September is the month where numerous people in our industry make the journey to Amsterdam to enjoy the delights of the RAI Centre or, if you’re like me, dread the impact of miles of walking in inappropriate footwear on your feet! There have been a number of years where my shoes have ended up being carried and I have completed the day in stockinged feet.
We probably all have mixed emotions about there being no physical IBC this year and lots of people are making alternative arrangements to ensure they don’t lose out on connecting with industry colleagues, trends and opinions. While my feet might be grateful for the rest, I started to think about the changes I have seen over many IBC years – but then also the similarities.
In 2005, I was leading the trainee engineer scheme within BBC Technology (which had just been acquired by Siemens as part of the outsourcing of technical services). I was invited to participate on a panel at IBC by BBC Training & Development to discuss the Future Broadcast Engineer; apparently, the future was bleak as IT encroached on the world of media. I wasn’t so sure it was as dire as the predictions made it sound then and I am not so sure now…..
Once again, we seem to be in a similar debate where ‘IT’ has been replaced with ‘Dev Ops’ and is bandied about as a silver bullet. Undoubtedly, just as IT professionals had their place 15 years ago, so do Dev Ops but I think it is wrong to assume that they are the panacea for the ‘all in’ move of media services to the cloud. If you want to do it properly, you need to make sure you converge your teams to work together – as a senior stakeholder in a recent project to move services to the cloud said to me, it wasn’t until the broadcast engineers were engaged that it really started to become a deployable reality.
As an aficionado of a good phrase or saying, while the past might be a foreign country I wholeheartedly believe that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So, for a trip down memory lane and to remind us of what the past can teach us, I have reproduced my presentation from 2005 for your review in 2020, accompanied by my current thoughts, looking back from a 15 year vantage point.
