Next month's EBU Technical Assembly will open with a keynote presentation on how content and technology can come together in new and innovative ways. Andreas Gall (pictured), a former technical director of Austrian public broadcaster ORF, will explain how Red Bull Media House, where he is the chief technology officer, has built a 360-degree media business on the back of a brand that has a reputation for pushing the boundaries.

Taking last year's Red Bull Stratos project as a case study, Mr Gall will explain how an event - in this case a record-breaking space-dive by Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner - can be packaged to serve a range of different devices and contexts. It wasn't just the dive itself that broke records: the live YouTube stream achieved around 8m concurrent views, smashing the previous record. But the event also had a strong presence on "traditional" platforms, being carried live by more than 80 linear TV channels around the world.

Strategic Focus

The keynote session is just one of a number of sessions at TA 2013 that will investigate the strategic implications of the changing media technology landscape. The challenges of producing and distributing content for multiple platforms will be addressed in Thursday afternoon's strategic focus session. Aspects considered will include semantic web, networked production, the distribution value chain, and how media consumption patterns are changing.

On Friday morning the focus will shift to the importance of standards, whether for broadcasting, video coding, broadband streaming, or app development. The impact of new software-based and open source approaches to technology development will also be explored.

TA 2013

The EBU Technical Assembly 2013 is hosted by the public broadcaster of the German state of Bavaria, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR). More than 100 delegates are expected, coming from around Europe and beyond. The TA is the most senior EBU body in the technical domain, consisting of the technical directors of all EBU Members, and the annual gathering presents a valuable opportunity to share experiences and discuss the challenges facing public service media.