Open Source in Broadcasting

For a variety of reasons broadcasters are not big users of open source - if anything many still have a viewpoint of Open Source that resembles views of the early 1990s. This presentation aims to explain what broadcasters around the world are doing in this area and what some of the difficulties are in an industry reliant on proprietary hardware and software as well as IPR-heavy. In particular it will look into the creation of the Open Broadcast Encoder (OBE), a professional television encoder running on commodity hardware which many Norwegian organisations have played a role in. Many of the deployments have been firsts for Open Source in broadcasting, not to mention software encoders, silencing many naysayers. Kieran Kunhya has worked on a variety of Open Source projects in multimedia, mainly on x264 and FFmpeg/libav, trying to make them suitable for use in professional environments such as Blu-Ray, television transmission and post-production to broadcaster file interchange. However, the technical issues are only half of the puzzle - he also spends a lot of time trying to explain Broadcasting to Open Source people and Open Source to Broadcasters and has spoken at many events about this. He is the creator of the Open Broadcast Encoder project, which is a fully open source broadcast encoder used to deliver a variety of channels around the world from the most high profile channels to much smaller channels, putting small players (e.g Frikanalen in Norway) on a similar playing field to the big players. He has worked on all the major deployments of OBE.