Exploring the future of media technology
ANIMATION LIVE TARGETED AD TECH
SPEEDWAY STREAMING BEHAVIOURAL DESIGN
3 WELCOME
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, WE HARDLY KNEW YE
Welcome to our special on audience analytics and targeted advertising. Our goal this month is to give a good cross section of the technology and techniques available to digital content producers to learn about their audiences and serve them advertising.
We had planned to feature Cambridge Analytica too. At the beginning of the year, we were told about Cambridge Analytica’s SelecTV service, launched at the Advertising Week show last September by the company’s brand-focused division, CA Commercial. According to a press release, the SelecTV service offered “100% target audience density through the one-to-one precision of addressable TV advertising. Using a well-established industry benchmark, CA estimates the value of complete target audience density to be an average 63% lift in incremental sales over and above age and gender targeting”. This was just before deluge of scandals that has caused Cambridge Analytica to shut down, but we long knew the company had been involved in data analysis and audience targeting in political campaigns around the world – and we, frankly, had some judgement about that. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica was co-founded by former Trump strategist and celebrity white supremacist Steve Bannon also gave us the shudders. So we held off making the call. But then, SelecTV seemed like such a good product. The technology would be something of interest to our readers. And this was to be the targeted advertising issue, after all. Technology is morally neutral, right? Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. When we finally did make the call, the Cambridge Analytica scandal had exploded, and the company was decidely not taking calls. There’s a tendency to want to think of Cambridge Analytica as an outlier. And Facebook’s recent troubles, too, are sometimes chalked up to a momentary lapse in judgement. But is there something in our powerful technologies that requires deeper consideration, and a better way of thinking, of acting, and engaging with the public? Is there something in the current system of data mining and targeted messaging that is inherently problematic? This issue hopes to raise some of the big questions, but it’s together as an industry that we’ll come up with the answers.
EDITORIAL EDITOR Neal Romanek +44 (0) 1223 492246 nealromanek@bright-publishing.com CONTRIBUTORS Ann-Marie Corvin Phil Rhodes Adrian Pennington
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, Mark George PUBLISHING MANAGING DIRECTORS Andy Brogden & Matt Pluck DESIGN DESIGN DIRECTOR
NEAL ROMANEK, EDITOR
nealromanek@bright-publishing.com @rabbitandcrow @nromanek
Need to update or cancel your FEED subscription? Email us at feedsubs@bright-publishing.com BRIGHT PUBLISHING LTD, BRIGHT HOUSE, 82 HIGH STREET, SAWSTON, CAMBRIDGESHIRE CB22 3HJ UK
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CONTENTS
12 YOUR TAKE 07 NEWSFEED
News from around the streaming world
14 STREAMPUNK 18 STREAMPUNK: TOOL OF THE MONTH 38 ROUND TABLE: BUILDING AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT Server side ad insertion YouTube: Friend or foe to indy auteurs? Live broadcast studio in an iPad Our panel of experts advise a hypothetical OTT start-up on how to approach advertising, analytics and audience building
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44 THE LIVE LIFE
My Little Pony comes to Facebook Live – LIVE!
48 XTREME
44
Building a new breed of affordable race cars and a new broadcast infrastructure to go with them
54 HAPPENING
56 TECH EMMY AWARDS Our thoughts on this year’s NAB show in Las Vegas
54
NAB hosted this year’s Technology & Engineering Emmy awards
58 START-UP ALLEY
This month we focus on some impressive new audio technologies
SUBSCRIBE SEE PAGE 62
58
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24 ANALYTICS FOCUS DATA SPECIAL New opportunities – and challenges – in audience analytics
29 GDPR: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Some facts on the new sweeping legislation on European data protection
30 ANALYTICS TECH PROFILE
A new company brings Big Pharma right to your front door
34 GENIUS INTERVIEW Boundless Mind co-founder, Dr. Dalton Combs, wants to democratise tech for shaping human behaviour
64 OVER THE TOP
Are we doing the best we can with audience data?
7 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR
TELESTREAM RELEASES WIRECAST 9 SOFTWARE the VISCA-over-IP protocol and will allow camera operation directly from the Wirecast user interface.
Telestream has released a new version of its Wirecast live streaming and production software for Mac and Windows. The new Wirecast 9 includes pan-tilt- zoom (PTZ) control for robotic cameras, support for the X-keys Wirecast control surface, and paired encoding contribution with Facebook Live. The new PTZ control is optimised for the PTZOptics camera line which uses
Improved Facebook Live integration will allow users to more easily stream content to clients’ Facebook pages without requiring admin passwords or credentials for the main Facebook account. This could be particularly useful for pages with multiple contributors and cross-promotional streaming. The new version is available as a free upgrade to anyone who has purchased Wirecast 8 in the past 12 months.
Support for P.I. Engineering’s X-keys control surface offers simple access to 12 sources on each of the five layers in Wirecast. The status of each layer and source is indicated on the controller and saved scenes, outputs and transitions can be called up with a single button push.
8 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
FACEBOOK LAUNCHES OCULUS GO
Facebook has announced the Oculus Go, its cordless, and more affordable, Oculus VR headset. At $199, the Oculus Go is more within reach of the casual VR consumer than the Oculus Rift and actually has a better resolution than its higher end predecessor.
Facebook will be releasing apps for the Oculus, including Oculus Venues and Oculus TV, which offer music, sports and TV viewing on the headset, including big OTT platforms such as Netflix. At its F8 Conference, Facebook also announced its partnership with RED
cameras to produce a new high-resolution VR camera system for real-time VR capture.
Facebook also showed off its new avatar technologies at F8. These allow for more photorealistic representations which can be used in a VR environment. DATA PROTECTION KICK OFF world – maybe most of them. One of the central tenets of the GDPR
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation kicks off this month. Described as the most important change in data piracy regulation in 20 years, the GDPR replaces the previous Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. GDPR affects anyone using EU residents’ personal data in the offering of any goods or services. Since the EU is the world’s largest single economy, that includes a lot of companies around the
legislation is that companies can no longer use long, confusing terms and conditions forms to obfuscate their customer data strategy. This information must be easy to access, easy to understand and, according to the GDPR, it must be as easy for a customer to withdraw consent as to give it. Read our full report on GDPR on p.29.
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9 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
ROYALTY-FREE AV1 CODEC READY
Spring is here and with it the budding of new life – including a brand new video codec, AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) . Developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a trade organisation whose members include the major internet media giants, the AV1 codec is designed as a royalty-free successor to the HEVC. The AV1 project kicked off in September 2015 and aims to be an open format for web video. The fact that it is royalty free means that use of it won’t require payment, as with patented technologies like MPEG.
It’s hoped that the new codec will allow for much greater efficiency in delivering web video and open up possibilities for new and better types of video as well as improved video quality in markets with lower bandwidth. Christopher Mueller, CTO and co-founder of Bitmovin, a member of the Alliance for Open Media, said: “We have found that AV1 improves compression efficiency by about 35% compared to other codecs, making it perfectly suited to very high quality video applications
and delivery of video to low bandwidth environments such as mobile devices.” Bitmovin is one of the first companies to employ the AV1 codec in its products.
APPLE INTRODUCES PRORES RAW
Apple has updated its Final Cut Pro X editing software and with it introduced a new video file format, ProRes RAW. ProRes RAW aims to combine the visual and workflow benefits of RAW video with the performance of ProRes. ProRes RAW will allow editors to import, edit and grade footage with the RAW data from the camera sensor, which should work well for workflows using HDR. Optimised for macOS, full-quality ProRes RAW files can be played on MacBook Pro and iMac in real time without rendering. ProRes RAW files are smaller than ProRes 4444 files, which aids in archiving and storage. Final Cut Pro can work natively with ProRes RAW and ProRes RAW HQ files created by Atomos recorders. The format will be available as a free update for owners of Atomos Sumo 19 and Shogun Inferno devices.
RAW POWER Apple’s new format, ProRes RAW, combines the visual and workflow benefits of RAW video with the performance of ProRes
10 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
I FEEL THE NEED, HE NEED FOR FEED!
The annual NAB 4K 4Charity run again took place in the 7:30am cool of a Las Vegas morning at this year’s NAB Show. The image of broadcast tech as crawling with armies of pasty-faced engineers, shunning all exercise more vigorous than bending to plug in an SDI cable (too harsh?) is banished forever when you get out to one of the 4K 4Charity runs. Over 560 people registered for this year’s NAB 4K 4Charity run. The event raised $34,828 for Girls Who Code and FIRST Nevada.
Romanek made a spectacular showing as well and were absolutely amazing and if you ask them they will tell you they almost won. If you missed the NAB run, don’t fret. The IBC 4K 4Charity run is only a few months away. The run starts at 7:30am on 15 September at Amsterdam’s Amstelpark. Beneficiaries will include Stichting NewTechKids (NewTechKids Foundation), a Dutch charity which promotes computer literacy in primary schools. Another change for the FEED team to almost, very nearly win…
Girls Who Code is a US non- profit organisation which promotes education for girls and young women in computer science across the US. The charity arranges after-school coding clubs and special summer programmes which help girls learn coding and gain exposure to tech jobs. Las Vegas-based FIRST Nevada engages young people in mentor- based programmes that build science, engineering and technology skills. Bright co-founder and publisher Matt Pluck and FEED editor Neal
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11 NEWSFEED Updates & upgrades
SCIENTISTS MAKE PLANS FOR EUROPEAN AI
What’s on the Christmas list for European scientists this year? A new world-class hub for AI research. The proposed European Lab for Learning & Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) would aim to become a major world centre for AI, and compete with growing AI research in China and the US. In an open letter signed by top European academics and scientists, the ELLIS proposal recognised that European funding for research in machine learning and AI has fallen behind these competitors and that the founding of a new research lab would be a way to promote both European scientific advancement and economic investment.
“There are still a few machine learning and perception research hotspots in Europe that play in the international top league,” says the ELLIS letter. “Virtually all of the top people in those places are continuously being pursued for recruitment by US companies. “Even if we only wanted to retain these centres, we would need to increase our investments in line with what other countries are doing. To strengthen our position, we need to build on what is strong in Europe, think big and have the courage to try new models. We believe our best bet is for the outstanding centres in Europe to join forces.”
The open letter notes that “there is no shortage of funding for AI research, but it is extremely hard to attract outstanding researchers”. The proposed solution is “to offer positions with outstanding academic freedom and visibility”. The ELLIS programme would perform fundamental research in modern AI, spawn start-ups in the field, and aim to foster economic development and use of AI to improve the lives of people. It would be a top employer, “on a par with Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, and MIT” and become a world-class venue to get trained in the field. You can read the entire letter here: https://ellis-open-letter.eu
RISE FOR FEMALE BROADCAST MENTORS
Rise, UK-based advocate group for gender diversity in broadcast manufacturing and services, has announced the pairings for its first professional mentoring scheme. The new programme will see 17 female broadcast industry leaders offering one-on-one mentorship to women at various career levels. Each mentoring placement involves 12 hours of contact, the opportunity to meet fellow mentees on a monthly basis, plus attend networking events and workshops throughout a six-month period. The mentees were chosen from over 35 applications and are all based in the UK. The programme is sponsored Clear-Com, Avid, Bubble Agency, Pixelogic, Sony DADC, Sohonet and Hootsuite. Rise membership is free. Details are available at http://risewib.com
12 YOUR TAKE Yospace
Words By Tim Sewell, CEO,Yospace
Dynamic Ad Insertion technology can help you get the right ad to the right audience at the right time, but it takes some know-how to make it work
needs to provide a link between the broadcaster’s encoders or packagers and the playout automation system in order for them to be properly injected. Note that live commercial breaks, particularly in sport, tend to be highly dynamic and often non-uniform in length. The DAI system has to be adaptable enough to manage that, with the ability to ‘crash back’ to the live programme early if required. Ad copy should be prepared for delivery ahead of time. It must be transcoded to match the adaptive bit-rate (ABR) encoding profile and audio levels of the live stream. ONE-TO-ONE ADDRESSABILITY Server-side stitching must be performed at the edge rather than earlier in the workflow. This is the only way full addressability can scale because you only need to package and deliver the stream once (or twice if you go for a joint HLS/DASH strategy). Here’s a point I cannot emphasise strongly
what the key considerations should be when devising a viewer-friendly digital advertising strategy for the long term. SEAMLESS STITCHING The need for seamless stitching will seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often it’s overlooked: fundamentally, if there’s no audience then there’s no ad revenue. Advertisers and brands follow eyeballs – a mantra they repeat time and again – so ad breaks must be as seamless over OTT as they are on linear TV. To ensure frame-accuracy, SCTE-35 markers* must be correctly placed in the stream. If they’re not present in-band then the Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) system
TIM SEWELL: Digital advertising can engage viewers and boost revenue but the user experience cannot be compromised
elevision has been with us for 70 years, and the concept of TV advertising has been the bedrock of TV revenue for all that time. But
demands are changing. OTT streaming and dynamic ad insertion offer a fantastic opportunity to engage more closely with the viewer and enhance advertising revenues, but they must go hand-in-hand with a premium TV-quality user experience. In this article I’ll outline
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13 YOUR TAKE Yospace
enough: ad stitching tech should act as middleware between a broadcasters’ video delivery workflow and the ad decisioning or programmatic ecosystem. As such it must be fully interoperable, but independent of these other platforms to ensure long-term success (more on this below). The DAI platform must support the open IAB VAST standard, versions 3.0 and 4.0. One of the biggest selling points of DAI is accurate and real-time measurement. Given current industry standards for measurement, where practical, an SDK in the client should fire tracking pixels back to the originating ad server, defaulting to server-side reporting where client-side isn’t possible (as is the case with a number of connected TVs). RELIABILITYAT SCALE Even if you achieve one-to-one addressability within a seamless viewing experience, achieving it at scale is another matter. Any form of advanced targeting dictates that millions of ad calls must be made per ad break. One of the latest innovations for live streaming in this regard is pre-fetch, which allows ad calls to be made in advance, even if it’s not clear when the next ad break will be. The most valuable ad breaks are often the most complex to leverage. Sports events are often very dynamic in that ad breaks are
timed according to the state of play (after a touch-down or time-out) or are unplanned (extra time in a football match). However, the most difficult ad breaks to unlock are often the most valuable, and your DAI provider must be able to support all these more demanding use cases, and at scale. IT IS VERY, VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOUR DAI PROVIDER IS AGNOSTIC TO THIRD-PARTY SYSTEMS other functionality, such as ‘non-linear startover’, or live rewind. There is increasing talk in the industry about reducing ad loads (while maintaining
revenues through targeting) to cater for younger viewers who are being brought up on ad-free experiences. Adaptable ad policies can be managed through a ‘stream management’ provider on a per viewer basis, but only if the streams are personalised rather than just segmented. Broadcasters are beginning to position their OTT products for mainstream adoption, and this marks a new era for the concept of television and TV advertising. With it comes a huge opportunity to excite viewers and greatly enhance the value of television. With the right DAI partner this will drive engagement for many years to come.
FUTURE-PROOFING The most advanced DAI providers are often recognised as ‘stream management’ specialists rather than simply ad stitching enablers, due to the level of integration required with a broadcaster’s end-to-end workflow. It is very, very important that your DAI provider is agnostic to third- party systems along the way – you don’t want future strategic decisions regarding data management, programmatic or ad- decisoning to be compromised by ‘stream management’ being inextricably tied to your decisioning or programmatic workflow. ‘Stream management’ also recognises
* SCTE-35, aka Digital Program Insertion Cueing Message for Cable, is the SMPTE standard that supports the splicing of content into live streams
STREAMPUNK 14 Filmmakers
Social media might be filled with auteurs – but where are the filmmakers? FINDING A NEW ROUTE FOR FILMMAKERS Words by Phil Rhodes
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15 STREAMPUNK Filmmakers
huge amount of money is floating around in the worlds of Twitch, YouTube and other social video platforms, generated by what’s
the OTT providers – Amazon, Netflix – as they attempt to outspend each other. That’s given rise to some of the most ostentatiously high-end television that’s ever existed, but it has still done very little for the world of genuinely indie filmmaking. This could be because the successful online video auteurs, those who could conceivably raise funds for a more traditional production, are generally not budding narrative directors. They’re enthusiasts for their subject – which is often themselves – who happened to find themselves in a position of popularity, so even where crowdfunding works, it mainly feeds more of the same – or at least documentary rather than narrative. Kickstarter is anxious to tell us about more than 24,000 successfully- funded documentary projects that have graced its pages. Of those, 17,428 matched the search term ‘documentary’ at the time of writing. Yes, there have been shorts and features, and there have been web series too, a format which crosses the periodic release schedule of a YouTube channel with the world of narrative filmmaking. In general, though, there hasn’t been that much of it. GETTING SOCIAL WITH SOCIAL It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The effort that must go into creating a pilot episode which can compete with those extravagant Netflix and Amazon shows is beyond what most people can fund out of pocket. Worse, a single pilot episode is not enough for the social web, where a following is often built up over dozens of releases. Few narrative filmmakers could make themselves push out enough of that sort of content, with enough genuine enthusiasm, to build a worthwhile following, and anything better is impossibly expensive. Still, as an enthusiast of well-produced drama, it’s difficult to completely give up on the idea of independent social crowdsourcery. It’s certainly a much more attractive prospect than the traditional, not- so-voluntary, unpaid pseudo-apprenticeship
essentially small-scale TV production. It’s resulted in the creation of a lot of woodworking how-tos and a galaxy of speciality vlogs. It has not, however, done much for the traditional world of independent filmmaking. Why? Well, there are people who find themselves in charge of a significant online presence without ever having really intended to. Someone might decide to post an unedited mobile phone clip on the laundry detergents of ancient Mesopotamia and find that, yes, a million people are willing to subscribe to a steady stream of content on the subject. But there are others who lay out a formal business plan, with a strategy for control over the subject matter and production - after all, nobody wants to become briefly infatuated with something, throw together a video, lose interest, then discover that half of Twitter demands more of the same on a twice-weekly schedule. Either way, get enough people interested, and it’s now entirely plausible for an individual media socialite to wield the sort of power that was previously granted only to the person in the corner office at a production company. If that seems like a stretch, consider that crowdfunding sites like Patreon and Kickstarter exist to turn enthusiastic followers into units of currency. If you have a million fans, you can theoretically produce anything. And out of the top 5000 YouTube channels, how many have a million subscribers? All of them. Still, the existence of these potential mini- moguls doesn’t seem to have pushed much money in the direction of the sort of film and TV we’ve enjoyed for decades. Many YouTube videos can fairly be described as short documentaries, but in internet terms, traditional drama and documentary is mainly being produced and distributed by
LICENSING A POPULAR IP IS NOT AN OPTION READILY AVAILABLE TO THE BUDGETS OF AN INDY AUTEUR
STREAMPUNK 16 Filmmakers
THE RIGHT DIRECTION Indy filmmakers are yet to benefit from social video platforms. Mutual benefit could be the key to success
GIVING SOMETHING BACK The key is probably not to see a social media headcount as a source of funds to be exploited. The idea of mutual benefit in commerce is more important online than it ever has been. Invite a Twitch streamer to play a part in your production, and perhaps that Twitch streamer will play your trailer into his or her stream at some point, and all their viewers will go and watch it. At the end of the day, it’s about time social media gave something back to conventional filmmaking. The complete democratisation of camera and post- production gear, to a really very high level, has made it theoretically possible for more or less everyone to make films that are competent at least technically, and more or less everyone has, give or take, the competence. Back in the day, either you joined as a trainee and worked your way up – a nightmare of working 70 unpaid hours a week – or you made shorts and hoped someone would notice. Perhaps not that much has really changed: the challenge is still getting people to notice.
that people go through before they’re allowed to make a creative decision on a film set. After all, it’s possible to run a social media empire from the back bedroom while wearing a bathrobe (that, for many, is the basis of the attraction.) An alternative approach – maybe a naïve one – might be to exploit a following that’s already been established by someone else. That’s far from a new idea, given the popularity of book-to-film adaptations, film- to-book adaptations, or, in the famous case of Hairspray , a film-to-stage show-to-film adaptation which also spawned a book. Licensing a popular IP is not an option readily available to the budgets of an indy auteur, so the eye of the wannabe turns readily to
the power wielded by people who’ve already climbed the ranks of popularity. In 2018, though, people with a mere four-digit Twitter following can be quite protective of what they have. Twitch users who may only stream to a couple dozen viewers often have a ‘business enquiries’ email address prominently displayed and are cautious about sharing the spotlight. This display of commercial awareness is an aspect of the modern internet that sits uncomfortably alongside the friendliness of the average beer-fuelled Twitch stream, but it’s not hard to understand the caution given how easy it is for a reputation to be tarnished, and a following damaged, by even the hint of selling out.
AT THE END OF THE DAY IT’S ABOUT TIME SOCIAL MEDIA GAVE SOMETHING BACK TO CONVENTIONAL FILMMAKING
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STREAMPUNK 18 Tool of the Month
inamaker is an app-based streaming solution for live
mobile video. Released last year, Cinamaker allows users to record and edit multi-camera live streaming via iOS or Android device. Cinamaker CEO and founder Benjamin Nowak had been working with technology for synchronisation on smartphones for some years, resulting in the iOS music app TuneMob. TuneMob allowed music to be played back, in sync, through up to seven iOS devices simultaneously. “TuneMob was more of a novelty than a powerful utility,” says Nowak. “But it dawned on me that a perfect leverage for our sync technology would be multi-camera video.” Cinamaker offers built-in video syncing using multiple iOS devices, without the need for an externally generated sync or timecode, allowing users to create a live iOS-based production ecosystem, in which multiple iOS devices – or the audio or video devices linked to them – can be switched live without the need for additional devices. Cinamaker is releasing two apps – the primary one will be on iOS. Another consumer app will be released, for Android smartphones only. Cinamaker’s live workflow features include multi-camera capability, live preview
CINAMAKER
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19 Tool of the Month STREAMPUNK
ON STREAM The tool enables live streaming, editing and switching of video as well as live audio mixing
and remote control, all through an iPad interface. At its simplest, Cinamaker can use smartphone cameras directly, or it can connect to external cameras through encoders via HDMI or SDI sources, as well as using RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol). It supports up to four video streams of up to 25Mbps and up to eight audio sources. Through a partnership with Panasonic, Cinamaker is optimised for Panasonic PTZ broadcast cameras, including options for easy remote control. Cinamaker can stream directly to Facebook Live and YouTube Live, as well as to webpages or any RTMP destination. An upcoming cloud-service, called Blaster, will allow users to direct a stream to four different streams at once. Blaster will be provided as an add-on subscription service. Through its iPad UI, Cinamaker can also do live audio mixing. “We also can allow an iPhone to just capture audio and put it in sync with everything else and make it available through the mixer,” says Nowak. “We can also pull audio off a traditional mixer board which can come in as an audio input.” Cinamaker also comes with a graphics system with features like picture-in-picture and chroma key as well as still and animated alpha channel graphics. It also supports text objects and embedding of clips. EDITING EASE One of the newest features in Cinamaker is a real-time editor. “Unless you choose otherwise, all your source footage gets saved on the iPad,”
WE ARE THE VIDEO STORYTELLING TOOL FOR EVERYONE, AT A PRICE POINT THAT EVERYONE CAN AFFORD
explains Nowak. “Not only do you have the cut from your live stream, you have your source footage, so you can edit that with all your metadata preserve.” Through an interface similar to that used for the live stream, users can then play back all the video sources as if they were real- time cameras. “It allows you to move the scrub bar to wherever you want to change a camera selection, or turn graphics on and off, and then essentially re-record as if it were live.” Project files are in the XMEML format and compatible with Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. “When you open a project file in those editors, your source footage is all in sync, and all of your camera decisions and media objects are already in their libraries and in your timeline with all the metadata.” “With that, we can also give users the ability to do editing in a live, real-time workflow by simply touching whatever angle they want at the time,” says Nowak. “It enables live multi-camera editing and live switching very simply.” IN-HOUSE ENCODING The company is also planning to roll out a line of its own encoder hardware. These
encoders will allow for faster and easier device detection on the network. “For professional environments, most people want to use a wired set up,” says Nowak. “We’ll be offering ‘Connectivity Kits’. We’ve sourced great camera adapters, and we’ll also offer smartphone adapters which will allow you to connect your smartphone using power over Ethernet cables, so you can have power and data all day with the reliability of wires.” “We’re doing some testing now with an international broadcaster in the US, as well as with a handful of YouTubers, including Jam In The Van. We’ve done numerous events, everything from small conference room to large corporate events, including a big outdoor event in Costa Rica, and we’re also testing in a handful of schools, because education will be an important market for us. “We believe we are the video storytelling tool for everyone, at a price point that everyone can afford… We’re surprising ourselves. We have a broader appeal than we thought.”
n Learn more about Cinamaker, and download
the latest version, at: www.cinamaker.net
20 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Brightcove
Words by Mark Blair, SVP international, Brightcove GET YOUR AD GAME ON Optimising content for viewing on any device, at any time and anywhere is becoming the norm, and ads must keep up
optimising the experience for each device that ad content might appear on. There will be opportunities for differentiating the ad experience for each viewer on each device, based on a variety of viewing parameters – time of day, location, content being viewed. If a viewer is watching something in the morning, at a bus stop, they’ll be served a much shorter ad, whereas lean-back watching in the evening is going to allow a very different experience. Advertisers and agencies are increasingly going to have to offer full service digital campaigns. This will involve a sit down with a broadcaster to explain exactly how to run a campaign across different channels, different devices, aimed at different audience segments. The agency of next year will develop the efficiency to operate a campaign across the entire spectrum, and the broadcaster will also have the efficiency to buy into that process with a single transaction.
devices in the home. As the mobile device market becomes saturated, and more and more connected devices enter our lives – assisted by 5G networks – connected viewing of anything, on anything, from anywhere will be the norm. This opens up more and more opportunities, and challenges, for online video advertising. In the new landscape, traditional advertising will be entirely digital advertising. We won’t even think of it as ‘digital’ per se. It will all be digital, and fully addressable. Content will be pushed to any device and it will be single technology that’s delivering both the content and the ads.
MARK BLAIR: Video advertising strategies are going to have to be more nimble and of higher quality than ever before
report last month from the Interactive Advertising Bureau said that almost 60% of advertisers’ digital budgets are being allocated
to video, and half of those ad buyers plan to increase that video spending in the next year. The video advertising landscape is always evolving. As handheld devices become the default means of accessing content worldwide, mobile video advertising will be rising to the top of the heap, and video advertising strategies are going to have to be more nimble and of higher quality than ever before. We are moving towards a video landscape which will be dominated by connected
THE RIGHT AD TO THE RIGHT PERSON
We are at a point where technology is allowing us to target advertising with tremendous precision. In the coming years, serving ads will be less a matter of sorting out the right technology to use, than of
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21 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Brightcove
IMPROVING AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT This world of ubiquitous digital ad reach requires a solid foundation if it is to work at its optimum, and that foundation is always going to be the relationship with the customer. So what are some of the best strategies for collaborating with your viewers? First of all, context is key to success. You need to get as much information as possible about the viewing environment in which an ad is being served. Customer data is one of your most valuable assets. But all your deep customer insights will be for naught if you aren’t offering the best possible experience. An advertiser’s mandate is to deliver engaging and informative experiences. Quality matters. When a viewer is watching online video, expectations are no different than if they were watching something on a terrestrial HD service. They will have little tolerance for buffering and they’ll expect the ad
ALL YOUR DEEP CUSTOMER INSIGHTS WILL BE FOR NAUGHT IF YOU AREN’ T OFFERING THE BEST POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE
Service reliability is also essential, and that reliability of service has to extend across devices and locations. A viewer is going to want an identical, glitch-free experience whether she is watching something at home on her couch, or in a café on holiday in a foreign country.
and content quality to be the same as the traditional TV experience. Audio quality is no less important. Customers expect seamlessly normalised audio, and they’ll get angry if they have to jump to reduce the volume when their programme switches to an ad. With Brightcove’s server side ad insertion we always normalise the audio levels from ad content to media content to provide that high quality of experience, no matter what device is being used.
OWN THE DATA You also want to ensure that your
relationship with your customers is as one to one as possible. And one of the best ways
22 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Brightcove
of doing that is to make sure that you own all the data. You don’t want all the customer information you have to also be freely accessible to your competitor. Look closely at the terms and conditions you have with your vendors to be sure that you have full control over the data and that it can’t be shared in ways you don’t want it to be. This month, GDPR comes into effect. This European General Data Protection Regulation will provide stiffer rules about what can and can’t be done with viewer data, but rather than disadvantaging vendors by potentially decimating their databases, the new laws are going to prove to be a real benefit in the long term. Consumer trust is going to be boosted, the databases that vendors end up with will be of higher quality, and with other countries looking with interest at the European law, it may lead to more universal standards and practices for data collection. Of all the core metrics you’re collecting, engagement data is arguably the most important. One of the great advantages of video is as it plays out, you get clear data
payment model has had success, often integrated in telco systems. World TV drama portal Walter Presents, for example, uses Brightcove’s turnkey SVOD platform, with a very small team, to run a successful subscription platform. The cost of delivering video services has really come down. Sponsorship can be a good alternative to advertising too for things like short-form content. You might look at a niche sport that has a high net worth audience behind it, or a big sport with a specific regional limitation. Having access to that highly specific audience can be very appealing for sponsors. But advertising isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it is going everywhere – and learning how to negotiate the opportunities in a fully streaming landscape is going to be one of the greatest assets you can have.
points about where people are engaging with content and at exactly what point they stop. ADVERTISERS AND AGENCIES ARE INCREASINGLY GOING TO HAVE TO OFFER FULL SERVICE DIGITAL CAMPAIGNS AD ALTERNATIVES There are alternatives to advertising, of course. SVOD and TVOD are valid options, provided the content is at a value where it can be monetised. In non-European markets, primarily Asia and the Middle East, a micro-
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WHAT’S MINE Feel like you’re being targeted? Just wait until AI- charged advertising gets hold of you Words by Adrian Pennington
MINED interest in buying a new deodorant, and I support West Ham.
anonymised ads, but that’s not where things are going. Social media networks in particular are already finessing ways to predict our every desire. It gets them closer to the holy grail of serving up ads that don’t feel like ads because they’re useful. None of this is new, having been core to the work of marketers and Mad Men since the dawn of television. But when you apply it to a technology that is the centre of almost everything we do, suddenly the scale is totally different. “With the advent of digital streaming services, TV has become an increasingly individual affair, and therein lies the challenge that all content providers now face – if a viewer isn’t watching TV with others, why should they be offered the same viewing experience, content and promotions as everyone else?” observes Ron Downey, CEO of multiscreen video developer Massive Interactive. The power to leverage data and deliver truly tailored consumer experiences is made possible when broadcasters shift their
ecently, while watching Homeland on catch-up via my Virgin box, I experienced something that is increasingly
The same programme viewed as a live stream increasingly serves up more of these ‘personalised’ ads, which are even more jarring in their incomplete knowledge of me. I may have signed up to Channel 4’s digital service to occasionally stream one of my favourite shows, and I understand the bargain struck by trading my data to ultimately pay for ‘free’ content, but such targeting still remains, to my mind, an uncomfortable experience. Perhaps it’s just that I’m used to
familiar to TV viewers. In the ad-break a commercial appeared which clearly thought it knew something about me. It was an ad for deodorant and featured players from Liverpool FC in the club dressing room extolling the virtues of the product. This really irked me. I may live in Liverpool and I fall into the male demographic, but the ad was skewed for a younger person than me, I have no
WITH THE ADVENT OF DIGITAL STREAMING SERVICES, TV HAS BECOME AN INCREASINGLY INDIVIDUAL AFFAIR
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content and infrastructure online. Sky’s decision to migrate its TV services to IP, and ultimately remove the need for a satellite dish, is an example. Among other things this will help Sky to deeper user personalisation. Sky’s addressable TV service, Sky AdSmart is already enabling advertisers to target households based on factors such as age, location and life stage from a combination of Sky’s own customer data as well as info from consumer profile experts like Experian. FUELLING PERSONALISATION And, according to Sky, it works. Switching channels during a targeted advert is reduced by 48%. Virgin Media has integrated AdSmart into its set-top boxes too, giving both companies combined access to 30 million viewers across the UK and Ireland, and crucially more scale to compete with their true rivals, the social media networks. Fuelling personalisation like this requires massive amounts of user data. Digital-first companies such as Netflix are experts in leveraging every swipe, point and click from their viewers to deliver sticky consumer experiences. However, traditional broadcasters haven’t been in a position to capitalise on the information at their fingertips and have lost valuable market share as a result. “This is beginning to change,” says Downey. “Video service providers, who have either made or are in the process of making the shift to OTT, have implemented user-experience platforms that allow them to harness the power of data to deliver truly personalised experiences. Whether this is the ability to identify a segment of users likely to churn and tailor promotions to prevent this, or increase customer loyalty through the delivery of highly targeted content, success will come to those who put the experience first.” Virgin Media owner, Liberty Global, is taking its data mining to another level. It is harvesting consumer information aggregated from its 24 million customers, accessed over 14 million devices, and uniting it with third-party data to offer insights on advertising and programming to granular targeting goes hand in hand with technologies to automate the process of insertion in individual streams. According to IAB Europe/IHS Markit, more than half of European display ad revenue is now traded programmatically – that is, automatically. The industry makes use of an intricate web of ad agencies, exchanges, networks, broadcasters with which it partners. The effectiveness of increasingly
EVEN A 0.1% ACCURACY IMPROVEMENT IN OUR PRODUCTION WOULD YIELD HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN ADDITIONAL EARNINGS
demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms to manage the delivery of those ads around the clock. Data is a hot topic since the Cambridge Analytica scandal smashed the illusion of Facebook as a neutral, free service. Google, Amazon, Twitter et al have not been subject to the same data regulation as broadcasters, but in the EU that changes fromMay (see boxout). EXTRACTING YOUR INTERESTS But digital first companies, as usual, are one step ahead. Google chief Sundar Pichai has already alerted us to the company’s shift to an “AI first” world. Applying an AI is the difference between making multi-millions in ad dollars and multi-billions. In a Google white paper (https://arxiv. org/pdf/1708.05123.pdf), the company explains that an online publisher’s revenue relies heavily on the ability to predict click-through rate (CTR) and calls this “a large-scale problem that is essential to the multi-billion dollar online advertising industry”. Identifying frequently predictive features, and at the same time exploring unseen or rare cross features, is the key to making good predictions, the paper states. Since current systems are inadequate, Google’s team posits the use of a “novel neural network that explicitly applies feature crossing in an automatic fashion”. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is at it too. A recent research paper (www.microsoft. com/en-us/research/publication/model- ensemble-click-prediction-bing-search- ads) from its Bing search unit notes that “even a 0.1% accuracy improvement in our production would yield hundreds of millions of dollars in additional earnings.” Alibaba is on a similar wavelength. To better “extract users’ interest by exploiting rich historical behaviour data”, crucial for building a CTR prediction model, its data scientist proposed (https://arxiv. org/abs/1706.06978) an industrial scale Deep Interest Network to be developed and deployed within Alibaba’s display advertising system.
According to US academic, and former advisor to the Obama White House and Facebook, Dipayan Ghosh, AI will increase the speed of ad mediation, inundating users with content tuned to their personal desires. In an op-ed in the New York Times , he predicts: “It will abet the seamless and accurate development of ‘look alike’ audiences enabling advertisers to upload their customer lists and automatically send ads to like-minded people that they do not already know. And it will enable automated contingency-based marketing, allowing clients to programmatically trigger certain kinds of content to be shared in the moments after real world events transpire.” The fallout from the Facebook scandal has everyone scrutinising exactly what data tech giants hold. Google basically knows everything you’ve ever done on its platform – every email you’ve ever sent or was sent to you via Gmail, every Google search you’ve made – and deleted – and every Google Ad you’ve ever viewed or clicked on. It’s worth remembering that Google also owns YouTube. Facebook has a similar database on all its users but bowed to pressure and (blaming a bug) is now deleting all videos filmed using the company’s desktop web camera tool, which most users thought had been deleted anyway. The company is also requiring advertisers to actively certify that they have permission to upload contact lists for targeting customers on Facebook, in order to better preserve user privacy. You don’t have to be Elon Musk to feel nervous about this. Even erstwhile Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon pledged his allegiance to restore “digital sovereignty” at a recent Financial Times event. He defined this along the lines of reclaiming our own personal intellectual property from big tech firms albeit as part of his wider nationalist polemic. “As the industry integrates AI into digital advertising, disinformation operations and legitimate political communications will gradually become concerted, automatic and seamless,” Ghosh suggests.
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ETHICAL RESPONSE You can call it paranoia, but such ideas are now part of the mainstream cultural dialogue. The current season of Homeland is themed around the insidious dangers of fake news and its dissemination on social networks. A group of Silicon Valley insiders intends to put a check on this runaway train. “What began as a race to monetise our attention is now eroding the pillars of our society: mental health, democracy, social relationships and our children,” states The Center for Humane Technology. This organisation is headed by Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist (a position specially created for him after he distributed an in-house email questioning the effects of Google tech design on society) and is arguing for an ethical response to what it sees as society’s addiction to clicks. “Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google… are caught in a zero-sum race for our finite attention, which they need to make money,” the Center contends. “Constantly forced to outperform their competitors, they must use increasingly persuasive techniques to keep us glued. content grows exponentially, platform companies must rely increasingly on automation: YouTube automates billions of videos to play next for 1.5 billion users; Facebook automates millions of ads to its 2 billion users; Twitter automates showing millions of #trending topics to hundreds of millions of users. Humane Tech says these automatic algorithms are “easily gamed” to manipulate society at a massive scale, “because platforms lack the capacity to reliably check for conspiracies, lies and fake users. We can’t expect attention-extraction companies like YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter to change, because it’s against their business model,” says the group. The collapse of public trust in Facebook is welcome news to those who have warned about the perils of ‘data extractivism’. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argues in The Guardian that the data debate presents the political left with an opportunity to rethink many of its positions: “on how to organise the provision of welfare in the age of predictive analytics; how to organise bureaucracy They point AI-driven news feeds, content and notifications at our minds, continually learning how to hook us more deeply – from our own behaviour.” The organisation notes that as
WHAT BEGAN AS A RACE TO MONETISE OUR ATTENTION IS NOW ERODING THE PILLARS OF OUR SOCIETY
of liberated behaviour. “True they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce but they cannot reimpose the hierarchical propaganda driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago,” he writes. “By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history – the educated and connected human being.”
and the public sector in the age of citizens equipped with sensors and, often, superior technologies; how to organise new kinds of trade unions in the age of ubiquitous automation; how to organise a centralised political party in the age of decentralised and horizontal communications.” This chimes with commentators like Paul Mason. In his book Postcapitalism , that info-tech will deliver socialist projects from co-operatives to communes to outbreaks
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