TVBEurope June 2019

Intelligence for the media & entertainment industry

JUNE 2019

JUNE 2019

HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON YOU

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CONTENT Editor: Jenny Priestley jenny.priestley@futurenet.com

THE NEXT STEPS

Staff Writer: Dan Meier dan.meier@futurenet.com Graphic Designers: Marc Miller: marc.miller@futurenet.com Sam Richwood: sam.richwood@futurenet.com Managing Design Director: Nicole Cobban nicole.cobban@futurenet.com

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t times it’s hard to keep up with the sheer amount of merger and acquisition activity going on within the media and entertainment industry.

Disney has acquired Fox, Comcast has bought Sky, will CBS and Viacom merge, could Apple buy Netflix? Just trying to stay abreast of everything that’s happening within the content side is hard enough, but then on the technology side we’ve seen Grass Valley buy SAM, Intel acquired Omintek, and Vizrt surprised everyone when it announced it had bought NewTek just before NAB 2019.

Contributors: George Jarrett, Philip Stevens, Daniel Gumble, Russell Grute

presenters, alongside Patrick Moore and Cliff Michelmore, and it was an absolute pleasure to travel back down memory lane with him.

As part of our special feature celebrating the anniversary we also hear from Hasselblad, who provided the camera that captured that historic one small step in July 1969, as well as lens company Zeiss. As someone who grew up in a world where man walking on the Moon had already happened, I continue to find it incredible that those images were broadcast live around the world in an era when media technology was light-years behind where it is

‘I continue to find it incredible that the Moon landing was broadcast live around the world in an era when media technology was light-years behind where it is now.’

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that there’s a lot going on! And I don’t think it’s even close to being over. To that point, this month Dan Meier asks Devoncroft’s Josh Stinehour to gaze into his crystal ball and try to give us some idea of what the future holds.

Plus, Grass Valley’s Neil Maycock looks back over the first year since the SAM acquisition; and George Jarrett delves further into the Vizrt and NewTek deal.

My highlight this month has been the opportunity to talk to broadcaster James Burke about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. He was one of the BBC’s main

now. Would it have the same impact now with TV viewing so fragmented? I like to hope so.

Also this month we’re launching a brand new section: The Final Word. It’s an opportunity for a member of the media tech industry to tell us how they got started, where they see the industry going and anything else that they need to get off their chest.

We’re starting with Jump’s Joss Armitage.

If you’ve ever met Joss you’ll know he always has something to say! n

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TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 3

IN THIS ISSUE

JUNE 2019

08 New streaming services ‘golden opportunity’ for cinematographers

Canon’s Stephen Hart Dyke explores

exciting new developments in the world of cinematography

09 Pro Tools retooled

Adam Lebowski from Avid discusses Pro Tools’ new and improved features

10 A whole new world

Devoncroft Partners analyst Josh Stinehour

tells Dan Meier about the industry’s M&A activity

12 The most live event that ever happened

Jenny Priestley asks broadcaster James

Burke what it was like to cover the Moon landing

10

20 Creating significant change

George Jarrett looks inside Vizrt’s recent acquisition of NewTek

26 ‘There’s not much we don’t do without Dalet Galaxy’

CNNMoney Switzerland CTO Michel Croibier talks to Jenny Priestley

36 Entering the 3D dimension

Philip Stevens draws back the curtain on animation, VFX and CG

44 Cloud atlas

Broadcast Innovation’s Russell Grute reports back from the AWS London Summit 2019

46 The final word

12

36

Jump’s Joss Armitage on how he got started in the industry and where it’s headed

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Managing technology through the transition

By Chris Sjerven, VP of supply chain and operations at Imagine Communications and Dan Walsh, COO at Fortress Solutions

T

he constant question in media technology today is how to manage the transition from existing broadcast technologies to software-defined networks and IP connectivity. Everybody knows that the transition must be made, but for various reasons everyone has a different plan for how to get there. This transition is not unique. The telecommunications industry went through it two decades ago, and had to work out how to maintain legacy systems — sometimes longer than expected — while the new IP solutions became established.

The situation in the media industry is very similar.

Typically, broadcasters have significant investments in legacy systems, which must be kept running until they can take the next leap in technology. The challenge comes when they find they cannot get the support they need on legacy systems that are still at the heart of their operations.

At Imagine Communications, our slogan is “your path, your pace,” which means that we help customers make that transition when they are ready and in a way that works for their business.

As we all know, broadcasters need to keep their systems running at an availability rate of five, or even six nines (99.999+ per cent uptime). They need technical support which will achieve that: resources able to address issues in legacy equipment, with parts immediately available to keep hardware solutions running.

What the industry needs is a suite of services offering technical support and hardware maintenance that will range from basic return and repair, all the way up to a managed fleet of equipment where support is provided as a service, according to a defined service level agreement (SLA).

Many broadcasters still rely on their legacy equipment as the centrepiece of their operations. Risks to operations are increasing as this older generation hardware is needed beyond its traditional support cycle. Broadcasters need service and support solutions that help them to safeguard

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their systems until they are ready to make the jump to an IP-based network. Such a service and support program would make companies more comfortable, enabling them to make a slower, managed transition from a technology architecture standpoint, as well as giving them more control over structuring the investment needed for new technology.

Typically, a customer today will have a network which is tuned to their operational requirements. Some equipment may be getting older, and those parts of the system may need to be replaced sooner rather than later. To do that, they must be confident that they will have support for the entire system, not just the newer components.

What they are looking for is a contract that will cover the complete platform, throughout the transition. This is a reoccurring message that is being heard throughout the media industry, worldwide.

A partnership between Imagine and Fortress, called Imagine Service Fortress, which launched at the 2019 NAB Show, is a natural solution to meet today’s media industry challenges. Both companies have a global reach and can deliver the required level of support to any broadcaster. The new maintenance package provides multi-vendor hardware support and service for almost any vendor product, through a single point of contact.

The goal is to provide certainty around equipment performance. That, in turn, will ensure operational costs are more predictable and will avoid the need to make distress purchases for failing equipment. This measure will help cut costs and allow for better equipment lifecycle management.

Meeting this goal provides real reassurance that there is a practical path which suits broadcasters’ needs. They do not need to have the budget or resources of a global player to manage a big-bang changeover. They can choose their own route to the inevitable software-defined architectures, do it at their own pace, and be confident in the knowledge that the technology they rely on every day will be secure. ■

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Maximising broadcaster revenues via data driven decisions

By Märta Rydbeck, managing director, EMEA, Switch Media

D

ue to the changing demands of today’s viewers, the business of broadcasting is evolving rapidly. With the move from traditional linear TV to on-demand addressable video delivery, consumer expectations have skyrocketed. They expect content to be available on a vast array of devices, meaning broadcasters are now faced with a complex set of challenges in publishing to these devices.

These problems arise across areas such as content preparation, encoding, delivery and monetisation.

Broadcasters are faced with investing significant capital in projects to address this changing landscape. Meanwhile a unique opportunity has arisen whereby using the right tools, managers can make informed, data-driven decisions generated from processes and systems across the entire video ecosystem.

Similarly, a benefit of delivering to internet connected devices is that broadcasters can gain extensive real-time data on content performance and consumer behaviour. By analysing this information broadcasters can rapidly form a view on what is working and what is not, and act accordingly.

Broadcasters can now embrace tactics that big data companies have been using for years, such as leveraging real-time dashboards and alerting in order to drive business decisions and maximise revenues.

Using a powerful workflow engine, broadcasters can get a view of the time taken for content to pass through each step of the process, identify bottlenecks and expediate publishing processes. Broadcasters often receive content files close to when the rights window opens. With these valuable insights, managers can ensure their teams are focused on the right tasks to get priority content online ASAP. In our experience using these insights to prioritise tasks can cut content turnaround time in half, meaning rights holders get maximum value from their investment.

Additionally, trending this data over time means businesses can gather insights on team performance, allowing for decisions on process improvement.

In this 24-hour news cycle world we live in, fast turnaround time of breaking news and events is critical to broadcasters.

Using an enhanced and highly tuned live-to-VoD workflow, linear content can be available as catch-up across a wide range of platforms within moments of the event occurring.

Used across a wide range of premium news, TV and sports broadcasting including the likes of the Olympics, Game of Thrones and Grand Slam tennis, Switch Media were one of the first to execute this in such tier one events.

The enhanced workflow is based around pre-processing content during the event, to make catch-up content available within minutes of conclusion. To add to the user experience, broadcasters’ editorial teams could mark interesting moments such as big match plays, crashes or medal ceremonies as they happened. This feature proved popular with viewers as they could jump to the most interesting sections of the event. It also meant that the broadcaster gained greater viewer engagement.

Viewer engagement data originates from the video player and is posted back to a data warehouse with app and user data information. In the most basic of forms, these analytics provide facts on viewer engagement with programming; how many are watching, on what device, their location and when they drop off content.

At Switch Media, we understand broadcasters require flexible solutions that fit seamlessly with their business processes. Over time we’ve developed tools, modules and solutions that have been used to build multi-award-winning apps and services. The next logical step for us was to productise this experience, hence our product suite, MediaHQ. Our mission is to provide flexible, lightweight components that seamlessly integrate with existing systems and can be adapted for a range of requirements. MediaHQ embraces data in a highly granular manner, captured from within the workflow engine, MediaHQ components or third party integrations. These dashboards reveal valuable information via widgets which functional teams can use in day to day activity, enabling broadcasters to maximise revenue via data-driven decisions. Information and data are crucial to keeping up to date in this in this fast-evolving and ever-changing market. ■

TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 07

OPINION AND ANALYSIS

New streaming services ‘golden opportunity’ for cinematographers

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By Stephen Hart Dyke, European product marketing manager at Canon Europe

n April, and hot off the heels of the Apple TV+ announcement, Disney signalled its own industry-changing move by confirming their own new streaming service, Disney+. Both developments were shrouded by speculation for quite some time, but now that both brands have made their plans public, industry discussion has turned to how the growing pool of streaming services can compete for viewers and the golden opportunity for cinematographers.

According to new research by analyst house Ampere Analysis, consumers believe the quality of content offered

by Disney+ at launch (due to be November this year) will be higher than that of its SVoD rivals, Amazon, Netflix and HBO. Taking a quality over quantity approach, Disney’s launch content will be just a fraction of the size of Netflix’s US catalogue.

The opportunity for streaming services to compete successfully for market share lies in the creation of quality original content. Apple is expected to spend $2 billion this year on original material for its Apple TV+ in the hope to compete with shows from Netflix (which will spend $15 billion), Amazon ($7 billion) and others. UBS Analytics estimates Disney+’s investment of original content at around $800 million. Ultimately, this is all good news for cinematographers and DoPs. Additional streaming services provide yet another opportunity to showcase their most creative work – from documentary features to cinematic dramas. However, with Disney’s reputation for premium cinema content and the likely subscriber demographic of Apple TV+, we anticipate both platforms will introduce quality standards to help DoPs futureproof their content with industry-leading kit and meet the ever-evolving creative demands of the industry and customers.

Netflix has the right formula to meet these high standards. Part of its success comes down to the governance of its Originals content, with the introduction of the Netflix

08 | TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019

Post Technology Alliance, which launched in September 2018. The purpose of this program is to bring together industry leaders and manufacturers, committed to working closely with Netflix, to innovate production workflows and support creatives globally. Netflix understands that quality comes from all corners.

One of the conditions of Netflix’s Post Technology Alliance is around resolution. Netflix does not accept any content that is less than 4K, however the bar is rising and it is likely to be a focus for other services.

While 4K televisions are yet to become the norm in most households, the technology is becoming more affordable and as such, we’re naturally seeing the appetite for 4K content rise. Down sampling to 4K from higher resolutions has resulted in premium content that meets viewers’ increasing demands for high-quality content. However, as the expectations and needs of consumers continue to grow, requirements of the broadcast industry are shifting.

8K is also firmly on the industry’s radar as there is no doubt that streaming services are already looking seriously at 8K to further futureproof their content and stand out from competitors. In terms of resolution, 8K has many other benefits as it surpasses what the eye can see. In the future, when the infrastructure is in place and internet speeds increase, 8K will enable consumers to have incredible immersive experiences – allowing them to be part of the content from the comfort of their own home, including through VR. These are exciting developments for cinematographers.

New streaming services provide a plethora of opportunity to showcase their work alongside other original series and films. There is no doubt that we will see more streaming services aiming to create high-quality, award-winning content that does not only compete with productions made by their fellow competitors but also mainstream blockbusters. ■

FEATURE

PRO TOOLS RETOOLED Adam Lebowski tells Dan Meier about the improved features of Avid Pro Tools 2019.3

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vid Pro Tools is a digital audio workstation (DAW) prevalent in music studios, recording studios and audio post facilities, as Avid pro audio market solutions manager Adam Lebowski explains: “When you watch the Grammys or the Academy Awards or any award show like that, if there’s audio involved it’s very likely that Pro Tools is part of the process at some point, which is a nice feather in our cap.”

The software is upgraded on what Lebowski calls “a regular feature release cadence,” an alternative model to that of companies which release products monolithically every 18 months or so. Because Pro Tools is available as a subscription as well as a professional licence, these incremental improvements provide users with increased value throughout the year. “It also gives us the ability to react and to build products and features for our users that are tailor-made,” says Lebowski.

Part of this upgrade process involves reducing manual tasks, whether it’s creating audio tracks, organising your session, saving presets or editing MIDI; “anything that detracts from that elusive creative flow,” as Lebowski puts it. “So a lot of our features relate to that. We introduced track presets last year, we introduced a whole slew of media improvements in the way that you interact with MIDI, even the ability to search for plugins and buses very quickly.

“Then at the end of the year, we introduced new virtual instruments in Pro Tools and partnered with a French company called UVI that makes a really great virtual instrument called UVI Falcon,” he continues. “Falcon is now bundled with our paid tiers of Pro Tools. And they worked with us to create a new expansion pack that’s free of charge and also bundled with all tiers of Pro Tools.”

These tiers include the free, streamlined version Pro Tools First; the middle-tier, industry standard Pro Tools; and the advancedtier Pro Tools Ultimate. “When you are looking at top-echelon feature films and recorded music, those are typically being done on Pro

Tools Ultimate,” exxplains Lebowski.

A major feature of the 2019.3 upgrade is to increase the maximum number of voices in a session by 50 per cent across Pro Tools Ultimate. “The more voices that you have, the bigger the session that you can run,” says Lebowski. “Who this really benefits in my experience is people working in post, where the track counts are just soaring, easily into the thousands.” For Pro Tools HDX which includes a DSP card, the limit is increased to 384 voices per card - and with three HDX cards in a single system, this enables up to 1152 voices.

The MIDI track count in Pro Tools and Pro Tools Ultimate is also being doubled from 512 to 1024. “This is really targeting people working with massive sample libraries (like Vienna Ensemble Pro) and film composers that are needing to maximise or be efficient about the way that they route these massive sample libraries and mix them in Pro Tools,” Lebowski notes.

The upgrade additionally introduces a multi-seat licence server, addressing the case of multiple Pro Tools systems involved with a single administrator. “In the old way of dealing with this, if you had multiple Pro Tools

systems, each system needed an iLok and each system would need its own account,” says Lebowski. “A school might be a really good example, because they could have a classroom full of 30 different systems, and managing that is a real bear. So being able to manage multiple feeds from a single licence using a local server is a super improvement for the customer.”

Another improvement included in this upgrade is the ability to add plugins, change loop duration, perform routing and create or delete tracks without stopping playback. “In previous versions of Pro Tools it’s just the way the software worked - Pro Tools would actually stop playback,” explains Lebowski. “So you can now do all of those things very fluidly and again in that creative mindset, and experiment with new effects and sound all without stopping the playback.

“We pitched it really as a music creation feature, but I’ve heard from customers, especially at NAMM, talking to so many customers on the audio post side of the fence that are very excited about it as well,” he continues. “Just for a productivity enhancing feature, the quicker that you can work, the more you can get done.

Sometimes the less thinking you do the better!” n

TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 09

Ilustration: Sam Richwood

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FEATURE

A WHOLE NEW WORLD How mergers and acquisitions can unlock value in the media tech industry. By Dan Meier

I

f the urban legend about Walt Disney is to be believed, someone at the corporation is going to have a lot of explaining to do once he’s cryogenically defrosted. Not only will they have to explain why Will Smith is the same shade of blue as him (and who Will Smith is), there’s also the launch of Disney+ later this year (which JP Morgan analysts expect to beat Netflix in terms of subscribers and price) alongside news of the company’s $70 billion takeover of 21st Century Fox, which is bound to be a shock to a very cold man’s system.

“The scale of those deals defies explanation almost; when you look at the amount of money being spent consolidating those organisations, then the synergies are just equally breathtaking, looking at what’s going on with Disney and Fox right now,” comments Josh Stinehour, principal analyst at Devoncroft Partners. “With global media supply chains and the amount of overlap you have in those organisations, and the cost of that being what it is, especially in Europe, that’s just so so attractive; you can make the numbers work and you can communicate a compelling story to investors.”

This flurry of M&A activity is not limited to the consumer-facing side, with suppliers, vendors and manufacturers consuming each other like crocodiles eating pirates. “There’s a little bit that’s rippling down from the customers - so bigger customers, all things being equal, should equate to bigger suppliers,” notes Stinehour. “I think more specifically, you look in our industry and it’s highly, highly fragmented versus other comparable technology verticals; telco, for instance, where you have a few very, very big technology businesses, and then lots of small ones. In our world it’s just shockingly fragmented.”

One example of the many recent mergers on the vendor side is when Brightcove bought Ooyala’s OVP business earlier this year. “Brightcove is an organisation that’s running around the world spending 35 per cent of its revenue on sales and marketing, and through that getting growth, this most recent quarter it’s two per cent year over year,” says Stinehour. “Well that doesn’t seem like a particularly good investment.”

“So they turn around, they spend that on buying Ooyala’s business that Ooyala doesn’t want; Ooyala’s moved on to other things,” he continues.

“And you look at the comparable yield, or the return on that investment, you’re getting more than $1 revenue growth for every dollar you spend there, so just a much more efficient growth path. And you add to that the fact that Ooyala has customers say in Asia-Pac and Latin America and a presence and product in those geographies that otherwise you would have to go build out offices and hire people in order to get - I mean it’s just a

very compelling proposition.”

Geographic expansion is something Stinehour feels is undervalued when it comes to M&A activity: “I think people are overconfident in their skill and ability to accomplish really difficult things. I know that’s an abstract statement, but think of the monumental divide there is between even places like America and mainland Europe; gigantic barriers to growing a business across those geographies.”

Stinehour considers the idea that a company can send “a couple of smart chaps over with a couple of days’ provisions and they’ll come back with a sales channel into the Americas or into Western Europe” to be naive, considering the comparative benefits of acquisition: “We’re talking about very compelling pricing of these assets, you get an existing base of customers, and this base of product, existing awareness of brand; you get all that stuff day one, you don’t have to build it from scratch. Engineers tend to view sales and marketing as a much easier path than it is in practice.”

What then motivates the smaller companies to sell to these bigger players? “The number one answer is typically getting access to greater sales and marketing resources, greater distribution of their products, which makes a lot of sense,” says Stinehour. “The examples I would give there is look at organisations like Blackmagic, which has been very successful with that model, buying organisations like Fairlight audio consoles, or Ultimatte virtual studios/graphics, and breathing new life into those products in the form of R&D.” The acceleration of M&A activity makes it easy to assume that the industry will coalesce around a handful of businesses, but Stinehour sees this fear as unfounded: “So you show up at IBC one year and they don’t need 14 halls anymore, they just need two or three halls, I think that’s misguided. A more likely projection is that the big companies will get bigger. Instead of a big company in our world being worth say $500 million, maybe it’s closer to a billion dollars of dedicated operation.”

“And then the small companies will get smaller,” he continues. “So there’ll be a great business proposition for a couple of guys to start a software business that solves a rather narrow problem in the media workflow, and maybe that’s a $5 million opportunity and will never be a $10 million opportunity. But that’s still a great business opportunity for a couple of individuals to work out of their garage and drive sports cars. But you can’t put that inside of a billion dollar business, that’s just the nature of how these things work. So I think when we show up at IBC 2030, you’ll still have kind of a comparable number of companies.” n

TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 11

FEATURE

THE MOST LIVE EVENT THAT EVER HAPPENED Broadcaster James Burke talks to Jenny Priestley about his role in the BBC’s broadcast of the Apollo 11 mission

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n July 1969 some 600 million people worldwide watched as Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the surface of the Moon. All three channels in the UK, BBC One, BBC Two and ITV, provided extensive coverage of the Apollo 11 mission from blast off on 16th July, to Armstrong’s history-making steps at 2:56am GMT on the 21st.

The BBC broadcast 27 hours of coverage of the Apollo 11 mission over a 10-day period with much of the broadcast based at the Corporation’s Lime Grove Studios.

Presenter Cliff Michelmore was joined by Patrick Moore and James Burke who provided the scientific and technical explanations and analysis.

Burke began working on the coverage of the Apollo missions after fronting the BBC’s science and technology series, Tomorrow’s World. When Apollo 7 was announced in 1967, the producer of Tomorrow’s World put him forward as an expert who could provide insight into the technology used to take man to the Moon. After finding himself somewhat surprised, Burke got on the phone to NASA: “I asked them to send me every book they had and I spent months reading and reading about space,” he says.

“I think the BBC didn’t initially realise what a massive impact the landing would have,” Burke continues.

“With Apollo 7, which was really the first time NASA

12 | TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019

successfully put three men up into orbit, the BBC said the news division would cover it, not the technology division. I remember we were literally sat in a kind of small conference room, we didn’t even have a studio. There was me and a desk and a blackboard and a little TV screen so we could see the pictures being sent back to Earth. So it was a very small-time beginning.”

After seeing the audience figures for that initial mission, the BBC began to realise the potential the race to the Moon could have: “All of a sudden on Apollo 8, which was the one where they went around the Moon and came back again, got a very big audience. We did that one at Alexandra Palace.”

Burke admits that when he worked on the missions up to Apollo 11 he viewed them as “just another job.” The team at the BBC working on each mission knew what NASA’s plans were, initially 20 Apollo missions were scheduled, and so they “were just building up” to 11.

“There was no one moment when I suddenly thought ‘I’m going to be doing the Moon landing’, because it was a year away and nobody knew what the Moon landing was going to be like,” explains Burke. “It wasn’t like a horse race, or royal wedding where you’ve been through something like that before. Nobody had ever been through something like the Moon landing.

FEATURE

“The hardest thing of all, was when to speak. That was probably equal in terms of my memory of the scale of this amazing occasion.”

JAMES BURKE “All you could do is really just prepare as well as you could, because the flight plan, while containing a vast amount of technical data, and which I learned rapidly to understand, didn’t say things like ‘What’s it like on the Moon, what are they going to do, what are they going to say on the Moon?’”

“As you know when you’re on television live there’s a thing in your ear so the control gallery people can ask you questions or talk to you. I remember when the pictures came down from 11 and we saw the surface of the Moon for the first time, the director said, ‘What are we looking at it?’ I had to say to the audience, ‘What are we looking at? I have no idea because nobody’s ever done it before!’”

Preparation for the BBC’s coverage began months ahead of the mission date, at least from Burke’s point of view. “I started doing the detailed reading probably a couple of months ahead,” he explains. “One of the astronauts once said to me that flying to the Moon is nothing but minutes and seconds, because every minute and second there was something to do. So looking at the flight plan in great detail you knew what was going to happen technically, every second.

“Then, of course, we went over to Houston and to

the Cape to interview people who were either engineers or flight controllers or the astronauts themselves. We would go over for maybe two weeks, we were looking for a lot of material because flights to the Moon were really radio programmes and now and again there was a bit of television. So there was a lot of material to fill in.”

Once back from Houston, preparations began in earnest for the Apollo 11 broadcast. On the night Armstrong said those famous words, both the BBC and ITV were on air for 11 hours, a historic moment for British television as it was the first all-night broadcast. Looking at it with 50 years of perspective, you would expect the presentation team would have spent hours rehearsing what they would say, but that’s not the case. “We rehearsed in the sense that you sit at a desk, and somebody says, test your microphone. But there were no real rehearsals,” says Burke. In fact, he describes the event as being like a horse race in the sense that “you know when the horse race starts and you sort of know when it ends, and in between you react to what’s happening.”

“There was a kind of studio technical rehearsal on the day but that was no more than just testing the plugs. There was no way to rehearse anything to do with the mission itself. It was the most live event that ever happened, and you had to react to it as it happened. Now they would rehearse for all eventualities, but television back then was a lot more live than it is now.”

Looking back on those hours on air, how did Burke feel as he took his seat next to Moore and Michelmore, knowing that what was about to happen would be such a major part of history? “I suppose apprehensive was the word,” he admits. “There’s a contradiction involved. As a journalist, the last thing you want to do is run out of words and you have to be fluent in explaining whatever it is that you’re explaining. Whether it’s your point of view or a question, you don’t want to run out of words. At the other end of the scale the problem was when to know to shut up. Because the unforgivable sin would be to talk when an astronaut talks, and since you never know when

TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 13

FEATURE

“Nobody had ever been through something like the Moon landing.”

JAMES BURKE

the astronaut’s going to talk, because there’s no plan, apprehension was probably the word that explains it best.”

Burke continues: “Basically, you’re trying to do a job and you know that it’s going to be a long job, and you know you have to be able to call up all kinds of information. You split the brain into two, one half is listening for every hint that the astronaut is going to stop talking, and the other half of your brain was ready to be voluable if they didn’t talk. And the nightmare was when Armstrong got to the bottom of the ladder, would you talk over the words?

“I suppose really the whole thing boils down for me to that one moment. We all presumed he was going to say something when he stood on the surface of the Moon for the first time and we all presumed it would be when he got down the ladder. So you have to shut up and stay shut up.

Of course one of the scariest things in television or radio is shutting up for too long. If you shut up for too long the audience starts to wonder what the hell is going on. But if you hang on that dangerous extra second, you might talk over the guy and that’s the ultimate crime.”

Famously, Armstrong decided to step on to the Moon earlier than anyone expected, which could have led to millions of viewers missing those famous words. “Yes, that was interesting,” laughs Burke. “We kind of went off the air once they landed because the flight plan said Neil and Buzz would go to sleep for several hours. But knowing the flight plan as I did, I knew they were preparing for

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stepping on to the Moon.

“I went up to the control gallery where the controller of BBC One was, and said ‘I think they’re going to get out’. He asked if I was saying that we should go back on air, and he said to me, ‘If they don’t get out, you’re going to be in very deep trouble.’ So we went back down to prepare for them getting out, and they go out. I think we could have jumped back on the air rapidly if we hadn’t realised what was going to happen. We wouldn’t have gone to bed or gone off to the dressing room, we would have stuck around.”

Asked how it felt to watch Armstrong step out of the Lunar Module, climb down the ladder and take that one small step, Burke describes the experience as two things: “One is absolutely mind-boggling because this is the first time in human history anyone has ever done this; and the other half of you is saying, ‘What do I say and when do I say it?’ because you don’t know if they’re going to speak or not.

“The hardest thing of all, was when to speak. That was probably equal in terms of my memory of the scale of this amazing occasion. Half of me was saying ‘My God, look at this. We’re on the Moon’ and the other half of me was saying ‘Don’t talk over them’.”

As mentioned above, a lot of the television coverage of the Apollo missions up until 11 had almost been the equivalent of radio broadcasts. For Apollo 11, NASA chose a Hasselblad 500EL Data Camera with Reseau plate, fitted with a Zeiss Biogon 60mm ƒ/5.6 lens to broadcast

FEATURE adventure.”

TVBE JUNE 2019 | 00

FEATURE

PICTURED RIGHT: James Burke

with a Zeiss Biogon 60mm ƒ/5.6 lens to broadcast history to the watching millions. Would the mission have had the same impact without those images? Burke is certain it would not: “It would not have had the same impact at all,” he says. “During Apollo 10 when they went round the Moon for the first time in 1968, I had a day off and I had to go to Paris for something. I remember standing looking at the sky and thinking ‘My God these people are going to the Moon’, but I could only imagine what that was like.

“I think it would have been nothing like as impactful if it had been radio. I say this because on Apollo 12 Al Bean pointed the camera at the Sun and blew it. And I had to say to the audience, ‘I’m afraid the camera’s broken and there will be probably no more pictures.’

Patrick Moore and I were left with three hours of programming and only radio to illustrate what was going on. So we had an example of a programme where there was no picture from the Moon and the audience figures dropped like a stone.”

Looking back at the events of July 1969, how does Burke feel now about being involved in the broadcasts?

“I suppose I feel like a journalist feels. I was involved commenting on one of the most important things that

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ever happened in the history of humankind. But I don’t know how you feel that. We all know it happened and at the time, it was kind of ‘gee whiz’.”

“I can only say that it was not the most difficult job I’ve ever done in my life,” he laughs. “But it was exciting in the sense that now and again, for about a second or two, you thought ‘My God, look where we are, look at what we’re doing’. But very briefly, because the job was too busy to be doing too much introspection. Afterwards, again as a journalist you think ‘Well what’s next?’ I think probably I feel more proud than I would have been, for example, if I had been asked to comment on a royal wedding or something, because this was a specifically unique event.”

Finally, if July 1969 hadn’t happened and man was about to land on the Moon today, does Burke think it would still have the same impact? “If we were landing on the Moon today, nobody would have ever been there before. And so we would still be saying, ‘My God, what’s that?’ And I would still be saying ‘I can’t tell you’.

“Going to the Moon was a great adventure. It might have been a waste of money, it might have been scientifically useless, it might have been propaganda, but it was a great adventure.” ■

FEATURE

PUTTING NASA (AND THE WORLD) IN THE PICTURE Hasselblad’s technical communications and training manager Chris Cooze provides TVBEurope with the facts and figures behind the company’s involvement with the Apollo 11 mission HASSELBLAD’S association with NASA began with Mercury 8 astronaut Walter Schirra who wanted a camera that would give him high quality images.

NASA purchased an off the shelf 500c camera for Schirra to use from a local camera store.

The unit was modified to prepare it for use in space. The main changes were: • The auxiliary shutter, mirror mechanism, viewfinder and vinyl coverings were removed as they were not needed • The camera was painted matt black to minimise reflections • The Zeiss 80mm lens shutter was modified to stay closed after each exposure

The modified 500c flew with astronaut Walter Schirra aboard his Mercury 8 mission on October 3rd, 1962.

The first manned Apollo flight (Apollo 7) used the tried and tested 500c + Zeiss 80mm lens and SWC with its Zeiss 38mm lens.

For Apollo 8, which would sling shot around the Moon, two new 500EL cameras were

used including seven Hasselblad 70mm film bulk exposure backs. A Zeiss 250mm lens complemented the two Zeiss planar 80mm lenses.

The specially designed Lunar Surface cameras were the Hasselblad EL Data cameras (HDC).

These cameras had additional adaptations specifically for Lunar surface work: • A réseau plate was added to the camera to

TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 17

enable photogrammetric measurements from the images (produced the small black crosses every 5mm) • The new 60mm Zeiss Biogon lens had very low distortion and high resolution • The camera was silver to try to stabilise the unit’s temperature on the lunar surface when moving from minus 65°C in the shade to over 120°C in the sun The Lunar surface cameras were mounted on to the astronaut’s space suit with a mounting bracket in the middle of the chest section.

The large shutter button allowed the camera to be triggered more easily with gloved hands.

Only one lunar surface camera (EDC) was taken on Apollo 11 and was attached to Neil Armstrong’s suit for the majority of the surface

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time. It was the first time the camera had ever been used.

Only five photographs were ever taken of Neil Armstrong while Apollo 11 was on the surface of the Moon. One showed Neil Armstrong in the Lunar module after the surface EVA. The remaining four photos show Armstrong outside the Lunar Module and actually moonwalking. One is a reflection in Buzz Aldrin’s visor, the remaining three show Neil Armstrong in direct view, though only two of them show Armstrong in the full frame of the photo, rather than cut off. ■

FEATURE

MAKING A SMALL CONTRIBUTION TO SOMETHING MOMENTOUS ZEISS provided the lenses for the Apollo 11 mission. Markus Goegele, director external corporate communications at Zeiss Group talks Jenny Priestley through the company’s involvement

How did ZEISS become involved in the Apollo programme?

In 1962 Walter Schirra took a Hasselblad 500C camera with a ZEISS Planar 2.8/80 lens with only a few small modifications into orbit for the first time to study and document our planet from space.

The cooperation between ZEISS and NASA became closer, as a special new lens for the documentation of the moon surface was commissioned: the ZEISSBiogon 5.6/60, a wide-angle lens which meets the stringent requirements of photogrammetric photography with regard to image quality and freedom from distortion.

When did you know NASA wanted to use a ZEISS lens for the camera that would capture Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the Moon?

The importance of photography in space was realised after the first Project Mercury missions. This prompted a collaboration with ZEISS to develop photography systems specifically designed for space and its extreme conditions.

Did you have to make modifications to the lens, and what were they? How did you adapt the lens to work in space?

The extreme conditions of space required multiple modifications to the lenses: - the rims of the lens elements were not lacquer coated as usual but coated with graphite to avoid an evaporation of the lacquers - inside the barrels, all inner cavities were opened to avoid damages caused by changes in the air pressure/vacuum. In some openings on the barrels, filters were implemented to the outside - grease in moving parts was replaced by dry-film lubricants to avoid soiling of the lenses from grease particles - operation controls on the barrel were modified to allow them to be used with gloves - the cameras used on the Moon surface were fitted with Reseau plates from ZEISS, which created cross marks on the images during exposure.

These distinctive crosshatches made it possible to calibrate distances and heights enabling size-ratio analyses of objects on the Moon.

What did being involved in the Apollo 11 mission mean to ZEISS? How did it impact the company?

When the ambition was set to send a man to the Moon and return safely back to the Earth, many people helped to make this dream become reality.

ZEISS was part of this mission: camera lenses specially designed for space captured the iconic images marking this monumental achievement. The courage and foresight underpinning this along with precision are among the most important values at ZEISS. Today these images from the Moon missions continue to resonate throughout generations, in part due to their exceptional quality. They inspire us to improve what we do every day – just like half a century ago, when we made a small contribution to something momentous with our technology.

Did ZEISS continue to work with NASA? The ZEISS space lenses were used up until 2001, when NASA sent the space shuttle Discovery into space. ZEISS also worked with other space organisations, e.g. ESA. Just recently, on 26th November 2018, ZEISS optics have landed on the ISS for an experiment using a miniature microscope to visualise dust particles. The project focused on the creation of chondrules, small spheres found in many meteorites that are considered the building blocks of the universe. Part of the Apollo astronauts training also included celestial navigation, taking place in a Planetarium equipped with ZEISS projector technology and is still in today’s training schedule of crews flying to the ISS. ■

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FEATURE

CREATING SIGNIFICANT CHANGE

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The announcement of Vizrt’s acquisition of NewTek was a shock to the media technology industry.

George Jarrett talks to both companies about the deal, plans for the future and reaction from the industry

FEATURE

P

rior to NAB we saw press notices concerning endless numbers of synergetic ‘partnerships’ between connectable vendors, then came a shock wave as Vizrt announced it had acquired NewTek in a deal minus any traces of weakness.

Both vendors were in rude R&D, technical and marketing health, with strong user bases across multiple industries, and they cited a common vision, complementary technologies, and very little product duplication as three of the deal lockers.

To get behind what happened, Michael Hallén, the current president and CEO of Vizrt, who

leads the new enlarged business, and Dr Andrew Cross, president & CTO of NewTek, who assumes the role as president of R&D in the new company talk to TVBEurope.

Thinking about all those Las Vegas wedding chapels and getting hitched, when did Vizrt and NewTek start dating?

“We knew each other well long before my time, and I have been heading Vizrt for nearly three years. The early dating started ahead of that,” laughs Hallén.

“I’ve lost track of how long we have been close partners and friends, but it has got to be more like four of five years. It goes back longer

than most people realise,” adds Cross.

“What I have been attracted to, and we talked a lot about it when we briefed our internal people, is that our views of where the industry is going are very similar, and have always been so. We both believe in the IP transition and that software takes over the world, but we come from complementary angles. We are on the same path to the future,” continues Hallén.

Cross takes the shared view of IP and IT, computers, networks, and pushing a new future for video creation further: “You can look at any market, even outside the video sector, and you can identify the long-term trends in technology.

In our space there are a lot of traditional vendors that have grown up where the market was 50 years ago, and it is clearly changing in a significant way now.”

BRILLIANT MINDS Building a significant presence in the market is what both companies bring to the party.

And planet broadcast’s emergence from the strangulation of hundreds of unique standards and years of proprietary strife to become just another industry using the same technologies represents something of a goldmine to Hallén and Cross.

“When IP took off we both jumped in, so our position is that we are already there. Where a lot of the market sees this as change, these are principles to which we have dedicated our entire strategy individually for 10 years at this point,” says Cross.

Hallén concedes that in some respects the market is catching up. He explains: “At the inception of Vizrt 20 years ago we focused on developing our software as hardware agnostic, which was not the norm then. As a software company with software architecture you are basically IP by definition.

“What we have been doing all these years is to back port our IP infrastructure to SDI to comply with the appropriate protocols. Now the market is catching up with us we can let that go,” he adds. “When we compile the brilliant minds of both sides, we are creating something that can make significant change. That is what the aim is for this combination.”

Does it pay to have a sophisticated Opex mindset for customers of everything Vizrt can now supply in the area of software-based content

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FEATURE

“The combination of Vizrt and NewTek becomes a bit of a platform for new technology.”

MICHAEL HALLÉN

production? Subscription for software tools has grown rapidly. “It has, but as vendors supporting users across the world in different industries and at different types of sites we have had to cater for both models. We have at Tier One level a significant number of huge companies that are not interested at all in going to Opex,” concedes Hallén.

Cross adds: “In the technology world subscription is a buzz word of the moment, but I still see a significant number of customers who do not want to go to Opex yet.

It depends very much on business models, and it has not all gone subscription by a long shot.”

PROPRIETARY THINGS WILL BE GONE At NAB Vizrt stated that it is now the biggest player in IT/IP based video production. Is this based on combined market shares, or maybe the expanse of what it now offers in terms of toolsets over wider areas?

“You answered the question,” laughs Cross. “We are probably the one single vendor that has committed to a truly IT based set of content creation tools, from kids in a classroom doing video production right the way up to national elections or the Super Bowl. It is both breadth of market, and the number of product offerings.”

One of the key attractions of NewTek was its awesome presence in the North American market. Vizrt already had 30 offices across the world, and 500 employees.

Andrew Cross suggested at NAB that the combined company is one of the “most disruptive changes for the video industry in decades” and Richter scale in its potency.

Was he for real?

“I should define disruption. 10 years from now the video industry is clearly going to be different, and I believe it is going to happen in the same way as the mobile phone market changed over 15 years to its computer-based iPhone/Android infrastructure,” he says.

“People will say ‘wow’ because the days of proprietary things will be gone, and we will be looking at a world dominated by computer networks and IT technologies,”

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Cross adds. “When people look back at the big things along the way, I think our deal will be one of them, because it is the first time a big player in this market has said, we need to build the next generation of content creation company. This will be one of the key steps along the way that were signposts for where the industry is going. And that is why I see this as disruptive.”

ADDING IP CAPABILITY The responses from the respective user bases were a key factor during the NAB Show.

“The user reaction surprised me,” admits Hallén.

“Obviously we realised this was a good piece of news, but when I spoke to the Tier One user base they were extremely supportive. A lot of them had already piloted or worked a little bit with NewTek products. A great number of them saw it in the way Andrew (just) described about 10 years time, and they said that in that context it is a clever move.

“In terms of craft thinking both our booths were extraordinary, and the user base sees that we are adding much more IP capability. They are enthused about what is going to come out of this combination.”

Cross was also surprised: “The reaction exceeded what I could have possibly hoped for. I thought it might require more explaining than it did.”

The dream of software-based video production has been bubbling up as the industry goal for some years, with lenses and camera bodies being almost the last hardware.

Many vendors have had to spend millions of dollars reinventing themselves through software and the Cloud, so is it true that Vizrt’s biggest competition comes from newer software houses and recent start-ups, and companies entering the broadcast market from other industries?

“That is a valid point. As we move forward into an industry that is moving over to IP, very naturally the competition will come from elsewhere. It will not come from the traditional hardware centric broadcast

FEATURE companies that are trying to re-invent themselves by adding more software, because I think that they are in for quite a struggle,” says Hallén. “Potential threats will come from elsewhere.”

The holistic aspects of the full workflow that Vizrt gives its customer base are key. “That gives us a head start, and it is up to us as a combination to be more innovative and to embrace new technology as it comes around,” says Hallén.

“We have been successful doing that in recent times and I do think we will co-operate with new and completely different players.”

A GOOD MERGING OF WORKFLOWS Andrew Cross agrees with Hallén, and adds: “The broadcast market, which now includes lots of things, is a weird thing because there are workflows that matter.

People do expect to work in a set way to produce a show and the way that shows and the formats of shows exist is something that has evolved over 50 or 60 years from film.

“So whilst a lot of the technologies that have been created have been changed, a lot of the basic formats of shows have not,” he adds. “While the way you need to work in production has not changed, we want to give people better tools to make more people able to give that message. To some degree what this industry needs is both a good merging of workflows that people need, but with the modern technologies that are now available.

To the sense that this is true, it does give us a head start and strong position regardless of innovations that are happening elsewhere.”

Both Vizrt and NewTek had many technology partnerships prior to the acquisition, so will anything change? “We will look for the same thing we always looked for, which is innovation,” says Hallén. “We partner with companies we think bring something really good to the

table. The combination of Vizrt and NewTek becomes a bit of a platform for new technology. Bringing small innovative partners onto our platform in different ways of arrangement gives us a bit of an edge.

“And with the global customer base we now have together in small, big, medium, and different markets, we have become quite attractive as a kind of springboard into the broadcast industry,” he adds.

Cross continues: “It has to be said that we are two strong companies. This was not an acquisition of weakness, but of strength. Our number one goal, both internally and externally, will not see us looking to change everything around because we think we are doing a lot really well.

“What does happen here is that the combined technology and innovation pool within the new and larger company is much deeper, and it allows us to move technologies between fields where it might not have made sense before,” he adds.

Hallén had just the experience to illustrates Cross’s point: “When we presented the acquisition internally, I was in Norway where we have a large R&D site and the reaction from one of the engineers was, ‘This is cool, can I actually take a piece of NewTek software I know about and bring it into my product? That would be awesome’. That reaction illustrates what we are up to together,” he adds.

Will NAB and IBC remain strong and relevant through the big changes coming?

“Users are clearly feeling different market forces impacting around them, and it is exciting for those shows.

In many ways it is going to continue making going those shows even more exciting,” says Cross. “It is not just the same things we saw 10 years ago; we are not seeing version 15 any more thankfully. The shows are changing, and hopefully we are a part of that. It is our intent to help bring that change to these shows.” n

“10 years from now the video industry is clearly going to be different, and I believe it is going to happen in the same way as the mobile phone market changed over 15 years.”

ANDREW CROSS

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FEATURE

CHALLENGING THE EXPECTED Neil Maycock, senior vice president, strategic marketing at Grass Valley, looks back over the past 12 months

W

hen Grass Valley a Belden Brand, announced its acquisition of Snell Advanced Media, it caused a stir in the industry as customers were unsure at first what this would mean for them.

We have all watched M&A activity in the past that has seen well-loved product lines culled, innovative brands subsumed into large corporate juggernauts and customers left with no clear roadmap for systems that lie at the very heart of their operations. While it is not unreasonable to expect a level of disruption during a major integration, Grass Valley had a clear strategy for the two product portfolios with an approach to ensure that all products, from both ranges, remain in the wider portfolio.

Continuity of supply was a major concern for both customer bases, and something we looked at carefully.

While it may seem counter-intuitive to maintain two large product offerings, including duplication, in reality there is very minimal overhead in keeping all products and letting them run through their normal lifecycle. From a manufacturing perspective our operations are high diversity and low volume – particularly when compared with consumer product manufacturing, for example – incremental operational cost for us is not very high, and more importantly, this is dwarfed by the benefits of providing our customers with security around their investment in Grass Valley.

A year on from the acquisition of SAM, we are really pleased with the outcome. We have demonstrated the ability to deliver real innovation that enables broadcasters and media organisations to build agile, future-proofed infrastructures and workflows with zero compromise. And we have continued to enhance our customers’ ability to deliver the

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best content to more viewers, across more platforms.

In addition to aligning ourselves to customers, we also set in motion a major strategic planning process – an annual activity that was more prominent last year after the acquisition. As a company, we took a deep dive into all aspects of our markets, technology and consumer trends, developing a plan that addresses the growing demands of the market and our customers’ expectations. On a personal level I’ve been involved in many strategic processes in my career, but none have come close to what we did last year.

The thoroughness of our process gives me great confidence in the direction we have set for Grass Valley.

We have succeeded in maintaining revenue performance and achieved our critical target on customer retention.

Moreover, we have exceeded our synergy targets, and achieved very strong profitability in the year through realestate consolidation. We have also derived benefits from leveraging the combined intellectual property and through that we have improved our buying power by applying lean principles to our operations.

TAKING A FORWARD FOCUS In 2019 we have several strategic themes that we will be focusing on. One of the strongest markets for us is live production and this, coupled with the interesting moves in remote production, will feature heavily on our agenda for the year. We also believe that the industry has reached an inflection point with the adoption of IP. During the last year or two, truly open standard IP projects have been limited in number because of the slow rollout of standards and the perceived complexity of being an early adopter.

As a result, many projects took an approach aligned with

FEATURE proprietary solutions – even with the limitations they impose. Now, with the success Grass Valley and others have had with open standards-based solutions, and the greatly simplified implementation of these projects, we are seeing a significant ramp up in this area. As the technology matures further and price points come down, we will see the speed of IP transition take an upward trajectory.

At IBC 2018, we announced our Core Technology initiative that provides common services and functionality for multiple GV products developed with state-of-theart software techniques and technologies. This agile R&D approach will set the direction for the Grass Valley portfolio, delivering common cores, platforms, engines and interfaces across key application areas, and throughout the year we will see product introductions that benefit from this initiative. We will be launching some real breakthrough solutions in the coming months that I think are going to surprise and delight our customers.

We’re a business that is the result of many mergers and acquisitions over many years, and we have a leadership team with unmatched experience and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. This deep level know-how extends to our staff as a whole – they understand the industry and

the way media organisations, of all types and sizes, operate.

Additionally, Grass Valley has the scale and resources that allow us to take routes that might not be an option for other businesses. The result of all of that is we follow a path that puts our customers first. One of our core company values is “customers define our success” – a principle that ultimately benefits Grass Valley too.

It is this combination of factors that enabled Grass Valley to finish last year in a really healthy position; SAM fully integrated and the overall business at a healthy level of profitability. The company is in a strong position to execute on our strategy, and with the trends we see in the market place we are expecting a very successful 2019. n

“A year on from the acquisition of SAM, we are really pleased with the outcome.”

NEIL MAYCOCK

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‘THERE’S NOT MUCH WE DON’T DO WITHOUT DALET GALAXY’ CNNMoney Switzerland CTO Michel Croibier talks to Jenny Priestley about the station’s first 18 months on air, and how Dalet’s workflow platform Galaxy is at the heart of production

J

anuary 2018 saw the launch of CNNMoney Switzerland, a channel dedicated to the Swiss economy and finance. The channel broadcasts from two studios based in Geneva and Zurich. The station launched with a brand new Zurich studio, built by media systems integrator Videlio.

The news and studio workflow is based on the Dalet Galaxy platform, which manages newswires, story creation and rundowns, from any desktop workstation. Studio playout is ensured by Dalet Brio servers and graphics

by Dalet Cube. Dalet Xtend provides a gateway into the Adobe Premiere Pro CC editors.

After almost 18 months on air, chief technology officer

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Michel Croibier says the journalists and production team at CNNMoney Switzerland have definitely benefited from moving from a traditional broadcast base to a more ITbased technical team. “This is very important, and a big shift for most TV stations, because nowadays you work with a fully IT system,” he explains.

“You need a technical team that is really good at managing IT systems and the traditional broadcast knowhow is becoming less important, especially if your TV station is moving toward nonlinear content such as social networks, websites, mobile apps, more than traditional linear TV programmes.”

Croibier admits to being a big fan of the Dalet

FEATURE technology that has been employed at the Zurich studio, explaining that the new integrated system has proven to be a great tool for both the journalists and production teams as they only have to use one piece of software. “When they arrive at the office in the morning, they launch the Dalet client and everything they do, from writing the stories, doing voiceovers, editing, everything is done using one single solution. So, it’s much easier to learn from a technical point of view and for us also doing support is much easier.”

“I suppose it’s rather obvious in the end, because if you have a traditional TV station, you have one piece of software for the reporters, one for editing, a different one for audio, and in the end the staff have to learn how to use all those different pieces of software and the way they interact with each other,” he continues. “In the case of a unified system it’s much more simple so if you want to go from the media asset management to the running order, you just drag and drop.”

For a news channel, whether it covers traditional or financial news, getting breaking stories on air as fast as possible is obviously a priority. Croibier says the move to Daley Galaxy has helped the CNNMoney Switzerland team speed up in terms of producing content. “Because it’s one system, one unique database, as soon as you start doing something like ingesting some content, you can immediately start to use it to edit, to log, to write a story or even to embed it into an existing story,” he explains. “It means we can get breaking news on air much, much faster.

It also enables us as we’re recording something to grab a part of it, extract content, create the metadata and post it to social media.”

“We’re using the platform for every possibility it offers. We’re using it as an archive system, as a MAM, as a playout system, it also does all the broadcast graphics and imports and exports for social media. There’s not that much that we don’t do with the Dalet system. We can also use it to transcode because we have the Dalet AmberFin transcoding solution as well.”

One of the aspects of the Dalet Galaxy platform that Croibier is keen to point out is its ease of use. He says the team at CNNMoney Switzerland learned how to use the

platform very quickly. “That’s been the big advantage, we can have interns that come to work with us and in about an hour they know how to use Dalet, which basically means they know how to do everything!”

“One of the great things with Dalet is that it’s very easy to limit what the user can do based on their access rights.

It’s easy to make things simple, because if you don’t want a user to go near linear playout, just remove the access rights for that user, and they will have a very simplified interface.”

Croibier likens Dalet Galaxy to a Formula 1 car: “You need to have a technical team performing regular checkups to make the most out of it,” he laughs. “But that’s the case in every complex system.”

In the next few months CNNMoney Switzerland will expand to a new facility in Lake Geneva, which will again employ Dalet’s solutions for production. “It’s very easy to exchange content between our facilities with Dalet Galaxy,” he explains. “Metadata is obviously key when you exchange video with other partners, especially rights are very important, and Dalet makes that very easy. So, if we need to exchange with other company partners, broadcasters, newspapers, it does the job because import and export are really easy with the solution.” n

“Because Dalet Galaxy is one system, as soon as you start doing something like ingesting content, you can immediately start to use it to edit, to log, to write a story or even to embed it into an existing story.”

MICHEL CROIBIER TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 27

JUST THE BEGINNING Daniel Gumble speaks to Shure’s Stuart Moots, associate director, pro audio, and John Born, senior product manager, microphones, to discuss the launch of Shure’s TwinPlex line of subminiature omnidirectional lavalier and headset microphones, and entering one of the most challenging markets in the business

A

t this year’s NAB Show, Shure finally pulled back the veil on a product that has been waiting to see the light of day for just shy of 10 years. While the company’s business in the world of microphones was booming, monumental efforts were being exerted in the name of R&D behind the scenes, in preparation for what many of Shure’s senior figures have called one of the most important launches in its storied history.

The product in question was TwinPlex, Shure’s new line of subminiature (5mm) omnidirectional lavalier and headset microphones. Designed primarily for the broadcast, film/TV and corporate presentation markets, TwinPlex has been painstakingly engineered to provide natural audio at both high and low frequency for when professional vocal performance is needed. The range consists of four lavaliers (TL45, TL46, TL47, TL48) and

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a light and adjustable headset microphone (TH53) in multiple colours with extensive accessories and options.

The dual-diaphragm omnidirectional design aims to deliver off-axis consistency and low self-noise, creating lifelike vocal clarity and warmth.

MIC CHECK To simulate years of intense use, the TwinPlex cable was flexed, stretched and pulled to the absolute limit in internal tests. Available in 1.1mm and 1.6mm options, the paintable cables offer immunity to kinks and memory effects and have a spiral construction with redundant shielding.

According to Stuart Moots, associate director, pro audio at Shure, the arrival of TwinPlex marks a major step into a somewhat new territory for the brand.

“TwinPlex is the next step in taking our microphone

FEATURE technology into avenues where we have previously had some success, but now have a product that can deliver what we have come to expect from all Shure products,” he says. “Technology, longevity and second-to-none sound quality is what our customers expect from Shure. We’re confident that TwinPlex will deliver on all fronts, and in doing so become the de facto choice for a lavalier solution across a huge number of markets.

“The possibilities with TwinPlex are not to be underestimated; we have taken key learnings from our KSM8 Dualdyne technology and applied it to the lavalier microphones,” he continues. “It would be easy to dismiss this as just another subminiature microphone, but the technology and processes we used to produce it were developed specifically for this mic. From the dual-redundant ground within the cable to the dual-diaphragm capsule, every aspect of how lavaliers are used from theatre to broadcast were considered in producing a lav that can stand up to the extremes of any performance, while consistently upholding the sound quality expected at this level.”

John Born, senior product manager, microphones at Shure, concurs: “This is arguably one of the most significant microphone launches for Shure in the last 10 years. For years, our customers looked to other manufacturers to fulfil premium needs for either sound or durability… that is no longer the case with TwinPlex.

TwinPlex offers best-in-class sound quality, specifications, and durability. Combined with multiple colour, connector, sensitivity and frequency response options, the TwinPlex portfolio can drop into virtually any workflow or use case with minimal effect to the engineer.”

perfecting and field testing this portfolio, with years of extensive research, tweaking and refinement from the cap to the accessories,” Born explains. “TwinPlex will be a portfolio that lasts for decades. It has been a joy to see the market react so positively to it.”

Moots adds: “The multitude of options, from headsets to cables, connections and accessories, allows it to be used with any system, be it wired or wireless. This is obviously a huge advantage for anyone wishing to invest in a product that needs to work across different scenarios with different manufacturers. We are aware it won’t be easy as the market is very established, but we have listened to what the market wants and we’re confident TwinPlex will deliver.”

As for how receptive the market is to a new player looking to take on the established order, time will tell.

Shure unquestionably has sufficient heft and reputation in its more traditional markets, and if the amount of time spent designing and refining TwinPlex is anything to go by, there’s little reason to doubt it can excel in the field. The ambition is certainly there, as Born concludes: “We wanted to offer the most durable, best sounding sub-miniature lavalier and headset products to mate with our premium wireless solutions.” n

A SHURE THING? Despite the fiercely contested nature of the broadcast market, both Moot and Born believe that this area of the industry is ripe with opportunity for Shure to capitalise on. They are, however, more than aware of the challenges that come with successfully establishing a new product amongst some long-standing competing heavyweights.

“We knew that taking on entrenched leaders in this market is challenging, that is why we spent so much time

“This is arguably one of the most significant microphone launches for Shure in the last 10 years.”

JOHN BORN

TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 29

A PEEK AT PARLIAMENTS Philip Stevens continues his look at how European legislatures are broadcast

PICTURED ABOVE: The main chamber in the Spanish parliament is covered using 10 remote control cameras

C

30 | TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019

overage of the events in the UK parliament were shown widely as the Brexit debate raged earlier this year. But Westminster is not the only parliament that uses television to show viewers what transpires in the various legislative buildings.

Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is the location of the Milli Majlis – the National Assembly – which is the legislative branch of the country’s parliament. Televised coverage of the proceedings began in 2006 using an analogue, standard definition system. Last year, the broadcast team decided to move to HD and expand the use of remote-control technology.

The TV system covers the main chamber, where debates

and law making are carried out, plus three committee rooms. However, the main output is for internal use only.

Beyond that, the team produces an edited daily Parliament programme which broadcasts on many local TV channels.

There are plans for a full parliamentary channel in 2020.

Eight Sony HXC-P70 cameras are used in the main chamber. These were chosen to meet specific focal length demands and the low light levels in the hall. The main committee rooms are served by four BRC-H800 cameras.

Remote control is handled by Telemetrics PT-HP-S5 pan-tilt heads and Telemetrics RCCP-1A Remote Camera Control Panels with Legislative software. The two Telemetrics RCCP-1A LGS control panels include the

PRODUCTION AND POST ability to synchronise presets, while the camera control functions make extensive use of the Telemetrics Enterprise Database System (EDCS).

CONTROL DESKS In March, UK based Custom Consoles completed a project that included three rectangular Module-R technical control desks and a 3.8-metre-wide MediaWall monitor display mount in the television operations control room.

This work was commissioned by specialist broadcast systems integrator ProMix, based in Baku.

“MediaWall is also very popular with customers, allowing freeform attachment of video monitor panels in practically any size as well as auxiliary devices such as loudspeakers and studio clocks,” says ProMix general director Gunduz Suleymanov. “MediaWall allows flat-screen monitor displays of practically any width to be constructed from standard horizontal and vertical support elements. It can be used as a fully self-supporting structure or coupled directly to a studio wall. Individual screens can be positioned so that the edges meet exactly to form a continuous horizontal display limited only by the boundary of the monitor panel itself.”

“All three desks as well as the MediaWall were preassembled in the UK and then delivered to ProMix who then installed the desks in the parliamentary TV studio control suites and integrated the technical equipment,” adds Custom Consoles’ sales manager Gary Fuller.

Largest of the three desks is a 4.7 metre wide five seat unit incorporating an Allen & Heath SQ6 audio mixer, the Telemetrics robotic camera controller, Ross Carbonite Black video production switcher, Cinegy playout, ingest, CGs and auxiliary engineering facilities. Six computer monitors are mounted on Ergotron adjustable arms behind the main work surface, with the desk front parallel with the MediaWall display.

“As far as the future is concerned, we are planning to install cameras in a further five meeting rooms and will be transferring to NDI signal distribution.”

MARINA BUNTIĆ JURIČIĆ

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PRODUCTION AND POST

PICTURED ABOVE: The new control desks in the Azerbaijan parliament TV gallery

Suleymanov explains that the second of the three Module-R designs is a four-metre wide four-seat control desk for use by two producers and two engineers. The third desk is 3.6 metres wide and configured for use by three media management staff assigned to video editing and archiving. Video Capture is done by a Cinegy Ingest channel, utilising four separate channels for recording.

Cinegy Desktop is used for general editing, while craft editing is entrusted to Adobe Premiere. Cinegy Air Pro looks after playout.

COVERING CROATIA Based in Zagreb, the Croatian Parliament or the Sabor is the unicameral (one chamber) legislative body composed of 151 members elected to a four-year term.

Broadcasting of the parliamentary proceedings started in September 2006, when its plenary sessions were available via the internet and a special TV channel called Saborska TV (Parliamentary TV).

“HRT, the public service Croatian Radio and Television broadcaster, is under contract to cover the morning sessions live until the lunch break, and where proceedings

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are thought to be of vast public interest, the entire session will be shown,” explains Marina Buntić Juričić, the Croatian Parliament’s head of the press office. “These broadcasts cover the plenary sessions integrally, festive parliamentary sessions and other special events such as conferences, student model sessions and so on. In addition, Committee meetings are streamed live on-demand via the parliamentary YouTube channel. These Committee broadcasts are solely under the control of parliament.”

In the plenary hall, four Sony HDC-P1 and three robotic Sony BRC 900 cameras are used, while the committee rooms utilise three Panasonic cameras robotically controlled with a custom-built system.

The gallery equipment for the main chamber includes a Panasonic AW-HS410 vision mixer, a Studer 962 audio console and Grundig LCD monitors. The committee rooms are serviced by a Soundcraft SI Expression mixer and a vMix – the software vision mixer available for the Windows operating system. The vMix software is also used for the HD 1920x1080 (1080i) playout.

“We have developed our own systems for a number of operations, including graphics application for the Plenary

PRODUCTION AND POST

Hall, the sound recordings – based on H264/AAC and the in-house editing facility,” explains Juričić.

She concludes, “As far as the future is concerned, we are planning to install cameras in a further five meeting rooms and will be transferring to NDI signal distribution.”

SPANISH PARLIAMENTARY SCENE Coverage of the Spanish parliament’s plenary sessions began in October 1992 and six years later for commissions and committees. In addition, coverage is provided for other activities and events approved by Mesa - the representative organ of all the deputies composed by president, vice-presidents and secretaries - of the Congress of Deputies. These programmes include tutorials and other material for the Congress Web Archive and content for social media platforms.

“We offer our broadcast television coverage for several platforms and users,” explains Eva María Moreno Fernández, communication advisor for audio-visual and media services. “First, there is the Parliamentary Channel which is distributed by web and Hispasat satellite. Then, we have web streaming, where a maximum of five channels

TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019 | 33

PRODUCTION AND POST

PICTURED ABOVE: The production gallery controlling Spanish parliamentary coverage

are available live online with catalogued speakers. Plus, we have 16 channels available for broadcasters that work in the chamber and who have their own TV and radio studios in Congress.”

Alongside those outlets there is an international service offering four channels available through Torrespaña – the broadcasting centre in Madrid.

Moreno says that 50 remote control cameras, six studio cameras and two ENG cameras are employed for the parliament’s work. “In the Hemicycle – the main chamber - we have 10 remote control cameras. The remaining 40 remote controlled cameras are in committee rooms, while the studio cameras are used for other video productions and to cover events in places where there are no remotecontrol cameras.”

“We are working on a new project to upgrade all the current SD equipment to HD.” EVA MARÍA MORENO FERNÁNDEZ

34 | TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019

These cameras are a mix of Thomson Grass Valley 1707 – which it is planned will be updated in the near future, nine Grass Valley LDK 3000, four Sony HDC-P1, two Grass Valley LDX 80 and 20 Grass Valley LDX C80. The ENG unit uses Sony XDCam PW500.

The robotics are a combination of Vinten Radamec 431 and FHR-35 units, and TG27 from Shotoku “We use a video matrix Imagine Platinum - 300 I by 300 O - from Harris and Grass Valley vision mixers Kayak for SD broadcast and Kahuna for HD. Our audio mixer is a Yamaha Digico 21, while recording is handled

by Grass Valley Stratus utilising 12 channels, with Tedial Tarsys 3 with five channels being used as the media asset manager. Graphics for the live broadcasts come from Avid Orad Morpho. The playout system for the Parliamentary Channel is Vector Box.” Avid is also the choice for editing, where Media Composer is used. Graphics for edited packages comes from Adobe CC. Although the broadcast equipment is owned by the Congress, a contractor - Mediatem (from the Mediapro Group) is appointed to provide staff.

Moreno concludes, “We are working on a new project to upgrade all the current SD equipment to HD. And we are looking at changing some procedures for recording and managing all the media we produce.” n

PU T A PAUSE IN YOUR DAY With so many demands from work, home and family, there never seem to be enough hours in the day for you.

Why not press pause once in a while, curl up with your favourite magazine and put a little oasis of ‘you’ in your day.

To find out more about Press Pause, visit;

pauseyourday.co.uk

ENTER THE 3D 3D DIMENSION DIMENSION Philip Stevens is drawn into the animation world within a VFX and CG framework

PICTURED ABOVE: Santander’s Piggy commercial

F

36 | TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019

ounded in Soho in 1986 with a mission to use technology to create the most extraordinary images possible, visual effects specialists Framestore now employs over 2,400 staff across its film, advertising and content divisions with offices in the UK, US, Canada and India.

Framestore’s animation work is generally, although not exclusively, within live action productions and alongside feature films such as Paddington 2, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Dumbo and Captain Marvel, and television series like Walking with Dinosaurs, the company has been involved with a huge number of

renowned commercials, including M&S’ Paddington and the Christmas Visitor, McDonald’s #ReindeerReady, Santander’s Piggy, and Politics. Tamed. for The Times and The Sunday Times.

In addition to the service it provides across films and commercials, it also provides animation for immersive experiences (virtual reality and augmented reality) and even theme park rides. The results show the company has more than fulfilled its original aims.

ANIMATION TODAY Of course, animation and special effects have changed

PRODUCTION AND POST enormously since those early days of cartoon characters from the studio of Walt Disney and others, so what is the procedure for bringing ‘life’ to these 3D creations in the 21st century?

“In the past, the first stage was often the creation of a storyboard based on a client’s ideas and brief,” states Ross Burgess, Framestore’s head of animation in the London office. “Today, with shorter time frames for production and tighter budgets, the initial work is called pre-visualisation and involves computer animation. We have a whole department that is dedicated to that ‘pre-viz’ and once the character representation – we have another department responsible for that part of the production – has been approved by the client, the work can begin.”

Burgess explains that the director will work with the pre-visualisation department to create the shots that he or she envisages. “In the old days the director would be the animator, but that’s clearly not the case now. Today, different directors have different ways of working. Take, for example, our Reindeer Christmas commercial for McDonald’s. Here, the director, James Rouse, understood characterisation and came in very early and sat through the pre-viz explaining what actions he required. Indeed, he acted out a lot of the actions so that the animator can see what the director really has in mind. On this commercial, Framestore animated the reindeer completely – there’s no live action animals involved.”

He continues: “At this stage it’s more about layout and the chance to tell the story in terms of what happens where. For example, does the character enter stage right and exit stage left? This is all done in 3D and shows, for instance, how long a piece of action might take to complete. That was never possible with a conventional drawn storyboard.”

Once the pre-visualisation has been completed and approved, the final animation can begin. Framestore has opted for the Maya 3D animation, modelling, simulation

and rendering software for this part of the operation.

VISIT THE ZOO Framestore holds a full library of previous animations of both humans and animals to help in this pre-visualisation stage. “We use tons of references because we do a lot of photo-realistic work and we have all the material to create the kind of reaction shot that is needed. In fact, we have a full zoo here in Chancery Lane, London!”

Talking about the recent commercial for The Times, Burgess points out that there was more live action than 3D characterisation, but nevertheless there was a call for significant background animation. “In this case, we used 3D animation to bolster the live action images to give the story far more audience appeal. The ad features lots of live action animals complimented by animated characters. The Lion and the Unicorn are two of the heroes of the piece, both of which were completely CG. And the House of Commons is also completely computer-generated so it was our job to film the live action animals and place them inside the set alongside the animals that were animated.”

ACTIONING THE AUDIO Of course, one vital element in any animation production is ensuring the audio will match the action – especially where lip-sync is involved.

“In an ideal world, we would like to receive the audio ahead of the animation process,” says Burgess. “But while that might happen with feature films, it seldom occurs when it comes to commercials. In fact, it often happens as one of the last stages of ad production, and then we need to reanimate in order to perfectly fit the audio.”

He feels the reason for this operational procedure is to accommodate the more free-flowing aspects of advert production. “If we are given the audio early in the cycle, it makes making changes that much more difficult if voice over artists or actors need to be recalled.”

“We use tons of references because we do a lot of photo-realistic work and we have all the material to create the kind of reaction shot that is needed.

In fact, we have a full zoo here!”

ROSS BURGESS

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PICTURED ABOVE: The commercial for The Times and Sunday Times used 3D animation to bolster the live action Images

If the animation includes the need to have characters move to a music track – a dance, for instance – an audio timeline is attached and is visible on the animation program.

“When we worked on the Beauty and the Beast film, we needed to animate a ballroom sequence where the computer-generated Beast danced with Belle. Although we didn’t have the final music, a rough track was provided enabling us to know that we had sufficient animation footage. When the final music was available, we were able to make adjustments so that the action fitted the sound.”

DESIGNATED JOBS For the McDonald’s Reindeer commercial a team of six animators were employed. The work is divided up in different ways on different productions. In some cases, one animator will be given a sequence to follow so that continuity does not become an issue. A lead animator may

38 | TVBEUROPE JUNE 2019

be responsible for multiple characters. Another animator may be required to produce the background action.

Once all the animation has been completed, the files are turned over to the lighting department who will add the various effects that are needed to produce the right ‘feel’ for the production. “Sometimes, to achieve that correct lighting effect, a character may need moving. There are several different lighting programs and these enable the department to just add what is needed to the published animation file.”

The production can then move to editing. Where the material is destined for a Framestore production, the inhouse editors will use Avid for films and series, while Hero is preferred for commercials. But where the animation is to be incorporated into a third-party production – as is often the case – the sequences will be passed to the company responsible for the finished product.

PICTURED BELOW: Ross Burgess, Framestore’s head of animation

To accommodate the need to fit the animation to audio tracks or other elements of a scene during editing, animators produce ‘handles’ – extra 15 to 20 frames at the start and end of each sequence so that adjustments can be readily made.

Once editing is completed, colourisation can be carried out.

“The reason for having different departments for all these tasks is that we can provide the best specialist attention in all areas of production,” emphasises Burgess.

That co-operation extends to all divisions within the Framestore capabilities. For example, Framestore’s film division worked extensively on the first Paddington movie in 2014. Then for the 2018 M&S 90-second Christmas commercial featuring the bear from Peru, more than 75 artists across the integrated advertising division became involved.

“Framestore’s advertising team worked hand-in-hand with the film division, as well as previsualisation partners, to fulfil its brief,” explains Burgess.

FUTURE ANIMATORS So, what advice would Burgess give to those looking at a career in animation? “There are three key elements. First, is clarity of purpose. In other words, understand that you may have produced a film at home or at college, but that when you work for a company, you’re not executing your own vision – it is the vision of the director. Second, is observation. We need to observe people and how they react – and in that way gather references for animating.

And finally, you need to understand workflow – and that means not ploughing on to the next stage without having the work so far signed off.”

He concludes by stating that there is so much media being generated at the moment that there are many jobs waiting to be filled and it is the responsibility of both colleges and the industry to work together so that future entrants understand what today’s animation is all about. n

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PRODUCTION AND POST

ANIMATION IS

CHILD’S PLAY Philip Stevens hears the story behind children’s animation Labuntina Sing-along

E

arlier this year, Salford-based dock10 completed the full post production and delivery of 10 threeminute animated music videos destined for airing on Sky Kids. In all, the series production took 18 months.

Titled Labuntina Sing-along, the concept originated from animator and songwriter Valentina Ventimiglia.

“The idea was developed as a song-based way to entertain and educate my young daughter,” explains Ventimiglia.

“The series, featuring three characters, Judi Bee, Kodi Fox and Lili Fish, launched on Sky’s Kids app earlier this year, and new music videos have been added regularly since that time. The series comprises animated music videos of original nursery rhymes, which are designed to entertain children. In addition, some of the programmes introduce nursery rhymes in the English language for the first time.”

Originally a Kickstarter-funded project, the team at dock10 worked with Ventimiglia to help develop a pilot to take to market. The project was commissioned by Sky

Kids’ head of kids’ content, Lucy Murphy, on the final day of the 2017 Children’s Media Conference in Sheffield. It was also backed by Creative England. Launched in April 2018, it is now available across Sky Kids’ on-demand platforms, including Sky Q, Sky+, the Sky Kids app and the Now TV Kids Pass.

Ventimiglia continues: “Considering its nature and format, Labuntina strongly relied on one person’s vision, so it was necessary that I oversaw the whole process. This inevitably meant delays here and there”.

In fact, all the music is original - composed by Ventimiglia, orchestrated and produced by Lorenzo Castellarin, and engineered by Paul Harrison at dock10.

Head of VFX operations at dock10, Damien Lynch, takes up the story: “dock10 provided voice recording facilities, to record the children’s singing, along with music mixing, sound FX and final audio mixing. Ideally, we would have started by having all the 10 music tracks ready

“To see a Kickstarter-funded idea grow from a concept to a delivered commission has made the whole team proud to be part of its success.”

DAMIEN LYNCH

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PRODUCTION AND POST

and voice recording done and edited, before moving into animatic, animation and eventually post production, but the reality is that all of this had to overlap across the year, to allow a constant workflow and staggered delivery. We delivered four promos and three episodes, followed by three further deliveries across the year.”

Vision-wise, five out of 10 episodes were composited at dock10, in After Effects. All final online finishing was carried out in Autodesk Flame, and broadcaster AS-11 deliveries were carried out by the Media Tech team at dock10.

Lynch provides more detail: “We used Adobe Animate (ex Flash), Adobe Photoshop for backgrounds and Adobe After Effects for compositing. Pro Tools was the main audio tool used, and all final vision finishing and mastering was carried out using Autodesk Flame.”

He adds: “It was a fantastic project to work on. It is a simple but lovely concept, and Valentina’s enthusiasm, commitment and hard work made it a no-brainer to get involved with. To see a Kickstarter-funded idea grow from a concept to a delivered commission has made the whole team proud to be part of its success.”

Ventimiglia concludes: “It was a long but rewarding road to bring the seeds of my ideas to fruition. But I couldn’t be happier with the shows now. Many people were committed to the journey to bring Labuntina to life. The team at dock10 were brilliant at accommodating our needs. Working with children was very challenging and that’s another area where we found incredible support from the team.”

Labuntina Sing-along is now available on Sky Kids and Now TV. n

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TECHNOLOGY

STAYING ALERT Jenny Priestley talks to technology specialists Broadpeak about their M2 EAS alert system

H

ow do you alert a viewer to an emergency when they’re not watching a linear channel? Other than sending an alert to another screen, there’s no way to do it. But French technology company Broadpeak has devised a solution that can break into both linear and VoD content, no matter what screen the viewer is watching.

The M² EAS solution enables pay-TV operators to interrupt any programme distributed in HLS or MPEG-DASH formats. The content is replaced by a live feed showing the alert message. At the end of the alert, the streaming session is played back from the point of interruption.

It relies on the manipulation of the manifests that are used to announce to a player what chunk of video it should request. In case of an alert, the manifest sent by the origin server is modified by Broadpeak’s Manifest and URL Controller (MUC) module in order to reference the EAS replacement content instead of the VoD or live chunks. In the case of VoD, a library in the application allows the position of the playout to be tracked.

“Our idea was to create a solution that works in the adaptive bitrate format,” explains Nivedita Nouvel, VP marketing at Broadpeak. “An emergency alert system is something that is quite codified, it’s based on the different countries, and based on the traditional streaming format that is used in broadcast for MPEG-2 transport system. For this you have a standard solution that exists to interrupt a programme to broadcast an Emergency Alert System. For everything that relates to the new formats, an adaptive bitrate like HLS or MPEG-DASH, there’s not something that is fully standardised.”

Currently, US broadcasters are subject to regulation regarding these kinds of alerts. “There were some discussions in the US about whether Netflix or YouTube should display these messages in the same way cable companies and IPTV companies have to and those discussions are ongoing,” continues Nouvel. “At Broadpeak, we decided to work in advance on a solution that would allow the interruption of content that is streamed in an ABR format to display another video related to the alert message.”

“We think that it can be of interest to operators even if there is not such a legal requirement to have this type of solution that allows them to very rapidly interrupt any programme, live or VoD, that their subscribers may be watching and display an important alert message.”

Nouvel admits creating a solution that works across both linear and VoD hasn’t been easy, but Broadpeak has managed to overcome the technical challenges. “When we talk about ABR content, you have the

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manifest that is going to tell the player what chunk of video it should display next,” she explains. “When you are using live content you cannot know in advance everything that is going to be available. So the manifest that you use is called an open manifest. The player needs to request this manifest again and again to know what it needs to play. If we want at some point to interrupt the programme to switch to something else in a way that is seamless for the viewer, in linear we can imagine how to use this mechanism to replace one piece of content for another.

“VoD is more difficult because the content is fully available. When you send the manifest, usually you send it only once and it describes all the chunks of the video. So the technical idea that we had for the solution was to have this manifest that is updated in order to know if there is a switch that needs to be triggered at some point and to be able to switch to this new channel, even when the viewer is watching VoD content,” continues Nouvel.

TECHNOLOGY

M2 EAS: Multiscreen and Multiservice EAS SERVICE PLATFORM Operator alert system

CMS

Billing server

EAS Manifest Manipulator

EAS Video delivery mediator Alert message live channel for region B Live / VOD content

In band alert message detec�on

Origin packager

HEAD-END

Alert message live channel for region B

Manifests

Web / Service portal

SmartLib Session context saved

HOME NETWORK REGION A

Streaming servers Video chunks

OPERATOR’S NETWORK

SmartLib Live / VOD content

https://broadpeak.tv

HOME NETWORK REGION B

“With our solution, it’s not just an overlay, it stops the video and switches to other content where the viewer is given advice on what to do.”

NIVEDITA NOUVEL “Our idea is a solution that is more generic to operators who usually control the streaming of their content themselves. The idea is that if the viewer is watching live or VoD through IPTV, cable TV or a DVR system, and on any screen, they can benefit from this feature.”

Any operator using an alerts system could leave themselves open to a malicious attack, both from inside the building and out. Nouvel says Broadpeak has taken this into account and implemented a number of security steps within the solution. “First of all, everything is controlled through HTTPS, so you have something that is secure in terms of how you’re going to access the solution. There are also some other types of protection, like DDoS protection, so that you can fight against attacks that try to overload the system.

“In terms of implementation, you need to have firewalls that are going to protect you against an attack. It can be quite straightforward when we talk about an operator because all their streaming system is already deployed on the managed network. We are not talking about public Cloud, or the open internet, we’re working in the managed network of the operator. So the type of protections that an operator needs to have

for this solution are exactly the same that they need to have in any case for protecting their streaming service. We’re talking about the head end, and we’re talking about the backbone network, the managed network of the operator.”

There are already alert systems on the market that display text over video, used particularly in the US for missing children. Nouvel explains that Broadpeak’s solution could be used for other serious events: “With our solution, it’s not just an overlay, it stops the video and switches to other content where the viewer is given advice on what to do - so for example if there’s a hurricane, or a terrorist attack.”

“When all of these alert systems were originally designed everybody was watching live TV. Now there are so many different ways of watching content. It’s a matter of saving lives to be able to send this information to as many viewers as possible.”

“The content of the alerts has to be very controlled so that it doesn’t panic viewers,” she concludes. “But if it can save lives, if there is a hurricane for example, it’s incredibly important that all viewers are aware of this as fast as possible.” n

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TECHNOLOGY

CLOUD ATLAS Broadcast Innovation’s Russell Grute asks where are we heading at the AWS London Summit 2019?

O

n Wednesday 7th May an army of young technologists marched in to the posh end of London’s ExCel looking for some direction. Heads-down with smartphones out front and rucksacks on their backs, everyone headed for buzzword city. A typical noisy Expo for AWS Partners was supplemented by eight parallel AWS conference sessions held in 1000-seater auditoriums. Between these jam-packed sessions many thousands were on the move.

AWS might aspire to move and exploit our big-data, but right now they could learn a bit about moving people too. Real people I mean, not virtual.

For me, working in broadcast and media, most useful were the shared experiences from the many other industries present. I found many relevancies to our own most pressing industry challenges from contributors in data science, logistics, finance, training and food.

For starters, during the Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) session, Deliveroo explained how it placates “hangry” customers using GPS and highly adaptive logistics. Re-selling delicious third-party food is apparently much less important to customer satisfaction than accurately setting expectations during the last 10 minutes of delivery where appetites are even more unpredictable than the local road traffic.

Tree loving bio-mass energy retailer Drax highlighted the use of predictive sentiment analysis which is used by their frontline agents to improve a customer’s sales journey. Drax can tell the difference between TV viewing, a fridge, cooking or charging an electric vehicle, to better engage customers about their daily electricity usage. Apparently, it’s obvious when we are on holiday too. Customer-facing anomalies derived

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from this big-data are exhaustively analysed and “should be beyond six sigma…” before they are acted on. Drax were open about the practical challenges of working with big-data admitting that filling their data lake was an overhead much bigger than expected. Presumably it’s all that bio-massive data!

Amazon Lex uses Machine Learning to provide tools to create those creepy chat-bots we often encounter, usually slightly prematurely, on web sites. These hope to robotically guide our “chat” using specific hierarchical directions such as: intent, utterances, prompts and fulfillment. The Lex API provides integration for conversation between the “bots”. I wonder what they talk about.

In the Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) session we were introduced to the concept of the “Digital Twin”. This process uses interactive visual AR to clone real-world devices, appliances and systems. This was shown providing remote hands-on training which, in practice, was actually hands-off. The trainee, handling a virtual object such as a water pump or electrical switching system could familiarise themselves with its assembly, performance and repair. Very similar to the techniques used in gaming and esports, the Digital Twin concept is one of the most genuinely pragmatic uses of AR and VR I have seen so far.

So let’s set check our compass. In the broadcast and media industry many ask where are we going with services like AWS and Cloud computing. Broadcasters were first introduced to Cloud, and somewhat misled, with the simple proposition of less expensive replacement storage at the back-end. Through deeper understanding of the possibilities of Cloud computing this progressed to faster and more scalable content transformation in the

middle. More recently we are hitting our stride with programmatic advertising and improved audience insight at the front-end. That’s a long journey and with much in between.

AWS and its many young partners showed how I could now purchase virtual objects (A vase. Really?), interact using a virtual voice (Woof!) and work with virtual assistants (they would need to be very patient). I could also now have a virtual care giver and even experience augmented weather too (no need to look out of the window anymore).

Over the years I’ve seen many external influences and insurgencies into the broadcast and digital media technology space.

AWS’ width in technology progress and depth in thought leadership are somewhat overwhelming right now. Whilst personally I still prefer the real world, over 12,000 attendees at the AWS London Summit seem to know where they’re going. And it’s off the map. n

THE FINAL WORD

THE FINAL WORD TVBEurope invites Joss Armitage, managing partner, Jump, to get a few things off his chest How did you get started in the media tech industry?

If I wasn’t going to be an international music god (any day now…) then writing for a living always appealed. I started at a small publishing company working on a video mag (as in actual, physical videos) aimed at video rental shop owners. Then I became the editor of CSCI (Cable and Satellite INTL) magazine. Also, I used careful planning, diligence and sheer hard work, otherwise known as blind luck. After publishing, I moved into PR and haven’t looked back. Almost 11 years ago we launched Jump, bringing a fresh approach to communication.

How has it changed since you started your career?

Beyond recognition. From a journalist perspective, it was fax and landline all the way. From an industry perspective, Scientific-Atlanta and General Instrument were the two of the biggest players in the cable and satellite field at the time. On-demand meant shouting at an inanimate object and then being deafened by the lack of response. Then there were the early attempts at internet-enabled TVs/set-tops: oh dearie me.

In terms of Jump, this has also changed beyond recognition. Where once it was essentially press releases and articles (in various guises) the rise of the internet and social media – just media, really, in a B2B sense – means our work now ranges from website creation and management, trade show support, through videos to social media campaigns as well as the aforementioned items. This broader communication remit allows us to work at a more strategic level, which is an exciting development. At heart, it’s still all about helping companies be correctly positioned, creating materials that work for them when they aren’t speaking directly to existing or new clients. It’s about an integrated, quality approach.

What makes you passionate about working in the industry?

From an early love of photography and some short film making at university, coupled with an insatiable cinema habit when I first came to London and even still now, I love images and storytelling. I’m also fascinated by the way that technologies evolve and in the age of the internet, that’s particularly pertinent.

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If you could change one thing about the media tech industry, what would it be?

Given what we do – PR, marketing and creative services across the full breadth of the industry – the lack of willingness to talk can sometimes be frustrating.

But I don’t think that’s only our industry. On a less Jump note, to encourage younger generations to enter the industry. And from a consumer perspective, consolidation of available services would help. A person can but dream…

How inclusive do you think the industry is, and how can we make it more inclusive?

I certainly think this is an area that could be improved. In my opinion, it’s still far too male-dominated and the industry can benefit from younger, fresher voices. I’m hopeful that as the walls around the broadcast industry continue to crumble, this will be a natural process.

How do we encourage young people that media technology is the career for them?

Bribery? Slightly more seriously, by attracting them at a young age. We know that there are good courses and apprenticeships out there and both these avenues need to be encouraged, with manufacturer support where possible.

Where do you think the industry will go next?

I think we’ll see more mergers and acquisitions on both the creation and distribution sides; continuing IP deployment; further expansion and ultimately the consolidation of consumer video service providers. We are in a transition period, though it’s far from clear to what exactly we’re transitioning.

What’s the biggest topic of discussion in your area of the industry?

How we can continue to ensure that our clients are heard and seen. Ignore the cliché alarm sounding behind you: it’s faulty. There’s so much noise being generated constantly that the quality of content that we create and the ways we help clients present themselves are paramount. This has never been more important. Really.

What should the industry be talking about that it currently isn’t?

That’s a secret only Jump knows. ■

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