End-to-End Digital Programme

Tender description

The BBC has a programme of work called ‘End to End Digital’ (‘E2E’) which seeks to ensure the BBC makes an effective and efficient transition to becoming a fully digital broadcaster. One of the projects within that programme is Digital Delivery and Archive (‘DD&A’). The DD&A project is charged with giving the BBC the capability to receive material by file, move it to linear and non-linear broadcast, and then store it within a digital archive. Today television, radio and online content production is already broadly tapeless. These production processes have evolved over recent years to see digital capture, ingest and editing, and in a few places digital delivery for playout. While radio, online and most news in the BBC are now fully digital, the use of tape in programme delivery, movement and archive, is still seen in large areas of television programme making. In this context the DD&A Project is seeking to do the following: • to take receipt of television programmes from independent and in-house suppliers to a new industry standard for tapeless (otherwise known as ‘file-based’) programme delivery, know as AS-11 DPP. This standard was defined by the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) – a pan-broadcaster initiative of which the BBC is a founding member with ITV and C4 – and has been adopted by all UK broadcasters. • to ensure that once television programmes have been delivered in file format, they can be moved to linear and on-demand playout, and to the BBC’s archive, in a file format. Initially it is only long-form TV programmes that will use this new capability; • to create a central digital archive for the BBC. This will give the BBC the ability to move, store, find and retrieve programme files from a central store. In the early days the digital archive will only have basic functionality – users won’t be able to view all the BBC’s archive material on their desktop – but it will be a key step towards removing tape from our workflows.