the cloud, so we knew there were certain partners that fit into that workflow. Every time we asked a company if they could help us, they said yes. I don’t think anyone said no. I believe that’s because On Air is so unique, and because it’s global, it has kind of resonated. One of the reasons we’re doing this is that this is a global industry, and we want students to understand that and engage with that. That’s why industry wanted to engage with it, because they’re global companies more often than not, and actually they want to reach that talent globally.
One of the great things about On Air is that we’re testing and pushing technology. We’re using TAMS in a real life environment. We’re kind of experimenting a bit with some of the technology that’s out there as well. Because it’s on such an epic scale, everyone’s gone, I can’t quite believe that’s actually happening, and that’s the idea. Some of these people have been working on it for six months, and blood, sweat and tears have gone into this.
From an industry perspective, I hope everyone will look back at today and think, what an insane, brilliant, incredible, innovative, dynamic, vibrant, inclusive, celebratory 24 hours it’s been. From a student perspective, they’ve grasped the opportunity wherever they are in the world, and they’ve produced this amazing content. They’ve worked collectively to deliver their segment, and they’ve produced it wonderfully. And then you’ve got the Ravensborne students who’ve had like this triple whammy of not only doing their one hour of live content, but they’ve also had an alumni event and they’ve been managing the channel playout and the production of the TV studio. So they’ve had the opportunity to work in a real-life dynamic environment that is reflective of what it’s like to work in the industry. I don’t think you can put a price on the value of that and the experience. This is just the start. We want to continue to build this community and forge those relationships and connections between students and industry. Everyone has got lots of ideas about how we would do it again next year, how we can make it better, how we can scale it more. But that all depends on how I recover from this one!
John Biltcliffe, industry specialist solution architect at AWS
The whole point of TAMS is to rethink how we do fast turnaround workloads in a cloud native way. As an industry, we’ve kind of done those workloads very much the same way on premise, typically video servers, file systems, often proprietary formats. To do news and sport workflows in the cloud, we kind of found it very challenging just to lift and shift what had been done for years. It’s not particularly cloud native and it doesn’t particularly scale well, flexible. TAMS is kind of the way of saying, how do we rethink those workloads to be cloud native, working very much with software-based API first, using things like object storage rather than file systems?
TAMS is an API specification from BBC R&D. They released that as open source. At AWS, we’ve been supporting and working with them over the last couple of years because we were seeing the need in the industry. We were thinking very much along the same lines as the BBC, and rather than come up with something else and have two competing specifications, we partnered with the BBC. They’ve got the technology and the skills and experience of having played in this space for a number of years. AWS has got the customers who are asking for it, and the partner network to hopefully deliver it. We’ve been working on enabling customers and partners to adopt TAMS, working to get it built into more tools, working with customers who are interested in the early adoption stages to go live. On Air is the first live production use case.
TAMS is about using that live content as fast as possible. How do I edit it while it’s still ingested? How do I get clicks for social media as fast as possible? For On Air, we’re doing a continuous single, 24-hour record. We’re not using AB servers or anything like that; it’s just one continuous record into the TAMS store. We did a seven-month record after IBC last year. We left it going to see what would happen, and seven months later, our ingestor fell over.
When we were having the first initial technical meetings for On Air, we were thinking, what do we do for recording, and TAMS was suggested. We want to be slightly careful, because it is the first live use case. We want to make sure that however we used it was not going to impact the broadcast. So we made sure that it’s being used for recording and clipping content after the event. So we’re only using it for a relatively small use case of what it’s capable of, but we are doing a single, continuous, 24-hour recording of the content that’s being made available to all the universities around the world. They can log into TAMS’ UI tools, view the content, click sections out of that and download it as the live broadcast is going on. And that’s the point of TAMS: to enable those workloads.
Bill Hobbins, senior lecturer, Digital TV at Ravensbourne University
Carrie used to work with our new vice chancellor, John Kingsbury, and asked if Ravensbourne would be interested in hosting the main hub for On Air. That was probably at the beginning of the summer, and then it kind of really kicked in when the students came back at the beginning of term in late September. So we’ve only really had about three weeks to fully prepare for this, as far as the students are concerned. I think we’ve probably got about 50-60, maybe even 70, students from Ravensbourne involved. The first 12 hours were pretty much run by the second-year Digital TV students and broadcast engineers from that year. The second half has been run by year three students who are in their final year, and they’ve done a bit of live TV before.
We strongly believe that our students learn best by really doing. We don’t do a lot of ‘sit and listen to us’ lectures. We get everybody stuck in. This was a perfect opportunity to do that. We’ve got students working on Autocue, script supervising, playing in clips, working on playout and in sound. Everybody’s been playing their part. The first 30 minutes, just going live and that Herculean effort from all of the industry side and all the student side actually coming together and it working, was probably the most challenging part of the day. Carrie’s team have been phenomenal. They’ve been working on it for months, trying to work out how the hell to do it.
If Carrie asked us to get involved again next year, of course, we would. It’s just a fantastic thing to be part of. We learned a host of lessons. We’d do some things a bit differently, some we’d do exactly the same, but we’d love to have another go. I think everybody around the world probably would say that.
Maisie, second-year digital TV production student at Ravensbourne University
I got involved in On Air because it just seemed like a really fun opportunity. It’s been really fun, but quite tiring. I’ve been working on social media and also as an assistant floor manager. The most challenging part of the day has probably been staying with it and knowing that you’ve got to carry on for the whole 24 hours. We were here doing prep before it all started, making sure everything was set to go live. The most fun has just been like seeing it all in action, all this work. I’ve been checking out the livestream on YouTube, watching how it’s looking. It’s just really cool to see that what we’re doing is actually working. Obviously, we’re all students, so to see that we have the skills to do something like this and actually get a live broadcast out for other people to watch is fantastic.
Scott Kerr, lead solution architect, Sky
Carrie mentioned she had something exciting she was going to do, and she wanted to get me involved, and I agreed without first finding out exactly what it was. Then once I heard, I thought ‘that’s a bit mad’, but I’ll do it anyway, plus I’m ex-Ravensbourne, and so the whole place is quite close to my heart. My son is actually at the University and he’s producing one of the shows for On Air.
I’ve been working as tech lead, which meant I got to do some things I don’t do in my day job at Sky. I’ve also helped out with playout graphics creation and stuff. Inspiring the next generation is something I’m quite passionate about. I’m heavily involved with Rise Academy and SMPTE in trying to bring young people through and make them feel comfortable, and part of a network, and this seemed like a great extension to that.
The great thing about On Air is that there’s been lots of students across the world communicating with each other and congratulating each other. It’s really lovely to see. There’s been a sense of community. They’re all in it together and supporting each other. If some of these people come out with one or two connections that they can call on in the future, that’d be a great thing. When I was at Ravensbourne, we had Rave on Air, which was a big end-of-year broadcast, and we got the fell that adrenaline rush of doing a live show, and the buzz of knowing we put on a good show. On Air is similar to that but supercharged.
Archie, studying editing and post production at Ravensbourne University
I’ve never done anything like On Air before, it’s completely out of my comfort zone. I like the pressure of just having things thrown at you and working with other people, meeting new people from other courses and from the industry.
I’m using TAMS to go through the livestream and clip bits that I think would look good on social media. I was working last night with people who were focused on the social media side of things, and they were giving me pointers on what they wanted, and I was scouring the stream for things I thought would suit what they wanted. I started at 10.30 last night and I was meant to finish at seven in the morning, but I just never left!
Russell Trafford-Jones, industry engagement manager, Techex
My role at On Air is making sure that the contribution side works as well as part of the distribution. The aim is to do everything in an ‘industry’ way so that it showcases to the students what the industry does. Why does it have a schedule that’s so precise? We’ve got six continents all trying to contribute to On Air, so you’ve got to be a bit more organised than just sitting there with the vision mixer trying to make it work. It is genuinely a learning curve for everybody.
We’ve actually put a lot of work into making sure that we can get the video and audio from the different continents back to London without it getting lost on the way. We’ve done that two ways. One is using AWS backbone to get it from Brisbane, which is where the live broadcast began. We’re also using tx edge from techex to land the SRT to switch it, and to monitor it and make sure it’s good. And then we’re using tx darwin and the playout suites in order to process it and get it out the door. We’ve built a two-module system within tx darwin, which tears apart the incoming stream and then pieces it together again, ensuring the timing is correct. One of the core functions of tx darwin is to get rid of timing problems.
Dan, first-year Digital TV student at Ravensbourne University.
I’ve only been at Ravensbourne for three weeks so to be involved in this is really exciting. They told us about it in our first week, and I was like, I’m completely down. I’m so happy to do this. I’ve always been interested in the television industry, and the fact that I have this opportunity to do a 24-hour broadcast at my university, so I’m in my space where I’m learning, it’s just a win-win.
As a first year, I’m technically supposed to be shadowing, but I’ve been doing racking for the past hour or so, checking the colour balance etc, and that’s been really fun. I was down in the studio at the end of the first 12 hours and everyone was just so excited. If I get this opportunity again in my second or third year, and I can actually be in the forefront of the production, I’d be more than happy to do that. And I’d be so happy to take even a leadership role or anything that needs to be done.
Tia, final year Digital TV student, Ravensbourne University
I got involved after one of our lecturers asked us to sign up. The great part about today is that, for my year, we haven’t been in the studio or the gallery for seven, eight months, so this is our first time being in this environment for a while, and I feel like we’ve done quite well. We’ve picked it up quite quickly, which I guess is what our degree is for. Experiencing that again, having the first years with us, being able to teach them, and just seeing them get involved, has been really nice.
The switch over from the first 12 hours to the second 12-hour shift was very chaotic and a little bit unorganised, but I very much like the adrenaline rush of not knowing what’s going to happen next, so I really enjoyed that. If anyone was thinking about getting involved in On Air next year, I would say absolutely, join in. Working in an environment like this, and working with industry professionals, and just seeing what everyone else is good at, it’s been so beneficial and incredible.
