Source: C. Pasquier
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) held its third Developer Conference (DevCon) on the 6th and 7th October 2015 at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. It provided participants with an opportunity to learn about best practices in software engineering and get hands-on experience with development and deployment tools. Sound & Vision's Themistoklis Karavellas and Jaap Blom report.
This year's event focused on sharing new ideas: on running software-driven broadcast infrastructures, improving engineering workflows and organizing development teams. DevCon 2015 attracted participants from 13 countries around the world, expressing the media domain’s needs and views for the future.
The programme of the conference included talks and workshops about Agile Software Collaboration, Broadcast Personalization, Cross Platform Authentication, Data Visualizations, Video Playout solutions, Content Recommendation, Newsroom Publication, HTML 5 video play-out, Platform Security and Data Journalism. Sound & Vision’s Jaap Blom and Themistoklis Karavellas took part in the conference with presentations on HTML5 streaming in EUscreen and Sound & Vision’s Agile development approach.
Themistoklis Karavellas presenting HTML5 - a security solution for EUscreenXL. Source: Jaap Blom, CC BY-SA.
HTML 5 Security solution for EUscreenXL
Themistoklis Karavellas from Sound & Vision presented the implementation and architecture of the video play-out solution developed for the needs of EUscreenXL. EUscreenXL is a project aiming to align audiovisual collection of European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. It does so by making archive videos available on the free portal EUscreen.eu and link existing web videos to the digital cultural platform Europeana.
For the EUscreen portal, the transition from a flash based play-out to interoperable HTML5-based play-out - an emerging standard that has various content protection implementations - created a content security gap which Sound & Vision investigated.
AGILE at Sound & Vision
After announcing the incidental absence of a keynote speaker, the organisers offered the stage for attendees to talk about the use of AGILE development within their organisations. Jaap Blom - among others - took the stage and talked about Sound & Vision’s “Two speed IT” setup, which involves two (Scrum) development teams: an R&D team that - mostly within collaborative research projects - investigates new technology, existing tools and best practices and a core development team that works on corporate projects, directly touching the core infrastructure and the operations department. Jaap indicated that Sound & Vision is currently looking for ways to further optimize the knowledge & resource exchange between both teams.
Highlights of DevCon 2015
Cornelius Suermann from PayPal started by demonstrating how their software engineering teams from Germany, U.S. and Brazil really benefitted from using their InnerSource concept, which in a nutshell is applying open source development standards within a company.
Within this context he illustrated that before using InnerSource it was nearly impossible for the German team to make necessary changes to the core system in time, needing to request the very busy U.S. team to make changes. By using GitHub and well-written documentation, the German team could branch off of the core system themselves and could quickly and directly communicate with the U.S. team using GitHub’s collaboration functions.
Underlining that the basis of its success depends on well written documentation and collaboration using a system like GitHub, PayPal eventually ended up with better, more modular software and more effective teams.
Bridging hardware and the web
Dietrich Ayala from Mozilla began with describing the difficult process of earning support for an OS on mobile devices, which entails having to go through various procedures and strict acceptance tests for each manufacturer and telecommunication company. Having achieved all that for Firefox OS, he went on to explain why their new OS with its web based approach for app development is the way to go.
Since large companies are building a better web, with better standards, web apps become more powerful and get closer to mimicking the performance of native apps. Being able to use web standards enables easy interoperability and decentralized, uncensored participation, since no app store is required.
Dietrich Ayala presenting Firefox OS. Source: GraphyStories
To illustrate how one would build an app using web technology and Firefox OS, Dietrich showed that all hardware calls are accessible via JavaScript APIs, which would bring app development within reach of web developers and casual programmers.
Finally Dietrich showed various examples where Firefox OS could work with e.g. smart TVs and Raspberry pi, and, in combination with FlyWeb could be used to interact with nearby devices of any sort and thus bring “the internet of things” within reach as well.
Rethinking application design
Thomas Parisot talked about BBC’s usage of Docker for organising software in sustainable and easy to maintain components. In light of Sound & Vision’s upcoming CLARIAH infrastructure - which will host various tools developed by different parties, using different technologies - Docker could be a very useful solution for packaging a heterogenous group of tools into maintainable components.
BBC's Cross Platform Authentication workshop. Source: EBU Technology & Innovation
Cross Platform Authentication
Sean O’ Halpin and Chris Needham from the BBC presented the Cross Platform Authentication system (CPA) they developed, how to implement it and the architectural backbone supporting it. The workshop followed an interactive tutorial powered by Jupyter. The corresponding documentation can be found here.
Rick de Bruyn presenting iNOS. Source: Frans de Jong
iNOS
Rick de Bruyn from NOS presented a centralised news content creation service. This is a cross media (TV, Internet, Radio) web based platform offering access to news feed wires, planning of events and stories, sharing of research information, MAM search, online publication and rundown creation for TV-Radio while being able to monitor and coordinate the associate workflows.
Data Journalism
Data Journalism was a separate track on day 2 of the conference and included two interesting presentations.
The first was by Frédéric Vergez from RTS, who shared his experience concerning the workflows within data journalism projects. He pointed out that journalists and programmers can really help each other, since journalists do not master all tools needed to analyse or visualise data and programmers don’t necessarily have the journalistic mind for analysing data and telling a proper story. See one of RTS’ stories here.
Some of his advice for data journalism projects: have a small team in the same room, favor individuals and interactions over processes and tools - journalists are already “agile” by nature. Moreover, he noted, it’s important to think about whether it is desirable to design for mobile first, since it does not always provide the optimal environment for visualisations with a lot of data.
Another interesting presentation was by Roger Klomp, who presented the journalistic case of The Shell Search, which operated under the premise that it is possible to penetrate closed systems, e.g. of huge corporations, such as Shell, by using available digital resources.
All in all, EBU DevCon was a very carefully organised conference able to cover many of media developers’ interests. It triggered creativity and collaboration and we look forward to next year’s presentations of new developments.
More info
The highlights presented above are some that peaked our interest, but there were many other interesting talks and topics:
- you can find the programme of EBU DevCon 2015 here;
- the presentations here;
- and all hands-on workshop abstracts can be found here.