61 HAPPENING IBC2019
RUN LIKE THE WIND The FEED and AWS Elemental teams
The IBC 4k 4Charity run was held by AWS Elemental at Amsterdam’s Amstelpark. The annual run, now in its fifth year, raises money for charities helping to educate disadvantaged communities – particularly young people – in technology. The 4K 4Charity runs have raised over $1 million for charities so far. The beneficiary of this year’s event was Technovation, a global education non-profit that empowers the world’s under-represented young people, especially girls, to become innovators and leaders through engineering and technology. Through its two programmes, Technovation Girls and Technovation Families, the charity introduces underprivileged communities to new technologies and helps apply them to solve real-world problems. This year, 4K 4Charity run received an award from IBC, recognising the run’s contributions and remembering 4K 4Charity founder and AWS Elemental CEO Sam Blackman, who died in 2017. The run’s sponsors included AWS competitors Google and Microsoft and over twenty others including BT Sport, Interra Systems, Verimatrix, Zixi, Bitmovin, Harmonic, IBC and FEED . This year’s run included some special visitors, too. Renowned footballer Robin van Persie participated, and this was the first 4K 4Charity run – maybe one of the only runs ever – to include a goat as a participant. During the race, a goat, inspired by the runners, jumped out of its pen and ran with the crowd for the rest of the race, all the way through the finish line. He finished ahead of our editor. Not baaaad. 4K 4CHARITY TOTAL TOPS $1 MILLION
MY PRECIOUS Actor/director Andy Serkis was a special guest at this year’s IBC
working with data. Some of it might be working with and training AIs. Most of it will be innovating with different types of content and means of delivering those to audiences. Hence the large number of digital solutions providers at IBC who are offering sets of software-based – often cloud-based – tools to solve a host of content creation and distribution problems. Broadcast technology companies are becoming broadcast solution companies. Their specialties are no longer in the development of new technologies, but in the creative application and innovation around already existing technologies. Creativity is now as important as technological skill – maybe even more so. There seemed to be clear awareness at IBC of how the broadcast tech sector fits in with the larger video world. At FEED , we’re well aware of this and are reaching out to new verticals all the time. Vendors at this year’s IBC wanted to talk to us about other sectors – e-commerce, aerospace, corporate, mobile – as much as they did
about broadcast and VOD. An all-IP media world means broadcast loses its supremacy as the central hub for video content, but it also means video technology providers can quickly and easily serve whole new sectors. It also allows other players, who may have once been outside the broadcast space, to offer services to broadcast. I remember, when I was helping run the IBC conference about four years ago, a speaker from YouTube telling nervous IBC-ers: “Hi, I’m from YouTube. I’m here to help.” These digital giants – Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM – have offered the broadcast industry technological options that they never would have developed on their own. And the increasing number of OTT platforms has forced new ways of both creating and delivering content to be adopted (the IMF format might be still sitting on a shelf if Netflix hadn’t mandated it as its preferred method of file delivery). This might have been when the broadcast world realised IP is not just useful – but stable, mature and grown-up.
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