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Day one at this year's EBU Technical Assembly took delegates from space-dives and private clouds to data-mining and couch potatoes, and a lot more besides.

Around 110 technology leaders from public service media organizations have gathered at the Bayerischer Rundfunk HQ in Munich for the event. It opened with a look at how the host broadcaster is transforming itself into a tri-media company. The integration project "BR hoch drei" is helping BR get in shape for the media landscape that lies ahead.

Andreas Gall's (pictured above with EBU Technology & Innovation Director Lieven Vermaele) keynote presentation, which was interesting, inspiring and at times provocative, outlined his vision for "giving wings" to content and technology. As CTO of Red Bull Media House he has clear ideas on how a modern media company should operate - and he believes public service media can and should embrace new ways of producing and distributing content. The footage he showed from Felix Baumgartner's record-breaking space-dive clearly showed the power that media has to provoke emotional responses.

Righfully proud

The Proud to Present session was an hour-long showcase of projects from around Europe, with seven short, sharp presentations. To mention just three examples, there was RTVE's UHDTV pilot in Spain, SRG-SSR's use of a private cloud infrastructure as a multimedia playout centre, and SVT's impressive online open archive.

The multiplatform challenge

The TA focuses primarily on matters of strategic importance. Thus the afternoon session brought together four presentations under the broad theme of "multiplatform, from production to distribution". The BBC's Oliver Bartlett explained how open and linked data sources can used by broadcasters to get more value out of their media assets. He used the excellent example of how using linked data allowed the BBC to create thousands of webpages automatically during last year's Olympics.

Next up, Klaus Illgner of the IRT research centre outlined a vision of fully networked media production and made a plea for EBU Members to join the on-going standardization efforts in this field. He was followed by Darko Ratkaj of the EBU, who broke down the media distribution chain in a way that revealed where the real value lies for the various stakeholders.

The day came to a close with Sarah Pearson of 1-3-9 Media Lab, a project that uses in-home cameras to observe and analyse how users are consuming media on multiple screens. The footage she showed was at times amusing, at times a little disturbing, but always intriguing. It certainly showed that the reality of a multiplatform world has arrived.