Is SaaS the secret to modern TV development?

For over 100 years, the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation – the BBC – has pushed the boundaries of TV production, creating and distributing innovative shows and documentaries worldwide.

The logistics of that process have undergone massive changes in recent years, and the corporation is again leading the way with its digital transformation strategies.

Speaking at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) this month in Amsterdam, Sinead Greenway, the BBC’s director of broadcaster and end-user technology said the organization was “SaaS- first, cloud-second, on-prem only when necessary.”

“We want to get out of the business of running and maintaining heavy infrastructure,” Greenway said. “And we want a cost and resource profile that scales with our organization. We’re 20,000 people that could scale up to 40,000 when we think about all the talents and the contractors and everybody else that’s in our world. So we have to make our part easy.”

Part of the problem for the BBC is how good it actually is and how long it has been in operation (102 years). For the relatively small license fee, you get surprisingly varied options across information (news and sport), music, education, and live TV. This also includes hundreds of TV shows and documentaries. And as part of its digital transformation much of this – some 25 petabytes worth – has been moved to the cloud.

“We’ve got lots of great stuff and the challenge is having lots of great stuff,” Greenway explained. “How do we have less? How do we have the best and how do we make it do more? And then enabling colleagues to work anywhere, including flexibly for more offices. This isn’t a caving speech; this is very much about an infrastructure approach and how we look at our networks and breaking that link between our building and our people so that they can do their best. So aiming for that hard thing, working well from everywhere.”

What’s apparent here is that on-prem is becoming highly unfavorable for some. Digital transformation seems to generally mean physical servers are someone else’s problem – let the hyperscalers deal with those – but looking at the wider picture, it seems that software is the main driver of this trend.

Take, for example, SAP; at its Sapphire conference, the company made it quite clear that it wants its customers in the cloud and its strategy is to entice legacy on-prem clients with generative AI tools, like its copilot, Joule. Addressing this directly, CEO Christian Klein said: “I guess we will find no one – no investor, no customer, no partner – who believes the future is on-prem”.

Generative AI on-screen

Looking around at IBC, it was impossible to ignore the effect generative AI is having across the media industry. Whether it’s being used as an aid for content creators, or enhancing our understanding of news programs, there is a clear demand for these types of tools. However, there is a rather surprising way in which part of this adoption is being driven, according to Chinese company Huawei.

“Today users are spending more time on mobile. But, most importantly, people are not just watching, they have also become content creators. So now it is user-generated content that is making the real difference,” Jamy Lyu, Huawei’s president of cloud media services, said during the company’s pre-IBC media summit.

Lyu observed that increasingly mature AI is reshaping the wider media and entertainment industry, with cloud and AI, in particular, revolutionizing content production.

There is also a demand for more real-time interaction during live-streamed events, such as sporting competitions and breaking news stories. Here, AI and cloud technologies are powering innovations that improve latency. Take, for example, Huawei’s Cloud Low Latency Live (LLL) service which works with its Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) to limit latency to within 500 ms and reduce frame freezes by 10%. This can enable viewer interactivity as watchers can chat together in a live room, instead of just liking videos.

What’s more, the technology also includes a function to prevent ads from interrupting video playback, as the Huawei Cloud uses AI recognition and codec to fuse targeted ads into less obtuse areas of the screen – which is a more passive way to mix advertising with content.

Advertising is unavoidable and it’s an industry that’s already seen drastic change courtesy of AI. For the BBC, which is largely funded by taxpayers, new technologies are helping it achieve digital transformation under a tight budget – ultimately helping it avoid mass advertising.

“We absolutely face all of the financial and operational constraints,” Greenway said. “In a hundred-year-old organization, some of those constraints paradoxically give us the catalyst for change. So having this simplified medium supply chain driving velocity, thinking about more lightweight approaches to what we can do in the cloud, in terms of production, is how we shift the dial from one to the other and make those tough choices.”