THE FINAL WORD
THE FINAL WORD Marina Kalkanis, CEO, M2A Media, looks into her crystal ball
How did you get started in the media tech industry? I trained as a software engineer in the 1980s and worked in many different industries before joining the BBC in 2003. The BBC was an early pioneer in online media and in 2006 I started working on the first generation of BBC iPlayer. From 2009 I ran the Media Services department with responsibility for delivering all of the online media. It was an exciting time building services that broke new ground in online media technology. How has it changed since you started your career? When I got started in 2006 online media was not yet a mass industry and was more of an experimental place. Many experts thought the internet would never be able to handle media streaming bandwidths. In those early years most of the media processing was with proprietary solutions like Real Media, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Windows Media. There was almost no media on mobiles and each handset manufacturer had their own operating system. The browsers also needed plugins and weren’t interoperable either. There was very little interoperability and the streaming quality was nowhere near broadcast quality. What has changed is the emergence of widely adopted standards like H.264/AVC, MP-DASH, HLS, CMAF, MXF. Also, the requirement to build open APIs around services and to have interoperability. HTML5, iOS and Android made a huge difference in creating standards. What makes you passionate about working in the industry? Offering a great quality streaming service is something that really benefits people. You can see a direct connection from creating a service that works well and the pleasure people take in using it. It is also great to see new ideas and improvements constantly being proposed. The media tech industry is the perfect combination of creativity and technical innovation. If you could change one thing about the media tech industry, what would it be? I would like to see greater diversity and inclusion in the media tech industry, so that the industry truly reflects the audience it serves. How inclusive do you think the industry is, and how can we make it more inclusive? Industry bodies like DPP, SMPTE, RTS, HPA, SVG, EBU etc. are making real efforts to increase inclusivity but our cultural stereotypes and unconscious biases are hard to overcome. I think the media tech industry is working to be more inclusive but there is a long way to go. That means offering additional support to under-represented groups. We all have
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unconscious biases and we have to work to retrain ourselves away from these. I think it’s particularly important as we move in to machine learning, virtual reality and AI that we don’t bring our unconscious biases across into the virtual world. How do we encourage young people that media technology is the career for them? I think young people are naturally attracted to media but find the tech roles more intimidating. I think keeping pathways always open is good and encouraging staff to try different roles. Creating mixed teams that bring together different skills can help young people feel more comfortable with more technical roles. Where do you think the industry will go next? We’ll see much more crossover between traditional longform media and other online formats like esports, chat, gaming, VR etc. We’ll also see much more data associated with video as the AI and ML services mature and are used as standard across the industry. This means searching for video and for specific moments, people, places etc. in video will become increasingly easier. What’s the biggest topic of discussion in your area of the industry? In live streaming simplifying workflows is a big topic of discussion. Content owners want to maximise the reach and monetary value of their content through subscription and advertising. They need the service to run flawlessly particularly during the big moments. Receiving bad reviews on Reddit or Twitter for a live streaming service can be devastating to a content publisher. Low latency is also a big topic of discussion particularly for our live sport customers. The industry is responding to the recent announcement from Apple on Low-Latency HLS. Getting latency down to, or better than, linear TV levels will be a big push now as more sport viewing moves from linear to OTT consumption. What should the industry be talking about that it isn’t at the moment? The industry is not talking about sustainability in any big way yet. We are certainly expanding and replacing our media devices more quickly in this generation than happened 20 or 30 years ago. I can see more attention focused on sustainability in the manufacture and disposal of devices as well as the infrastructure that supports online video. We’ve seen a big shift from processing in local data centres to centralised public Cloud facilities. We should be looking for sustainability efficiencies now from the public Cloud providers. n