Playout

Nick worked with the MD and Financial Controller at ITV Millbank Studios to win contract to provide play out and production services for BBC Parliament. Specifing and purchasing equipment, appointing a systems integrator and project managing the installation of facilities. During the contract period Nick recruited staff from junior technicians to Chief Engineer and oversaw significant technical developments including the roll out of three generations of graphics automation.

Additionally Nick used the Aston API to programme the on-screen news ticker for BBC Parliament. The system could select news items either from the BBC News RSS feeds or from an independent RSS feed which was securely maintained using PERL and Javascript applications.

Nick also worked with a hardware manufacturer and software developer to create a system to store caption metadata in the VBI data of Parliamentary recordings. This allowed recordings to be played back either clean, or with captions in the style specific to the programme in which the recording was used.