BAFTA wins government funding for online video project

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has won funding for a new project that aims to solve issues with the quality of online video.

Resolving Visual Quality for Media (REVQUAL) is a project overseen by BAFTA Research, a commercial business unit operating within the organisation, which aims to help audiences receive high quality video online and help producers ensure each distribution route is consistent.

The funding has come from the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

It follows BAFTA’s success in the Technology Strategy Board’s ‘Cross-platform Production in Digital Media’ competition and will see BAFTA Research receive a share of £30m ($50m) funding that will directly support REVQUAL.

BAFTA Research will lead the project, supported by University College London (UCL) and Film London. It follows BAFTA’s previous work in visual quality assessment and builds on past research conducted in collaboration with UCL.

The project will run for two years from late spring this year.

According to BAFTA, REVQUAL will “innovate an automated service – a ‘web crawler’ – that continuously improves content owners’ networked video to generate the best possible versions for viewing.”

BAFTA said it hoped it will become an essential part of online quality control as video compression standards, bandwidth availability, and mobile and other platforms continue to evolve.

An ‘open dataset’ of human responses to quality, presented as a series of reference videos, will also be created help all researchers concerned with visual quality.

Kevin Price, BAFTA Chief Operating Officer, said “Technology research is a relatively new activity within our 67-year history. We are very pleased the Technology Strategy Board will be supporting our latest project, which allows the Academy to provide innovations that benefit the industry as a whole.”

Pam Fisher, BAFTA Research Manager, added “REVQUAL will help us meet the needs of customers using our technology, addressing concerns about preserving visual quality throughout the workflow, from the point of content creation through to viewer presentation.”