BBC Moves Local Radio Stations To The Cloud

The BBC has moved the online homes of four of its local radio stations onto the cloud, citing cost reductions and the decrease of upgrade times.

As part of its Virtual Local Radio (ViLoR) project, the broadcaster has move BBC Radio Northampton, BBC Radio Suffolk, BBC Essex and BBC Three Counties Radio into a virtualised environment.

ViLoR is being developed by the organisation’s Technology division is collaboration with the station in Northampton and BBC Local Radio.

The four chosen studios appear to regulation locations, but they are now equipped with the latest in-studio capabilities and the underlying infrastructure has been moved to central, shared location.

The broadcaster claims that editorial teams will now have full control over play-out systems and mixing desks, but the actual audio files are stored, streamed, mixed and processed in real-time from a remote data centre.

According to the BBC, although the back-end equipment is now centralised, editorial and production teams are still able to present to local community just as they did originally.

Latest “Cost-Saving Innovation” From The BBC

“This is an excellent example of BBC innovation helping us find new, lower cost and more flexible ways of providing the technology our programme makers need to deliver great local radio to our audiences from the local community,” claimed the organisation’s interim CTO Peter Coles.

“Northampton is a first, but significant, first step toward us providing the potential for a fully virtualised BBC Local Radio networks and I’m sure we’ll see the industry begin to adopt a similar approach,” he added.

“Throughout the design and installation of ViLoR, BBC Local Radio producers, presenters and journalists have worked with the BBC’s technology experts and we now have the best studio equipment in the business,” claimed Jess Rudkin, managing editor for BBC Radio Northampton.

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