FEED Issue 05

Exploring the future of media technology

5G SPORTS WORKFLOWS ECOMMERCE ROUND TABLE FASHION WEEK IN VR

THE STATE OF 4K BROADCAST ASIA

How to turn customers into fans

3 WELCOME

EVERYONE IS A BROADCASTER! SO NOWWHAT?

It’s become a cliché, but the truth is, each of us has a staggering arsenal of global communications tools literally at our fingertips, and using them intelligently has now become an essential part of doing business – no matter what your business is.

EDITORIAL EDITOR Neal Romanek +44 (0) 1223 492246 nealromanek@bright-publishing.com

In this issue we look at how businesses are using video to boost their brand, drive sales, and expand their client base. We feature an investment bank that has turned the abstract world of finance into a fascinating video oering which takes us around the world and into the lives of the people benefited by its work. We look at how London Fashion Week brought customers catwalk-side to experience the work of top designers with 360 video. And our monthly round table oers invaluable tips on how to use video in creative ways to take your business game to the next level. This month we also check in on the state of 4K. Ten years ago, there wasn’t much debate about moving to HD – it was a goal that all video content would naturally progress toward. But now, with so many platforms and content types competing – as well as most of the world watching video on mobile – the path to 4K, HDR and other higher formats is far from clear. We also feature coverage of FEED ’s Asia debut! At last month’s Broadcast Asia show, we were proud to join in the APAC media tech conversation at the region’s biggest industry trade confab, and grateful to our exhibitor partners who helped promote FEED at the show on their stands!

CONTRIBUTORS Michael Burns

Ann-Marie Corvin Adrian Pennington SENIOR SUB EDITOR Lisa Clatworthy SUB EDITORS 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 Andy Jennings DESIGN MANAGER Alan Gray DESIGNERS Flo Thomas, Man-Wai Wong, Lucy Woolcomb PUBLISHING MANAGING DIRECTORS Andy Brogden & Matt Pluck DESIGN DESIGN DIRECTOR

NEAL ROMANEK, EDITOR

nealromanek@bright-publishing.com @rabbitandcrow @nromanek

Need to update or cancel your FEED subscription? Email us at feedsubs@bright-publishing.com BRIGHT PUBLISHING LTD, BRIGHT HOUSE, 82 HIGH STREET, SAWSTON, CAMBRIDGESHIRE CB22 3HJ UK

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CONTENTS

VIDEO FOR BUSINESS

BANKING

The European Bank for Reconstruction & Development takes us around the world

FASHION

London Fashion Week used 360 video to bring customers to the catwalks

ROUND TABLE Our experts advise a

hypothetical ice rink on building a video oering

HEALTH

NEWSFEED YOUR TAKE

The new AWS Media Services are making it easy for businesses to launch OTT oerings

News from around the streaming world

BRAND BUILDING

A 4K future will go hand in hand with the switch to IP

Want to boost your tech brand? Start thinking about humans

GENIUS INTERVIEW

SMPTE’s Barbara Lange leads the organisation into the 21st century

TECH FEED

The future of 4K is far from certain – especially as viewers move to mobile

XTREME

Fox Sports trialled 4K over 5G at the US Open golf tournament

HAPPENING

FEED makes its Asia debut!

FUTURE SHOCK

UK company MicroFocus was doing AI before it was cool

SUBSCRIBE SEE PAGE

STARTUP ALLEY

A cloud-based audio mastering service, new video analytics tools, and an app to improve your digital diet

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7 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades

BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR

NETFLIX OFFERS ULTRA PACKAGE

Netflix is trailing a new tier of service. Its new Ultra plan (€16.99 a month) will oer Ultra HD, high dynamic range video and HD audio, as well as the option to play content on four screens simultaneously. Its previous high-end oering, Premium, oers UHD video and HD audio, but no HDR. In the new configuration, the Premium plan is reduced from four screens to two screens. A Netflix spokeswoman told CNET that the new oering was a test of dierent price points and features, but would not necessarily be rolled out universally. Whether a regional experiment or the beginning of something bigger, Netflix has established itself as a consistent 4K content provider and any moves it makes toward 4K and UHD are likely to establish benchmarks for the rest of the industry.

■ Read more about the unfolding 4K landscape in our TechFeed on page 20.

INSTAGRAM LAUNCHES LONG FORM VIDEO APP

Instagram has jumped into the long-form video melee with the launch of IGTV, a new app for watching long-form vertical video. IGTV can be watched from within the Instagram app or through a standalone IGTV app. IGTV is distinguishing itself by championing full screen vertical video only, and videos can be up to an hour long. Instagram has tried to make the app frictionless and, a bit like old school telly, video starts playing as soon as you start the app. There’s no selecting of individual accounts or videos first. The company seems to be touting IGTV as an influencer platform. Move over YouTubers, here come the IGTVers!

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8 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades

IBM’S SUMMIT SUPERCOMUTER TAKES THE LEAD IN SPEED

The IBM Summit supercomputer has claimed the title of being the world’s fastest machine. Built for the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, the Summit supercomputer has been clocked at 122 petaflops (one petaflop equals one quadrillion floating point operations per second) and has a theoretical peak processing power of 200 petaflops. In comparison, your new laptop might be able to pull o something in the realm of one teraflop (one trillion floating point operations per second). For certain applications, the Summit will be capable of more than three billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops, and it’s hoped that the machine will pave the way for the first exascale computing ecosystem for broad scientific use by 2021. Summit usurps China’s Sunway TaihuLight as the fastest computer in the world. The Sunway TaihuLight, which

WORLD BEATER The Summit supercomputer from IBM has reached the peak of performance, achieving 122 petaflops per second (photos courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy)

has a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops, and a peak processing power of 125 petaflops. Summit runs a Linux OS consisting of 4608 compute servers, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators, interconnected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand. The supercomputer has more than 10 petabytes of memory, paired with fast, high-bandwidth pathways for e icient data movement. Among the first projects to take advantage of the supercomputer’s brawn will be experiments in astrophysics, understanding of materials at the subatomic level, using machine learning to get data about cancer prevalence, and genetics research.

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9 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades

EDGEWARE’S BIG EVENT STREAMING Edgeware is oering a suite of new features in its CND technology for delivering live OTT services at large scale and, it says, in higher quality than broadcast TV. The technology was developed for operators who have invested in the rights to sporting events or reality shows attracting large numbers of simultaneous viewers. The suite of new features includes Edgeware’s Dynamic Asset Spreading which enables operators to spread popular content across a wider range of servers. The wider the spread the greater the streaming capacity, while reducing the risk of server overload. Another new feature, called Predictive Session Load Balancing, dynamically reacts to any build-up in the queue of requests, checking them against pre-set limits. It controls the way very large numbers of viewers come on-board for the same content and directs new client requests to the next available server to pre-empt network congestion. A third tool, Edge Asset Request Consolidation, keeps streaming servers from sending out many identical requests for the same content if there is a cache-miss. Cache-misses can occur for live content in networks with minimised latency because new segments of content may not have been written to the origin server before the client requests them. This tool can amalgamate thousands of identical requests for new segments into one before sending it to the origin. As well as relieving pressure on the origin server, it also preserves capacity for getting data to a distribution point. The new features are available and already being used in live networks.

IBM’S PROJECT DEBATER GETS ARGUMENTATIVE

Project Debater, an AI developed by IBM, has gone head to head against two humans in a debating contest. Held at a conference room at IBM’s San Francisco oices, the event featured a stage occupied by a tall black monolith on one side and two frail, squishy homo sapiens on the other – 2016 Israeli debate champion Noa Ovadia and debate expert Dan Zafrir. Project Debater faced o against two humans in separate arguments. The first topic was “We should subsidise space exploration”. The second was: “We should increase the use of telemedicine”. The format of the two debates was a four-minute opening statement from each side, followed by four-minute rebuttals, then two-minute concluding summaries of two minutes each. IBM’s stated goal in developing Project Debater was to use AI “to facilitate intelligent debate so we can build well-informed arguments and make better decisions.” The developers hope that technologies like Project Debater might challenge humans to consider options they might not have considered before. The project has been in development at IBM’s lab in Haifa, Israel. The elements which come together to form the argumentative robot include argument mining, in which the AI accesses past evidence, like website, journals and news

reports, to support its position, as well as the development of deep neural nets with weak supervision. The latter is a technique of machine learning which uses less refined, but much larger scale data sets. Weak supervision helps avoid the bottlenecks which occur in an AI’s development by spoon-feeding it more specific, but limited, data sets. Natural Language Processing algorithms are one of the key elements in the Project Debater design. A back and forth using real human language is one of the projects main goals. Some of the NLP elements integrated into Project Debater are automatic speech recognition, the ability to detect argumentative structures, and identification of thematically related sentences. A simple word like “should”, which humans take for granted, doesn’t come as naturally to an AI as discrete nouns like “cat” or “podium”. The final results of the debates were: Project Debater 1, Humans 1. Although it’s worth noting that the judgement was made by a voting audience of humans! The topic for the next debate: “Are humans prejudiced against AI’s – and if so, what should be done to stop them?” ■ Read more at IBM’s Project Debater website: https://www.research.ibm.com/ artificial-intelligence/project-debater/ research.html

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10 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades

LONDON’S TRICKBOX GOES BIG FOR STREAMING

Trickbox TV, a London-based supplier of video production gear and services has acquired the live streaming arm of UK streaming and IT services company, Echo Eight. In addition to purchasing Echo Eight’s live streaming technology and contracts, Trickbox has appointed the company’s director, James O’Farrell, as Trickbox TV Head of Live Video. The deal includes multiple LiveU encoders for remote live streaming. Trickbox TV, which manages Tower Bridge TV Studios, hopes it will strengthen its live streaming capability. Trickbox’s recent live-streamed projects included an event promoting Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom , in which a Tyrannosaurus Rex was launched down The Thames on a barge.

“I’m really excited to take on this new role and to assist with the company’s continued expansion into the live-streaming market,” said O’Farrell. “Streaming live video provides a compelling, cost-eective way to reach wider online audiences.” K TRANSCODING FOR NORTHERN EUROPE

Cloudncoder, a transcoding platform from Olso-based Norigin Media, will provide the 4K cloud origin services for live and linear TV for a Scandinavian cable operator. Norigin will be rolling out the 4K service more widely available in anticipation of greater demand for 4K content. Cloudncoder oers a hosted TV platform for linear OTT services and provides support for multi-DRM, catch-up and DVR. The platform, which utilises the HEVC codec, is used by Tier 1 operators across Northern Europe including Deutsche Telekom and Scandinavian pay-tv operators. Broadcasters and operators with a 4K oering will now be able to use the Norigin platform to capture, transcode and package 4K linear feeds or live events.

SCANDI-CODE Norigin Media’s new Cloudncoder transcoding platform o ers a hosted TV platform for linear OTT services with support for catch-up, DVR and multi-DRM.

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11 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades

FORMULA REVS UP FOR AWS TOOLS

UK broadcaster ITV has adopted a new content management platform from TVT. The ContentSelect solution will manage media logistics, content preparation and access services across all ITV’s platforms. The system will link teams across the organisation and connect to ITV’s global partners. TVT has created an integrated media asset management platform for ITV, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, CITV, ITVBe. and ITV Choice internationally. TVT will allow ITV’s compliance, media logistics and operations teams and TVT’s media management and access services teams, as well as third-party providers and localisation partners, to all have real-time visibility and access to content management tasks. Users will be able to track workflow progress from receipt of material, through content preparation and compliance editing to access services and localisation, through to delivery for linear playout, on-demand services and international fulfilment. NEWMAM PLATFORMAT ITV

The Formula One Group is moving its infrastructure from on-premises data centres to Amazon Web Services. AWS will provide Formula 1 with tools to enhance its race strategies, data tracking systems and digital broadcasts. These include Amazon SageMaker, a managed machine learning service that enables developers and scientists to build machine learning models, and AWS Lambda, an event-driven serverless computing service. The organisation will also use AWS Analytics services to examine and analyse metrics in new ways. Formula 1 has also selected AWS Elemental Media Services to power its video asset workflows, enhancing the viewing experience for its 500 million-plus fans worldwide. By streaming real-time race data to AWS using Amazon Kinesis, Formula 1 will be able to capture and process key performance data

for each car throughout every race. Using advanced machine learning by Amazon SageMaker, Formula 1 can then determine how a driver is performing and whether or not drivers have pushed themselves over the limit. Formula 1 hopes to share these insights across broadcast and digital platforms to improve the fan experience.. “By leveraging Amazon SageMaker and AWS’s machine- learning services, we are now able to deliver these powerful insights and predictions to fans in real time,” said Pete Samara, Director of Innovation and Digital Technology at Formula 1. “We are also excited that the Formula 1 Motorsports division will run High Performance Compute workloads in a scalable environment on AWS. This will significantly increase the number and quality of the simulations our aerodynamics team can run as we work to develop the new car design rules for Formula 1.”

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12 YOUR TAKE 4K

Words by Mark Hilton,VP, Live Production, Grass Valley

In the quest for a powerful set of tools that seamlessly supports both HD and 4K HD live productions, broadcasters should start looking toward an IP-based infrastructure A BRIGHTER FUTURE

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13 YOUR TAKE 4K

THE POWER OF IP In the constant drive to create and deliver more immersive, higher quality content, broadcasters are actively exploring how new technologies can be used to bring their viewers closer to the action. In particular, delivering them in ways that make content more appealing and accessible to younger audiences who tend not to consume linear broadcast content as much as their older counterparts. Adoption of IP for broadcast is key to agility and scalability. It’s no longer a question of why to transition from SDI to IP-based platforms but, rather, when and how. This rapid adoption is happening despite the fact that the full extent and benefits of IP’s agility have yet to be realised. The embracing of IP-based infrastructure is gaining momentum, largely due to the publication of SMPTE’s ST 2110 specifications, and work done by industry bodies such as Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) and Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) to drive vendor interoperability. Confidence among broadcasters, outside broadcast companies and media organisations is growing with the likes of Canal+, RTL, Timeline and Arena among others investing in IP-based infrastructure. IP and 4K go hand in hand. To support 4K UHD uncompressed live production and deliver operational eiciencies for multi-camera productions, IP is widely accepted as the most eective way to do this. K APPLICATIONS Sports broadcasters are leading the way with 4K UHD deployments for premium sports as they did with HD adoption. In a bid to deliver a richer, more immersive experience to fans, with more detailed replays of race incidents so they can get a better feel for the live action, Formula 1 made the transition to 4K infrastructures and workflows for the 2017 racing season, and is currently broadcasting the 2018 season in 4K UHD. Other sports providers, such as Sky Sports and BT Sport in the UK and DirecTV and DISH in the US, have been making early forays

into 4K UHD with some coverage of premium sports. The number of 4K UHD live sports productions will grow in 2018. For those consumers who prefer digital access, live streaming of sports content is also going 4K UHD; the BBC has been trialling its 4K HDR iPlayer to download live 4K UHD and HDR streams of both the World Cup and Wimbledon. It’s not just sports fans that want to get up close and personal with the live action on screen. Music festivals give broadcasters another opportunity to deliver more immersive content, enabling fans to feel as if they are there in person. Again, 4K UHD provides ‘almost as good as being there’ experiences with richer, more detailed images that allows broadcasters to tell the story of what’s happening on stage in a more compelling way. Delivered by Sky, the Isle of Wight Festival 2017 was the first music festival to be broadcast in 4K UHD and the broadcaster streamed high quality coverage again for this year’s show, adding Dolby Atmos immersive sound to some of the performances for a fully engaging eect. For broadcasters who are not yet planning to distribute 4K content to consumers, it provides a best-in-class archiving format to preserve quality for future uses of that content. As storage is becoming less expensive, some broadcasters will decide to produce in 4K and then downconvert to HD for the current distribution channels. LOOKING AHEAD Consumers have long judged video content by the visible quality of images on a screen and are always on the lookout for the next breakthrough that can improve this further. Over the years, we’ve witnessed the shift from black-and-white to colour, from SD to HD and now to 4K UHD. It only took a few years for 4K UHD to go from a faraway technology to being solidified as an evolving standard – an achievement that is testament to significant advancements in the realm of content delivery. Just as this integration continues to unfold, attention is already shifting to 8K in the wake of announcements about 8K television sets at this year’s CES conference. This type of forward momentum is exciting and challenges the media industry to constantly innovate. But for now, 4K UHD is here to stay, and broadcasters will need agility, flexibility and scalability at the heart of their operations to adapt to this higher resolution and reap its benefits.

MARK HILTON: It’s no longer a question of why to transition to IP-based platforms but, rather, when and how

etter quality pictures matter to consumers. When they watch sports or other live entertainment, they want to

feel as close to the action as possible, regardless of where they are tuned in. As a result, more consumers are investing in 4K TVs to get the higher quality viewing experiences they desire. The global 4K TV market is expected to reach 380.9 million USD by 2025, according to Global View Research, with Asia Pacific and North America leading in market share. This means that broadcasters are under pressure to make high-quality content available to consumers. With an increasing amount of 4K content being distributed by streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, this makes it all the more important for content owners and providers to turn to 4K. K UHD TODAY HD has become the norm in developed markets, with most mainstream broadcasters oering an HD service. Until recently, 4K UHD was used for special broadcasts of big events like the Olympics, but this is now changing. This year will see 4K UHD being deployed by the likes of Sky, BT Sport and the BBC for regular sports coverage, making it increasingly accessible to the consumers who want more immersive content. However, until 4K UHD becomes the industry standard, delivering simultaneous HD and 4K UHD feeds of live sports and entertainment content present a challenge for broadcasters, regardless of the production scale. Broadcasters and production companies need easily scalable solutions that can support both HD and 4K UHD productions seamlessly with minimal disruption to existing workflows. The ability to transition to fully-integrated 4K UHD in a live production environment that delivers the same functionality and speed as existing HD workflows is a key consideration with any new investment.

THE GLOBAL K TV MARKET I S EXPECTED TO REACH . MILLION USD BY

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GENIUS INTERVIEW 14 Barbara Lange

BARBARA LANGE: STANDARDS ARE THE BASELINE THAT INDUSTRY CAN GROW ON TOP OF Entering its second century, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) had adapted to an all-digital world. SMPTE executive director Barbara Lange is leading the industry’s most venerable standards body into the brave new world

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GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange

FEED: How did you come to head up SMPTE? You originally trained as a scientist, right? Barbara Lange: Yes, I was a scientist, for a brief moment in my career. I had a degree in chemistry, but then I landed in academic publishing. As the internet became mainstream, academics and institutions started working with chemistry databases. It exciting times, – doing very primitive types of searching, before there was ever a notion of anything like Google. I ended up working for the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), which is a large technical professional association – they claim they are the largest technical association in the world, with over 400,000 members – and they are a major academic publisher in engineering. I got involved in platform development and product managment, and helped migrate them from print to an electronic publishing operation. It was the late nineties and early two thousands, and it was all about getting rid of print and taking advantage of the capabilities of search. I became intimately involved with building IEEE’s digital library platform. Then in 2010 I got recruited to lead SMPTE. SMPTE was at a point where it really needed to operate as a business and take advantage of all the wonderful intellectual property it had. I’m now

helping to keep it sustainable well into its next century. FEED: How have things changed at SMPTE since you came aboard? BL: We’ve done great things in the last eight years. We now have our own digital library. We’ve grown our visibility, both in terms of our membership and what people know about us. Our educational programming has advanced as well. There’s more work to do, but I’d like to think we’ve become more visible to the community – and all this while the industry has really grown and changed, and migrated headlong into the IP and streaming world. When I joined SMPTE I didn’t have an iPad. I barely had my first iPhone, and now we can hardly imagine living without those devices. FEED: What were some of the issues that needed to be upgraded when you arrived at SMPTE in 2010? BL: The Society was trying to address the digital transition both from the industry side as well as internally. Change is hard and a lot of organisations didn’t survive. In that first internet bubble, we saw SMPTE change significantly with an influx of the new technology and a new way of thinking. I think it really impacted the organisation, and it took about ten years for the board to understand

FROM THE VERY START SMPTE film leaders and test patterns have provided a true north for countless film and TV productions.

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16 GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange

how to navigate the change. They had to ask themselves, “Do standards still matter? Does a member organisation still matter?” And they had to do a little soul- searching: “We’re almost a hundred years old. How do we want to address this?” My first challenge was to level-set things and find out where our business opportunities were located. The first opportunity I saw was in leveraging our intellectual property, not only to generate revenue, but for our education materials. I also wanted to shore up the brand and get people excited about it and wanting to participate. The Society wanted to be in a really strong position as it approached its centennial, and we are. And now we are looking at the next century and what it might mean. FEED: What types of SMPTE intellectual property did you make available? BL: The primary ones are our standards documents. We have close to a thousand if you go back to the very first ones that were developed back in 1917. We’d been kind of hiding it from the public. If you participated in the standards process, you knew all about them, but we hadn’t done a good job of sharing them. The same with our journal (SMPTE

Motion Imaging Journal). We had a lot of very good journal content, with technical articles and historic materials by Walt Disney and Herbert Kalmus, and other extraordinary figures in the industry. Now we’ve been able to make that available to more than just the SMPTE community; we’ve digitised everything back to 1916 and it’s managed on a platform owned by the IEEE. The other intellectual property we’ve been developing is our educational programming, including webcasts and virtual courseware, where we can educate people about these new technologies. In addition to these central operations, our chapters around the world – what we call sections – are active in educating members at a local level. So in New York or Hollywood, or the UK or Hong Kong, they organise monthly meetings and have education. That content isn’t part of the digital library at the moment, but it’s part of the ecosystem of education that our members can enjoy. FEED: Has the increase in local sections helped “internationalise” the industry? BL: It’s a constant ambition to make sure that the industry knows that SMPTE is a

GERMAN ENGINEERING SMPTE’s events - like last year’s Oktoberfest Reception - oer members a venue to exchange ideas and unwind. These technologists are queuing for beer.

global organisation. And we have been since the beginning. The first sections formed in the early part of SMPTE’s existence were in Canada, the UK, and even Australia. We’ve been a global organisation for almost the entirety of our existence. Back then it was motion pictures – broadcast and television didn’t come into play until the forties and fifties – and the technology was being developed in mancorners of the world. SMPTE was a community, even back then, that could tie people together. Even in the days of hand-written letters and mailing things through the post, it was a global organisation. We have about 27 sections around the world right now. Most of them are in North America. But outside of North America we have sections in the UK, Poland, Italy, Russia, India, Hong Kong, Australia, and we have a new section being revitalised in the Nordic area. We may be based in the United States, but our standards work is meant to address global issues, and our standards community is global in nature. One of our strategies has been developing toolsets to allow the dierent sections to communicate more easily with one another, so they could, for example, stream their monthly meetings and share a great visiting speaker with the rest of the world. We don’t yet have it functioning in a way that is broadcast style, but we’re looking at ways we can make that easier for people. Right now, the sections post their meetings on their own websites and we help them communicate back and forth. But in the future we hope to be able to connect the sections a lot more for collaboration with each other.

YOU NEED A STANDARD THAT HAS LONGEVITY AND RELIABILITY... IN THESE TIMES OF CHANGE

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17 GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange

FEED: And you’ve also been cooperating with the HPA (Hollywood Professional Association) and helping them put on events? BL: We partnered with the HPA a couple of years ago. Our stas are blended now and SMPTE run both organisations. That’s been a happy relationship for the last few years and our goal is to blend the technical, SMPTE side with the more creative side of the HPA. It’s a much younger organisation than SMPTE and we really want to help them grow. HPA has a strong place in Hollywood and want to grow that internationally. FEED: We’re in a new, all-digital world, where technologies can evolve and change rapidly. How does a standards body, whose job traditionally is to provide stability, cope with that onslaught of change? What is SMPTE’s function in the new environment? BL: There are groups in the world who say, “We don’t really need standards and standards bodies anymore”. My opinion, and maybe I’m biased, is that in this time of rapid change, there’s a stronger need for a body that cares about due process and still develops a concensus-based standard and, most importantly, is there for the long haul. It’s easy for a group to get together and say, “We’re going to do a specification and we’ll all agree and get it done in

WE’VE BEEN DEVELOPING OUR EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING, INCLUDING WEBCASTS

six months”. But then what happens next? What happens when interest in that technology goes away? Or the people supporting that organisation lose interest? Or they go bankrupt or get acquired? I think organisations like SMPTE and other SDOs (standards developing organisations) are there to curate that technology, not just now but for the future. I think it’s vital that you have that reliability. We care so much about that due process and the curation of technology for the long haul. I think there are other organisations that are there to solve a quick problem – and that might be only for a couple of years – but then what happens? What happens when you build a process based on a technology that was short and sweet at the time, but isn’t curated for the long haul. What happens when you need to fix something? Do you start over? That’s when you need a standard that has longevity and reliability. I think that’s terribly important, especially in these times of change. And over the years we’ve seen that bear out, even from the very beginning. The reason SMPTE was formed was that when

the motion picture industry was starting out there was a lot of chaos. There was a lot of competition around technology, and the industry came together and said, “Wait, this is crazy. We’re not doing ourselves any favours. We need a standard way to operate”. Standards work throughout any industry. Whether it’s finance, health care, consumer products, standards are the baseline that industry can grow on top of. But you’re right that due process takes time, and sometimes people don’t want to wait. We are using more and more software tools to help achieve greater eiciencies, whether they’re collaboration tools or software hubs, like GitHub. As the industry moves more toward software FEED: Has the increasing importance of software in the industry altered or expanded the membership of SMPTE? BL: We have seen some churn, even in the last year or so. But we are seeing new members coming in – the Googles, the Amazons, the Netflixes – and they solutions, we’re becoming more a software-based standards body.

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18 GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange

AS THE INDUSTRY MOVES MORE TOWARD SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS, WE’RE BECOMING MORE A SOFTWARE BASED STANDARDS BODY

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19 GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange

have embraced SMPTE, which we’re very happy about. We don’t have Facebook yet as a member, but as Facebook starts getting more into content creation, I think we’ll start seeing them look to us. We are actively looking to that world. A lot of those software people have never heard of SMPTE, believe it or not. Part of it is going to be an education exercise and talking to them about the benefits of joining an organisations like SMPTE. FEED: What kind of outreach has there been to that software and developer community? BL: One of the ways we’ve done it is with an event we just did in the Silicon Valley area called Entertainment Technology. This year’s event was a two-day conference produced by the local SMPTE section. Google hosted it in a wonderful new facility and it was excellent. It’s an opportunity to be right in the middle of Silicon Valley, and the purpose of the conference has always been to try to marry the traditional Hollywood manner of making content with Silicon Valley types who may have never heard of SMPTE. This year there was a lot of discussion about immersive technology and how that changes storytelling, and there were a lot of technical discussions about how Google Chrome is accommodating media. And that’s a way we reach out to that community and make them aware of who we are. FEED: SMPTE has seen lots of technologies come and go over the years. Do you have a sense of the current period as being quite extraordinary? Or is the industry evolving in the same way it has always done? BL: When you’re in it, it’s sometimes hard to see the big, monumental changes. You see incremental changes, but it’s only when you step back that you say, “Wow, what did we just do?”

I don’t know if anyone can tell what it’s going to look like in three to five years time. But we believe that there is always going to be a need for standards. SMPTE is going to need to be adaptable – and sometimes standards aren’t so adaptable – so we’re in the process of developing a programme of technical specifications that build on standards, but allows flexibility. One of the things I’ve heard recently, which tells us how dramatic the changes could be, is Uber’s recent announcement that they might have flying cars in five years time. We don’t even have autonomous cars figured out yet, but they are thinking that in five years they’re going to do flying cars. And it might happen. Things like that will change everything. If you’re sitting in an autonomous car, what will you do while you’re sitting there? You’ll work or you’ll be entertained, and that’s going to include motion pictures. And what about immersive technologies in that environment? We can’t even get our heads around that – we’re still struggling with the idea of VR. So I think it will be even more rapid than we can even imagine. And the best we can do is keep our eyes open and be aware of these big innovators and disruptors. They don’t have a connection with SMPTE by any stretch right now, but they ultimately may. In fact, our annual conference in October will be about entertainment in the car, with a key speaker from Intel. For us, it’s about being mindful and paying attention to the outside world and not being so motion picture and television focused. That will always be there, but there’s more out there. We just need to have our eyes wide open.

A CENTURY OF GUIDANCE Clockwise from top: A SMPTE delegation visits US president Calvin Coolidge in 1926; film director Cecil B. DeMille addresses a SMPTE gathering; SMPTE engineers weigh in on Telstar, the first American telecommunications satellite; SMPTE test patterns

IT’S ABOUT BEING MINDFUL AND PAYING ATTENTION TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD AND NOT BEING SO MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION FOCUSED

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20 TECHFEED 4K

COMING

O K WHEREFORE ART THOU? UHD programming may be growing, but viewing still remains limited, and its future as a mass medium is uncertain Words by Adrian Pennington

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21 TECHFEED 4K

OON? S ON?

n media technology it’s often only the latest innovations that generate headlines – the status quo is far less newsworthy. So, we should be treating the summer’s excitement around 4K UHD live streaming of the World Cup and Wimbledon with the caution it deserves. The reality is that the vast majority of content online, or not, reaches our screens in high definition at best, and for many people that will remain the benchmark for some time. Even when it comes to traditional modes of delivery, UHD is a long way from becoming standard. Statistics provided by analyst NSR reveal that just 0.17% of the world’s TV channels distributed by satellite are UHD today, and there will only be about 930 UHD satellite-delivered channels by 2026. Another analyst, Euroconsult, forecasts 1116 UHD channels by 2025 out of a global total of 47,300. Of that number, about 22,485 would be in HD and the rest still in standard definition. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is the cost of distributing

channels of higher resolution which require purchasing more satellite capacity. And the production cost of 4K content itself has been, until recently, at a premium, as post facilities, equipment manufacturers and rental houses try and extract more bucks for using the new technology. The cost of storing and processing the additional material (data) is more expensive than HD and has certainly caused some blockbuster VFX feature films to be post- produced at 2K (HD) even though they are acquired at 4K, 6K or, in the case of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 , 8K. What’s more, these costs cannot easily be passed on to the consumer who is reluctant to pay more for content which may be perceived as only a moderately better resolution. VOD streaming services have fewer of these inhibitors, and indeed Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Apple are now commissioning most of their originals in 4K. Even here it has proven diicult to entice subscribers to pay an additional fee to receive a show in 4K. When, last year,

Apple made shows on iTunes the same price regardless of resolution, it forced rivals like Amazon to revise their fees downward too. Netflix is about to test these waters further. It is trialling an Ultra tier of its service which will charge select subscribers €16.99 a month to view content in UHD and HDR across up to four screens. EXPERIMENTAL Despite the enthusiasm of a few big companies, 4K live streaming is still at the experimental and promotional stage of its evolution. At the FIFA World Cup, Telestream (which makes products for video capture, encoding and transcoding) told FEED that it is working with various broadcasters, producing some 60+ channels of live HD streaming and just one 4K stream. This 4K stream is being driven largely through a promotional agreement with a consumer electronics manufacturer. Still, others take a more optimistic approach. Olivier Karra, director OTT

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22 TECHFEED 4K

and IPTV solutions at media processing solutions developer Harmonic, believes 4K live OTT streaming is breaking through. “Constraints are being unlocked, or at least diminished, one after the other even if sourcing content for a linear channel and HDR compatibility remains challenging,” he says. Certainly, live 4K OTT will increase: anything that service providers do in the VOD space is likely to be emulated in live applications at some point. It’s just a matter of when the technology catches up. “If you look at the bitrate variance that you produce for VOD content, it’s standard to have H.265 4K variants at the upper end of that spectrum – I would expect this to become the case with live,” says Telestream’s CTO Shawn Carnahan. As always the nub of the issue today is cost – it is expensive. “While VOD delivery of 4K content is more expensive (than HD), it’s not that much more expensive,” explains Carnahan. “However, encoding live 4K streams requires significant computing resources (at least double). Combine this with the much higher delivery bandwidth costs and 4K live streaming is substantially more expensive. LIMITED BANDWIDTH It is limited bandwidth speeds to the home, rather than a failure of service providers to optimise the content delivery network, which is also inhibiting 4K live streaming. “The reality is that you won’t get anywhere near the same eiciency out of 4K encoding in a live application as you will for VOD,” says Carnahan. “The bandwidths required to deliver 4K live are pretty high – prohibitively high for most clients. We’re talking about 18Mbps minimum and that’s tough to sustain at the consumer level. “It’s a catch-up game. As more consumers have fibre in the home with

IMPLEMENTING UNIVERSAL HDR SUPPORT WOULD BE IDEAL BUT IS NOT ECONOMICALLY VIABLE

100 Mbps sustained connections, then it’s not so much of a problem.” Amazon recommends at least 15Mbps, while Netflix advises 25Mbps. But if other devices at home will be occupying your bandwidth, 15 or 25Mbps alone won’t suice. Latest figures from UK communications regulator Ofcom, based on a survey from November, show the average UK broadband connection is 46.2Mbps, compared to 36.2Mbps the previous year. Ofcom also broke the data down by connection type. For example, at peak times fibre averaged 33.5Mbps and cable (Virgin Media) achieved 99.7Mbps. Anyone in the UK with an ADSL connection is still suering from 9.6Mbps download speeds. However, there’s a clear digital divide between rural and urban locations, with

more than half of broadband customers in rural areas receiving an average download speed of less than 10Mbps, compared to 21% for the whole of the UK and 16% in urban areas. Under current plans, the UK government is aiming for 98% coverage for superfast (24Mbps+) broadband, and an assurance that the remaining 2% can get at least 10 Mbps on request. “Most countries in western Europe have a fairly good penetration of high connectivity into the home, but that doesn’t mean consistency of delivery over the internet isn’t a challenge,” says Ian Munford, the Director of Product Marketing and Enablement for Media Solutions, at content delivery network provider Akamai. “Many devices are competing for bandwidth in the home.”

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23 TECHFEED 4K

Realistically though, latency has little to do with encoding or bandwidth. Even if you have reliable 40Mbps connections for 4K streaming latency, it is the segmentation and cache levels throughout the CDN which are responsible for 95% of all latency. “You can try to optimise that, but it gets much more di icult with higher bitrates to push the envelope,” says Carnahan. Harmonic’s Karra agrees, “In order to maintain a premium video quality and a quality of experience, content owners do not want to see their content being ‘squeezed’ too much. A balance needs to be found.” The introduction of high dynamic range, which is believed to make a greater perceptual di erence to image quality than upping the number of pixels, adds more complexity to the mix. It also consumes about 10% to 15% more bandwidth than encoding a standard dynamic range UHD signal, reckons Harmonic. And that’s before higher frame rates – useful for sports, and nigh on essential for computer gaming – are taken into consideration. experiment during the World Cup required viewers to have at least 40 megabits into the home to receive the full 3840 pixel resolution running at 50 frames-per-second. A bigger challenge was the support of mixed HDR combinations throughout the distribution chain. The BBC wanted to stream an HDR signal that would work on the widest range of displays possible, and not just the latest HDR-outfitted devices. Yet the host FIFA signal was produced with an arguably more premium experience in mind. “Implementing universal HDR support would be ideal but is not economically viable,” says Karra. “This is why chipset, decoding devices and TV manufacturers are generally only implementing a subset with specific flavours. Even when a single HDR type is being used, switching back and forth to UHD SDR or HD can be challenging.” Harmonic says it can solve this pain point by enabling automatic HDR conversions if necessary and thereby allowing service providers to normalise their distribution formats, despite the diversity of content formats. Then there’s the issue of whether 4K content works for smaller screens. You need to use either a connected TV or an OTT ALTERNATIVES The BBC’s live UHD HDR streaming

set-top box connected to the TV to truly benefit from the video quality increase in a perceptible manner. Yet the worldwide trend is toward increased mobile device viewing. In Akamai’s analysis of what constitutes optimal stream quality for long-form viewing, it found that 1.5Mbps to 2Mbps was more than su icient for viewing on an iPhone. “Your eyes can’t determine better perceptual quality beyond that,” says Munford. With live, event-based streaming, higher framerate is a positive, but it’s a must when it comes to eSports. “A 60p experience on mobile is arguably better than a 4K lower framerate experience,” says Carnahan. “The resolution does not necessarily make the experience more compelling, whereas higher framerates can.” Even BT Sport, which is investing in a future 5G network, understands that 4K UHD is not a good use of bits or bandwidth to mobile. “Going forward, our baseline for live events streamed to mobile will be HD 1080p, 60 frames a second,” says Matt Stagg, BT Sport’s director of mobile strategy. IS IT STILL AN HD FUTURE? Even content producers who are at the cutting edge of production are not yet swayed that the benefits of cost and convenience of working in HD have been overtaken by those of 4K. “The whole idea of resolution for a filmmaker is a bit of a myth,” says Robin Dimbleby, a natural history producer who has filmed lions and monkeys for Sky wildlife shows and who is currently filming in Indonesia for NHNZ. “The most important thing is for your story to come through properly. We don’t want to get into a resolution arms race which is why we do a lot of HD sequences still within our quota [of HD material acceptable for Sky’s UHD output]. “Who has a 4K TV? Everyone is still watching in HD.”

UPWARDLY MOBILE With increased use of mobile devices to watch live events, 4K has to work harder to convince users of its benefits

TECH SOLUTIONS The industry is creating some fantastic encoding e iciencies that make 4K VOD streaming viable by lowering the bitrate. Harmonic’s EyeQ Content Aware Encoding technology is claiming bandwidth savings for UHD HEVC up to 40%, for example. With VOD, the consumer doesn’t mind if it takes another 10-15 seconds to bu er up at the start of a program. But any lag with live becomes a real consumer bugbear. It’s considered pretty good just now to keep latency within the 10-12 second range for live OTT. Harmonic says its technology has already demonstrated end-to-end UHD HDR workflows with latency below six seconds.

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24 XTREME 4K

Words by Neal Romanek

In addition to being one of golf’s premier tournaments, the US Open is one of the world’s largest live production environments. Fox Sports jumped in head rst to trial a 4K over 5G production workow

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25 XTREME 4K

ast month’s US Open Golf tournament ended in another win for Brooks Koepka. It was the first time the same golfer won two consecutive US Opens since Curtis Strange’s win in 1989. Another landmark for this year’s event was that US broadcaster Fox Sports covered the tournament in 4K high dynamic range, delivered over a 5G network. The trial was aimed to showcase what is almost certainly the future of outside broadcast. There’s still a bit of squabbling about what the benefits of 4K will be – what content it might best suit, whether HD paired with HDR is more than adequate, how relevant 4K might be in a world increasingly eager to watch content on a phone. But when it comes to sports, there’s no end to the craving for greater realism and detail. Whatever else may happen with 4K technology, it has a future at events like the US Open. In last month’s trial, however, the most important thing wasn’t 4K. The big advance was the use of 5G wireless technology to transport live 4K footage. Footage from two cameras at hole 7 of the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club was transmitted to a production vehicle via 5G and made available for delivery by DirectTV. Fox Sports teamed up with MediaKind (the rebrand of Ericsson Media Solutions), Intel and network provider AT&T. TAKING ON G Sometimes 5G is rolled out as a panacea for all possible networking woes, a kind of electromagnetic miracle that’s will usher in a golden age of connectivity. But the truth is, a fully connected 5G future is going to allow for some really cool stu, including ultra-low latency, multi-gigabit download speeds and easy connection and

A FULLY CONNECTED G FUTURE IS GOING TO ALLOW FOR SOME REALLY COOL STUFF

HOLEINONE Fox TV not only covered this year’s US Open in 4K, the company also trialled live transmission via 5G wireless technology

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