KitPlus | Articles

How to engage students with live projects

For many employers, how and what we teach at university is sometimes considered to be very mysterious. The responsibility for creating the structure and content within the curriculum is the responsibility of academics. In my experience, the best method for making sure that students and staff are kept up to date with current working practices is to...

Submitted by Martin Andrews

Published 26 March 2020

Grading BBC Sounds

The BBC has launched its new personalised music, radio and podcast app with a campaign that follows one listener’s journey from meeting Kylie Minogue in a lift to Idris Elba on a bus. BBC Sounds offers a single home for the BBC’s thousands of hours of audio content, including live and on-demand shows and special music mixes curated by artists. BBC...

Submitted by Simone Grattarola

Published 25 January 2019

The Pace of Change

The youngest human to stand on the moon (so far) was Charles Moss, the lunar module pilot of Apollo 16. Charlie had a wonderful claim: his father witnessed the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, and lived to see his son on the moon. Does anything capture the speed of technological advance better than that? The whole of the history of powe...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 08 September 2018

Artificial Intelligence and Economics

It’s May, so it seems inevitable that this month’s column should be a bit of a reflection on NAB. And it will, in due course. But first, some news which I think is interesting. Cisco, the IT giant, is selling off its video software solutions business. It is being bought by an as-yet unnamed new company, backed by venture capitalist Permira Funds. T...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 07 June 2018

Opting In or Opting Out

Peter Savage, CEO of Azule, explains whether you should opt in or opt out of the current red tape nightmare facing businesses large and small. No, this isn’t another Brexit referendum but I doubt whether any of you reading this are not affected, in some way, by the new European General Data Protection Regulation, commonly known as GDPR or, as I li...

Submitted by Peter Savage 2

Published 07 June 2018

The ITTP - A Review

Five years ago a group of practitioners who were concerned about the poor training provision and a lack of common skills standards in the broadcast industry formed the ITTP. Since then there have been many meetings with senior industry figures and representatives from training organisations and educational establishments. The ITTP has received supp...

Submitted by graham reed

Published 19 October 2017

Realising the ideal

On 26 July 1916 there was a public meeting in New York. It was called by a group led by Charles Francis Jenkins (and more on him in a moment). But the guest speaker was Henry D Hubbard, at the time the secretary of the US National Bureau of Standards. This is some of what he said: "Interchangeability of parts is an important principle of standardis...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 24 August 2016

FBI Interview

This issue we chat with Ann Charles, a freelance Broadcast Technology and radio production consultant. Give us your elevator pitch. Who are you and what do you do?Hello, I'm Ann Charles and I'm a Radio Production and Technology Consultant. I help individuals and companies get the most out of their station's technology so they can make the best prog...

Submitted by Ann Charles

Published 22 July 2016

Education meets industry...

by Bernard Newnham Issue 98 - February 2015 Heatherden Hall - the most famous country house you\'ve never heard of. Famous because it has appeared in large numbers of British films from Goldfinger to Carry on Camping. Why? Because it\'s the original building at the UK\'s premier film studio - Pinewood. A fitting place, then, to hold a conference on...

Submitted by Bernard Newnham

Published 01 March 2015

Time out

by Dick Hobbs Issue 97 - January 2015 Charles Holland Duell, United States Commissioner of Patents from 1898 to 1901, is supposed to have said "Everything that can be invented has been invented". It is pretty certain that this is a completely apocryphal story, of course, but it sticks in the memory. In fact, we have a verified quotation from him wh...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 February 2015

ITTP Conference

by Graham Reed Issue 96 - December 2014 Plans are coming along very well for the 2015 Conference of the Institute of Training in TV Production, ITTP. The conference held last January at Pinewood Studios was a great success with many high profile speakers and there was also much lively debate between session panel members and the delegates. Since th...

Submitted by graham reed

Published 01 January 2015

Does lack of training produce inaudible sound

by John Barlow Issue 89 - May 2014 Jamaica Inn just happens to be the latest example of a mainstream TV drama production being broadcast with inaudible dialogue. The reasons vary from production to production but the end result is always an enormous waste of both acting and technical talent along with immense swathes of production budgets. Was it a...

Submitted by John Barlow

Published 01 June 2014

No more pizza for Dick Hobbs!

A couple of months ago I used this column to talk about geeks and nerds. Our industry depends upon them, whether we like it or not. Re-reading the article, I was struck by the fact that I quoted four people in the article (five if you count Christian Louboutin). All were male. According to a recent survey just 17% of the people in the technology se...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2013

Putting the Realism into Reality Television

“Reality television’ as a category of programming emerged in the late 1990s with the introduction of shows that attempted to portray real people responding to real challenges under more or less continual public gaze. Unlike sport, where the focus is primarily on physical skills and endurance, reality television shows place their participants in a w...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2012

tv-bay questions

Name & Title?Eugene McCrystal, owner of EMC Post Production in DublinWho are you? (about yourself and who you work for)?I have been working in the broadcast and film industry for over 20 years. I started my career as an engineer with Carlton Television but quickly transitioned within Carlton to online editor. In 2004, I co-founded EGG Post Producti...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 June 2011