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SEPTEMBER 2019

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CONTENT

SHE’S NOT THE MESSIAH… SHE’S JUST THE EDITOR

Editor: Jenny Priestley jenny.priestley@futurenet.com Staff Writer: Dan Meier dan.meier@futurenet.com Graphic Designer: Marc Miller marc.miller@futurenet.com Managing Design Director: Nicole Cobban nicole.cobban@futurenet.com

’m always really pleased when we can celebrate our broadcasting heritage within the pages of TVBEurope and this month I’m really delighted to have a show that’s 50 years old as our cover star. While we spend a lot of time looking towards the future and the latest technologies, sometimes I think it’s important to stop for a minute and celebrate what we’ve achieved so far. Without Monty Python’s Flying Circus so many of the comedy series that we’ve all grown up with wouldn’t have made it on to our screens. And really the show was quite groundbreaking with its use of animation thanks to the genius of Terry Gilliam. I do wonder sometimes whether it would make it on air in the current broadcast climate, or would it find a home on a streamer that’s

Contributors: George Jarrett, Philip Stevens, Mark Layton Group Content Director, B2B: James McKeown

new VAR technology that has got all football fans talking, the team from IBM Watson explain how AI technology is providing bespoke information and technology services to both Wimbledon and the US Open tennis tournaments, and we hear how Sky Sports offered a new perspective during their coverage of golf ’s The Open. Elsewhere in this issue, Philip Stevens travels to Albert Square to kick off a new series looking at continuing dramas - or the soaps as we say in our house; we go behind the scenes on Peaky Blinders to hear from the show’s production sound mixer about how to hide microphones in ladies nighties! And, we take a look at the current outlook for the broadcast and technology industry with contributions from Kagan and Ernst & Young.

‘Sport and the way it continues to push technological boundaries remains a huge topic of interest to the broadcast industry.’ more minded to invest in left-field content? Anyway, 2019 marks the original BBC series’ 50th anniversary and to celebrate the shows have been painstakingly restored and upscaled to HD for a new DVD release. Dan Meier talks to restoration colourist Jonathan Wood and sound editor André Jacquemin about their work on the project. As always, sport and the way it continues to push technological boundaries remains a huge topic of interest to the broadcast industry. This month we take a look at the

Finally, to quote Keats, now is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness - or just autumn. I don’t know about you, but I am ready for it. Autumn to me is nights drawing in, Saturday evenings in front of the TV, and of course our annual trip to Amsterdam for IBC. I’m not quite sure whether I’m ready for the madness of IBC, but I say bring it on! I hope to see you there. n

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All contents © 2019 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price of products/services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsible for their contents or any other changes or updates to them. This magazine is fully independent and not affiliated in any way with the companies mentioned herein. If you submit material to us, you warrant that you own the material and/or have the necessary rights/permissions to supply the material and you automatically grant Future and its licensees a licence to publish your submission in whole or in part in any/all issues and/or editions of publications, in any format published worldwide and on associated websites, social media channels and associated products. Any material you submit is sent at your own risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future nor its employees, agents, subcontractors or licensees shall be liable for loss or damage. We assume all unsolicited material is for publication unless otherwise stated, and reserve the right to edit, amend, adapt all submissions.

JENNY PRIESTLEY, EDITOR

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 3

IN THIS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2019

07 Delivering broadcast- quality live sports for OTT

Harmonic’s Thierry Fautier tackles the challenges of sport streaming

12 Candid photography

Monty Python’s Flying Circus takes flight for its 50th anniversary

20 A spectrum of hybrid models George Jarrett meets Masstech CEO George Kilpatrick

24 Adding haptics to the user experience

Densitron’s Martyn Gates touches on haptics technology

32 A peek behind the curtain

Production sound mixer Stu Wright discusses his work on Peaky Blinders

36 Predicting an uncertain future

Martyn Whistler from Ernst & Young surveys the content distribution landscape

54 Next question: what makes a good game show? Philip Stevens asks the million-pound question

60 On set with EastEnders

The first chapter of Philip Stevens’ new series on soaps

78 3D vision

Jenny Priestley flags up MRMC’s role in Sky’s golf coverage for The Open

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Why British broadcasters can no longer afford to ignore niche sports By Charlie Horrell, CEO, Imagen Ltd

hile traditional sports such as football, rugby and cricket remain popular among UK audiences, in recent years, we have seen an increasing number of Brits gaining an interest in alternative or niche sports. Thanks to the internet, it’s not uncommon for people to be fans of everything, from korfball to handball, and now there are more than 13 million NFL fans in the UK. Although, despite the internet informing Brits about these sports, unlike traditional sports that are regularly broadcast on free-to-air TV channels, fans of these more niche sports are often unable to actually watch the action. With such a large audience of niche sports fans ripe for the taking, ignoring this valuable market is a missed opportunity for broadcasters. So, how can UK broadcasters tap into the ready-made audiences for alternative sports and what will be the benefits of doing so? STREAMING SPORTS The way audiences consume and follow sports has changed dramatically with Google’s Sports Viewing Survey finding that 30 per cent of sports fans have live streamed sporting events on their smartphones or tablets. This demonstrates that the traditional method of broadcasting sports on regular free-toair channels is not the only option available to broadcasters and streaming sports could be the way to satisfy niche sports enthusiasts while continuing to offer the standard service on their main channels. In recent months, we have seen the BBC make use of this method by streaming the Korfball National League final on BBC iPlayer and extra Wimbledon coverage on its ‘red button’ feature. This has allowed the BBC to continue broadcasting its regular content for existing viewers, while also attracting fans of korfball, for example, to its online platform. It’s not just national broadcasters who could benefit from this model, as shown by US-based streaming service FloSports, which has made streaming niche sports its USP and now streams up to 10,000 live sporting events a year. As a result, the platform has been able to market itself to the underserved who are looking to follow their local team, rather than a national

06 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

club, for example. Streaming sporting events online would allow broadcasters to continue to serve mainstream audiences on their main channels, while also catering to niche sports audiences. Additionally, it may allow them to grow their audience base further by attracting viewers who have yet to hear of certain sports. DEVELOPING A CONTENT PLATFORM An alternative way to tap into the niche sports audience is through creating a bespoke content platform, something which the NFL has done successfully with ‘NFL Game Pass’. This is also an approach adopted by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) after popularity increased and more than half a million viewers tuned in for table tennis events at the 2016 Olympic Games. In order to capitalise on this growing interest and make the most of the content it had accumulated over the years, the ITTF worked with Imagen to create a centralised video archive. Not only do content platforms allow organisations like the ITTF to share their content, but it also meant they can use footage to create marketing materials and increase awareness of the sport among both existing enthusiasts and new, younger audiences. As viewing habits have changed, so too have the models adopted by broadcasters - we only have to look at the BBC and ITV joining forces to create the upcoming subscription service Britbox to see that. However, despite being a highly lucrative market, niche sports audiences have largely been ignored along the way. As competition increases among broadcasters and new streaming platforms emerge, broadcasters must begin to develop offerings to cater to this audience, with implementing an online content platform among the most effective approaches. With the internet continuing to introduce new UK audiences to niche sports and as society becomes ever-more multicultural, tapping into these audiences at this stage will provide broadcasters with the opportunity to increase their scope and reap the rewards of having an entirely new audience at its disposal. n

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Delivering broadcast-quality live sports for OTT By Thierry Fautier, vice president of video strategy, Harmonic

ive sports streaming is a hot topic. According to eMarketer, in the next three to five years, worldwide revenues from sports digital media rights will grow by 11.5 per cent compared with traditional TV rights at 3.2 per cent. Until recently, live sports streaming experiences were limited to the second screen (i.e. PCs and smartphones), but with the advent of connected TVs and BYOD settop boxes (STBs) such as Roku players, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Android TV, live OTT content is now delivered to the first screen. As a result, live sports streaming sessions have gotten longer and are now available in higher quality, nearly matching that of broadcast. For live sports experiences, consumers expect exceptional video quality, without buffering. The delay for live video streaming must be on par with broadcast. This article analyses how those targets can be reached and what type of infrastructure needs to be deployed Compression is the engine of ABR delivery. The lower the bitrate, the easier it is to deliver unicast streams to devices with the highest QoE. One of the biggest challenges operators face when delivering live sports streaming content is that with low bitrates, the quality suffers thereby degrading the viewer’s quality of experience. Using the most advanced codec, such as HEVC, can help resolve this issue; unfortunately, the current licensing terms have slowed down deployments. That being said, recent reports show that by 2019, 63 per cent of operators will have an HEVC service deployed. In June 2017, Apple announced that it will support the video compression standard across all of its platforms, including Mac, Safari, Apple TV and iOS11. This announcement is expected to help HEVC gain significant traction, since iOS traffic counts for about half of all video streaming over the internet. In the meantime, to deal with the HEVC licensing problem, some companies have developed what Netflix calls “per-tile encoding” for VoD content. The industry at large has now defined this approach as “content-aware encoding (CAE),” and the technology supports both VoD and live applications. CAE received a huge blessing from Apple when the company announced support of VBR for VoD and live encoding in iOS11 in 2017. CDNs can easily scale to support the biggest live sports events. In India, CDNs supported more than 20 million concurrent users during

IPL cricket games, proving that they are up for the challenge. To be efficient, a CDN needs to have adequate streaming capacity as well as servers located as close as possible to the clients. Some CDNs perform better than others during certain times of the day and in certain locations, which explains why CDN selector technology has been well received by the industry. Building CDNs inside of the operator’s network, using either offthe-shelf technology from CDN vendors or technology developed by the operator itself, is another way to improve OTT delivery. When video traffic is overloaded on the server, which is possible during a major sports event, it can be offloaded to commercial CDNs. Caching servers are located closest to the subscriber to ensure the best QoE. The drawback of this approach is that it is capex- and opex-intensive, as the operator needs to deploy the network and manage the CDN 24/7. In order to provide a delay comparable to broadcast, a low-latency encoding solution is a must. Current OTT encoding systems produce a latency of more than 30 seconds. To tackle this issue, MPEG CMAF is a new format that not only reduces latency for OTT but also solves scalability issues. MPEG-CMAF is based on fMP4 (ISOBMFF) and can be used by both MPEG-DASH and HLS delivery formats. What’s even better, MPEG CMAF includes a low-latency chunk (LLC) option that enables operators to deliver a segment by small chunks (e.g. 200 ms) before the full segment is calculated. In 2018, Harmonic conducted numerous live video streaming trials with MPEG CMAF LLC, measuring a latency of between 6.5 and 9 seconds over a variety of deployment environments (i.e. on-premise, private Cloud, public Cloud), networks (i.e. managed and unmanaged) and types of access (i.e. fixed and wireless). Using CAE, CDN optimisation methods and MPEG CMAF LLC as their baseline, operators can deliver a superior-quality live OTT sports experience at scale. Other proprietary techniques exist, such as peer-to-peer and client acceleration, that can provide additional gains. Open caching, being specified by the Streaming Video Alliance, brings the edge cache within the ISP network and will increase the QoE at the expense of additional infrastructure costs (i.e. Capex and Opex). n

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 07

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

True IP interoperability: the importance of NMOS to AoIP By Dave Letson, Calrec’s VP of Sales

s our industry hurtles towards interoperability, those with their sights on the future are trying hard to play together. AES67 and SMPTE 2011030 have given us a common language, but what are we doing to manage the transition? As we all know, AoIP has been discussed for many years across both TV and radio, with deployments well underway. Radio stations have been leading the way and have been ahead of TV broadcasters for years; the BBC’s Virtual Local Radio (ViLoR) project is a landmark example of this. This is partly because the radio world’s relationship with IP has no need for video and has more static routing of signals. But in radio it has tended to be manufacturers’ proprietary IP protocols, which means they are using AoIP solutions that are vendor specific. This isn’t the promised land of true IP interoperability with all the advantages that brings. Meanwhile, from a TV point of view, a Calrec console has to interface with, for example, a Riedel comms system, Grass Valley switchers and Evertz routing, which brings added complexity. One of the key touted benefits of moving to IP is the ability to use existing network infrastructures and COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) hardware. Customers want to be able to pass audio, video, control and other data over shared IP networks, and they want to use open standards to do so between devices made by different manufacturers. Standardised IP connectivity eradicates much of the cost, space, system complexity and cabling overhead of having a multitude of interfaces for analogue, AES3, MADI, SDI, etc. This is the goal of both

AES67 and ST2110. Additionally, broadcasters can future-proof their systems by moving to COTS equipment. Manufacturers have jumped on AES67 and its implementation. But it’s still not easy to integrate AoIP systems from multiple manufacturers. An interesting article published last year by Solent University (UK) described a presentation by BBC Research and Development looking at AoIP and the future of radio. Presenter Jamie Laundon explained that interoperability is key, and central to this is AES67, which has been added to ST2110 to create ST2110-30. But what many don’t fully understand is that this only addresses the transport layer, not device discovery/registration on a network, connection management or network control. This is where NMOS comes in. Calrec believes that the continued development and adoption of NMOS is vital in the deployment of IP-based systems. Currently, customers have to configure all the streams that they want to output from a given device. A user – or more likely an engineer - has to login through the UI of that device to do this. If a station wants to receive the streams on another device, that device also has to be configured. Without advertisement, the other device doesn’t know that stream exists. An engineer has to manually key in the Session Description Protocol (SDP), which describes a media stream: what and where it is. Currently there’s no automated or standardised mechanism to exchange SDPs; control and management is not factored into AES67 or ST2110-30. However, there are various methods of doing it, each one dependent on different manufacturers. NMOS standardises that across all devices and allows

‘Broadcasters have been demanding IP interoperability for years...we mustn’t back away from it.’ 08 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

OPINION AND ANALYSIS it to be managed centrally. Streams are advertised, so a user can go to a mixing desk, see all the streams and select what they want to receive. A single PC application can also be used to make these stream connections. This provides the ability to use an IP network as a router without having to go from device to device, login, configure and select. Doing it manually generally means engineers are needed to set it all up. It all needs testing and bedding in, and then it tends to be the case that the setup isn’t touched after that, leaving all these static streams. NMOS allows the dynamic routing of the streams. That’s interesting for a number of reasons. It’s much cheaper because it makes it possible to use the IP network as the router rather than having to buy a bespoke audio router, and it allows COTS technologies to be used rather than bespoke equipment. Broadcasters have been demanding IP interoperability for years although as an industry adoption has been slow; but we mustn’t back away from it. With Calrec’s IP-native modular Type R radio system and ImPulse IP Core, discovery and management were central to the design from the outset, and we believe that NMOS is vital in the push towards true AoIP interoperability. We took onboard customer desire for interoperability and COTS IP equipment. It is the future. We are committed to being fully interoperable, making as many vendors as possible compatible with our technology. n

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Mind the gap between ASR and broadcast transcription requirements By Dom Bourne, founder, Take 1

started creating transcriptions for the broadcast industry in the same year that Google was launched. In the 20 years since then we’ve progressed from transcribing VHS dubs and biking them back to Soho to file-based workflows and instant global delivery. In that same time, transcriptions have gone from being used solely to prepare paper edits to becoming the cornerstone of international content delivery, used to inform the entire localisation process and to create everything from translations to subtitles, captions, dubs and audio descriptions. Never has there been a greater demand for broadcast transcriptions. The popularity of high-shoot-ratio, reality programming means more producers are transcribing rushes to prepare for edit, and the explosion of video platforms has created a global marketplace where localisation is a key part of the production process. While the industry has relied on humans to manually transcribe broadcast content to date, the growing demand has spurred efforts to develop an automated solution to bring down costs and speed up workflows. Enter AI and, specifically, automatic speech recognition. You don’t need me to tell you that AI is a hot topic at the moment, and automatic speech recognition is an application of AI that has the potential to fundamentally change how we produce broadcast transcriptions. Until recently, machine-generated transcriptions didn’t meet the high-quality standards broadcast workflows demand, but improvements in the quality of ASR outputs have seen a growth in the adoption of this technology, particularly in generating subtitles for live and online video content. There’s no question that transcriptions created by humans are still more accurate, but the gap is closing. Contrary to popular belief, however, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a future for human transcribers in broadcast. In the short term we’ll need humans to edit ASR-generated transcripts to bring them up to broadcast standards. If producers need to search pre-edit transcripts, or if the transcript is being used for content localisation or access services, then they need to be highly accurate and ASR is not yet able to meet these standards. Based on our tests with a leading producer and broadcaster using an industry-preferred ASR system, it’s still more costly to edit ASR outputs than it is to use a human workforce throughout - but these scales

10 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

will tip as the quality of ASR improves. A hybrid workflow is the next stage in the evolution of transcription for broadcast. In addition, localisation relies on more than just audio transcriptions. The post production (or as-broadcast) script that informs international delivery is made up of a set of data that can include audio transcriptions, speaker lists, screen captions, graphics and credits, shot descriptions and music cues. While ASR technology may be able to provide the audio transcription, the other elements are more complex and will need to be created by a team of people. But ASR isn’t the only way that technology can make transcription and localisation workflows more efficient. What we do with the transcription data is as important as how we produce transcriptions in the first place. Post production scripts contain valuable metadata which can serve many different functions and workflows, but they’re typically produced as Word documents for delivery to the primary broadcaster. Take1 creates the post production script in XML instead, providing the ability to re-purpose the original data into the various scripts and reports needed throughout the entire content supply chain. With metadata in an XML file, we can convert the post production script from a single-purpose document into the blueprint for the entire localisation process. If we go one step further and include this XML version of the post production script in the IMF package for delivery, this can be rendered into speaker lists, speaker word-counts and other datasets at the touch of a button. There’s a lot of debate about the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the industry of the future, and there’s little doubt that the way transcriptions are created will be affected by this technology over time, but I believe it’s the data within these transcriptions that holds the key to making future workflows more efficient. This belief has prompted Take 1 to develop Liberty – a system which converts transcriptions into XML metadata so that it can be repurposed into the various documents and reports needed throughout the global content production workflow. We believe that Liberty can change the future of localisation by deriving data once and applying it throughout the value chain – which may sound like a lofty ideal until you remember that we’ve been doing this as long as Google. n

Dan Meier asks restoration colourist Jonathan Wood and sound editor André Jacquemin (knowingly) about their work on Monty Python’s 50th anniversary releases

alf a century ago, Monty Python crashed onto British TV screens like a giant animated foot. To celebrate 50 years since Flying Circus took off on BBC1 back in October 1969, the Pythons are launching a selection of items and events including a film season at the BFI, a commemorative “Very Silly” IPA and a world record attempt for the “largest gathering of people dressed as Gumbys.” Closer to reality, all 45 episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus will be released on limited-edition Blu-ray

12 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

and DVD, along with unseen and excised footage. All four series are being painstakingly restored and upscaled to HD by Network Distributing, a complicated process that’s enough to make anyone’s brain hurt. “I can see why this hasn’t been done before, because it’s a huge task. It’s a real jigsaw puzzle mix of existing material,” explains restoration colourist Jonathan Wood. “You’ve got the original quad tapes, you’ve got 16 millimetre film, you’ve got neg and prints, you’ve got 35 millimetre, you’ve

FEATURE got some bits only available in NTSC, you’ve got some film recording that we’re doing colour recovery on, we’ve got everything you can think of. And that’s not unexpected because that is the era of the material. It just means it’s a very complicated puzzle to put together.” Network’s task involves scanning, transferring and upscaling all this footage, but not before cleaning up the SD material. “Most people have got a flat-screen TV on the wall - it’s either HD or 4K, it’s a big screen,” says Wood. “These programmes are made in the era where it’s a 20inch tube telly in the corner of the room. And the trouble is if you take those raw tapes and you just upscale them and put them on one of these modern screens, you’re going to see all the faults. You’re going to see all the noise, the dropouts, the flashes, the field phase errors, chroma errors, all sorts of things. And that’s not what it’s about; this is about getting the best presentation of these episodes as possible in a highdefinition format. “When you’ve dealt with the faults, you’ve got rid of the flashes, the dropout, the dirt, you may have improved the colour, what you’re left with is just the performance,” he continues. “The original video tapes and everything else is the carrier. It’s just the medium by which the performance was brought to the viewer. If you can clean that up then that’s what you’re watching. You’ll never be disturbed by, ‘Oh what was that flash there, oh look at the dirt all over that.’” He also notes the “intrinsically SD” nature of videotape, meaning the restored shows will not look as good as the latest 4K blockbusters. “But you can improve it hopefully to a degree where it’s not a shocking contrast. The whole idea of this is to present the episodes in the best quality possible.” That the complete set of tapes even still exists is “amazing” to Wood, given the BBC’s propensity to reuse tapes in the ‘60s and ‘70s, let alone the survival of unaired footage originally cut for timing or censorship reasons. “There will be quite a good amount of content that possibly most people are unfamiliar with, which have just been languishing in a can or wherever, unseen until now.” There are also formatting issues to consider in dealing with film that’s not dead but has been resting for 50 years, as Wood explains: “We’re finding that they sometimes make use of polygon telecine which was a particular type around in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And the trouble with that is that often for one reason or another it wasn’t fully frame locked, so you end up then having film frames smeared across different video frames. So in trying to clean up the

dirt from that, if you haven’t got the film and you’re having to work from tape it’s extremely difficult because the dirt then appears on more than one frame. So those sequences are not good to work on. If you get something like that episode it’s going to take considerably longer to clean up.” The restoration retains the original broadcast’s 4x3 aspect ratio, in “pillarbox” HD, with black masking on either side. Wood describes looking at previous restorations of the series: “Because you’re dealing with analogue recordings, the line length in terms of the width of the picture changes quite considerably, sometimes between episodes, sometimes between scenes. And I think to standardise it previously they zoomed the picture and cropped to what are the standard dimensions. We decided we’re not doing that, we’re just filling the height of the picture so we have a clean top and bottom, but then we’re leaving the width to whatever it is on the original… it was made in 4x3 and stays in 4x3.” Wood adds that the brief from Python HQ was straightforward in terms of making the episodes as high quality as possible for 21st century viewing. “Terry Gilliam

PICTURED ABOVE: Michael Palin, Terry Jones and John Cleese

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 13

PICTURED ABOVE: Terry Jones and Eric Idle

came in the other day and I’m very pleased to say he was very happy with what he was seeing,” he notes. On the subject of Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s sound editor of 50 years André Jacquemin is full of praise. “Terry is brilliant to work with,” he says, having worked on a number of the director’s feature films, most recently The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. But now Jacquemin is back in Python mode for five new Radio 4 specials, executive produced by Michael Palin, and produced by Jacquemin assisted by James Peak, again featuring unheard material from the Monty Python sound archives. “We had to dig in and make a choice about what was available, what was left, what was unheard that was never released,” says Jacquemin. “But we thought what we’d like to do is to try and get some alternative versions of the originals, so we found a couple of those and somehow we made up the programmes. But it was certainly a bit of a research job to go back into the archive and many hours and hours of listening. “Then everything was put through with Mike [Palin] and I finished remixing the sketches so it was in some kind of good order and sounding as fresh as the day we originally recorded them,” he continues. “Once it went through the Mike process, we then emailed everybody in

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the Pythons and let them hear it and had their suggestions as well, which then had a few tweeks that the other Pythons made. So it’s pretty much a Python project.” He adds that the material “sounds like it was recorded yesterday - and the other weird thing which I felt very attached to was hearing Graham Chapman, and obviously Terry Jones has got a problem now as well, and just hearing how vibrant and how intuitive their performances were, and how brilliant they are; I miss their involvement dearly. And just the sheer quality of the stuff - not just in what they had written and performed, but actually in the quality of the recording. So in that sense, I think we did a really, really good job for it to stand the test of time, and actually the quality was there.” Sound editing has obviously changed considerably since then, and Jacquemin recalls co-writing the Life of Brian title music with Dave Howman: “Terry Gilliam said ‘I think it’s a bit long now so we better take a verse out.’ And we recorded the song on a 1-inch 8-track tape machine so we didn’t have any backup. I said to Terry, ‘You sure you want to cut this out? We should really copy the tape and have a backup in case something goes wrong with the razor blade when we slice the tape up.’ And he goes ‘Andre I trust you, just hack away.’ So I cut the verse out and

FEATURE

luckily it went alright, but had that gone wrong, we could have been in trouble because at least with digital, you can recall your mistakes. And on tape, if you don’t have a copy of something and it’s creased, damaged or the tape gets stretched, you’ve lost it.” Jacquemin was also keen to involve Gilliam in the radio project, a format incompatible with animation. “I wanted to get him involved in the process of the radio thing and I thought, ‘Well how do we do this?’” he says. “Without giving too many secrets away I managed to get Terry involved in the programmes, because I thought it’s a very important element, him being the animator more than one of the actors. So I came up with an idea for Terry which he loved so that worked out really well. “The thing about working with Terry is you have to get into Terry’s mind and you have to kind of try and stay one step ahead, which is unbelievably difficult,” he continues. “People do say a lot of times, ‘Oh god it must be chaos working with Terry, blah blah blah. And I actually find him so good, so talented, so original, and he’s a pussycat really in a way. And we get on obviously very well having worked together for 50 years now. I truly believe Terry is a genius.” He says the same of the Pythons as a group: “You have to kind of get into their heads. People say, ‘Oh Andre you must have had such a whale of a time when you were working with them and it must have been just a barrel of laughs.’ Well actually, it was a barrel of laughs, but it was quite a serious barrel of laughs. We had to concentrate very hard that we didn’t lose pace; everything was a little bit haphazard when we’re working because sometimes if we didn’t like a sketch or there was something we felt needed a little more work while recording, we would then jump to another sketch. But then they would say, ‘Let’s have a go at that other sketch’ and then you’d have to go back to the other sketch. So it’s quite a haphazard way of working and we obviously had to keep a strict list of where things are to be recalled at any moment.” Jacquemin recalls the last time Monty Python performed live together: “We were in the dressing room

and it was just amazing how when they’re together, there’s just something quite electric with them all. The atmosphere goes up about 20 notches, and it gets almost electrical blue because of the energy that’s in the air. It’s quite fascinating just to witness that. And you just realise how clever and how brilliant they are individually, but collectively, they’re an awesome force.” A 50th anniversary statement from the group themselves reads: “Python has survived because we live in an increasingly Pythonesque world. Extreme silliness seems more relevant now than it ever was.” It’s Jacquemin’s view that a Monty Python political party could be the solution. “They’ve all got their own very, very strong strengths, and I think they would have been a brilliant political party to sort our troubles out.” Would Minister of Silly Walks John Cleese’s views on Brexit and immigration not cause a People’s Front of Judea style fracture? “Well possibly, but interestingly enough I actually recorded Peter Mandelson’s autobiography, and as he was reading through his book I thought a lot of the stuff that was going on in the background of the Labour Party was unbelievably familiar. The difference was that with Python, there was always a result at the end of any dispute or discussion; they’d actually resolve something and they got something out of it. And that was the huge difference with Python, was that they’d always come up with a final answer to a query or a question or whatever. And that’s how we ended up I think doing such great stuff in the end, because we wouldn’t let anything go until we were happy with it. And I think that’s a big difference in how they operate.” Fair enough - if snakes can take over Westminster, why not Pythons?

PICTURED ABOVE: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

“It was quite a serious barrel of laughs.” ANDRÉ JACQUEMIN

Monty Python is turning 50 this year. For details of all the anniversary events and special releases, and to buy exclusive anniversary merchandise, visit http://www. montypython.com/. Monty Python’s Flying Circus: The Norwegian Blu-ray Edition box set is on sale from 4th November from Network Distributing. n

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 15

COVERING SPORT FROM ALL ANGLES

By Jenny Priestley

ver the summer TVBEurope launched a Summer of Sport series of podcasts. Each podcast covers a different area of sports broadcasting from dealing with rights, to production, to a new OTT service. Here follows some of the highlights from each one. THE RIGHTS NEGOTIATOR Eurovision Sport works with members of the European Broadcasting Union to deliver sport content across both traditional broadcast and digital platforms. As well as working on some of the major international events, Eurovision Sport covers some of the more niche sports. According to Eurovision Sport’s head of content and servicing Frank Choquard, the organisation’s main raison d’etre is to make sure that it acquires on behalf of the EBU members premium content from the sports market, to be broadcast European wide. “Regarding content and servicing, we have two main activities,” explains Choquard. “The first is being sure that we have an efficient and effective contract implementation, taking care of all of the issues on behalf of our broadcast

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partners, on behalf of the federations, and making sure we connect the dots. At the same time within this very fragmented market, and a landscape which is digital media nowadays, we also have to use the content of our contract as a great asset and to make sure that we really offer the best possible content experience to European viewers.” To that end, Eurovision Sport aims to have an “integrative approach” when it comes to the distribution of content. According to Choquard, it is that key driver for deciding if content should air on a premium linear channel such as BBC One, a dedicated sport linear channel or a digital platform. “The question should be how can I really personalise the experience of this content to my audience?” he says. As well as working on events such as this summer’s FIFA Women’s World Cup or major athletics championships which will always find a TV audience, how can Eurovision Sport work with smaller sports who don’t get those big primetime slots to find an audience? “I think, again, it’s one solution does not fit all,” explains Choquard. “Because of today’s development with technology and so on, as a

FEATURE sports federation you will always have to ask first ‘what are the strengths of my content and my product, and am I sure that I cannot find territories where it becomes a premium linear TV product?’ You may have territories where all this content is relevant for linear TV. But if that is not the case, then with the ongoing development of technology, with the appetite of the consumer to watch everything, we should look at the capabilities of digital. “Actually, I don’t like this generic term, because everything is digital from digital transformation to digital publications. Really digital is about direct to fan platforms. If I’m sure that as a content owner, my content does not fit on any premium linear TV channel, then I should produce it as a direct to fan experience. Premium linear TV channels will always be the biggest audience generator for a lot of content, we’ve seen that with the FIFA Women’s World Cup. But at the same time, I don’t think as broadcasters and media organisation we should be afraid to promote our digital platforms and to have a digital first experience, because when we have limited resources to produce and to engage content with audience, is it better to do a so-so traditional product? Or would it be better to really invest in doing a very efficient digital first?” Another key role for Eurovision Sport is working with

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“The way we consume live sports will keep evolving, but what I think is key to how we consume live sports is the interaction between human beings.” FRANK CHOQUARD

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TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 17

PICTURED ABOVE: The FIBA Media team at work

appetite of the younger generation to interact with the content is very different. Some viewers might want to watch short-form content, some might want the long-form and that’s where we need to adapt. This is what we do now on most of our properties, we adapt our distribution strategy, first on the business model to fulfil the financial expectation of everyone, but also on the way the content is delivered, according to what is relevant for the associated publishers. We have to think ‘how do I make the content relevant for the platform of this partner?’ and the one solution fits all answer is over.” Sport remains one of the last bastions of live TV viewing on linear TV. It is supposedly the one thing we all tune into because we don’t want to watch it on catch up. Does Choquard think that will ever change? “I hope not,” he admits. “I think one of the key values of sport is the emotion it brings. And these emotions come with live action. When we watch football, Olympics, and so on, first we cheer for our nation, then we cheer for some of the athletes. We want to see this live interaction and it comes straight to our heart. The way we consume live sports will keep evolving, but what I think is key to how we consume live sports is the interaction between human beings. We love to share this moment with our own community.” THE PRODUCER FIBA Media was formed in 2016, following a long term partnership between the DAZN group and FIBA, the International Basketball Federation. The partnership, which runs until 2033, includes the various media rights linked to the FIBA national team competitions as well as the Olympic Qualifying tournaments and youth events as well as the basketball Champions League, which is the club competition in Europe. The joint venture is managed 50/50

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by FIBA and DAZN, and according to Stephanie Mignot, director of TV/new media operations, the two companies have a common vision to “create opportunities to develop and promote basketball, and take basketball coverage to the next level, working with broadcast partners around the globe to promote basketball locally.” FIBA Media is the host broadcaster of the Basketball World Cup in China this September. The company’s role involves securing broadcast agreements across 80 countries and delivering production of all 92 games in the tournament, which will take place over eight cities in four provinces. “FIBA Media has been appointing different technical providers and production crews to be able to deliver the host broadcast activity in each of the eight venues,” explains Mignot of the sheer scale of organising coverage. “We will have a dedicated team to produce the games and as well service all the broadcast partners that will be coming on site. We will effectively have an organisation in place which will involve around 800 people that will be split between the venues. Mignot says FIBA Media intends to implement a lot of different innovations around the tournament: “We will produce an international feed of each and every game, which will include 20 cameras for the first and second round, and up to 25 live cameras for each game for the final round that will take place in Beijing. That will include a lot of super slow-mo cameras as well as spider cams “We will also be pushing the boundary as far as basketball coverage and FIBA is concerned, as we will be producing the matches in Beijing in full UHD,” she continues. “We have also developed what we call a super feed, an additional feed supplementing the live coverage, which will be available to our partners around 45 minutes before tip off and up to 30 minutes after the end of the game. That will include all the behind the scenes, starting with the team’s arrival at the arena, interviews, highlights, all the replay angles and other additional content that cannot be part of the live coverage. So we will have a very large production facility to enhance the coverage.” “We will distribute all the international feeds of the games as well as the super feed via satellite from the venues,” continues Mignot. “We also expect to have IP connectivity to deliver all the audio through IP, because we’re welcoming a lot of the broadcast partners on site for live commentaries.” THE DIGITAL PLATFORM At the start of the summer, European football’s governing body UEFA announced the launch of its own OTT platform, UEFA.tv. It is the first OTT service from a football governing body and aims to offer original programming based on 60 years of European football.

FEATURE It will also become the home of UEFA’s youth, women’s and futsal competitions. According to UEFA’s marketing director Guy-Laurent Epstein, UEFA.tv is a natural evolution of the organisation’s pre-existing digital services. He explains that the platform has three main objectives in the short-term: “The first one is really to complement our digital platform ecosystem. We have UEFA.com, we have apps available for most of our competitions and for next year’s Euro 2020 Championships we’ll be offering fans a lot of opportunities on a local basis to discover where the stadium is, what’s surrounding the stadium, information about access to the venue, what is the city centre like etc. “We decided to add an entertainment platform to this ecosystem that uses video to offer the fans the ability to further follow our competitions. We want to provide a lot of content for the fans and enhance our fan community and grow our database of the fan community.” Laurent continues: “The second objective is to create with our own platform and a home for our grassroots football. UEFA.tv will include our Under 21 competitions, all the women’s football, futsall football and youth football. They will all be covered in a live format on our platform. This will be complemented with free to air coverage in the relevant participating countries or in the host country. Another objective is to use and give a home to the 60 plus years of UEFA competition archive. We believe that it’s not exploited in the best manner currently. We have fantastic content there and we want to make it available to the fans.” Germany’s Bundesliga will be the first national league to be represented on UEFA.tv. The deal between the two organisations includes Monday highlights of weekend matches, shows such as the Bundesliga Special and archives of past Bundesliga matches and UEFA Champions League matches involving German teams. Does Epstein therefore envision a time when UEFA’s own competitions won’t be on traditional broadcast channels but be available on OTT platforms instead? “We already have media partners that are OTT platforms,” he says. “DAZN is one of our partners in various countries in the world, for example, in Japan or in Germany. As part of our portfolio of partners, we go from very traditional state-owned free to air broadcasters, to commercial free to air broadcasters, to what we can call the traditional pay platform telecommunication companies. We already have the widest spectrum of partners already existing in the media landscape. Are we going to broadcast our premium competitions or distribute our premium competitions on UEFA.tv? It’s not envisaged in the short-term. “What we’ll be doing in the coming months and years is to cover the other aspects of each match week of the competitions. So for the Champions League, the Europa League, the new Nations League or the European

qualifiers, we will have content from both pre and post match. We will still be respecting the wider live environment of the broadcasters because they are our main partners and we want to respect that, but we’ll be looking to tell stories from a different angle, ideas that are complimentary to what broadcasters would do.” Epstein says the feedback from fans so far has been very positive. “The platform is very robust, the look and feel of the platform is good. We posted a film that is about 14 minutes long that offers a different angle to the Champions League Final and it was very well received by the by the community.” Recently UEFA invited seven start up companies to demonstrate how technology can enhance the game both for fans and players. The idea behind it is again about innovation: “We’ve been working on improving the digital distribution for the fan experience with our PICTURED ABOVE: broadcasters for many years,” explains Laurent. “We’ve UEFA.tv on mobile been looking at technology and broadcast innovation for a long time and innovation is now part of our daily life. I strongly believe that sports in general and football in particular is very much influenced by technology. We have an opportunity in the overall 360 spectrum of our game, to bring innovation and to bring technology that will enhance the game. This is true for the player performance, the management performance, fan engagement and the broadcasting experience, it is true for the production of the matches using AI or remote production. It is true in the overall 360 environment of what the sport is about. We obviously want to investigate that to make sure that we bring more value to the game.” Finally, what does Epstein think is the future for football and TV? “My belief is that in general fans want to be part of the conversation, they want to influence the environment in which they interact,” he says. “So I believe that the future lies with personalisation of content, giving the ability to the viewer to watch the game in the way they would want to watch it and to have all the information they want to have. “Back in 2012 we launched technology that allowed the viewer to select the camera angle they wanted to use GUY-LAURENT EPSTEIN to watch the game on the second screen application. But I believe going forward, you could offer to the fans many different things to personalise the way they watch the game: camera angles that are following one team rather than the other because you are a fan of that team, commentary from a well known fan of a team or a former player or just fans of that team. You could show on the screen the data that you want to watch about certain players such as the speed they run. The viewing experience becomes about what you want to have as a fan of the club, and the ability to share that with your friends and with the world. So I really believe personalisation is the key going forward.” n

“Sports in general and football in particular is very much influenced by technology.”

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 19

FEATURE

A SPECTRUM OF HYBRID MODELS George Jarrett meets recently appointed Masstech CEO George Kilpatrick

hen he moved to Masstech from Amazon Web Services to become CEO just prior to NAB, George Kilpatrick found a staff of less than 100 punching at a mighty rate above its weight. A customer base of 400 plus was a great starter, so what surprised him? “I have to say that scale of the business for the relatively small team. We do have that number of customers, and we hold some of their most precious global assets,” says Kilpatrick. “I was also surprised by just how skilled our support and engineering teams are, and how often they are asked by users to go way beyond what Masstech supplies, and look into wholesale discussions on workflow.” Among the issues Kilpatrick is keen to discuss is the key doubt about the Cloud, that it is no longer security, but the fears of compromising vital full resolution onpremise workflows in any Cloud transition, and those infamous egress costs that are causing concern. “This is quite a complex question. Everyone is enthused by the Cloud, but there is a sanguine approach at play,” says Kilpatrick. “Cost is clearly a big issue, and what that means is that people are having to learn to understand how you use the Cloud. Your specific workflows will determine your cost. “Store content without ever touching it, and you can get pretty good pricing,” he adds. “But anything that requires any major egress like post production, where you are pulling content regularly for edits, means there are questions. It is definitely true that people are more concerned about the complexity, and they are seeking more detailed cost of ownership calculations to really understand their specific workflows.”

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FEATURE

A COMPLETE SPECTRUM OF HYBRID MODELS In summary, media companies are a little more sceptical, but still excited about the prospects of Cloud. But the mindset of moving from traditional on-premise models has two outcomes, of which hybrid solutions are strongly favoured – typically with browse and orchestration in the Cloud, and full-resolution masters stored on-premise. “We definitely see hybrid as the way ahead. People are experimenting with the Cloud but if you take 5 per cent or 100 per cent conversion to the Cloud, different companies are at different positions in that migration,” explains Kilpatrick. “There is a general acceptance that we will never completely get away from a hybrid model. Some parts of the workflow requiring very fast, low latency will be located next to the on-prem solution, while some parts lend themselves better to the Cloud. “Compute in the Cloud is clearly really advantageous, also anything where edit centric workflows fit in the Cloud, allowing remote access, scalability and elasticity,” he continues. “The costs of pulling storage, the egress charges, are such that people are thinking hard about which assets sit in the Cloud. It could be private or public Cloud and Masstech is agnostic in that respect. We manage so many assets in the Cloud, and across our user base we see a complete spectrum of hybrid models.” INNOVATE MORE QUICKLY What about the huge interest in SaaS and the trusted values of micro services: do they suggest that Opex and subscription are killing off Capex? “IBC will be a good opportunity to hear from users how they are playing SaaS and if it is relevant to them, but there is a lot of room to grow in the SaaS space,” says Kilpatrick. “Regarding Opex, paying for what you use is a far more attractive proposition, certainly if you are a smaller company not having to do large capital outlays. It allows you to innovate more quickly, and crucially to fail quickly.

“Some people are still wedded to the Capex model and prefer to be able to capitalise investments, but generally Opex is the new industry mantra,” he adds. “People are excited at the possibility of removing large Capex investments, and putting the money into Opex and subscription.” The strange ubiquity across storage platforms, with archive and storage becoming much closer in end user thinking, is another trend Kilpatrick has noted. “It is all about monetising the content, I guess. Archive tended to suggest it is locked up and never looked at, but storage is now becoming living storage. We use the term ‘active storage’ so the term archive is more loosely understood and people are certainly accessing those archives now,” he says. “A lot of companies are experimenting with proxy only workflows to minimise the transportation costs. And clearly linking that back to people like us enables them to do the work and then restore uncompressed files when required for any particular workflow.”. Where does streaming enter the equation? “It depends on the formats you are going to use – proxies or uncompressed. It is still the case that OCN from a camera is a substantial file, and this is where people like AWS use things like Snowball for pulling content off camera, off set,” says Kilpatrick. “But if you are shooting at low res, or you are happy to do a conversion on set, the companies that are looking at starting the post process early will use streaming,” he adds. “We have a number of sports customers where remote editing early in the post process is utilising streaming techniques. We will see more and more of that, but you need to be able to link the streamed content to the original at some point.” SEE A LOT OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERS This takes the user into metadata enhancement, metadata logging, and basic timecode to avoid losing sync. Does

“We are very keen to use and promote open systems. The broadcasters and post houses do not want bespoke issues.” GEORGE KILPATRICK

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 21

FEATURE

Kilpatrick see media companies employing their own software development teams? “Yes, but it depends on the company,” he says. “The larger ones do have software development teams, but less so the smaller companies. We see a lot of software engineers in a lot of our work, because we specialise in complex restorations of workflows and archive workflows, and work either by providing additional software skill or working with the in-house team. “This is why it is important we are agnostic in terms of storage formats; we don’t care if it is Cloud or on-prem, NAS or spinning disk. It is important that people use open systems so that there are no bespoke developments,” he adds. Over his first six months with Masstech, what were the core user worries/concerns that he discovered? “Most users are hearing the Cloud stories and working out in their own minds if their workflows are relevant. Apart from the issues of cost and complexity, there is also the question of skill sets – do they have that in-house cloud understanding,” Kilpatrick says. “Where new technologies are concerned they are both excited and concerned, and the big discussions are around things like analytics and the data lake kind of ideas where they can use analytics to understand their storage usage. This movement and predicting content use moves them into AI and ML,” he adds. “At the base of their worries is remaining competitive.” This leads to the use of automation to do things like compliance editing, redaction or transcription to boost metadata and management. “There is an awful lot of interest in that area, and everyone is trying to understand, and then apply it to their own workflows,” says Kilpatrick. “We are in a very exciting place.” AIMING AT THE NON-ENTERPRISE MARKET Masstech has three main product areas – news systems, 24/7 workflows, and that hybrid Cloud area. Kilpatrick starts with news: “Our solutions are completely integrated into newsroom control systems, in RCS and the five or so other flavours you can find globally. We are integrated with a number of AI services from both public Cloud providers and open source AI solutions.” From AWS it includes recognition, and from Azure similar capabilities, and an example of open source would be transcribing speech to text in the newsroom. “The tools are very impressive, including live speech to text in multiple languages. This has been something

22 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

beyond us until very recently,” he says. When it comes to 24/7 workflows, Masstech will launch its Clover system in Europe at IBC. “We think it is pretty unique, and it sits on one physical server or virtually in the Cloud on VM. It does ingest, storage, transcoding, search, workflow, and life cycle management, and it is aimed at the non-Enterprise market,” explains Kilpatrick. “We launched Clover at NAB for the Latin American market. We also have Federated Search, which allows the smallest news station to find the same story as the largest news station, if they are in the same network.” LOOKING AT ADJUNCT MARKETS Like any strong software house, Masstech has numerous partners, and it all started 15 years ago with Avid selling and supporting the Masstech FlashNet archive product. “We have a very close and continuing partnership with Avid, and we work with all the major broadcast MAM vendors like Grass Valley and EVS, plus many storage partners like IBM and Quantum,” says Kilpatrick. “More recently we have strong and developing partnerships with AWS and Azure, because as our user base moves towards those storage media companies and also thinks about using them for compute, we need to be completely on board. “They use partners to do the deployment, and to do the detailed workflow analysis. And this is because we are media experts and know how to use AWS tools to help media companies,” he adds. “I see this growing significantly. We have worked with Wasabi and Google but a lot of our work recently has been with AWS and Azure.” When it comes to SaaS and thinking of software as a service and a process that goes through time, Kilpatrick says: “It does, and it is interesting because it means it does evolve, and potentially new markets come towards it, and they become addressable. “For us that means continuous innovation and updates, but it also means potential opportunity in other markets. We are looking at adjunct markets like gaming and digital advertising: they are not classically in the media entertainment space, but they use very similar workflows and tools,” he adds. “Media and entertainment is becoming much more IT centric, and much less broadcast and media specific in terms of the software,” Kilpatrick concludes. “We specialise in intelligent storage management and life cycle management of content and monetising content, and lots of industries have that need.” n

PRODUCTION AND POST

ADDING HAPTICS TO THE USER EXPERIENCE By Martyn Gates, director of product development, Densitron

or nearly one hundred years, television has only been about moving images and sound. The next phase of television may well be about sharing a multi-sensory experience, starting with haptics, i.e., anything to do with the sense of touch. In recent years scientists and engineers have been working on a variety of means to transmit sense data across the internet, and with the advent of the SMPTE ST 2100 definition of haptic-tactile essence for broadcast, the broadcast community is considering adding additional senses to its content. And that’s worth noting. The haptics industry is projected to be worth more than £15 billion by 2022 according to a trends report published at the end of 2016 by market data company Research and Markets. It’s expected that in the next few years haptics technology will fundamentally change the way we experience our world, both outside the home and, for our purposes, anywhere we have a connected device that we interact with to consume content.

24 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

Haptic-tactile content captures the following properties of physical objects: position, orientation, velocity, and acceleration. It enables the viewer to have a shared haptic experience at a distance. Examples of physical objects might be an NFL football, a racing yacht, snowboard, etc. Haptic-tactile essence is acquired through sensors such as accelerometers and is embedded in the ancillary data space of SDI. This essence is then transported through the content path and delivered in some fashion to the viewer where it is deembedded and converted into a signal that drives appropriate actuators that enable the viewer to ‘substantially’ experience the same haptic-tactile effects of the actual event taking place on-screen. However, so far SMPTE ST 2100 only defines parameters for position, motion, or direction. Other types of haptic-tactile essence like texture, temperature, or weight, have not yet been addressed, but they’re on the horizon. Hybrid control surfaces such as touchscreen displays

FEATURE no longer solely a case of how an interface looks or responds. Increasingly, it’s how it feels, and the more tactile the better. The majority of control surfaces for broadcast applications generally conform to accepted user interface standards and have done for decades. However, considerable recent advances in display and touchscreen technology mean that it’s time to rethink how we interact with the devices many of us use every day. Haptic feedback technology combines tactile (what we physically feel from external stimuli) and kinaesthetic (what our body tells our brain from within) feedback, to tell us how to interpret forces, vibrations, and motions. All told, our bodies and brains are historically pretty good at it. But our ability to interact with physical machines and electronic devices has - in the broadcast industry - lagged behind other industries. However, that’s changing rapidly. High-performance displays are essential for broadcast monitoring applications, especially when a touchscreen layer is added for control. The hybrid control surfaces we are most familiar with today include electrically connected transparent, flexible push buttons, control surfaces, mechanical potentiometers, and faders. The arrangement, integration, and selection of these control elements are guided by what operators need for a specific application. But they need to feel that feedback quickly for it to make any immediate impact. And therein, for the moment, lies an issue that affects broadcasting in other ways. LATENCY

are increasingly being enhanced through the accelerating development of haptics to provide items like transparent buttons, optical blocks, and smart glass with a far more tactile sensation. Touchscreens have of course become an ubiquitous aspect of our lives but, for the most part, it’s a one-way experience. We touch a surface at a cash point, checkout, smartphone, or our laptop and it responds to a command. What they don’t do is touch back to provide an actual sensation of having moved a lever or pushed a button. They will ‘beep’, but it doesn’t feel like a beep. For haptics to gain traction it’s important for additional intelligence to support the interaction between the human and the membrane or glass – otherwise known as the human machine interaction (HMI). That’s what will increasingly enable haptics to be adopted within a wide range of broadcast applications. HMI is the interface that enables us to interact with a machine or computer. Now, that’s no surprise to anyone. We encounter haptics every day. But what is more illuminating is that it’s

Latency has a crucial impact on a feel of responsiveness of a system and on user performance, but studies suggest that further improvements are required and I very much doubt, at least in the near future, that what some are calling a ‘tactile internet’ – requiring latency of less than 1ms round-trip - is realistic. It’s interesting that the primary reason for that is that users perceive latency more acutely when dragging as opposed to tapping. Dragging immediately lets you know how much latency you have, and it’s annoying. An on-screen object that lags behind an operator’s finger generates a perceivable spatial distance that’s disorienting. To function properly as a user experience, hapticenabled feedback requires latencies of at least 20ms or lower to provide a useful improvement to the user experience, but we’re not there yet. One consequence of those advances is that using haptic technologies to their best advantage will require new skills that will involve training, much like dentistry, medicine, and defence, which have been using haptic-enhanced technologies for years, but they are fortunately a natural evolution of existing ones. With the emergence of smart glass and an increasing number of AI applications - coupled with the publication of SMPTE ST 2100 - haptics look set to gain even more traction within the broadcast industry. n

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CONVERTING FROM SDR TO HDR By Varun Patel, product manager LYNX Technik and Lucien Lenzen from the Hochschule RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Germany

o address the increasing consumer demand for exceptional quality content, many media professionals are implementing HDR solutions into their workflows, utilising image sensors and cameras that inherently support wider density and colour ranges. HDR (High Dynamic Range) provides viewers with enhanced contrast and increased brightness and more vibrant colour, resulting in a far superior image when compared to current standard HD and 4K UHD signals. Whether content from HDR cameras needs to be processed for delivery to HDR equipped displays, or whether HDR content needs to be converted to SDR to provide content to the vast installed base of standard SDR displays in a media facility, the demand for HDR is clearly there. One of the main difficulties involved in progressing from standard dynamic range (SDR) to high dynamic range (HDR) television is the need to provide good

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downward compatibility with the huge number of SDR television receivers already installed and in current use. The new generation of broadcast cameras can provide a much wider scene contrast range than conventional displays and it is obvious that converters are needed to handle the different formats. In cooperation with the University of Applied Science in Wiesbaden, Germany, LYNX Technik AG developed a set of HDR to SDR conversion solutions for its greenMachine platform which down convert HDR images to SDR images. To understand the difference between a classic HDR down converter and the enhanced solutions that LYNX Technik has introduced, we should take a look at how contrast compression is performed. Many camera operators use a knee function to incorporate luminance information which would normally be outside the SDR range. Traditional HDR down converters work in more or less the same way. However,

FEATURE the capabilities of such systems are very limited compared to the wide range of luminance information. Normally they use a fixed curve that doesn’t take much image content into account. Even if it does though, using a flat gradation to cope with a high contrast range will lead to a flat-looking image at some point. This is why the results of some more sophisticated approaches which use metadata to tweak the curve based on the image content are still not necessarily convincing. Moreover, metadata is hard to handle in a live broadcasting environment. The problem of dealing with a higher contrast range at acquisition rather than at distribution may be a new one for the broadcast industry but it is an existing one for film-makers and computer graphics artists. Film has always captured more information, so manual grading always has been and still is performed by a colourist. The problems with grading though are that it doesn’t work for live broadcasting and it can be expensive. Meanwhile, computer graphics artists use various procedures based on tone mapping. These also have some drawbacks for live broadcasting: They can be computationally intensive for video applications and because they are basically designed for still images, problems arise from the temporal domain, leading to flicker artefacts. HDR Evie, powered by LYNX Technik’s greenMachine platform, was developed to enable live automatic contrast compression avoiding the artefacts inherent in classic tone mapping techniques. Statistical analysis is performed on every image to preserve as much scene contrast range as is necessary but at the same time as little as possible. For example, it is not expedient to set a very dark exposure to prevent some small irrelevant highlights from clipping while the main part of the image is underexposed. Based on models of the human visual system, especially around the perception and preferences relating to contrast, the algorithm calculates the amount of clipping, or rather contrast compression, required. HDR Evie is an automatic process which analyses the incoming HDR image on a frame by frame basis. Changes in luma will also affect the colour impression. That is why the chroma is automatically adjusted to the new luma. Temporal filtering is performed to avoid flicker. HDR Evie provides more than simply better image quality; it also affects the way in which content is produced. By optimising the lighting balance and exposure, aperture setting becomes less crucial. As long as the information in the captured scene is not absolutely crushed or burnt

out, HDR Evie will try to map it into the final contrast range. As a result, controlling aperture is much less critical on the production side. In a typical televised football game, for instance, some areas of the image may be obscured by roof shadows while others are bathed in overly bright sunlight. The aperture needs to be constantly ridden but it’s likely that the overall image will nevertheless be fairly poor. HDR Evie can enable both a constant f-stop number and a balanced image as long as there is no clipping at the camera output. Sensors that can deal with a higher dynamic range therefore work better. Of course, the f-stop still has to be adjusted if the lighting condition changes substantially; on a very good HDR camera sensor, a single cloud would not affect the result, however an overcast sky would require a new setting. Production flexibility can be increased by reducing the need to light a scene. HDR does not provide a total solution; sometimes even making things worse. This is why there is also a need for HDR-to-HDR conversion. This means not only changing the HDR signal type. For example: from Perceptual Quantizer (PQ) to Hybrid-Log-Gamma (HLG) or vice versa, but rather balancing the image as in the SDR case. HDR at acquisition doesn’t always work well on the intended HDR display. From evaluations with normal TV viewers, it can be shown that more local contrast and homogenisation is also preferred for HDR signals. This is why HDR Evie can also be used to enhance HDR processes such as HLG. Because of the good downward compatibility of the HLG curve, the resulting (processed) HLG works very well on both SDR and HDR displays. Since HDR Evie is designed to work best with natural images, it can produce unintended changes (e.g. in exposure) when processing synthetic images such as a colour bar. Another limitation are the results from the temporal filtering. To avoid pumping, the adaption speed is restricted. On a crash zoom or very fast pan it is not possible to guarantee an ideal exposure all the time – but, on the other hand, a wrong f-number would be worse. Moreover, the image analysis needs one full frame before it can start its processing, leading to a delay of one video frame HDR is still a challenging topic. Higher dynamic range at capture does not solve the problem of a non-homogeneous lighting condition within a scene and can even create new problems. HDR Evie is designed to produce better images easily and economically, while optimising lighting balance and exposure, and also correcting hue and saturation. n

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STRAWBERRIES AND SCREEN Dan Meier goes behind the scenes at Wimbledon to see the technology served up by IBM Watson

BM Watson might have had the busiest summer of anyone apart from Ben Stokes and Spider-Man, providing bespoke information and technology services to both Wimbledon and the US Open on an unprecedented scale. Since its doubles partnership with Wimbledon began in 1990, the company has collected a net amount of 62,814,711 data points, which are spun up into insights, highlights and analysis.

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“Wimbledon described the championships as like putting on a fantastic wedding,” says Sam Seddon, Wimbledon client and programme executive at IBM. “So you’ve got to manage and micromanage the detail to make it the most wonderful day and experience possible. But they’re inviting 500,000 guests, they’re streaming it to 20 million guests, they’re doing it for 13 days, and they need 24/7 security.”

PICTURED: IBM Watson’s data scientists and digital editors at work at Wimbledon

“We want to create highlights packages faster than a global news organisation.” SAM SEDDON

BREAKING INTO MEDIA IBM Watson supplies the technology elements needed to ace this objective and to enable Wimbledon’s emerging media enterprise. “They’re starting to set up a completely integrated broadcast and digital capability,” explains Seddon, citing the increasingly disruptive role sport is playing in the media business. ”The FIFA Women’s World Cup, British Grand Prix, Tour de France - they’re all happening at the same time so there’s a huge amount of focus on getting eyeballs. So the way that they’re doing that is by essentially turning themselves into a media business and thinking and acting like a media business.” At the same time, social media organisations like Facebook and telco giants such as AT&T are branching into sport broadcasting and streaming, hence Wimbledon’s attempts to smash into the broadcast arena. “What we help them with is all of the enablement layers that allow them to put on the show,” says Seddon. “To a large extent that starts with data - whether that’s photography as data or stats as data, or whether that’s video.” IBM Hybrid Cloud is used to disseminate that data to 200 territories around the world, distributed from IBM Watson’s on-premise Cloud to mobile phones, tablets and desktops; 49.5 million users visited the Wimbledon.com website in 2018 over the course of the two-week tournament. The site is home to digital experiences designed and built by IBM Watson, including live scores and the MyWimbledon guest experience programme where members can personalise their web portal. Users can also vote on the content that’s available on the large-screen TV on Henman Hill. “So whether you’re a debenture holder, or whether you’re a hospitality user, or whether you’re a player, or whether you’re a fan, you’ll all come into a single access point, Wimbledon.com,” says Seddon.

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SAFETY NETS Another major role the company plays is in security, having helped to prevent more than 200 million cyber threats during the 2018 championships. Seddon uses an example of a security event from March 2019 where QRadar identified 663 different IP addresses associated with the attack. “IBM Watson for Cyber Security is able to distil that down to just 18 IP addresses in this set of particular events, which were then deemed to be a coordinated attack. “What that allows us to do is be a lot more focused in terms of how we’re going about analysing and tracking the source of this and being able to then put further measures in place if needed to ensure that nothing comes through,” he continues. “Since we put this in we’re about 60 times quicker on being able to respond to cyber security events, which from Wimbledon’s point of view is something they’re really, really focused on because their whole business model is built on quality.” AI ADVANTAGE Perhaps the most advanced aspect of IBM Watson’s solution is its AI deployment, capable of generating a postmatch highlights package in just two minutes. During the 2018 tournament, the company analysed over 2,000 hours of video content to generate hundreds of these packages for the website and other broadcasters. “We want to create highlights packages faster than a global news organisation, we want them to be high quality, we want them to be Wimbledon quality, and we want them to be exciting,” Seddon remarks. “So how do you define excitement?” Seddon describes the three sources of data used to make this judgement: sound coming from the umpire’s chair, video of the players themselves, and match data.

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“By looking at those three things together we’re able to define per points, how exciting is it by: are the crowd really animated? Is it a key point in the match? Are the players gesticulating, are they excited and fist pumping?” Using these metrics, IBM Watson ranks every single point by excitement, and packages the highest scoring into highlights along with automated graphics. The 2019 championships saw the introduction of two new AI components. The first is Watson Acoustics, a machine learning tool trained to listen for the sound of the tennis ball on the racket. “That helps us from a clipping point of view,” explains Seddon. “Once the ball hits the racket you know the point’s started, and from an editing point of view that allows us to be very tight on the clipping, which is important to Wimbledon because they have only a certain amount of rights footage themselves, because they give that out to the BBC and worldwide broadcast partners. “The other thing that we’ve introduced is an integrity solution,” he continues. “At the end of a match the crowd will disperse, they’ll go and get a drink, top up on Pimms, whatever it is they need to do. And it doesn’t matter that we’ve got another great quarter final coming on straight after it, the crowd noise in the stadium will be very, very different in the first period of that match. So what this allows us to do is moderate that, ensure there’s complete fairness for the next people that are coming on the court, and that their highlights are as high quality as the match that’s playing out. So just because there’s not much crowd in there, it won’t have an impact on that.” RALLYING THE DATA IBM Watson captured approximately 4.5 million points of tennis data during the 2019 tournament. These are input by trained tennis players, whose knowledge of the game allows them to see ahead of the point. “If there are any issues around the grounds then what they can do is call through a radio comms panel, talk to the operators that are watching the game, say ‘I’ve got an issue with 592 on

whatever court’ - so set five, game nine, point two.” The operators can then replay said point and correct the system where necessary. “It’s also very valuable to the players,” adds Seddon. “They get a match report within 20 minutes of the match finishing, but they also get a video file with the match analytics embedded into that file. So they can then jump through that and look at all of their break points or their winners or whatever it may be. By the time they’ve got out the shower they’ve got access to it on a mobile phone or tablet.” The press also make use of this data via IBM Watson’s bespoke reporting service, as Seddon explains: “We’ve got results back to 1877 and all of our statistical data back to 1990. We’ve got a screen called the ‘Did you know?’ screen in the digital teams room that’s on a rolling ‘we found a new thing’, just helping seed ideas for content and prompt ideas.”

SECOND SERVE How much divergence is there between the solution deployed for Wimbledon and that of the US Open? “They’re both different unique client requirements,” says Seddon. “Some of the digital convergence is new here, that’s very much a Wimbledon thing; the Acoustics and integrity solution are new here. But the core part obviously like scoring systems are common between the two environments - but Flushing Meadows is a very different beast altogether as a venue and as an organisation. “It’s a year round process so we’re constantly innovating, so we actually have a slightly offset delivery programme; it’s about 18 months,” continues Seddon. “We do a kind of random ideation session that if we could dream up how to fly to the moon what would we do? And then we’ll come out of that with some proof of concept we want to do, give ourselves time to test those, maybe develop some prototypes in the six-month window, and then we’ve got a nine-month window to get production ready for it,” he concludes. n

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Production sound mixer Stu Wright discusses his work on Peaky Blinders CAN YOU GIVE US SOME BACKGROUND ON YOURSELF AND SOME OF YOUR PAST PROJECTS? I’ve worked in the industry for around 21 years now, mixing my first low-budget feature film Soulboy around 10 years ago. Before that I went straight into my first job with no experience which was a Channel 4 Shooting

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Gallery short which was shot on 35mm. After a year of shorts I started dallies on things like Brookside, then I did a few seasons on Wire in the Blood. After mixing a few years of CBBC’s Wolfblood and Tracy Beaker Returns/Dumping Ground I moved into bigger productions as my peers progressed.

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HOW DID YOU GET THE JOB ON PEAKY BLINDERS? I got onto the fifth series of Peaky Blinders due to working with Si Bell and Anthony Bryne on Anthony’s In Darkness feature the year prior to Peakys. I’ve grown up with Si working on various projects and we cope well together on set which led us to do Anthony’s Butterfly drama also. HAVE YOU HAD EXPERIENCE OF DPA PRODUCTS PRIOR TO PEAKY BLINDERS? WHAT HAVE YOU USED AND WHAT HAVE YOU USED THEM ON? I used DPA 4071s for three years on Wolfblood and Dumping Ground, also some features like The Liability and Estranged. I loved the sound of them, but had issues with cable breaks on a regular basis due to the nature of the shoots and very cold weather at times. So I moved back to the cos11s for a few years… until now! REGARDING THE 6061 SUB MINIATURES – WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO TRY THEM FOR THIS SERIES? I knew they were coming and unfortunately were not available when we began work on series five, but I was always curious to hear the DPA capsule again. I didn’t go for the tough series as the cables would not work well on light garments like t-shirts etc. I hoped the 6061 would be the solution.

WHAT DID YOU ESPECIALLY LIKE ABOUT THEM? There were placement issues on some costumes with the cos11s, especially the ladies’ evening wear, but these were solved by the miniature sizing of both capsule and cable, meaning even in tight mid shots the mic would remain hidden. Basically they saved the day in some scenes! DID YOU NOTICE ANY DIFFERENCE IN SOUND QUALITY OR DID YOU THINK THEY WERE MUCH THE SAME AS PREVIOUS DPA LAVALIERS? No instant horror… just amazement that it can sound so good even up against the 4017 in perfect conditions! WHAT ABOUT THE CAST – WHAT DID THEY MAKE OF THE MICS? Being mic’d up can be a complete tragedy for some cast, anything which can ease the pain always brings hope to their daily lives. The 6061 excites most actors as they can see the potential in a shorter/easier rig - which may also reduce the dreaded ADR! WERE THEY EASIER TO HIDE? WHERE WAS THE MOST UNUSUAL PLACE YOU HID ONE? We could get these on the ladies’ nighties with help from URSA thigh straps, hidden in the slender silk seams. The impossible became possible!

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FEATURE IN THE NEW SERIES, THERE’S ONE SCENE WHERE YOU SHOT THE WHOLE THING IN ONE TAKE – CAN YOU TALK US THROUGH THAT? WHY WAS IT DECIDED TO DO IT IN ONE TAKE AND WHY WASN’T A BOOM MIC AN OPTION? The scene was a five-page whirlwind which screamed one take! Just to keep the energy and emotion live it seemed the best way to go. The scene was centred around one character with five others coming in and out. Lighting and a 360-degree shot would not allow boom coverage on all characters and costume action meant not all would have useable consistent personal lavs. A central 6061 allowed for consistent dialogue to be contained between a boom and the other personal lavs. The boom filled and got some of the action, but the 6061 in one spot gets the medal.

6061 managed to pick up the performance effortlessly without getting podium shuffling and knocks which the planted mkh50 did.

YOU ALSO USED A VINTAGE MIC WITH A HIDDEN DPA INSIDE – WAS THAT ANOTHER 6061? AND HOW WAS THE SOUND? WAS IT USEABLE? This was one of those “the prop mic is on its last legs… don’t break it.” It was unusable, the casing and screws were battered. So, we decided to weave a 6061 around the original cable and place the capsule just below the Vintage head. The scene was a loud rally speech so the

WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW AND ARE YOU USING DPA MICS? I’ve just wrapped an amazing original Warp Film for Sky Atlantic one-off series called Little Birds which more than allowed for testing of the 6061s, 4017s and a 4018. The shoot was crazy for sound due to two weeks of gale force winds in Tarifa and hard lighting meaning booming was rarely a reliable option! n

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“The 6061 excites most actors as they can see the potential in a shorter/ easier rig - which may also reduce the dreaded ADR!” STU WRIGHT

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PREDICTING AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE Ernst & Young’s Martyn Whistler discusses the key attributes media companies need to be competitive and relevant in a changing ecosystem

arlier this year, I was reflecting on how it didn’t seem so long ago that I was updating my DVD collection by downloading digital formats of favourite movies. Now even the idea of downloading seems very outdated. Collections of content have themselves become a thing of the past, supplanted by our need to access rather than own. But what the demise of downloads tells us about the world of content and access to it, is that the winds of change are blowing fiercely. Game changing technologies, which define new business models are not themselves indestructible but temporary, even disposable. A company’s ability to embrace the necessity for reinvention will go a long way to determine whether they will thrive or die. Over the next year or two, the landscape of content distribution will see rampant upheaval. Anyone who thinks the media industry is near maturity could not be further from the truth. New streaming services are set to launch, with the aspirations and resources to be global leaders, while smaller, niche players will reinvent themselves and ramp-up their services. All of this is against a backdrop of incumbent investment in content, technology, talent and increasingly, production capabilities. Despite the apparent uncertainty, many executives are excited about the opportunity. EY’s latest survey of business confidence shows 83 per cent of media and entertainment executives are upbeat about their future earnings prospects. Despite their optimism, recent conversations with media executives reveal an increasingly prevalent sense of transformation fatigue. It doesn’t mean companies can’t or aren’t

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‘In a future that is at best unpredictable, successful media companies will be need to be adaptive digital enterprises with a clear strategy but the ability to pivot as necessary.

innovating, quite the opposite, but there is a change of mood. There is a rebalance between the long-term, visionary transformation and simply doing what needs to be done. Questions are asked around what executives should prioritise, what their peers are doing and how do they execute. I imagine, to be a modern media executive today, it feels a little like being asked to fix the bus while driving it. Among the many priorities and starting points are what I frequently refer to as housekeeping. These are the things that are integral to the business, but which may no longer be fit for purpose. They are also the things that are often overlooked as they’re considered non-priority, too expensive or because of a lack of understanding. By way of example, let us take something as integral as metadata. We hear much about data being the foundation of the modern, digital enterprise. Yet many media companies still struggle with incomplete insights in almost all aspects of their business. They invest in new distribution platforms but lack clarity on the rights they own and can exploit; they reinvent user experiences without a complete picture of their customers. Even the essential investments being made in ad tech, which are designed to level the playing field with digitally native leaders in advertising, are questionable when it’s hard to target specific individuals. Hitherto, the challenge of housekeeping has been daunting, expensive, or both, but times are changing. The deployment of a suite of technologies branded as intelligent automation such as computer visualisation, robotic process automation, or AI all enable cost effective

FEATURE solutions. Increasingly the previous scepticism about these technologies is being replaced by a willingness to invest, trial and prove the concept. For media companies, at its best housekeeping might seem as less than transformational and at its worst, simply introspective. However, fixing some of the fundamentals is a necessary starting point. It enables the exploitation of content, customers and technologies that has fast become a prerequisite for being competitive, let alone releasing a media company’s full potential.

one builds but be fit for many scenarios. Many incumbents understand that the endless customisation of their offthe-shelf technologies has left them unsupportable and obsolete. The balance needs to come from technologies that are also adaptive and can manage evolving workflows and future content distribution models. 2. Build the business case: In recent years a pragmatic, ‘launch and learn’ mentality has often led to doing away with the solid foundation of a business case based on a well-articulated strategy. Too often, technology investments resemble a ‘build it and they will come’

‘Too often, technology investments resemble a ‘build it and they will come’ approach and assumes that big ticket investments will be enough to remodel the business and entice customers. Technologies such as VR have proven that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.’ FUTURE PROOFING If housekeeping seems challenging then what about the other side of the equation – that of transforming the business? If recent precedent tells us anything, it is to avoid being too prescriptive about the future. I hear much about the journey that media companies are taking but the reality of this journey is that no one seems to know where they are going, what route they will take or when they will arrive. There is clearly no single vision of the future. Familiar debates rage about the relative virtues of OTT business models; add funded vs subscription vs transaction or a hybrid of all of the above. The likely answer is that they will all find a place but the balance will change over time. Perhaps more compelling is the debate around advertising models. While there may be consistency in the rush to be ever more targeted, there will be a fragmentation in the mix of formats; pre-roll, in-programme, various versions of product placements and even adverts when the programming is paused. But amongst all of this debate, the latest EY research shows a growing number of OTT users willing to pay to watch catch-up without advertising. In a future that is at best unpredictable, successful media companies will be need to be adaptive digital enterprises with a clear strategy but the ability to pivot as necessary. Important focus areas will include: 1. Adaptive technologies: Providers of technology need to find the balance between standardisation and adaptability. In essence it needs to avoid bespoke, one-to-

approach and assumes that big ticket investments will be enough to remodel the business and entice customers. With a treadmill of new inventions and innovations from content distribution platforms to the smart home, it’s clear that not every investment guarantees a market. Technologies such as VR have proven that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. A strategic understanding of the market is imperative, not based on assumptions but hard work, analysis and data. 3. Evolving vendor relationships: Recent EY research, which looked at technology investment across many sectors, highlighted the evolving interaction between technology vendors and their customers. The majority (70 per cent) of companies would prioritise vendors that can deliver business outcomes as partners ahead of pure cost or technology benefits. A further level of granularity reveals the single biggest benefit they are looking for from this new vendor relationship is that it will implicitly grow technology skillsets and awareness within the customer organisations. While these may seem self-evident, it’s the obvious stuff that is all too often ignored. What is exciting about the future is that it is uncertain. Looking into the future of the media industry, it is not set to an end state but a myriad of questions about where to prioritise. Focusing on the big picture transformation at the expense of the ‘little things’ is a short-term fix. Instead, media companies need to ensure the foundations are in place on which to build a flexible operating model. n

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VAR: A DECADE OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT By Igor Vitiorets, CTO at Slomo.tv

n Europe, 2019 has witnessed the ‘coming of age’ of Video Assistant Referee (VAR) technology. It played a key role in the FIFA Women’s World Cup in France and many leading football leagues, including the Premier League, are implementing the technology this season. However, here at Slomo.tv, the core enabling technology has been many years in development. Slow motion replays have become an intrinsic part of live sports broadcasts, but back in 2005, our dream was to capture that footage in such high resolution with fast replay capabilities, that it could be used by officials in the game to help judge incidents. Very soon, that dream became reality. Slomo.tv developed the concept of a modern video judging system for ice hockey. The first 4-channel sports video judging system, videoReferee, was used at the 2007 World Hockey Championship in Moscow. Today, Slomo.tv has successfully delivered over 180 systems to a number of leading national and international leagues and federations. From ice hockey and basketball to canoe slalom racing, water polo, wrestling and handball, each sport required us to customise our systems to meet specific requirements. Those 12 years of experience in video refereeing has helped our team to develop the necessary skillsets for hardware, software and the methodology of VAR. In 2016, Slomo.tv participated in the International Football Association’s (IFAB) development of video judging systems. Since then, we have participated in VAR focused events with IFAB and FIFA, including workshops at the organisation’s headquarters in

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Zurich. Consequently, Slomo.tv is on the list of FIFA approved VAR system suppliers. What is clear is that the implementation of VAR technology is a major move for any sporting association. We have developed our videoReferee system to provide one of the most advanced VAR solutions on the market today. Starting with fully integrated, ready to use 12-ch system videoReferee-ST, to the videoReferee-FC with up to 32 3G/HD channels are supported by one 4U server, with four graphics outputs for video referees, operators and assistants. The system provides user-friendly and fast interfaces that include gesture control and the ability for collaborative work by teams of VAR/AVARs and ROs. Our systems support centralised, local or hybrid workflows. However, best VAR systems are not only about the equipment, but also about the people who operate them. In addition to the operating skills required to work the system, staff need to understand the “ideology” of football, know all the rules and regulations, and have their own practical experience. Importantly, in addition to supplying the equipment itself, Slomo.tv provides training services to facilitate VAR/ AVAR and RO certification.

Our training product portfolio includes the “Academy” system, which is specially designed to train replay operators and to develop coordinated work amongst the entire refereeing team. The use of special video materials and clips dedicated to football in the Academy allows our customers to significantly reduce the time and cost of the training. The importance of this element cannot be under-estimated. When a new league or federations adopts VAR, there is an immediate need to go through a steep learning curve to become competent and confident in using the system. The Academy simulates the highpressure environment of on air/live work and thus helps the organisation evolve their own collaborative working practices between the match officials and VAR operators. One other key point is the need to offer a range of VAR systems to meet different budgets. Slomo.tv has developed a range of 8, 12, 24 or 32-channel systems which can meet any budget. We are currently negotiating with several national football leagues and hope this will lead to interesting projects. n

REINVENTING THE FAN EXPERIENCE WITH TECHNOLOGY By Brian Morris, VP, Media and Entertainment Services, Tata Communications

ajor advances in technology, and resulting shifts in consumer behaviour, have created a broad spectrum of opportunity for fan engagement among sports organisations, broadcasters and rights holders around the world. Today, sports fans are constantly seeking new, digital ways to get closer to their idols and teams. Social media has been a crucial driving force in this. Following a match, Arsenal fans now turn to YouTube to share their reactions in the form of video comments. Others opt to follow their favourite sports on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat to get exclusive updates and insights. Formula 1 has also had success in connecting with fans through their app, sharing detailed live coverage during all the races. Yet, new technologies are emerging – such as Video Assistant Referee (VAR), 5G, 360-degree cameras and virtual reality (VR) – that present sports organisations, broadcasters and rights holders with new sponsorship and

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advertising revenue opportunities – but only if they are adopted in a commercially savvy way. FIFA EXPLORES VAR SPONSORSHIP Football has already built up a truly global audience. For instance, the English Premier League (EPL) is now the richest football league in the world, thanks to record combined revenues of £4.6 billion last season. And, while higher spending on player salaries continues to impact the bottom line for many clubs, EPL revenues are projected to grow year-on-year with many revenue-driving opportunities on the horizon. After the success of VAR during the 2018 FIFA World Cup and 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, as well as the annual UEFA Champions League and FA Cup, the Premier League has agreed to finally introduce the technology this season. VAR supports the on-field referee by checking all key incidents during a match. The VAR team informs the

FEATURE on-field referee of what they have seen and the suggested outcome. In some instances, VAR will help to explain why an on-field decision has been overturned. This is then broadcast to the audience watching, which could potentially be also viewed via an app on mobile phones to bring fans closer to the action on the pitch. Graphics are set to be displayed on large screens within the stadiums to explain VAR-related delays to fans. However, two stadiums in the Premier League – Manchester United and Liverpool – do not have big screens. During these matches, the VAR communications will be made using audio announcements. However, this is not the only way VAR can be used to build better engagement with fans. The potential commercial opportunities VAR could present have not been lost on broadcasters and football’s governing bodies. FIFA is currently exploring the untapped sponsorship potential by selling rights. VAR is present at moments of high drama during a game – the moments that garner the most uninterrupted attention and engagement from fans. As such, VAR is a clear sponsorship asset which could be monetised by the game’s rulers. Although FIFA has not committed to cashing in on the VAR opportunity just yet, many businesses will be hoping that they can have their advertising displayed during these intense intermissions. NOT THE ONLY TECHNOLOGY ON THE BLOCK There is a lot of money and investment at stake when it comes to sports broadcasting and this is especially true when it comes to new and emerging technology like 5G being used in sports. 5G will allow for much more experimental football coverage as it will provide the latency, bandwidth and quality required for live broadcast. It will enable broadcasters to send match footage back to base quickly and also reduce costs around the number of technicians required at each game. 5G will also result in highlights being made available faster than ever and could even pave the way for increased quality and speed of user generated content at live sporting events. Our recently commissioned report Show Me the Money! calls for sports to embrace technology innovation to broaden their appeal amongst new audiences, to expand new geographies, and create more immersive fan experiences. This illustrates that technology innovations can quickly become crucial new revenue drivers. In this digital age, viewers expect the very best, across multiple devices and on demand. They want more access to more real-time data and high quality visuals. The fans want to see flashpoints replayed instantly from multiple angles and they don’t want to miss a moment of action. They want that stadium experience but from the comfort of their own home. New technologies are

helping broadcasters to meet these demands head on. Recent tech advancements, like Cloud computing, OTT internet broadcasting, artificial intelligence (AI), big data and virtual reality (VR), are leading the charge towards personalised broadcasting models. For instance, all matches of the FIFA World Cup in Russia were broadcast in full 360-degrees for the first time, giving viewers closeup shots of the players. VR offers the best of both worlds for sports fans who want to be close to the action while also getting the whole picture of what else is happening around the pitch. TECHNOLOGY WILL REINVENT THE FAN EXPERIENCE Delivering an exceptional fan experience hinges on getting the right content to fans at the right time. New technologies will enable this, but they will also change how the rules of sport are implemented. Take for example, cricket – arguably a sport that has embraced technology more enthusiastically than perhaps any other. In the quest to help bring fans closer to the action, broadcasters are given access to data feeds, such as Hawk-Eye, which uses cameras to track the path of the ball and inform LBW decisions. Hawk-Eye expanded its offering to include Synchronised Multi-Angle Replay Technology (SMART), which makes all its camera angles available to third umpires in real time and uses software to automate certain cameras and production processes in order to streamline the workflow of live coverage teams. However, there were teething problems. Without Hawk-Eye the umpires had to rely on their instinct and guesswork. The introduction of this technology has helped drive significant improvements in decision making for the umpires. While it remains to be seen how VAR breaks might be monetised in the Premier League, the fact is new technologies will bring fans much closer to the action. Fans who are better informed, more knowledgeable and more engaged are likely to develop greater bonds to the sports they love. This is important for sports organisations, broadcasters and rights holders because they can be translated into revenues. n

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 41

FEATURE

DIVERSE CONNECTIONS New IMCG chair Morwen Williams speaks to Mark Layton about the group’s work and giving women a greater voice in the tech industry

orwen Williams was appointed committee chair for the World Broadcasting Unions’ (WBU) International Media Connectivity Group (IMCG) in July. Williams brings plenty of experience to the role; having already spent four years on the IMCG planning committee, she has been with the BBC for three decades and at the start of this year was promoted to head of UK operations for BBC News. She now leads its technical and studio teams and manages multi-millionpound budgets, as well as being responsible for creative technical newsgathering for stories and all news studios in London and Salford at MediaCity. All in all, she manages a team of more than 700 people, aside from her work on the IMCG. For those unfamiliar with the group, it provides a global forum for members of the WBU to exchange information and resolve common operational problems faced by broadcasters across the world. Its mission is to “identify, evaluate and educate” and find solutions for issues related to the transmission of video, audio and other broadcastrelated data, at both the point of collection and delivery.

42 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

“It started in the 1980s as a satellite committee, but with the ever-changing industry we work in, it’s expanded to be much more than that, embracing newer technologies that are at the heart of the industry – or where the industry could benefit in future,” explains Williams. “We hold forums twice yearly – usually, but not always, one in North America and one in Europe. The BBC happens to be hosting the next one in early November at MediaCity. Participants are usually members from the WBU, including broadcasters, satellite and fibre optic carriers, telco and transmission service providers and invited participants associated with the industry.” The group prepares several panels at these forums where guests can discuss the latest issues and attend industry demonstrations and presentations. Williams will now officiate at the forums in her new role as committee chair and decide the topics of the panels to ensure that they remain relevant and engaging. Williams cites the group’s work in bringing broadcasters and providers together as among its greatest success stories, including its work last year on C-Band and intentional interference to satellite services and its recommendations

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SUPPLEMENT FEATURE

INTELLIGENT FUTURE

Sony’s Intelligent Media Services is a portfolio of powerful tools for small and large video companies alike

ast year at IBC, Sony launched Intelligent Media Services. With audiences consuming content on devices whenever it best suits them, content creators need extra support in building and delivering content in an ever-shifting landscape. Sony’s Intelligent Media Services was rolled out as a portfolio of open technology and services, designed to transform the traditional media supply chain and unlock more value from content. Sony’s Intelligent Media Services spans the entire media supply chain, from capture and management to delivery of content. The company’s well established hardware business has been a cornerstone of the broadcast sector for years; servers, switches, OB trucks and, of course, cameras are well integrated into studio environments around the world. But beyond the hardware, Sony also has an array of services in the purely digital space. “What we offer is a variety of services together as one portfolio,” explains Stuart Almond, head of Intelligent Media Services at Sony Professional Europe. “Every time we have engaged with customers, there is always a pain point, always some internal problem specific to that company. As a result, we have developed a much more consultative approach. Intelligent Media Services is based around Sony’s ability to have expertise

“We have massive development capability within our organisation.”

and consultants available to find out what those pain points are. It might be a broadcaster, or a production company, or a business that’s trying to get themselves to be more efficient by migrating to the Cloud. They want to know what services are available and what exactly we can offer in each individual case.” The Intelligent Media Services portfolio is a synthesis of technology and services that Sony is presenting as a suite of options for businesses. These include XDCAM air, Media Backbone Hive and Media Backbone NavigatorX, Sony’s archiving solutions like Memnon, and the Ci Cloud collaboration platform, as well as Virtual Production - a Cloud switching service, in addition to managed OTT and delivery services through Ven.ue and the now essential ball-tracking technology, HawkEye.With Intelligent Media Services, Sony aims to help video companies of any size unlock more value in their content by transforming the way they do business and enabling more agile and efficient media supply chains. “We engage with a multitude of different customers and they’ve all got different needs,” says Almond. “Some of them are trying to think about how they speed up and become more efficient in their workflows around acquisition and production. Some want to automate more, or they want to introduce AI and Cloud into their workflow because they want to do a lot more OTT delivery, and are looking for efficiencies. We have services, we have products and we have development capability, training capability and support capability. We can deploy with this customer and work with them as a strategic partner.” n

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | III

SUPPLEMENT

UPPING THE

SERVICES GAME S

ony has upped its game in the services area of its business in response to the rapid and radical changes taking place in the industry. “We are entering a whole new world of microservices,” explains Stuart Almond, head of Intelligent Media Services at Sony Professional Europe. “People really want open technology that allows them to pick and choose best of breed. And when people look at Sony, they see we’re both focused and open, pioneering and absolutely partner-led in what we do. So it felt right in this world of microservices to let everyone know that we do actually have our own portfolio, and one that is tried and tested.” The new landscape includes many more niche players and content providers who, until ubiquitous streaming video came along, were often marginalised. These include everything from corporates to niche sports to education, as well as more mainstream VoD entertainment providers. Many of these are looking for technologies that are going to amplify what may be limited resources. “Some small production companies may be a team of up to three or four people who want to capture content, produce that content and get it either streamed or played out,” explains Almond. “Our Virtual Production, for example, allows that market to do a lot more. Virtual Production is, at the simplest level, a virtualised switcher, but you could effectively have any number of fixed wireless cameras that you’re connected to through Wi-Fi, and your switcher could be located anywhere in the world. “The service means I can actually see my live camera feeds, no matter where they’re from, and I can switch like a professional. I can add graphics, I can add social media over the top, I can add in files to play out as part of my broadcast. And that is via a €350 monthly starting package. The doors are open for this kind of smaller company, too. You can take advantage of our free trial for a limited amount of time - get on it.” Media Backbone NavigatorX is the portfolio’s media asset management tool, which has also been competitively priced. It offers multiple creative teams or just a few individuals a single interface for accessing, searching, retrieving and preparing for edit video content. It features a simplified workflow engine that allows users to easily share links to content, or add QC or encoding. “You literally can do a nice and simple drag and drop,

as if you’re playing with a graphics tool,” says Almond. “You’re building a workflow, and you don’t have to be an engineer to do that. You just need to know where your content’s coming in and where it’s going out. It allows teams to build those workflows to suit their needs.”

VARIETIES OF SERVICE The depth and breadth of the tools in Intelligent Media Services may surprise those who have engaged with Sony products only within a narrow production parameter. Many in the industry may not be aware that Sony offers a fully managed OTT service, for example. The company’s Ven.ue suite encompasses an end-to-end digital media management and distribution solution, which offers OTT delivery along with a full content management suite. Ven.ue, like the other tools in the Intelligent Media Services portfolio, can be fine-tuned to each customer’s needs. Some video distribution companies look to Ven.ue for content amalgamation, with a business model around buying content from multiple vendors that needs to be quality controlled and put through its player for end user consumption. The proliferation of VoD services make this an increasingly common scenario, and the need for a solution that brings divergent sources into one workflow is an essential part of building a robust VoD platform. There are also distributors who need to send multiple types of content to outlets worldwide. BBC Studios, for example, uses Ven.ue across workflows to capture different types and lengths of content, and the multitudinous different versions of that content, that need to be distributed across multiple countries worldwide as part of the BBC Studios delivery programme. In other cases, Sony uses Ven.ue to provide customers with a complete, fully managed OTT service, right up to building the end user website and managing subscription services on behalf of the customer. People are familiar with Sony’s archive and storage solutions, but its move to the Cloud is increasingly expansive. The Intelligent Media Services include Cloud-based archives on-premises, disaster recovery, strategy and solutions, and its popular MAM-based systems, especially around news production platforms. Sony’s Cloud microservices notably extend the toolkit available to content owners. Sony Virtual Production, built on AWS, is an on-demand Cloud production service that provides a toolset

“People really want open technology that allows them to pick and choose best of breed.”

IV | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

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for multiplatform simultaneous streaming. The entirely Cloud-based, ondemand system allows customers to stream to a virtualised switcher using any browser. Cloud production capabilities are further extended with Ci and Media Backbone NavigatorX, which allow studios, broadcasters and media content creators to work more closely across different teams. Ci, which was originally developed as an asset sharing tool at Sony studios, is a fully collaborative online workspace. “People often don’t realise that we’re big on software,” says Almond. “We have massive development capability within our organisation. We don’t just sell products, we’re a systems integrator. And that’s what Intelligent Media Services delivers. It’s a portfolio of open technology and services. If we have customers who want to stream live news across multiple platforms, we’ve got it covered. If there are production teams wanting to access content anywhere without constraints, we can also do that. Or if we have customers who are providing OTT services and need better distribution or media processing services within their workflow, we can look, too. And if you’re starting to think engaging your audience with different types of platforms, be it VR, mobile or using social in different ways for news, we have solutions. The key thing for us is that every customer who comes to us has a business. At the end of the day, they’ve got two objectives: they want to stay in that business and they want to grow it.”

BEYOND THE TECHNOLOGY Sony’s Intelligent Media Services extends beyond pure technology. The services join up with Sony’s decades of experience consulting and partnering with customers. “We have a consulting architect who will normally go to meet one of our customers who is thinking about business transformation,” says Almond. “Maybe they’re taking their entire operation to the Cloud in the next five years. So we have teams and specialists who sit around the customer’s table, find what we need to do, how we’re going to do it and then take them on that journey. There is a massive amount of development capability in the organisation, as well as a massive amount of delivery and system integration speed, as well as support teams that work around the clock, giving support for the various customers that we have globally. There are a bunch of other companies out there – Cloud services companies and other microservices companies – but they won’t have had that long-term, multidecade experience that Sony has had in the broadcasting video industry.” “Last year, the question put to customers was ‘where will you be in five years’ time?’ But I don’t think the question is where will you be. I think it’s who do you want to go on the journey with?” n Find out more on pro.sony/ims

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | V

SUPPLEMENT

NHRA SUPERCHARGES PRODUCTION WORKFLOW USING SONY’S INTELLIGENT MEDIA SERVICES

he National Hot Rod Association (NHRA), the largest motorsports sanctioning body in the world, recently came to Sony with a simple request – to increase the value of their production assets and use them to support enhanced storytelling. According to Mike Rokosa, the NHRA’s technology executive, the organisation sought to reach more consumers on more devices with more content, in a faster manner. Mike Rokosa found that Sony “had, or partnered with other entities to provide all of the pieces of the puzzle that would allow NHRA to maximise fan engagement and create new fans.” After learning more about Sony’s range of production capabilities, the NHRA chose to transition to Cloud-based distribution workflows using Sony’s Intelligent Media Services, many of which were created or customised to meet NHRA’s specific needs. Now, NHRA has expanded into a content factory through their implementation of Sony’s turn-key technology. Rokosa says that Sony’s Intelligent Media Services “allow us to invest in and broaden the NHRA’s assets, as opposed to building our own hardware.” To go to an NHRA race is an experience unlike any other. A general admission ticket gives you full access to the pits, allows you to interact with the racers and crew, and view 10,000 horsepower funny cars and dragsters that shake your bones to the core as they race down the track at speeds of up to 339 miles per hour. Working hand-in-hand with Sony, the NHRA is now able to preserve, digitise and share archival footage, publish real-time video updates for social fans and bring a new pipeline of content to on-demand viewers, bringing the thrill of an NHRA race to fans anywhere, anytime. Through Memnon’s digitisation and archival capabilities, the NHRA has found what Rokosa believes is “a viable and cost-effective solution” to preserve valuable content from their over 50 years of historical assets

“Sony is one of the leaders in Cloud-based systems and our organisation saw Ci as an opportunity to work collaboratively across various unique racetrack locations in real time, enhancing our productivity.” VI | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

SUPPLEMENT that he says “doesn’t add extra infrastructure or support.” Once this analogue content has been digitised via Memnon, it can be housed in Sony’s collaborative Ci Media Cloud platform for secure access and simple sharing from virtually anywhere. Additionally, NHRA fans will experience the thrill of live drag racing action on a new platform called NHRA.TV starting this season. NHRA.TV will operate on a Cloud-based video streaming platform utilising Sony’s Intelligent Media Service, Ven. ue, to provide an ever-increasing catalogue of exclusive drag racing video content on demand and live. Rokosa points out: “Sony is one of the leaders in Cloud-based systems and we saw Ci as an opportunity to work collaboratively across various unique racetrack locations in real time, enhancing our productivity.” With the adoption of Ci Media Cloud, the NHRA has positioned itself as the leader among major sports organisations leveraging the Cloud for end-to-end media management. “The NHRA is small administratively when compared to larger leagues, so we have to be more agile, more creative and more entrepreneurial in how we compete,” says Rokosa. “Sony is giving us that edge with a Cloud-based infrastructure optimised for immediate sharing, publishing and distributing.” The collaborative Cloud platform will enable the NHRA’s expected 5TB of data per event and 120TB of content a year to be tagged with rich custom metadata that is easily searchable. Uploaded files can be shared securely and easily through Ci’s MediaBox feature with broadcast and social media teams for posting with immediacy. Now everyone in the NHRA’s production pipeline will have access to their content, regardless of their location, which meets one of the organisation’s fundamental challenges. Once this content is in Ci, it can be packaged and staged for Ven.ue.

VEN.UE OTT VIDEO STREAMING The NHRA had established an OTT platform as part of their new media infrastructure. “Collaborating with Ven.ue allows a world of additional functionality that was not possible before, and tools to strategically grow this product into the future with minimal infrastructure costs and personnel,” explains Rokosa. Through Ven.ue, the NHRA’s content will be customised, published and monetised, creating expansion opportunities, as well as international visibility for the NHRA – which satisfies the organisation’s core goal. As the first professional sports association to use Ven.ue, the organisation will build a customised OTT platform for the NHRA, in addition to VoD opportunities which offer new revenue streams. Ven.ue extends the NHRA’s reach to additional delivery and distribution platforms and fulfils the fans’ desire for additional content. Rokosa noted that the organisation would use these new platforms to drive fan engagement and create a new base of loyal NHRA fans. As Rokosa says: “The NHRA and Sony found each other at the right time and in a way that worked for both of us.” Through the use of Sony’s complementary and interconnected media solutions, the organisation is streamlining efficiencies that enhance their workflow while generating more engaging content for their enthusiastic fans – something any sports organisation would benefit from. As motorsports continue to grow exponentially and find creative avenues to interact with their dedicated

supporters, the NHRA has new and immersive opportunities to tell relevant stories through videos and social media experiences that enhance fan involvement and, in turn, add new dimensions to the sport and its leading talent. Rokosa observes: “The fact that Sony has some of the best cameras in the world and an enormous stake in the consumer market offers us the ability to continue to grow our relationship into the future and we’re looking forward to it.” n Find out more on pro.sony/eu-IMS

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | VII

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FEATURE for broadcasters on how to deal with issues of interference. The group’s focus is now on new technology such as 5G and discussions surrounding how it can be harnessed for both contribution and distribution, while Williams describes further development of satellite technology as “a major plank of our work,” adding that “the threats from piracy and cyber security are other hot topics which are focusing the industry on a daily basis.” Now a few months into the role, Williams says she hopes the position will help her to achieve another ambition – increasing diversity in the media tech industry. “I want to keep motivating and modernising the group to tackle newer issues. I’d like to deliver on some of the issues affecting and concerning our industry in the connectivity sphere and make a real difference. But a major goal for me is to improve and expand the diversity of the group – both gender and ethnicity. The operations business suffers from being a little male-dominated, though that is improving. You just need to look at the attendance at IBC or NAB to see that. There are some great women in technology and I’m committed to making sure they have an equal voice and platform. I will work hard on inviting a full range of potential new speakers to our events and working with new colleagues from all across the industry.”

Before being invited to become chair, Williams helped to prepare content for the twice-yearly forums as part of the planning committee, with her experience working for the BBC providing her with a particular insight into connectivity issues faced by those in broadcast media. “As a journalist, my background is in newsgathering and mainly major special events coverage,” says Williams. “I’ve been involved in or overseen many of the largest events in the UK and some abroad for the past 20 years. So my background is very different to many on the IMCG and I have focused on the areas where I can use this experience, such as contributions via IP, cellular, more digital technology and mobile journalism, and platforms on the web and social media.” Williams adds that her new role complements her position at the BBC, giving her access to other contacts and colleagues who are able to share and advise upon broadcasting concerns. “It’s a great network to be part of and I’m proud and delighted to have been asked to take a more leading part in the next stage,” she says. “They work alongside each other pretty well so far. I might think twice about that statement soon - our next forum comes just a few days after Brexit and we may have been pretty busy on the news front!” n

LET US REIGNITE IT!

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 51

FEATURE

A EUROPEAN OUTLOOK Michail Chandakas, OTT analyst at Kagan, a TMT offering of S&P Global Market Intelligence, takes a look at the European OTT and pay-TV markets over the next couple of years

evenues from the subscription over-the-top market in Europe are expected to double over the next five years, reaching $12.77 billion in 2023, according to Kagan estimates. This growth is due to a number of different factors, including the expansion of international media players in the region as well as new service launches by local players, both by incumbents and smaller media groups. Formed alliances in the United Kingdom, Germany and France among broadcasters will further intensify the competition in the OTT landscape. We focused on 18 European markets: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Poland and Russia. According to our projections model, the total number of paid subscriptions in those 18 markets will rise from 66.6 million in 2018

Europe online video subscription revenues and annual percent growth, 2018-2013 Total online video subscription revenues ($M)

% growth

14,000

45 40

12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

20 15

4,000

2,000 0

5 2018

2019

220

2021

2022

Data compiled Feb. 2019. Sources: Industry data; Kagan estimates Kagan, a media research group within the TMT offering of S&B Global Market Intelligence. ÂŠ2019 S&B Global Market Intelligence. All rights reserved

52 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

2023

to 121.1 million in 2023. We expect the annual growth rate to slowly decline as we approach 2023, given that the OTT market shows signs of saturation. The above revenue and subscriber metrics refer to services that offer stand-alone monthly subscriptions that are either paid directly to the streaming video provider or to third parties via wholesale licensing agreements. We consider single-day and weekly one-off subscriptions as transactional video on demand and exclude them from the model. In many European markets similar to the US, we see a number of streaming services available offering linear channels in an attempt to replicate traditional multichannel packages at a lower price entry point. Unlike what is happening in North America, in Europe as a whole online alternatives to traditional pay-TV have not led to a decrease in the multichannel subscribers, with IPTV driving the sluggish growth. This is partly because multichannel is more affordable in Europe compared to the US, there are strong TV Everywhere propositions by local telcos and multiplay bundles combining TV with fixed broadband and mobile are popular. Looking at the share of the online video subscriptions in the total video subscriptions market that includes multichannel, we notice an increase from 28 per cent in 2018 to 41 per cent in 2023. This trend does not translate to revenues due to the much lower average revenue per user of streaming platforms. In particular, only 26 per cent of total consumer spending will go toward subscription online video in 2023. Even though OTT is growing in terms of subscribers, many stand-alone services are not economically viable due to increased operating costs, including marketing campaigns and content acquisition. As a result, we have seen a number of closures over the last few years, such as Watchever in Germany, FilmStruck in France, Spain

FEATURE Europe online video as a percent of total video susbcriptions, 2018-2013 Multichannel subs (residential & commercial)

Online video subscriptions (aggregate)

100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0%

2018

2019

220

2021

2022

2023

Data compiled Feb. 2019. Sources: Industry data; Kagan estimates. Kagan, a media research group within the TMT offering of S&B Global Market Intelligence. ©2019 S&B Global Market Intelligence. All rights reserved

and the United Kingdom and the upcoming closure of CanalPlay in France. The recent trend of aggregation that started with the deal between Liberty Global PLC and Netflix in 2016 is expected to continue with more streaming services finding their way into multichannel

bundles or in the platform of an online aggregator such as Amazon Channels. Smaller niche services such as Hayu and Eurosport Player are especially benefiting from such agreements by becoming available to a wider audience while reducing marketing costs. n

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PRODUCTION AND POST

NEXT QUESTION:

WHAT MAKES A GOOD GAME SHOW?

Philip Stevens quizzes the experts about the popular genre

“T

hat’s the $64,000 question!” It’s a phrase that is thrown into a conversation when a difficult question of any kind is posed. The implication being that the answer is extremely tough to answer. The phrase originated, of course, from an early American game show (generally called quizzes, in those days). The format was simple. Ask a question and determine if the contestant had the knowledge to answer correctly. Although the answers to the initial questions earned modest cash sums, by the time the contestant reached $64,000 the questions were extremely difficult. Today, knowledge to answer questions is still a requirement in most shows, but the formats have changed beyond recognition. “Gameshows, from the longest running such as Jeopardy in the US to the newer classics such as our own Money Drop are often the most economically viable and loved of any genre,” explains James Fox, joint managing director at Remarkable Television. “They also travel faster than any other genre and just when people think the days of the game show are numbered another blockbuster comes along and proves them wrong.” Remarkable is the maker of several well-known gameshow formats, many of which have travelled widely around the world including Pointless now in its 21st series on BBC 1 and which has travelled to 12 countries, House of Games which is about to launch series three on BBC 2 (a run of 100 episodes) and All Together Now, a singing game show format which is now in 10 countries. Remarkable also

54 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

produced Deal or No Deal from 2005 to 2016, with some 82 countries opting for a Deal. THE RIGHT MIX What does Fox believe makes the genre so popular? “The combination of jeopardy, emotion, interactivity and challenge mean that well produced shows can attract large, broad audiences,” he says. “The ability to play along or shout at the television is key. And not just the ability to answer the questions, but also to have an opinion on the big decision contestants are about to make. For example, should they take the deal or play on?” With all that in mind, how does Fox go about finding new formats? “We are obviously looking for a compelling idea, but within that we are looking for a USP which has potential for longevity. We are also looking for how talent can be involved and not just hosts/presenters, but multiple roles such as co-hosts and experts.” But he says the main challenge for game show makers is producing the volume required at the speed necessary within tight budgets. That means making multiple programmes in one day. “Teams producing games shows are some of the most skilled, hardworking people in the industry.” He goes on, “Finding new hosting talent can also be challenging. Many people think that being a game show host is easy. It’s really not - finding the right names who can carry a format is not always easy. Beyond that, we are also always looking at ways to innovate long-running series. The challenge here is to keep shows vibrant without digressing too far from what are often incredibly well-loved formats.”

BIG MONEY Without doubt, one of the most successful formats of recent times has been Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with license agreements in 107 countries. Several of the team that created that show have now set up their own company. Called Boxatricks, the main players are Steve Springford, Michael Whitehill, David Briggs, John Gough, Andrew Eborn, Fintan Coyle and Colman Hutchinson. “Boxatricks is basically a format creation and development

company,” explains Hutchinson, one of the company’s creative directors. “We create game show formats, acquire third-party formats, and carry out consultancy work that helps other people develop their formats.” He says that one of the major changes on the UK game show scene over the last 10 years has been the move from prime time viewing to daytime scheduling. “You look at the successful formats such as The Chase, Pointless and Tipping Point and they all occupy pre-prime time slots. But

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better way to proceed is to sell an established format to a new territory. Generally, what works in one country will work in another. At Boxatricks, we are always investigating new markets.” Beyond that, it is also important to consider the spinoffs from the conventional broadcast, including second screen applications with the use of mobile and tablets and other online devices. When it comes to the production of a game show, Hutchinson says that four things are vital – the host, the music, the lighting and the graphics. “You have to involve the graphics company early on. In fact, most graphics people say they would like to get on board at the concept stage so they can show what can be achieved.”

PICTURED ABOVE: Colman HUtchinson

“A quiz show has to draw in the audience so it is part of the proceedings.” COLMAN HUTCHINSON

once these became successful, you see celebrity versions are made and these are often scheduled for prime time viewing.” But whatever the time, what does Hutchinson think makes the genre so popular? “It is a good investment. You can make up to five programmes a day, get a good audience – all meaning value for money on the part of the broadcaster. The financial pressure is on and game shows help to get the throughput in a viable way.” He says the challenge for game show producers is obvious. “You have to come up with a format that is going to attract the audience. The mistake some make is to arrive at a similar idea to an existing format – but that hardly ever works. An original idea that’s captivating has a far greater chance of success.” According to Hutchinson, some people who offer a new idea say ‘this is a great game to play’. That, he says, misses the point. “It might be fun for the contestants to play – but is it watchable? A quiz show has to draw in the audience so it is part of the proceedings. The viewer has to be able to say ‘I simply cannot afford to miss this programme’ or ‘I have to keep watching until I get the answers’. Even if you know the answer yourself, you stick with it to see if the contestant gets it right.” In short, he believes, the simplest formats are the best. “If you have a quiz show that is difficult to understand then people don’t want to invest the time in watching and trying to work out what’s going on. You have to use a format that enables the audience to play along or get really involved.” Having said that, Hutchinson concedes that getting a new format accepted is not always easy. “While an existing show is attracting an audience, the broadcasters are often not interested in trying out something new. A

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GRAPHICS – THE WOW FACTOR South Wales-based Kinetic Pixel was formed in November 2013 by Craig Hann and Joe Styles after their previous employer left the game show graphics business. That decision left a number of high-profile productions in need of similar services, so the newly created company quickly picked up where they left off. “Our key staff have worked in the industry for many years, and I myself started with Celador International in 2001 working as part of the team building and rolling out Who Wants to be a Millionaire? across the world,” explains Craig Hann, managing director. “Our other current UK credits include Pointless, Only Connect, Tenable and Countdown.” Hann points out that there have been some significant milestones in the company’s history. These include being named Small Business of the Year in 2015 by a Welsh business support consortium, winning the open tender for Countdown in 2017 and seeing the industrial design and development of the new Fastest Finger First units for the reboot of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? in the UK through from concept to manufacture. From a graphics perspective, what changes has Hann seen since Kinetic Pixel was formed? “Budgets and deadlines. Budgets are constantly squeezed, and in the early stages of a format’s development we often have to consider the work we’re doing as a loss-leader in order to make pitches and run-throughs possible. This means we have to be selective about the projects we take on, so we’re choosing the formats that have a strong executive team behind them, previous success in other territories or seem like they have something unique and fun that might give them a good chance of commission.” In terms of deadlines, Hann says they are always tight, and often the brief can change right up to the recording. “We’ve got an amazingly adaptable team and some seriously powerful home-grown software that lets us deal with changes quickly and with minimal risk to the show.”

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NEW FORMATS Coming up with new ideas is also part of the company’s activities. “We consult with productions on many aspects of a format, and have partnered with a few producers in Wales on the development for a handful of Welsh language shows, and it’s certainly something we’d like to do more of. We start with the format treatment, which is usually a simple slideshow or basic version of the gameplay designed using PowerPoint, and we define the game logic, animations and player interactions and automation from there. We have a unique insight into the design and mechanics of quizzes having seen so many over nearly 20 years so we perform a key role in getting the games to play fairly and to have a clear set of rules.” There has to be careful consideration of what elements might change, especially once rehearsals start and the producers see the games on camera for the first time. “Flexibility is key,” admits Hann, “and our focus on adaptable graphics elements and real-time rather than just playout gives us the ability to give producers what they need at short notice.” Hann explains that the video hardware is off-the-shelf professional equipment, the same that can be found in any gallery or outside broadcast unit. “We design custom

hardware for buzzers, inputs, triggers, wearable tech and input devices. Our PC hardware is a mixture of consumer tablets and laptops, and custom-built graphics servers.” As we’ve seen, alongside graphics, lighting and set design are key to a successful format. How does Kinetic Pixel interact with these elements? “We work very closely with set designers when specifying screens, buzzers and interactive consoles. It’s important the set designer knows what equipment is available and how it can be integrated into their set build.” Hann continues, “The partnership with the lighting director and the console operator is very important, especially on a show like Fifteen to One, where we have over 300 discrete lighting cues that have to be carefully programmed, tested, and integrated into the game logic.” He concludes, “We, and our competitors, are tasked with a lot more than just ‘graphics’. Our output is now much more nuanced and technical than just the graphics you see on-screen. Our deliverables can cover anything from artificial intelligence, machine learning, complex triggers and control of physical props, question and content management, wearable technology, discrete stand-alone games and integration with second screen and social media platforms.” n

PICTURED ABOVE: Craig Hann

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ESPORTS PRODUCTIONS UP THEIR GAME WITH DEDICATED ‘PLAYER CAMS’ By Jackson Root, marketing director at Marshall Electronics

ith over 400 million viewers tuning in to spectate in 2019, global esports championship attendances are quickly growing to rival traditional sporting events. Over the last decade, the global esports economy has grown at a dizzying pace to top $1 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow to nearly $3 billion by 2022. This movement has in large part been spurred on by the phenomenal growth of live OTT web streaming services like Twitch, where users can watch esport athletes play video games and narrate as they play. It should come as no surprise that esports has changed the game for live event production. Similar to producing any fast-paced event coverage, having reliable, high-quality equipment is essential to producing a successful live broadcast. As esports continues to gain notoriety, rivaling even the most popular of traditional sports, so too will broadcasters, studios, arenas and manufacturers need to adjust to keep pace. Large esports arenas are being outfitted worldwide with extensive production setups mirroring even the most professional broadcast infrastructures, equipment, and workflows. For many esports tournaments, production workflows must be prepared for traditional broadcast, simulcasts to spectator video walls, and streaming platforms. Additionally, esports broadcasts will feature the active game play, pre- and post-game interviews as well as commentary, in addition to replays, cutscenes, game play trailers, and lower third advertising. Unlike most professional sporting events, however, organised esports teams are comprised of competitors making moves and plays digitally, commanding digital avatars from behind a PC monitor. Helmets, cleats and shoulder pads are replaced by high performance video processors, headphones and computer mice. This

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difference in the very nature of esports leads to major differences in coverage and commentary of the sport. Esports tournaments can have over 50 video sources throughout the facility, including coverage of the arena, commentary, and individual feeds of players in real time. esports commentary and spectating differ dramatically from traditional sporting leagues as eye movements, hand movements, and minute facial expressions are watched closely to determine the flow of matches, leading to the rise of the esports ‘player cam’. Generally considered to be more digitally and technologically savvy than an average broadcast viewer, the esports fan expects a considerable amount of content with a high-level of quality. The current viewing experience blends live broadcasts of players’ interfaces, with inset PIP (picture-in-picture) feeds of the players. Dedicated player cams situated atop each players’ station aid in providing the immersive experience demanded by this emerging demographic.

PRODUCTION AND POST The benefit of having dedicated, individual player cams is that viewers are able to see the intensity of the esport athletes’ faces as they play, which adds to the compelling nature of the broadcast and event. Providing a wide field-of-view, player cams are typically mounted atop each player’s computer monitor in order to capture their movements and expressions during the tournament. When esports first began to rise in popularity, tournament hosts relied on standard USB webcams, which resulted in a complicated network of wires and conversion boxes to make the player cams a functional asset to the programme. Today, many leading integrators and producers working in esports have turned to professional-grade cameras, such as the Marshall CV500 series HD Miniature Cameras, rather than USB webcams. Opting for a professional camera with 3G/HDSDI output will eliminate any additional conversion equipment, adding latency and the potential for equipment failure during broadcasts. Additionally, these miniature cameras typically offer a “set it and forget” level of setup, meaning that video crews can affix the solutions atop each computer monitor and leave them virtually untouched throughout a tournament. For especially heated events, however, they also offer a high

level of durability to withstand a constant change of players at the gaming stations. Esports broadcasters also turn to these professional grade solutions for the compact size, high-definition output and professional adjustment settings. Included among these are white balance, low-light sensitivity, interchangeable lenses, and more, which ensure the broadcast quality is a near-match to the graphics one might find within the actual game play. Another important consideration for selecting the right cameras for esports productions is lighting, and having a camera that can provide high-quality footage in low-light settings is required, as there is typically a constant shift in stage lighting throughout the arena. Additionally, choosing a professional camera with FullHD output allows for broadcast readiness, meaning that it will be equally as applicable for web streaming as it is for international television broadcasts. This is perfect for arenas, studios, and gaming brands that work with major networks that now frequently air championship rounds of high-profile tournaments. n

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PRODUCTION AND POST

ON SET WITH

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PRODUCTION AND POST

Philip Stevens wanders down the streets of Walford to begin a series on ‘continuing dramas’

ext year sees the 35th anniversary of the ever-popular BBC soap opera EastEnders. The first transmission was at 19:00 hours on the 19th February 1985 and attracted an audience of 17 million viewers. Created by the writer and producer team of Tony Holland and Julia Smith, the name of the fictitious area called Walford is a mix of two east London districts, Walthamstow and Stratford. Over the years, the show has collected an array of awards. These include ten BAFTA Awards, the Inside Soap Award for Best Soap for 14 years running (from 1997 to 2012), 12 National Television Awards for Most Popular Serial Drama and 11 awards for Best Soap at the British Soap Awards. As well as being seen in the UK, EastEnders is shown to TV audiences internationally, mainly to English speaking countries: New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, Canada and the Caribbean as well as Sub Saharan Africa and pan Europe on BBC Entertainment.

Since its inception, the programme has been made at the BBC’s Elstree Centre just north of London. Here there are not only a multitude of sets for the various interiors of homes, shops and, of course, the well-known Queen Vic pub, but a massive exterior lot with an area of 8,700 square metres that houses Albert Square, the street market, underground station, park, allotments and a host of other locations. TIME FRAME So, what are the challenges of working on such a high-profile programme? “Initially there were two 30-minute episodes each week, but this has increased in stages over the years to the current count of four, and that means two hours of television every week,” states BBC Studios series producer, Sharon Batten. “I liken it to a train that never stops, plus there is the challenge of coming up with new and innovative stories and characters. From a production point of view, it is relentless but we wouldn’t have it any other way.”

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BBC Studios line producer, Sue Mather adds, “And we are making stories that will attract a younger audience and which are relevant in the modern world. An audience who are not traditionally TV watchers.” That last point is borne out by the fact that the audience numbers are increased by around one million when iPlayer viewing is taken into consideration. The time from story concept to transmission is quite long. In July, for example, the Christmas episodes were being planned. “Having said that, we have storylines going much beyond that time frame,” says Batten. “When it comes to actual scripts, we plan to get these completed six

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to eight weeks ahead of shoot. We have a pool of around 30 to 40 script writers and we can match those who have particular experiences with past episodes with upcoming similar stories.” STAYING TOPICAL However, there is always planning for ‘topical dropins’ – references to incidents or events that happen after the shoot, but which need to be included at the time of transmission. “We are geared up to react very quickly to events such as the birth of a royal baby, a general election result and so on. The very next morning after such an

PRODUCTION AND POST following evening’s episode. These drop-ins go down really well.” Although drop-ins have become part of the production, the regular workflow sees four episodes in production at any one time. A standard block for those episodes is 10 days. “So, two weeks to shoot four episodes,” explains Mather. “Therefore, in order to get 212 episodes completed, plus the extras for Christmas, we need two teams shooting at any one time. The actors will go between the two teams. That means actors running between exterior lots and sets.” In order to allow all the personnel involved to have a decent Christmas break, a third team will come on board to cope with the additional workload. And that adds an extra challenge for the actors as they need to be across 12 episodes during those shooting days. With all that in mind, how long is allowed for rehearsal time? “Five minutes!” emphasises Batten. “Obviously, we allow time for a line run before the shoot starts.” Mather adds: “If there is a long two-hander scene, we will try to schedule some rehearsal time. This enables the director and the actors to really work out the scene in depth. But normally, it is a five-minute line run through already mentioned, five-minute block and technical lineup and then 10 minutes to shoot it. Obviously, there are some more complicated scenes and we will allow extra time to shoot those sequences.”

event, we have writers scripting an appropriate scene and we check which actors are available. The production team will shoot the sequences and it will immediately go into post production ready for transmission. If we know something is likely to happen to which the characters need to react, we can plan that into the schedule.” Mather provides more insight. “Sometimes we can pre-plan these drop-ins with more accuracy. For example, last year’s royal wedding we could prepare for in advance. More recently, we did a topical drop in following the Cricket World Cup victory and the British Grand Prix. Both these events were featured in the

THE SHOOT A pool of around 25 freelance directors are employed on EastEnders. “We have a meeting on the early drafts of each episode four weeks in advance of the shoot,” states Batten. “Then the directors will receive a script from which they can work out their shooting plans two weeks before the studio date.” All scenes, whether studio, on the Elstree lot or an exterior location, are shot multi-camera, but with each output ISO’d for editing purposes. Sources from any set or exterior can be routed to any of the three on-site galleries. “Although we have a gallery for each team, the directors work on the floor to be close to the action and, therefore, get the very best performance from the actors. Performance is key to our success,” says Mather. “But we still have a vision mixer producing a cut version. We did try working without a vision mixer, but found it didn’t work out and was much slower. If a third assistant is directing background, for example, he or she can see what is the ideal cut. Without that cut version, we were finding things a lot more complex with walk-ons. And it helps the sound operators to know when a close up is being used because they can get the boom in to achieve the correct perspective.”

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PRODUCTION AND POST

“I liken it to a train that never stops, plus there is the challenge of coming up with new and innovative stories and characters.” SHARON BATTEN

AVID EDITING The vision mixed cut will go to the edit, along with the ISO feeds. A rough cut is created during the shoot, and then the director will sit with the editor for three to four days. Once the director is happy, the executive producer will view that version and make any changes that may be required. Then the episodes will go to dubbing and grading. The EastEnders production team is fully Avid based with five edit suites. They use an Avid ISIS 5500 with 5 x 64TB engines as the main editing storage but rushes are also automatically copied to a separate backup ISIS 5500 using Avid Copy Servers. “We have a full DaVinci suite for grading and half a day is allowed for each episode,” explains Mather. “An external colour grader comes in to really enrich the quality.” EastEnders has been known to transmit a live episode. And on at least one occasion this was from a secret location away from the safety of the Elstree ‘home’. “We recorded a full dress rehearsal of the episode which was running on EVS in sync with the live – just in case the feed went down,” says Mather. “But then we are used

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to dealing with emergencies – cast and crew getting stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway, someone going sick, unexpected weather conditions and so on – with such a tight turnaround these happenings can mean some quick rescheduling from our fantastic team.” BEING EFFICIENT As part of the drive for sustainability, the production works on low-energy lighting. At present about 50 per cent of the lighting falls into that category and that move continues with the aim to become 100 per cent efficient in the relatively near future. Recycle bins, an electric car and charging points also appear on the exterior lot – to continue that theme of sustainability on screen. Mather concludes, “One of the benefits of our set-up is that we do everything on site here in Elstree. Right from story conception to final output. We even do our own tech check – so whereas every other show would have to send their programming for checking before transmission, so we are absolutely self-contained. And that adds to our efficiency.” n

PRODUCTION AND POST

DUBLIN’S FAIR CITY CELEBRATES 30 YEARS Philip Stevens adds an Irish flavour to his look at ‘continuing dramas’ PICTURED ABOVE: The new set utilises materials usually used for building construction rather than set design

PICTURED ABOVE: Brigie de Courcy

air City is an Irish television soap opera which has been on RTÉ One since 18 September 1989. Plots centre on the domestic and professional lives of the residents of Carrigstown, a fictional suburb of the Northside part of the city of Dublin. The area encompasses a restaurant, pub, garage, corner shop, community centre, charity shop and various businesses. Originally aired as one half-hour episode per week for a limited run, the show is now broadcast year round on RTÉ One with four episodes per week (Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday), all of which air at 8pm. Fair City is the most watched drama in Ireland and reaches the Irish diaspora across the world through RTÉ Player. It routinely achieves 35 per cent share and has peaked at 41 per cent share. So, with such a success, what challenges do the production team face when it comes to working on the series? “The biggest challenge is the lack of a series bible,” admits executive producer, Brigie de Courcy. “It would

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have been easy to set up and maintain a bible from episode one, but it is a very hard sell to our budget controllers at Episode 4000. We are proud of how many new writers and directors we bring to the medium, but there is no doubt that this makes it harder for them.” PRODUCTION CYCLE Long term story planning starts about 12-18 months ahead of transmission. The time frame from specific story beats to the day an episode airs is around 23 weeks. A pool of around 40 script writers is needed for the series, although only one is used for each episode. “Our directors work on a five-week cycle, with the script available to them the week before the start of their cycle. One block of four episodes are filmed across six days, with one day being allotted to rehearsals. This shooting schedule comprises two days EFP in director’s week three, and four days studio in director’s week four. This means that each week there are two directors

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filming, one on exteriors and one in studio. The four episodes are edited using Avid across seven days with a further two days for colour grade – also using Avid - and three days sound post production,” explains de Courcy. “We have two sound stages for filming interior scenes, Stage A and Stage C. In Stage A we have five fixed sets, while in Stage C we have one fixed set and five bays for rotating domestic sets. Our exterior lot covers 2,500 square metres. Some directors prefer to work in the gallery, others on the floor – we can accommodate both.” The interior scenes are covered by three Sony HD cameras. Although all cameras are ISO’d, a cut version from a vision mixer is also available for the editors. Footage from the exterior scenes is recorded on the hard drives of the two XD cameras. “We have two lighting directors working on a rotation in the studio, while we use lighting camera operators on EFP shoots.” NEW SET Recently, Fair City’s streets got a complete makeover. After five years of planning and ten months of building, new

interior sets appeared on screen in December 2018, while the revamped exterior lot was first seen a month later. “With four episodes airing every week, the new exterior set gives more variety and options to story writers and directors,” states de Courcy. “Fair City stalwarts including McCoys, the Hungry Pig Diner and the Community Centre have all had a face lift.” She continues, “Marrying the audience expectation of the old familiar layout of the exteriors with the new ambition of the Fair City team was a delicate balance. The old exterior set had been built very simply, with no anticipation that the show would last 30 years. It had been added to as time went on, but it always had significant challenges for directors. With the new footprint of the exterior set, the sizes and orientation of individual sets was impacted. But we built new roads, giving visible locations to sets that had only existed in the studio, we solved shootoff problems, and we are gradually cladding the large workshop that borders one side of the new exterior set to look like industrial/commercial premises so that it can feature in story terms.”

PICTURED ABOVE: The cast at work

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DETAILED DESIGN Fair City’s head of design, Marianne Dunlevy, explains how the new set was brought to life: “To plan the brand new Carrigstown streets, we visited various other famous soap sets, such as Coronation Street and Hollyoaks to ensure what was created by RTÉ took the lead from these creations, but reflected Carrigstown and the community. Many hours were spent surveying, photographing and researching the streets around Dublin City and suburbs. It was essential that we recognised the changing style and architecture trends around Dublin, for example the painted electricity boxes, taking the lead from the ‘Dublin Canvas’ community project.” The first drawings were hand drafted, and the process began by sketching all of the buildings, as the new area to which Fair City was moving had a different shape and size. This was also an opportunity to improve the exterior sets and make them more realistic and weather proof. It took six months of meticulous planning to complete the drawings. Dunlevy continues, “The materials chosen appear as similar as possible to the old set, so the changes were not too dramatic for the viewer. These materials are usually for

building construction rather than set design, and this helps it to look authentic, believable and most importantly, be weather proof for the exterior parts. Our scenic painters completed the look by adding an ageing affect to all the buildings to make them look lived in.” Parts of the previous set were recycled, including the fire alarms, house numbers, the telephone box and post box, the bins, and even some of the railings from the houses to help the new Carrigstown feel familiar. The set now provides, for the first time, the opportunity to shoot 360 degrees. This was not an option on the old street, and, says Dunlevy, offers a more fluid movement of the characters through the streets. De Courcy adds, “The audience adjusted remarkably quickly and positively to the new look Carrigstown, once again proving that in soap, story is more important than anything else!” She concludes, “In the shifting world of TV drama, Fair City has been remarkably steady with six executive producers during its 30 years, and I have been in the chair since 2008. We also have one actor who appeared in the first episode and has been to the forefront in every season since. It remains an appealing ongoing story.” n

PICTURED ABOVE The newly construicted set

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HOW C A THE NE N TAKE US XT FRO TO NTIER Mike Arthur, senior vice president Sports and Licensing at Veritone explains how AI can help with instant, automated digital content rights licensing

n nearly every industry, artificial intelligence (AI) is going to or already has helped streamline and automate previously highly manual processes. Considering the wealth of unstructured data including audio and video in media and entertainment, the opportunity for AI to improve and accelerate processes and also generate new revenue streams is tremendous. For example, think about metadata generation. AI can be used not only to automate a very manual process, but illuminate information about the content that would most probably have not been surfaced otherwise. AI can apply what is known as cognitive engines — special software that understands different categories of information such as spoken word, logos, objects, faces and more. These cognitive engines work together to scour and inspect content and log details describing items within the media in near real-time, subsequently delivering this information as metadata into the Digital Asset Management (DAM)

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system used to store the assets. As you can appreciate, there is no surprise that many media and entertainment companies are already using AI this way today. As AI technologies are becoming more integrated in the production process, a lot of this metadata will be inserted automatically at the time of production. This presents a gamechanging opportunity for rights holders for immediate content curation, distribution and licensing. Interestingly, we are only seeing a few early adopters leverage this tactic at this time, but the real impact could occur over time in the licensing space — because one of the elements covered in the metadata will be rights and clearances. To explain this point, let’s first look at how licensing works today, using sports as an example. Anyone who wants to reuse a piece of copyrighted content — such as an ad agency or a TV network — must pay for the licensing rights to do so. For stock content, people can find it, pay for the license, and download it in

one transaction without getting humans involved. That means rights holders have an automatic means of tracking content use. But for exclusive, high-value content, such as a football broadcast, behind-the-scenes practice footage, or interviews with star athletes, buyers must negotiate terms of use and the price they’ll pay before they can legally use it. With premium content, there are usually multiple owners who must approve the purchase. In the case of the football, you’d need permission from the team, the professional football league and all the athletes who appear in the clip, at a minimum. Today that’s a manual process that requires humans to negotiate the terms and get direct approval from all the rights holders. It’s the best way for content owners to protect their copyrights and intellectual property and make sure they get paid, but it takes time. One of the biggest areas for licensing occurs with sports networks and broadcasters repackaging sports content for digital distribution over their web and OTT channels. That’s because, rather than watching the full television broadcast of a match, many fans are turning to digital channels for match highlights and associated content. By keeping an eye on these alternate sources, fans can piece together the game without having to tune in to the broadcast. Sports broadcasters are heeding this trend by

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populating their digital channels with content that will appeal to those fans. Fans expect digital content to be up to the minute. However, the manual licensing process doesn’t happen at internet speed, so unless the sports broadcaster has pre-negotiated digital rights, the digital repackaging won’t either. And when you consider that these same broadcasters are also looking toward the day when they can deliver customised OTT content to individual viewers (more on that later), the need for live or near-live digital rights licensing becomes clear. Enter AI. AI OPENS THE DOOR TO AUTOMATED, NEAR-REALTIME DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT With its ability to accelerate metadata tagging and process content at superhuman speeds, AI could usher in the era of automated licensing in real or near-real time. The result would be practically instantaneous digital rights and clearances verification, including geo-blocking/fencing. HERE’S HOW IT WOULD WORK: Once a rights manager establishes approved use cases and parameters with the rights holders and obtains all clearances from intellectual property owners (such as athletes who

PRODUCTION AND POST

appear in the content), the rights manager would enter the approved use cases and clearance information into a licensing tag, and it becomes part of the metadata. When a content request comes in, the AI system would grab the requested content, review the use case, and determine if it meets the criteria that are embedded in the metadata. If it does, then AI technology would clear the use case, record the value of the content, and send an invoice to the requesting party. From there, the AI would send a report to all the rights holders indicating the number of transactions, the approvals and their use cases, and the amount of money collected. And it would all happen within milliseconds of a clip being requested. AI ENABLES CREATION OF HIGHLY PERSONALISED CONTENT ON THE FLY This automated, instantaneous licensing process is an essential element in another AI-enabled function on the horizon: creating and pushing personalised content to individual viewers over digital channels based on their known interests. For example, suppose a sports broadcaster knows (based on searches or requests) that a certain OTT channel subscriber is a fan of Liverpool Football Club. The broadcaster could rely on AI to uncover every bit of content related to the team, past or

present, from match footage to video of fans who have decorated their homes with LFC gear. Using algorithms, AI would scan the content on the web for relevant clips and then curate it to create a new, individualised version of content for the subscriber in question â€” say, a 15-minute video of highlights, interviews and historic footage related to the team. Upon approval by the broadcaster, AI could deploy that video to an online platform to be pushed to the subscriber. Meanwhile, the AI will determine how much of the content it just created requires how much payment, and to whom. For rights holders, it would aggregate all the various licenses and fees and send the information to each of the applicable IP rights holders. In this way, AI will not only be able to create custom content on the fly but ensure that content is cleared and the appropriate rights fees are charged before the viewer ever sees it. All in the blink of an eye. This use of AI is far from mature, but the future, I am convinced, will usher in a new frontier of licensing and digital rights and clearances verification â€” not just for sports rights holders, but for all kinds of content owners who want to accelerate licensing, protect their intellectual property, and capture the revenue associated with granted rights. n

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THE

ESPORTING CHALLENGE Philip Stevens looks at a total game-changer PICTURED ABOVE: The esports following is massive – as evidenced by this view of an arena

here can be little doubt that esports is growing at a quite astonishing rate. The number of tournaments has increased dramatically, while prize money is well up there with some of the top ‘traditional’ sports. Such is the following that the big events generally take place in huge arenas with spectators watching the proceedings on big screens. But beyond that, competitions are screened online with Twitch and YouTube being, arguably, the main platforms. With that as some background information, what happens at the production end of these live events? COMPLEX CONFIGURATIONS COVERED In many ways, the production of esports for the viewing audience is far more complex than traditional

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sporting events. “There is a whole new world of esports production, which has larger layering demands and more instance layering configurations required,” explains John Carter, VP of product at EVS. “Our Dyvi production switcher has a software-based architecture and panel design that enables the production of these large-scale events and has established an efficient new show format for them.” He goes on, “The value of Dyvi in esports is linked to the GPU processing and the huge creativity by creating Stages and Scenes. Plus, with Dyvi, users can break down complex compositions and workflows on a single button. There is the flexibility to create an unlimited number of dirty feeds.” Jens Fischer, account manager and esports specialist at

PRODUCTION AND POST EVS, explains there are two key areas to consider when it comes to a choice of vision mixer panels: “One is the panel itself. Although it looks like a traditional vision switcher, and can have a workflow that is pretty well like any other mixer, the level of manipulation is enormous. The massive difference is that you can map out the panel to whatever you want, making it completely beyond recognisable realms. So, the workflow can be changed considerably from traditional operation.” He points out this flexibility is a huge benefit when it comes to the complex production of esports. “In this genre you want to control many different things simultaneously. You need to monitor any number of different layers – for example, the scores from each player, graphics, which can include bugs, lower thirds – plus the need to push the variables up and down. In addition, you may need to link the mixer to XML sources outside of the panel, like the game server itself ”. Using a traditional vision mixing panel would make controlling all these elements difficult. “That’s because older mixers have their mapping fixed,” emphasises Fischer. “With the Dyvi switcher, you can split up the traditional MEs into sections. That means for esports buttons controlling the views of one team can be placed in one quadrant, while the corresponding sources for the other team are in another quadrant. Alongside those areas there is a conventional programme mix.” And those sources can be numerous. In addition to a camera covering each player there are feeds showing what each competitor is seeing on his or her screen, plus general atmosphere shots from the playing area and auditorium. ADVANCE PLANNING The various configurations of shots that the director thinks will be needed during the broadcast can be stored in folders and can be readily called up as required. But these can be easily changed ‘on the fly’ if the unexpected happens. The other key area is the back end – the processing module. Not only can the panel be configured in any way the director/vision mixer wants, the layering structure provides a very high level of flexibility. “We can liken this to Photoshop or After Effects. The layering capacity is not limited. Even when you get to many multiple layers you can control these in the same manner as a traditional mixer.” But why would a director want to use a high number of layers? Ian Futter, a product specialist with EVS based in the UK explains. “Suppose the director says to the vision mixer, ‘each time a player is knocked out of the competition I want a single cropped image of that competitor to turn black and white.’ Traditionally, the response might be ‘that’s a graphics job, not a vision mixer’. With the Dyvi that can be easily achieved using

the layering configuration. That’s because it is possible to split the image, put them on a layer and assign a macro to that effect.” Other effects can be created and stored in a similar way. Of course, to make all these layers and effects, the person configuring – and operating – the panel needs to know as much about the games as the players. “It is helpful to have an esports guru carry out the mapping,” says Futter. “The director needs to be someone who understands the game and who can use the tools that have been laid out for her or him. “ Beyond the broadcast needs, the Dyvi can also control in an extremely powerful way another vital element in esports events – the video walls. Traditionally, a separate device (adding even more processing delay) is needed, but the Dyvi can provide all the manipulation for the sources that feed the walls regardless of the fact that is a non-16:9 LED-Wall. So, with such a comprehensive piece of kit available, just how is it used? The Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) is the longest running global pro gaming tour in the world. Started in 2006 by the

PICTURED ABOVE: Directing the multi-camera coverage at ESL requires an intimate knowledge of the game

PICTURED BELOW: The vision mixing panel of the Dyvi provides features that are especially relevant for esports

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 75

PRODUCTION AND POST Electronic Sports League (ESL), the competition features the world’s best gamers playing in several events. After a successful first edition, ESL One returned to Katowice in February where 12 teams fought for a piece of the $300,000 prize pool. “Esports’ fan base is growing with programming for tournaments like the IEM now being created to engage audiences using features similar to many other sports,” says Simon Eicher, executive producer at ESL. “Our

programming now appeals to much more casual viewers, engaging those who now watch games like they do any other live sporting event.” Eicher continues, “Deploying these professional processes has allowed us to simultaneously improve our live output while seeing a reduction in production costs because we can work much more efficiently. It’s these kinds of improvements to esports programming that will allow us to continue growing the sport to wider audiences.” n

A raid on the gaming community Square Enix is a Japanese video game developer, publisher and distribution company. It is known for its portfolio of hugely popular game franchises including Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Tomb Raider. Continuing the narrative of the 2015 game Rise of the Tomb Raider, Square Enix launched a muchanticipated new instalment, Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Having been some time since the launch of its predecessor, Square Enix knew that the launch of Shadow of the Tomb Raider needed to renew excitement in the franchise. In order to do so, it wished to ‘gamify’ the launch and introduce the game in a way that would resonate with the gaming community. Given the mostly young, tech-savvy nature of the target audience, it was clear that the launch needed to be innovative and grab attention. By creating a live video experience across multiple social platforms, Square Enix could facilitate interaction, with no limit on the size of the audience. The experience could be enjoyed from the comfort of the user’s home, or on the go, and had the unique ability to reach an established and relevant audience. The Producers, a content driven experiential agency were chosen by Square Enix to help it realise its vision for a live launch. The Producers enlisted London-based specialist Groovy Gecko to

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help deliver the live stream element of the project. Working with The Producers, the company delivered an interactive stream, which involved an almost 60-hour long treasure hunt, streamed directly into the five main social media platforms (YouTube,

Facebook, Twitter, Mixer and Twitch). “From the set of a Mayan-themed tomb, a series of clues and puzzles were needed to solve in order to work out the location of a replica dagger worth £20,000,” explains Groovy Gecko business development director, Jake Ward. “The various clues supplied viewers with a number of letters which could be brought together to form a three-word anagram. The anagram could then be used with the What3Words platform - a technology that has enabled the world to be divided into a grid of 3m x 3m squares, which are each assigned a unique three-word address. “Once the anagram had been deciphered by viewers, it was possible to use the What3Words app or website to

pinpoint the exact location of the dagger. When found, it could be traded in by one intrepid explorer for a huge cash prize of £20,000!” It was important that viewers who joined the live stream at any time, or only watched for a short period, could also participate. Spot prizes were therefore awarded at intervals throughout the stream. As another method of ensuring continued engagement, additional pre-recorded and live content was inserted seamlessly at regular intervals. This included live gameplay of influencers playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, to give sneak-peeks ahead of its release, and celebrities like former SAS soldier Ant Middleton, taking on apt challenges in the jungle. A key aim of Square Enix’s was to reach and attract existing audiences to the live launch stream, as well as capturing new audiences. Using a bespoke tool, Groovy Gecko handled the distribution of the video stream into multiple pages and platforms, and this allowed Square Enix to tap into multiple existing audiences and attract viewers. Sian Baker of The Producers concludes, “The live stream succeeded in successfully launching Shadow of the Tomb Raider in such a way and at such a scale that many other launch methods could never have achieved. A total of 1.3 million viewers watched Square Enix’s live launch, with a combined viewing time of almost 15 years. n

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TECHNOLOGY

3D VISION Jenny Priestley talks to the team at MRMC who provided a whole new outlook for Sky’s coverage at the 148th Open golf championship

uring this year’s coverage of The Open at Royal Portrush, Sky offered golf fans a brand new perspective on their favourite golfer’s swings with the deployment of Mark Robert Motion Control’s Polymotion Stage. The Stage is a state-of-the-art mobile solution for high-quality volumetric video capture (3D video) and avatar creation. Providing a unique studio environment for the creation of volumetric video, stills and avatars, Polymotion Stage is available as a Stage Dome or as a convertible Stage Truck solution. The technology has been developed by MRMC, which is owned by Nikon, in conjunction with Dimension, after the company spotted a gap in the market. “We could see the value of taking a volumetric stage, ie. a stage that had lots of cameras, into the environment where the talent was,” explains James Banfield, synergy planning sales and broadcast marketing manager at MRMC. “We could see that there was an opportunity for taking new technologies to market that hadn’t been done, certainly not in sport in volume, and applying a different way of doing things, which basically meant that we needed to get the technology to where the talent was.” The Dome typically employs 106 cameras, but for The Open, MRMC used 120. Sara Gamble, head of volumetric solutions at MRMC, says that’s what makes the technology so unique: “We have cameras that collect data and RGB, we have cameras that collect data and infrared. There’s lots of different types of cameras that are inside the Dome, and they’re capturing at 30 or 60p at a raw format as well. That gives us the capability to capture a lot of detail in a very short period of time. What that really means is that we can capture moving motion in what we call 4D volumetric video, where it looks like a digital representation. That’s what you saw at The Open.”

“Because you’re capturing it for so many cameras, the output is the resolution rather than what the input is,” adds Banfield. “The input is huge because you’ve effectively got so many cameras, but the output can be into 2K or 4K at 30 or 60p. For Sky we used 2K 30p output.” The Dome produces three different types of output. Banfield describes the first as a 3D still “kind of what we’re all used to.” Another is 3D video that allows the user to capture the subject in a very lifelike pattern; “It is probably the most realistic digital replication you can get,” says Banfield. “It’s not just recreating the way they look, but it’s also recreating in a true fashion the way they move. The last output is an avatar. The avatar not only recreates how they look, but it allows their limbs and joints to be digitally moved afterwards. So in terms of the other types of sports where it could be used, it would very much

“We could see that there was an opportunity for taking new technologies to market that hadn’t been done.” JAMES BANFIELD 78 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

TECHNOLOGY

depend on what the brief was as to what would be the type of output and then that dictates what you do effectively with it.” “For Sky’s The Open coverage, we created the volumetric video, which is the complete digital representation of the actual golfer and their golf swing,” adds Gamble. “It’s an as accurate as you can get digital recreational of the person and their physical movements.” Banfield and Gamble are quick to stress that the technology would work not just for golf but for pretty much any sport - and the possible implementation opportunities don’t just stop with broadcast. “That is the thing that’s exciting about this technology, we see opportunities in fan engagement, getting close to heroes, being able to make superstars accessible in an AR world with mobile phone devices,” explains Banfield. “It can be used by broadcasters to highlight moments in time or the hidden story, which is what Sky did. It can show lots of little nuances between the players that you just don’t see, unless you employ this type of technology. “The technology could also be used from a training perspective to capture people’s motion over time. There are lots of different ways that technology could be used in the future,” he continues. “That’s one of

the most exciting things in that there are quite a number of different verticals where it could be applied, all utilising a very short period of time with the talent. So for example, the talent walks in and we’re able to immediately capture the stills, we’re able to immediately capture the video as they’re moving and doing whatever motion that they’ve been tasked to do by the end client and we can also create the avatar. So by the time they walk out, and that might only be less than 60 seconds that they’re actually physically being captured, it’s done.” The technology’s speed was key to its success at The Open, but it also took some forward planning by the team at MRMC. “We spent a lot of time focusing on ensuring that that processes are as quick as possible,” continues Banfield. “At The Open we reached out to all of the golf club suppliers of all of the golfers and got their equivalent golf clubs sent to us in advance. Then when the golfers walked into the Dome, they literally picked up their golf club with some reflective IR trackers on it so that when we analyse their swing, it was a digital double of their exact golf club. We go to a lot of detail to try and minimise the time we spend with talent and I think that’s one of the really big things that we’ve achieved with this product specifically.”

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TECHNOLOGY

At Portrush, MRMC used their Polymotion Dome, but the company is also launching a dedicated Polymotion Truck later this year, with both options available globally. “The truck allows us to drive up to the venue or talent location and immediately deploy within a couple of hours,” explains Gamble. “The Dome allows us to go to places that trucks are unable to go, a golf course, for example. It gives us two opportunities in order to expand the breadth of where we need to get to.” As well as sport, could the technology be utilised for other content genres such as drama or even a show like Strictly Come Dancing? “Absolutely!” says Gamble. “We’ve launched the stage with analysis in sport, but it does have a huge opportunity around entertainment pieces, any form of broadcast AR, VR or even MR. It gives us the opportunity to create and capture content in a real lifelike form, which then can be deployed over multiple experiences or to multiple environments. We are definitely looking at quite a few options where we can just deliver new and exciting content to entertainment users, existing users, and ultimately fan bases.” “The technology is very exciting. It’s a very intuitive way to show a new framing of sport and a new way to show superstars,” adds Banfield. “AR and VR, specifically as marketplaces, are really on a huge growth curve at the moment, with the likes of Apple and Google trying to

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outdo themselves on who can do AR on mobile better. We think that’s an exciting market for content creators in general, not necessarily just the broadcasters but creatives that are looking at different ways to engage with audiences.” Although they’re unable to tell us where we might see the technology next, Banfield does say it will be “very different to golf.” n

TECHNOLOGY

THE IDEAL SOLUTION FOR HDR>SD

R CONVERSION

Identified as one of the top key trend s for 2019 and beyond, HDR (High Dynamic Range) provides viewers with a brilliant visual experience unlike any other. The demand for more realistic and vibrant colours and enhanced dynamic range is ever-increasing. This creates a demand for broadcasters and media professionals to implement HDR solutions into their workflows to not only deliver enhanced content to the new HDR equipped displ ays, but more importantly to provide equally stunning content to the vast installed base of standard SDR displays. With this demand in mind, LYNX Tech nik has developed a suite of HDR solutions, powered by its multi-purpose award-winning platform, greenMachin e. HDR Static HDR Evie HDR Evie+

TERS TIONS FOR BROADCAS

VE SOLU

PROVIDING INNOVATI

s for openGear frames se 4K and HDR solution Cobalt Digital will showca duct highlights ng to end-users needs, pro at IBC2019. Always listeni NAL SDR/HDR TIO EC rs and encoders, BI-DIR will include new decode new multiviewers, 12G tion, RIST main profile, conversion for live produc DAs. openGear router and 12G -end HDR R include complete end-to HD in s ent em New advanc converter. s ros n/c 9904-UDX-4K up/dow erate selfworkflow within Cobalt’s gen can 4 990 the ls, te of HDR too Utilising Technicolor’s sui ata providing SDR adjusting, dynamic metad SDR preserving to R HD to HDR, and then rmation. complete HDR picture info the Cobalt 9904 or, col hni Working with Tec d at several sporting has been successfully use ’s coverage of the TV events including France French Open. 9992-DEC Series of Cobalt will introduce the rs for openGear. Like ode dec -2 G PE HEVC/AVC/M uoder will offer pay-as-yo dec the 9992-ENC encoder the annel l-ch dua C DE 2-2 ludes the 999 go licensing. The series inc

82 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

HDR Static uses a single static correction for the entire production, which is effective for fixed, predicable applications such as TV studio productio n. HDR Evie uses proprietary frame by frame algorithms to analyse and convert HD or 4K HDR video to SDR video in real-time and displays images as you actually see them. Coming to IBC 2019, LYNX Technik is debuting HDR Evie+, which uses segmented frame by frame algorithms, allowing adjustment of each segment (144 segments/frame) of the HD or 4K HDR content in realtime. HDR Evie and HDR Evie+ are ideal HDR > SDR conversion tools for more dynamica lly demanding and unpredictable content, such as live spor ts or news broadcasts, as the analysis and corrections must be adapted on a frame by frame basis to cope with challengi ng lighting conditions, brightness levels and image composit ion. Come see LYNX Technik at IBC2019 at stand

8.C65

single-channel 4K or 2-DEC-4K-HEVC with decoder, as well as the 999 port for H.265. dual-channel 2K and sup duction norm, and ing to accept 4K as the pro inn beg are ters cas “Broad s for studio and tion solu ge of openGear-based Cobalt has a growing ran e president, sales and Chris Shaw, executive vic mobile production,” states . marketing, Cobalt Digital s to process, monitor, flexible and affordable way e vid pro ts “Our produc ” t. ic 4K and HDR conten and distribute true dynam Emmy earlier in l companies awarded an era sev of Cobalt was one ing technology work on ARQ, the underly the year for collaborative point to multipoint , tion ryp enc features such as powering RIST. Further are to be re ST-2110 transport and mo distribution, and reliable 2019. demonstrated during IBC ies of multiviewers. elop its popular 9971 Ser dev to es tinu con t bal Co ring of nito mo d Delivering uncomplicate als, the 9971 sign HD and 4K ous asynchron internationally. use in ady multiviewers are alre For more information ple stand 10.B44.

ase visit Cobalt at

TECHNOLOGY

R SPORT!

FEED YOU HUNGER FO

highly year! This includes being Globecast has had a busy aury Sport Am g pin hel ’re We t. rke active across the sports ma ltiple globally ners and organisers of mu Organisation (A.S.O.), ow and content to create and share on-dem renowned sports events, days of 210 ses ani tplace. A.S.O. org using our Content Marke ntent is Co ies. ntr cou 25 in nts h 90 eve competition per year, wit ls, the nne cha on visi ers including tele shared with A.S.O. custom . use l rna .O for inte wider media and also A.S ntent year agreement to use Co A.S.O has signed a multicially spe a ng Usi b. Hu dia Digital Me Marketplace, part of our le formats ltip mu to al is easily transcoded video: designed website, materi the h wit d ate oci ass a can then be ts and then clipped. File dat righ and ess sheets or a press kit. Acc h for example, scripts, cue wit e, rfac inte r use ple dled, via a sim management are also han cs. isti stat A.S.O able to see viewing d Cup of Nations, we supplie For the 2019 Total Africa working es, vic ser n utio trib dis n and comprehensive contributio final were the opening match and the with local partners. Both , content was VoD ce tpla rke Ma nt Conte broadcast in 4K. Using our to use, es liat affi tions and stored for prepared in multiple resolu I. RO and nt engageme increasing viewership and cing rts services, we’re introdu Further expanding our spo a response is s Thi 9. 201 IBC at Nerwork Globecast Managed Cloud able to be to t rts broadcasting marke to pressures across the spo es can liat affi t tha y, ivel feeds, cost-effect deliver specific/different liates. affi all to ds fee all r ive to del select rather than having

GETTING REVENUE SH

ARES RIGHT WITHOUT

THE MATHS Millions of VoD/OT T cons umption records a month need to be ingested for intricate rev enue share calculations if distributors, platforms and talent are to get what is theirs by rig ht. But whatever kinds of calculations are needed for whatever kin d of beneficiary the new WHATS’ON rev enue calculation engine by MEDIAGENIX allows users to produce the needed overviews and a range of reports which can be easily pre-co nfigured or manually pro duced according to user reporting requirem ents. Calculations for royalties and participations have grown in complexity now that bus iness models become mo re and more sophisticated. With new players adding to the com petitive clutter and the rise of dig ital platforms fed by the multiplatform expectations of the viewer , ever more business and revenue split models are popping up. The basis for calculating revenue shares remains the same: you need to agree on the percentage split between beneficiaries, but you need to know how many people consumed your content and even possib ly by how much time the y viewed a particular programme. For TVoD or EST you mig ht say this is quite straig htforward. Subscribers pay a specifi c amount to watch or buy a movie or

d globally ltiple feeds to be distribute Globecast MCN allows mu to them c cifi spe t ten liates can air con via the Cloud. It means affi livered -de llite sate or efibr re t of mo without the additional cos ation, move from location to loc content. As competitions deliver content to way ple sim y vides a ver Globecast MCN also pro h processing wit ite transmission logistics, without the need for ons ud. Clo the in xity handled and management comple al monitoring d solution, including sign -en -to end an ply sup We rt layers. spo tran and ty content securi via dedicated 24x7 MCRs, provided astbec Glo a via ent em manag This can include affiliate affiliates , our Cloud routing allows 24/7 helpdesk. Meanwhile costs. idth dw ban ing sav d, nee ) they to request only the feed(s service ad and h tec multiple regional ad We, in partnership with ertion Ins Ad ic nam Dy e -Sid ht Server providers, will also highlig into ted gra solution that’s fully inte (SSDAI), a monetisation tomers to video service. It allows cus T OT e her our TV Everyw channel revenues. maximise OTT and linear 2019 at stand 1.A29 Come see Globecast at IBC

a series. This money is to be distributed over platfor ms, licensors and licensees. But what if you have also paid a Minimum Guarantee? At what point do you begin to pay overages? For SVoD it may becom e even more complicated. Say you have 500,000 subscribers and they all pay €3 per mo nth. This amounts to €1.5 million . You may have to calcul ate the time spent viewing programm es of a particular distrib utor and what percentage it represents of the total viewing min utes of that month before allocating shares to the different ben eficiaries. Explained like this, it pos sibly still sounds practic able, but in today’s media market, reality soo n kicks in. A whole lot of complexities and special needs have to be dealt with. Amid all the se challenges, the WHATS’ON revenu e share calculation engine allows operators to automatically apply calcul ation rules based on a series of preset formulas, and allows for quick gen eration of overviews and reports acr oss all share stakeholders. For more information visi t MEDIAGENIX at IBC, stan d 3.C59

TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019 | 83

TECHNOLOGY

KEEP ON RUNNING! Laura Barber, co-founder of the 4K 4Charity Fun Run series, tells TVBEurope about the inspiration behind the event and what runners can expect at this year’s IBC

OW DID THE INITIATIVE FIRST COME ABOUT? The inspiration for the 4K 4Charity Fun Run Series was a combination of the big headline for the global media industry in 2014 – 4K Ultra HD – and the late Sam Blackman’s commitment to making change for those underrepresented in the tech industry and our communities. During a team meeting early in 2014, I mused about putting on a 4K run. Of course Sam, who was the co-founder and CEO of AWS Elemental (Elemental Technologies), took that to the next level by incorporating giving back! He knew this would be a fun, unique, and healthy alternative to traditional tradeshow networking. More importantly, he saw this as a super-efficient way to raise funds for non-profits focused on increased diversity and inclusion in tech and to close the gap. WHAT WAS THE INITIAL RESPONSE FROM THE INDUSTRY IN SUPPORTING THE CAMPAIGN? Curiosity, excitement,, and then demand for more. With a guiding mantra that a small distance can make a big impact, the first 4km running and walking event exceeded all expectations. Supporters really identified with the cause, and the fact that 100 per cent of individual registration fees go directly to our designated nonprofits. IBC is where this all began, with the first run taking place at the show in Amsterdam in 2014. The first 4K 4C attracted the support of nearly 250 individuals, and raised more than $28,000 in donations.

THE RUN HAS BECOME SUCH A FIXTURE AT IBC AND NAB, WHICH IS A TESTAMENT TO BOTH THE MARVELLOUS AND SELFLESS WORK YOU HAVE PUT IN, AND ALSO THE INDUSTRY’S GENEROSITY. DID YOU EVER FORESEE THE CAMPAIGN BEING SO WELL SUPPORTED BY OUR INDUSTRY COMMUNITY? I keep thinking about that line from the Field of Dreams movie: “If you build it, they will come.” The fact that the 4K 4C has become the official run and community engagement activity for IBC, NAB, and SMPTE’s Annual Tech Conference is a testament to the marvellous and selfless nature of the thousands of people across our industry who have stepped up to make change. YOU MUST FEEL A LOT OF PRIDE AT HOW IT HAS DEVELOPED? What I feel is deep appreciation. On behalf of the 4K 4C delivery team, it’s an honour to support our industry and to embolden everyone’s efforts to enrich our communities through increased equity. It’s particularly exciting to see 4K 4C proceeds at work to close the gap and open up learning opportunities and new paths for success for

84 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

1 MILLION DOLLARS RAISED 10,000 PARTICIPANTS 46,000,000 STEPS

underrepresented youth. 4K 4C supporters are at work supporting these young people well beyond the finish line of each run. By taking action, they help high schoolers learn to code at Portland, Oregon’s Rosemary Anderson High School; inspire girls and families to identify community problems and create tech and engineering solutions thanks to Technovation; and students in the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Programme who need help covering transportation or living expenses. The support from sponsors and individuals has been mind-blowing and humbling. It’s so inspiring to see all those people, so happy and relaxed, lined up at the starting line early in the morning in cities around the world – and to hear how the 4K 4C has supported personal goals, professional connections, and giving back. FINALLY, FOR ANYONE THAT HASN’T PARTICIPATED BEFORE HOW DO THEY GET INVOLVED? We hope that as many people as possible will join us for the IBC2019 event, raising money for an excellent cause and taking this unusual networking opportunity to focus on a future in media technology that is more equal, more inclusive and more diverse. Join us on Saturday 14th September at 7:30am at Amstelpark in Amsterdam – register at https://4k4charity.com/ibc. Unable to attend, but still want to show your support? Please choose ‘Donation Only’ during registration. Enabling supporters to have the most impact possible, the 4K 4Charity Fun Run donates 100 per cent of individual contributions to designated non-profit beneficiaries. Anyone who is interested in sponsoring any of our 4K 4Charity Fun Runs in the future – contact the sponsorship manager: 4k4charity@elemental.com. n

TECHNOLOGY

A DIREKT LINE TO SPORT By Daniel Lundstedt, Nordic sales manager and marketing coordinator, Intinor

agardère Sports, a leading sports marketing agency, is a major component of Lagardère Sports and Entertainment. With more than 1,700 employees worldwide, it also forms part of the Lagardère Group, a global leader in content publishing, production, broadcasting, and distribution. Lagardère strongly believes that sport inspires and enriches people’s lives and as such is passionate about using its expertise to provide clients with the highest quality access to the highs and lows of shared experiences that sport provides.

When Lagardère was selected to deliver coverage of the 15 or so ATP 250 Series Tennis circuit events, its analysis of its overall linear TV delivery workload showed that the company was spending too much time and money on planning and implementing connectivity and delivery for each venue, and that was just to get the feeds back to its MCR where it would then need to add world feed commentary in English and highlights for news agencies, etc. Lagardère Sports knew that it needed to reduce the amount of time spent on individual venue planning and to ensure that the same return

“The Direkt system works even better than expected, which means Lagardère Sports can deploy it for other events.” 86 | TVBEUROPE SEPTEMBER 2019

TECHNOLOGY path to each tennis venue could be applied no matter where it was in the world. So the way forward was clear, but what the company didn’t yet have was the vehicle to get it there… and the technical assistance to make those plans a reality. Lagardère’s search for a solution led the company to us, Intinor, a solutions provider for high-quality live video over IP based in Umea, Sweden. Having spoken to a number of its industry peers, Lagardère Sports discovered that we were already providing technology for running events and decided it would be a good idea to take a closer look at our Direkt link, router, and receiver. Others had enjoyed success with them and shared their view they were easy to use and had the ability to perform several additional tasks not normally associated with routers. Very important to Lagardère Sports when studying its options was reliable redundancy. The company initially decided to implement Direkt as a small network ecosystem of transmitters and receivers and run the system as a test during the first two or three events of the tennis series. To ensure it was backed up in case the IP-based system had any problems, Lagardère Sports sent uplink trucks to each of the first few venues, but never needed them. Its engineers ended up sitting in the trucks waiting for problems that never happened, which was game, set and match for everyone. Martin Ekeberg, senior manager, broadcast services - media, Lagardère Sports, says: “After a few events from various venues in North and South America, which crossed the Atlantic back to the Stockholm MCR, were completed without issues, our confidence that the Intinor system was at least as good as, if not better, than any solution on the market was confirmed. We can now more efficiently deliver content with minimum latency with no compromise. It is also more cost-effective than dispatching satellite uplinks to every venue, which means we can spend more on each production to make them even better products for our clients.”

One of the additional benefits of Intinor Direkt is that it enables Lagardère Sports to simultaneously use several ISPs. The company generally uses a fixed, mainline ISP from a local telecom, but it also requires a second ISP, either via 4G, if at an outdoor venue or, if indoors where 4G isn’t very reliable, an additional fixed ISP for redundancy. In any case, there are always two internet lines, both connected to a single Direkt router. The quality of the signal has also improved because there is only one transcode into the Direkt box. That one signal leaves the venue and goes back to the MCR, and it’s the same for every venue around the world. And that’s the area that saves the most money. Lagardère Sports can apply the same configuration and return path to every venue. It no longer has to spend as much time and money investigating how to recalculate and reconfigure for every individual venue. Whether it is in Brisbane, Sao Paulo, or Atlanta, Lagardère Sports can simply state its requirements to the organisers in advance and be confident that its return path will work for every venue. The Direkt system will not be retired after this year’s ATP 250 Series tour is finished. Far from it. By all accounts it works even better than expected, which means Lagardère Sports can deploy it for other events such as athletics, aquatics, handball, and many others. The tennis was essentially a test, and a very successful one at that, resulting in considerable savings on total delivery costs. That in turn means the company can save money by applying the same or similar process to a wider range of sport and entertainment events that Lagardère covers. To quote Martin Ekeberg again: “It’s not just the technology Intinor provides that is appealing. Its after-sale support is exceptional. They always pick up the phone. They are really ‘on it’ and take genuine responsibility for their product and performance. Plus they’re very nice people who are a genuine pleasure to work with.” It’s always nice to hear that Direkt from a customer. n

PICTURED:

The Intinor Direkt link

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TECHNOLOGY

UNLEASHING THE POWER OF AVOIP Rob Green, senior manager, Pro AV and Broadcast, Xilinx, explains how AVoIP is ready to revolutionise the way audio-visual data is distributed

s a technology for audio-video networking, AV-over-IP (AVoIP) can release professional media workflows and broadcast applications from the limitations on cable length, data rate, and connectivity experienced with traditional point-to-point video interfaces such as SDI, HDBase-T, DisplayPort, or HDMI. By packetising AV signals and adding header information such as the destination address and sequence to each packet, AV content can be distributed in the same way as any other IP traffic, allowing flexible use of network infrastructure and permitting easy scalability. The IP network becomes video and audio format agnostic meaning that scaling from 4K to 8K becomes more a matter of sending more data packets, rather than a fundamental signalling and cabling change such as that from HDMI 2.0 (using TMDS) to HDMI 2.1 (FRL). It also allows IT-style management, with remote monitoring, troubleshooting and control possible from a central office. Depending on the application, the network may be any IP infrastructure, such as private LAN, dedicated Ethernet cable, WAN or 5G wireless. Typical professional media applications include moving AV throughout private networks within studios or production suites, or throughout premises such as corporate offices, factories, and venues like sports bars and shopping centres. These kinds of markets are typically cost sensitive and AVoIP can deliver savings through aggregation, allowing the same cable to handle multiple streams of media alongside other data so long as latency, timing, security, and quality-of-service (QoS) are managed properly. On the other hand, investment in new infrastructure such as IP switches is often required to properly manage this,

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particularly for timing synchronisation. In the broadcast sector, AVoIP enables distributed and virtualised architectures in which software apps and IP-addressable hardware are deployed anywhere on the network or in the Cloud. This will let the industry move away from the traditional inflexible and rigid Capex model towards a more agile and accessible open approach that makes high-value professional tools available as a service on a pay-per-use basis and only when needed. BARRIERS TO ADOPTION Alongside extra flexibility and scalability, AVoIP also brings added complexity. With more software layers involved, setting up and managing connections can demand IT knowledge and expertise that traditional plug-and-play point-to-point connections have not required. Moreover, AVoIP standards need to become more mature. Development in the broadcast sector more or less completely stopped while the market waited to see which standards would become dominant. The industry is now converging towards SMPTE ST 2110 as an open and interoperable protocol for transport and timing. Even so, AVoIP still cannot offer an easy plug-and-go solution for simply and quickly connecting cables to send content where itâ€™s needed. As an example, for an outside broadcast team covering an emerging news story, a conventional point-to-point protocol and connection such as SDI is still the fastest, easiest, and most dependable solution. This will undoubtedly improve as lessons are learned and adoption increases. The professional media world has not been so dependent on standardisation. Network planners can think in terms of closed systems, so various standards and proprietary formats have been able

TECHNOLOGY to coexist without market pressure to ensure interoperability. However, without a single, dominant open standard to specify aspects such as QoS metrics and bandwidth management, users cannot simply put professional video onto an Ethernet IP network, connect any chosen receiver, and expect that equipment to detect the AVoIP traffic and display the content. SILICON INTEGRATION The infrastructure products needed to make AVoIP networks real for pro AV or broadcast applications are dependent on silicon integration to convert between AV industry formats and the Ethernet/IP domain. Much of the current AVoIP development on the professional media side is based on competing formats such as AVB/TSN, SDVoE and Dante AV. There are no interface chips available off the shelf that can handle all the different proprietary protocols and bridge to existing standards such as SDI, HDMI and DisplayPort. There is little prospect that this will change as the situation continues to evolve at a faster pace than the typical silicon design cycle and a single, dominant open standard is yet to emerge. Adapting the silicon from one standard to handle another requires fundamental changes in the video pipeline, including re-packetisation, that cannot be implemented costeffectively in an ASSP. Moreover, market demands for various different compression algorithms and scaling factors, and flexibility in the number of channels that can be supported, present additional barriers to the emergence of AVoIP ASSPs for professional media applications. In the broadcast market, despite widespread adoption of ST 2110 as

a de facto standard protocol, relatively low-volume demand challenges ASSP viability. As such, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and programmable system-on-chip (SoC) platforms have become a key system component in the AV industry to adapt to changing needs. The basic intellectual property needed to convert baseband video to packetised video is well understood. As shown in Figure 1, by taking advantage of established Ethernet MAC cores and high-speed transceivers supporting uncompressed UHD video rates, an FPGA or programmable SoC can host a multichannel AVoIP physical layer along with real-time AV processing pipelines and codecs and, by integrating ARM processors in the same device, provide both hardware and software flexibility to adapt aspects such as video formats, network management and cable drivers where necessary. CONCLUSION AVoIP promises fundamental changes in the way AV content is handled and the types of services that can be supported, in the same way that changing to IP-based transport has revolutionised IP in the telecom and networking industries. Competing protocols in the professional media market and low volume demand in the broadcast sector could slow the pace of adoption by preventing the emergence of affordable standard interface ICs. Leveraging the flexibility of FPGAs and programmable SoC platforms to host the upper protocol layers in reconfigurable hardware creates a commercially viable route to making AVoIP real for media distribution and broadcast applications. n

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THE FINAL WORD

Lawo’s new CTO Phil Myers offers his opinion on the broadcast technology industry How did you get started in the media tech industry? I started my career in the broadcast industry back in the late 1990s as a videotape editor. Having worked on television commercials and documentaries during the early stages I became increasingly frustrated at the limited amount of creative tools available through the lack of investment in technology within clients’ facilities. It was clear that the only way to progress my career and play with new toys would be to raise the necessary funding in order to start my own post production facility. Whilst my passion remained in cutting moving pictures, my inquisitive nature ensured that over time I built relationships with many manufacturers; which ultimately resulted in me transitioning from being a customer to working for a broadcast manufacturer. And the rest is history. How has it changed since you started your career? I would say it’s almost unrecognisable. Over the last couple of decades technology has gradually shifted from bespoke proprietary hardware solutions to more readily available commoditised technology. However, in many areas these solutions have also transitioned from hardware to software only offerings. Certainly, in the specialist area that I joined the broadcast industry the progression from working with tape-based linear editing systems to hardware assisted non-linear systems evolved very quickly into CPU and GPU powered software only file-based editing systems. Whilst this shift was seen as revolutionary by many at the time, the reality is more recent moves into Cloud-based asset management and editing really shows how far this area has progressed. If you could change one thing about the media tech industry, what would it be? Certainly, when I started in the industry there were apprenticeship programmes and various ways to obtain the required training qualifications for technical positions within a traditional broadcaster. As investment in the broadcast industry over time has been squeezed unfortunately these areas have either been diluted or in most cases been dissolved. Therefore, if there’s one area that I’d like to specifically change this would be it. Without continued investment in training and ensuring that we bring through the next generation of broadcast engineers and technologists we will for sure at some point hit a very large skill set shortage. How inclusive do you think the industry is, and how can we make it more inclusive? As an industry I would say unfortunately we are faltering in this regard, especially when you gauge the rate of change against other high technology market segments. Whilst there are a number of great initiatives to help drive change moving forward, I do believe that we have an obligation to support this momentum from within our own

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organisations. It’s evident in other technology industries where there are higher levels of inclusion and a greater balance of diversity you see significantly improved creativity and innovation, as well as a higher level of motivation within teams. I would say, this is also consistent with what we are seeing at Lawo where a number of organisational changes have been made over the years to embrace this approach. How do we encourage young people that media technology is the career for them? Personally, I’d like to think a technical media career within a production company, or a broadcaster today is seen as being quite attractive and I see many talented young individuals coming through the ranks at several of our customers in both operational and technical engineering roles. The challenge we have as manufacturers is slightly harder if I’m honest, where the perceived learning curve is steep and where some essential parts of the production and commercial management process of these roles are seen as being far less attractive. However, with a good mentorship programme and a clear career progression plan I believe these challenges can be overcome and provide an exciting environment where young people want to collaborate, develop and progress their careers. Where do you think the industry will go next? Over the next 12-18 months I expect we will see further consolidation in the broadcast industry on both the customer and manufacturer side. From a manufacturer’s perspective, I would say consolidation isn’t necessarily seen as a good thing and whilst the promise of greater financial stability is touted as the business justification, in most cases the consolidation process only really serves to stifle innovation and ultimately reduce customer choice. That said, I’d expect those that are not consumed and continue to invest in R&D will provide innovative solutions with a focus on enriching workflows (IP), enabling new ways of producing high quality content (AR/VR) and introduce toolsets that allow customers to automated large parts of their broadcast chain (ML). What’s the biggest topic of discussion in your area of the industry? Without a shadow of doubt the continued adoption of IP-based technologies within the broadcast industry continues to be a highly debated topic. Whilst the focus has shifted in recent years from the business justifications of IP, standardisation and interoperability; the discussion has now shifted firmly to the enablement of new workflows and efficiencies as well as addressing topics such as device management and security. However, it’s clear that there’s still many views and opinions on implementation and best practises as well as a general acknowledgment of a skills gap in the broadcast industry when it comes to real-world deployments and the subsequence maintenance of these technologies. n

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