04-09-2021, 06:06 AM
I missed this thread - but as someone who uses BNCS quite a bit, feel I can't really let it pass me by.
It was originally designed by engineers at BBC Manchester, who would run courses for their colleagues elsewhere - at the end of the course they'd get a floppy disk with the development kit and head off to build their own. Eventually the team was subsumed into BBC Technology and outsourced to Siemens, who tried to market it as Colledia Control. (There were meant to be other Colledia products - playout automation maybe? - but I don't think any got as far as market.) It later ended up with Atos, and stayed there when the operational side was insourced.
As others have said, it gets a fair bit of use outside the BBC, in a variety of guises. In some places, it's up to the master control room to do all the routing, in others they'll set everything up and let individual users pick up the packages they want.
Doing everything through packages (essentially a shopping list of what to route) means that if an individual part like an incoming line or a framesync fails, the MCR can replace that in the package and it'll change it for all the destinations, without the operator needing to think about where's taking it, or even telling them it's been done.
Much of what it does isn't unique to BNCS (I've used VSM and it's pretty similar these days), but it's been doing it for a long time and is a decent mature product, and benefits from being easily customisable to suit the broadcaster.
It may be worth mentioning briefly SNCS, which was the similar system developed (and still used) by BBC Scotland. It was originally a command-line system, which now pretends to be a touchscreen system... but still requires quite a bit of typing (and logical thinking!) to get things done.
It was originally designed by engineers at BBC Manchester, who would run courses for their colleagues elsewhere - at the end of the course they'd get a floppy disk with the development kit and head off to build their own. Eventually the team was subsumed into BBC Technology and outsourced to Siemens, who tried to market it as Colledia Control. (There were meant to be other Colledia products - playout automation maybe? - but I don't think any got as far as market.) It later ended up with Atos, and stayed there when the operational side was insourced.
As others have said, it gets a fair bit of use outside the BBC, in a variety of guises. In some places, it's up to the master control room to do all the routing, in others they'll set everything up and let individual users pick up the packages they want.
Doing everything through packages (essentially a shopping list of what to route) means that if an individual part like an incoming line or a framesync fails, the MCR can replace that in the package and it'll change it for all the destinations, without the operator needing to think about where's taking it, or even telling them it's been done.
Much of what it does isn't unique to BNCS (I've used VSM and it's pretty similar these days), but it's been doing it for a long time and is a decent mature product, and benefits from being easily customisable to suit the broadcaster.
It may be worth mentioning briefly SNCS, which was the similar system developed (and still used) by BBC Scotland. It was originally a command-line system, which now pretends to be a touchscreen system... but still requires quite a bit of typing (and logical thinking!) to get things done.
