So, what's a TV app then? Well, I'm assuming everyone knows how to build web applications, and developing the bar for mobile application development's really lowered these days. We have to target as wide a range of devices as we can in order to make sure we hit as many homes as we can. We can't go after just the high end TVs that are easy to work with. There are 25 million homes in the UK and we're obliged to make sure that BBC content is available to as many of those homes as we can, which means we can't really target specific devices. Central to the idea of what we are as a public service entity is this this concept of universality. The second is our public service remit which, so pictured here is the Royal Charter which sets out our purpose. One is the TV ecosystems themselves, which were a challenge, and we'll talk about that shortly. Why do we work in an office where the number of TVs outnumber humans 10 to 1? Well, there are two important factors to TV app development. This did turn out to be a fire escape, so yes, I got in a little bit of trouble for that. Even if we find an unused corridor, we're pretty likely to just line it with TVs for testing. We've got racks and racks of old set top boxes and things like that for testing our broadcast chain. If an audience member phones up and they've got a problem with a particular device, we can quickly retrieve it and test it to see if there's a problem there. We have store rooms that are full of TVs and we've got hundreds of TVs in offsite storage. This is specifically our broadcast data player. I'm also always asked to put more pictures of our offices in our talks, but really the primary feature of our offices is the sheer number of TVs we have and devices everywhere. It is very different from anywhere I've worked before which - it's always been software companies, tech companies about selling software and services. So it's not uncommon for something totally random to be happening in the morning when you come in, like a jousting tournament. For a bit of context, a lot of content production happens at the BBC, particularly in Salford. We saw a base for a big proportion of our design engineering teams, certainly the biggest proportion of our iPlayer people. iPlayer TV and mobile teams are all based Salford, Media City, pictured. This is a domain that I'm heavily invested in, and yet TV application development is largely a bit of a mystery. ![]() On and off for the last 8, 10 years I've been building video applications, particularly big screen TV experiences. There are some great talks on the internet about video factory, about continuous delivery, about how we do our delivery pipeline. But this isn't the usual talk we do when we're talking about iPlayer. What's this talk about then? Hopefully you've read the abstract so it's not a total surprise. I look after 10 or so teams who build our big screen experiences, so not just iPlayer but any of our apps that run on set top boxes, TVs, games consoles. I'm an engineering manager for iPlayer BBC Design Engineering, which is the technology heart of the BBC.
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