October 2017 - Driving Customer Engagement

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SUPPLEMENT

TARGETED BROADCASTING BUILDS ENGAGED AUDIENCES Sony is more than just a manufacturer of great technology; it also provides services and solutions that help broadcasters and media companies engage better with their audiences, explains Richard Scott.

PICTURED FAR RIGHT: Richard Scott

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t the risk of stating the obvious, TV viewing habits the world over continue to change rapidly.

According to a Nielsen ‘Total Audience Report’ from earlier this year, both teens and younger millennials (18-27 year olds) are watching 40 per cent less traditional TV on average per day than they were five years ago. At the same time, older millennials (2836) are watching 25 per cent less.

Traditional viewing is also falling among the older age groups too, albeit not as quickly. It coincides with a rise in the popularity of on-demand and streamed content being viewed on other devices and other platforms. But it’s not a simple lift-and-shift migration.

The way in which TV is viewed has also changed too.

According to research by Accenture, for example, 87 per cent of viewers use a mobile ‘second screen’ device while they watch a TV programme. This could be for additional statistics and data during a sporting event or for talking to friends on social media.

From binge-watching boxsets to viewing content on virtual reality headsets, there are countless other examples too.

“Lose millennials now and the are unlikely to ever come back”

The upshot of this is that broadcasters need to work harder than ever to maintain their audience and build their brand. Making great content is not always enough. It has to be available whenever, wherever and however the audience demands it.

This is how millennials consume media. And, as they are the future, lose them now and they are unlikely to come back.

With this in mind, here at Sony we believe we are well positioned to help broadcasters transform their business so that they can better engage with this new generation of viewer.

Over many years we have quietly but successfully provided media firms with the digital services, tools and solutions they need to both connect with their customers and make their media supply chains more efficient.

Within the articles that follow, we will demonstrate our commitment to driving viewer engagement, especially in sport, and making improvements to the media supply chain that in turn allows more money to be spent on-screen. We will provide real-life, working examples of media customers who are building their brands and their audiences using innovative solutions developed by Sony.

Broadcasters and media companies have long trusted Sony to deliver the best technology for content creation. But we also have scale and understanding to do so much more. Now we are going to prove it.

Richard Scott is head of media solutions at Sony Professional Europe

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SPORTS PRODUCTION: RAISING THE GAME Hawk-Eye, Pulselive and PlayStation Live VR offer sports broadcasters the chance to drive customer engagement and win new viewers

PICTURED RIGHT: ATP Tennis events

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efore multi-channel television and the internet, sports fans were easily pleased.

With so little sport being screened, just having cameras at an event was enough to keep most viewers happy. It was a rare treat.

Today, with the advent of social media, live streaming, OTT services and next generation viewing experiences like virtual reality, audience expectations have risen.

The appreciative sit-back-and-watch TV viewer is being supplemented with a more demanding generation of consumer who wants an enhanced interactive ‘experience’ across multiple screens. They don’t want to just choose an event to watch - they also want to choose how they watch it.

With new media players entering the sports market, in turn providing further choice, the ability to offer a better viewing experience has become essential in the battle for eyeballs.

As such, making use of innovative technology that helps to increase viewer engagement is crucial.

Hawk-Eye - enhancing the fan experience Hawk-Eye Innovations, a Sony company, captures data from ball and player tracking cameras and uses it to deliver graphical analysis and insight.

Not only has it helped to improve refereeing and umpiring decisions in sports like football, cricket and tennis, it has also enhanced the fan experience across broadcast and online channels.

From a batsman’s wagon wheel in cricket coverage

to green screen analysis of a tennis player’s backhand, Hawk-Eye is responsible for delivering some of the most recognised and satisfying virtual graphics in sport.

The Tennis Channel, for example, used Hawk-Eye’s augmented reality software to analyse and graphically display exactly how players completed certain shots during coverage of Wimbledon.

Sky Sports utilised Hawk-Eye for its coverage of the British Masters golf, providing viewers with a ‘Green Reader’ that showed the potential putting line on certain greens. But Hawk-Eye is not just for enhancing the main broadcast coverage. It can also be used on second screens and in stadiums.

Hawk-Eye’s Smart Replay technology, for example, can provide corporate guests at a venue with a next generation hospitality experience by making all TV angles and highlights immediately available within suites via touch screens. For second screen websites and apps, Hawk-Eye provides polling, voting and simulations that make the fan experience more dynamic during a live event. This work dovetails with its sister firm, Pulselive.

Pulselive - making sport more interactive Pulselive, also a Sony company, deliver digital solutions to some of the world’s largest sport organisations, including the English Premier League, the International Cricket Council (ICC) and World Rugby.

This involves creating, developing and managing digital platforms, reaching millions of sports fans

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SUPPLEMENT every day whether that’s the official Rugby or Cricket World Cup website or the Premier League’s iOS and Android apps.

Operating at the intersection of digital, social media and broadcast, Pulselive focus on enhancing the live fan experience through interactive initiatives such as real-time audience polling on the BBC’s flagship football programme, Match of the Day. Second screen experiences have also been developed for broadcasters’ digital platforms. ESPN’s Courtcast, for example, integrates live coverage of all major tennis events, combining tournament data, live streaming, social media curation and Hawk-Eye data visualisation.

Based out of the UK, Pulselive also invests efforts into emerging platforms. A major current focus is AI and how Pulselive’s clients can have a presence on platforms such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

PlayStation VR Live - bringing the stadium into the living room PlayStation VR Live is a completely new concept in sports viewing. Powered by the Sony PlayStation, it combines a live immersive 180-degree view of the match - or any live event - with a TV broadcast feed, social connectivity and sports data.

Viewers can enjoy seeing a game from inside the stadium (complete with cutting edge 3D audio) and also watch the broadcaster’s live coverage, access different angles, replays and data feeds, or interact with social media, all done using a PlayStation headset and controlled using a PlayStation controller.

In June 2017, to prove the concept, Sony trialled the VR Live experience with UEFA during the Champions League football final. Following months of careful R&D, viewers in Germany were able to have an experience that was described as “just like sitting in the stadium” but augmented with data and social media.

ATP Media and Sony also delivered a Live VR experience at the Rome and London ATP tennis events, offering up a virtual hospitality box, match statistics and social media feeds alongside the virtual experience and live broadcast.

For the gaming generation that wants more than just passive TV viewing, VR Live brings them closer to the action while allowing them to customise their viewing experience and to stay in contact with friends. All from the comfort of their living room.

For broadcasters, VR Live can be easily integrated into an existing production set-up. Locked-off Sony F55 cameras in the venue produce a single precompressed VR stream that is transmitted to the cloud.

The packaging work is then handled by the PlayStation

and an accompanying app. It offers revenue opportunities too. Thanks to the PlayStation’s geo capabilities, advertising and sponsorship can be global or tailored to a local level, while pay-per-view options are already built-in.

When attempting to satisfy the modern sports fan, broadcasters and media companies need to do more than just capture the action. They need to increase customer engagement and be distinct from their competition. Through innovative technology solutions like Hawk-Eye, Pulselive and VR Live, Sony can help them to do precisely that.

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STREAMLINING THE MEDIA SUPPLY CHAIN With consumer demand for content showing no sign of abating, Sony is helping broadcasters and content creators to streamline their media management and their media supply chain

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hanks to the combination of multi-channel television, OTT, video-on-demand, and streaming services, there has never been more ways to consume video content.

Whether you want to watch it live on the big TV in your living room or stream it to your mobile phone while on the move, televisual content is available anywhere and at anytime. Supply should really outweigh demand. But it doesn’t. Consumers cannot get enough.

This gives broadcasters and other media companies a huge opportunity but also creates a major problem.

There is a need to produce more content but there isn’t always the money to do so.

As such, there is huge pressure to contain and reduce costs and, right now, one of the key areas of focus is the media supply chain.

Sony’s Media Solutions Group has already made huge strides here, driving innovation for broadcasters around the world.

Bringing the world together for CCTV The Beijing-based public national broadcaster CCTV operates 43 TV channels including six overseas in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Arabic.

Its news operation consists of a large number of local, regional and overseas branches and offices.

For news production, CCTV adopted a cloud-based global collaboration platform that has, at its heart, the same infrastructure as Sony’s omni-media network production system Media Backbone Hive. CCTV’s

collaborative network is accessible by all of its offices and locations and allows journalists to produce TV and new media content at the same time, as well as share and exchange content and access scheduling and planning functions.

CCTV took a combined public and private cloud approach to the platform using Alibaba Cloud in China and Amazon Web Services in the US and splitting out the services elements from the main application and distributing them across the private cloud.

‘Pop up’ production infrastructure is also utilised when required. In 2016, during a major international sporting event, CCTV Sports created a ‘Converged Content Platform’ for distributing content online and via mobile phones. It resulted in a huge increase in the number of viewers that saw the content, jumping from an average of around 5,000 to more than 1,000,000.

By employing cloud-native technologies, like those found in Media Backbone Hive, CCTV has become more efficient and streamlined its news production workflows.

A unique public/private partnership with WGBH Along with its local programming commitments, Boston-based WGBH is the single largest producer of television, online and mobile content for the pan-US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

To cope with rising storage demands, and looking to spend less money on distribution and more on content creation, the broadcaster completely remodelled the way it manages, prepares and plays out

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SUPPLEMENT its programming.

This was done by implementing Public Media Management (PMM), a cloud-based centralised media management and content distribution service developed in partnership with Sony.

PMM orchestrates the acquisition, transcoding, quality assurance and delivery of nationally distributed public television content, giving users one touch distribution across broadcast, web, mobile, OTT and MVoD. Importantly, it is a nationwide service that can be rolled out across other member PBS affiliates facing the same challenges, allowing them to replace their existing master control with new technology that is paid for as a monthly operating expense.

PMM works around a Network Operations Centre (NOC) located at WGBH that records and processes both real-time and recorded national content and transfers it to the cloud. Individual Nodes located at each PBS station then automatically download the required content based on a unique schedule. The Node also provides traffic management, automation, graphics, routing and storage.

The PMM service uses a range of proven Sony technologies including the Media Backbone Enterprise Management System, Ci Cloud and Optical Disc Archive.

With PMM in place, WGBH and other PBS stations are reducing the expense of master control, allowing them to focus on their mission of community engagement, providing content when, where and how audiences want it.

Taking an ROI-based approach to deploying supply chain technology at Turner Turner Broadcasting System Europe, a Time Warner Company, is responsible for 35 TV channels across Europe covering multiple territories and multiple languages.

Looking to modernise and streamline its media management and its workflows - but still retain the necessary flexibility to adapt to future business requirements - the broadcaster implemented Sony’s Media Backbone Conductor (MBC).

Located at its European Media Hub in London, the media operations and workflow orchestration platform allowed Turner to automate many of its workflows, including the management of all media throughout the processing phases, and manual operations such as QC and review, ordering and approvals. It also handles file movement and storage, transcoding, auto QC and packaging for playout

and distribution.

Working this way, the tools, processes and applications used in its various European Media Preparation Centres have been consolidated and standardised.

With the multichannel and multi-language output in mind, MBC also helped to simplify the creation and management of over 30 different additional subtitle and audio tracks linked to each original master copy of a programme.

For Turner, the return on this investment has been a more efficient and versatile operation that requires no video tape and less human resource.

Conclusion As Sony is probably best well known for its imaging tools, it will come as no surprise to learn that, in the future, supply chain applications will start to dovetail with acquisition technology.

The cloud-based workflow service for news production, such as XDCAM air, brings supply chain technology directly to the camera. This fundamentally changes both live and as-live production.

It is just another of the many ways that Sony’s cloud-based media-specific applications, systems and services, can help broadcasters to streamline their media management and their media supply chain.

Supply should really outweigh demand. But it doesn’t.

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Recapture lost audiences Break the news first across all platforms with Media Backbone Hive.

It’s time to reconnect with your lost audience in a more cost effective way. As viewers look to the internet, mobile and social media for their news fix, broadcasters can now reclaim this ‘Lost Audience’ with Media Backbone Hive, a Unified Content Platform linking everyone within the organisation to enable unified news production. One production system to deliver stories faster across multiple platforms online, TV and radio. No more silos.

No more duplication of effort. And lots more flexibility.

Media Backbone Hive

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