Exploring the future of media technology
SPORTS IN 360 VR START-UPS MOBILE QUIZ SHOWS CONTENT DISCOVERY
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Our VR special
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REALER THAN REAL We all know that VR is a very powerful medium, and it’s going to change everything we do in the digital realm – from entertainment to engineering. But what that looks like – and how and when it happens – is anyone’s guess. experiences for new types of viewers. We talk to BT Sport – ever the broadcast innovators – about their ongoing experimentation with VR and 360 sports content and how they’re finding that VR over mobile is sometimes a better experience than goggles. We also look at the potential for VR to take you places you’ve never been. A VR tour of Paris may not have the same romance as a summer stroll along the Seine, but what if you could toggle between the Paris of 1887, 1798, and 50 BC at will? Or take a live VR tour of Shanghai with your favourite influencer? Or visit the Maldives before they vanish under the sea? VR is going to be an essential part of heritage, education and even tourism. And where are you going to find all this VR content? We talk to a start-up using AI to create a discovery portal for VR content of all kinds – a kind of iTunes for VR that will give VR creators and consumers a place to meet and share. It’s true that the digital world which occupies huge parts of our day is already a kind of virtual reality. But get your headsets ready: you ain’t seen nothing yet. In this issue we look at how VR content is being used to add value to businesses and to create new
EDITORIAL EDITOR Neal Romanek +44 (0) 1223 492246 nealromanek@bright-publishing.com
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YOUR TAKE The new advertising landscape will require creative use of social media, data and audience participation CONTENT DISCOVERY With a glut of VOD services, watching TV had become a chore. Reelgood has a solution MOBILE QUIZ SHOWS Swedish start-up Primetime is taking the interactive game show format to the next level GENIUS INTERVIEW We talk to Vualto co-founder and CEO Camilla Young about the history of streaming and getting girls into IT THE LIVE LIFE We look at the livestreaming of a charity concert in Spain for young classical music artists START-UP ALLEY This month’s start-ups include easy event streaming, cloud-based mixing, and AR for real-time interaction TAKING STOCK We ask some of our media tech friends what went well in 2019 and what their battle cry is for 2020
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47 VR DISCOVERY A start-up is trying to harness AI-driven discovery and 5G to bring VR content to mass audiences
50 SPORTS
As climate change clips our wings, could VR become a new way of going around the world?
BT Sport has been a media tech innovator since it started. VR and 360 have been part of its DNA
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BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR
Adobe, in partnership with Twitter and The New York Times , has developed a tool that aims to help verify the authenticity of digital content. The project is called the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and was announced at last month’s Adobe MAX conference. Adobe is inviting other companies to join and contribute to the CAI working group. The company says its “vision for the attribution framework is to be open and extensible so that any company may implement it within their respective products and services”. ADOBE FIGHTS FAKERY The goal of the initiative is to allow content to be fingerprinted so that its source can be verified and alterations, misattributions or misuse can be flagged and tracked down. The partners will hold a summit around the initiative in the next few months.
A survey recently published by OLBG has shown that despite 40% of football fans knowing that unofficial internet streams are illegal, five million of them are still using these streams to access the sport on a regular basis. FOOTBALL PIRATES
The online survey asked fans how they watched their favourite teams, including on which devices and in which locations. A whopping 68% admitted to using someone else’s login on a device to watch matches, with almost one in ten doing so consistently. Almost half (48%) of UK fans watch football at home, while a third access it at the pub. Women would also
much prefer to watch football at the pub than men (20% vs 16.4%). The research also picks on the country’s capital. It revealed that football fans in London are the worst culprits – 58% of men admitted to using illegal streams, while a staggering 40% of football fans residing in the city skipped work to catch a game.
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7 NEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades
Facebook’s bet on the future of VR isn’t really going to plan. The social media giant has already put billions into the VR biz and when it bought VR headset maker Oculus five years ago for £1.5 billion, it believed that VR hardware was the future. But the technology is taking longer to catch on with the general public, something Zuckerberg spoke about when he responded to a question on the slow uptake of VR during Facebook’s Q3 earnings call. “This is taking a bit longer than we thought. And I’m still optimistic. I think that the long-term vision and the reasons why I thought this was going to be important and big are unchanged... And because of that, I think that we’re still going to get there,” said Zuckerberg. In May, Facebook launched its VR headset, the Oculus Quest. It retails for £499 and primarily functions as a VR gaming platform. It will also grant users access to Facebook Horizon, a new ‘social VR world’ that launches in 2020. Zuckerberg insisted during the earnings call that Quest is “growing and doing quite well”. FACEBOOK AND VR
RACE FOR ‘QUANTUM SUPREMACY’
Google has declared that it has achieved ‘quantum supremacy’ – the moment that a sophisticated quantum computer performed a task that stumped even the most powerful standard computer in the world – but this has been widely disputed in the quantum community. Google published its claim in the journal Nature after an earlier report on the work was leaked to Nasa in September. The paper describes how its research team built a superconducting quantum processor named Sycamore that uses the weirdness of quantum physics to solve problems. To demonstrate, the scientists set it to the task of checking the randomness of a sequence of numbers. What it rattled through in three minutes and 20 seconds would keep IBM’s Summit – the world’s most powerful supercomputer – busy for 10,000 years, or so they claim.
IBM argued that its supercomputer held at Oak Ridge in Tennessee could solve the randomness problem in 2.5 days, perhaps less, depending on the programming. They add that because ‘quantum supremacy’ requires a quantum computer to solve a problem that is beyond a classical computer, Google’s claim doesn’t hold up. IBM also hit out at Google for irresponsible use of the term, referring to an article in which Professor John Preskill repeated concerns in the quantum community that the term “exacerbates the already overhyped reporting on the status of quantum technology” and that “supremacy, through its association with white supremacy, evokes a repugnant political stance”. However, IBM did credit Google for an “excellent demonstration of progress” in the field and
acknowledged the challenge of working on quantum systems.
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8 NEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades
NETFLIX GETS CAUGHT SPEEDING
Netflix is testing a feature that will enable a small group of Android mobile users to change the playback speed of what they’re watching, a decision that has been criticised by some of Hollywood’s biggest actors and filmmakers. Viewers can choose to slow down content as much as 0.5 times the normal speed or increase the speed up to 1.5 times the normal runtime. Director Judd Apatow, who created the Netflix Original series Love , slammed the feature, tweeting, “No @Netflix no. Don’t make me have to call every director and show creator on Earth to fight you on this. Save me the time. I will win but it will take a ton of time. Don’t fuck with our timing. We give you nice things. Leave them as they were intended to be seen”. He continued to tweet, “Distributors don’t get to change the way content is presented. Doing so is a breaking of trust and won’t be tolerated by the people who provide it. Let the people who don’t care put it in their contracts that they don’t care. Most all do”. In a blog post, the streaming giant reassured that this is just a test and,
“as with any test, it may not become a permanent feature on the service”. Netflix also wrote that the feature has been frequently requested by its members and defended that the tool “has long been available on DVD players”. It added: “We’ve been sensitive to creator concerns and haven’t included
bigger screens, in particular TVs, in this test. We’ve also automatically corrected the pitch in the audio at faster and slower speeds. In addition, members must
choose to vary the speed each time they watch something new – versus Netflix maintaining their settings based on their last choice”. APPLE+ IS GO
Apple has finally launched its streaming service, Apple TV+. A monthly subscription will cost £4.99 – and, if you buy an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV or Mac, you’ll get a year’s subscription for free. That’s even cheaper than Netflix’s subscription, as well as the soon- to-be-released Disney+. Apple TV+ content can be accessed through the Apple TV app, which means you can watch it on a range of Apple devices, but also on compatible TVs and streaming sticks. If you own an iPhone, iPad or iMac, you should
find Apple TV+ already installed on the device.
Apple has signed deals with studios, including independent film studio A24 and the Oprah Winfrey Network, and will include shows like Amazing Stories and The Morning Show . There’s even a programme for youngsters called Helpsters . In addition to Apple TV+, Apple has introduced Apple TV Channels, which will combine cable sub scription services and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video, though unfortunately not Netflix.
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10 YOUR TAKE Advertising Innovation
The new advertising landscape requires creative use of social media, data and audience participation NOT YOUR PARENTS’ ADVERTISING
or years, television dominated as the avenue preferred by advertisers for promoting their products to the public, but the
landscape is now very different. The level of competition has increased dramatically: there is a wide spectrum of broadcast channels to choose from and technology has changed the way brands communicate with consumers. Add to all this the fact that consumers have more control than ever before, and it’s clear brands now need to adapt to keep up with the changing media environment. Indeed, whole advertising models have been altered, with AVOD, SVOD and TVOD all battling for supremacy. SVOD (subscription video on demand) is currently leading the way, with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime enjoying a head start on traditional players after building a customer base through subscriptions. As they reach a critical mass of audiences and a saturation point, they’ll need to find new ways to monetise content – which is when the AVOD model will come into play again. With things constantly developing, what are the key trends that advertisers should be thinking about and how can they plan for success in a changing industry? INFLUENCING Central to the shift that has taken place over the last five years has been the move away from traditional advertising towards content-driven advertising – commonly known as ‘influencing’. Gone are the days when brands would repeatedly broadcast the same content
ED ABIS, COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR OF NEVER.NO
Advertisers need to adapt in order to engage their audiences
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11 YOUR TAKE Advertising Innovation
to ensure brand recall and push the messaging out without any clear strategy. The most successful campaigns bring the messaging alive through creative storytelling, producing an experience that influences the target audience to buy into the benefits of a product or service. That’s why partnering with an influencer is now so important. Influencers offer an important platform for brands to promote their messaging across channels to the influencer’s followers. This doesn’t just refer to mainstream influencers. Micro- influencers – consumers who have been influenced and inspired to engage with a brand’s content – can also be integral to the success of a campaign. These micro- influencers are directed to share content and experiences that can be enhanced and amplified across multiple channels, providing a form of ‘word of mouth’ marketing that creates valuable organic advertising and instils a sense of faith in the product or service. Personalisation is also continuing to play a bigger role, primarily because it has become harder than ever to effectively engage consumers. Enabling audiences
to be a part of a campaign or to directly influence it in some way has become vital to extending a campaign’s lifespan – which is where personalisation comes into play. Personalisation techniques have become particularly prevalent online and might range from simply showing someone’s name or photo, to highlighting their influence through voting mechanisms. Whichever approach brands take, it’s clear this personal touch is something they can no longer afford to neglect. READY FOR THE FUTURE While the changing landscape does present some challenges for brands, it also offers an abundance of opportunities. The key is knowing who the target market is and where these consumers are viewing content across the mass of channels and platforms available. Once this has been confirmed, brands can then formulate a central campaign theme that’s modified to fit the audience’s likes, interests and values. Sky Adsmart and C4 have an excellent track record in
brands need to utilise technology to make intelligent and rapid changes throughout a campaign and deliver personalised content. For example, Never.no’s audience engagement platform, Bee-On, enables the integration of social media into linear, digital and streamed broadcasts for advertising campaigns. By incorporating data analytics, brands can make advertising addressable and run different campaign variants across channels to ensure messages are seen by the entire target audience. As well as influencing where to send the messaging, data can also be used to affect the content itself. Brands can focus on the trends and behaviours of the target audience and produce content that will enhance engagement – as long as the campaign creative is built in a way that lets brands respond to the data mid-campaign by constantly evolving and refining elements on the fly. Brands should also look to AI to improve advertising strategy and customer engagement. By integrating AI to enhance workflows and the content itself, brands will be able to make campaigns automatically responsive to changing behaviours and trends. Humans will still define the strategy and expected outcomes, but AI will learn to make changes more quickly than is humanly possible. Ultimately, the rate of change in advertising isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Brands have to be prepared to embrace the changes coming their way by incorporating technologies such as AI and addressing a wide range of platforms. That way, they will be able to create great content experiences that are engaging, personalised and delivered in real time.
delivering bespoke campaigns fit for the audience, however,
MICRO-INFLUENCERS – CONSUMERS WHO HAVE BEEN INFLUENCED AND INSPIRED TO ENGAGE WITH A BRAND’S CONTENT – CAN ALSO BE INTEGRAL TO THE SUCCESS OF A CAMPAIGN
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12 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
Betting on keirin cycle racing is an 80-year-old tradition in Japan. A new channel powered by AWS allows fans to keep track of all the action, with lower latency than ever before WINNING TICKET FOR CYCLING FANS
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13 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
eirin is a discipline of cycle racing started in Japan in 1948. The sport is motor-paced – racers follow a motorised bicycle
and the ability to clearly see the details of the action, regardless of viewing device, is critical to the WinTicket user experience. With this in mind, WinTicket recently shifted its video delivery workflow to the cloud, leaning on AWS Media Services to ensure the highest quality viewing experience for its audience. The WinTicket live video programming velodromes throughout Japan. To stream this content live, content feeds from each arena are brought into the cloud from AbemaTV’s studio and run through AWS Elemental MediaLive for video processing into adaptive bitrate outputs. Content is originated and packaged with HLS using AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and then distributed using Amazon CloudFront. “WinTicket audiences want to see race results immediately, so low latency is essential. AWS Media Services enable us to deliver content with 1.5 times lower latency than other services, giving us a strategic advantage,” says Hiroaki Egashira, CATS software engineer at CyberAgent. “AWS has helped us build a live delivery system with redundancy and high availability without impacting volume development processes,” says Egashira. “We’ve been able to reduce operational costs because we’re only charged on per-use basis, including serverless architecture such as Amazon API Gateway with AWS consists of keirin race coverage aggregated from more than 40
TURN OF THE WHEEL AWS Media Services are ensuring that keirin cycling fans in Japan can keep up with the action
AWS MEDIA SERVICES ENABLE US TO DELIVER CONTENT WITH 1.5 TIMES LOWER LATENCY THAN OTHER SERVICES until the final laps of the race, after which it’s a sprint to the finish. Motor-pacing creates a slip-stream for participants to ride, allowing keirin cyclists to accelerate to finishing speeds of up to 70km/h. Betting has been an integral part of keirin racing since its inception, when it was one of only four sports the post-war government permitted gambling on. The money bet on keirin in Japan is said to top a trillion yen (around $6bn). In addition to betting, Japanese fans of keirin can spend countless hours tracking riders, catching up on match results and reviewing upcoming race schedules, all of which are available via online betting service, WinTicket. In collaboration with AbemaTV, a CyberAgent Group internet TV station, WinTicket now offers a ‘Keirin Channel’ with 24/7 online voting, race information, odds, AI prediction functions and live video of Japan-wide keirin races. As with any other good betting service, low latency
Lambda, which we’ve adopted for delivery management.”
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14 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
Videofashion’s archive of five decades of the fashion industry is being given new life by AI AI GETS FASHION SENSE
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15 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
ideofashion has been recording fashion shows since 1976, and
the resulting archive of more than 18,000 hours of fashion footage and catwalk coverage is now available digitally. The collection represents the world’s largest library of fashion, beauty and lifestyle video programming, according to Anne Adami, Videofashion’s co-founder/ owner and managing editor. The archive is also 100% shot and owned by Videofashion, so it has no licensing or rights restrictions and can be fully monetised by the company. “We invented the genre,” says Adami about Videofashion’s archiving. “We were the first on Seventh Avenue and the first in the four major fashion capitals to tape fashion shows, interview designers and models, and go backstage and to red carpet events.” A decades-old video archive means decades of image format history. The archive currently shoots everything in 4K, but the materials in Videofashion’s library comprise six or seven different video formats in more than 33,000 different tapes. In past years, the company produced 30 series that were distributed on linear television. The internet has not only allowed more people access to fashion, but now offers an outlet for the wealth of material that includes not only the clothes, but the events, celebrities and professionals working in this three trillion-dollar industry with massive media coverage. Videofashion wanted to use new technology to digitise and monetise this treasure trove, so went to GrayMeta, specialists in AI-driven asset management solutions. GrayMeta’s Curio allows users to quickly search through complex media archives via a browser interface. With technology partners AWS and GrayMeta, Videofashion has digitised more than 2000 hours of programmes, now in the cloud and available for licensing. GrayMeta uses artificial intelligence to analyse, identify and tag content. So far, GrayMeta has processed more than 2000 hours of content, with more being processed each month, and content isn’t limited to video – it also includes documents and still images.
margins on the platform made the company look for ways to bring the archives in-house. During its analogue beginnings, the archive was organised with a simple file box and cards, with handwritten and typewritten notes, then Excel spreadsheets – seemingly a lifetime away from the brave new world of AI. “We put proxies of the 2000 hours of programmes we had digitised into the cloud and had them processed by Curio,” explains Adami. “It generated a whole bunch of metadata immediately – speech to text, logos, facial recognition. It’s incredible what we can find now in our library.” The new AI-accessible library has allowed for new discoveries in the content, and access to moments and information that had not been accessed for years. New users of the archive include CNN’s four-part series American Style , and famed makeup artist Pat McGrath. The project has also unlocked a new and transformative revenue stream, with the library footage monetised at up to $135 per second of content. Videofashion is also developing a family of fashion documentaries that build back from the archive. “Using Curio, I find gems every day, fashion moments I didn’t know existed or I had forgotten,” says
GrayMeta’s Curio leverages Amazon Rekognition for image and video analysis, including facial and object recognition. The company has also employed other machine learning tools for the Videofashion project, such as OCR (optical character recognition), and solutions by data analysis and cyber security company S2T. Adami sees the hunger for more content as a major opportunity for the archive. “Now all of that footage needs to get out there and be available to documentarians, TV shows, news media outlets, newspapers and fashion blogs,” she says. Videofashion had been working with Getty, but the slim
WITH PARTNERS AWS AND GRAYMETA, VIDEOFASHION HAS DIGITISED 2000 HOURS OF PROGRAMMES, NOW IN THE CLOUD AND AVAILABLE FOR LICENSING
Adami. “It’s a wonderful window into our library. We’re unlocking the value of it.”
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16 THE VOD FILES Content Discovery
Words by Neal Romanek
With the proliferation of streaming video services, watching TV is starting to become a chore. Reelgood has a solution
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17 THE VOD FILES Content Discovery
ust when you think you’ve hit peak TV, you realise you’re only in the shallows. There is much more looming on the horizon – Disney+,
services, wherever. And the service will make recommendations for you across services, as well. Company CEO and founder, David Sanderson, created Reelgood out of his own personal frustration as a consumer, after moving from his native Canada to the San Francisco Bay area to join the Facebook team in its early days. “Facebook is where I fell in love with building products,” he recalls. “I had been an accountant before. When I found out I could build products for a living, I felt like I was cheating, because I absolutely loved it. I couldn’t believe I got paid to do it.” When Sanderson moved to the Bay Area he didn’t bother getting cable. One of the early cord cutters, he had Netflix and another service and that was it. But then as more must-see TV began to enter his life – in his case, Game Of Thrones (HBO), Homeland (Showtime), Brooklyn Nine- Nine (Hulu) – he began to acquire more streaming services. “Every night I was flipping between all of my different apps to see if there was a new episode of one of the shows I was
Apple TV+ and Britbox, and a bunch of other services spun off from broadcasters and brands new to the media space. Some of these services are big and powerful, some light and agile, some just throwing their hats in the ring to see if they can find a new revenue stream, but they are all desperately hungry for eyeballs. In the meantime, most viewers already find swapping back and forth between Netflix, Prime and the couple of other services they watch to be back-breaking work. For some people, it’s a fine line between peak TV and digital noise. California start-up Reelgood has come up with a solution – a platform that aggregates multiple video service into one platform and allows viewers to search for and be recommended content, regardless of where that platform lives. Say you have a hankering to watch Futurama , a search will show you all the places you can see it – Netflix, Hulu, broadcast streaming
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19 THE VOD FILES Content Discovery
watching. Or if it was a Friday night trying to find a movie I was like, ‘Let’s see what we have in Netflix. Okay, then let’s see what we have in Hulu’. It just seemed so antiquated and silly. And the problem just kept getting worse, with more and more services coming out. “It’s one of those classic stories. I thought someone else would solve it – it was such an obvious problem. I even waited a couple of years. Eventually it was clear that it was something I would have to do. I knew how to launch products from my time at Facebook and I saw that this was essentially a data problem. And that’s what ultimately led me to leave, and to start Reelgood.” had the right idea at the right time. Interest in the Reelgood solution has snowballed as both content companies and content distributors realise they have a mess on their hands without an overhaul in content discovery across platforms. “I think it’s just a little bit of history repeating itself. When TVs first came out, they had a knob with three channels on it and that was fine. You didn’t need anything more. But once cable came there were then hundreds of channels, and there needed to be a TV guide to navigate all of that. Well, now TV has moved to the internet, and when it was just Netflix that IT’S THE DATA, STUPID Sanderson feels very fortunate to have
WHEN TVS FIRST CAME OUT, THEY HAD A KNOB WITH THREE CHANNELS ON IT AND THAT WAS FINE. YOU DIDN’T NEED ANYTHINGMORE
was fine. But now we’re getting past the three channels and that same problem is coming about.” Since it was launched in 2015, the Reelgood platform has acquired tens of millions of users, says Sanderson, and after growing in the US it’s about to launch into Europe and South America, starting in the UK in early 2020. The growth of the service has been largely organic: Reelgood hasn’t spent any money on advertising. The company won the Webby award last year for best entertainment app. And Reelgood hasn’t just been a success with TV viewers. Technology companies, as well as the streaming platforms themselves, have come to the company for help. “A lot of the big TV manufacturers and other hardware devices in the market have come to us looking to get us on their platforms,” says Sanderson. “They see we have a working product that people really love and want to try and bring that to their
smart TVs or set-top boxes. That’s our next evolution – to be launching with those different manufacturers.” Reelgood’s attention to putting the user experience front and centre is one of the drivers of its success. The simplicity and clarity of the interface hides a lot of technical complexity. “If we’re doing our jobs right it’s not seen, but there is a very complicated back end that powers the whole thing. And largely that’s the matching of the data from all the different services. There could be a situation where Season 1 through Season 6 of a show is on Netflix, Season 7 is on Hulu, and Season 8 is on AMC because that’s the newest season. Well, Netflix and Hulu and AMC all have completely different IDs or identifiers for that show. What our system has to do, is to match all those together. Gathering the data isn’t hard, but matching the data is.” How Reelgood receives the catalogue data from the different streaming platforms
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20 THE VOD FILES Content Discovery
is also quite complicated. There are a few different APIs that Reelgood uses, but data can come from the platforms through different feeds, FTP dumps, or emailed XML files. This solution to such a messy problem has brought the company an unexpected, new area of business. A lot of big companies are now licensing that cleaned- up and matched programme data from Reelgood, among them Microsoft, Verizon, Roku and CBS Interactive. algorithms and AI liberally, both for its own cross-platform content recommendation engines, and to manage the mess of data created by multiple services. “For the description field, we may have ten different descriptions for the same movies stored on our database. But which is the best one? We’ve had to build algorithms for every single field that will look at those and say, ‘This is the best description. This is the one we’ll show.’” Those differences can also appear in the quality of the content itself. One platform NIGHTLY EXPERIENCE FOR THE USER , I THINK, IS SUFFERING TOP-QUALITY AI The company is employing helpful WE’RE GETTING BETTER CONTENT, BUT THE ULTIMATE
may be streaming a new, remastered version of a film, while another could be streaming a lower res version from 15 years ago. “We are in the process of adding that information now. Part of it has been because Disney, from what we can see of their new streaming service, is flagging content so you know what is an oldie, what the different quality is. Netflix does
a bit of this, too – it will tell you whether something is 4K. So we’re adding that feature right now, so people can filter that.” Reelgood does its very best to nurture and respect its relationships with all of the platforms currently providing VOD. The company wants to be ‘like Switzerland’, Sanderson says. “In fact, there was one of the major services that was interested in investing in us. And while it was flattering, we turned it down because that could be seen as playing favourites with the content. So we keep a completely neutral status with all the providers.’ “In the past year, for the average US household, the number of streaming services they use is now over four,” says Sanderson. “I think that number could go to five, six. But I think at a certain point it will top out. People will only pay for so many services. But I do see the problem getting worse and fragmentation becoming a bigger problem. You have all these walled gardens and it creates that fragmentation. And while we’re getting better content, the ultimate nightly experience for the user, I think, is suffering.”
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22 MOBILE APPS Game Shows
Words by Elsie Crampton
HQ Trivia has been a pioneer in creating interactive game shows on mobile. Companies like Swedish start-up Primetime are taking the format to the next level
ust as they have every other night, the whole family go back to their mobile devices after dinner. Sometimes they keep their phones
on during the meal, each family member enthralled by the content on their screens. And it’s the time they are all finally connected as a family. There’s shouting and joking at each other’s expense. There are furious rivalries and promises to get even. And above all there is fun. This is the world of Primetime, a live mobile game show launched in Sweden in March 2018. “A woman wrote in to us and said, ‘For the first time, my kids want to be with and hang out with the family at the same time every night’. Nothing has done that for a long time,” says Primetime co-founder Petter Borggård.
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23 MOBILE APPS Game Shows
Fashioned on the model made popular by quiz app giant HQ Trivia, Primetime is a daily quiz program, available on mobile devices, which allows mass live participation of audiences. Like HQ Trivia, the show features live video interaction with its hosts, but the show claims to be a notch above its competitors, with nominal latency and real-time sync among the production team and home players. “Everyone watches things at their own pace now,” continues Borggård. “Primetime was something that collected the family
and that is what we want the focus of the product to be going forward.” At the end of 2017, Borggård saw the success of HQ Trivia and knew it was something that would work well for a Scandinavian audience. He acted quickly to make sure he was the one who made it happen. “I had been thinking about a daily quiz for a long time, but when I saw it with the video layer on top of it, I thought it was really something, and I knew it would work in Sweden, so I talked to some people
I knew in the industry. We built it and launched a few months later. We didn’t really have a plan except that we loved the product.” When Borggård kicked off the project in December 2017, he had until that point been an entrepreneur working in video, with a small production company run with two other colleagues who are now both a part of Primetime. “The development was very hectic. We were working late nights with a super-small team – with one main developer building the back end and the iOS app. We wanted to just get it out. When we launched we were still trying to get a feel for it, and I ended up having to be the show host for the first two weeks. But it was growing from day one and you could feel that it was something that was really catching on.” Borggård reckons that the technology his new company developed for Primetime is superior to that of its American progenitor, too.
A WOMANWROTE IN TO US AND SAID, ‘FOR THE FIRST TIME, MY KIDSWANT TO BEWITH AND HANG OUT WITH THE FAMILY’
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24 MOBILE APPS Game Shows
“Our technology is better. It’s 100% in sync. I don’t believe our competitors have that. So we can be more confident in certain aspects of the business.” He is also proud of how the show has chosen to interact with and engage its audience. The emphasis is not on huge prizes – relying on greed to drive traffic – but to keep the focus on an enjoyable experience for their target audience, the family, and not on the pay outs. Primetime has now expanded into the other Nordic countries with Norwegian, Danish and Finnish shows. STICKY VIDEO EXPERIENCE One of Primetime’s main technology partners was Stockholm-based Net Insight,
HQ TRIVIA CREATED A LOT OF BUZZ AND PEOPLE GOT INTERESTED IN CREATING SOMETHING SIMILAR
which specialises in OTT video delivery with particular expertise in low latency in live content. “Primetime is the biggest example we’re working on in terms of these live mobile shows,” says Alexander Sandström, Net Insight’s head of product marketing. “It was just a start-up working to create an audience with that sticky video experience.”
Net Insight has a streaming product for its more heavyweight clients and a managed service for smaller businesses, such as the Primetime start-up. The game format is becoming increasingly popular and Net Insight is currently working with two other audience interaction apps. “These other companies we’re working with are doing something a bit different,
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25 MOBILE APPS Game Shows
but it’s still interactive, with audiences asking questions and engaging live with what is happening in a studio. “HQ Trivia created a lot of buzz and people got interested in creating something similar. The first idea was to do something for local markets, but now there are a lot of new ideas for other interactive formats, which borrow from HQ Trivia and similar services but now have new experiences around that.” MOBILE AMBITION Sandström anticipates more theme- orientated content in these live apps – pre-game sports trivia attached to a live sports experience, for example. “That doesn’t necessarily have to be a ten-question quiz, it could be a one- question quiz at break times between periods or sets. Or it could be just challenging your friends around the outcome of a certain match situation.” “The other thing that is going to happen is companies being a bit more ambitious with the production. A lot of the programmes that have attracted interest in the past 20 years have been trivia-like, but you haven’t had the live component. There’s a competition going on on-screen and you’re trying to keep up with them on your sofa. It could be existing brand names and shows that open up to interactivity or just people replicating that with a completely new experience and brand.” There are advantages to developing these interactive shows entirely in a mobile environment. This kind of low latency, live integration with an existing TV broadcaster adds another layer of complexity that makes it less viable – and more expensive.
In addition, explains Sandström, there is much more available tech savvy in the mobile space. “It’s simpler to do in mobile, but also a lot of these innovations and ideas in interactivity are not coming from traditional shows and the broadcast industry, but from an app or in the online start-up scene. I do think we’re going to see traditional broadcasters now launching interactive experiences. They hope they can reach the younger audience that they are not reaching with their current programming, and they have more money so they have more ambition about what they could do.” Primetime’s Borggård says that Net Insight’s input was essential to the company’s fast launch. “It was a way for us to get going faster. They are a pretty big company. When I contacted them they had no idea who I was, but from the first phone call they showed an interest. They acted like a small start-up.” Norway is Primetime’s fastest growing market right now – perhaps not surprising given the high priority the country gives to family cohesion. The productions are all done from one location in Sweden, with different studios for each version running in parallel. “There is a lot coming for us, but we haven’t exactly planned what yet,” says Borggård. “It’s interesting to see what a lot of our competitors are trying. We still have quite good numbers in all our countries. It will be interesting to see where it will leave us in a year or so.”
I DO THINK WE’RE GOING TO SEE TRADITIONAL BROADCASTERS NOWLAUNCHING
INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCES
LET ME ENTERTAIN (ALL OF) YOU Primetime’s Petter Borrgård is confident that his new quiz app holds multigenerational, long-term appeal
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26 GENIUS INTERVIEW Camilla Young
OTT delivery and orchestration company Vualto provides video on-demand services for big broadcasters and big government. FEED talks to company co-founder and CEO Camilla Young about the history of streaming, developments in VOD and getting more girls into IT NO ONE’SWATCHING PROPER TELLY, SO I THINKWE ARE IN THE RIGHT BUSINESS
FEED: Can we start from the beginning? What was your background before you started Vualto? CAMILLA YOUNG: I started as a software developer in the late 1980s for Colman’s of Norwich, a food manufacturer, after I had done a computer science A level. When I was younger, I wasn’t able to study computing – it was 1984, the ZX Spectrum had just come out, and the computer club at school was all boys, but I was quite interested in it and had my own computer. So I did the computing A level and went on to do an HND (Higher National Diploma) in computer science, and did pretty well. I was at Colman’s for five years, coding in various languages and writing all sorts of things, like manufacturing systems for measuring the flow of liquid through a pipe. It was quite varied and gave me a really good grounding. Back then, there were 50 people in the IT department and half of
them were women – at the time, that didn’t seem unusual. FEED: We spoke to someone recently who pointed out that gender equality was actually more common in the earlier days of computer programming. CAMILLA YOUNG: Absolutely. I think gaming has got a lot to do with that. You
WE’VE GOT THESE SYSTEMS SUITABLE FOR BROADCASTERS, BUT PARLIAMENTS AND GOVERNMENTS ARE JUST THE SAME. THEY’RE BROADCASTERS IN THEIR OWN RIGHT
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27 GENIUS INTERVIEW Camilla Young
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28 GENIUS INTERVIEW Camilla Young
WE’VE GROWN OUR BUSINESS THROUGH PARTNERS – WE SELL THEIR PRODUCT AND THEY SELL OUR SERVICES
get boys who get really interested in computer games and spend all their time playing Call of Duty or FIFA , and that’s how girls see computing. And then it’s girls who get sucked into the social media. One day at Colman’s, like a lot of manufacturing companies in the late 1980s, they brought in Oracle, and a load of Oracle consultants. There was this very flash guy in a gold Porsche that used to come in, and he said to me, “What are you doing in Norwich? You need to get to London and get out there”. So that’s what I did. I got a job in Bracknell – the UK’s Silicon Valley at the time – managing sales promotional information for retailers and supermarkets. It was all to do with multidimensional databases. It was the early days of OLAP – it’s a way of slicing and dicing data. After that, I went to work for a management consultancy in London. After a few years in London, my husband and I moved to Cornwall. There isn’t a lot of tech in Cornwall, but I found a job in Totnes as a software delivery manager, looking after bespoke software projects. They wanted somebody with a bit of London, someone to give their teams a kick. In 2006 I went to work for Twofour Digital, an independent TV company (now owned by ITV). They had a big facility in Plymouth, where I learned video streaming.
Parliament TV, Europol TV, which was a big VOD TV system for the European Parliament. At first there was only one developer and me. But by the time I’d left, they had a team of about 25. It was the real beginning of the streaming times. We were also doing streaming for HBO in central Europe. We put in all the encoding and the infrastructure to do the first radio streaming from the BBC, which was a big project, and was a precursor to the BBC’s iPlayer. FEED: What was that like? You didn’t have a long history of streaming tech to draw on back then. CAMILLA YOUNG: We were learning as we went along, really. One of my first jobs there was to write a proposal for a tender. I read this tender and I hardly understood any of the words in it. I didn’t know what an encoder was. I didn’t know what a CDN was. So there was a huge learning curve, but the thing was we were all learning together. We did some really cool stuff there. I enjoyed getting into streaming and managing the team, and we were building our own OVP (online video platform) product, which was a bit ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the company decided it wanted to concentrate on the traditional broadcast side, and I couldn’t see a long- term career there. James Burt was the CTO at Twofour and is my business partner now. We could see the writing on the wall. After one particularly difficult meeting we said, “Let’s just do it ourselves”. From that moment to being in our own office, in a little business park, was six weeks. It was crazy. We took a few of Twofour’s clients that they didn’t want and started the business basically with about £300 each, which we used to buy some web hosting and business cards, and some bits and pieces. But we knew nothing about starting a business. We had a load of chairs, and desks, and office equipment that Twofour gave us and a beautiful little office kitted out in Plymouth, and we sat there on our first day, in March 2012, saying, “Now what?”.
FEELING CONTINENTAL Vualto landed its first contract with French television, and continues to attract mainland European clients
FEED: What did you do at Twofour?
CAMILLA YOUNG: My first job was to manage the streaming of European
We knew we wanted to do web streaming for people. We thought we’d do a lot of lower-end webcasting for events.
FEED: How did the business grow from there?
CAMILLA YOUNG: We did a few smaller webcasts for clients but our first big break was a project for France Télévisions, and that was to build their premium VOD portal. James had been at an industry event, and he met this guy outside having a cigarette and it turned out he was looking for solutions for France Télévisions. James and I went over to Paris, presented what we
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29 GENIUS INTERVIEW Camilla Young
FEED: What is the main thrust of the business now? CAMILLA YOUNG: We provide video streaming services, including VOD and live-to-VOD. We’re also doing a lot of digital rights management. Our first type of client is broadcasters. We work a lot with public sector broadcasters. But our other set of clients – and it’s been really good for us – are government clients. We do all of the streaming for the European Parliament – that’s 20 live channels.
thought we could do and got the project, which was £42,000. FEED: But surely it wasn’t all dumb luck? You had already built up some valuable experience. CAMILLA YOUNG: Oh yeah, we obviously had the experience. We knew what we were doing, but we had to make a name for ourselves. The France Télévisions project really springboarded the company, and we made a lot of good contacts. We’ve grown our business through partners, through building really good relationships with partners. We sell their
products and they sell our services. That’s the way that we like to work. Most of our clients are in mainland Europe, and we have some clients in the US, but very few clients in the UK right now. FEED: Where does the name Vualto come from? CAMILLA YOUNG: We had to come up with a name quite quickly. We chose Vualto, because ‘vu’ means ‘to view’ – as in to view video – and ‘alto’ means ‘high’. And there are a lot of clouds with ‘alto’ in their names. It’s really about viewing video in the cloud.
And in the UK, all our clients are government clients. We do all the
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30 GENIUS INTERVIEW Camilla Young
streaming for the UK parliament. We’ve been very, very busy with Brexit, obviously. We do the National Assembly for Wales as well, and also the GLA (Greater London Authority). We’ve got these systems suitable for broadcasters, but parliaments and governments are just the same. They’re broadcasters in their own right. Their priority is to get their content out there, so we use the same underlying systems and processes for our government clients that we do for the broadcasters. FEED: Do these government clients have any specific needs that are different from the broadcasters? CAMILLA YOUNG: They do more social media streaming, so for the European Parliament we’ve built systems to allow us to simultaneously stream to their website, their apps and to social media. They’re streaming to around 80 social media channels at once in 24 languages. They also want their content to be more readily accessible, so they allow downloads and clipping of their content that obviously
I WOULD LIKE MORE YOUNG PEOPLE TO GET INTO IT, MORE FEMALES. I THINK THAT’S REALLY IMPORTANT
broadcasters don’t. So we need to provide that, too. FEED: What are you seeing coming up in terms of streaming opportunities out there? CAMILLA YOUNG: Everyone’s got a streaming infrastructure now. Everybody is delivering multi-format. We’ve seen that become commonplace. What we’re doing now is looking at dynamic scaling, which is where you spin up all your resources only when you need to. Take the European Parliament, for example. They’ve got 20 live channels, but they’re event- based channels. They’re not streaming different meetings or different events, and sometimes they’re not streaming anything
at all. So why keep your cloud infrastructure and your service spun up when they’re not needed? One of our big pushes is to provision the infrastructure and streaming service only when they’re actually required, then spinning them back down again, which will save our costs. People have got the basics. The next stage is making it work a little bit better for people and giving more on the live-to-VOD side. People now understand they can use their live workflow to build their VOD. But now we’re looking at streamlining that to give clients frame-accurate VOD, very fast. So, in the past you could have live-to-VOD, but perhaps you had to wait a bit for the VOD to be produced. We’ve now come up with a way of producing VOD very quickly that is also frame accurate.
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