With great sadness and sense of personal loss, I have to report that Johnny died on 3rd April 2008 in Norwich. He had been ill for some time undergoing treatment for a tumour after earlier successful treatment for cancer. Our deepest sympathies go to his wife Sandy and to Jasper, Barnaby and Nicholas. His funeral was held at St Peter and St Pauls Church, Heydon on 15th April when the church was filled to bursting with friends from all walks of life. Tributes from his many fans are echoing on the internet - notably of course amongst fans of the Dr.Who and Space:1999 series as well as the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small and Heartbeat which made such an impact in the 1980's, 1990's and the early part of this century. His work continues to be repeated throughout the world on cable and other TV channels. We miss him dearly.
Robin Back and Johnny Byrne started the company in 1989 to make interactive stories for television initially hosted on CD-i. Our first published CD-i title was "Anne Willan presents the Food of France". When it was first released in 1992 in the USA, it broke new ground with animated DYUV sequences, attract-mode programming, and interactive credits. BEPL was credited with its first EMMA award in recognition of these achievements.
In 1995 we ventured into the PC-CDROM retail market with the DSA Driving Skills manual. This contained the entire Highway Code and also included the newly introduced theory test. This was presented in the form of a randomly generated interactive tests, performed in a realtime environment and cross referenced to the Highway Code. This product was particularly complex because of its sheer size; there were over 250,000 cross-linked texts, 100's of video, audio and animation clips.
More recently, professional Windows development has become our speciality. Successful involvement in the production of interactive retail products for major publishers, bespoke training software, kiosk software, shell programmes and web site design has enabled us to stay at the forefront of technology.
We believe that cutting edge production should be independent of technology; all too often clients are frustrated by the limited development tools available. We have solved many of these problems by listening to our clients and designing tools specifically 'to do the job'!
In 1997, we developed and remade a CD-i promotion disc for Antec International, who are important suppliers of pesticides, virucides and disinfectants to the agricultural industry worldwide. Various foreign language versions have been added including Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin chinese. Of particular note was the creation of a Website Index - not a search engine but a real index and thus much quicker to locate things. Another first for Antec and in regular use on their site.
In 1998 Java became a viable option for software developers. This allowed us to create true platform independent products. The first result was Linguist, a scripting tool for Java engineers to make multimedia and other programmes. Used to create a medical training disc, Linguist manages video, audio and text databases which combine to offer a real interactive experience.
In 1999, CD-i refused to die despite numerous funerals. This platform was used to make an interactive discovery game for PwC called 'Pursue'. Mixing of real-time video laid over virtual reality office environments called for new programming techniques, not to mention video-making.
Later on in the year we became involved in making the Nexus set of Games for Sky TV. Broadcast on the digital channel and compered by the inimitable Brian Blessed these were counted a great success. To such an extent that we remade them at the end of the year for the .tv Sky website.
2000, The M...Year. Everybody held their breath and nothing happened - well nothing major anyway. The applet/servlet versions of the Nexus games went live on Sky's .tv website as planned in February and whilst the programme was on air received an impressive number of hits - we're told. We also gathered another 30 episodes of the show were filmed using the original software. In the nature of television however, it quickly moved on and we have not seen hair nor hide of it for months. It may have been one of Sky's cutback casualties.
Also in 2000, after extensive use on CD-i, we remade 'Pursue' on DVD-ROM. The PC is much more demanding of image and video quality than a TV set so much of the backgound graphics and virtual reality work was redone. The underlying engine is Linguist, incorporating a number of JMF classes to handle media. The DVD platform itself cannot handle a tenth of the interactivity of CD-i so the DVD-ROM route was chosen but with DVD video quality.
Since the millennium, so many global events have affected business generally that it is little short of a miracle so many of us have survived. BEPL remains in business and continues to develop new concepts. The large interactive projects of yore were a casualty of events in September 2001 and the resulting immediate and swingeing budget cuts amongst our client base. Some have indeed since dismantled whole divisions with whom we dealt.
There are however, signs of future life as systems age and business requirements move on. Currently we are promoting a secure network concept called SPRUCETM. This allows self-contained networks to operate using internet links but without browsers. The elements of this new project are mature programming constructs with added security elements allowing a far higher degree of control than previously believed possible. For further details please write or email us for further information
We also 'do' websites and have been managing online databases for Antec International (now DuPont Animal Health Solutions) until January 2008 when the databases were finaly taken in-house by DuPont's IT team.
For details of all our many and varied projects please look in our PROJECTS HISTORY section.