Simon is currently a Principal Technologist at the BBC but started his broadcasting career in Student Radio in 1983 when he was studying Electrical & Electronic Engineering at the University of Bradford.
He joined the BBC in 1988 as a trainee Radio Engineer and having worked as an engineer across most the BBC’s radio services, he moved to work on TV projects in 2006 when managing part of BBC R&D. Here his work included selecting audio codecs for FreeView HD and addressing the issue of rolling out surround sound as part of HDTV [including co authoring EBU R123]. He has worked on numerous BBC & EBU projects since including Loudness [& EBU R128], object based audio, binaural audio and audio archiving. He’s a member of the DPP Technical Standards Committee, chairs the Radio Academy Tech. Con. Committee and co-chairs the audio sub group of FAME, a European group looking at the audio technology that will accompany next generation UHDTV.
Objective Analysis – another way of looking at things.
In this presentation Simon will share some thinking on 2 different subject areas covered by is current work.
The idea of treating media as objects has been with us for a while now and in recent years audio objects have begun their journey from concept to product. In the first part of his presentation Simon will try provide some insight on how far and how fast object based audio is developing, how this technology might fit with our current broadcast chain, how it might affect our working practices and what sort of benefits it might provide. To do this he will show a TV broadcast chain model developed by FAME [the Forum for Advanced Media in Europe] and show how this approach fits with broadcast technology architecture models, how it can be used to high light the way our systems inter-operate and how opportunities for new solutions are becoming available. On this journey we will reflect on the difference between audio and video, look at the range standards being developed and surface some of the key terms and definitions for this technology.
It also seems fitting, given the venue for this symposium, that we should consider what impact broadcasting has on the environment, so in the second part of his presentation Simon will consider the carbon footprint of broadcasting and discuss some of the challenges that looking at this area of our endeavors shows up. He will consider how broadcasting’s carbon footprint compares to that for other industries and explore what capabilities we might need to be more sustainable.
