How the BBC Saves Money by Transcoding in the Cloud

The BBC is one of the most nimble broadcasters around when it comes to online streaming, and at the recent Streaming Media West conference in Huntington Beach, California, attendees learned about its latest project. In one panel, Stephen Godwin, senior technical architect at the BBC, explained how his team created a cloud-based transcoding system. Godwin sat down for a red carpet interview to discuss the work.

"Previously, we were using a ground-based hardware system that we put together about four or five years ago and that system was built at a time we weren’t doing smart phones, we weren’t doing tablets. So we were constantly running into, as we added these new things in, into limitations of the system," Godwin said. "With the new system, the main thing is it gets out of the way and we can put as much content through as we’d like and it scales not just in terms of technology but also in terms of price."

The BBC delivered excellent online coverage of the London Olympics, and with the Winter Games in Sochi nearing, Godwin explained how it plans to grow its efforts.

"We did a lot of work for the London 2012 Olympics. We had the 24 live streams there and we made two-and-a-half thousand hours of content available as video-on-demand from the two weeks of the London Olympics," Godwin explained. "We hope to build on that. We’ve got the infrastructure in place that we built for the London 2012 Olympics and so we expect again that sort of live stream content and video-on-demand content."

For the full interview, watch the video below.

Troy Dreier: Hi. We’re coming to you from the red carpet. It’s Streaming Media West in sunny Huntington Beach, California. I’m talking with Stephen Godwin, the senior technical architect at the BBC. Stephen was on a panel earlier today where he was talking about a giant effort the BBC just completed of moving it’s transcoding machinery equipment into the cloud. How did that go and what are the advantages to your project?

Stephen Godwin: So it went very well. The advantage we’ve got now is we’ve got a system that can scale that handle anything we want to do in the future and we’ve got some really big plans about what we want in the iPlayer to do over the next couple of years.

Troy Dreier: Give me a little brief of what you actually did? What was moved into the cloud? What can you do there now that you couldn’t before?

Stephen Godwin: So previously, we were using a ground based hardware system that we put together about four or five years ago and that system was built at a time we weren’t doing smart phones, we weren’t doing tablets. So we were constantly running into, as we added these new things in, into limitations of the system. We’d run out of disk storage. We’d run out of I/O on the disk or on the network and those are really difficult things to upgrade and really difficult limits to remove. So with the new system, the main thing is it gets out of the way and we can put as much content through as we’d like and it scales not just in terms of technology but also in terms of price. So if somebody comes to me and says we want to do ten percent more content online, I can work out how much it’s going to cost and typically that would be ten percent more than what it’s costing at the moment or better because you tend to get economies of scale when working in the cloud.

Troy Dreier: How long did this project take and what partners did you work with to make it happen?

Stephen Godwin: So the project took a little less than a year with about 18 software developers. We’re on Amazon EC2 Instances in cloud and we’re using their SQS service and S3. We’re using S3 quite a lot for storing our media and we’re also working with elemental. We’re using their Elemental Cloud product.

Troy Dreier: Excellent I’m always excited when I see BBC news come up not just because I love the content but because you guys are doing amazing things. I know last month, the head of the BBC said that the iPlayer and your online efforts are now on par with the other channels. This is like a fifth channel, and that just really legitimizes online efforts and it gives you a lot of opportunities to do things you couldn’t do before and serve your audience in ways you couldn’t before. Tell me about some of the things you’re able to do online that you couldn’t do with radio broadcast?

Stephen Godwin: So a good example would be the Glastonbury Music Festival over the summer in the UK where we had over 170 hours’ worth of content over just one weekend and that came from 160 different clips, highlights, full sets of some artists and there are over 120 artists in total. Now that’s more content than we could actually have broadcast on any of our traditional channels over that weekend, but we were able to make it all available on the iPlayer so it becomes a way of getting that quantity of contact from an event like that available to our audience.

Troy Dreier: Can you tell us what over big projects you’re working on?

Stephen Godwin: So the other things we’ve worked on very recently is we’ve had to think what iPlayer Premium is. Well we’ve made programs available seven days before they’re due to be broadcast on traditional TV and that’s been incredibly successful. You’d be surprised by how successful it’s been. So there’s one program, a comedy, called “Bad Education” which was broadcast on BBC 3 and that we perhaps expect to get one and a half million viewers on the normal broadcast. We’ve got one and a half million requests for the video before the program was broadcast, and for later episodes in the same series, we go up to two million requests for the video.

Troy Dreier: Wow, it’s building. So we’ve got a Winter Olympics coming up. That’s got to be a big deal for you. What are you doing to prepare for it?

Stephen Godwin: So again, we did a lot of work for the London 2012 Olympics. We had the 24 live streams there and we made two and half thousand hours of content available as video on demand from the two weeks of the London Olympics. We hope to build on that. We’ve got the infrastructure in place that we built for the London 2012 Olympics and so we expect again that sort of live stream content and video on demand content.

Troy Dreier: Well, I don’t know how you’re going to top what you guys did for London. That was amazing. One thing I think I’m always impressed by with the iPlayer efforts and the BBC is the sense of mission that you guys really feel that you’re serving the people and this is part of the government and it’s something that we don’t see with commercial efforts here. What does that mean to your work that sense of mission of trying to deliver to the people what they’re paying for?

Stephen Godwin: So everything we do is driven by the fact that we’re paid for by our audience. We’re paid for by the license fee. So that means that we really care. Everybody in the UK has a reason for wanting the BBC to exist and we really want the iPlayer to be part of that, and I think for a new generation it absolutely is the way they can tune BBC content.

Troy Dreier: Well thank you so much. I look forward to seeing what’s coming next from BBC and your iPlayer efforts. This Troy Dreier coming to you from the red carpet at Streaming Media West.