A Gleam In The Actor's Eyes: Pixar Supervising Technical Director, Rick Sayre on HDR

IBC Executive p30

http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/ibc2015_executive_summary/30

Attending computer graphic show Siggraph in 1985, Rick Sayre first came across a small outfit called Pixar. It was showing the Pixar Image Computer, a machine born at LucasFilm that had the computational power to manipulate digital images with high resolution. Impressively it was able to handle 12-bit colour values, over and above the 8-bit depth which has been common for much of content production ever since. Moreover, these 12-bit colour components could represent values greater than 1.0.

“I was encouraged in the very early days of Pixar that the people there had total respect for the imaging process,” says Sayre, who joined the start-up in 1987 and has been involved in many of their short and feature projects from Toy Story onwards.

“For most of the past thirty years in CGI and VFX it was only possible to display a limited range of light values for images,” says Sayre. “By convention we picked 1.0 for the brightest value we could make, and accepted that 0.0 wasn’t really black. Now, with the new high dynamic range displays, we can begin to talk about images as a photographer would - in terms of contrast, mid greys and tonal structure. Not only VFX elements and light probes, but finally the images the audience will see can move beyond that 0 to 1 range.”

Sayre was involved in Pixar's pioneering work in creating an HDR finish for Inside Out and was Digital Imaging Consultant on the Dolby Vision HDR for Disney's Tomorrowland.

Unlike the current migration to 4K and Ultra HD, the addition of HDR does not incur a huge knock-on cost in data handling. “Improving the pixel has a much lower incremental cost than making more of them,” he observes. “More pixels cost more to render but better pixels require more care.”

HDR manifests itself clearly in the brightest areas of a frame such as metallic reflections or light sources. Sayre says that on Tomorrowland, the technique “revealed a gleam in the eyes of the actors which it has not been possible to show theatrically before.

"We have yet to fully explore what it means to not only capture in HDR but to light for HDR,” he suggests. “A DP will know instinctively what an audience is going to see and what dynamic range is appropriate. Today, you might gel a window on location interiors to avoid it looking blown out. With HDR capture you don't necessarily have to do that since you can delay the decision until post. So now you can show the audience what is outside that window. The question is whether you should, in terms of the story. The DP needs to be involved in that post production process. We need to beware of gimmicks.”

In addition, HDR between scenes will need consideration. “Moving from a night time interior straight to a daylight exterior may require a few frames of adjustment, depending on how we wish the audience to experience that change. Making HDR practical for editorial is another important step.”

Sayre's inspiration outside of the film industry come from photography and the natural world. “We are hard-wired to appreciate the beauty of the forms we see around us and as revealed in our understanding of physics.”

He views the advent of virtual reality as a fresh approach to a style of storytelling that harks back to the ancient Greek theatre-in-the-round.

“Many of the storytelling dilemmas we are struggling with right now were present thousands of years ago with ideas of audience interaction and breaking the fourth wall,” he suggests.

The veteran employee has seen the company grow into the world's leading CG animation house under the auspices of Disney which acquired Pixar from majority stakeholder Steve Jobs in 2006.

“When I started here, you could fit the entire company in one room, and everyone knew everyone,” says Sayre. “Pixar was small, intense, free-wheeling and idealistic.”

And his favourite Pixar film? “That's easy, The Incredibles.”

Hitting OTT Out Of The Park: Joe Inzerillo, CTO, Major League Baseball

IBC Executive p42
http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/ibc2015_executive_summary/42

The hottest player in TV right now is the technology wing of Major League Baseball. Arguably it has been the hottest player for over a decade, pioneering live streaming of video content below the radar and accumulating a wealth of expertise that has seen it courted by HBO, Sony and ESPN.

“We've been doing OTT before the term even existed,” says Joe Inzerillo, CTO, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) – known as BAM. “We feel like even Netflix got a boost because we were doing OTT before they were.”

Inzerillo joined MLBAM in 2003, three years after the unit was set up to create websites for the 30 MLB teams and to consolidate MLB’s digital rights. He had started his career as a cameraman with Chicago White Sox before moving on to direct video operations for the league. At MLBAM he set about creating MLB.tv, a streaming service so successful it has become the poster child of how to do video on the internet, worldwide.

“The hallmark of what we've done is scale and the dimensionality of that scale,” says Inzerillo. “We had to deliver over a million plus streams concurrently and routinely. When we started doing this the technology simply wasn't around. We had to build our own, in-house, and figure out compression, geofencing, and multi-application delivery at scale.”

In addition to streaming over 2500 baseball games a year it handles the back-end duties for World Wrestling Entertainment’s streaming channel and Turner Sports’ (college basketball) March Madness. It powers Sony PlayStation Vue and delivers subscription OTT for golf's PGA Tour.

Capping that, last month MLBAM signed a ground-breaking $600 million six year deal with
National Hockey League (NHL) in which MLBAM takes control of NHL digital and broadcast rights, including NHL.com. NHL took a 10% stake in BAM as prelude to a forthcoming spin-off which will see the separate company valued somewhere between $3-5 billion.

The tech unit's skills are in such demand that HBO turned to BAM to launch its subscription OTT service HBO Now with Game of Thrones season 5 in April.

“The cable market has such huge penetration in the US I'd say that it has held back the market for OTT,” says Inzerillo. “So you can't underestimate the upheaval HBO's gutsy decision meant to the deal flow in the global market. It says OTT is 100 percent mainstream. No question.”

The company has just signed its thousandth employee having grown ten times its size in 2003. “I'd be surprised if you don't see us expand into Europe,” he adds. “We hope to get an anchor tenant very soon.”

With a burgeoning sports portfolio there are some suggestions that an independent BAM could bundle these into a digital only service to rival ESPN. Others see in its deal with HBO the potential to become a content service provider on par with Amazon and Netflix. Either way, could BAM turn competitor to its current partners?

“We are already in a situation where the whole TV ecosystem is 'frenemy' – folks partner and compete with each other,” says Inzerillo. “All those decisions are in the hands of our CEO. My personal belief is that I'll be involved in some form in all of it still [post spin-off]. I've been very involved with the OTT expansion of our business and I expect it to expand at an increased with an infusion of cash.”

Taking Broadcast to 4G and Beyond: Matt Stagg, EE

IBC Executive
http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/ibc2015_executive_summary/28

In 2012 mobile operator EE launched the UK's first 4G network and has used its experience to understand how a high capacity data network influences user behaviour. A key learning is that video consumption on mobile is even more significant than expected, and set to grow beyond initial expectations. While Cisco predicts that 72% of mobile traffic will be video by 2020, “we are looking at 75% by 2019,” says Matt Stagg, EE's Principal Strategist. “When we saw this huge uptake in video we realised that what we'd built was in fact a media distribution network.”

EE is now pioneering LTE (or 4G) Broadcast, the main benefit of which is the ability to simultaneously distribute live content to an almost unlimited amount of users without running into capacity issues of each user watching individual content.

“The biggest fundamental shift we will see in the next decade for mobile distribution of TV is LTE Broadcast,” says Stagg. “EE’s vision for LTE Broadcast is that it will be better than TV.”

Stagg led the team that delivered the UK’s first engineering proof of concept at the 2014 Commonwealth Games (partnered with the BBC, Qualcomm and others), and followed that up with a trial at this year's FA Cup Final at Wembley to prove how it could combine the efficiency of broadcast with the functionality of unicast. “It's the next iteration of red button,” says Stagg.

EE plans a limited live rollout for LTE Broadcast toward the end of 2016. “We're not saying it's a commercial launch but we will start to put capacity on the network for certain events where it provides benefits.”

One benefit is to alleviate spikes in congestion around live sports events, not just for users wanting to access the same live content but for other network users whose normal browsing might be affected.

However, talk of the technology pushing aside DTT as the main distribution network for live and linear TV is, for now, premature.

“We are actively steering away from that and saying let's focus on where we need this technology now. In the future, who knows?”

The Mobile Video Alliance (MVA), which Stagg co-chairs, is in accord. “We are not discussing [LTE Broadcast] as a DTT replacement but as a way of improving performance and efficiencies of delivering live linear TV, predominantly, and on top of that we have all the other services [like mass software updates].”

Stagg co-founded the MVA (which now resides within the Digital TV Group) in 2013. “Personally, it is one of the best things that has happened. I was given quite a free reign. No one really saw how mobile video needed to be treated differently and what an impact it would have, but this has now become one of most active working groups in the DTG. It's done a huge amount for driving forward UK mobile TV and it's seen as a model, globally, for how you bring mobile operators, content delivery networks, broadcasters and contentproviders together to work on delivering a superior customer experience for everyone.”
As EE is still in the process of being acquired by BT for £12.5bn, Stagg's lips are sealed but he restates EE's broader strategy as being about 'connected everything' “exploring uses for mobile connectivity in the home, at work and in the car.”

Stagg, who has clocked 25 years’ experience in telecoms and was recently voted in the top 50 most influential people in New TV, is also a mentor for the 5GIC project at Surrey University where the awesome potential of a mobile technology without bandwidth limits is taking shape.

“5G may yield a perception of limitless bandwidth because you will always have enough for your purpose,” he says. “This could be the connected car, remote surgery or holographic projection. 5G is not just a new air interface and associated technology. It is best understood as an ecosystem which a lot of industries, not just mobile operators, are exploring to change the way we think about being connected.”

Vice News: Millennial News Network

IBC Executive 

“The new battleground for news is authenticity,” declares Kevin Sutciffe, Head of News Programming Europe. “We're not shying away from the difficulties of reporting and we're prepared to show the harsher realities of events in a way that many regulated terrestrial broadcasters cannot.”

http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/ibc2015_executive_summary/8 via @Issuu

The battleground is also over viewers, in particular the Millennial generation, which the online upstart believes have been excluded from mainstream TV news agendas.

“We launched Vice News 18 months ago to turn the commonly held misconception - that 18-35 year olds are not interested in news and current affairs - on its head,” he says. “Vice is a response to something that worked well but has now become stuck and is not serving a part of an audience which is mobile, online and wanting a fresh approach.”

Sutcliffe, who has previously described BBC journalism as “beige”, doesn't come across as confrontational to the TV news establishment. He is after all a serial (Bafta and Emmy) award winning documentary maker and former Deputy Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4 and Senior Producer at the BBC's Panorama programme. 

“TV reporting hasn't changed in 20-30 years and rolling news is a very tired format,” he says. “It is journalism fitted around the demands of the system. Our approach is to be honest. We recognise the world is very difficult to define and report so we have different lengths of film and immersive first person journalism which tries to tell the story as we find it and not package it down into 3 minutes bites.”

With reportage about the coup in Mali, the Ukraine conflict and, most notoriously, a documentary which embedded a team with Islamic State, Vice News has become the fastest growing such channel on YouTube, gaining 1.45 million subscribers, 350 million video views and high engagement on Facebook.

“News doesn't break in the newsroom,” says Sutcliffe. “It breaks on Twitter. Our films are made by journalists the same age as our audience and they are all switched onto social media to engage more deeply with stories.”

'Old' media investors have lined up to grab a slice of this hot property. WPP, Fox and Disney/Hearst-owned network A+E Networks have taken stakes in the group which began as a punk magazine in Montreal in 1994, valuing it over $2.5 billion and fuelling speculation of an IPO.

Characterised by Vice founder Shane Smith as “the CNN of the street”, its most recent deal saw Vice extend a deal with HBO to produce a daily news programme and have its own branded channel on the HBO Now streaming service.

“If we're going to make a scheduled TV news show how are we going to not make it like everyone else?” questions Sutcliffe. “We're spending a lot of time thinking and planning that now to try and capture the tone of what we do online.

“The notion of whether news should be emotional is worth exploring,” he suggests. “Our audience is intelligent. They know where to look for stories. They resist the patronising view of some broadcasters where stories are told in the round and everyone has a say. Our approach is to challenge the older models and say that there isn't one way of reporting a story accurately.”

Emotional Engagement Drives Onscreen Narratives: Gawain Morrison ‪CEO Sensum

IBC Executive 

Unsound was the world's first bio-responsive horror film, a 2011 short in which scenes, music and sound effects could be altered based on the biometric readings of the audience.

p45 http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/ibc2015_executive_summary/44 via @Issuu

“We thought we'd cracked a new form of entertainment,” says co-producer Gawain Morrison. “We pitched all sorts of ideas at Hollywood studios and the TV industry. No-one was interested.”

Now the time is right. “A lot has changed since then and companies are much more open to it,” he says. “There's an explosion in business and consumer consciousness about emotions ranging from mainstream content (Pixar's Inside Out to Channel 4's Humans about robot AI) to behavioural economics and emotional response techniques for audience measurement.”

In 2013 Belfast-based Morrison co-founded Sensum to develop and market a software platform which consolidates and provides context to emotional data triggered by content on any screen gathered from a variety of off-the-shelf biosensors including EEG headsets, smart watches, health and fitness trackers, eye-scanning heat maps and heart rate monitors – anything that triggers emotion.

Sensum has secured $1m in funding to develop the sweet spot for understanding emotional response data.

“There's been a whole shift in mobile and digital which has been about extending the life of a piece of content across multiple platforms,” he says. “Success means a deeper engagement with audiences. The next layer is to look at biometrics and emotions and to generate new revenues and new creative opportunities.”

You can't help but be engaged by someone who lists on their LinkedIn profile a period of 'Lounging and Loitering' for three years in South East Asia.

These opportunities include “new kinds of entertainment beyond just staring at a screen,” he says.

“Storytelling is all about emotional relationships. We have to give people a reason to live in the worlds of virtual reality or photorealistic computer games. You can understand that better by using biometric feedback and sentiment analysis. You can try out multiple cuts, with different timing, audio, and scene selection, to determine what is most engaging for your target audiences.”

How near are we to the vision of Unbound in which individual emotional responses are fed back into the story or game in realtime to alter scenes on the fly?

“It's a question of budget,” says Morrison. “Creating multiple story trees in live action drama, especially at 4K, is too cost-prohibitive at this stage. With gaming and animation though, you have all the assets of a 3D world and realtime engines which could drive realtime shifts in narrative and interaction.”

Traditional media companies, he thinks, have been “terrified” of change and of the power that the science of emotion can have in engaging people.

Nonetheless, Sky, the BBC and Virgin Media are among broadcasters tapping technologies like Sensum for fresh insights into consumer responses to programming and advertising.

Morrison is the first to admit that eye-tracking sensors and skin temperature or pulse monitors are invasive of privacy unless pitched as aiding personalisation.

“If you can show people that you can weed out the nonsense in their programmes of an evening they understand it and are open to it. This technology is a slow burning fuse but it is being embraced.”

Coax still going strong

TV Technology Europe

“Cabling, widgets and glue” to route AV signals have never been more important says the industry’s leading specialist in cabling and interconnection products Canford. http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/tvtech_sep_web/28

Celebrating its fortieth birthday in 2016, Canford has certainly seen change throughout its existence – the difference now being the speed of change. Its broadcast customers range from equipment end-users, studio technicians, studio system integrators and OB truck builders.

“In essence the routing of signals around a building or on location boils down to the loss of performance in the equipment at the receiving end,” says founder and chief designer Iain Elliott.

Attenuation is the power loss caused by a coax cable. The longer the coax, the greater the loss, but the loss is also frequency dependent, broadly rising with frequency (or waveform degradation).

Canford began in the analogue domain and encountered the first digital explosion with the AES digital audio specification for 110 ohms. On introduction in 1985 it caused some concern about how far a signal could travel without debilitating attenuation, an issue long since alleviated.

“Exactly the same concerns occurred around SDI and now the hot topic is how far a SDI signal will go over 6G coax,” observes Elliott.

Until very recently there was no standard definition for 6G of what signal loss was acceptable to receiving kit. That meant that different vendors used different tests to measure their equipment's performance and the industry lacked a direct comparison between them.

Now that SMPTE ST-2081 has been published these assumptions can be laid to rest. Accurate “what’s the maximum run length” figures can now be calculated for each design of coax cable, although manufacturers may or may not include safety margins which makes direct comparisons less straightforward.

“When 6G equipment first emerged I did some calculations based on the SMPTE 3G standard and basically found that you can't go much more than 50 metres without having to use very large copper cable. That makes it very expensive and difficult to handle and terminate.”

With the increasing pace of the move from specialist broadcast cables and connectors to universal standard Category cables (Cat6 and Cat6A) and fibre, the product ranges Canford carries to support this technology are changing fast. But these changes always have knock-on effects. Finding an RJ45 connector large enough to fit onto Cat6A is not trivial, but exactly the sort of problem solving that is behind much of the firm's product sourcing.

While the bulk of cable is installed, deployable Category cables are now required to support location production. “Category cables were not designed to be flexible,” says Canford. “They don't lie flat on the ground because of the necessity to fix the geometry of the paired wires in relationship to one another.”

Canford were the first to introduce a truly deployable Cat5E cable that laid obligingly flat on the ground like a mic cable. “That cable proved extremely successful, but inevitably some users then requested a deployable Cat6, so we did it,” he adds. “But the principal method of attaining successful transmission of higher data rates is the accurate retention of the cable geometry, which is a direct conflict with achieving flexibility. A deployable Cat6A looks very challenging to produce economically. But we’ve already started the trial development work.”

Japanese group Senko also have DIY fibre termination kits suitable for location work, “another evolutionary product.”

Canford sales of Cat6A are predicted to be significantly higher next year, based on a notable hike in interest now, but this does not signify a collapse in the market for coax.

“Coax is still there because there's a broader market beyond broadcast in industrial, signage and education that wants BNC or Micro-BNC connectors and SDI coax. IP is coming, but for the vast majority of people there is a long life in SDI and coax. It's interesting to note that the classic BBC PSF1/3M coax cable has still refused to die, even though it's now a pretty inefficient design.”

For the majority of co-axial connectors, it is critical to have a connector that is specific to the cable to be used. Most connector manufacturers use a cable group coding system, but they are all different, as might be expected. Since a substantial number of Canford’s original range of co-axial cables were BBC designs, it is logical therefore to use the BBC’s own classification, extended to cover newer designs from Canford’s own range.

When ordering connectors, it is essential to check that the correct crimp die is being used when making crimp terminations. Because there are small detail variations in similar connectors from each manufacturer, different crimp dies may be needed. A similar looking connector from another manufacturer, on the same size cable, does not guarantee that the crimp die regularly used will still work.

While Elliott highlights product from Draka (manufacturers of the Canford SDV series cables) and Belden as the dominant quality brands “you should not find any difference in performance between them.”

He explains, “It's understood [among manufacturers] that you don't design a cable that needs a new connector but instead stick to a standard family of sizes (of which 0.6/2.8 and 1.0/4.8 are the two most common).”

“The laws of physics command that there is only so much you can achieve with current cable technology,” says Elliott. “You could gain an advantage by having a slightly larger centre wire but when manufacturers need to get higher precision in BNC performance they tighten the tolerances and so constrain the centre wire closer to the primary specification.”

One technique that has improved cable performance is the use of gas injection for producing the physical foam dielectric of coaxial cables. The ideal dielectric would consist of a vacuum, but practically the need to insulate and accurately space both the inner and outer conductors demands a dielectric material with tough physical and electrical characteristics. Traditionally that was made with a chemical mix injected into the cable but newer methods made of nitrogen gas deliver a more consistent performance. This is particularly beneficial where a coaxial cable is exposed to crushing, squashing and several bending manoeuvres during installation. The gas injected dielectric also ensures a better life span and stable attenuation values.

“However, it requires a very, very expensive gas injector in the manufacturing process. For the highest level of performance you have to get a very consistent formation in the dielectric. Beyond that, there's not much more you can do.”

Another rule of cable design is compromise. “Depending on what is required of the cable, the solution may have different characteristics,” says Elliott. “The vast bulk of cable is for fixed installation, but if you want to make cable more flexible for deployable operation you have to compromise. You trade some performance for greater flexibility.”

The seemingly hasty arrival of IP networking could see portions of the industry leap like lemmings into investment but broadcasters could also choose to upgrade in SDI for which the roadmap includes a 24G standard capable of 4K at 120 frames a second. Meanwhile, the IT industry is upping bandwidth at such velocity that already technologies of 25GbE, 40GbE and even 100GbE are emerging with the cost reducing every day. Imagine Communications, which is outfitting Disney/ABC with IP, has 'proof of concepts' in its labs with 40GbE and even 100GbE backbones.

“IP networking offers a lot of different possibilities to the discrete video channels of Coax but much of that is down to the capital kit that an operator decides they need for type of work they are going to do,” he says.

Canford’s range has always been a mix of in-house designed and manufactured products, alongside more specialist third-party product lines. Even with 400+ different mains distribution units, the company still hasn't met all the facility combinations that system designers require.

Some are ultra-basic products where sophistication isn’t applicable, at the other end of the scale, it now has a family of IP-addressable mains distribution units that will message when something isn’t quite right with one of the connected pieces of kit, and which can be fully controlled from an iPhone.

Adds Elliott: “IP may well become universal – or it may remain specialised. Whichever way it goes is down to commercial drivers and black box vendors.”

Behind the scenes: Rugby World Cup 2015

Broadcast 

For the Rugby World Cup kicking off in September, host broadcaster ITV will be rolling out a series ofinnovations in replay technology, camera positioning and fibre connectivity. Adrian Pennington reports

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/behind-the-scenes-rugby-world-cup-2015/5094323.article?blocktitle=Production-Feature&contentID=1169

Since its inauguration in 1987, the Rugby World Cup (RWC) has become one of the most significant international sporting events. It is the third largest TV spectator sport after the Olympics and Fifa World Cup, boasting a global audience of 4.2billion.

“This year’s operation is on a much grander scale than any previous Rugby World Cup,” says World Rugby head of RWC Alan Gilpin.

The event will take place at stadiums across England and in Cardiff from 18 September to 31 October, with ITV acting as host broadcaster. It will air all 48 matches live from 13 stadiums, only four of which are recognised rugby grounds: Twickenham (London), the Millennium Stadium (Cardiff ), Sandy Park (Exeter) and Kingsholm (Gloucester). Others are football grounds, including Elland Road (Leeds), Ashton Gate (Bristol) and Old Trafford (Manchester).

ITV, which has covered the RWC since 1991, has been planning the event for more than three years. It is a massive logistical exercise for technical director Roger Pearce.

“Production is reasonably straightforward technically, but with 13 venues and up to four live matches on a single day, it is quite a task to manage the outside broadcast facilities,” he says.

Five OB trucks from Arena will provide all of ITV’s coverage. Eight scanners from CTV, NEP Visions and Telegenic will service the host feed, which will be routed to the Inter national Broadcast Centre (IBC) at IMG’s Stockley Park base. This will essentially be a switching centre that will route the multilateral feed from the venues onto Globecast’s worldwide satellite distribution network. IMG will also host live production of press conferences and the official ‘citing commissioners’ (independent officials).

Foreign-language graphics for French broadcasters TF1 and Canal+ will also be produced at the IBC because World Rugby insists that changes in graphics are monitored for consistency of branding.

“It’s a remote production in the sense that all the multi-language feeds are going to be triggered at the IBC,” says IMG senior vice-president and global director of engineering and technology David Shield. “This allows greater efficiency as they can be used for multiple games throughout the day.”

The match feeds will be recorded onto around 40 EVS XT3 servers, live logged on IP Director and sent to the RWC archive – managed by IMG and into which rights holders can dip to augment programming – and to Avid Isis for highlights production.

IMG will also produce matchday highlights, a weekly half-hour programme and daily digital highlights for internet and mobile.

The Tournament Information Service (TIS) provided by Opta will include a live data feed from each venue. This, in turn, will drive the host graphics machines supplied by Alston Elliot, which will be used to create graphical analysis such as heat maps. The TIS will also provide all commentary feeds into the IBC as voiceover IP, using systems from Riedel and BMCUK.

Perhaps surprisingly, no 4K will be captured during the tournament. “At the time we were agreeing the broadcast specs [four years ago], 4K was less prevalent than it is now so it was never scoped into what we were doing,” says Gilpin. “We’re not short of coverage in terms of HD cameras. We’ll review the position immediately after this World Cup as we begin planning for 2019 in Japan. We are driven by the desire of rights-holding broadcasters.”

SIS LIVE FIBRE NETWORK

SIS Live is providing ITV with all communications and live feeds for the six-week competition, including a return HD feed to the OBs on-site. It has plugged dedicated 1Gigabit fibre into each venue based on Net Insight’s Nimbra platform (pictured below) and is providing 10 single and three dual antenna uplink trucks, with more than 1,000 hours of satellite capacity, as a back-up. At the four main venues (Millennium Stadium, Wembley, Olympic Park and Twickenham) SIS is also providing a third back-up in microwave links.SIS purchased fibre connectivity for the tournament from Vodafone and will operate it as a managed network for ITV out of its operations centre at MediaCityUK in Salford.

Coverage from different grounds will vary according to a seeding worked out by World Rugby and ITV. Games at Twickenham and Cardiff, for example, are categorised as A+ and will have the most camera positions. Matches at Milton Keynes or Brighton will have fewer bells and whistles, mainly because these football grounds do not have regular camera positions for rugby.

“A+ matches will have 37 or 38 cameras, including remotes in the dressing rooms and coaches’ boxes,” says ITV project director for multilateral Paul McNamara. “That’s excluding ITV’s separate on-field presentation and studio operation.”

One fresh innovation is a railcam that will run behind the posts at either end of the Twickenham pitch. “With a scrum on the 22 metre line, you have the option of looking head-on at rucks and mauls, all the pushing and shoving, rather than a conventional side-on view,” says McNamara. “It took a lot of persuasion and testing to get the RWC to agree because these positions are in the line of sight of spectators and press photographers.”

ITV has also put cameras into each corner flag “to give a wide angle of players diving into corners. It’s a fantastic effects shot.”

Match directors will also be able to cut to a ‘Ref Cam’ worn on the official’s chest. French broadcaster TF1 is offering an unedited stream of this with the referee’s in-game commentary (which will also be streamed to a mobile app by sponsor O2).

BSI and Vitec-owned Camera Corps are providing the specialist cameras, including Spidercam for overhead tracking shots of line-outs but excluding I-Movix Ultra motion cameras, which will be supplied by Editec.

“With all of these effects cameras, the key is timing,” says McNamara, who picked up a Bafta for Best Director of a Multi-Camera Programme in 2015 for his work on the FA Cup Final. “I’ll be telling all my directors not to overplay them. We’re covering 48 games, so we need a bit of restraint and editorialising so we don’t use our toys up in one go. They are fabulous to use but we also need to go back to our main cameras to tell the story.

“What’s great about rugby as opposed to football is that the match is only live for 38 minutes out of 80. There are so many stoppages in play that there is plenty of time to go back and put in replays. There’s no point doing that when play is live and risk missing an incident.”

SONY HAWK-EYE’S SMART REPLAY SYSTEM

A unique aspect of rugby coverage is the Television Match Official (TMO), who will make final calls on certain aspects of play using multiple replay angles.

For the first time, the RWC is making use of Sony-owned Hawk-Eye’s Smart replay system. Its technology will take all individual camera feeds and make them available in a single interface.

“Select replays can be grouped together into split screens so that the same frame can be seen side by side from different angles,” says IMG’s Shield. The technique will come into its own when there is a question over whether a foot was in touch before the ball was grounded over the try line. Previously, the TMO always sat with a broadcast director in an OB unit. Now they will be located in a separate Hawk-Eye unit. The angles will still be controlled and served up by the TV director but there was some nervousness at ITV about losing control of the TMO operation.

The same multi-angled feeds from Hawk-Eye are also available to the match director as part of conventional coverage, to touchline medical staff for viewing on iPads as an aid to diagnosing a concussion incident, and to the citing commissioner, for whom the ability to freeze frame and zoom in on a frame will be useful in identifying rule breaks.

Up Periscope

TVB Europe

Is Now-casting the future of live?

Broadcasters managed to stave off the early threat from online video by offering something that YouTube, Netflix or Facebook could not; namely, coverage of live water cooler events. Indeed, TV viewing of live and recorded programming has increased as a result of incorporating interactive, promotional and companion apps on smartphones and tablets.

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TV's long term hold on live may, however, be numbered or at least forced to adapt once more. The rollout of 4G networks and WiFi as utility means the broadcast experience is being reinvented for mobile. Global events like the Olympics or World Cup have reached a tipping point in consumption on digital platforms where viewers can access on-demand clips, scroll backwards during live play and direct their own multi-camera coverage.

The buzz around live streaming sites and social media apps is indicative of this trend. The poster child is Twitter's Periscope but it is far from alone. Services like Livestream, Bambuser, Ustream, SnapChat and Qik pre-dated Periscope which launched in March to nip the sudden growth of rival streamer Meerkat in the bud.

Hang w/, which promotes itself with celebrity endorsements, is a more established app with a million users and just launched on the Apple Watch. Vine has 40 million registered users with user-created videos limited to six seconds. YouNow claims 150,000 broadcasts daily and 100 million user sessions per month.

Users of these sites are predominantly young. YouNow, for example, says 70 per cent of its users are under the age of 24. Research by TNS indicates that over 50 percent of us engage in other digital activities while watching television. When mobile video viewers do watch traditional TV, 22% are regularly doing so while watching video simultaneously on their phone, states an IAB report in June. What's more, mobile screens are regularly being used for streaming longer-form video, the IAB found.

“If broadcasters ignore live streaming platforms they will be stuck in the one-size-fits-all television model of yesterday, and their products will be less valuable to the consumer of tomorrow,” warns Stephen Smith, CTO, Cloud Technologies, Imagine Communications. “Content owners, distributors, and others in the media industry are faced with three different responses to these new threats: they can ignore them, fight them, or embrace them.”

Digital marketing firm, Greenlight suggests that one in five marketers plan to use live streaming apps like Periscope in campaigns this year. Traditional media is not closed to experimentation. US chat show hosts Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon have incorporated the new live streaming apps into rehearsals and on-air monologues; Major League Baseball reporters are live streaming MLB practice sessions; a ceremony at Twickenham to mark 100 days until the 2015 Rugby World Cup aired on Periscope. When Snapchat announced its Discover channel in January, the brands that dominated its lineup were National Geographic, CNN, Comedy Central, and Vice.

“Television networks could exploit these new technologies to deepen their relationships with viewers and move from digital cable to smartphones,” reckons Om Malik, partner at investment firm True Ventures and founder of online publisher Gigaom.

Social media–centric news

Meerkat and Periscope are groundbreaking in their use of the real-time Twitter timeline as the key mechanism to drive tune-in to a live stream. With both apps you initiate a live broadcast on your mobile, type in a few words about what the viewer is about to see, and enable that text (plus a link) to be shared to Twitter. If a person is already following you on the app, they also can get notifications that you are broadcasting via iOS notifications.

The fact that anyone, anywhere can now upload footage of a live event or breaking news story mean Twitter via Periscope could become a 24/7 rolling news channel. Again, it is the demographic that matters.

Business Wire revealed that 60 percent of millennials in the US depend on social media to keep up–to–date with current affairs, preferring to visit BuzzFeed and Huffington Post rather than traditional news outlets. Sky News suggest that only 18 percent of 16-24 year olds in the UK trusted mainstream media to provide them with relevant information. The online only Vice News launched on last year and has since become the fastest growing news site on YouTube.

Publishers and newscasters have dabbled. During the UK general election in May, The Economist used Meerkat to explain deflation and Sky News journalist Joe Tidy used Periscope to get a behind the scenes look at the first leaders' debate. He also used the chat and 'love heart' functions (which rate a broadcast's popularity) to encourage 200 viewers to post questions, comments and reactions.

According to the The Wall Street Journal viewership of its live video stream is much higher than traditional cable networks through syndication with other sites who repost the videos. Presence on social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Periscope and others contribute to the increased number of viewers.

One advantage that live streaming has over conventional broadcast news is the instant conversational element that viewers can have with the broadcaster themselves. Each YouNow broadcast, for example, features a window where the broadcaster livestreams themselves, and a chat window, where users interact with broadcasters.

"The fact that the camera faces in as default, not out, suggests how valuable we believe conversation is to the success of this format," says David Pakman, a partner at YouNow investor Venrock.

The latest iterations of live streaming services are limited. There's no search function in Periscope, for example, and you can only shoot in portrait mode, making the video unsuitable for the 16:9 standard screen aspect ratio (though this development is coming).

The time window to rewatch video could extend back further than 24 hours when the content deserves it. A fast-forward function would help, as would crowd-sourcing live clips of the feed for broader social distribution. Such criticisms seems churlish for an app developed barely 18 months ago and now with Twitter's R&D team working on it 24/7.

Subhead: Piracy

Live streaming has already gained notoriety for being hijacked by pirates. HBO issued takedown notices to Periscope after it was used to broadcast the fifth-season premiere of Game of Thrones and courted further controversy when used as an illegal platform for the streaming of the Mayweather Pacquiao boxing match in May. Anti-piracy specialist KLipcorp suggest up to 750,000 pirate viewers watched the fight in Europe alone. The pay-per-view to watch cost $99 but the fight had to be delayed 45 minutes while rights holders like Comcast and HBO caught up with last-minute orders. In the interim, more people piled into illegal views of the contest apparently unconcerned about the sub-HD quality of the video.

When asked about the controversy surrounding the Mayweather Pacquiao fight, Twitter's then-CEO Dick Costolo likened Periscope’s effect on live events to that of fantasy sports on live sports. In his opinion it will ‘surround and amplify’ those events, rather than enable piracy or theft.

The EPL currently restricts Sky and BT from broadcasting live games to the mobile devices of fans in stadiums but how can sports organisations like them stop a stadium full of fans with phones live streaming? The answer is not to treat Periscope like Napster but to take advantage of the engagement with the team or sport it brings.

“The industry needs to stop looking at Periscope as a piracy issue,” declares Smith. “It’s a business model that we are not taking full advantage of at the moment. It’s also an opportunity to reach people who are priced out of certain events, or do not consume content because they cannot get it on their preferred platform. If we can fix these issues, I would argue that we would fix the majority of the piracy problem.

He argues that by augmenting a broadcast with multiple types of content and viewing options, media companies can provide a tiered experience that can be monetized accordingly, “taking advantage of audiences with different ideal price points.”

YouNow offers one monetization model. Users can buy into Bars, a virtual currency which they can exchange for a number of 'thumbs up', to tip their favourite broadcaster and help them trend. YouNow takes a cut of these in-app purchases and says that many of its 'broadcasters' make more revenue than they do on YouTube.

Smartphones bring immediacy, and engagement to the traditional ways of consuming video at a pace which could leave TV behind. This is the most important implication of the rise of Periscope et al. Having made live streaming by mobile so easy the nature of live has changed for good. Live is no longer a passive experience but a shared one in which interaction can be realtime.