talk-data.com

Join us at BBC Quay House in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester on Wednesday 24th January, from 3pm for an afternoon of talks on developing applications for smart TVs, set-top boxes, streamers, and games consoles.

Doors will open at 3pm and the talks will kick off at 3.15pm. Some of us will also be heading to Kargo (https://kargomkt.com/) after the talks (around 5pm), to continue the conversations.

RSVP is open! Sign up now if you'd like to join. Please bring ID with you to the event. In person attendees must be over 18.

This meetup is kindly sponsored by BBC iPlayer & BBC Sounds.

We're expecting this event to be quite popular, so please ensure you're able to join us, before RSVPing.

Further information on getting to MediaCity can be found at https://www.mediacityuk.co.uk/visit-us/

You can find out more about our meetups, including our Code of Conduct, on the BBC website - https://bit.ly/bbc-tech-meetup

We will be live streaming this event on our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@BBCTechMeetup

The live stream will start at 3.15pm on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1PM93h2FHU

Agenda:

15:15 – 15:20 – Welcome

15:20 – 15:45 – Revolutionising CTV: The Power of Automation (Martin Tyler & Taha Ibrahim, FX Digital) Device fragmentation in the CTV space poses a distinct challenge, necessitating broader platform support than traditional web and mobile spaces. Users often keep their devices for long periods, leading to a vast array of models requiring testing. Most companies can't afford large QA teams to test regularly enough, making automation testing crucial. Many automation testing solutions are available, however what is regularly overlooked is the difficulty transitioning from merely having an automation system to achieving comprehensive device and feature automation coverage. This challenge is compounded during ongoing projects with many features and automated test cases. Successfully navigating this terrain can revolutionise CTV development. This talk will explore FX Digital's shift from mainly manual testing to integrating automation across all devices and projects daily. We'll discuss strategies for managing and expanding device roster, constantly scaling systems, optimising pipelines, gaining DevOps skills, keeping stakeholders informed, and addressing CTV-specific features.

15:45 - 16:10 - How to pirate your own content (Ethan Mills & Wendi Fan, Softwire) In order to support new content formats & preview thumbnails, we needed access to the original VoD content masters; however, we only had access to encrypted, and fragmented, Microsoft Smooth Streaming content. We developed a custom tool, based on the Dash.js codebase, to recompose and decrypt the MSS content; then, we built the new content processing pipelines based on AWS technologies, PlayReady DRM encryption, and ffmpeg, and we implemented front-end support for the technology. In this talk, we'll discuss the challenges of this approach, and what we learned along the way.

16:10 – 16:35 – Networking and refreshments (break)

16:35 – 17:00 – Monoliths to micro front-ends: there and back again (Ryan Waudby, BBC) Embark on a swift exploration of the BBC's over-a-decade-long journey in TV application development, unravelling challenges, inventive solutions, and ongoing endeavours to tame the fractious TV browser landscape. This talk will cover the various iterations and milestones of front-end development across the BBC TV platform over the past years, some projects aiding teams to diverge and discover while others were converging the platform to share successes across the whole estate. It will be given at a high level and leans for more breadth rather than depth, hopefully sparking conversations afterwards.

HighlightsFollowing a panel including Beggars Group’s Martin Mills and Kill Rock Star’s Portia Sabin, we’re looking at artists on their rosters and asking, “What makes them two of indie music’s longest lasting labels?”  Mission    Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists, and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.DateThis is your Data Dump for Friday, June 21, 2019.A2IM Indie Week, Day 4Several Indie icons closed out A2IM’s Indie Week in New York City yesterday, two of them being the legendary Martin Mills and Dr. Portia Sabin sharing what’s helped them make Beggars Group and Kill Rock Stars, respectively, some of indie music’s longest lasting labels. Beggars Group is the parent company of 4AD, Rough Trade Records, Matador, XL Recordings and Young Turks.Mills started it in London in 1977, and his many labels have gone on to sign everyone from Adele to Radiohead.While Adele hasn’t released anything for some time, her 25 album, which released physically in November 2015 and digitally in June 2016 via a joint deal between XL Recordings and Sony’s Columbia, “single-handedly revived global album sales”, according to the Guardian.The album’s streaming success is no joke either, as it’s maintained a 70-80 Spotify Popularity Index score over the last three years, and has been included on upwards of 12.5K Spotify playlists.That kind of success under XL’s guidance gave Adele the leverage to be able to sign an enormous and unprecedented £90 million deal with Sony in May 2016.No doubt the industry will be keen to check her next album from one of the industry’s biggest major labels.Now entering the underground, since 2006, Sabin has run Pacific Northwest-based indie label Kill Rock Stars, which has been a home to riot grrrl legends Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, and folk rockers the Decemberists.Sabin’s roster is more niche than Mills’, but Kill Rock Stars’ ability to navigate catalog digitization and promotion has allowed their artists to prosper.Smith, for instance, maintains some 1.4M monthly listeners on Spotify, despite the fact that he passed away tragically in 2003. In March 2017, Kill Rock Stars released an expanded edition of his 1997 album Either/Or, which helped increase Smith’s Spotify followers by around 70 percent to 430K and spiked his monthly listenership by an estimated 250K. Whether by keen artist development or catalog revitalization, Beggars Group and Kill Rock Stars have each found a way to not only survive longer than most indie labels, but to also thrive while doing so.OutroThat’s it for Indie Week and your Daily Data Dump for Friday, June 21, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.Free accounts are at chartmetric.comAnd article links and show notes are at: podcast.chartmetric.comHappy Friday, and have a great weekend!