Rethinking Radio with Broadcast Bionics

The COVID lockdown era saw the technology and workflows of radio quickly evolve to embrace remote collaboration and production.

WHILE THERE WAS repurposing of existing technology, and no small amount of improvisation, the experience has had a profound effect on the design of radio facilities and the workflows they are designed to enable.

Helping to navigate this shift is Broadcast Bionics, a developer of audience engagement and communication tools for Radio and TV. These include Bionic Talkshow, Bionic Social, Bionic Director and Bionic Contest. Emerging from isolation to reconnect with its customer base, managing Director Dan McQuillin says, “There’s definitely a real demand in the industry to consider new workflows, to make changes both to studio facilities and business models, to adapt both to new technology and the changing patterns of the way that kind of content is being produced and consumed.”

C+T: What’s changed since the pandemic and what hasn’t?

“What hasn’t changed is the fact that you get back with old colleagues and meet friends and it feels as if we’ve sort of never been apart. Maybe that was all the zoom meetings that we had and people being busy making the changes necessary to broadcast from home and access facilities. But, postpandemic, we’re definitely seeing a lot of investment by the broadcasters in new studio facilities in creating additional content for for new platforms, so I feel there’s actually a confidence around the industry and understanding that our audiences’ habits and behaviors are changing, but along with that we have an opportunity to generate new content on new platforms in different ways. We’re focusing on talking about that challenge of how we can employ studio facilities and equipment to not change what we’ve always done, but to be able to do it at a different scale, to be to do it more flexibly, in more agile ways, “Over the last few years, there’s not just been a greater level of change, but a greater pace of change. Whereas before, perhaps you might have built facilities and designed things to run for a decade doing one big thing, we now have to generate studio facilities with the agility to change continuously as you might be doing one thing one week and doing something else just a few months later.”

How has Broadcast Bionics evolved to meet those needs?

“I think we’ve learnt a lot of a lessons as to how we can be more agile, and that concept of building agile building scalable facilities that are largely software-based so that they can be scaled quickly and are largely browser-based so they can be operated from anywhere, have the ability to interconnect using WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) so people can be in any location.

“We’re now building a standard into the workflows and products that previously would have always been very studio-centric. Now, we’re just redefining those studios and which content comes best from which kind of studios, and how we can generate additional content - be that linear traditional radio and TV content or podcasts or ondemand.”

What tools does Broadcast Bionics bring to this flexible world?

“There’s probably two big things we’re talking about when it comes to flexibility. One is a thing that we call the Bionic table. That’s an idea that we can simplify studio facilities to just four microphones, four headphones and a table to tell your story around. Then, in software at the back end, we can deliver everything that a large monolithic studio could do.

“That means you can generate an incredible number of pop-up studios around a facility - every one of your meeting rooms can be a studio. We’re not locked inside these large complex monolithic studio spaces and that has three big benefits to content creatorsone, it means that it’s much more affordable to create content production spaces, you can think about much more quickly and deeply, moving around facilities in five or ten minutes, rather than five months. “It also democratises storytelling and content creation. They can be operated by anybody with an iPad or a device at the edge. So, it really de-skills that complexity of operating for the content creation and, thirdly, it actually generates a different style of content.

“We’re also talking with broadcasters about a product we have called Virtual Rack which is about virtualising all that stuff in the basement. It takes all of the traditional audio processing tools that you’d have - from microphone processors to FM processors to talk show systems and software-based mixing consoles - and, instead of having physical equipment in a physical rack, we’ve created a virtual rack appliance, which has an essentially an app library, and from inside that you can just click and select and plug things in and out of your virtual rack. So, you’re not committed to physical hardware and plants. You can, again, configure that and spin that out very quickly so one day you might have eight FM processors, the next day there might be four FM processors and six sets of IP codecs linking buildings together. It’s a different way of deploying your architecture, but it makes it much more scalable and agile for facilities not to be locked into one thing for the next decade. You can very quickly spin stuff up and down in software and reuse the same hardware in a very energy efficient and cost effective-way.”

Does the Virtual Rack include third-party apps?

“We’re working with all the partners we can find who offer containerised versions of their products. Some of our products will be available inside the Virtual Rack. We work with Telos, Axia and Omnia, so the Omnia processor is available in there. Sound4 has a cloud-based processor. That’s available inside Virtual Rack.

“You don’t buy those products from us. We provide the virtual software and appliance. Our app library is not an app store, but it’s a library of applications you can spin up and down and then you licence those. They run up in demo mode and then you licence them from your ‘local dealer’. So, yes, processing you can get from Sound4 or Axia, talk show systems you can get from us and from Telos. We’re working with WideOrbit on their playout system being implemented in there, and Xperi with their data solution for broadcasters. Those are the ones we’re working on right now for the public launch.”

“We will be at NAB (Booth W1867) in April, but we’re kind of just talking to broadcasters about it. Not so much to sell it as a product but to have people start thinking about it as a philosophy and a kind of a way of designing facilities to give them that flexibility, that scalability in their agility.”

Visit https://www.bionics.co.uk