ESPORTS BLOCKCHAIN FOR ADVERTISERS HOT MEDIA TECH START-UPS INSIDE THE YOUTUBE SPACE BUILDING A NETWORK FOR YOUTH SPORTS
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ISSUE #01 MARCH 2018 £4.99/$13.99 WWW.FEEDMAGAZINE.TV
YOUR 5G FUTURE
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WELCOME
WELCOME TO FEED EDITORIAL
EDITOR
Neal Romanek
+44 (0) 1223 492246 nealromanek@bright-publishing.com
CONTRIBUTORS
Ann-Marie Corvin Heather McLean Adrian Pennington SENIOR SUB EDITOR
Lisa Clatworthy SUB EDITORS
Jo Ruddock Siobhan Godwood Felicity Evans ADVERTISING
SALES DIRECTOR
Matt Snow
+44 (0) 1223 499453 mattsnow@bright-publishing.com
SALES MANAGER
Krishan Parmar
+44 (0) 1223 499462 krishanparmar@bright-publishing.com DESIGN
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Andy Jennings DESIGN MANAGER
Alan Gray DESIGNERS
Flo Thomas, Man-Wai Wong, Mark George PUBLISHING
MANAGING DIRECTORS
Andy Brogden & Matt Pluck
What if you could build a broadcast tech magazine from the ground up? How would you do it? What would you cover? Would you stick to the same stories about the same infrastructures at the same incumbent institutions, peppered with an occasional thought leadership piece about a far-off connected media future? Or would you (clever as you are) realise that connected media future is here. it’s now. We’re living it. And that broadcast has changed so much in the past five years, that the term has almost lost its meaning. In the current media landscape, some of our biggest stars are twentysomethings operating out of their basements. A small church in Ohio can broadcast its message anywhere in the world. OTT TV companies command more respect from talent than big movie studios. And politicians are circumnavigating traditional gatekeepers and talking to followers directly online. FEED is the first magazine dedicated to exploring and explaining the tech and tools behind this streaming video ecosystem. Oh, and a magazine? On paper? Really? Yes, really. We’re all striving to have healthy boundaries around our media-saturated lives, but in the meantime, our ability to concentrate deeply is taking a beating. We reflexively respond to the email, the tweet, the text, the clickbait, the Like button, and our thought life gets broken into bits, mosaic tiles that can be hard to piece together into long-term visions and goals. There’s no time to think, no time to plan. We end up reacting, rather than creating. A print magazine – solid, tangible, analogue – offers a valuable gift. Time. Time to discover something unexpected. Time to think. And the opportunity to think, deeply and creatively, will be your most valuable business asset in the coming years. The future won’t belong to technologists and engineers. It will belong to thinkers. So whether you’re a YouTuber, a major lifestyle brand, a small business with a video offering, an eSports athlete or even a traditional broadcaster, we welcome you to our first issue of FEED. Flip through it, keep it a while, sit with it, use it as an excuse to think – about your business, about the future, about how to better serve your users and your stakeholders. Let us know how we can help.
NEAL ROMANEK, EDITOR nealromanek@bright-publishing.com @rabbitandcrow nromanek
BRIGHT PUBLISHING LTD, BRIGHT HOUSE, 82 HIGH STREET, SAWSTON, CAMBRIDGESHIRE CB22 3HJ UK
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CONTENTS 07 NEWSFEED
The latest news from around the media tech ecosystem
10 YOUR TAKE
Niche markets for OTT success
12 STREAMPUNK
Inside YouTube Space London
18 STREAMPUNK: TOOL OF THE MONTH Shooting wireless with NewTek’s Connect Spark
20 CONTENT FOCUS
COVER STORY: XTREME
Delivering the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics to the world, plus a look back at 90 years of Olympics broadcasting history
We go live-streaming with Groovy Gecko
34 TECHFEED
This month’s tech focus is 5G. Will superfast networks change everything?
40 GENIUS INTERVIEW ESL UK’s James Dean talks about the future of eSports
48 THE LIVE LIFE
Streaming company LiveArena brings youth sports to the world
53 START-UP ALLEY
Three new media tech companies you need to know about
60 FUTURESHOCK
MadHive is using blockchain to revolutionise advertising
62 HAPPENING
Connected Media Europe: a new streaming confab for BVE
66 OVER THE TOP
Tempted by tech? Always be willing to walk away
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BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR
CES GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS This year’s CES show in Las Vegas showed signs of leaving behind its B2C roots and becoming a B2B show – such was the assessment of the UK’s Digital Production Partnership (DPP). The DPP has taken an interest in the development of CES as a bellwether for TV industry trends, and has produced analyses of the show for the past three years, including a look back at the show’s development since 2010. The report observed that voice assistance and speech recognition was the breakthrough tech this year and that
ISTOCK.COM/WOODKERN
VOICE CONTROL WILL REVOLUTIONISE HOW WE FIND CONTENT THE REPORT’S KEY FINDINGS:
■ Voice assistance and speech recognition dominated CES 2018. Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are being integrated with TV’s and will radically alter the media industry. ■ CES 2018 was the show where B2B outweighed B2C, as many companies left the relationship with the consumer to the tech giants, and focused on specific business opportunities. ■ One effect of the focus on business-to-business products was that new consumer products from the major manufacturers were thin on the ground at CES 2018. ■ China is up and coming. The most likely competitors for Google, Amazon and Apple are going to be their Chinese equivalents, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. ■ Home robots are starting to become a reality – but as tools for the workshop, not the living room.
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voice search for content, would be gamechanging. “Voice control, implemented in voice assistants and TVs, will revolutionise how we find content,” said DPP managing director Mark Harrison. “The winners and losers are as yet unknown, but with younger consumers already comfortable with both voice interface and with online video, I know where I’m putting my money.”
The line between consumer and business showed signs of blurring at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s largest trade show, convention and exhibition
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HUAWEI’S NEW SERVICE FOR SPAIN & ITALY Chinese telecommunications company Huawei is launching an OTT streaming video service in Spain and Italy. The new platform, Huawei Video, will be rolled out this quarter only on Huawei and Huawei’s Honor smartphones. The service will offer both internationial and local content, as well as free trailers and documentaries. Huawei has made content deals with Spanish media companies, including Atresmedia, A3Media and Under The Milky Way. The company has indicated interest in expanding the roll-out to other European countries.
IP TRADE ORGS JOIN FORCES The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) is merging with the Media Networking Alliance (MNA) to form a single trade association for promoting IP-based infrastructure in the media and entertainment industry. The combined organisation will keep the AIMS banner and continue under the existing AIMS by-laws. The two groups have been in an informal collaboration since AIMS’
SINCLAIR MOVES PLAYOUT TO PUBLIC CLOUD Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) is moving playout of its KidsClick block of children’s programming fully into the public cloud. The new implementation went live in October and is one of the first times a major US broadcaster has moved a critical operation to a fully virtualised public cloud environment. It is hoped the cloud-native and geo-dispersed environment will allow SBG greater agility, scalability and flexibility. KidsClick is a three-hour block which airs daily on a number of SBG stations. By centralising the playout and ad trafficking operations of KidsClick in a virtualised environment using commercialm off-the-shelf equipment, SBG aims to deliver programming and advertising tailored to the requirements of individual affiliates. “The scalability and customisation capabilities that the public cloud approach offers is unlike anything we could do using a traditional, on-premises model,” said
Del Parks, CTO of SBG. “And since we’re only delivering this programming for a few hours a day, the flexibility of originating in the public cloud is a far superior alternative to purchasing traditional equipment that would sit idle for many hours at a time.” Imagine Communications’ Versio Platform underlies KidsClick operations. Versio is a software-only, cloud-native playout solution for fully virtualised environments, both private and public. In the KidsClick model, an instance of Versio, running a unique playlist and ad load, is assigned to each time zone. The deployment also uses Imagine’s SelenioFlex File, a file-based processing solution running in the public cloud. SelenioFlex File resources can be applied to pre-produced KidsClick content requiring transcoding, format conversion, bit-rate adjustments, audio processing or other modifications before being played out.
founding at the end of 2015. Both organisations have worked separately to promote a standardsbased approach to IP interoperability. MNA has been focused on the AES67 open standard for audio over IP and audio over ethernet. Its membership has consisted of companies in the broadcast, pro audio, pro AV and installation markets. In the past two years, AIMS and MNA have executed a formal liaison agreement and cooperated in promoting AES67 technology. The AES67 standard was published by the Audio Engineering Society in 2013. It is designed to enable interoperability between IP-based audio networking systems such as RAVENNA,
Livewire, Q-LAN and Dante. The organisations hope the merger will improve coordination in creating new IP standards in the broadcast and audio market segments, which have in the past run the risk of developing in siloes. “With the merging of the organisations, we have a larger voice and a single place for technical and marketing discussions amongst a larger group of industry leaders,” said Rich Zwiebel, chairman of the MNA. “As AIMS, we will be able to provide a more Brazil. compelling message to the industry, assuring true industry-wide audio/video IP interoperability across the broadcast, installed systems and live sound markets.”
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BRAZILIAN TELECOMS USE TV2U FOR OTT OTT media services company TV2U has helped Brazilian partners SOL Telecom and CCSTV launch new OTT entertainment platforms. TV2U offers a platform that enables companies to provide OTT streaming services to their customers. The platform is pre-loaded with content including movies TV programming, karaoke content and games. TV2U offers a cloud-based service hub for end-to-end Internet delivery of live and on-demand content, including ingest and encoding, analytics, personalised advertising, DRM
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and global delivery through thrid-party CDNs. The company has completed deployment with the integration of the head-end at both SOL Telecom’s and CCSTV’s facilities with TV2U’s content management services. The first service offering will feature 100 live channels of premium and local content, with planned growth of more than 250 channels, plus on-demand content. After its initial launch to customers of SOL Telecom and CCSTV, the service will expand nationally across
ACCEDO STUDIO MAKES FOR FLEXIBLE UX Accedo is using Google Cloud to help media and entertainment companies access a single, unified cloud platform. Accedo Studio, operating on Google Cloud, aims to help companies build customisable video experiences by creating or updating user interfaces across all devices. The interfaces can be made unique to a specific brand experience and appropriate for the infrastructure and organisation of the business. The cloud-based UX management tools of Accedo Studio allow video channel managers for fine-tuning and iterative development of customer experience, informed by audience data gathered in real time. Accedo Studio offers Standard, Professional and Pay TV levels of features.
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YOUR TAKE
Simplestream
OTT CLIMATE GOES CLOUDY Words by Dan Finch, chief commercial officer, Simplestream
Want to be a success in the new OTT content marketplace? Choose a niche and stick to it. And use the cloud
DAN FINCH: The incumbents make it difficult for new entrants to gain - and keep - a foothold in a market that continues to evolve.
here is no denying that recent years have seen a hugely competitive OTT climate develop, with Netflix, Amazon and Hulu leading the way. A report from Statista showed that the number of digital video users worldwide is expected to reach over 800 million by 2021 – with Netflix, Hulu and Amazon accounting for 30% of this total. Digital TV Research predicted the number of global Netflix subscribers will rise to 128 million by 2022 – an increase of 44% from 89 million at the end of 2016 – with international subscribers due to exceed US ones by early this year. The growth and monopoly that these video giants have built has encouraged new services to enter the market – all competing for viewer attention. There are now nearly 200 SVOD services in the US and Canada alone and it’s hard
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Simplestream to remember a week in which a network or studio doesn’t announce the launch or expansion of a video service – 60 of which were introduced last year. Yet despite the rise of SVOD, there have already been some casualties. If we look at services such as Fullscreen, Vimeo SVOD, Seeso and Cox’s offerings, Flarekids and Flareme TV, we see big companies spending huge amounts of money on content, infrastructure and ongoing support, but in the end they have been wound down. This back-pedalling has been due either to a change in strategy or, in Cox’s case, because the operational running costs were too high to make a viable business – even with more than 300,000 subscribers. This demonstrates that the OTT market is not a video delivery utopia, as online engagement increasingly fragments. The incumbents make it difficult for new entrants to gain – and keep – a foothold in a market that continues to evolve. MIDiA research found that SVOD accounts for 10.5% of all online video engagement with much of the growth in video consumption being routed through messaging apps that account for 6.5 billion monthly active users – over twice the number of website users at 3 billion and social network users at 2.6 billion. It’s therefore difficult for new mainstream services to launch successfully. However, niche services providing very specific, bespoke content have a much better chance by providing something that is either not available on mainstream services or is much more difficult to find. In an increasingly sophisticated digital marketplace, niche services provide the opportunity for platforms to monetise underserved consumer interests. However, it’s critical that these operators can tackle issues including monetisation, effective asset management, efficient turnaround time to market, multiplatform delivery and content licensing fees, which all combine to make it challenging for niche platforms to launch and prosper. NWSL Media is one such niche platform that is prospering. As a worldwide sport, women’s soccer has a huge fan base in the US and this is growing globally. The US National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) realised that new strategies were needed to costeffectively improve its outreach and give viewers more power in where and how they watched games. Having previously used YouTube to stream games, NWSL simply wasn’t getting the best out of
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THE CLOUD ENABLES NICHE OPERATORS TO LAUNCH SERVICES QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY its broadcasting potential – both in its outreach and monetisation. A+E Networks saw the potential in NWSL’s fan base and invested in the league in January 2017, creating a joint venture called NWSL Media. With A+E’s breadth of experience, the new venture would handle the broadcasting rights, production, website and sponsorship of its properties. However, A+E wanted to bet on the league at a time when women’s soccer had the potential to really take off. With a growing fan base nationally and internationally, one of the biggest issues A+E had was how to ensure this interest was being met through services that fans could seamlessly access and engage with. The result was that Simplestream built a multiscreen streaming service that now enables fans to watch over 120 live matches per season in high definition with synchronised scores, line-ups, play-byplay and box score data. Companies need to be dynamic, forward-thinking and embrace change by
leveraging agile strategies that can adapt to rapidly reflect market demands. TRACE is another such example. Urban music and entertainmentfocused broadcaster TRACE is a niche operator known as a voice for young African talent and a global driver of afrourban entertainment. Attuned to evolving video industry shifts, the content owner and provider decided the time was right to invest in a global, all-encompassing, multi-device platform. Partnered with Simplestream, TRACE built a content offering of 21 paid TV channels, four FM radio stations and over 30 digital and mobile services online. The key to building a successful niche service is to deliver unique content with a reliable user experience through efficient tech. Streamlining the ingest, storing, editing and layout of content through a single unified cloud-based workflow enables content providers to deliver high-quality and diverse video services to millions of consumers flexibly, at low incremental cost and at scale. The cloud brings many benefits, including improvements in scalability, QoS, OPEX, streaming quality, ad insertion, deployment speeds across multiple territories, minimising upfront costs and creating more personalised channel offerings. This then paves the way for more investment to be redirected to licensing, marketing and content development. The cloud enables niche operators to launch services quickly and efficiently with premium content at a fraction of the cost of legacy broadcast solutions.
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YouTube Spaces
GROWING SPACES Words by Neal Romanek
Technology manager for the YouTube Spaces in EMEA, Chris Lock gives us a tour of Google’s versatile new incubator for online talent he YouTube Spaces are waiting for you! YouTube Spaces provide free studios and equipment for popular YouTubers (‘popular’ is 10,000 followers or more). London was chosen as the site of the first YouTube space, opening at Google’s Covent Garden headquarters in July 2012. Since then, a dozen more Spaces have sprung up in major cities, including Berlin, Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York. In August 2016, YouTube Space London was reopened – bigger, better and faster – in new digs at Google’s King’s Cross site. Chris Lock is the technology manager for all YouTube Spaces in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Lock joined the YouTube Spaces team just over four years
ago, originally looking after the technical infrastructure of the first YouTube Space London. “As the aspirations of the community grew, we identified an opportunity to build a next-level facility at our new home in King’s Cross,” remembers Lock. “From being given clean access to the building, we managed to build, partially commission and put on an incredible launch party in around eight weeks, this was only possible due to the flexible design and determination of all involved.” The YouTube Spaces are designed to be labs of sorts, helping the YouTube creative community to flourish by providing top resources to creators and artists. The latest incarnation of YouTube Space London is a 20,000 square foot full-service production facility. YouTube creators with
THE CORE AIMS WERE TO BUILD AN INCREDIBLY FLEXIBLE SPACE THAT ALLOWED FOR A DIVERSE RANGE OF PRODUCTIONS
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YouTube Spaces
PRODUCTION CONTROL London’s YouTube Space offers facilities to cope with cope with all kinds of production demands, from live gigs to VR
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more than 10,000 followers can learn about production techniques and new technology, experiment with new formats and concepts, and network with a diverse community of creators. As with YouTube itself, the needs of the creators are widely divergent. “The requirements of the community vary from single camera digital cinema workflows, to full live productions including remote participation from our worldwide facilities that are streamed live to the platform,” says Lock. “Artists may need to multitrack a performance or host live gigs for their fans. They may need to launch their latest album live on YouTube. They may even use VR or live motion capture.” And the facilities available in the YouTube Space are indeed impressive.
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YouTube Spaces
CENTRE STAGE: YouTube Space sound stages include an award-winning lighting installation from Photon Beard
EVERY DECISION WE MAKE IS CENTRED AROUND THE NEEDS AND PREFERENCES OF THE COMMUNITY “From the very early conception of the project, the core aims were to build an incredibly flexible space that allowed for a diverse range of productions and the unique requirements that come with those. “We frequently consult with creators and artists on the equipment that they will use on a day-to-day basis and have an open line of communication through our production specialists. Every decision we make is centred around the needs and preferences of the community. They are, after all, the rock that keeps the ecosystem alive.” A significant amount of research was conducted on core routing. Lock and the technical team were keen to offer uncompressed live UHD production, and with the increase in bandwidth required, they began evaluating the use of IP. As standards had yet to settle, they decided the most flexible and risk-free approach was to adopt an SDVN solution feedzine feedzinefeed feedmagazine.tv
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YouTube Spaces
from Evertz using ASPEN, which has served them well. The Space is now embarking on the migration to the ST2110 standard, which will allow separately routable video and audio over IP networks. The audio subsystem is built around Dante, using the System T 72 fader audio console from Solid State Logic. This gave the team the balance of significant firepower for music production, while also being a very effective TV mixing desk. The space also has a smaller 16 fader junior control available. “Dante gives us the ability to quickly and easily respond to changes in user audio requirements,” says Lock. “Depending on the artist’s preference we can either track to ProTools or Logic in a redundant configuration and we have capacity for a significant amount of outboard equipment. “Our front-of-house systems connect both to the core Dante network as well as local pre’s when required, with them being
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STAY FLEXIBLE: The Space’s camera gear includes everything from Canon DSLRs to the RED 8K WEAPON.
able to utilise a redundant pair of Waves SoundGrid Servers.” Distributed RF is available throughout to ensure microphones and IEMs have coverage no matter where you are in the facility. A wide range of microphones is available, from multiple manufacturers, and ample PAs for a full range of artists. The facility is using Ross Acuity vision mixers running in UHD mode. “We are able to share ME resource between each of the switcher panels, allowing us to either operate two smaller live productions at the same time from separate galleries, or combine resources for the larger shows.” The facilities can share low latency baseband video and intercom trunking and employ the Riedel’s Artist system and Bolero for wireless intercom requirements. With that solid infrastructure, YouTube Space London offers a treat box full of production equipment for creators to use.
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YouTube Spaces
SOUND SOLUTIONS The audio control room at YouTube Space London is built around a Dante network
In order to accommodate the mix between digital cinema and live workflows, the Space offers Sony’s F55 cameras, with the broadcast module. The flexible Sony cinema cameras operate over SMPTE hybrid fibre, allowing the team to change location easily for live production, as well as using them for digital cinema workflows. “Each creator has different needs and preferences. We try to offer as much choice as possible whilst also giving the opportunity to experiment with equipment they would otherwise struggle to access,” says Lock. The Space offers a wide range of production gear, ranging from DSLRs such as the Sony A7S and the Canon EOS 5D – Canons have become a tool of choice for many YouTubers – all the way to high-end digital cinema such as the RED 8K WEAPON. There is also a stock of 360 cameras, such as the Yi Halo that uses the Jump Assembler, as well as ambisonic microphones for recording immersive audio. As you would expect from YouTube, the Space is well networked. “Our production IP networks are all based on 10GbE,” says Lock. “We have used
INCUBATORS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF STREAMING CONTENT PRODUCTION pre-terminated MTP trunk cables to flood wire the facility, this gives us the flexibility to add I/O and even extend our intercom and wireless RF system wherever the need arises. “We are using redundant high bit rate J2K contribution lines to interconnect the facilities worldwide, we currently have end-to-end sub 100ms latency between Los Angeles and London. And we are able to distribute back to the platform at UHD resolutions using a redundant pair of RTMP encoders.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Chris Lock doesn’t come from a traditional systems integration background – or even from a streaming video background. “I have a very non-traditional background in terms of production engineering, I actually began my career working for a
company developing live and file-based newsgathering solutions for the broadcast market. This gave me a great grounding in IP as well as baseband video. “As the Spaces have grown, I have been fortunate to lead the technical design of all YouTube Spaces across Europe, Middle East and Africa, including Paris, London, Berlin and Dubai.” The world of the streaming video auteur is still in its early stages. The YouTube Spaces will no doubt be incubators for the next generation of streaming content production. So what’s next? “The YouTube Spaces have always, and will continue to lead the way implementing support for new platform features such as 4K and VR180. We have some awesome projects in the works, watch out for announcements!”
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WHAT IF YOU COULD TEST & MONITOR THE QUALITY OF YOUR MOBILE APPS FROM EVERYWHERE? Discover all the monitoring technologies Witbe can offer, including Video MOS, on booth C25. www.witbe.net
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Tool of the month
EASY REMOTE VIDEO WITH SPARK Words by Neal Romanek
Product Name: Connect Spark Company: NewTek Price: $499 for Connect Spark HDMI; $700 for Connect Spark SDI
ewTek’s products have been a boon to the streaming sector. Its TriCaster has become a workflow workhorse for the micro-broadcaster. In 2015, the company introduced its Network Device Interface (NDI) standard, which allowed video tools to send back and forth high-resolution video through any IP network. The royalty-free protocol was quickly adopted by online video producers – to the chagrin of trade organisations trying to develop unified, non-proprietary standards. Last year, NewTek released the Connect Spark. The Spark is a piece of compact, plug-and-play hardware for delivering SDI or HDMI video anywhere over an IP network. The Connect Spark can send a digital video source to the network in HD, with NDI output and support for resolutions up to 1080p at 60 frames-per-second. Using either Ethernet or Wi-Fi the Spark can be available as an input source for an NDI-compatible device or application. Cameras, switchers and microphones only need to be connected to the network for the Spark to be able to access them. Users can monitor video, access audio and video settings and manage permissions through a browser-based control panel, and the Connect Spark can be designated as an input source for desktop video applications, such as Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, Skype, WebEx and Zoom.
The Connect Spark is available in two models – one for HDMI input, the other, a bit more expensive, for SDI input. After some months on the market, the Connect Spark has had good uptake by companies needing easy and flexible ways to import video into their network. Remote productions are especially benefiting. A typical use case is the work of Brazilian live-streaming company JupiterReturn. “Our Rio de Janeiro office was tasked with conveying the overall feel of staying at a luxury hotel along the beach in Copacabana,” says JupiterReturn executive producer/director Victor Borachuk. “The deliverable was a basic one-camera 4K stream connected directly into our TriCaster TC-1. But we felt this didn’t allow viewers to experience elements such as the hotel restaurant, the rooftop pool deck, the concierge service or the gym overlooking the beach. Using NDI and Connect Spark boxes, we chose a few locations within the hotel, put them on a VLAN, and gave viewers a live tour of the hotel and a bit of the neighbourhood.” The plug-and-play usability of the Spark makes it appropriate for non-
professional use. “The Connect Spark allows us to walk around our entire campus, using our Wi-Fi network to send live video from our cameras back to our studio,” says David R Burgess, director of the digital media production department at a private school in Florida. “It has simplified our set-up for live sports coverage. We no longer have to spend hours pulling fibre optics to cameras.” The most recent version of the Spark includes a Virtual PTZ feature, which allows users to select and create multiple shots from a single, fullresolution video signal. The selections can then be stored as presets. The feature offers live virtual zoom and pan control throughout the frame. A Multicast Mode has also been added, which allows multiple destinations to receive the Connect Spark video source without having to establish individual point-to-point connections, resulting in thriftier consumption of network bandwidth. The latest iteration also offers an external LTC time code reference for embedding time code into the Connect Spark video signal for synchronisation with other NDI video signals.
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NEXT MONTH
The New Reality
FINDING YOUR WAY AROUND VIRTUAL REALITY
VR, AR, MR & ?
Immersed in video, social media and data of all kinds, some would say we’re already living in an augmented reality. What’s the next step? VR glasses may be just the start
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EDUCATION & ELEARNING
Video has become a vital tool of university and youth education. Webinars and online tutorials are an industry in themselves. Learn more in our Education Special!
CONTENT BY AI
Artificial intelligence is already being used to analyse content and viewer data, but how long until AI starts creating content? And why would we want it to?
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Live Streaming
FEELING Words by Adrian Pennington
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Live Streaming hether it be for marketing purposes, as a supplement to traditional broadcasting, to increase access to live events or for fun among a private group, live video streaming is adding another component to the way information is communicated. But live streaming is not as easy as you might first imagine. Even the simplest content has an aspect of risk. Errors in the stream are difficult to hide given the live nature of the content, and viewers won’t wait around if there’s an interruption in the stream. Live video streaming is composed of a chain of interlocking parts, including production, connectivity, encoding, CDN and delivery services. These and other elements are being increasingly offered as a package by streaming media companies, some of which also provide bespoke online video players and stream analytics. PRODUCTION These days there’s nothing acceptable about a sub-broadcast quality stream. Video production and live-streaming company Streaming Tank, whose clients include i24News and Eurosport, use Sony EX3 and PMW300 and Canon EOS C300 cameras for capture – and have access to larger ENG cameras and capabilities for 4K for more complex events. For its bigger productions or locations with poor network signals, Streaming Tank even runs its own OB truck which offers access to a Dawson Tooway satellite as well as integrated connectivity, vision and sound equipment, including BlackMagic Design’s ATEM Television Studio live production switcher and HyperDeck Studio recorder. Streaming Tank uses a mix of in-house kit and expertise plus external partners and freelancers to put together a video production service to fit the event – from lean singlecamera solutions to complex, dynamic shoots required in stadiums, festivals and outdoor events.
CASE STUDY: BAFTA 360 At the end of last year, Groovy Gecko live-streamed the Virgin TV BAFTA Television Awards 2017. Interviews from the star-studded red carpet were delivered directly to Virgin Media’s Facebook page, in interactive 360 video. This allowed viewers to look around the red carpet as though they were on it and alter their viewpoint by physically moving their mobile device or using a mouse on a computer/laptop. “The beauty of a 360 stream is the amount of freedom it gives to the audience,” says Jake Ward. “This makes for a highly interactive and immersive experience, far
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DEMANDING AUDIENCE Viewers will not accept any interruption in the stream – even of just a few seconds
beyond that of a static, nonlive stream. By combining the effect of live video and the 360° feature, viewers had extended access to an exclusive event and got to follow the celebrities as they walked the red carpet.” After only an hour, Virgin Media’s stream had attracted around one and a half times more viewers than the live stream on the official BAFTA Facebook page, which did not feature 360° interactivity. “This suggests our 360 video was more attractive to viewers than a simple live stream, which would not have afforded the same type of immersion for viewers,” says Ward.
THEY ASSUME THAT A STRONG INTERNET CONNECTION FOR THINGS LIKE WEB BROWSING WILL BE THE SAME FOR LIVE STREAMING CONNECTIVITY Once a video and sound team are in place some companies may want to utilise stand-alone connectivity solutions as a way to get the on-site video stream from venue out to the internet. “In the simplest set-up this means having our own engineers on-site with our encoders connected to a stable broadband connection, but that is not always possible so we work with a number of alternatives,” says Jake Ward, business development director at live-stream specialist Groovy Gecko. These connectivity alternatives include: Satellite bandwidth: Streaming media producers with expertise in IP-over-satellite can set up an on-site broadband connection good enough to stream your webcast with full redundancy. Satellite/fibre acquisition: When the video signal is already being uplinked to a satellite or transmitted over fibre to BT Tower, producers can bring the signal down into a partner satellite acquisition centre and encode your webcast from there. Mobile multiplexing: For webcasting on the move or in difficult environments, backpacks are the best option. LiveU’s units, for example, merge together multiple 3G, 4G and wireless signals and output a high-quality video stream that can be acquired at the streaming provider’s hub and encoded for your webcast. Smaller, lightweight
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Live Streaming units, such as the company’s LU200, permit camera ops to wear them and move easily. More robust models like the LU500 can bond up to eight network connections, while being combined with the LiveU extender and providing up to 20Mbps. Streaming media producers will also partner with a CDN, or several of them for redundancy, to deliver the live stream anywhere in the world. “Quite often, we’re working with a production company,” explains Groovy Gecko’s Ward. “They give us a TX, their live output from their camera mix, and then it’s split (for safety reasons) into two or more encoders, which encode that stream into a suitable video format. “Maybe we’ll add in other interactive elements like live polling on Facebook Live. Then those live streams, once they’re complete, are sent to what’s called a publishing point – that’s on a standard CDN, something like Akamai – and then going onto the client’s own page or, more commonly these days, a publishing point on something like Periscope, Facebook Live or YouTube. “Of course, you can run a very simple low stream off a single server that a company may be hosting, but as soon as that hits a certain number of viewers everything’s going to start to fall apart. From a CDN point of view, we use people like Akamai, which delivers a considerable portion of streaming on the Internet. If that goes down and fails to work we’ve all got much bigger problems.”
ON POINT Longer-form content that is important to your target audience and enables interaction is likely to perform well in a live stream
HOW DOES A CDN WORK? CDNs are made up of a large number of server farms around the world joined together by ultra-fast connections. When a file is uploaded to a local server for viewing on-demand it is rapidly duplicated across all the CDN’s servers. You can upload a file in London, and when it is replicated, a user in New York will be accessing it from a local server in New York. This means that there are multiple copies of your content on servers around the world, and that ensures 100% availability. For example, if servers in London were down, the users in London might be served their file from Frankfurt. There might be a negligible drop in performance, but the file would still be available. One advantage of working through a CDN is redundancy. “You have the output you want to broadcast going into two different encoders then publishing hopefully through two different internet connections to two different places on the CDN,” says Ward. “That means that if something on the CDN goes down and you’re publishing through London, and London has an outage, your signal is still being sent via Bristol, via a different internet connection. “On CDNs, that seamlessly falls over, and the audience never knows that they’re suddenly accessing a secondary stream – the stream just continues as it was. Facebook and other social platforms only have a primary stream in, so we’ve done a lot of work to create a secondary
LIVE SOCIAL
The functionality of live social platforms has enabled brands to move away from live videos delivered by smartphone to professionally produced multi-camera interactive streams. At the outset it’s important to consider what types of content will work best as live social streams. The key thing to remember is: just because something is happening live doesn’t mean it has to be a live stream. There are only three reasons why content should be live-streamed: The event or content delivered via the live stream is of such importance to your target audience that they’ll want to see it as it happens – for example, a major new product launch or a unique live event. The content of the live stream allows the audience to interact live, such as asking a well-known expert a question. Content is delivered over social but connected to traditional broadcast channels, for example an advert on TV which directs users to view a live stream for more interactivity. “The data we’ve gathered from producing hundreds of live video streams for Facebook Live has shown
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that if content does not come under one of these three categories it is unlikely to deliver a large viewership,” says Jake Ward. “Therefore, it should simply be delivered as on-demand content, as this reduces risk and allows the content to be more precisely crafted.” Regardless of the content, Groovy Gecko suggests that, contrary to the accepted wisdom that social content should be short, with live social streaming, longer content is actually much more effective.
“The core audience who have liked and engaged with your brand page are more willing to watch content for longer if it’s interactive, or it can deliver a unique live experience,” says Ward. “Additionally, the nature of sharing and liking of live video posts means that longer streams work more effectively. Live streams also feature more prominently in user’s timelines when they are live.” Groovy Gecko data suggests that streams lasting over 20 minutes reach a much larger proportion of audiences.
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Live Streaming workflow to enable that. For security purposes most of the social networks are now looking at adding a primary and secondary stream which will have seamless cross over. “If a live stream of a major brand goes down, then it’s serious. It really is not just looking at the technical solution, it’s looking at the areas of risk. You have to sit down in a planning meeting from a content point of view and a technical point of view.” Most often, the issue with bandwidth is purely making sure that it is strong enough to handle a high-quality stream. “Many clients tend to forget about the importance of a strong Internet connection when it comes to getting live content offsite,” says Ward. “They assume that a strong Internet connection for things like web browsing means that it will be the same for live streaming, but this isn’t the case. They may have a speed of 100MB, but when a building full of people are draining the bandwidth, it often gets squeezed to considerably lower. We get around this when handling a stream by physically sending an engineer to test a venue’s broadband signal.” Then there’s the added worry of the rise of live 360 video in 4K. On the one hand, shooting 360 footage in 4K is clearly beneficial for the medium, increasing the quality and therefore the viewer experience, but it requires more bandwidth. You will want to ensure the average viewer is able to enjoy a stream even without a 15MB connection. Part of this involves degrading streams for those who lack the bandwidth to stream 4K.
RUN LOLA RUN StreamAMG streams football matches using its proprietary encoder Lola. Clients include UK’s Derby Country and Ukraine’s Shakhtar Donetsk
FACEBOOK WILL AUTOMATICALLY KILL A STREAM IN UNDER TEN SECONDS IF IT DETECTS ANY COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL COPYRIGHT PERMISSIONS Whilst most people can appreciate the importance of getting the right permissions to use copyrighted material, many are not aware of how long this process can take, and how sensitive social networks are to any form of copyright infringement. Both Facebook and YouTube have sophisticated monitoring systems to detect copyrighted material, and if something isn’t cleared properly, you can bet they will know about it. YouTube offers a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy, but Facebook will automatically kill a stream in under ten seconds if it detects any copyrighted material which the streamer does not have the rights to use. “The problem is, these systems are so sensitive that even a copyrighted piece of music played accidentally could take a stream off air,” says Ward. “I’ve had situations in the past where everything is copyrighted, but someone has driven past in a car playing a radio track, and I’ve got a strike on YouTube. Copyright is really a big issue at the moment, often not looked at and not cleared properly by the brands. It takes time. Facebook takes five or six days to clear a music track for use on a stream. If you’re trying to do something really quickly, you may hit problems.”
CASE STUDY: STREAM AMG DELIVERS CHAMPIONSHIP FOOTBALL StreamAMG takes charge of the live web streaming for a string of European soccer clubs, including Shakhtar Donetsk and AC Sparta Prague, as well as institutions such as sessions of the UK Supreme Court and the European Council, which unites a single video feed with 32 audio feeds. The company also works with a growing number of Championship football clubs in the UK, including Derby County, to stream home matches internationally. In all these cases, StreamAMG takes the produced feed and passes it through its own low-latency encoder, Lola. “We have two installed on-site at each football club we work for – a primary and a backup,” explains Duncan Burbidge, CEO of StreamAMG. “We get handed the SDI feed from the OB supplied by the club. We take in that single SDI feed and create MPEG Dash and HLS versions and apply a digital rights management licence within Lola. We might also provide a personal stream for the club owners (Lola can handle 18 streams at once).” All this activity is monitored remotely from StreamAMG’s network operations centre in Stratford, London. The feeds are ingested to the NOC from satellite and fibre links either direct or via London’s BT Tower along with ISDN (all audio comms still use this old-school telephony) before being rebroadcast via CDN. “The ability to monitor all encoders simultaneously is a big plus,” says Burbidge. “We’re doing HD standardly at 1080p. We could go UHD at 4-6Mbps but we are not seeing demand for it. UHD would get more expensive and, given the kind of money you can generate from advertising and pay-per-view, a big chunk would be taken out by bandwidth required for UHD.”
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Olympics
DIGITAL ICE Words by Neal Romanek
Coverage of the Olympic Games is evolving to meet bigger audiences in better ways port broadcast has always been an early adopter of new tech. Fans want to be ever more connected to the action, and broadcasters are in an arms race to stay ahead of the competition. The Olympic Games is always in a balancing act when it comes to new technology. The diversity of Olympic events, the wealth of stories and the global nature of its audience, stretching out over a two-week period, offers unparalleled opportunities to reach viewers in new and better ways. However, the defining features of the Olympics brand are excellence and quality. Olympics coverage can’t afford a single technical hiccup and while a trial for a new online service may run beautifully in Seoul, you’re in for trouble if you expect the same results in Cuba. Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) was created by the International Olympic Committee in 2001 to be the Host Broadcasting organisation for all Olympics Games – Summer, Winter and the Youth Games. The organisation, headquartered in Madrid, is dedicated to a consistent
broadcast approach across all the Games at the highest standards of production. OBS produces all Olympics coverage, including providing the International Television and Radio (ITVR) signals of the Games, and designing, building, installing, operating – and dismantling – the International Broadcast Centre (IBC). Part of the OBS mandate is to adapt to meet the requirements of new technology. This year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea offered new opportunities for new platforms. “In the past decade, the growth of digital platforms, new technologies and cloudbased services have revolutionised the way the sports broadcast industry produces and delivers content,” says Sotiris Salamouris, OBS chief technical officer.
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OLYMPICS BROADCASTING HISTORY
PARIS
First radio broadcast of Olympic Games
BERLIN
First TV broadcast, sent to public television offices in Berlin and Potsdam
LONDON
Games are broadcast within a 50-mile radius of London
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Olympics “In 2006, in Turin, the Host Broadcaster provided nearly 1000 hours of live content,” says Salamouris. “Twelve years later, OBS delivered a record 4000 hours of live coverage from Pyeongchang. The delivery of the Games has significantly improved in sophistication and picture quality – with two- and four-point cablecam systems, point-of-view cameras and drones. OBS has also supported new broadcast formats, such as 4K and 8K, and is producing an extensive volume of live competition content in both formats.” NEW INITIATIVES Compared to the Sochi Winter Games in 2014, the variety of content produced at Pyeongchang was much wider, and content was pushed far more quickly and more efficiently in multiple formats to a variety of channels. Native 4K coverage was produced for a large number of sports, including curling, figure skating, freestyle skiing (aerials, moguls and halfpipe), ice hockey, speed skating, and the opening and closing ceremonies, while Japanese broadcaster NHK produced 8K coverage for the opening ceremony, figure skating, short track speed skating, ski jumping and snowboard big air. “At Pyeongchang, there were a series of new initiatives that were taken to facilitate RHB’s (Rights Holding Broadcasters)
TOTAL OUTGOING CAPACITY WAS SEVERAL HUNDRED GIGABITS PER SECOND, EQUIVALENT TO THE TOTAL OUTGOING INTERNET CAPACITY OF A SMALL COUNTRY operations, especially on the digital front,” says Salamouris. “RHBs could receive the international signal over an IP network or use web-based file transfer solutions to send their footage back to their home countries, enabling them to run part of their operations remotely and with greater flexibility than in the past. “The contribution fibre network connecting all the venues to the IBC was the largest ever, composed of hundreds of dedicated fibre circuits which enabled the transport of an unprecedented number of live HD, 4K and 8K signals, without any compression.” PyeongChang 2018 was the most connected in the history of the Olympic Winter Games. International distribution was carried out through connectivity to five international points of presence around the world. Total outgoing capacity was several
hundred gigabits per second, equivalent to the total outgoing Internet capacity of a small country. RESHAPING OLYMPIC BROADCASTING High-speed Winter Olympics events lend themselves to extreme coverage. Aerial and ground-level tracking cameras have become indispensable, allowing audiences to follow speed skaters or accompany cross-country skiers through gruelling miles. Helmet cameras on ski and snowboard cross started appearing in 2010, and in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics the first drones were used. Now the emergence of new technologies such as virtual reality are reshaping sports broadcasting. OBS offered VR and panoramic video production of selected live and recorded
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CORTINA
First live broadcast of Winter Olympic Games
TOKYO
events to the RHBs, utilising an immersive, stereoscopic VR platform. OBS made significant adjustments to the VR/360 service after trialling it in Rio. More than 55 hours of live sport coverage from PyeongChang 2018 were produced in VR. “It is no longer just about the quantity of television hours, but more about the type of content, where and when it is available and how it is produced. Storytelling coverage is key to engagement in the digital arena. “The focus of OBS is not primarily on the development of camera hardware, though we are doing that,” continues Salamouris, “but how to find the best way to make sports accessible to the younger audience and to connect with their media consumption habits. Sochi revealed that the consumption of the Olympic Games on digital platforms is now as intense as that of linear coverage. Rio confirmed it.” OBS tried to enhance the second-screen experience, providing broadcasters with additional material for social media, more analytical data, different angles, super slowmotion and 360° replay technology. “OBS is constantly enhancing our production capabilities which allows us to capture images far closer to the action than ever before. We’re creating content which is more action-driven and more appealing to a younger audience, already accustomed to this type of storytelling. OBS is supporting the RHBs to easily build digital distribution platforms that offer a unique user experience to support the huge amount of live and VOD content that becomes available.”
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Olympics broadcast internationally by satellite
In Sochi 2014, OBS introduced the Olympic Video Player (OVP), a whitelabel platform for desktop, tablets and smartphones providing live streaming and video-on-demand for every competition session of the Games. OBS expanded its digital offering for PyeongChang 2018 and delivered individual digital components for RHBs to integrate within their existing digital products. The Olympic Video Player is available in 95 countries and provides fully integrated data, a news channel, live streams and on-demand video. OBS is also using a range of cloudbased technologies as part of its collaboration and workflow support systems. SNOW BUSINESS “The weather in Pyeongchang was the greatest challenge faced by OBS in preparation for the Winter Games.” says Salamouris. “There is no weather insurance! The broadcast operations for the mountain venues needed to take into consideration potential snow, ice and extreme cold, as well as strong winds when designing the coverage plan and the technical installations required. “The venue installations – from cabling to the construction of cable bridges and camera platform towers – started on 1 November and while the weather was relatively mild and the installations were going according to plan all through November, in December, the weather turned much colder.
MEXICO CITY
First Olympic Games broadcast live in colour
SAPPORO
Japanese network NHK provides feed for broadcasters to choose their own coverage
EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS At the Winter Olympics, equipment has to be able to handle mountain conditions, including wind, ice, snow and extreme cold
LOS ANGELES First Olympics to provide HD coverage
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“One more challenge that the Winter Games present is the that the operations are spread out to further locations, with much longer distances between them. The venues during the Summer Games, although more numerous, are normally concentrated within a single metropolitan area.� BBC ON THE SLOPES The BBC Sport website is the biggest sport website in the UK and streamed all the key moments from the PyeongChang Winter Games. The BBC has long realised that its online strategy is at least as important as its broadcast plans. The BBC website featured on-demand clips, bespoke highlights, medals tables, schedule and results, live text blogging and reports. The content was responsive across desktops, tablets and smartphones, with mobile at the heart of design and commissioning. Fans could sign up for mobile medal alerts on the app via top stories as well as updates by country. BBC Sport provides content both on its website and through social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Bespoke content
MORE THAN 55 HOURS OF LIVE SPORT COVERAGE FROM PYEONGCHANG 2018 WERE PRODUCED IN VR
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LILLEHAMMER
First Winter Games broadcast live in Africa
THE OLYMPIC CHANNEL At the end of the Rio Games, OBS launched the Olympic Channel, a multi-platform streaming destination offering Olympics-based content all year round. New material is uploaded daily, and the Channel offers material that complements OBS Olympics coverage. The Channel just launched its first original series, Trending Gold, produced in 360 VR by Jaunt. www.olympicchannel.com
and treatments are created for the different platforms and audiences. “We also engaged with fans by providing behind-the-scenes content with BBC presenters and expert analysis from former medallists and Olympians including Jenny Jones, Chemmy Alcott and Robin Cousins, as well as members of Team GB competing in Pyeongchang,” says Anna Thompson, digital lead for the BBC in Pyeongchang. With the Olympic venue on the other side of the world, the BBC used remote technologies as much as possible. These included new remotely controlled audio mixers, operated from the BBC’s Salford studios. The BBC also employed end-to-end IP connectively in its production set-up for all services between South Korea and the UK and deployed its own networks in Korea to facilitate presentation positions. Data, audio and video transmission were reliant on IP connectivity. “For these Games we didn’t do any 4K transmissions,” says Thompson. “The nature of the host broadcaster coverage wasn’t ideal for our needs being a mixture of technologies, and with significant additional financial impact we elected not to do so.”
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PRESENTING THE PRESENTERS The BBC broadcast from Pyeongchang between midnight and 9.15am UK time and then switched to the BBC’s Salford studio once it got dark in Korea. Leveraging its biggest sportscasting names – such as Clare Balding and Hazel Irvine – the BBC tries to make as much of a show out of its presenting. “The BBC has adapted its presenter coverage so the viewer gets more of a feeling of being at the event and experiencing the atmosphere,” says Jonathan Bramley, executive producer, major events at the corporation. “This was pioneered by roving radio cameras and Steadicam presentation in 2010 and 2014, and a greater venue presence with ‘announce platforms’ at five events at Sochi 2014. “Weather always offers up the biggest challenges,” Bramley confirms, “firstly because of operating in a cold, snowy, mountain environment but also because of the numbers of events delayed and postponed because of adverse conditions, which can cause many scheduling issues both for the organisers and the broadcasters alike.”
SALT LAKE CITY First time host broadcaster covers all Winter events live
BEIJING
First fully HD Olympics, with 5.1 audio
LONDON
First live 3D and 8K Super Hi-Vision trials
SOCHI
First drone use. Olympic Video Player introduced
CONTINUOUS DEVELOPMENT From aerial and ground-level tracking cameras to helmet cams and drones, new kit is regularly introduced to enhance the viewer experience
RIO
4K, HDR and Dolby Atmos content. VR introduced. First 8K Super Hi-Vision
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co ath nn er ec M tiv cLe ity a re n t vo al lu ks tio w n ith ju th st e ar ex ou p nd ert th s ab e o co u rn t th er e
5G
Words by Heather McLean
igger, better, faster, badder – 5G is coming, and as dedicated followers of fashion, we should all be terribly excited about getting the next ‘G’ on our smartphones. Or should we? Turns out that while 5G is going to be a great thing for us day-to-day consumers of mobile technology, this big ‘G’ is actually going to be a lot more important, and wider ranging, than any of its predecessors. What makes 5G different from previous standards is the way it is being designed, taking the outline for what it needs to be from multiple industry sectors as opposed
to being a consumer-driven standard. From autonomous vehicles and media everywhere, to a guaranteed data rate that means users will no longer talk about speed (or a lack of it), this standard will have 99.999% reliability, will connect the Internet of Things (IoT), and will have ultralow latency and a guaranteed quality of service. NEXT MAJOR EVOLUTION “5G is the next major evolution of mobile networks,” says Steve Plunkett, chief technology officer at Red Bee Media, formerly the broadcast and media services division of Ericsson. “It introduces significant improvements in
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high-quality video, in industrial and medical situations. It will facilitate large-scale autonomous vehicles such as selfdriving cars and drones. In short, it will collapse distances between people and the world around us, enabling innovations that will change society in much the same way that voice- and text-based communication has up to now,” Plunkett says.
performance and capacity over 4G LTE networks, through a combination of more efficient radio transmission, access to greatly more radio spectrum and changes to the core networks that connect radio base stations. This translates into much more bandwidth for mobile devices, less transmission delay (latency) to better serve real-time video and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), along with more certainty and performance guarantees for different categories of user and applications. In short, it’s faster and better than the best on offer today and it will change how we work and play.” Yet 5G is more than a new generation of technologies; it promises a new era in which connectivity will become increasingly fluid and flexible. According to Michele Zarri, technical director at GSMA: “5G will be a catalyst for innovation and enable richer, smarter and more convenient living and working”. GSMA Intelligence expects 5G to cover 74% of the EU population by 2025 with over 170 million connections. The combination of high bandwidth and low latency will allow real-time, interactive communication at a new level, believes Plunkett. He says 5G will allow people to fully experience locations and events without physically being there (using AR, VR, mixed reality and 360 video). “It will allow the remote operation of equipment, using
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NEW WORLDS OF POSSIBILITIES “5G will open up a new world of possibilities,” enthuses Kjetil Horneland, CEO at Norwegian video solutions provider Sixty. “Imagine being close to a match in a sports event, no matter where you are, with almost no delay from the live experience, to it being available on your mobile device in a stadium or at home. Imagine richer content at your fingertips, where you actually influence the TV broadcast, more than just watching a static TV broadcast. At any time you could jump into a VR experience of it all. Imagine gaming, TV, social and data services all merging in one delivery, but in a form where you find it simple to use and that the experience is personalised to your preferences. Imagine being connected no matter where you go. This means getting more and richer digital services wherever you are, in the street, at an event or at home; the world will be seamlessly connected.” Horneland continues: “In the past decade we’ve seen an enormous shift in the industry when it comes to mobile networks, Internet access and the availability of streaming media services. Still, this is only the beginning. By 2021 the industry prediction is that around 85% of the world’s Internet traffic will be video. With more and more connected devices available, the network side needs to keep up to distribute these services effectively. The Internet was not really built to distribute these loads of data, and we are gradually seeing a shift of better network technology to serve our distribution and future of IoT.
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5G IS A TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN AUGMENT AND MAYBE EVENTUALLY REPLACE DIGITAL TERRESTRIAL TV
HISTORY OF MOBILE NETWORKS
MAKING IT WORK So how will all this work? One aspect of the magic is network slicing. This allows mobile networks to chop the 5G spectrum they own into smaller pieces to use almost as mini virtual networks within the whole, for multiple purposes. “With 4G, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, everyone is using the same network, which means it’s still a best-effort service,” says Matt Stagg, head of mobile video and content at EE. “What happens with 5G is that you can segment the network so it enables you to create virtual networks tailored to the requirements of what is using it. For autonomous vehicles, we can use edge computing to get the low latency needed, whereas consumers don’t need 99.9% service reliability to watch cat videos. But if they’re watching breaking news or critical communications, they do. 5G is a technology that can augment and maybe eventually replace digital terrestrial TV,” Stagg adds. There have already been some 5G trials around the globe, even though the first edition of the 5G standard was only ratified in December by the 3GPP. The standard has established a set of features and functionality needed for deploying a commercially operational 5G system. Adds Plunkett: “There are a number of technology trials underway and both standards and spectrum harmonisation will be complete in 2019. By 2020 we will see the start of large-scale availability and use. In the meantime, 4G LTE is continuing to improve, both in terms of coverage and new versions that will smooth the transition from 4G to 5G.” EE carried out a lab trial in November last year demonstrating “phenomenal” speeds, according to Stagg. The operator worked with Huawei to create 2.8Gbps download speeds across an end-to-end 5G test network in its UK mobile lab. It linked the fully virtualised 5G core to a 64x64 Massive MIMO active antenna unit broadcasting 5G New Radio, using 100MHz of 3.5GHz test spectrum via the proof-of-concept Huawei 5G baseband unit. The consistent 2.8Gbps speeds and sub 5ms latency were delivered end to end, rather than just across the air interface. Earlier this year, in collaboration with Samsung Electronics, Arqiva launched the first field trial of 5G fixed
SELF CONTROL 5G will facilitate the use of autonomous vehicles such as self-driving cars and drones
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“The rise of IoT services will be huge. Imagine simple gadgets measuring your entire life from health to media services. Imagine having services which will keep you healthy, before you get sick, because it was detected in time. With better networks it will all be connected. You control both your life and all your surroundings from wherever you are.” Says Brian Morris, VP and general manager, media and entertainment at Tata Communications, 5G will power new sports and entertainment experiences as well as platforms that are inherently mobile, for example, VR, AR and live 360 video, but that are today dependent on Wi-Fi. He explains: “5G will make experiences, today constrained to static Wi-Fi, truly mobile. Looking at live 360º video, for example, to date, any 360 video experiments in sports have been hampered by a delay between the 360 video and live TV feeds, preventing a widespread adoption of the technology in live sports. “At the 2017 Singapore Grand Prix, Tata Communications conducted a test of truly live 360 video to show how the F1 racing experience could be augmented for fans, enabling them to experience the action in and around the circuit almost as if they were there,” continues Morris. “It was all about overcoming that delay, and showing how a fan could watch Lewis [Hamilton] or Sebastian [Vettel] coming into the pits on TV, grab their tablet and get a second, completely in sync 360º view of everything too!” Meanwhile, Zarri says the ‘headline’ 5G services will focus on three areas: Ultra-HD video, AR and VR applications. However, 5G will also enable machines to communicate without human intervention in an IoT capable of driving a nearly endless array of services. He adds: “It will facilitate safer, more efficient and costeffective transport networks and offer improved access to medical treatments, reliably connecting patients and doctors all over the globe. From low power, sensor-driven smart parking to holographic conference calls, 5G will enable richer, smarter and more convenient living and working. It is a giant step forward in the global race to digitise economies and societies.”
Professor Albert Jahnke claims development of a radio telephone for the Oakland Transcontinental Aerial Telephone
German railroad system trials wireless phones on military trains
First class passengers can call phones from a mobile phone on the Berlin to Hamburg train
Bell Labs trials a pre-cellular VHF radio telephone system
Humphrey Bogart uses a car phone in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina
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with performance in excess of 1Gbps – that’s 30-50 times faster than 4G (the highest average 4G speeds in the UK are still less than 30Mbps) – which can enable high-quality video streaming and virtual reality. Arqiva achieved up to 25 simultaneous UHD streams on a single CPE. Some countries are further ahead than others. We will see pre-5G in Korea this year, comments Zarri: “Markets such as South Korea, Japan and China are driving the development of 5G mobile technologies, just as Europe pioneered 3G and North America led 4G. China’s mobile operators plan to run a phased testing period for 5G networks through to 2019, before commercially launching services in 2020.
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wireless access (FWA) technology in the UK. The idea behind FWA is to provide a cost-effective and streamlined alternative to fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) or fibre-to-thebuilding (FTTB) solutions, without sacrificing on service performance, capacity or user experience. Samsung’s 5G Access Units (base stations) were used, utilising high frequency mmWave (millimetre wave) spectrum and advanced technologies such as beamforming, to provide high-density coverage and ultra-high bandwidth connectivity to customer premise equipment (CPE) installed in a nearby location. The trial successfully provided ultra-high speed connectivity to multiple devices,
Sweden launches MTA, 160MHz automated mobile phone system for vehicles
First US automated mobile phone system for vehicles
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Russian engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich develops a mobile phone that weighs 70g
Soviet Union launches ‘Altay’ mobile network in Russia
Penn Central Railroad offers phone service along New YorkWashington route via payphone
Motorola releases first mobile phone, weighing 1.1kg, with talk time of 30mins, charging time of 10h
Analogue cellular networks (‘1G’) deployed in Tokyo by NTT
Analogue cellular networks rolled out to Nordic countries via Analog Mobile Phone Systems (AMPS)
AMPS rolled out to the Americas; DynaTAC 8000X mobile phone launched by Ameritech
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CHANGING CONTENT DISTRIBUTION The most obvious application for moving content around is improved mobile broadband, with 5G building on the capabilities of its predecessor. Chris Alner, business development director, satellite and media at Arqiva, says: “The next is fixed wireless access (FWA), as in many instances 5G will offer better speeds and lower costs than fixed broadband solutions, such as fibre and cable; this will be the case in urban and suburban areas under certain conditions.” Trials suggest 5G could be considerably faster than we currently believe, “with some in the industry estimating eventual download speeds up to 1,000 times higher than 4G, potentially exceeding 10Gbps”, states Alner. “This may
not happen immediately, but such speeds are faster than most, if not all, current UK consumer fixed broadband lines. This could be an indication that 5G will transform the telecommunication industry as a whole, not just mobile.” The superior capabilities of 5G to deliver at fast speeds with close to zero latency will mean that live events such as sports can be streamed to individuals in near real time with excellent speed, quality and reliability. “Content such as match statistics could be superimposed and viewers could choose from multiple camera angles to make it a more immersive experience,” says Zarri. “This will likely lead to innovations in the delivery of premium content offers. It will also take seconds to download typically heavy content such as TV, films (in 4K or 8K Ultra High Definition) or games, without any connectivity problems.” In the end it is about the content and how easy it is to get it distributed, says Horneland. He explains: “This puts the
First 2G/GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard deployed in Finland First SMS message (written by a machine) sent
First personto-person text message sent; IBM Simon smartphone released
Finland’s Radiolinja (Elisa)launch first downloadable ringtone SMS used to pay at vending machines in Helsinki
AUGMENTED VIEWING A test of live 360 video at the Singapore Grand Prix allowed fans to experience the race as if they were there
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“There are also challenges the industry will face. In some scenarios, the deployment of 5G may be very expensive compared to the additional revenues it will produce initially.”
Japan’s NTT DoCoMo introduces full Internet service on mobile phones
3G technology launched by NTT DoCoMo
ITU-R specifies 4G standards
Ericsson demos mobile TV over 4G LTE
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THE DEPLOYMENT OF 5G MAY BE VERY EXPENSIVE COMPARED TO THE ADDITIONAL REVENUES IT WILL PRODUCE INITIALLY content owners in a powerful position, as you can see in the rise in cost of media rights. Everyone needs relevant content to distribute no matter which network they are using. As a result, larger players in the market will probably challenge the smaller operators and distributors. Local distributors can choose to become bundlers of content offerings and act as reseller channels, but they will still be threatened by global trends and distribution offerings. In terms of business models, I think you’ll see big changes in which companies will still be around in ten years’ time. You will also see new bundles of media services that have not existed before.”
ON THE MOVE 5G will make experiences totally mobile, without being reliant on static Wi-Fi
First 5G test network built in Finland
China tests 5G networks in 100 cities; NTT DoCoMo and Ericsson achieve 20Gbit/s with connected mobile devices in 5G trial; Google starts developing 5G network SkyBender
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DODGING POTENTIAL PROBLEMS However, Alner comments that all this speed does come with problems: “5G networks will be very different from today’s 3G and 4G networks. They require real-time, end-toend visibility; automated, intelligent resource analysis and
Samsung and Arqiva conduct trial of 5G Fixed Wireless technology in central London; SaT5G consortium launches project to integrate satellite into 5G networks
allocation; and most importantly, they will be underpinned by software-defined networking control. The success of 5G, therefore, and whether its potential is fulfilled, will depend on how these components are deployed and managed.” “5G is a global opportunity but uncertainty still surrounds several key technologies required to make it a reality,” says Zarri. “Not all technologies for 5G have been proven, especially at commercial scale. The speed and extent of 5G deployment will also depend on local demand for it, and this means that fragmentation could be a real danger for its global success. We think that the critical development will be in virtualisation and the ability to do network slicing because this allows mobile operators to generate multiple types of networks from the same infrastructure and support multiple types of businesses associated with them. For us, virtualisation and the new architecture that is designed around it is the major revolutionary aspect of 5G.”
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GENIUS INTERVIEW
James Dean
JAMES DEAN: “IT’S ALL TV TO THEM” Words by Neil Romanek
In our first Genius Interview with top talents in media tech, we talk with James Dean, managing director of the UK branch of ESL, the world’s biggest eSports league. Dean helped turn UK eSports into a national concern - now he’s taking it global FEED eSports hasn’t been around very long. What were you doing before it showed up? JAMES DEAN My background is in the geeky end of computing – which has always had a game element to it. When I was at the University of Birmingham, studying for a computer science degree, I got a part-time job writing at a computer magazine. It gave me an entry into the computing industry and opened up contacts with people I could speak
to and collaborate with on any aspect of computing – and that included gaming, of course. After I graduated, I got a job with a company that sold computers. I was building PCs and selling them – it was mainly through magazines, back then. I also launched a gaming brand within the company – the thing that was driving consumer sales of higher spec computers was gaming. So gaming started to look more like a career possibility, rather than just a personal interest.
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BUILDING ON THE ESL NAME Opening an office in the UK and hosting structured events helped to develop the eSports industry in the region
FEED When did you get the call from ESL?
FEED What was the big challenge for getting UK eSports up to speed?
JD Around 2004, I struck out on my own and started an agency that looked after consumer computer hardware brands. Our clients included graphics cards companies, such as Zotac, and companies in that PC gaming sector. We started thinking about what we could do around eSports on a competitive level, and through our clients we sponsored some of the gaming tournaments, both online and at offline physical events. They never really gave the return that we were looking for from the commercial perspective though, despite the engagement being good. We started working with a company called SteelSeries, which is still one of the largest gaming peripheral companies in the world – it’s been sponsoring eSports teams since day one. We were operating their entire operations in the UK.
JD eSports started to take off, and we started to do some European events too. In 2012, SteelSeries introduced me to ESL, which is headquartered in Germany. At that time ESL was almost unheard of. Even its own events were fairly modest. It was subscription-based and online back then, rather than driving ticket sales or advertising around viewership. It was too early on for that. There was some growth there, but it wasn’t the size we needed it to be. In 2013, we made an agreement with ESL in Germany to open the UK office. They gave us full control over the return of investment for any partners that were getting involved. We started off modestly, but grew rapidly. In the beginning, it was difficult to reinvigorate the UK gaming community, it had diminished, because there wasn’t much PC-oriented eSports activity. We had to rebuild a community and engage them again.
JD The UK had been considered a bit behind the curve in eSports, because there wasn’t a huge amount of PC gaming activity happening in the region. UK gaming is more console- rather than PC-based, but the PC market is growing and continues to grow. The UK is now the second-largest market in Europe after Germany. I think it was mostly because there weren’t enough structured events on offer for UK PC gamers to get involved in. There were local cybercafés, but they couldn’t compare to what Germany and the ESL were doing at that same time – at CeBit in Hannover, they were hosting large tournaments that would have 5000 people attending for four or five days. In the UK, there was nothing even close to that. People were trying, but it wasn’t taking off. In the UK, we needed to develop stability and consistency, which helps communities grow. We started to build on the name ESL had established in Germany.
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FEED And how did you venture into eSports?
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JD We looked at all the different games that had an eSports following to see what the UK community interest was and to see what we could do first and fastest. Our first UK tournament was for Dota 2 in tandem with a FIFA tournament. We got some reasonable numbers, but it was still only 20,000 viewers online. And that was the UK’s largest tournament in a long time. We kept testing the water with different communities to see what their interests were. Inadvertently, we started to discover new talent. We picked up CS-GO (Counter-Strike Global Offensive) and League Of Legends. It turned out to be a very large, sleeping eSports community, just waiting to get involved. The next move was to launch a UK national league. We partnered with the MCM London Comic Con to run our finals there and it got amazing traction. At that time, every time we ran an event, we’d set a new record for maximum concurrent viewers online. Our first tournament was 20,000 people in total. Now we had grown to 20,000 people concurrently watching a 16-hour tournament. We were starting to hit total viewership in the hundreds of thousands and that is what helped build the commercial premise with sponsors and advertisers. The physical attendance was key too. MCM Comic Con is a large event with a lot of gamers, we were easily filling 500 seats there with people keen to watch the tournament. That was our first break, introducing the Premiership. We did it with three titles, League of Legends, Counterstrike and then Hearthstone.
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FEED How did you go about building that UK eSports community?
FEED So you took eSports to a national level in the UK. What was the next move after that? JD It’s all well and good a team becoming the best in the UK, getting prize money and winning the title, but where do they go next? So we’ve been doing League of Legends which offers qualification for the next level at the European tournament, and that has really changed the game. It has started to secure that career path. If you’re the best in the UK at League of Legends, then you should be starting to compete at a higher level – and that means moving on to the European and global tournaments.
FEED How is UK eSports affected by national players moving to an international level?
IN THE FUTURE I DON’T THINK AUDIENCES WILL BE PAYING FOR CONTENT. I’M WAITING FOR THAT TO BE A THING OF THE PAST
JD Viewership starts going up, the player base starts going up and the interest commercially starts to increase. eSports is a global activity. If you’re a player online, you’re already a global player. There are a lot of people who are interested in who will be the next team moving up to the European level. We’re all familiar with the big global players like Fnatic, Team Liquid and Power Of Nine. But the real interest is where the next teams are coming from – and those big teams will want to be finding new talent as well.
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SLEEPING GIANT UK audiences grew rapidly following the launch of a national league and partnering with MCM London Comic Con
There are a lot of opportunities for teams to come out of nowhere and have a business. We’re still at that stage of forming these potentially world-renowned teams, which is quite exciting. Our ESL UK national league is continuing to start qualifying teams into higher leagues. We’ve just added new game titles, including Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, to the Premiership, and we’re looking at other titles, including mobile games. Our expansion now is about more game titles and more promotion into higher leagues. If you compare it to football, for example, you could say that the English Premier Football League is one of the best leagues to watch in the world. In the
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same way, people might want to watch the UK’s ESL national league from other parts of the world. It’s kind of a one world situation. FEED What’s next in the development of eSports? JD There are some games that are dominated by certain nationalities. We are starting to ask a lot of questions in that space as to why, and we’re working with universities on a research level. Working with the University of Leicester and the University of York, our premise is to offer an eSports module that can be attached to any subject the university is offering. You could be
doing a law degree and you could take an eSports module to apply what you’re learning around law to the eSports industry. Psychology and life sciences, also data analysis and statistics, are particularly interested in doing research. There’s a huge amount of data generated by eSports and a lot of stuff to look at in terms of playing habits and data about the individual’s playing. That’s only just starting now. We’re really excited about taking a lead in that; I think the UK can offer a lot for the overall industry. We had the University of York at one of our large events in Hamburg. They had a team doing live data analysis with a new technique they’ve developed. They were collecting the player data – how the game was being played – and it was being analysed for narrative use. They were feeding detailed statistics to the commentary team to highlight and provide commentary on the gameplay FEED How does eSports tech compare with traditional broadcasting? JD The only problem is that within the broadcast industry, the technologies are so expensive. If it’s new tech, broadly speaking, it’s untouchable. It’s been designed for someone like NBC to come in and have a competitive advantage
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THERE ARE A LOT OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEAMS TO COME OUT OF NOWHERE AND HAVE A BUSINESS over someone like ESPN. So software – which we could code in half a year – they’ll charge a million dollars for.
JD Big TV networks are already looking at owning and licensing certain games. Turner in the US has opened the ELeague. But those networks are having their hands forced to get that content back on Twitch too, for free. There’s been a backlash in the gaming community, which has said, ‘You can’t take it off our primary platform, Twitch. We need to be able to see all those matches’. This has become a question in sports generally. So many sports networks are talking about ‘losing the millennial audience’, but I don’t think they are losing them, I think millennials are just watching in a different way. It’s just that the networks are not seeing them take up cable sports package subscriptions anymore – it’s not good value for the millennial audience. So their models need to change to be more around how viewers watch content online, free and multiplatform, and they’re willing to be advertised to. But there’s a differential in that monetisation. You’re seeing that in sports; you’re seeing cricket go back to the open form. FEED What is your experience in getting content to viewers, now that eSports broadcasts are becoming more complex? JD In the broadcast industry there are set standards and guidelines on how you deliver a programme. The difference is that eSports comes from an endemically
© ESL | HELENA KRISTIANSSON
FEED eSports started as a democratised, fan-driven medium. Do you see that continuing, or is it going to be appropriated by bigger companies and broadcasters as it grows?
digital platform, and there are some steps missing from that delivery. We’re at the point where we have a programme feed that is literally encoded, on a PC usually, and put straight out to a CDN like Twitch, Facebook or Twitter. The cost of delivery is down to the downstream bandwidth to the consumer. When we are then presented with the opportunity to put our content on a TV network, we’re in a different situation. The TV network will send us an IP encoder and they’ll take that to a server online somewhere and then ingest it into their studio and broadcast it. It’s mad to think that you are serving millions of viewers all over the world just using the Internet. It’s amazing that we’ve gotten to that point – this huge viewership on a such a comparatively simplistic platform.
DECIPHERING DATA The UK is taking a lead in data analysis at eSports events, with live stats and player data being fed to the commentary team
The consumer doesn’t care how they get content. People are consuming content on the Internet as if it was TV. It’s all TV to them. Twitch, for example, is watched massively on mobile and it has smart TV apps and OTT apps. The costs of distributing over a CDN like Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, is lower than trying to do it over a cable network, or satellite distribution. A typical eSports broadcast reaches four to six megabits per second. To get that on a satellite channel is bloody expensive. I love looking at that existing broadcast industry and seeing how we’ve borrowed from it and learned from it. The idea that
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GENIUS INTERVIEW
James Dean
CREATING LEGENDS Successful UK teams can now compete on a European and global level
back in 2013 ESL, as a global company, was distributing content to millions of people without any kind of backup, redundancy system was crazy. FEED What is the future of eSports?
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JD In the future I don’t think audiences will be paying for content. I’m waiting for that to be a thing of the past. I’m counting the days until Netflix becomes free! They’ll have some kind of advertising model instead. You could do it in so many different ways, once you have access to people’s data. I think we’ll see a time when each individual game is treated in its own way. Looking at League of Legends, which has reached that point of maturity, it has just landed a big licensing deal. The monetisation of that IP is no longer relying solely on the viewership of watching the League of Legends finals. People are now contributing to that IP in a multitude of ways – whether it’s spending money in-game, buying merchandise, responding to sponsorship or watching on a platform that has an advertising deal. I can imagine having these open studios with prime retail space where you can go play, watch, view and hang out around the IP of a specific game. You can see how Disney is doing it, lapping up IPs and monetising them in different ways. We’ve seen that happening in many different ways. We used to see a game coming after a film. Now it’s the other way around. If you like an IP, and you like the world of that IP, you’ll pay to spend more time in it.
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THE LIVE LIFE
LiveArena
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THE LIVE LIFE
LiveArena
PRO STREAMING FOR JUNIORS Words by Neal Romanek
Pontus Eklöf, COO of LiveArena, was quick to realise the potential of the Internet as a means of distribution. He used this headstart to carve a unique niche in youth sportscasting across the Nordics
PONTUS EKLÖF saw that the big opportunity was going to be on the Internet, not in the transition to digital
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round 15 years ago, a group of Swedish broadcast veterans got excited about the shift from analogue to digital TV that was taking place in countries around the world. The digital switchover (still in progress in some countries) promised an increased channel space, greater opportunity for niche channels, new types of interactivity and a host of other features. But the new technology didn’t quite meet their expectations, as Pontus Eklöf, COO of Internet broadcast company, LiveArena remembers.
Eklöf says, “Quite early on we realised this wasn’t going to be the big game changer. We saw that the significant change was actually going to be on the Internet, not in the switch from analogue to digital. So we started looking at what it was possible to do on the Internet. We thought we’d get our usual production team together and we’d be ready to go.” But Eklöf and his colleagues discovered that delivering a production over the web was a different scenario from what they were used to doing in television. They needed bandwidth, storage, a whole lot of
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LiveArena things that hadn’t been issues until then, before they could fully utilise the Internet as a means of distribution. In 2005, they launched their first Internet platform, based in Stockholm, called MPS Broadband. The company became LiveArena, a specialist in delivering live on-demand TV channels over the Internet to any device. The company’s first success has been a global platform for delivering youth sports. “We realised early on that you could do live over the Internet,” Eklöf says. “By coincidence we started working with the Swedish subsidiary of Canal Plus, which is big in the Swedish market with sports rights. We suggested to them they might want to do live streaming with sports. They worried that to do so would be cannibalising their own rights. But the company was coming up for sale, and the owners thought, ‘Well it’s a not a good business decision in the long term, but maybe we can raise the value a bit in the short term by adding this live-streaming service’.” LiveArena (still MPS Broadband) got the go-ahead to live-stream one game of the Swedish Hockey League each week. “They charged more, at a lower image quality than the TV broadcast games, but it very quickly became their fastest growing business segment,” says Eklöf. The company began looking for other opportunities to expand its streaming service. This was a decade ago, with the technology still in its infancy. “The structure back then was you had to lease servers and capacity with operators. There were CDNs around, but
WE REALISED EARLY ON THAT YOU COULD DO LIVE OVER THE INTERNET
THE FULL PACKAGE Simple production facilities were installed in 250 ice hockey arenas across Sweden ahead of the creation of Swedish Ice Hockey TV
ON POINT LiveArena was initially hired by Canal Plus to live-stream one game from the Swedish Ice Hockey League each week
the cost was still quite high. There was a piece of the puzzle missing.” That piece of the puzzle fell into place when LiveArena began talking to Microsoft, which was just launching Microsoft Azure cloud platform with its Azure Media Services for premium video streaming. Microsoft debuted Azure Media Services with live streaming of the carrying of the torch for the 2012 London Olympics. “We took all our experience that we had acquired and moved that onto the cloud,” says Eklöf. “In parallel, we had been talking to the Ice Hockey Federation in Sweden – we had been working with them on their premium rights. We told them they had an uncapitalised right in youth ice hockey. They couldn’t sell the rights to a broadcaster at that time, but they could provide their own channel.” In partnership with the Ice Hockey Federation, LiveArena equipped 250 ice hockey arenas around Sweden with simple production capabilities, using mid-range Sony camcorders and Internet connectivity, and built a system for broadcasting junior and youth ice hockey. The result, aimed at family and friends, was a subscription service called Swedish Ice Hockey TV. “The service is still up and running and is broadcasting about every Swedish ice hockey game there is. We do 10,000 ice hockey games annually and have an archive of about 50,000 games.”
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DOWN TO THE WIRE The more advanced production kits used at higher end hockey arenas in Norway and Sweden rely on Telestream’s Wirecast software
The service is also spreading to other countries. LiveArena has begun working with the National Sporting Federation of Norway, streaming additional sports, as well as other sporting federations in Sweden outside of ice hockey. Norway took things a step further and wanted to have increasingly sophisticated productions for the more advanced players, including multi-camera shoots, scoreboards and graphics and commentary. “We needed to figure out more advanced solutions. We developed a sturdy computer that would work in cold ice hockey arenas and be rugged. We needed a good software solution and chose Telestream’s Wirecast.” There are 80 of these production kits distributed to higher end hockey arenas in Sweden and Norway. In Norway, the gear is also used for second division senior ice hockey as well as the higher junior games. The simplest production set-up provided by LiveArena involves camcorders and an encoding application developed by the company that allows users to create a simple scoreboard.
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The more advanced production kits are enabled for two-camera set-ups and advanced scoreboards and graphics, and include Telestream’s Wirecast streaming production software. Wirecast has seen an explosion of use in recent years as live streaming expands to all sorts of verticals. The software is offered in two versions. Wirecast Studio allows unlimited capture, production and encoding of both HD and SD video sources for live streaming to multiple servers and platforms. In addition, Wirecast Pro offers eight-track audio output, replay, support for more capture devices and IP cameras, web stream input, programme feed output, live scoreboards, virtual sets and ISO recording. LiveArena has an agreement with incumbent Swedish telecom operator TeliaSonera to provide connectivity in the arenas with a dedicated 2 or 4Mbps upstream connection for streaming to the cloud. In addition to ice hockey, LiveArena’s junior sports offering is also streaming netball, volleyball, and Norway has added martial arts and handball.
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Ann-Marie Corvin profiles new media tech companies you need to know about tart-up Alley is our monthly feature profiling new players in the streaming media space. Our selections this month all took part in the Start Up Forum at last year’s IBC show in Amsterdam. The IBC Start Up Forum was organised by Media Honeypot, a
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Helsinki-based incubator, which brings together media tech startups from around the world to meet investors and potential collaborators. On 15 February, this year’s Media Honeypot Helsinki brought together 400 investors, entrepreneurs and carefully vetted start-ups to pitch and network.
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HECAS
HECAS Country: South Korea Started: 2014 South Korean start-up HECAS so impressed the judges at the pitching competition of last year’s IBC Start Up Forum, that a runner-up award was created specially for them (first place was taken by Jukedeck, who we will profile in an upcoming issue). Low latency is crucial for live streaming services, but users are often left frustrated either by the ten – or more – second delay or the less-than-TV-like delivery of the services being provided. HECAS, based in Seoul, has started shipping a commercially proven solution, and is working on several others, which aim to tackle these issues.
HOISOO CHO: Providing key differentiators such as playback synchronisation and interactive services will enable operators to create premium subscription models
The firm was initially set up three years ago to develop a live mobile streaming solution that would allow Korean subway commuters to enjoy the national baseball league season via SK Telecom’s Oksusu IPTV service. “One of the main challenges was that the service was not smooth due to the network being operated by different carriers, as well as the lack of backhaul capacity of subway Wi-Fi,” explains Hoisoo Cho, HECAS director of business development. To solve these issues and deliver ultra-low latency to Oksusu’s sport-specific relay channel SPOTV, HECAS developed its Mobile Live Streaming (MLS) solution. HECAS MLS uses MPEG-MMT based video streaming to solve the latency issues by using Media Processing Unit (MPU), the smallest video information division unit within the MPEG-MMT standard, transmitted using Multi-Media Transport Protocol (MMTP). The Oksusu service now boasts latency below three seconds on 4G networks, has 10% less data traffic than latency solutions which use the comparative HLS/DASH standard, and has a playback differential of less than 30 milliseconds between multiple devices. In common with many start-ups, the firm’s origins lie in academia – in this case, the KAIST Media Network Lab in Daejeon. Both Cho and HECAS CTO and R&D lead Jinhong Yang hail from this top-level tech university, and researchers from KAIST Lab are working on some of HECAS’ core technologies. With the predicted growth of mobile video and a market-proven solution at hand, the start-up is courting interest from investors and partners, with discussions currently underway with several US-based broadcasters.
IMPROVED EXPERIENCES Low latency ensures a better user experience and has led to interest in the solution from several US-based broadcasters
MOBILE CONTENT WILL SOON BE ABLE TO PLAY AT THE SAME QUALITY AS THE TV
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In the meantime, two further HECAS products are set to debut this year. First up is the MLS Cloud engine, which acts as a streaming server. “MLS Cloud will provide services that customers can use as needed on a cloud-based basis. We are preparing Amazon Web Service as our first target environment and plan to launch it soon after testing,” Cho reveals. The firm is also working with a TV
manufacturer to port its MLS player into Smart TVs so that viewers will be able to enjoy the same ultra-low latency live streaming experience. In addition, according to Cho, HECAS is collaborating with SK Telecom on developing experimental services such as a 360 live video service. She adds that providing key differentiators to operators such as low latency, playback synchronisation and
interactive services will eventually enable them to create premium subscription models. “Mobile content will soon be able to play at the same quality as the TV. This will bring operators new revenue models. For example, in order to use real-time live streaming service for sports content such as MLB, there will be premium subscription and service providers and sports leagues will the share profit,” concludes Cho.
REAL TIME COMMS HECAS solves the synchronisation issue so viewers will see the same content at the same time
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Promethean TV
PROMETHEAN TV Country: Canada Started: 2016 “Just like in the music industry, the business models for telecoms and content producers will be turned upside down by new technology in the next ten years,” predicts Ian Sharpe, CEO of video overlay platform Promethean TV. Already a $37 billion market, online video is predicted to become central to this sea change with video traffic comprising over 80% of all consumer online traffic by 2021. But monetising live-streamed video is a challenge. Ad blocking on online video is forecast to cost $35 billion in lost revenue by 2020 and while video takes up the largest percentage of traffic on a CDN, it contributes the least amount of profitable revenue. To this end, Promethean TV has a unique perspective on how to make video pay in this brave new world: a product that is player agnostic and one that creates a real-time feedback loop for advertisers. “We think of it as augmented advertising,” Sharpe quips. The start-up’s core technology is an interactive layer for digital video, ‘clickable overlays’, which deliver what
WE THINK OF IT AS AUGMENTED ADVERTISING NEXTGENERATION TV Customers are now able to get actively involved in watching TV without missing any of the action
INNOVATION ON SHOW Promethean TV introduced its technology to IBC attendees last year after being invited to join the Akamai booth
Sharpe makes sound like both the ad man and the couch potato’s dream. “Imagine watching your favourite sports team, ordering pizza, getting live fantasy updates, buying your favourite player’s jersey, all while never missing a moment of live action,” says Sharpe. Sharpe adds that the Promethean TV platform delivers overlays to the video player via a web instead of a client-side http ad request, the latter of which can be easily blocked. Promethean’s founding team, including Sharpe, all hail from eSports streaming company Azubu, where they witnessed first-hand how broadcasters were unable to monetise effectively through video, and how brands were unable to drive a measurable return from the space. Their fledgling company is named after Prometheus, the Titan who in Greek mythology stole fire from Olympus and
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SETTING THE WORLD ALIGHT Promethean TV’s CEO wants to ignite video commerce with its plan to monetise content via clickable overlays
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gave it to humankind. Sharpe’s aim, he says, is to “ignite video commerce”. The firm’s beachhead customer is Thai telco True, part of the CP Group, which is about to roll out a new retail-based loyalty platform called True Privilege, built with the support of Thailand’s leading retailers. True customers can earn points by visiting partner retailers such as 7-Eleven, and points can be redeemed on more items or by watching movies on the True network. The platform went live in the middle of January and Reed Anderson, True Digital Media Platform chief technology officer, says that it is “critical” to the telco’s future plans. “It’s about offering our customers that next-generation television experience. Our customers won’t always want to passively watch television, they’ll want to actively be involved,” he adds.
According to Sharpe, early feedback on the platform has been positive, with click through rates of up to 56%. The platform’s price structure offers a revenue share model for companies seeking to predominantly drive sales, or a licence model for companies aiming to foster engagement first. “We only charge for overlays used, so an individual streamer can garner as much benefit as a massive national broadcaster,” he adds. The CEO says that the company’s roadmap for 2018 involves “finding the right investors and/or strategic partners”. The firm was invited onto cloud delivery giant Akamai’s booth at IBC last year to exhibit as part of the CTO’s Innovation Showcase and, according to Sharpe, this has opened up potential integrations with worldwide partners that the firm is currently exploring.
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Valossa
VALOSSA Country: Finland Started: 2015 Last year AI was the hot topic of B2B technology shows. Robots were wheeled out for press conferences and content producers started to scratch their heads and wondered whether they’d be out of a job in five year’s time. Meanwhile, Finnish company Valossa was quietly showcasing its automated video recognition and insight tools and attracting significant interest. Valossa is a great example of a reallife use case for AI, which helps, rather than replaces, content producers as the growing amount of video streaming becomes impossible to curate using only human labour. Based on a proprietary technology using computer vision, natural language processing, information retrieval and
pattern recognition methodologies, Valossa AI analyses videos, automatically generating descriptive tags, categories and overviews. The tech – which grew out of one of Europe’s leading computer science and AI labs at the University of Oulu – can be used to help locate and search archives for anything inside a video: dialogue, emotions, colours, objects and more. For non-live streaming, Valossa CEO Mika Rautiainen says that common use cases include “scene-level content search and discovery, highlighting potentially inappropriate content and enabling targeted advertising by providing insight on the content types and topics”. For live, he adds, “it’s about fast recognition of important events and
moments, as well as appearances of brands, key people and products”. The system’s ease-of-use and level of analysis is impressive: it not only recognises faces but even identifies the ages of people – though it somewhat unfairly labelled the 57-year old musician Stephen Duff y as a ‘senior citizen’ in the demo which I witnessed. Such issues, however, are rapidly being ironed out according to Sami Niska, Valossa’s chief sales officer. “The AI is constantly improving based on our customer data and feedback, and Insight Tools are being enhanced with features that make the training of customer-specific recognition a simple process,” she says. According to Rautiainen, in the start-up’s early phase, Finnish pubcaster
MICA RAUTIAINEN AI will enhance the customer experience while increasing revenue and lowering OPEX for live streaming customers
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AI WILL ENABLE BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES, AND THUS MORE REVENUE
YLE helped Valossa identify the most common needs in the content production via its Yle Beta incubation programme. More recently the firm has become focused on forming partnerships with video tool and system providers that integrate its recognition technology as new features in existing products. These include sales and technology partnerships with two media players: Accurate Player – a Sweden-based firm which offers a broadcast-quality HTML5 frame rate accurate solution for post production workflows; and GrayMeta, which is integrating Valossa technology into its platform. For individual companies and users, pricing is carried out on a self-service basis via Valossa’s online portal, based on analysed video minutes, so that customers pay only for what they consume. For those who want to try the product first, the company is currently offering 300 minutes of free analysis.
HITTING THE TARGET By providing insight into content types and tools, advertising can be much more targeted
“Our price point is very competitive against other video recognition APIs. And the per-minute volume price decreases when the monthly volumes increase,” Niska adds. The solution’s accessibility, numerous use cases along the video content chain and its many technology partnerships has led to a $2 million round of funding to date, including finance from UK-based deep tech investor 01 Ventures as well as from Reaktor Ventures and Butterfly in Finland and a number of angels. But Rautiainen and Niska also hope that the firm’s AI solutions will generate revenue for users too: “AI will enable better customer experiences, and thus more revenue and lower OPEX for our live streaming customers,” Rautiainen says.
FACIAL RECOGNITION Valossa AI can recognise people’s faces as well as their age thanks to constantly improving technology
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Blockchain
BLOCK PARTY Words by Neal Romanek
Tom Bollich, CTO of MadHive, says OTT advertising needs a rethink. Could blockchain technology be the solution?
TOM BOLLICH: CTO of MadHive, Tom thinks that blockchain offers significant opportunities for advertising
his technology will definitely change the world, completely,” says Tom Bollich, CTO of MadHive. Part of the founding team of Zynga, who brought games like Farmville to a little social platform called Facebook in its early growth phase, Bollich is now a partner in MadHive, another venture riding the wave of new Internet technologies. Based in New York, with offices scheduled to open in Omsk, Russia, the company aims to use blockchain technology to transform the world of advertising. ‘Blockchain’ is a term starting to appear more frequently in headlines, but few people really understand it. And those that think they do quickly realise they don’t once they try explaining it to someone else. So here’s our stab at it: At its most basic, blockchain is a way of accounting over the Internet using a decentralised ledger. So far it has mostly been used for moving wealth around – primarily in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The record ‘blocks’ in a blockchain system are encrypted and are very resistant to being manipulated or hacked. Blockchain combines both privacy and verifiability. Those with an analogue mindset might imagine a colossal blackboard where transactions are chalked up and we all get to see that blackboard, no matter where we are. In a world increasingly confused about what is fact and what is fake, blockchain seems to offer ways of storing data that are verifiable universally.
THIS TECHNOLOGY WILL DEFINITELY CHANGE THE WORLD, COMPLETELY
Bollich values independence as one of the key lures of blockchain technology. It’s very difficult to monopolise control over it its shared information ecosystem. “It was great for us at Zynga to build on top of the Facebook ecosystem. It was great, until Facebook turned it off. But with blockchain you have an ecosystem that can’t just be turned off.” Bollich points out that the Internet was around for 20 years, with not many people using it. But when TCP/IP became the established protocol in 1983, there was a sea change that allowed for an entirely new and efficient way of exchanging information and the World Wide Web was born. But the TCP/IP technology has evolved in such a way that it tends to put the large players – Amazon, Google, Netflix etc – at the centre. How often, after all do we look beyond the first few returns of a Google search – let alone the first few pages? Who-owns-what is the key principle that drives control and revenue on the Internet as we see it today, and most of the attention on the Internet is controlled by a few players. Bollich envisions a new blockchainenabled ecosystem which will allow a decentralised, and privacy-centric, Internet to evolve. “Blockchain allows you to store code and data in a protocol that nobody owns. It’s a little bit like crowd computing, but it’s sitting above merely running on people’s computers. “Blockchain and bitcoin were the first time you were able to give one of something over the Internet,” explains Bollich. “Before blockchain it wasn’t possible, unless you went through an intermediary, like a bank or a company. If you needed to send one thing, you went to a supposedly trusted source, and then they sent that thing. Now using blockchain, I can send you one bitcoin
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BLOCKCHAIN GLOSSARY ALTCOIN
An alternative cryptocurrency – literally any cryptocurrency that isn’t bitcoin. Popular altcoins include Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano and Litecoin.
BITCOIN
directly, without having to use that intermediary, and no one else is going to be getting that bitcoin except you.” Last summer, MadHive partnered with US media corporation Tegna, the broadcasting and digital half of what had previously been Gannett. Tegna owns 46 US television stations. “We knew blockchain was going to change things, and we knew OTT advertising was broken. We wondered if we could leapfrog the current tech stack and go into blockchain. So we built an OTT company and are now pushing all that we have learned into the blockchain world. One of the big things for us is that using blockchain you get to reimagine everything. “We see this as a privacy-first ad tech system. Imagine a system living in your TV which is an ad server. It knows all about you and pulls ads to you, but it never reveals any of your information outside your ecosystem. We see privacy as a human right.” Bollich sees a use case where AI bots on a consumer’s device would collect information about a consumer and then share that privately with interested brands and publishers, directly. “If you start reshaping how advertising works and what brands and publishers really want at the end of the day, you can really bring users and brands together. You won’t have some big bucket of data in the middle
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WE KNEW OTT ADVERTISING WAS BROKEN anymore with a third-party company running machine-learning algorithms to figure out who people are and what their relationships are.” This technology is at its early stages and MadHive is still intensively researching how its AI agents might interact with outside parties. But given the rate of change in the digital world, it may be a matter of months, not years, before we see blockchain-enabled media applications popping up. Being able to connect consumers with brands and content – and directly, not through a content aggregator or service provider – will create new opportunities for brands, advertisers and creators, and may threaten many of our existing business models. “Ultimately we’d like to insert this into the ad tech system as it exists today. Or we may have to change things a lot. We’re still figuring out the best steps to approach that. It’s a bit like how the World Wide Web was in ‘96 or ‘97: you’re going to be able to do all these amazing things, but first you’re going to have to build it.”
The first major cryptocurrency, issued in 2009 via a pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. Bitcoin uses blockchain, a distributed ledger, to record the history of all bitcoin transactions.
BLOCKCHAIN
A digital ledger in which transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly over a distributed system.
CRYPTOCURRENCY
A decentralised, privately created currency, independent of a central bank which uses encryption to record and verify the transfer of funds. Cryptocurrencies simplify transfer of wealth between individuals. The most popular cryptocurrency is bitcoin.
ICO
Initial Coin Offering. Similar to an initial public offering (IPO), a method of raising capital using cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Some regulatory bodies have warned that ICO investments are very high risk, and offer little protection for investors.
IPFS
Interplanetary File System. A peer-to-peer protocol for sharing and long-term archiving of files in a distributed system using blockchain (https://ipfs.io).
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HAPPENING
Interview
CONNECTING BVE TO 21ST CENTURY TV Words by Neil Romanek
Connected Media Europe returns to BVE, this time with its own plot on the show floor. Neil Nixon, content & marketing director of BPL Broadcast, hopes his show-within-ashow will bring streaming to the UK’s biggest media tech expo. FEED How did Connected Media Europe get its start?
NEIL NIXON At last year’s BVE show, we trialled a seminar programme, which we called Connected Media Europe. We wanted to test the water and give an opportunity to businesses that work in that connected, ‘TV everywhere’ space. BVE historically hadn’t concentrated on those technologies. It gave some of the vendors we’ve worked with previously in Amsterdam (IBC) and more recently in Las Vegas and New York (NAB Show) a chance to check out BVE. It was a show that hadn’t been part of their circuit and we thought we could give them a taste of it. It gave us the opportunity to test the audience too: was our view and BVE’s view of this evolving audience correct? Based
on the success of that seminar programme, we’ve extended that into a full exhibition this year. FEED Can you tell us about BPL Broadcast’s history before Connected Media Europe? NN BPL Broadcast launched what became Connected World at the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam. I worked on that project from the start. That has since become IBC’s Content Everywhere segment, which IBC now runs in-house. After our arrangement with IBC ended, we started working with the NAB Show team in Las Vegas producing Connected Media|IP, where we now have 70 or more exhibitors and two theatres, with Cisco as our platinum sponsor. That’s become a very big event. We’re also doing a smaller version of Connected Media|IP now at NAB Show New York. FEED What has the response been to Connected Media Europe? NN We’re really excited that it has taken off as well as it has. It mirrors what we’ve experienced at similar events we’ve launched in the past. We’re delighted to have AWS Elemental and Google Cloud Video as two of our key exhibitors at the show. Having those brands involved from day one has been a real validation of what we are doing.
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Interview
MAKING CONNECTIONS Having big names such as AWS Elemental and Google Cloud involved from the start “is a real validation of what we’re doing”
FEED How have you seen BVE changing in response to the requirements of the industry? NN BVE has continued to evolve from its roots as a production-based show and broadened its appeal. The one element of the broadcast chain that it was missing is connected media, which we’re happy to bring this year. The BVE seminar programme offers six blocks of seminars that run right through the broadcast production chain in order, and we provide the sixth and final part of that chain. This technology is coming of age and continuing to evolve to meet the everincreasing demands of an empowered consumer. Connected TV has long since passed its concept stage, and it’s now about the business of making it work. And that’s the Connected Media Europe strapline: ‘The business of connected content’. We’re seeing more and more applications that measure and monetise how consumers are using content. Those will be key themes throughout our seminar programme this year. FEED What will the Connected Media Europe seminar programme be like this year? NN It’s a development of what we started last year. It runs for the full three days of BVE. There are four panel debates – two on the first day, one on the second and one on the third. We’ll have two keynote
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CONNECTED TV HAS LONG SINCE PASSED ITS CONCEPT STAGE AND IT’S NOW ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF MAKING IT WORK presentations each morning – one from AWS Elemental and one from Google Cloud Video. In addition to that, we have other thought leadership presentations which fill the programme throughout the three days. FEED What else can people expect to see apart from the seminar programme? NN Connected Media Europe is a co-located event. It’s not technically part of BVE, but it runs seamlessly alongside. In addition to the presentations running all day, every day, we have our exhibitors, many of whom are showing at BVE for the first time. We also have a studio where we will be filming throughout the show. We’ll be recording interviews with our exhibitors and many other key industry personnel that come by. We edit that footage and use the content on our website, and the interviewees can use it on their own websites too. It gives everyone, including the event, a much wider profile. There’s plenty going on, and we encourage everyone to come and take a look!
In partnership with
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HAPPENING
Schedule
1 MARCH 2018
THURSDAY
28 FEBRUARY 2018
WEDNESDAY
TUESDAY
27 FEBRUARY 2018
CONNECTED MEDIA EUROPE 11.00
11.30
12.00
12.30
Intelligent cloud media workflows for delivering better viewer experiences. Presentation by Simon Frost, head of marketing and business development, EMEA, AWS Elemental, an Amazon Web Services company.
Panel debate: How do we build a compelling user experience? Panellists: Maarten Tielemans, chief product officer, THEOplayer; Thomas Christensen, CEO, Nordija; Taras Perevorskyy, CEO, Suitest; Ruud van der Linden, founder and CEO, StreamOne.
Video delivery in the cloud. Presentation by Kip Schauer, head of industry for media, Google Cloud.
Can you watch it now? Monitoring end-to-end by placing tension in your delivery chain. Presentation by Luke Carriere, technology evangelist, Witbe. esentation by Witbe.
11.00
11.30
12.00
12.30
Intelligent cloud media workflows for delivering better viewer experiences. Presentation by Simon Frost, head of marketing and business development, EMEA, AWS Elemental, an Amazon Web Services company.
Service assurance of live OTT: Differences to SVOD (repeat). Presentation by Johan Gรถrsjรถ, director of product management, Agama.
Turning data into insights. Presentation by Paul Mattei, sales engineer, Google Cloud.
The global OTT market: An independent look at trends, insights and AI best practices. Presentation by Ed Haslam, chief marketing officer, Conviva.
11.00
11.30
12.00
12.30
Intelligent cloud media workflows for delivering better viewer experiences. Presentation by Simon Frost, head of marketing and business development, EMEA, AWS Elemental, an Amazon Web Services company.
Panel debate: The impact of cloud on content workflow Participants: Lionel Bringuier, AWS Elemental; Mikael Dahlgren, Agama; Brenton Ough, Touchstream; Martin Smole, Bitmovin; Matthew Wilkinson, Magine Pro.
Inspiration + innovation: Cloud workflows for VFX. Presentation by Todd Prives, product manager, Google Cloud Platform
The rise of SVOD. Presentation by Dan Finch, CCO, Simplestream.
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Schedule
@ BVE 2018 14.00
14.30
15.00
16.00
16.30 11.30
Efficient multicodec support for OTT services: HEVC/H.265, VP9 or AV1? Presentation by Michael Armstrong, VP of sales EMEA, Bitmovin.
Panel debate: From the camera to the consumer – understanding how we can secure content in the world of OTT. Participants: Adrian Graham, senior cloud solutions architect - media, Google; Alex Qi, CEO, Hyku; Maarten Tielemans, Chief Product Officer, THEOplayer
All good things come from an Origin. Presentation by Ewout Meijer, sales account manager, Unified Streaming.
15.30 11.30
Myths of TV engagement: What works and what doesn’t in UX personalisation Presentation by Mario Criminal, head of product management, ContentWise.
Service assurance of live OTT: Differences to SVOD. Presentation by Johan Görsjö, director of product management, Agama.
14.00
14.30
15.00
15.30 11.30
16.00
The curious case of OTT content availability and viewer churn. Presentation by Brenton Ough, CEO, Touchstream.
Panel debate: Big data and the role of analytics in building a better consumer experience. Participants: Ed Haslem, CMO, Conviva; Ewout Meijer, sales account manager, Unified Streaming; Paul Mattei, sales engineer, Google Cloud.
DRM and content protection – how to prevent your video from being stolen. Presentation by Maarten Tielemans, chief product officer, THEOplayer.
Content overload: The end of TV as we know it? Presentation by Thomas Christensen, CEO, Nordija.
Codeless test automation for smart TV, set-top box and console apps. Presentation by Taras Perevorskyy, CEO, Suitest.
13.30
14.00
14.30
Interactivity and the future of media. Presentation by Alex Qi, CEO, Hyku.
Increase viewer engagement with personalised playlists and recommendations. Presentation by Ruud van der Linden, Founder, CEO, StreamOne.
OTT distribution: Launching a successful video service in a saturated market. Presentation by Matthew Wilkinson, GM, Magine Pro.
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Live2VOD – there’s no longer time to wait. Presentation by James Burt, CTO and co-founder, Vualto.
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OPINION
Over the top
CHOOSE NEW PLATFORMS, Words by Neal Romanek
DON’T CHASE THEM Each new connected device means a new set of deliverables for your company. When do you say NO?
he Consumer Electronics Show is one of the world’s biggest trade expos, showcasing everything from TVs to mobile devices to personal robots to UV sensors you stick on your thumbnail. The UK’s Digital Production Partnership (DPP) has been monitoring CES for some years now and sees the show as a significant bellwether of where the content industry is trending. Its latest analysis of CES underlines that the show is much more than just a venue for new TVs and mobile phones. CES is becoming the place where the consumer gets crazy new ideas about where and how they want to experience their content next. The new DPP report highlighted voice integration as the biggest game changer at this year’s show. And if it takes off, voice interaction will be a radically new element added to the content experience. Voice integration is going to mean more than telling Alexa to find the 1984 version of Red Dawn in HD. Eventually, it will mean the production of content which will require an ongoing voice component. User voice data will be incorporated as a separate element in everything from audience analytics to writing. New voice services might include content providers gathering audience attitude based on verbal comments and feedback (‘Our home voice data says the most verbally abused player in tonight’s match was…’), or playing along with a quiz show in real time, or being able to comment on social networks without having to look down at a device. The age old pastime of shouting at the TV will finally yield tangible results. The adoption of each new integrated and networked consumer technology presents a challenge to content producers. New technologies change the way the audiences interact with content, which
THE TAIL HAS BEGUN TO WAG THE DOG then influences the style of the content itself, and in turn further disrupts how content is monetised and inspires new advertising models. And the new consumer technologies are coming faster and faster. Content providers no longer have the leverage they once had in dictating the platforms audiences use. The tail has begun to wag the dog. It’s a peer-to-peer media world with consumers distributing and forwarding content from their devices, and demanding, as a right, the opportunity to comment and feed back to content owners. Even the biggest media company ends up being one more peer among many with content providers now in direct competition with their audience for those valuable minutes of attention. The industry finds itself in the same position as a car manufacturer who has discovered that his consumers actually want motorcycles this year. Then camels. Then jetpacks. The car maker realises he’s no longer in the car business. He’s maybe in the transport business, but he has no
idea what conveyances his customers will be demanding next. This puts big content producers – TV networks, news organisations, movie studios – in the position of trying to deliver everything everywhere, knowing that each year another technology is going to show up that will further extend the list of deliverables. There is a handful of companies with the resources to pull off this ubiquitous content delivery, but most of us eventually have to make a choice. As SimpleStream’s Dan Finch points out in this month’s Your Take (p.10), in the crowded OTT video marketplace it’s niche providers who are finding success. Delivering specific content to a specific audience can be a winning strategy. Applying this selectivity to the tech platforms we use is not a bad strategy. Blindly chasing the next technology is a sure way to burn yourself out – and potentially bankrupt your business. Gather knowledge about your core audience, and incorporate their habits into your strategy. But it’s a partnership you want with them. Adopt new technologies they are using, but only if they are a clear boost for your own specialty. So many companies have wasted time chasing new tech, when they might have better spent that energy developing and innovating in the technologies where they really shine. New technologies should, be a means to expand your company’s vision, not just another set of audiences to chase. Could voice interaction create a whole new layer to your business plans? Could it make your existing services more exciting and useful? Great, then look into it. New technologies get our imaginations going, they suggest new paths our businesses might take. But before you approve that purchase, remember the most important rule in Las Vegas: Know when to get up and walk away.
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