Eighteen months earlier, Siemens acquired the BBC’s technology division, taking on 1,500 employees and signing a ten-year outsourcing contract worth €2.7 billion.
At NAB, Siemens announced the Digital Fabric programme to connect the BBC’s numerous digital systems through an IT interoperability infrastructure. It is intended to exchange material across different formats and standards. The infrastructure will use IBM WebSphere as part of IBM Media Hub, selected by Siemens for the BBC from several systems.
Siemens also announced plans to build an open, scalable archive for the BBC with HP. The installation was intended to become the broadcaster’s central archive and reach 16 petabytes of storage within ten years.
