Saturday 25 July 2015

In the clique of the boutique


Shots - July 2015

More and more Flame artists and VFX supervisors are choosing to become masters of their destiny by opening specialist shops, but will the success of the little guys mean they’ll get too big for their boutiques? Adrian Pennington speaks to the heads of several bijou studios to find out how big ambitions and small budgets are changing the market.

Small groups of entrepreneurial talent have been going independent for as long as there have been larger facilities for them to splinter from. Green shoots are, after all, vital for the regeneration of this business. But what’s noticeable about the recent trend in start-ups is the sheer number that have launched and thrived in today’s incredibly competitive market.
Most of these new businesses are happy to be classified as boutique, where the term refers both to size and a culture of personal service that’s apparently at odds with the factory mentality
of giant operations.
“Boutique is an attitude. It means more than one-size-fits-all,” says Paul Simpson, who pioneered the boutique movement with Realise Studio in 1999. “It’s really about running jobs from an artist-led, rather than a production or accounts, perspective.”
Derek Moore describes Coffee & TV, which he co-founded, as a “hippy commune”, adding “We support each other through successes and disappointments with a unified feeling you don’t get in a large facility.”
Will Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Milk, speaks for many when he notes, “We’re not listed on the stock market with a duty to return a dividend to investors. We still get everyone around the table and let them know the P&L of the business and where we are going with it.”
Scott Griffin, nineteentwenty’s MD, says he wants to inculcate “a small company feel but not a small company reputation”; while the essential
appeal of a boutique for Neon co-founder Tom Bridges, is “the palpable sense of enthusiasm, of collaboration, which our clients seem to enjoy. It’s not impossible to recreate this in larger facilities, but I think it’s exponentially more difficult.”
At a large company with more work and people to juggle, it’s not uncommon for a VFX producer to be looking after 10 jobs at a time, which means they’re being spread rather thinly.
“Jobs will often be shoe-horned in, last minute changes to existing jobs have to be accommodated, artists are being pulled off one job to finish another or to be sent on a shoot,” notes Chris Allen, executive producer at CherryCherry. A boutique operates on a different scale. “We can respond to client requests immediately. When you call us, it will often be me that answers the phone,” says Allen.
Hani AlYousif, VFX supervisor and founder of Filament, makes a similar point. “A producer and director don’t want to spend half an hour of their booking time waiting in reception. They know they can reach me. They know they can always get in when they want and that I will personally do the job.”
‘Boutique’ signifies a place that’s run a little leaner, is able to adapt a little quicker and offers an open architecture for different types of creative to gather in one space.
“It’s not just who you are but who you say you are,” says Jason Mayo, partner at New York’s Click 3X. “When companies say they are boutique they want to present a little bit of a
personality or atmosphere for a client to make them feel more comfortable.”
Artists with itchy feet will always seek to break out on their own, but the cost of doing so has previously been too high without venture capital backing. The shift from bespoke to off-the-shelf computing gear and from film to digital as an origination/distribution medium, has altered
the picture dramatically.
“When I was a colourist, the badge on the kit
really mattered,” observes Gary Szabo, MD of Smoke & Mirrors. “Now clients genuinely don’t care. They want delivery on time and on budget and above creative expectations.”
In 1995 a Flame cost a million pounds. Even three years ago you needed £200k, putting it beyond the reach of most wannabe owner- operators. In 2000, £270k would get you 240TB of storage, which today can be picked up for about £25k. Back then you would get little change from £1.5m if you wanted a telecine machine. Now grading software like Da Vinci is given away free.
Where hero hardware was once lauded above the operator, the industry now genuinely claims to prize the talent behind the machine.
AlYousif believes the catalyst for this was
the introduction of Smoke on a Mac in 2010. He bought two of them, sublet rooms in Soho and was off and running with a handful of loyal clients. After investing £90k in a Flame, Filament had to ramp up to beat MPC to the GoCompare campaign for Fold7 in 2013. “Once you have a Flame you can scale as much as you like by renting licences for Flare [a subset of Flame],” he says.
The democracy of tech is a universal phenomenon – VFX shops across the globe, from the US to Sydney to Amsterdam, have sprung up almost overnight. “You don’t need huge render farms on site,” says Simpson. “By plugging into the cloud you can scale to take on as much work as the bigger places.”
Kit costs are never this simple, of course. As Coffee & TV’s Moore observes, “The minute you have two people working on shared data you need shared infrastructure, which needs to be maintained and operate securely.”
Aside from the opportunities afforded by lower- cost gear, many founding fathers (VFX remains a male domain) also cite the bureaucratic hurdles in facility supermarkets as a reason to up sticks. Simon Wilkinson, managing director of The Flying Colour Company, recalls such frustrations at a former employer: “It took 35 business plans
just to sign-off buying a Baselight. I missed
the dynamism and diversity of being at the front of the creative process.”
Gripes like these may strike a chord with anyone seeking greater career control. “At a large outfit you’re just a number on a spreadsheet,” says AlYousif. “Now that I run the sales and admin side I don’t have to worry about an operating group outside the UK deciding to restructure my job.”
Bridges launched Neon as a reaction against financial targets and internal politics. “I wanted to focus on the work – and have that be the yardstick by which we get measured, rather than how much we spend on client lunches,” he says. “We make an expensive, highly bespoke, product. To me it’s madness to apply high volume, double-glazing- style sales techniques to that.” Neon is able to invest in R&D projects (such as pushing the technique of photogrammetry for short film Macro), “which no investor would have countenanced”.
An oft-quoted complaint from those formerly at big facilities is that the star artist will attend meetings to win the work but during the course of post will get shunted to another project.
“The client will get moved to the ‘B’ team or whoever happens to be free to work,” says Moore. “That has to happen to keep the machine running, but it means clients can feel lost.”
The more experienced an artist, the more likely they are to make a career move that will allow them to trade on their name. Setting up your own studio can be as much a lifestyle choice as it is about earning more of the pie. As Milk’s Cohen puts it: “Many have fantasized about the nirvana of owning their own place where everyone walks on pink fluffy carpets. We got our opportunity [when The Mill shuttered its TV programming VFX division] and now we have a responsibility to make it work.”
Aspiring to be a master of one’s own destiny is often just pub talk, but the recession may ironically have spurred more folk to walk the talk and actually walk out on their job security.
“Lots of people were doing crazy stuff for very little money just to keep money coming through the door,” says Moore. “When we came out of recession, budgets never went back up. That meant people found it hard to hit the margins, leading to a lot of the most talented staff feeling a bit disenfranchised and thinking they can do it better. What’s happened is a perfect storm of budgets dropping and technology becoming more affordable, allowing the best artists to prove to
themselves whether they can do it better or not.” Griffin admits he was one of those, co-founding nineteentwenty in November 2013 “to try and produce the best VFX for high-end commercials, but more economically.”
With the boutique genie out of the bottle the post production model has arguably changed forever. “More and more clients prefer the same great quality of work but with the more personalised service you get at a smaller place,” says Allen.
While some clients opt to route work through large facilities with whom agencies run bulk accounts, directors may stick to their guns for the choice of working with select talent wherever they may be [see box Big or boutique? below]. This is often the case if directors feel backed into working for an agency’s own ‘boutique’, such as WPP’s Gramercy and Publicis’ Prodigious.
“The market has worked in favour of dynamic businesses that can wrap their arms around production companies rather than simply supply them,” says Wilkinson.
None of this is to denigrate the work or reputation of international powerhouses like Framestore, MPC and The Mill. Most ex-employee- turned-facility-chiefs acknowledge the debt that they owe to their alma mater and the crucial role that these enterprise-class facilities can play in leading the market.
“MPC has a depth of creative talent not available in smaller studios,” says MPC Advertising’s global MD Graham Bird. “We offer more specialist talent in terms of digital intermediate – lighting, animation and world-class colour grading. The ability to deliver a project creatively from start to finish incorporating colour grading is a huge advantage.”
By definition, boutiques can’t offer that breadth of service, but being bijou shouldn’t lead to the misconception that they can’t take on volume.
“Boutique implies we’re not capable of the big stuff – and that’s not true,” says Moore, who’s not a fan of the term. “We won a very large-scale international campaign [H&M through Strange Cargo] because the client trusted us and wasn’t worried about our notionally smaller footprint.”
Allen agrees. “Smaller companies are just as capable of taking on creatively heavy VFX jobs. The difference being we just can’t take on as many of them simultaneously.”
In a saturated market often the greatest challenge for a start-up is finding and winning the work. “Loyal clients have stood by us and we can be competitive in terms of cost,” says Griffin. “We’ve been very careful to turn down a couple of larger jobs because at the time we felt we weren’t able to do them justice. An important part of the process is being honest about what you can and can’t do. One bad job would get around Soho like wildfire.”
Coffee & TV’s headcount has leapt from just four to 24 in two years. “Our original goal was to make the business robust. Now our goal is to prioritise the quality of work we do. We want to ring-fence the size of the operation, to stay together on one floor, because when you’re split between floors or buildings it is really difficult to communicate between teams.”
If size is part of being ‘boutique’, at what point do successful boutique brands lose that feeling – or what strategies can they employ to retain it?
“Someone once told me that after reaching around 20 people you need to start putting a lock on the stationery cupboard,” says Bridges. “That’s the point at which you start needing a layer of middle management, when going into work becomes just another job, when people can stop caring as much, and when financial priorities will
likely become more important than artistic ones. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, of course, but I think there’s probably something to it.”
According to Allen, there’s a tipping point where a house goes from being a boutique to a beast. “Which is great, but of course some beasts need constant feeding.”
With growth comes greater financial pressure to meet the monthly payroll. As Allen observes, “The growth of a post house is very much exponential – doubling in size doesn’t necessarily mean your profit will.”
Milk began in 2013 as a largish boutique with 40 people. Now, having just opened a studio in Cardiff, the headcount is 120 – and rising.
“We were very vocal about not wanting to be big and that’s still the case,” says Cohen. “If you open somewhere else with 20 or 30 people you can very much replicate the culture you have in your main office rather than growing to 300 people at your main site.”
Opening small satellite companies seems to be the way many boutiques envision future growth. Coffee & TV and nineteentwenty staff London offices backed by a Bristol base. With studios in London and Istanbul, and plans to open another location soon, CherryCherry’s Allen says “You could call us a global boutique.”
In January, MPC opened a studio in Paris, far smaller than its LA and New York operations but along similar lines to its homes in Amsterdam and Mexico. Bird calls this “boutique studio within a network” unique and a way of keeping ambitious talent within the family.
“We help [talent] to realise their ambition by setting up a new business,” says Bird. “The studios have a boutique feel but they don’t have the limitations one might associate with some standalone studios since they are fully connected to MPC’s wider resources.”
Billing itself as the original boutique, the 20-year-old Smoke & Mirrors has seen its business treble in size in the last four years with a £19m+ turnover and a staff of 250.
“We’ve had to focus on not losing that boutique feel while overseeing a period of terrific growth,” says Szabo. “We have to manage growth to retain the personality of the company.”
That includes last year’s relocation to a new five-floor Poland Street home. “We’re breaking out of boutique and into the big league, but we’ve got to make sure our clients have that boutique feel – the commitment you give to their projects.”



Big or boutique? The directors’ perspective
“Directors want to surround themselves with a team they can trust and if the relationship you have with an artist is a good one then the size of the house is irrelevant,” says David Rosenbaum, LA-based director at Humble. “However, with budgets getting smaller it’s becoming more and more difficult to justify spend on VFX, so there’s something to be said for smaller facilities because they can usually match your budget.”
Having graduated from Digital Domain, Rosenbaum disagrees that the culture of giant
VFX shops is necessarily corporate. “Nevertheless, if you choose a big house there is a higher chance you may not be getting their ‘A’ team,” he says. “You may get their ‘B’ or ‘C’ team because other directors or clients take precedence over you.
“Directors are selfish beasts who want to know we’re the only ones in the room even though we realise we’re not. Since boutiques don’t have the structure to support that many jobs there’s an advantage in going there to get their ‘A’ team all of the time.”
When director Christopher Riggert started out he was attracted to the best known brands, but over time his opinion changed.
“I wasn’t making deep relationships with the people in the organisation,” he says. “Your sole contact is with one or two heads of department then you are pushed around internally. I found it very frustrating because if something starts to go wrong and you are on a timeline crunch you need direct access to operators. I’ve subsequently sought more boutique experiences because I want to know who the operators are. Ultimately
it comes down to the person making contact with the work and their commitment to it.”
Repped by Biscuit Filmworks and based out of LA, Riggert tends to use Rock Paper Scissors for editing and its sister VFX boutique a52. “I could still be working on an edit while a52 are blocking out 3D, so the workflow makes sense. And they know they have some allegiance from me.” He adds, “I’m not scared to work with people remotely in [Riggert’s native] Australia from here. We no longer have to be sitting in the same room.”

The view from the US
Having spent more than half its 22 years as a boutique, New York’s Click 3X has broadened into a creative digital studio and design company with around 70 staff. Partner Jason Mayo says its recent planned expansion is part of a macro trend in the US away from smaller shops.
“There’s a move toward places that can do everything in one package,” he explains.
“Those with smaller places might be able to handle specific jobs for less money, but they can’t offer all the things a client might want.”
He thinks the trend toward specialisms in VFX, graphics or editing may be reversing because deliverables are changing. “Outside of the TVC, clients want rich media content for digital ads, or pre-rolls, a Facebook game, versions of video for YouTube,
Instagram and Vine. People are trying to get twice the work done for the same amount of money and with fewer people it’s almost impossible to manage.”
While production companies are adding graphics and VFX arms or editing departments, edit boutiques are adding Flame and graphic design. Click 3X has appointed 10 directors and owns shooting stages as well as suites
for VFX, design, grading and digital. “Five years ago it would have been impossible to take on the size of job we can now,” Mayo says.
“Boutiques still work because the talent is more diverse and the software investment is attainable now. But you have to be very committed to a specialism and be selective in your work rather taking everything on at the same time.”


Friday 17 July 2015

LiveLike promises sports virtual reality from a GoPro

SVG Europe

http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/svg-europe-analysis-livelike-promises-sports-virtual-reality-from-a-gopro/

Virtual reality promises to place viewers in the best seat in the house at live sports events but most emergent solutions require placement of a bulky, expensive multi-headed rig and use of bespoke picture-stitching software and streaming algorithms. Not so LiveLike, a San Francisco-based start-up which launched in May with a social sports viewing app for VR that makes use of broadcast cameras already in situ at a venue. The idea is to make VR capture less of the bolt-on problem which bedevilled stereo 3D, and more of a simple button push operation.
“Our product is a mobile-based virtual reality application that teleports fans to a real stadium presidential suite from where they can watch full live games and feel like they are present at the event,” explains founder and CEO Andre Lorenceau.
For ‘presidential suite’ read skybox or VIP hospitality suite. The view is one that you might get overlooking or looking down on the stadium.
“It gives broadcasters the ability to broadcast in virtual reality using an app that is complete and comfortable enough for viewers to want to spend a full game inside of,” says Lorenceau.
VR sports experiences such as NextVR’s NBA courtside views immerse the user in a 360-degree or 180-degree live environment using a custom set-up and multiple Red Dragons which can cost $500,000 a pop. LiveLike’s aim is to get sports VR content out into the market quicker by offering a more cost-effective solution.
Unlike NextVR, LiveLike’s solution uses just one camera. Unlike NextVR this won’t give a 360-degree view but by placing a wide angle lens on the camera LiveLike says it will provide a field of view up to 170-degrees.
LiveLike then wraps that video feed into their app, placing it behind the rendered glass of the virtual ‘presidential suite’.
For cameras? Lorenceau says even a GoPro can be used. “It is an easy-to-adopt solution that requires no special equipment at all, simply one fish-eye lensed camera,” he says. Close-ups of action can also be overlaid on the crowd allowing for multiple views of the action at once.
Another cool idea, which may beat Facebook-owned Oculus Rift to the punch, is the idea of social interaction. “Inside LiveLike, fans can instantly change seats to catch every goal from right behind the posts, and best of all, they can hang out with their friends on the same virtual couch to cheer together, no matter how far they actually are.”
It’s a new development for LiveLike and like the rest of the system is still a prototype but the ability to chat with multiple friends is being readied for launch early 2016.
It is also working on a way to deliver 360 video angles and on building live streaming capabilities. Currently optimised for Samsung’s GearVR, LiveLike is working with other VR platforms in time for their launch around Christmas and early 2016.
Lorenceau says the firm is already partnering with “multiple broadcasters” to bring its technology to major sports events next year. “If we can immerse you in the moments you really want to be immersed in, like scoring a goal or a touchdown, and then bring you back to your suite with your friends that will be a better overall experience,” he says.

MAM: From Centre Court to Second Screen

Broadcast

Traditional MAMs are too slow for fast turnaround sports, but asset management remains vital to exploit digital rights for second screen and for archive. A look at how four sports producers use MAM.


Wimbledon and Rugby World Cup

IMG manages the archive rights for both the AELTC for Wimbledon and World Rugby for this summer's World Cup. Asset management workflow is similar in both cases.

“The live feeds are recorded into EVS and logged and clipped using EVS IP Director as live and sent to Avid for quick turnaround,” explains Dave Shield, SVP Global Director of Engineering & Technology at IMG. “Where heavier editing is required the material resides on near line Avid ISIS and accessed for browsing via Avid Interplay Production Asset Management or by IPD.”

Finished programming is sent to the archive. “For Wimbledon this means keeping whole matches as well as finished daily highlights packages and any digital clips published online. The MAM is not really used in live production, it comes into its own as a media management process at the end.”

IMG's MAM is from Ardome, software acquired by Vizrt and incorporated into its latest MAM Viz One to which IMG will be upgrading by year end.


Henley Royal Regatta

For the first time since 1968, boating extravaganza Henley Royal Regatta was broadcast live. Earlier this month, eight hours a day over five days of action was live streamed to the Regatta's YouTube channel under production command of Sunset+Vine Digital.

“The workflow is similar to the one we employ for Crufts,” explains James Abraham, S+V's digital strategy director.

Working with facility partner Timeline, S+V ingest RF feeds from drones, hoists, Thames-side positions and ENG cameras, plus onboard GoPros into a nearby flyaway gallery where the world feed was cut by editorial director Michael Cole. Streaming specialist Nexus Entertainment encoded the content, published online and provided a duplicate stream for producers to assemble a 20-minute daily highlights show and individual clips of all 200 races.

Logging for the event was nowhere near as complicated as the mammoth data collection that went into S+V's host broadcast of the Commonwealth Games - but just as important.

“The track is a well-defined straight mile so we know where we are in a clip and we've known the names of teams, coxes, coaches and schools for months to prepare stories,” says Abraham. “We took expert advice to understand who was playing for a Team GB place and where any hysterics might come from.”

Metadata is held with the video in perpetuity. “It is important to us and Henley that if someone rows for a school today and they make the Olympic team for Tokyo 2020 then we are able to find that footage and react to it.

“There are a lot of assumptions that Henley is simply a posh day out – a perception which used to exist about Wimbledon,” he adds. “It is possible to elevate the sport to a wider audience and show that this is not about lifestyle but a true bluechip sports event that represents one of the pinnacles of rowing. Henley needed to invest in broadcast in order to raise its brand profile and an internet-based solution helps them reach a wider audience. The story we are telling is able to give context to the athletes and that is only possible with an editorially-led approach to asset management.”

US Golf Majors
US media management and distribution company T3Media has honed its MAM over a decade in live sports and claims major US golf tournaments as clients. For these events it negotiates with the host broadcaster to access select feeds (from up to 100 cameras ringing the course) and pulls them into EVS servers which amount to 20TB or 300 hours over four days.

The archive is used to post produce tournament packages and acts as a repository into which rights holders can dip at any time including augmenting coverage in the build up to the following year's tournament.

According to T3Media, the host broadcaster (Fox Sports in the case of the US Open in June) is able to access the archive in some cases faster than from their own EVS recordings. T3Media also produces around 700 clipped highlights (such as a Rory McIlroy birdie and all the approach shots), encodes and publishes those to the organiser's live mobile app in about 15 minutes.

The heart of the operation is T3Media's Library Manager which gives users access to frame accurate previews of every piece of archived content, and tools that create search terms to quickly locate a specific moment.

“The software provides the means to load, review, and add frame accurate metadata to assets,” explains explains Greg Lose, T3Media SVP product and engineering.. “Users interact with the tool’s video player to create custom category timelines (such as scene, legal, descriptive or trivia) and vocabularies and can use it to edit, preview and export metadata. The tool supports both title-level metadata (such as title, talent roster) and frame-based metadata at the moment of its creation (such as sports play-by-play, scene detection).

It's a process which could be elevated in partnership with tennis federation USTA for whom T3Media also works. “We would take the data feed produced by IBM detailing the speed, type and tracking of a shot and sync that to our metadata with the video,” explains Lose. “Then we'll hire loggers to input subjective description like 'Prince Charles spectating' or 'fantastic backhand' to the scientific metadata. The more we enrich the metadata the greater the possible search and discovery of those time-based moments.”


UEFA Champions League
Deltatre provides two platforms for rights holders of UEFA's production of Champions League. One is a browser-based on-demand clips distribution solution called Livex. The other is a full archive management system of content called Legacy. With up to eight matches per night, this represents a considerable operational and technical challenge.

Legacy's MAM based components are EVS based and Deltatre provides the workflow around it for contributing video content and integrating match-based metadata to auto-populate the system.

Deltatre also create video assets and related metadata that populates Legacy, such as match highlights, pre and post-match content. Editorial team's use Legacy content to then populate UEFA digital media channels (.com, social, YouTube).

The archive runs from 1992 to the present and houses all CL matches including additional ISO angles, pre/post match footage. Users are able to select footage and pull down content in a variety of formats from broadcast through to digital mezzanines, stored at Interoute in Geneva.

“All match assets are searchable on Legacy to enable the creation of fast turnaround editorial content as distinct from fast turnaround match highlights,” explains Pete Burns, Delatre's UK commercial manager. “Editorial means the creation of packages like 'goals against former clubs' or 'late winning goals' or 'great comeback compilations' during the game for playout at halftime or post-match because we have access to this wealth of content.”

Legacy combines match video with metadata which Deltatre collects on behalf of UEFA. This data feed contains automated data, such as player tracking to generate heat maps, with stats such as 'shots on target' which are logged manually by Deltatre staff in the stadium. All the data is validated to check for any inconsistencies at the company's Turin HQ before being synced with the video in Legacy.
“For fast turnaround match highlight content the traditional MAM is not really used because of time constraints,” says Burns. “We are seeing a move toward a ecosystem using Forscene (cloud-based clip assembly) that allows us to combine live video with graphics (from Deltatre's own Magma graphics platform) with data in realtime, overlaid with commentary to create match highlights. If you are creating highly reactive fast turnaround editorially-led programming it makes sense to use the archive MAM.”

Since off-the-shelf MAMs are less suitable for such near live content creation, sports producers including Deltatre prefer to develop their own bespoke MAM software.

“There's no doubt that sports archive is valuable but the real value is in live or near live content,” says Burns. “Broadcasters want to enhance their main coverage with access to a wider selection of clips and content for second screens platforms, such as web, mobile and tablet.”

That is the focus of Deltatre's latest initiative which captures a variety of camera angles, graphics and data feeds via EVS C-Cast to enhance broadcasters digital coverage. Already in use by Sky Sports forThe Ashes, the full extent of the service will be applied by UEFA from the start of the 2015-16 Champions League.

UEFA is also introducing audio watermarking, a process that involves embedding audio stamps into one of the audio tracks of the live feed. The idea is that these stamps will enable broadcasters to further market their second screen experience.


For instance, a Lionel Messi goal would be audio watermarked linking the match action to a series of relevant additional content available on the viewer’s second screen, such as further information about the player, an opportunity to view a selection of his previous Champions League goals or an Adidas e-commerce promotion.

The Evolution of MAM

Broadcast Tech p28

Media Asset Management systems are gaining increasing functionality as file-based workflows and multiplatform delivery becomes standard across the industry.


You could ask ten different users and a dozen different vendors what they understand media asset management (MAM) to be and you'd get different answers. MAM used to simply connect storage to a layer of software with information about its contents but asset management has become fundamental to pretty much every part of production, post and distribution.

This creates its own problems, not helped by the way different MAM system vendors market their product. Where does a MAM stop and a PAM (Production Asset Management) start? Or a GAM (Graphic) for that matter? Others use terminology like media logistics or workflow orchestration. Is MAM a library management system or a end-to-end content lifecycle platform?

Vendor driven categorisation of MAM is meaningless,” declares Petter Ole Jakobsen, CTO at Vizrt. “Our view is that MAM is changing from the task of storage to one of getting content from in-point to out-point in the fastest way and also to store it for eternity.”

Service providers have pressing need to launch channels quickly and to repurpose material for outlets including OTT on-demand and catch-up, create international versions, box sets and promos to support it all. That means knowing where content is and getting access to it fast.

Service providers used to come to us and say 'we want some intelligent storage for our content and to deliver it to a single point,'” says Lesley Marr, COO, Deluxe Media Europe. “Now the requests are about the whole supply chain delivering to multi-platforms and not about one area or piece of kit.

These are not new requirements but demand has massively increased as services have become outsourced and aggregated,” she says. “ITV, for example, has a VOD platform it manages in house, linear playout managed by Ericsson, content preparation managed by Deluxe, and global content produced and distributed by a range of providers. How do you tie all that together and get some intelligence in the supply chain in order to find an asset?”

A few year back MAM vendors had strengths in particularly business areas or workflow, whether that was around news, production, programme prep or archive - to the extent that some facilities ended up with multiple MAM systems or, at the very least, a lot of overlapping technology that brought about a notion of siloed cultures.

A siloed approach is typical of the way software has been developed in the broadcast industry,” says Tony Taylor, CEO, TMD. “There can be no argument that the future will be around file-based workflows in data centre environments. This depends upon metadata: acting on it, reacting to it and enriching it as it passes between and through facilities.”

If smart MAM is better understood as metadata then gathering it starts at the camera, journeys through the production stage, incorporates mastering and formatting into deliverables such as DPP files and its retrieval from archive afterwards.

MAM is moving further away from technical standards and deeper into the business domain where each organisation is different,” says Nick Ryan, CTO and co-founder, Nativ. “In terms of metadata, MAMs generally aim to support over-arching metadata standards (for example EBUCore) whilst also trying to provide mechanisms for flexible custom schema definitions. Rights data is even more complex and standalone rights management systems are needed and hence integration starts to play a part.”

A layered approach

It may be helpful to conceptualise a multi-platform workflow in terms of layers. At the bottom are hardware like servers, encoders and transcoders, and the content delivery networks. Above that is a control layer, which tells the hardware what to do with each piece of content. Above that is the business layer where executives examine the economics of the operation to make commercial decisions. In the middle lies asset and workflow management.

Put simply, a CEO should be able to look at one screen – familiar to them because it is in the enterprise management layer – and make a decision to, say, put a particular programme on iTunes,” says Taylor. “That decision should pass automatically to the workflow management system which will draw on the technical metadata to determine precisely which processes are required, and implement them at the right time, again fully automatically.”

Vizrt says its latest developments will extend reach into the control room for video management ahead of playout and into post with deeper Adobe After Effects workflows.
MAM is no longer about news or sports programming, it is also about promos and playout and live production,” says Jakobsen. “It doesn't make sense to have a number of different video management systems when the goals is to get to air really quickly.”

Is it desirable, though, to implement a one-size fits all MAM when such a system is probably not going to be 'best of breed' in all areas?

A MAM that claims to do everything won't be doing anything to 'best in class' standards,” says Ryan. “QC, transcode, format conversion... these are all things where specialist vendors come into their own. Integration allows for existing infrastructure to be migrated gradually: customers don't want to hear that investing in new MAM capabilities means that several other tools they have invested in and standardised on will no longer be used.”

This doesn't mean that the service as a whole can't appear to the end user as one system and is where workflow orchestration together with integration come to the fore.

Focusing on a single system interface may not be the most best approach,” advises Ryan. “Users across the organisation in operations, legal, technical or craft edit need to access the system via an interface that is appropriate and familiar to them.”

Taylor says its “ridiculous” that the media industry can think about multi-platform delivery in anything other than a single workflow environment: “Conceptually, you are delivering your content to your audience. It is one concept, so how can it be anything other than one workflow environment?”

Broadcast engineers have always chosen the right set of functionality and performance for a specific installation and this is unlikely to change. “As we move into the IT-centric and Cloud era, we have to find ways to maintain and simplify that choice,” argues Taylor.

Some MAM vendors make a virtue of a service-oriented architecture that allows their software to easily hook into that of third party storage, edit, QC or playout systems while maintaining consistent metadata.

The new generation of MAM feature centralised catalogues and a core infrastructure that have workflow and task-specific tool sets for each business area enabling media organisations to deploy a single MAM for individual parts of the business or enterprise-wide,” argues Ben Davenport, marketing director, Dalet.

The ability to integrate tools from a range of vendors is perhaps the most critical element in any installation,” he says. “The tool set requirements are significant and also constantly changing. The industry may talk of 'swiss-army-knife' media processors but there is very rarely a single tool that will handle all requirements and even more rarely one that will do so well.”

With workflows this complex what clients seem to prioritise is transparency. “They need to understand where they are in the process,” says Marr.


box: What is an asset?

The notion of an asset has changed. With linear delivery, an asset often equates to a single episode of a series and the challenge is to ensure that the individual asset passes through the workflow in time to go on-air. In a multi-platform world, the thing being monetised may actually represent a number of episodes or an entire series.

The nature of the workflow therefore changes quite significantly with concepts of 'bulk' work orders and grouped encode and distribution,” suggests Dalet's Davenport.

The traditional assets of MAM encompassed video, audio and images. Now closed captions and subtitles have also become primary assets.

Considering all the ways in which captions could enter a workflow and all the manners in which legacy captions could be stored, the tool set required just to handle this critical piece of ancillary data is massive,” says Davenport. “The role of a smart MAM is to make this underlying number-crunching completely transparent to users, ensuring that they can focus on business level and creative activities.”


Thursday 16 July 2015

Is Lean Back 2.0 the Future of Multiscreen Viewing?

Streaming Media Europe

The future of TV is personal and lean back, says 3 Screen Solutions (3SS), which aims to be the company driving that ambition. Its idea is to track all available content on a platform, extract it from 'silos,' and make it available for search through a single query.

"Lean Back 2.0 [as 3SS brands it] combines the relaxing and passive nature of linear TV with the time-independence and sheer variety of VOD in a seamless way," says co-founder and MD of Business Development Kai-Christian Borchers. "To do that, broadcasters need to create personal channels out of search and pull content out of silos into a linear order, like a playlist, which becomes the viewer's own personal channel. The service will require profiling of the user and be based on user behaviour connected to social recommendations."
3SS is part way there with at least one client. The company served as prime developer and system integrator for the viewer interface for Swisscom TV 2.0 to which over 500,000 Swiss households are now interacting (taking custom from UPC Cablecom's Horizon) and winning the Best Multiscreen TV Service award at TV Connect earlier this year.

"With Swisscom we developed a true seamless multi-screen environment in which users can navigate and search between the big screen, tablet, or smartphone, consume content on any device, pause it or swipe to another screen and continue watching," says Borchers. "What is not yet achieved—and where we think the market needs to move—is to make all content silos searchable and to create a user experience that is not driven by the brands which want to protect their own silo, but driven by the user."
The keys to monetizing the OTT sector are metadata and rights, which 3SS believes currently don't "talk" to each other as they need to.
"Broadcasters have metadata about content purchased from Gracenote or Rovi, they have other more limited sets direct from satellite, other silos of metadata for VOD probably provided by rights holders, and others for catch-up and another for OTT," says Borchers.
"If you really want to build a superior service, you have to take all these and put them together and match up the metadata," he argues. "Current hybrid search and recommendation engine systems are blind in the sense that even when they are looking at content from different silos they are not aware of it. You need to know that the Titanic movie on TV is the same Titanic as the VOD offer, is the same as a a 'making of' documentary in catch-up, for example. But because these are several different data-sets, they will be shown as two separate results or recommendations."
As a result, he says, many platform operators are sitting on a "metadata train wreck" in which good money is flowing away after bad as providers struggle to develop a ‘joined-up’ content strategy.
He continues: "As a user I don't want to search a TV channel. I want to see who has a particular piece of content regardless of the channel or service. Everything should be integrated. It's very important to align this metadata to provide a proper customer experience."
He concedes that 3SS does not yet have such a product on the market but says it knows what it takes to build it. One hurdle is that the content aggregators who provide OTT services to broadcasters and operators do not want their offerings to be comparable.
"Netflix doesn’t have an interest in you seeing that this movie has been running on TV and is available in the catch-up library," he says. "Neither do most private broadcasters. They don’t want their client to be moving out of their world but to keep it in their own world."
This is where rights come in. Under 3SS' schema metadata is extracted from copyrighted material, and then manipulated. "The system would need to know who this content belongs to, and am I allowed to mess around with it?"
3SS was founded in 2009 by co-partners Borchers, Ulrich Beutenmüller, and Rudolf Maiterth to provide software, applications and engineering support to service platforms and equipment providers.
It has grown mainly in Europe's German speaking territories—Germany, Austria, Switzerland—winning business from the region's big pay-TV players including Kabel Deutschland and Unitymedia, German publisher Bild. Some 60 percent of its business is in front end development, with the other 40% being back-end integration.
"We founded the company as a systems integrator or software developer because we realised client's requirements for front end interfaces has always been driven by the need to for customisation," says Borchers. "Each cable provider or OTT provider wants to have a specific look and feel so we felt it impossible to operate on a product base."
For German-based Rovi-owned entertainment platform Nowtilus, 3SS designed, developed, and integrated a Video Download Store for Warner Bros complete with TVOD, EST, and DTO functionalities. It has also designed and developed the TV interface based on Android STBs for Swisscom brand Wingo providing live TV, TV Guide and replay. For Zattoo, 3SS conceptualised and implemented a STB front end built on ABOX42 middleware and connected to the Zattoo playout system for linear OTT channels. It built a client-server web-application used by Netgem to manage all its VOD platforms.
For KabelKiosk, Eutelsat’s OTT/IPTV offering for cable operators (which in 2014 was acquired by M7 Group) 3SS carried out all the OTT Integration (integrating with Kaltura) as well as the PC front end and the integration of billing and VOD (integrating with ROVI). It has also recently worked with a major mobile service provider in the U.S. to implement VOD solutions for two mobile phone brands, the names of which 3SS can't share publicly.
With its HQ in Ludwigsburg (near Stuttgart), privately-held 3SS employs 150 people, of which 110 are developers based at "near shore" sites in Romania, Ukraine and Moldova which are less expensive and therefore one key to 3SS' competitiveness). It also has commercial offices in Switzerland, Germany and the US.
In the last six months it has begun to expand further afield. It has rebranded from "a geeky techie company" to a "much more professional look and feel" with Swisscom as its reference client.
"We did a lot of consulting with Swisscom in the beginning since they were not used to developing on their own from scratch," explains Borchers. "They'd worked with Microsoft Mediaroom (now part of Ericsson) but realised that being a small operator in a small country with less than 1m subs for IPTV was not a focus at Redmond. They needed a solution tailored to their local requirements. In addition, customer satisfaction was low and the (Mediaroom) licence fee was high. Swisscom were asking how they could be more independent of these large systems providers and be more flexible in release cycles. The answer was to try Android."
In two years 3SS developed a Android-based multi-screen solution that Borchers believes "sets a new benchmark at half the cost of other providers. Within three months we can bring new features to the STB and mobile devices for Swisscom, a cycle which is unheard of in the industry."

Thursday 9 July 2015

Smart Dubai Aims to Lead the World in Connectivity by 2020

IBC
Dubai has fired the starting gun in the race to be the world's first United Nations' approved Smart City, with 5G mobile broadband a key component of its mission.
The Emirate will be the first city to assess the efficiency and sustainability of its operations using key performance indicators developed by the ITU-T's focus group on Smart Sustainable Cities.
The two-year pilot project is a collaboration between Smart Dubai and the ITU - the UN agency responsible for information and communications technology (ICT) - and will contribute to the international standardisation of Smart City indicators.
“UAE is home to some of the highest ICT penetration rates in the world,” said Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, Director General of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of the UAE. “We are creating the conditions necessary for the government and industry to capitalise on this ICT ubiquity to build smarter, more sustainable cities that are highly responsive to citizens’ needs.”
As part of the plan, Dubai's two major telecoms operators are competing to deliver the region's fastest mobile broadband speeds.
Etisalat and du are upgrading their network to advanced 4G technology (4G LTE-A / 4G+) which is a stepping stone en route to establishing a 5G network.
Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is named as a partner in both telco operator's efforts.
Earlier this month, du beat its rival to the introduction of a first LTE-A network, claiming its service will offer customers broadband speeds of up to 225Mbps. It has also had a paper on 5G standardisation approved by the ITU.
Saleem Al Blooshi, du's EVP for Network Development and Operations, said the milestone “strengthens Dubai's position as it works towards becoming a Smart City.”
5G prototypes and trials are predicted to begin by 2018 with commercialisation projected from 2020.
That's a significant date for the Emirate because in 2020 it will host the World Expo, a five-yearly event first held in London in 1851 and designed as a showcase of technological wonder.
Under the theme ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future’ Expo 2020 Dubai will be held at the Dubai Trade Centre-Jebel Ali, a 438-hectare site under construction, including a gated 150-hectare exhibition zone. It will be the first Expo held in the Middle East.
Among the other visitor attractions planned to be open by 2020 are IMG Worlds of Adventure, 'the world’s largest temperature-controlled indoor themed-entertainment destination; Legoland Dubai, Bollywood Parks Dubai and the Dubai Safari Project.
By 2020, it is estimated that 6.5 billion people worldwide will use mobile networks for data communications and that 100 billion additional items — such as water metres, medical devices, and home appliances — will also be connected via mobile networks.
5G is expected to be able to deliver data speeds in the range of 10 to 50Gbit/s, which is 3,000 times the speed of current 4G networks. It is a foundation platform for the Internet of Things allowing billions of devices to connect to the internet at very low latency. Among the applications thought possible with 5G, for which there is currently no standardisation, are driverless cars, remote surgical operations and holographic video.
Already one of the world's best physically connected nations, with Al Maktoum International expected to be the world’s largest airport with capacity for 160 million passengers by 2020, Dubai aims to lead in online connectivity too.