Exploring the future of media technology
LOREM SUM SITAM ELITWI LOREM LOREM IPSUM ER 360 SAILING IN CALIFORNIA APPINESS AT THE ROYAL WEDDING FAKE OR FACT: BUILDING A NEW NEWS PREPARING FOR MEDIA 4.0 LIBRARIANS CTETUER ADIPISCING MAGNA ALIQU ER
NIBH EUISMOD
3 WELCOME
OLD MACDONALD HAD A SERVER FARM. A I, A I….
The robots are coming! But don’t worry. They’re here to help. Some of us have concerns about the boom in artificial intelligence. Will AIs put us out of work? Will they automate our society into a hyper-efficient, sterile joylessness?
Will they allow populist dictators to take over the world? Will they get obsessively jealous of my new boyfriend? And, of course, will they figure out that the big threat to their existence is the tailless monkey in charge of the electricity, and then take measures accordingly? AIs are coming, and we will have to learn to coexist with them. Artificial intelligence – right now notably embodied in machine learning algorithms – will be a set of increasingly powerful tools that will affect every part of the industry. The seismic disruptions may not hit for another decade, but in the coming years it won’t be a question of whether or not you’re incorporating AIs in your business, but what kind of AIs. One of the big media industry applications for AI right now is content recognition and automated metadata tagging. Media asset management and storage systems are starting to adopt this technology across the board. AIs can now recognise and catalogue individual actors within footage, or locations, brands, props – machine learning enables an AI to identify just about anything in a piece of footage. This saves a tremendous amount of worker hours and makes petabytes of unviewed footage accessible and able to be monetised. We hope you enjoy learning about the new world of AI- enabled tech, and we hope you learn to make friends with the AIs – after all, you may end up working for them some day.
EDITORIAL EDITOR Neal Romanek +44 (0) 1223 492246 nealromanek@bright-publishing.com CONTRIBUTORS Ann-Marie Corvin David Davies Adrian Pennington
Philip Stevens 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 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
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CONTENTS
12 YOUR TAKE AI IN THE ARCHIVE
The future of dynamic archives
07 NEWSFEED
22 TECH FEED
News from around the streaming world
We’re entering a new generation of content storage – AIs will be managing it 28 AN AI CHEAT SHEET The first step in
14 STREAMPUNK 16 STREAMPUNK:
Museums are the new thing
07
TOOL OF THE MONTH A stylish and easy-to-use camera for live streaming
learning is knowing what to call things
30 GENIUS INTERVIEW
64 OVER THE TOP
Dr Francesca Tripodi looks into how our online algorithms encourage extremism
Robots aren’t taking your job, they’re taking your boss’s job
16
36 APP ROYALTY
40 ROUND TABLE: NEW NEWS Our panel tells a hypothetical news start-up how to build a local channel How Sky News added facial recognition for viewers of the royal wedding
46 CONTENT MAKERS
46
DMS is where the big studios go to get their messaging right
50 EXTREME
The Congressional Cup yacht race goes 360
54 FUTURE SHOCK
56
Heralding the changes in video production, distribution and consumption
56 START-UP ALLEY
This issue it’s AR characters, TV remotes in a phone and AI-generated music
SUBSCRIBE SEE PAGE 62
60 HAPPENING
60
Oslo reinvents the TV technology conference
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7 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR
GOOGLE TRIES NOT TO BE EVIL
In May, Google held its annual Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California. The company’s announcements underlined how AI and machine learning are becoming integral to the Android operating system (in fact, it could be argued Google is first and foremost an AI company) and how caring for the human beings using these technologies is becoming a hot button issue. Among the most discussed topics at the conference were the details of Google’s new Digital Wellness initiative, which looks at ameliorating a host of digital sore spots, including news feeds, addictive interfaces and the effect of screen technology on children (see FEED’s May issue for more). Google’s revamped news service will offer personalised top stories prominently displayed, including local news and events. Video news will be highlighted with a feature called Newscasts, which provides short video summaries of stories. A feature called Full Coverage allows users to dive deeper into the stories and see them arranged along a timeline. A ‘Subscribe with Google’ option will make it easier for users to subscribe to news sources and see them in their news feed. New features have been rolled out in Google Assistant which can now make calls for you autonomously, even adding um’s and ah’s in the conversation to convince the other party that they’re talking to an imperfect human. Assistant is also much more handy now at retrieving media content on demand. As part of the company’s Digital Wellbeing Initiative, the Android OS will let users track how they are using their devices, including time spent on each app and the numbers of notifications received. YouTube will now come with a ‘Take a Break’ reminder that viewers can set every 15, 30, 60, 90 or 180 minutes. The reminder can pause the video being
watched until the user dismisses it. Users can access past viewing data as well. Google has also added features for greater parental control. The household authorities can now instantly and remotely control the Wi-Fi access on any Android device or can set timers for greater control over family members’ screen time. It will become easier to put boundaries around kids’ YouTube usage too with new YouTube timer controls. When the end
of a pre-determined viewing session is reached, viewers will see a ‘Time’s up!’ notification and the app is locked. It’s hoped that these tools will help restore some sanity to the use of digital tools – especially for children. Google is certainly hoping it takes some of the heat off. And if nothing else, it will now be much easier to use Google Assistant to call emergency services while you’re fending off your crazed, YouTube-starved children.
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8 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
VO, WIZTIVI AND EKT IN JOINT OTT/IPTV OFFERING
Viaccess-Orca, Wiztivi and EKT are collaborating on an end-to-end OTT multiscreen and IPTV solution for pay TV operators and service providers. Viaccess-Orca (VO) is a provider of OTT and TV platforms, content protection and advanced data solutions, Wiztivi specialises in multiscreen user interfaces, and EKT designs and manufactures set-top box solutions. The joint multiplatform/multiscreen TV and DVB hybrid solution aims to help operators accelerate time-to-market for services and meet UX expectations of a new generation of viewers. Viaccess-Orca’s TV Platform delivers TV services to any device across any
network. It includes functionalities for content, service delivery, customer and device management, content personalisation, content protection, and advanced TV analytics and can be deployed on premises or in the cloud. The VO TV Platform, both on premise and in cloud, has been integrated with Wiztivi’s TIMELESSUI cross-platform UI solution and EKT’s Solid TV STB solutions which are based on both Linux and Android. The VO TV Platform and TIMELESSUI integration will allow portability to most targeted environments, including iOS, Android and EKT STB, providing the same user interface and experience across multiple devices.
“It is challenging to deliver content to a growing number of connected devices over different delivery networks. On top of it all, today’s pay TV operators must also provide an exceptional user experience to stand apart from the competition,” said Chem Assayag, EVP marketing and sales at Viaccess-Orca. “Partnering with Wiztivi and EKT, we’ve simplified the management and delivery of next-generation OTT and IPTV services, enabling pay TV operators to drive new revenue streams and increase viewer satisfaction by making the TV experience feature-rich, personalised and consistent across screens.”
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9 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
WAZEE UPGRADES STOCK FOOTAGE PORTAL
The UK’s Digital Production Partnership has released a new implementation guide, DPP Metadata Exchange for News. The guide aims to help news organisations and vendors implement a common metadata framework based on the International Press Telecommunications Committee (IPTC) NewsML-G2 standard. It’s hoped the DPP Metadata Exchange for News will help in the streamlining and automation of news processes, versioning and management of rights and restrictions from planning to delivery. The DPP Metadata Exchange for News implementation guide provides an overview of the minimum metadata requirements for exchange, introduces new production workflows, maps the business requirements to IPTC NewsML-G2 and provides detailed implementation guidance covering the end-to-end news production process. Wazee Digital has relaunched its Wazee Digital Commerce portal. The stock footage library now features improved search, preview, download and purchase functions, while offering sellers of stock footage a better storefront experience. The upgrade has faster search, preview, download and collection management along with more intuitive navigation, including enhanced video playback, accelerated downloads and simplified checkout Wazee’s Digital Commerce portal hosts video content from more than 120 suppliers, including 4K content, news archives, establishing shots, nature imagery and drone footage with associated metadata. The portal is powered by the company's enterprise software-as-a-service cloud platform, Wazee Digital Core. "One of our main goals is to simplify the user experience while remaining cloud-native, scalable and agile. We also strive to ensure our products have a progressive and elegant look and feel. With this upgrade, Commerce is faster, more intuitive and more powerful than ever before," said Wazee Digital CTO Greg Loose.
DPP STREAMLINES NEWS METADATA
metadata between international broadcasters and news agencies. “The lack of basic metadata in end- to-end digital news workflows has introduced inefficiencies in newsrooms around the world,” said DPP managing director, Mark Harrison. “The development of a common metadata framework will enable newsgathering organisations and their suppliers to increase efficiency by supporting and enabling faster discovery, better rights- informed exploitation, automation and greater re-use of captured content.” The DPP will launch a testing programme for DPP Metadata Exchange for News tools and will offer a DPP Tested certification for products and services that are interoperable. DPP Metadata Exchange for News is available for download at: https:// www.digitalproductionpartnership. co.uk/what-we-do/metadata- exchange-for-news/
This includes: • Transfer of news planning information to in-field news acquisition systems
• Transfer of captured assets (clips) and metadata from in-field news acquisition systems to media asset management systems • Transfer of news content and metadata to NLEs • Exchange of news content and
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10 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
FACEBOOK RELEASES SDK FOR GAME STREAMERS
In a move to put them in competition with Amazon-owned Twitch, Facebook has released a new Games SDK to improve integration between PC gaming and Facebook’s streaming platform. A new livestreaming API will make it easy for PC game designers to enable live streaming to Facebook from within their games. According to the announcement on the Facebook developers page, 800 million gamers already play a Facebook connected game each month. The new Games SDK will support C++ and Unity and aims to increase gamer community engagement by
making it easier and more rewarding for players to share from inside a developer’s game. The new livestreaming API will allow game developers to add Facebook streaming functionality to their PC games. Players of games incorporating the API can livestream directly from the game client to a Facebook surface without any hardware or third-party software. The livestreaming API will become available for mobile developers in the coming weeks via Facebook’s updated mobile SDK. Later in the year, Facebook will be adding functionality to enable players to
record gaming moments and share the videos on Facebook Pages, Groups and Profiles via a new clipping feature. Additionally, a new rewards feature will allow PC developers to enhance the game watching experience by granting free, in-game rewards for viewers who tune in during livestreams on Facebook. Other new features in the Games SDI include a Key Player Stats function, which allows PC game developers to integrate real time player stats into Facebook Groups, and new gamer and audience analytics features, previously enabled only for mobile and web developers.
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11 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
DUTCH OTT APPS COLLAPSE
Dutch telecommunications company KPN has shut down its OTT app KPN Play. After launching in 2015, the service announced a 1 July termination date, citing insufficient demand in the market. The KPN website will remain accessible until October 1. The no contract KPN Play service provided both live streaming and on- demand video to the Dutch market. In a statement on the KPN Play website the company said: “We have learned a great deal from KPN Play and are using this for other products, including the KPN Interactive TV app that is part of KPN’s Internet and TV packages.” KPN Play follows two other ailing online services in The Netherlands. Dutch OTT TV company Mobile2Morrow (M2M) shut down in May, and in March, T-Mobile announced the end of its Dutch OTT video offering, Knippr. The Mobile2Morrow service started at €5.99 per month and offered over 150 international channels, including 4K content. Knippr, powered by Ericsson and developed by Stoneroos, had only just won an award for best Apple TV app from iOS news and info site iCulture. Knippr launched in May 2016. In another change in the Dutch TV landscape, the European Commission has finally cleared the way for US mega-telco Liberty Global to acquire Dutch cable operator Ziggo. Ziggo is the largest cable operator in the Netherlands. The purchase had been approved in 2014, but was halted by a complaint lodged by KPN.
APPLE RELEASES IOS 12 Apple has announced an upgrade to its iOS operating system. One of the improvements for the new iOS 12 is an increase in speed for certain functions. Apple promises two times faster app launch under heavy workload and a 70% wellness controls. A new feature called Screen Time allows users to better track their use of apps, websites and devices. Users will also have greater control over their notifications, with Siri adding notification suggestions based on how users interact with their apps. iOS 12 also includes more privacy
faster swipe to camera. Facetime will support video and audio with up to 30 people at once and will feature tools for creating highly customisable animojis. The new operating system will feature enhanced AR tools. Apple’s ARKit 2 for developers will allow creators to better create and integrate AR experiences for multiple users. AR objects can be sent with Messages and Apple’s Mail. Following in the footsteps of Google’s recent announcement, iOS adds improved
functions. Safari will now prevent Share buttons and comment widgets on web pages from tracking users without their permission. The new privacy features will also prevent advertisers from collecting a device’s unique characteristics which might be used to identify the device or retarget ads across browsing. A public beta will be available this month. The public launch will happen this fall.
UPC HUNGARY SEEKS ASSURANCE network, UPC hopes to achieve real-
Hungarian cable operator UPC Magyarország has adopted a new video assurance platform from Agama Technologies. Operated by Liberty Global Europe, UPC Magyarország (UPC Hungary) is the largest cable television operator in the country and provides digital and analogue cable video, broadband internet and traditional circuit- switched and digital telephony (VoIP) services to 2 million service subscribers. Headquartered in Linköping, Sweden, Agama provides solutions for monitoring, assurance and analytics of video service quality and customer experience. By implementing Agama’s video assurance platform in its head-end and
time operational transparency on service performance. The new system will help the UPC operations teams manage, deploy and innovate in an agile manner. Installation of the system was facilitated by Budapest- based systems integrator and Agama partner Silicon Computers. “By choosing Agama’s modern, software- based solution, we are able to get great support for both automated monitoring as well as visual inspection. We now have a real-time view of the delivery chain with key metrics directly available for our services, from the head-end and through the network,” said Tibor Szabadszallasi, video manager at UPC Hungary.
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12 YOUR TAKE Andy Hurt
Words by Andy Hurt, SVP marketing and business development, Wazee Digital DYNAMIC ARCHIVES
A static archive can’t handle the flood of footage now being produced and the vast potential of untapped archives. Are cloud-enabled, dynamic archives the way forward?
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13 YOUR TAKE Andy Hurt
2 Maximise your metadata. In the cloud, enriched metadata makes otherwise stagnant or lost assets searchable, discoverable and shareable. Most assets enter an archive with a full load of technical metadata and sometimes even basic descriptive metadata, but that metadata isn’t enough for monetisation. You really need a thorough description of the content so that you can find it and turn it into clips that people request. Therefore, it’s important to have a viable process in place for capturing detailed metadata. Some cloud-based dynamic archive and management platforms come with granular-level metadata and search algorithms that help ensure you and your stakeholders can easily find and retrieve just what you’re looking for. 3 Have a monetisation strategy. It’s not just about having metadata and being able to search your content. You must be able to sell and distribute that content to a third party. That means you need a partner who not only has a background in media asset management, but expertise in licensing content as well. 4 Create the right workflow. The right workflow starts in the cloud, with a cloud-native MAM system built not just for management but for monetisation. Putting the right software in place makes it easy to build a specific workflow for any given request – a workflow that includes finding and tagging assets, creating clips and making those clips accessible to third parties. Consider this: fulfilling requests for content can yield hundreds or even thousands of video files, each with its own separate metadata file. Imagine the logistics of finding and transferring all those files from one location to another if they were sitting behind a firewall in a tape-based archive. But when they’re already in the cloud, then it’s all about enhancing and continuously monetising your assets – a much simpler workflow that can only be done by an architecture intended for the cloud. 5 Centralised global access. Getting enriched content to the proper audience is essential. A dynamic archive provides a single avenue to capture, organise and share content giving centralised access to content in a secure cloud environment. With this method, rights holders have complete control of their content with the ability to distribute to global stakeholders, including news media and corporate partners through permission- based access. Dynamic archives are meant for multi- use. Anyone with high-value video content, such as iconic moments in history, sports or pop culture, can use a dynamic archive to generate new revenue streams.
management platform on top brings content out from behind a firewall and makes it easily accessible to any permissioned user with an internet connection, from anywhere in the world, all from a central location. THE BENEFITS: • Simplify discovery and access from anywhere • Reduce capex through scalable cloud infrastructure • Create content once and use it many times, thanks to automated workflows in the cloud • Develop new sources of revenue • Centralised global access HOW TO BOOST YOUR REVENUE STREAMS 1 Start in the cloud. Traditional archives and MAM systems store content behind a firewall, likely on LTO tape, where it is inaccessible to anyone outside your organisation — the very people who might want to buy it. A cloud-native MAM application that is also tied to licensing will turn what was once just a storage expense into revenue. Therefore, the first step is to store your assets in a cloud-native platform, where they are more easily searchable and distributable according to strict security policies. Putting content in the cloud might seem counterintuitive, but actually it’s the key to a successful workflow. The importance of the cloud cannot be overstated – once assets have entered the cloud you can set up predefined workflows for all your digital endpoints, and then rely on cloud infrastructure for automatic transcoding, computing and publishing. In this way, you can create content once and use it in innumerable ways with very little human intervention. Even better, once the content has been published to YouTube, Facebook and other digital platforms, ads can be placed against it, and it becomes another source of revenue. The cloud offers unprecedented scalability; a key benefit is that there are so many different endpoints and strategies for content delivery. Cloud-native infrastructure lets you scale up and down as needed and only pay for what you use, as opposed to building an in-house infrastructure for peak usage and having it sit idle most of the time.
ANDY HURT: It’s not enough to simply store your content – optimising secure access can create ongoing revenue
ou know the drill: you create the content – it could be sports coverage, news, a TV show – play it out once, then send the tapes,
film, hard drives or digital files to a vault or digital library somewhere behind a firewall for safe keeping. That’s great for long-term preservation, which is critical, but not so great if you want to reuse that content in the future. And these days, that’s what it’s all about. With today’s IP technology, content creators and rights holders must be prepared to repurpose or die. In other words, to compete, you must be able to distribute your content broadly. That means delivering it not just to traditional satellite and cable providers, but to multiple digital endpoints (think Hulu, Netflix, Facebook and YouTube, not to mention your own OTT platform). You can’t accommodate all those endpoints without being able to access, repurpose and reformat specific assets to get them to the right audiences through the right channels. Speaking of broader distribution, archives are increasingly becoming a hub for licensing, reselling and distributing assets to third parties, such as filmmakers and advertising agencies looking for content to use in their projects. This monetisation opportunity is another reason to make sure your archive is more than just a storage cellar. Finding, retrieving and reusing content from a traditional static archive can be cumbersome if not impossible. That’s where dynamic archives and the cloud come in. While a static archive is simply a place to store media after it had been sent for distribution, a dynamic archive lets you go back into your archives and easily reuse specific assets whenever and however you choose. Add the cloud to a dynamic archive, and the possibilities for repurposing and remonetisation are almost endless. Storing assets securely in the cloud and then adding a cloud-native, browser-based DYNAMIC ARCHIVE + CLOUD = POSSIBILITIES
CONTENT CREATORS AND RIGHTS HOLDERS MUST BE PREPARED TO REPURPOSE OR DIE
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STREAMPUNK 14 Chocolate Films
London-based Chocolate Films is using its long experience in museums to serve an exploding video market in the heritage and culture sector VIDEO AT THE MUSEUM
hroughout the big changes that have affected the media industry Chocolate Films has stayed true to its origins, and it seems like that integrity is starting to pay off in a big way. The company was founded in 2001 by Mark Currie, who was working in marketing after a stint as a touring theatre actor and director, and Rachel Wang who had an art history degree, but found herself working in corporate finance. The two started making films in their off hours, teaching themselves as they went along. “It was just at the beginning of the XL1/ PD150 era, when filmmaking suddenly became that little more democratic,” says Mark Currie. “You didn’t need a 50 grand camera and a crew of ten. You could grab a camera and start making stuff.” The company was launched with a deliberate guiding ethos: “We wanted to make content about things that interested us, with a fine art and arts focus. But I was also keen to run it like a touring theatre company – which sounds a bit odd for a video company. When I had been touring with shows as an actor, I always loved that we did workshops and local engagement events in every single town we visited. So we decided to set up the company, not knowing the term at the time, as a social enterprise.” In their first year, half of Chocolate Films time was spent making digital video content, but in the other half, they ran workshops for young people and vulnerable adults. The company formed relationships with museums early on and quickly became a specialist in producing content for galleries, exhibitions and heritage sites. “We decided not to do traditional broadcast quite a long time ago, and everyone thought we were a bit crazy,” says Currie, “but everyone I know in broadcast is now in a deeply competitive environment
WE DECIDED NOT TO DO TRADITIONAL BROADCAST QUITE A LONG TIME AGO, AND EVERYONE THOUGHT WE WERE A BIT CRAZY
Now every cultural institution on earth wants video content, and though the budgets are often quite small, these institutions have exclusive access to one-of-a-kind subject matter. And content which might have only shown on a kiosk in a museum now has a worldwide reach. “The experience of going to a museum is only a couple of hours,” says Currie, “but this extra content allows people from their homes, or even from other countries, to learn more about the content in a range of ways.”
and there seems to an awful lot going on now in our area. So I’m quite happy about the decision.” When it began, the company had been focusing on niche content for niche audiences. A couple of decades ago video made produced for an art exhibition or a heritage site might be viewed at the venue itself, but unless it was appealing long-form content that easily fit into a TV broadcast slot, the audience for it was going to be very limited.
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15 STREAMPUNK Chocolate Films
Chocolate does some corporate and events work, but its bread and butter are the UK’s cultural institutions. Currently, the company is working with The National Gallery, the British Museum, The British Library, the V&A museum and Hampton Court Palace, just to name a few. These institutions are using video in increasingly innovative ways too. There are promo videos, but also content for education, events and advocacy as well as creating AV content for installations and exhibitions themselves. 1000 LONDONERS Outside of the museum world, one of the company’s large-scale labours of love is its 1000 Londoners project. Each week, the company shoots and uploads a micro- documentary about an ordinary Londoner – underlining the fact that there is no such thing as an ordinary Londoner. The project is almost one third of the way to completion - so only 12 more years to go. At the 1000 Londoners website, Chocolate has showed off its museum content skills by making the hundreds of short films searchable in a variety of useful – and fun – ways. Viewers can peruse Londoners by age and gender,
by location, and even by star sign. Different themes or ‘seasons’ include Activists, Dog Owners and Londoneers enjoying Halloween. “It’s almost a random sample of a 1000 different people from this amazing city. We have stories of the super-rich and people in food banks… Our mantra is everybody is interesting, and we have to keep reinventing it.” 1000 Londoners is distributed in just about every way except traditional broadcast. As well as the website and online social platforms, the films are shown at special screening series and have appeared as pre-show content in Vue cinemas. Upcoming are screenings at London’s City Hall and the National Portrait Gallery. GETTING THE FORMAT RIGHT Chocolate Films’ experience in short form content has allowed it to accumulate real expertise in what works across new platforms and audiences. One of the key services it provides to its partners is the strategy for what types of video are most effective in a given outlet. “When people come to us and say they want a video, we always try to track back and ask who their audience is and what
platforms the audience is using and then work out a plan from there. People will want a film and then think they can break it down into small bits to put on social media, but we’ve found that doesn’t work as well as planning out a strategy. “These strategies used to just be things for the big ad agencies, but we do that now for even our smallest client,” explains Currie. “Each video is there to help serve a purpose and solve a problem for you, so we need to work out the best way of shooting them to achieve your goals. “If people have a massive YouTube presence, we’ll recommend a slightly more narrative-shaped film. But if it’s Facebook or Twitter or Instagram we’ll look at it in a completely different way. And the storytelling changes for each as well. For Facebook we often recommend a more journalistic style, an inverted pyramid, because you know that there’s going to be drop off. On Facebook, telling the story, then putting all the information at the end is not great. “For us consultation up front on the shape, form, and how to tell the story is absolutely crucial.”
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STREAMPUNK 16 Tool of the Month
ivestream was an early innovator among streaming video platforms. Founded in 2007 as Mogulus, the company provided
easy-to-use, but sophisticated browser- based tools for building and operating a live-streaming channel. The company changed its name to Livestream in 2009 and became adopted widely for live events, especially concerts. Easy social media integration made the platform a good engagement platform for fans. Livestream has also been adopted by sports teams and corporates. Striving to become a complete end-to-end streaming service, Livestream started rolling out its own custom hardware, integrated with its software solutions. The products try to combine Livestream’s trademark high-end simplicity. The company was acquired last year by Vimeo which plans to integrate Livestream technology into the Vimeo creator experience. CAMERA Our Streampunk Tool of the Month is Livestream’s camera, the Mevo. Mevo was launched in 2016. It incorporated a Sony 4K camera with a 150° view and was designed to be simple to use with a not unreasonable $299.99 price point. The Mevo included custom cropping and facial recognition
MEVO ISN’T DESIGNED FOR SHOOTERS, IT’S DESIGNED FOR PEOPLE DOING THINGS THAT NEED TO BE SHOT
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17 Tool of the Month STREAMPUNK
ON STREAM This month’s tool, the Mevo Plus from Livestream enables live streaming, editing and switching of video as well as live audio mixing.
pack of gear for a discounted price. Given that many of the Mevo’s users won’t be elaborate productions who are choosing from shelves of kit, it’s a smart idea to provide Mevo as an elegant little kit with attractively designed cases. Many users will want to be able to chuck everything in the back seat of the car, or in their suitcase, and get on to the event without having to individually pack and remember a dozen pieces of kit. Mevo isn’t designed for shooters, it’s designed for people doing things that need to be shot.
THE MEVO PLUS STREAMS TO ALL MAJOR ONLINE STREAMING SERVICES , INCLUDING, OF COURSE, LIVESTREAM AND VIMEO online streaming services, including Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube, and, of course, the Livestream platform and Vimeo. PLUS So where is the Plus in this new Mevo? The new version has an upgraded Wi-Fi chip which makes for a speedier and more robust connection The company claims it will maintain a consistent connection up to 100 feet away from your mobile device, even in noisy environments. Livestream some Mevo accessories too. The Mevo Boost is a battery pack for the Mevo, which extends the use time of the camera up to ten hours. It has Ethernet, USB and Micro-USB plugs and can be used to charge other devices. Livestream is also offering the Mevo Stand which is… well, it’s a stand. It comes with a nylon carrying bag and adjusts from 24.6in to 58.3in. The company also offers a nifty Mevo carrying case and offers the entire
technology for live tracking. Also it looked cool – it was the kind of live-streaming camera you’d want to place all over your venue – or your house even. Last October, Vimeo and Livestream launched the Mevo Plus. The upgraded Mevo, selling for $499.99, is essentially the same device as the original Mevo. It has a 4K, 12.4-megapixel sensor and shoots up to 30fps, a built-in microphone and two audio inputs and one audio output. The camera can record up to 4K30 to an internal SD card and stream up to 1080p30 at 6Mbps. The camera generates its own network access point and can stream via its own mobile LTE connection or Wi-Fi. important – half of the Mevo Plus is the Livestream software, which is available for iOS and Android. As with the first-generation Mevo, the Mevo app allows for editing of the frame, including live cutting, zooming in and out, panning and shot selection with up to eight preset static crops. The Find Faces feature automatically identifies people in shot and a Live Follow button tracks a selected person automatically. The Live Follow feature can cut automatically to the subject most in motion. An Auto-Pilot setting adjusts the speed at which the camera makes the cuts. The Mevo Plus streams to all major SOFTWARE The second – and possibly more
n Learn more about Mevo Plus, and watch it in action, at: getmevo.com
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18 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Brightcove
Words by Mark Blair, SVP international, Brightcove GDPR BEGINS THE RACE FOR QUALITY With the start of the EU’s GDPR legislation last month, content providers face a number of challenges – and a few opportunities
must be able to leave a data agreement – with minimal effort – at any time. The European Commission has set stiff penalties for violation of these regulations with a fine of €10 million or 2% of a firm’s global turnover (whichever is greater) just for starters. It’s a big challenge: companies now have to be clear about how they are using people’s data and they have to be transparent with it. You have to adhere to a raft of regulations on that data; you have to manage and maintain it well, and if you make any mistakes with it, it’s going to sting. It’s early days and the jury is out on how strictly the EU will police the GDPR regulations, but there is a lot of political pressure now around privacy and the right of people to have their personal data handled appropriately. The fact that the start of GDPR coincides with the big stories about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook makes for a perfect storm for hypervigilance by authorities. Organisations that are not taking GDPR seriously and are not doing it
properly are putting themselves at risk, and there’s every chance that someone will be made an example of. Does GDPR mean that you’re starting your marketing efforts from scratch? There’s no doubt that you’re going to have to reapproach customers and projects for permission. The challenge is if you’ve been using that channel of communication for years, there’s now a real likelihood that you’re marketing database is going to shrink pretty rapidly. I personally have been inundated by emails by all sorts of services in the past few weeks, asking me to confirm my inclusion on a list or database. Many of them I can’t even recall signing up for in the first place. Some of the abilities businesses have previously enjoyed, like linking individual pieces of data to form pictures of user behaviour, may become a little less robust, and a little less granular. It may be a little more difficult to join the dots between types of user behaviour than it has been in the past.
MARK BLAIR: With the ushering in of GDPR for residents of Europe, there’s an opportunity to deliver higher quality
elcome to the Age of GDPR. From May 2018, all businesses handling the data of residents of the EU, regardless of where they are headquartered, are subject to new regulations. First, consumers must opt in to receive any type of data service, whether a simple email newsletter or a multi-year phone contract – and they must be shown to have opted in. The days of buying databases from third parties and folding them into your own are long gone. Data agreements, terms and contracts must also be easily accessible and transparent – no hidden fine print, no tricky wording and no manipulation or coercion to get someone to join a database. And you
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It’s a bit like landing on the snake in Snakes and Ladders and you’ve slid back a whole bunch of spaces all at once. But don’t despair. There are some great opportunities in this new world, but it’s going to take some work. What is going to advance a business implementing GDPR is not simply a massive database, but offering people a compelling and engaging value proposition. High-quality video is going to be a source of differentiation for both marketers and publishers. If you’ve lost a substantial percentage of your audience in a GDPR exodus, video is a perfect opportunity to re-engage. If you don’t have some of the data you’ve had in the past, it’s going to be harder to provide a targeted experience for users. This may mean a viewer isn’t as likely to stick with the experience you’re offering, and advertisers might be more cautious without the microsegmentation and targeting that comes along with a dense storehouse of customer data.
WHAT IS GOING TO ADVANCE A BUSINESS IMPLEMENTING GDPR IS... OFFERING PEOPLE A COMPELLING AND ENGAGING VALUE PROPOSITION
big winners, and with them the publishers and tech vendors who care about reputation and quality. On the whole GDPR will benefit the premium end of the market. That doesn’t only mean media behemoths, it’s the high- quality niche offerings as well. Low quality advertising, leveraging customer data in a potentially underhanded way is going to fade away, and brands that stand for quality and respect for data will be coming out on top. GDPR makes it harder to capture a viewer’s data and the truth is very few people go out of their way to watch ads.
Everything that helps create a better viewer experience, including such technologies as server side ad insertion or the option to turn off ads in exchange for access to some customer data, will be key in rebuilding an audience – and perhaps a more dedicated audience. BENEFITS GDPR doesn’t just mean upping the game in terms of content and service, it also means that the quality of the data we have is going to improve. As the effect of GDPR is felt, the audience will end up being the
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User interfaces are designed to be as frictionless as possible. We want our content to start with a single click. Ads are always going to be big sources of friction in the viewing experience. But if we put quality first, our desperate stranglehold on ad revenue can be loosened – at least a bit. If you’re offering a high- quality experience, you can allow your viewers to circumvent ads, in exchange for a bit more of their data. Premium content and experiences can be an incentive for viewers to register their data – in a fully GDPR compliant way. Once a viewer is signed up you can then provide a completely frictionless
experience. This becomes a great way to build partnership with your customers and to be able to use that partnership constructively going forward. Most people like quality. According to a study conducted by one of our peers, 1% of viewers aren’t interested in quality. The other 99% are. If GDPR is an opportunity to deliver higher quality experiences to your viewers, then web may have a bright future ahead of us.
ON THE WHOLE GDPR WILL BENEFIT THE PREMIUM END OF THE MARKET
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22 TECH FEED Content Management
UNLOCKS
Words by Adrian Pennington
THE PAST o longer the preserve of media and entertainment, video is a universal communication tool spanning sectors from education to architecture to health. Within the clipping. “As a result, AIs can be engaged from any distance without additional investments in satellite uplinks, dedicated fibre or on-site equipment or manpower.” AI/ML tools are being integrated into AI video technology is going to rewrite the rules for acquiring, storing – and even creating – content
However, the rise of AI tools is undercut by the lack of a standard for describing, searching and finding assets in the first place. Each AI provider has different API’s and access mechanisms for the analyses they perform. Each media asset management provider will offer a different way of integrating an AI and each corporation – whether museum, sports league or TV producer - will have a bespoke means of describing their own metadata. “For many years the MAM industry has been starved of metadata, including the ability to harvest technical metadata from media, add intelligence from file and folder naming, and offer manual tagging,” says Dave Clack, CEO of Square Box Systems. “Now with AI tools, there is a huge volume of metadata becoming available, often of low quality. Strong MAM players can manage this metadata explosion by curating metadata quality and providing strong user experience to display it well and unlock its potential.” A global standard for metadata is probably unfeasible, given the granularity required for each application [see page 29]. The more proscriptive a standard, the more restrictive it becomes. However, a flexible exchange format can bring metadata from an AI into a MAM in a useable way. Cantemo’s cloud hub for managing
marketing sector alone, 43% of marketers say they would create more video content if it weren’t for barriers like time, resources or budget. That’s where artificial intelligence and machine learning could yield dividends, provided it’s accessible to everyone managing, working and collaborating on video content. “While AI is now table stakes, fast transfer technologies [like IBM Aspera] are able to move any size or type of media content at maximum speed to enable near real-time media asset management workflows,” says David Kulczar, manager of IBMWatson Media, which provides AI-powered video services, including automatic closed captioning and highlight
editing and production asset management systems to create more efficient workflows, and curate and extract vast quantities of metadata. Recently released media asset management software includes a sub- $4000 appliance from axle ai that integrates face and object recognition and low- res proxy collaboration, and includes a panel for Premiere Pro CC. Prime Focus Technologies has inked a partnership with metadata specialist GreyMeta. Storage vendor Elements united with Veritone for automatic speech-to-text transcriptions. And Dalet added a Content Discovery module to its asset management software for journalists in the newsroom.
EACH AI PROVIDER HAS DIFFERENT API’S AND ACCESS MECHANISMS FOR THE ANALYSES THEY PERFORM
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23 TECH FEED Content Management
video, iconik, comes with a framework capable of integrating with AI platforms. Iconik currently supports Amazon Rekognition and Google Cloud Video Intelligence but can also integrate custom- trained video analysis solutions, adapted to content and workflow. “Iconik can be set up to analyse all or specific assets by its AI-framework and each entity, object or occurrence tagged with metadata,” explains chief executive Parham Azimi. “The suggested tags from the AI/ML are time code based and come with a confidence level, representing accuracy. Different workflows can be applied to each tag depending on the confidence level. For example, if a user wants to be shown every clip or a sub- clip with a shot of the sky they need only search for the phrase ‘sky’’.” This form of support allows users to tap into any AI solution. “For example,” says Azimi, “a custom-trained AI capable of recognising exact content or specific products – perhaps ‘Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 34iD’, rather than simply ‘white sneaker’.” There are potential conflicts when working with metadata originated under different AI/asset management protocols. One such flashpoint lies in assuming that the value of metadata in a file will be the same regardless of the AI-driven data set that generated it. “As the area is still maturing, I would not assume that, for example, face recognition from one system would be equal to face recognition from another,” says David Schleifer, COO, Primestream. “In fact, one system may focus on known famous people while the other might be a learning algorithm to build collections –
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24 TECH FEED Content Management
I WOULD NOT ASSUME…FACE RECOGNITION FROM ONE SYSTEM WOULD BE EQUAL TO FACE RECOGNITION FROM ANOTHER
therefore, different data used in different ways built on similar technology.” Nonetheless, the ability of AI/ML engines to auto‑metatag based on speech-to-text, natural language understanding, sentiment and tone analysis, and semantic scene detection is perceived as an increasingly significant benefit. “The next two years will be full
of things found in archives that we never thought we had,” says Nick Pearce-Tomenius, sales and marketing director at storage specialist
Object Matrix. “One example where we will see this being useful is the trend for consuming old TV series. AI can help find programmes from a specific series, even if it was made 20 years ago, and it can also help find other programmes featuring the same actors potentially. This suddenly makes it easy for broadcasters to monetise their legacy content.” In order for AI to extract the most value from these assets, their location need not be in the cloud. They could just as well be stored on-premises or, increasingly commonly, a mix of owned hardware linked to low- res versions, back-up copies or other data off-site. “Many on-premises asset management systems can export proxies to cloud storage to gather additional metadata,
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25 TECH FEED Content Management
THE NEXT TWO YEARS WILL BE FULL OF THINGS FOUND IN ARCHIVES THAT WE NEVER THOUGHT WE HAD
this case every piece of footage would have been tagged manually, requiring hours of labour,” explains Azimi. “Broadcast archives are traditionally massive in scale, and the more content that exists, the more difficult it is to manually tag content. Automated workflows, such as AI tagging, are therefore more important than ever.” AUTOMATED DISTRIBUTION The next step to automated production is automatic publication of personalised media experiences. MAM vendor Tedial claims we are already there. Its sport event tool Smartlive uses ‘AI enhanced’ logging to
these to social platforms using iconik,” says Cantemo’s Azimi. In April, IBM partnered with the Masters to bring cognitive highlights to the golf tournament. IBM’s AI identified key highlights based on cheering, high fives, commentary and TV graphics within specific video frames. As a result, video editors were able to package and distribute highlight reels in near real time. The Recording Academy also selected IBM’s AI for the 60th annual Grammy Awards to streamline the processing of over five hours of red carpet live coverage and more
than 100,000 images while also providing lyrical and fashion analysis for fans. In a more traditional news setting, AI frameworks make it possible to immediately identify and call up clips relating to a specific topic within breaking news. In the case of a natural disaster, a broadcaster might search within a content library and use AI to identify legacy footage of what an area looked like before the disaster, or search for past incidents in the same area. “This has been possible in the past, but in
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