68 HAPPENING BVE
Words by Neal Romanek
This year’s BVE show saw FEED take to the stage with seminars on esports, niche OTT and blockchain
t was cake and candles – or one candle – at this year’s Broadcast Video Expo (BVE) as FEED celebrated its first birthday at the
show. In just one year, we have gone from a completely unknown quantity to one of the top B2B magazines in broadcast. Our publishers, Bright, partnered with BVE across two major theatres at the show. FEED hosted the Techflow Futures Theatre, which ran keynotes and discussion panels on the future of connected video technology, while our sister publication Pro Moviemaker hosted the Pro Moviemaker Production Stage. The stage hosted camera and production technology demos. TALKING ABOUT THE FUTURE FEED produced several of the conference sessions at the show, kicking off with ‘Esports Is Real’, a look at the production opportunities in one of the world’s fastest-growing entertainment genres. Bringing new imagination and a ‘nothing is impossible’ mindset, esports companies are pushing traditional systems integrators to stretch their capabilities and try things they would never have dared a decade ago. The panel was made up of James Dean, MD of esports giant ESL UK, Andrew Lane technical broadcast manager at Faceit and Jonathan Lyth, technical director at ES Broadcast. The broad range of potential
esports content was made clear and James Dean said he hoped there would be greater initiative in bringing new kinds of games and new kinds of esports events into the mainstream. The hacker ethic that brought esports to the world still has much to offer for gaming-related content. The conference took a break from ever-present FAANGS with our panel on building niche OTT channels. Gavin Ho, technical director at 4K action channel Insight TV, Lucy Halliday, business development manager at AMC Networks International UK, and Joe Foster, CEO and co-founder of OTT technology pioneers Easel TV, talked about how the key to success in the OTT video world is to get to know a specific audience and to target and hone that content for that audience. In FEED ’s blockchain panel, two experts on the subject brought the delegates up to speed about a technology only dimly understood by most people. The guests were David Willbe of law firm Lewis Silkin and Joe Naylor, president of ImageRights International, a specialist in copyright enforcement for photographers. Willbe opened with a blockchain primer and Naylor followed by explaining how his company uses blockchain to establish
rights ownership for his clients. The ImageRights Blockchain Inscription Service inscribes documents into the Bitcoin Blockchain to prove ownership of an image at a given time and date. Naylor noted this blockchain inscription technology could be used to fingerprint any content from the moment of creation. BRITAIN’S TRADE SHOW SHUFFLE Next year, BVE takes place 9-11 June. This will enable companies to show off their NAB debuts to the European market, rather than being the show where nobody can talk about anything until NAB. It also puts BVE on a collision course with the Media Production Show. Will we see a joining of the two? I wouldn’t bet on it, but big trade shows are definitely in a state of flux.
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