BBC R&D is exploring how interactive and personalised experiences can be delivered to the public without the need for them to further invest in media hardware.
It’s an acknowledgement that low powered devices like TVs and media streaming sticks would struggle to be able to provide the kind of experience a games console could offer.
Now, the Render Engine Broadcasting (REB) team within BBC R&D believe low-latency streaming has the potential to address some of the challenges presented by the delivery of complex experiences to a range of devices.
In a blog post, team members Juliette Carter, Rajiv Ramdhany and Simon Lumb, have explained how they offloaded computationally intensive tasks such as the composition and rendering of OBM scenes to a powerful graphics card on a cloud server and streamed the results as video to user devices.
The BBC wants to provide universal access so that the streaming of a remote experience can happen on any device, no matter what its computational ability is.
To date this includes all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge), and native platforms (Mac OS, Ubuntu, Android, Raspberry Pi), where its demonstrator works in the same way.
Already the demonstrator can run Click 1000, the interactive special edition of the popular technology show.
Future applications could allow viewers to direct an episode themselves or run a game related to a show.