March 2022 - The Corporate Partnership Programme in action: BT-Pembroke Internships
Our Corporate Partners access various benefits through participation in Pembroke's Corporate Partnership Programme, including access to University research, bespoke events, and a wealth of other opportunities. For our March blog, BT's Sarah Mackenzie discusses their experience hosting two student interns from Pembroke College within the BT Applied Research team in summer 2021.
BT are corporate members of Pembroke College Cambridge. As part of the relationship with Pembroke, we host summer interns within BT Applied Research.
Last summer, we hosted two interns - Luke Hawksworth and Pranav Talluri – who spent 3 months with the BT Applied Research team investigating how cloud-based media services, such as those provided by AWS, could enable Object-Based Broadcasting (OBB) to provide personalised experiences to the widest range of devices and reduce the cost of bringing them to market. One of the placements was kindly funded by Professor Mike Payne, Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge.
During their internships, they worked together to build an end-to-end demonstration in which multiple video streams and graphics could be assembled by a programmatically-controlled cloud vision mixer, creating a single output stream which was delivered into an OBB application running on a client device.
They also extended Applied Research’s existing OBB platform with a capability detection service which determines whether a particular device requires a cloud-rendered stream, and worked with BT Sport colleagues to test how the state-of-the-art NDI protocol could be used to contribute live broadcast streams into AWS.
At the end of their internship, Luke and Pranav gave a fantastic presentation and demo to an audience of over 30 BT colleagues and stakeholders, live-streamed from the TV Lab at Adastral Park.
Their presentation was attended by a range of broadcast technology experts including BT Sport Chief Engineer, Andy Beale, and Mobile Strategy Director, Matt Stagg, all of whom were very impressed with what they had achieved. Luke and Pranav’s project has helped Applied Research to build momentum on new research in this area, which is highly relevant to BT Sport and our Media and Broadcast business.
“During the internship with BT, we managed to successfully achieve our end goal of evaluating cloud technologies and platforms for use in Object Based Broadcasting (OBB)," said Luke. “This involved many stages of progression, beginning from understanding the essentials of media transcoding and live content delivery, to considering the economical aspects of the required setup, finally leading to our proof of concept prototype showing off the full pipeline. Overall I have really enjoyed my time with BT and have learnt a lot from the various teams we collaborated with on this project throughout the summer. It has been invaluable in getting a taste of what real world applied research entails and is a route I am now keen to pursue.”
“My experience at BT has been amazing,” said Pranav. “I am thankful for the great people that I worked with over the course of the internship. I especially found it useful to get a better understanding of a research-based role. Before the placement, I imagined that a career in research would be very academic, but I found that there were lots of opportunities for more hands-on work as well.
“I was given real problems to solve that will go on to help BT’s ongoing effort to innovate. I worked on evaluating cloud technologies for delivering a new technology called Object Based Broadcasting, which gave me the opportunity to develop a range of skills, including working on and with AWS. The internship concluded with a presentation, live from Adastral Park, on the proof of concept we developed and our findings on the suitability of the technologies we evaluated. I would definitely recommend this placement to others and will definitely consider coming back to BT.”
Ian Kegel, whose team in BT hosted the students, added that: “This is the first time I have worked with Pembroke to recruit internship students, and it has turned out to be one of the most successful internship projects in my team to date. Luke and Pranav worked really well together, enthusiastically developing new skills to help them address a range of technical challenges. The Proof of Concept they created has helped to move our research forward and has a had a very positive impact on our key stakeholders within BT.”
Professor Mike Payne, who funded one of the internships, reflected that: “Over the years, many of my Pembroke physics students have benefitted enormously from BT Internships. When I saw the description for the Object-Based Broadcasting project last year I thought it was a wonderful project and definitely an opportunity for more than one student. As a result, I used my own funds to support the second internship for Luke to work alongside Pranav. I am absolutely delighted by their achievements.”
Overall this was a hugely successful and rewarding experience for both BT and the Pembroke students, and demonstrates the mutual benefit provided by participation in the Pembroke Corporate Partnership Programme.