LocationAgent

The methods by which television programmes and movies are made are constantly changing.
Also the methods by which we watch them - at home on TV, in Cinemas, on the move, on
mobile phones, on tablet devices, or via 'play again' services such as the BBC iPlayer which
are also evolving.
All of this now requires many digital file formats. It is necessary to convert from
many of these formats to other of these formats, via a process referred to as 'Transcoding'.
As more and more formats for production and consumption are established, and as file sizes
for media get bigger, as they are with higher resolutions and 3D (Stereo), the more this
computation becomes a bottleneck.
The simple approach is to purchase more transcoding stations - but this requires capital, which
TV companies do not like to spend.
Our alternative, as proposed in our LocationAgent proposal, is to assist the hardware units for
Transcoding with a virtualised service running in the cloud. However we see the innovation is
in developing an intelligent dynamic scheduling system that decides what files are processed
locally, which remotely, and which in the cloud. There is obviously a trade off between
processing time taken, and money spent in hiring virtualised services. This trade off would be
studied as part of the scheduling system