PAULA MATHEWS: 2020
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Back in 2005, there was an existential crisis brewing around commodity IT hardware and broadcast. What did it all mean for Broadcast Engineers? Were they toast? Would the IT whizz kids be the answer? In this article to coincide with IBC Showcase 2020, I invite you to travel back in time with me and look at why I think the answers then hold true now, as we face another philosophical debate about Cloud, DevOps and media...
In 2005, I was keen to show that despite the march of time since Clive James penned this piece, the criticality of getting programmes back on air had not fundamentally changed. What also had not fundamentally changed was that the ‘two people in the entire building’ that ‘really understand how the toys are put together’ were the broadcast engineers. Reviewing this now, I still feel confident that this holds true. Whether it’s 1976, 2005 or 2020 - we can all name a system that has recently ruined our day and the small number of people that were able to put it right. It’s a perpetual truth.
2020
I digress for a moment from the thrust of my presentation to point readers to the writings of Clive James, a writer who managed to communicate important messages while having you doubled up with laughter. His books of TV criticism and his autobiographies are worth a read. If you want to find out more about David Dimbleby’s struggle with the machines, you will find it in the Chapter ‘The Weld This Week’ in The Crystal Bucket. When I was looking for an interesting way to start my presentation in 2005 , I remembered how when I was re-reading The Crystal Bucket this chapter really resonated with me as a trainee engineer, in awe of the experienced engineers who were not phased by outages, able to think on their feet and quickly get issues resolved. I knew within the chapter, the essence of the value of broadcast engineering was captured.
2005
The remit of the 2005 panel was to look at whether Broadcast Engineers were born or made. When pondering whether the driving force is nature or nurture, my conjecture then, as now, is that you need both. My view is based upon my experience of supporting many and diverse routes into engineering, selecting candidates based on their core skills and then training for the rest. The benefits of this approach on diversity of candidates will be the subject of a future post! So nature provides the core skills and nurture provides the specific technical skills. My overall proposition on successful engineers that are supporting broadcast-type services is still that if you select for the core skills when you are taking on trainees or junior engineers, you can teach them the specific technologies, They will go on to quickly adapt to changing technologies throughout their careers. It is heartening to see many broadcasters and media services providers recruiting junior engineering and technical staff and providing apprenticeships or traineeships - I would however urge people to think about using the core skills approach to recruitment for these roles to ensure you a recruiting from the most diverse pool possible. I will return to this in future posts.
In 2020, commodity IT hardware is taken for granted as a staple within the broadcast environment and cloud-based infrastructure, platforms and software as services is where it's at in terms of the here and now. As with the commodity IT approaches in 2005, for all the opportunities presented by cloud services, it is worth making sure you are not unintentionally importing risks along with the benefits. I listen to discussions about CI/CD pipelines and applying incremental change and I get a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach - what if the change fails? What if it fails in a way that impacts services? How do broadcast service suppliers manage that when we have no knowledge or control over the change? The round up of cloud failures in 2019 makes sobering reading and underlines the continuing need to specify, build and support your cloud deployment around the requirements of delivering broadcast content. The certainty is that things will go awry , just like they did for David Dimbleby in 1976 - in the past, you had control as to how good or bad you were at recovering from issues; now designing for failure has never been truer if you want to stay in control and recover from failure gracefully. Failures are the moments of truth that define what you are made of - no-one remembers the 99.99% of the time things are running smoothly; everyone remembers the failures and, most importantly, how quickly and how well you were able to recover.
Paula Mathews 2020
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In 2005, there was an undercurrent that perhaps younger people wouldn't be so concerned about whether there were pauses or failures in the content they were watching and that perhaps the older generations needed to accept that their obsession with 'quality' and 'high availability' were irrelevant and passe. Apart from thinking that I would like the 15 years back that have flown passed since I was a younger fogey, I look at this and think that in that time, we have seen the continuing rise of on demand but it has been matched with the continuing demand for quality - in both the content and the delivery; people of all ages do care that the content they want to watch is available without issues, whether delivered via traditional broadcast methods or on demand. Even 5 years ago, Conviva reported that "Viewers used to be content with an OTT service if the video began playing at all – this is no longer the case. Consumers now demand a multi-dimensional experience that provides superior picture fidelity, zero resolution volatility, and TV-like viewing quality, and will abandon the streams that do not deliver." And so, here in 2020 and for the umpteenth time, I am able to nod wisely and tell my now 29 year old daughter that I was right all along!