Future Sports Media Offers Sports Clip Action at the Speed of Twitter

Streaming Media Global 

Swedish company Future Sports Media aims to usurp the lock-in that hardware vendors like EVS have on the fast-turnaround sports market with a software only product that works over IP. http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/Future-Sports-Media-Offers-Sports-Clip-Action-at-the-Speed-of-Twitter-106941.aspx

LiveReplayer—a software-based live production client from Future Sports Media—has gained below-the-radar commercial use with customers including Swedish ice hockey league HockeyAllsvenskan, Norwegian production company OB Team, and Scandinavian sports broadcaster C More.

"Our philosophy is to design everything with extreme simplicity of use," says Future Sports Media co-founder and CEO Mats Vindefjärd. "A lot of products claim to be really simple to use. We think we have taken that simplicity several steps further and like to say we can teach anyone with no background to run a full live production on it in just five minutes."

Even though the technology could be applied to news, entertainment, or security applications, Vindefjärd says the company remains concentrated on sports.

The firm's first product for live video clip creation and publishing to mobile phones launched in 2009, but proved to be ahead of the market.

"We were way too early. Online user behaviour wasn't mature enough; there weren't good enough payment or distribution mechanisms, and smartphones were just coming to market," says Vindefjärd, who has an engineering and business development background at Telia, Nokia, and HP. Founder and chairman Stefan Felter has engineering and research experience at Nokia, Saab, and Ericsson.

The software runs on Mac only, a conscious choice stemming from the company's belief in the many technical benefits the Mac platform has over PC. It is not planning to support any other platforms at the moment, but that this may change in the future.

LiveReplayer works with any encoder that receives AV using HDMI, and is compatible with Mac OS X. SDI or HDMI input signals are connected to the Mac's Thunderbolt port via a converter unit from Blackmagic Design. Picture and sound is output from the Mac HDMI port to an external encoder.

Importantly, it will also support IP based inputs (from IP cameras and network streams). If there are multiple simultaneous inputs, the user may mix these different types of signals simultaneously. As an example, there could be one or more manned SDI-camera and one or more unmanned (cheap) fix-mount IP cameras feeding into LiveReplayer at the same time. One click then yields a replay clip from each of the connected signals so that, for example, a goal can be replayed from multiple camera angles.

"Lots of development is being done right now, and some very cool updates are scheduled for release within a few months, including a very potent streaming encoder integrated right into LiveReplayer," says Vindefjärd.

LiveReplayer is installed on standard consumer hardware, and not a traditional replay machine consisting of proprietary hardware, electronics, and mechanics, he explains. There are features for sports-specific graphics and sponsor branding.

The second product, which builds on the company’s original founding idea, is just launched. LiveReplays takes the clips created in LiveReplayer and enables one-click publication via Future Sports Media's private cloud within seconds of the live action to sites embedded with its player. Applications include video-based live reporting and second-screen solutions supporting user-selectable multiple camera angles and slow motion.

"Our clients can themselves, through a back office web interface, set the service up, invoke other types of sponsor messages, control where to publish or distribute clips from every respective event," says Vindefjärd. "This end-to-end approach provides many benefits over less integrated solutions, including extremely quick publishing plus full control over the content at the fingertips of the production crew in the field."

Future Sports Media says several media publishing houses with large numbers of local and national newspapers, as well as regional TV channels, are ramping up their live production efforts and adding LiveReplayer and LiveReplays to the mix.

The system is designed to publish clips at pace with the live event on social media. An automatic Tweet function is planned to lure Twitter users to visit the channels.

"Before someone has the time to shout 'YEEEES 2-0!' on Twitter, there is a video clip of the goal already published in the club's or TV channel’s official channels," says Vindefjärd. "We will give clients the option to publish clips directly to social media feeds as well since this implies losing all or parts of the end-to-end control over content we place emphasis on promoting the client's 'own channels'."

Future Sports Media is privately held, has five permanent employees, and is preparing a financing round to close by Christmas.

"We are talking to major media houses which might have a hundred newspaper titles, or international organisations with multiple TV channels," says Vindefjärd. "We have maybe 15-20 of these cases in the pipeline. We expect a number of them to announce before the end of this year."

When in Roma: Spotlight on Panlight Italy

British Cinematographer 

In Roberto Jarratt's varied career spanning 60 years in the industry he has helped BBC Italy produce documentaries, acted as consultant to Lord Sidney Bernstein founder of Granada TV and been Managing Director for revered lighting specialist Mole Richardson Italia.

https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/panalight-italy/

Perhaps his most enduring achievement began in the early 1990s, following from the realisation that the Italian motion picture community faced a gap in the market for a high quality, new-technology-focused rental and service company.

With three young industry enthusiasts, Jarratt set about creating a modern rental company for the motion picture business. With himself as president, Panalight was born with its three original partners still heading the company: Carlo Loreti, managing director; Jarratt's son David as vice president and director of light & grip; and Roberto Schettini, vice president and camera director.

“The aim was to focus on the international market which was just beginning to show renewed interest in Italy at that time,” explains David Jarratt. “We were able to lead the company to the top of the European market by investment in technology research and development, combined with technical expertise.”

To establish an edge over other rental companies, Panalight immediately invested in the most advanced technology of the time – the ARRI 535 and 435 35mm cameras and the top-of-the-range film unit Moviecam developed by Fritz Gabriel Bauer – striking deals exclusive to Italy. In the lighting sector, Panalight offered the De Sisti and ARRI product range – again aiming for the top of the market – providing the full range of filters together with the Lee Colortran products. More recently, Panalight has concentrated investment in ARRI products strengthening collaboration with the German company.

“From the beginning, Panalight had the chance to supply important and large Italian-based productions which demanded more and more technological commitment,” explains Jarratt. These included The American (DP Martin Ruhe), The Passion (DP Luca Bigazzi), La Vita è Bella (Tonino Delli Colli), The English Patient (John Seale ACS ASC), The Talented Mr Ripley (John Seale ACS ASC), The Tourist (John Seale ACS ASC) and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (DP Robert D. Yeoman).

Over its 25-year history Panalight has established a strong relationship with Panavision. This stems back to the 1990s when, with Panavision's global chairman Bill Scott, Roberto Jarratt helped develop Panavision's business in Italy, Malta and Greece.

“Roberto always envisaged the importance of working jointly with Panavision and thanks to his insight, Panalight today can offer the very latest Panavision products,” says David Jarratt.

Headquartered a couple of miles from Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where they also have an office on the lot (Cinecittà Panalight) which serves as the studios' official kit supplier, Panalight maintains branches in Milan, serving the north of Italy, at Panalight Sudtirol in Bolzano and Panalight Apulia in Bari. Since 2011, a Maltese division offers full service to the island.

Last year was a record one for the company, attributed to the attractive tax incentives issued by Cinecittà Studios and the government's Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism. The tax credits, which came into force last April, were intended to attract bigger budget Hollywood movies and to benefit domestic film and TV projects.

As a result, blockbuster productions such as Baltasar Kormakur's Everest (DP Salvatore Totino AIC ASC), The Man From UNCLE (DP John Mathieson BSC), Ben Hur (DP Oliver Wood) directed by Timor Bekmambetov, Zoolander 2 (DP Dan Mindel ASC BSC) and Giuseppe Tornatore's La Corrispondenza (DP Fabio Zamarion) were all based in Italy and all serviced by Panalight. The company further supplied equipment and services to Point Break (Ericson Core) and the Ron Howard-directed Inferno (Salvatore Totino AIC ASC). Last year, the company serviced Alice Rohrwacher's Le Meraviglie (DP Helene Louvart), which won the Grand Prix du Jury at the Cannes Festival.

Panalight's proven ability to win business is explained by its continued investment and smart eye for the latest equipment. “We've grown the company to the same technological level as any company in the US or UK,” says Jarratt. “But we have to keep vigilant. The market is increasingly competitive and always demanding higher-end new technologies.”

Aside from the full range of traditional film cameras, Panalight offers digital units from Blackmagic Design to the ARRI Alexa XT and Red Dragon, supported with a comprehensive lens inventory including vintage Anamorphics from Todd AO and Xtal to the recent modern Zeiss Master and Cooke Anamorphics.

Its lighting roster, features new LED lighting fixtures, like the Cineo and ARRI Skypanel, as well as the 'M' series which grips to a special Technocrane and 3-axis stabilised remote head like the Flight Head V.

Significant investments in the last two years have been made in a Scorpio Arm, a controlled motorised arm for filming on a Mercedes driving up to 150kmh, and the Panaranger, for mounting on a Polaris Ranger Crew 800 jeep.

These gyrostabilised pursuit systems and remote heads are operated by PanaTeam, a crew of qualified professionals who “represent one of the few top teams in Europe able to produce first class results with this kind of system,” says Jarratt.

Sister company Cinetecnica provides gear for transportation, from grip trucks and trailers to motor home and generators.

Despite adopting these latest technologies, Panalight has also taken another important step in traditional equipment when this year it become the Italian seller for Kodak Film stock.

“This is a prestigious commitment which will ensure continued availability for unique shooting choices,” says Jarratt. “It is the experience and passion of our staff that allows Panalight to meet any technical and creative requirements and to achieve the best possible solution for every budget.”

SVGE Analysis: BBC reinforces esports’ mainstream appeal with League of Legends

Sports Video Group Europe http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/svge-analysis-bbc-reinforces-esports-mainstream-appeal-with-league-of-legends/ The urgent need to chase the millennial is leading broadcasters to belatedly attempt to capture a share of the online phenomenon esports. The BBC is the latest to jump on the bandwagon and it’s a canny move designed to shore-up the youth audience for its soon to be online-only service BBC Three (the TV channel closes January).

Beginning October 15, the broadcaster will live stream professional video gaming for the first time. It will cover four days of action from Wembley Arena of the League of Legends World Championships quarter final. The semi-finals of the tournament, for which teams are competing for a prize pool of £1.387 million, will be held in Brussels and the final in Berlin on 31 October.

BBC Three online coverage will be hosted by video game personality Julia Hardy and Radio 1 DJ Dev Griffin and feature interviews with competing players and fans. The production is being handled by BBC Sport’s digital team and will mix live with pre-recorded video inserts, text, audio and social commentary.

Mainstream media has belatedly woken up to the entertainment’s potential. ESPN, which has dabbled in live streaming esports events in recent years — notably the championship final of Dota 2 on ESPN 3 in 2013 – recently signalled its intent to beef up coverage by creating the new role of esports editor. The job requires proficiency in League of Legends, Call of Duty, DotA 2, StarCraft 2, Hearthstone, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and more. ESPN notes that it is important for editors to know and understand the fantasy and gambling scenes surrounding these titles.

And no wonder. According to ESPN, 3.7 billion hours were spent watching or playing esports worldwide in 2014, and 89 million people are regular enthusiasts. The League of Legends final of 2014 was watched by 27m people online, according to ESPN, beating the final round of The Masters (25m) and only below that of SuperBowl XLVIII at 112m. Another esports final, Dota2, gained fourth place in 2014’s online viewing rankings with 20m ahead of the NBA finals (15.5m).

Any debate about whether professional video gaming should be classified as a sport seems redundant in the face of its growing popularity among an audience that is not just young and digital but global. That demographic is drawing big brand sponsorship from the likes of Red Bull, Nissan, Coke and Logitech.

In August, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming, a dedicated app and website to go head to head with Amazon’s Twitch. Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014 for close to a billion dollars, beating Google to the prize. Twitch now has around 55 million monthly viewers and over 1.5 million channel creators. According to The Guardian 10,000 of these were earning money from advertising by the end of 2014.

YouTube Gaming will feature 25,000 games, each with their own page alongside channels from game publishers and YouTube creators. There is a strong emphasis on live streaming.

“On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time,” explained YouTube Gaming product manager Alan Joyce in a blog. “We’re also creating a single link you can share for all your streams.”

Some of YouTube’s biggest stars are gamers. Dan ‘The Diamond Minecart’ Middleton has 379m monthly views and 7.7m subscribers and earned $7.4m in 2014. PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg) famed for his ‘Let’s Play’ walkthroughs with commentary, has 291m monthly views and 38.9m subscribers; Markiplier has 252m monthly views and 9.1m subscribers.

Production of the broadcasts are also growing in quality. Native digital content from within the games are ripe for streaming. On top of that, POV cameras capture shots of the gamers (their facial expression and hand movements); wider positions show the venue’s spectators watching talent on giant screens and replay systems are available to the live show’s producer. Mics on the gamers can pick up their reactions and commentary and VTs of player personalities can be inserted pre-show or during the show.

Vision mixers commonly used in outside broadcasts compile graphics, audio mixing and special effects with the stream published to social media and converted to H.264 for distributing online. All of the feeds can be controlled remotely over IP, which Red Bull Media House does from the dedicated esports studio it opened at its US headquarters.

Of the many other esports platforms, one gaining more attention than most is Hitbox. It launched at the end of 2014, has attracted around six million viewers, and want to target streaming to 4K displays.

Encoding Vendors Jockey For Licensing Post-HEVC

Streaming Media Europe 

HEVC is barely out of the gate, but the race to achieve better quality and lower bandwidth might soon leave H.265 in the dust, according to speakers at a panel at this year's IBC.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Encoding-Vendors-Jockey-For-Licensing-Post-HEVC-106858.aspx

The amount of video coming down the track for carriage over mobile threatens to break the net unless encoding vendors and compression standards can keep pace. The lesson from a recent IBC panel is that this can happen—provided the industry pays for it.

"[Codec development] is not a charity. It is a business," said Tony Jones, head of technology, TV Compression, Ericsson.

McCann's Law [named after engineer and strategist Ken McCann] holds that the bitrate required to achieve broadcast quality video halves every 7 years. According to SMPTE fellow David Wood, current chair of DVB groups in 3DTV and UHDTV, and past chair of the World Broadcasting Union Technical Committee, this pattern was borne out in the developments of MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC and is also coming true for HEVC.

"In two years time the work on the next-generation MPEG compression after HEVC will likely follow the same curve," he predicted.

But this advance may not come quickly enough—or be good enough quality—for the needs of the mobile industry.

"When you understand that video spectrum is the most expensive spectrum on the planet you can see that compression is an area of huge focus for us," said Jones.

Ericsson—which has a stake at the table, developing encoders/decoders—made the point that there will be 13 times more video over mobile networks in 2020 than there was in 2014. Already half the traffic on mobile networks is video. By 2020 it will be more like 75%.

More HD services, and progressively UHD services, will drain capacity, he said. "We have to deliver video efficiently using technologies like LTE broadcast and we also have to compress it well."

Eric Achtmann, executive chairman of V-Nova, said broadcasters and operators already had a huge problem dealing with ever-increasing capacity demands.

"We recognise that current codec improvements are delivering a two-fold capacity improvement every five to seven years, but demand is growing at twenty-fold," he said. "Incremental improvements will not suffice and there’s a huge disconnect which needs addressing."

He argued that the installed base of receivers has become too large to make any change practical or cost-effective. "There are 2.6 billion smartphones in the market while 200 million payTV STB's are being deployed annually." The installed base is growing and it would simply cost too much to upgrade all of them, he said.

In addition, said Achtmann, the industry's "unprecedented" investment in capacity cannot carry on. "The U.S. is investing $1 billion every 10 days in extra bandwidth capacity and upgrades," he said. No matter how much money is thrown at the problem, he argued, that capacity will at some point be limited.

Having barely got out the door with UHD-phase 1, the industry is demanding a better pixelled version, variously with Higher Frame Rates, Wider Color Gamut, Higher Dynamic Range, and next-gen audio for which there are multiple contenders in each category attempting to pass through DVB, ATSC, and SMPTE committees.

"There is too much technology and not enough convergence," said Thierry Fautier, VP video strategy at Harmonic and president of the Ultra HD Forum. "We're living in a world where we can do all the encoding in software and decoders are programmable but this not helpful [to the complexity]."

Plus, if all of the above attributes are desired along with backwards compatibility to legacy hardware, then the question is "how can you process the raw video without introducing anything you don't want?" he posed.

Fautier reckoned HDR UHD might be standardised by 2017, and the full range of attributes including HFR by 2020 earliest.

"We need to develop better compression, and licensing is required if we are not to stifle that," he said.

"It's great that MPEG is royalty-free but I doubt the quality will match that of [a technology like] V-Nova," he added, in reference to Perseus, a proprietary codec developed by V-Nova which has been championed by cellular operator EE.

Jones laid out the arguments that create the conditions to improve compression efficiency. These include continued competition among encoder vendors; "without that nothing happens," he said. "If you have a monopolistic business you don't get innovation." He pointed to the telco industry, where voice codecs are specified and there's been little change.

"Wide adoption for wide scale of licensing makes R&D investment worthwhile," he said. "And we need standards. Open standards are critical. It's important to know you can rely on it, that it's peer-reviewed and it will do what it says it does. Free licensing is nice to have, of course, but free also inhibits the research investment."

Wood pointed out that if a company takes part in bodies like MPEG, ISO, or ITU then "no-one expects that you shouldn't be able to charge licence fees," he said, "but the rule says you should apply fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. The problem is that no one has defined what the word 'reasonable' means in this case."

This could create a field for lawyers as IP-patent holders argue over usage.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch," said Achtmann, whose company has yet to reveal the cost of licensing the Perseus technology. "When the cost of something critical goes to zero the investment drops. So the notion of saying 'free codec' and 'innovation' is a contradiction."

Page 1

Broadcasters Approach Cloud Playout with Caution

IBC 

Visitors to IBC2015 may have gained the impression from several vendors and demonstrations that IP networking and software defined TV was not just inevitable but ready to go off the show floor.

http://www.ibc.org/page.cfm/action=library/libID=14/libEntryID=116/listID=2

A more sober appraisal could be found in a survey published just before IBC. It suggested that the market for conventional channel-in-a-box (CiaB) playout systems would continue for some time to come. The survey of 400 industry professionals by Quantel Snell (since rebranded as SAM) dampened down hyperbole about cloud playout.

More than half of respondents to the survey (57%) said they were planning to keep managing their linear channel playout in-house even if they add new services, and only 16% were looking to outsource any expansion. Of those planning to expand their services, 41% were looking to CiaB solutions, with just 20% going fully cloud-based.

"While many people are undoubtedly interested in the principle of cloud playout, the great majority see it becoming a reality only in a number of years' time," said SAM's Head of Product Marketing, Tim Felstead. "While this survey also demonstrates the mismatch between the general level of hyperbole around the cloud and the reality shown by solid testing, customers are nonetheless looking for a solid transition path to cloud playout as it grows up to become a cost-effective, capable alternative.”

Few concepts illustrate the advantage of moving to IP better than cloud playout. Instead of vast banks of machines requiring lots of manual attention and intervention, software applications linked to data centres can provide broadcasters with the ability to launch channels from anywhere. Cloud-based operation rewrites the financial model, allowing new channels for tightly specified subjects or regions to be introduced quickly without demanding up-front capital. Targeted advertising or localised content can be inserted or versioned by broadcasters as quickly as their internet-only rivals.

Yet broadcasters are cautious. “The industry at large is overstating the technology's state of readiness,” says Steve Plunkett, CTO of Broadcast and Media Services at Ericsson, which manages the playout for the BBC and ITV among other UK broadcasters.

“A software-only implementation is far from a simple install and deploy model,” he says. “Organisations are very keen to move to the cloud and to its many advantages but most of them are also cautious, and maybe somewhat skeptical, about where we are right now.”

Broadcasters are reticent in part because of the different versions of what it means to work in the cloud according to different vendors. 

“Sadly, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors among the vendor community,” says Maurizio Cimelli, Managing Director, Deluxe MediaCloud. “Where there is talk of a product working in the cloud, often this proves to be no more than a powerpoint presentation.”

Many stalwarts of broadcast engineering have had to go back to the drawing board. Imagine Communications, for example, has reworked its entire product line over 18 months at a cost of $200m to operate over IP. SAM has done the same for its range of routers, production switchers and encoders. Significantly, both companies are intent on providing equipment that works over legacy cabled equipment as well as IP in order to smooth the transition for customers.

It's working too, since SAM claimed a contract to move Dutch media group Infostrada's entire facilities over to the cloud; Imagine has been working with Disney ABC in the US to do the same. Deluxe MediaCloud is working to transition the channels of Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in Australia to the cloud.

However, these instances are few and far between reflecting a technology transition in its infant stage.

“Some channels are less operationally demanding, less complex and less reactive and those are almost certainly better suited to the relatively immature new technology,” said Plunkett. “The reality is, if you have a very complicated channel it will place a burden on the technology which it would find difficult to manage just now.

On a positive note the rate of advance of the technology should see even complex channels switched to cloud within two to three years.

“A year ago, just getting anything to run in any fashion on IP would have been a tall order,” says Plunkett. “Things are improving satisfactorily to the point that in six months the industry will have moved away from the question of does it work, to the more interesting and valuable questions of what can we do with the technology.”

OTT VOD is a Broadcast Opportunity

IBC 

Video on demand (VOD) is fast becoming a significant revenue stream for pay-TV operators with predictions at IBC2015 from Time Warner Cable Media that 50% of its revenue may be generated by VOD in less than five years.

http://www.ibcce.org/page.cfm/action=library/libID=14/libEntryID=393/listID=2

Meanwhile Roger Lynch, CEO of OTT start-up Sling TV predicted OTT services will be in 35 million US households by 2022, representing a quarter of the market.

“In 2014 there were more than 1 billion on-demand impressions generated per month from US cable networks which is starting to be a meaningful scale for advertising models and starting to generate meaningful revenue,” said Joan Gillman, EVP and COO, Time Warner Cable Media (TWCM).

The irony of course is that Time Warner, which has launched VOD to IP devices and STBs and also owns HBO which has taken ‘Game of Thrones’ direct to fans with its own OTT service, and Sling TV parent Dish Network – are the old distribution media which OTT is out to consume.

“Some say we're attacking pay TV but in reality we are attacking the pain points that consumers are facing,” said Lynch in an IBC2015 keynote. “The next generation of TV viewers are younger, more mobile and more educated but the reasons they reject traditional pay TV are the same pain points of current subscription based pay TV; long term contracts, channels you don't watch, hidden costs and poor customer service.”

He added, “Dish understands that OTT is where the market is going and if it cannibalises their core business so be it. It turns out we don't cannibalise Dish because the demographics of satellite are different to that of OTT services.”

Both Lynch and Gillman argued that the growth of OTT is actually building a bigger pay TV pie. Lynch said he expected the overall pay TV market to grow, even while the share of traditional pay TV declines. “In the US, all pay TV operators sell the same package of channels but OTT will segment the market.”

“TV is still 93% of all content consumed in the US,” said Gillman. “Live viewing may be down 8.9% in the US but if you combine live linear with DVR and VOD then TV viewing is increasing by 16.4%. The growth of VOD on cable is thanks to a healthy TV ecosystem.”

She illustrated this with a statistic showing that views per month of ‘The Food Network’, a single cable channel, were higher than total views of YouTube in the same period (13.3 million to 13 million). “Scale matters,” she asserted. “The ad supported TV ecosystem is significantly larger than YouTube.”

In terms of ad supported VOD TWCM's revenue is under 10%. The speed at which it will rise depends on content availability and experimentation with business models. “Consumers do not use the term VOD,” said Gillman. “TV is TV and that's the way we think about it. They do not mind advertising if the ad load is well thought out, but they will also pay to receive 'ad-lite' premium content.”

Thomas Bremond, MD, Europe at advertising management specialist FreeWheel, believes the timescale by which VOD revenue exceeds that of conventional broadcast to be as short as two years; “consumers experience VOD as if it were linear on the TV, yet operators have the ability with digital to perform ad insertion and manage rights. VOD creates the best of both worlds between programmers and operators.”

In the same session, Channel 4 Sales Director Jonathan Allan, revealed that VOD will comprise 10% of Channel 4’s revenue in 2016. “90% of revenue is still not VOD so let's put this in perspective. But over the last 5 years the TV market has grown about 20% while our VOD revenue has grown 360%. In turn, that means we can afford to invest in our platforms and our content.”

Gary Woolf, EVP Business Development, Digital and Insight, all3media international also believed the percentage of revenue producers derive from digital will grow “aggressively.”

“By 2019, 3 billion minutes of video will cross the internet each month, video will make up 80% of consumer traffic and 75% of that is long form video,” he said, quoting Cisco stats. “Consumer demand for VOD will double between now and 2019 so broadcast VOD is an important opportunity.”

However, he warned, that a more fragmented ecosystem put the basic content funding model at risk. “It is critical to retain value from linear into the on-demand space,” he said. “We don't want to exchange analogue dollars for digital cents.”

Noting that even mid-range UK drama required distributors such as all3media to deficit fund 30-35% of a commission against future sale of rights, he warned broadcasters to mind the funding gap; “We want broadcaster partners to benefit from growth in digital but we need to make sure the costs are balanced.”

Another trend noted by the panelists was that Netflix no longer has a monopoly on content. The rise of Hulu+ and Amazon Prime as well as pay-TV operator VOD offerings has created more competition for content.

“Content owners have more choice but from a monetisation point of view it is critical to figure out the business model so that content development is healthy,” said Gillman. “If great shows aren't being made and funded then you are going to weaken your business.”

Sports Viewers Stream Their Teams, Changing the Game for Pay TV

Streaming Media Europe

Young sports fans are going to sites like Whistle Sports and Copa90 to catch the action, supporting a new style of sports coverage that invites fans into the conversation.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=106748&PageNum=2

The decades old wisdom that premium live sport drives pay TV subscriptions is in need of a reality check. The youth audience—called millennials or generation Y—definitely want to engage with sport, but seem to prefer doing so online by visiting sites which show hardly any live or recorded in-game action.

To prove this, look at the rise of U.S.-based Whistle Sports which launched in January 2014 and has attracted 110 million subscribers across multiple channels, including 25 million on YouTube, 51 million on Facebook, 11 million Twitter followers, another 20 million on Instagram, and 4.5 million on Vine. It is growing by 2 million a week in terms of aggregate social links and has just launched a e-gaming platform on Amazon-owned Twitch.

Or look at the similar content and distribution model of the U.K.'s Copa90 which focuses on football. It averages 3.6 million views and 13.8 million minutes watched per month on YouTube (where it recently reached 1 million subscribers), and publishes content across all the main social networks. In January, it acquired Kick.tv the digital network of Major League Soccer as a launch pad for its expansion into the U.S.

The common wisdom is that 14- to 25-year-olds prefer to access and interact with content on screens other than the TV, and that traditional media needs to react by adopting a mobile-first policy. But the reasons the YouTube social media audience for sports is growing is deeper than this. An aversion to paying for content is part of it, certainly, but there is also a feeling that the likes of Sky Sports, the BBC, NBC, or EPSN are peddling a brand of coverage that simply has less appeal.

Where conventional TV sports presentation is based around the live event and has a hard news, studio and desk-bound talent-in-suits approach, Whistle Sports and Copa90 have succeeded in capturing the spirit of the game by focusing on the culture and social aspects that surround the sport.

Both businesses encourage a network of independent content creators to publish authentic grass roots fan-based videos, and both supplement this with brand-funded content which aims to speak the same language.

According to Whistle Sports' executive vice president Brian Selander, short content includes instructional videos, bloopers, trick shots, and behind-the-scenes access. “Pretty much everything except for live game action,” he says. “There's a special emphasis on the aspects of athletics that is fun and surprising.”

The approach is similar at Copa90: “We think people go to Sky Sports to see what happened and fans come to Copa90 to find out how they feel about it,” says Phil Mitchelson, head of marketing at Copa90's parent company Bigballs. “We take every single piece of content that may be seen as wastage in a normal sports production—the build up, what restaurants to go to, what taxi to catch—and present it so that we have engaged fans weeks before the main content has even happened.”

Both companies say that their audience doesn't cannibalise the live viewing experience. “It's generative,” says Selander. “Once you go behind the scenes and get the insider perspective you can get a stronger connection to the [sports] brand and a stronger connection for audiences to want to watch the live game.”

Questioned at IBC as to whether or not this approach reached the new generation of fans, Dave Gibbs, Sky Sports' director of digital media, said: “A traditional broadcaster says 'I am going to talk at you and expect you to watch what I want you watch.' Copa90's approach is about building a community and bringing them into the conversation. There's a lot we can take from what they are doing.”

A few days later, Sky announced its first public collaboration with Whistle Sports, in which it invested $7 million a year ago. Whistle and Sky launched a social media channel in conjunction with Sky chat show brand Soccer AM.

Sky says its younger audiences are not deserting live broadcasts on its platforms, but hopes the move will expand its reach with millennials. “What we liked about Whistle was some of the commercial opportunities they create by working with brands to create branded content opportunities,” says Gibbs.

LG, Sony, Subaru, and Gillette have all customised campaigns for the network. “Branded content can't be along the lines of your traditional TV spot, but the millennial audience is more realistic than the older generation about accepting a brand's involvement in content at face value,” says Selander. “If the editorial tone and style is delivered in the right way then the audience will accept it.”

Whistle Sport revenue shares with 300 YouTube content creators including channels from Dude Perfect and NBA star Jeremy Lin. In return, creators get Whistle support and expertise.

“We support them with a data analytics and insights team does a lot of work mining data for what works, when it works, how it works, and how to do more of it,” says Selander. “On top of the data science piece we have a content production team providing advice on the best ways to make your video 'pop.' This team also creates and produces content. We can provide a business relationship for creators, for example in talking to Sky, and we also bring brands and agencies into the conversation.”

Global Reach for Sports

For Whistle Sports the partnership with Sky is about expanding its reach beyond the U.S. “We had lots of options and interest from people wanting to partner with us,” explains Selander. “Sky seemed like a fascinating fit—adding what is next into what is now. Sky has built a great brand in Soccer AM and strong relationships with the English Premier League, its teams and players. They have a great roster of traditional broadcast talent. Soccer AM is a great way to bring all of that more forcefully to a digital audience.”

Signs are that it's working: 400,000 people have already liked it on the Soccer AM Facebook page.

According to Selander, more than 35 percent of Whistle Sports' audience is not based in the U.S. An international expansion has been planned for a while, led by Jeff Nathenson, former YouTube head of football, based out of Whistle Sports' new London office.

“Even before Sky we had several hundred thousand followers in the U.K.,” says Selander.

 “While soccer is a focus for us given its massive global fanbase, the Whistle Sports social media experience is less about 'which ball' and more about the uplifting moments in sport—and those moments tend to cross boundaries.

“Millennials are global sports fans: They like to stream global sports content and discuss it on social media,” he argues. “Sport is inherently exportable compared to other verticals. A ball goes into the net in the same language whether you're in North America, Scandinavia, or China. We think there's real value in owning one vertical like sports.”

Sports Rights Shift Online

Whistle Sports has content deals with the NFL, Major League Baseball, MLS, NASCAR, the PGA Tour, and the Harlem Globetrotters. The leagues share archived content with Whistle Sports, though not live games. While Google has so far not dipped into its purse for live rights it could be just a matter of time, using growing YouTube sports fans as a base.

Live rights to streamed content from the major leagues remain at a massive premium, but signs are that both rights owners and internet players want to shift the action online. The NFL will stream the live game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars on October 25 from London's Wembley Stadium on Yahoo sites—the league's first exclusive pact with a digital channel. The NBA and Turner Sports streamed the first live game on Facebook in simulcast with cable's NBA TV.

“When you look at the NFL streaming rights paid by Yahoo, it's a breakthrough, but sports rights is not the best use of our money,” says Selander.

BigBalls CEO Thomas Thirlwall says rights holders are keen to share content with the network for free.

“With the connection with fans that we have we find that footage is being offered to us for no payment because rights holders are very keen on making sure they engage with the right audience which for them is the future of their sport.” As an example, Copa90 gained exclusive behind-the-scenes video access to the Brazilian soccer team during the World Cup 2014. “Football leagues and clubs want to play the game in front of fans. They want loyalty from fans and they realise that this group is being consistently overlooked by traditional media and are going online first.”

From 2016 to 2020, Sky will be able to take advantage of a new deal with the English Premier League allowing it to show clips from every EPL game across its digital platforms, including in-match content and highlights. That's something the Soccer AM social site could tap into.

The Sports TV Disruptor

However, there is skepticism from BigBalls which says it was approached by Sky to partner with the broadcaster.

“I don’t know any business that can survive by ignoring the next generation of fans,” says Thirlwall. “We’ve spent the last five years only going after that audience. We know how to talk to them because we listen to them and we invite them to be a part of the conversation. When we listen, we react and alter our programming to give them more of what they want."

The sports broadcast community will come more and more into this space, he says. It’s difficult to move away from legacy business models. “The problem is that big media businesses always handle young audiences very clumsily, and often in a very patronising way. We’re a massive disruptor of traditional linear broadcasting. The way we engage sports audiences, the way we find our talent, and the editorial tone of the stories we tell defy all previous logic that applied to TV sports programming.”

Sky Sports and Whistle Sports take on Copa90 but YouTube is the winner

Sports Video Group Europe 

http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/svg-analysis-sky-sports-and-whistle-sports-take-on-copa90-but-youtube-is-the-winner/ The battle for the millennial sports audience is happening online and astonishingly without the rights to show live action that has been the mainstay of pay TV broadcaster growth. Coverage of soccer in particular might never be the same again if the success of YouTube channels Copa90 and Whistle Sports continues on their current trajectory in reaching a community of younger fans at the grass roots of the global game.

US-based Whistle Sports claims 110 million subscribers across multiple channels including 25 million on YouTube, 51m Facebook fans, 11m Twitter followers, another 20m on Instagram and 4.5 on Vine. UK-based Copa90 averages 3.6 million views and 13.8 million minutes watched per month since launching on YouTube in 2012, recently reaching the milestone of 1 million subscribers.

“We could be seen as the greatest threat to linear TV sport broadcasting, but also potentially the clue to how they reverse that trend, and how we could become the biggest complement to that,” says Tom Thirlwall, CEO of Copa90’s parent Bigballs Films. “We have that young audience, and we know how to move that young audience around.”

Sky Sports is only too aware of the drift of audiences outside of the live presentation to digital media. However it chose to work with and invest $7 (£4.6) million in Whistle. The partnership, which began a year ago, unveiled its first collaboration last month, a social media channel for Sky’s flagship Saturday talk show Soccer AM.

“This is our first dedicated millennials video service,” says David Gibbs, director of digital media at Sky Sports. “We’re trying to talk to the audience in a different way by telling the story of an event in a different way and giving that millennial audience something they might not get through traditional platforms.

“We’re using the Soccer AM brand to talk to the millennial — or under 25 — audience,” explains Gibbs. “We know that this age group is engaging with our content on linear platforms but we’re seeing an increased amount of short form video consumption. What we’ve done is create bespoke scheduled content around a number of themes. This is complementary content to the linear schedule. Viewers will be encouraged to comment, like and share content.”

Thirlwall reveals that BigBalls held discussions with Sky Sports. “It was not right for us to go onto Sky’s platform,” he says. “They’ve seen our success and decided to adopt a similar approach. They need to. The subscription-based appointment to view audience is getting older. I don’t know any business that can survive by ignoring the next generation of fans.”

He continues: “If you tried to pitch anything around sport to a broadcast commissioner 4-5 years ago without showing a single piece of footage from a game, the door would be shut as fast as they would break into laughter. Our approach to connecting with a connected audience is vindicated. The stories outside of the 90 minutes are exactly what the Generation Y audience wants.”

Stories the traditional media have forgotten

Copa90 stories include the less obviously glamorous ones such as Derby Days in Dublin and Sarejevo and the crowd-supported resurrection of Spanish club Real Oviedo.

“These are not online click-bait featuring Messi or Ronaldo,” stresses Thirlwall. “These are the stories the traditional media have forgotten. These are stories about a constituency of soccer fans that the mainstream ignore. While they fill the schedule with live appointment to view, reruns or highlights that their data tells them audiences want to watch, our editorial is built on constant dialogue with fans.”

Production is constructed around the “anatomy of a story” based on when and where the audience is going to engage with a particular story. “We look at official platforms, vloggers and influencers around an event and look to break down the story into different packages to sit on multiple platforms,” he says.

Fast turnaround video is shot on Canon C300 DSLRs and cut on laptops running Adobe Premier. More high end features will be given a grade in Soho.

Content was initially published on the YouTube Copa90 channel. More recently, distribution has also been on BigBalls’ own sites (such as the Copa90 website), across social media and new video platforms like Vessel and Viber. The latest distribution strategy is Copa Collective which will see Copa90 films seeded across a variety of professional and independent digital channels.

“Copa Collective is a like-minded group of magazine publishers, freelance journalists and bloggers or instagrammers who we have united to work on with editorially to make sure more of our stories get circulated on more networks,” he says. “It’s about formalising a football influencer network.”

BigBalls makes money from YouTube revenue share and, increasingly, from branded content working with Vodafone, Nike, Adidas and others. An example is the video, How Stats Won Football: From Moneyball to FC Midtjylland made with Hyundai.

“The biggest asset are fans and the moment we piss them off by overtly selling to them then we lose them,” says Thirlwall, a former director at agenies Leo Burnett and McCann. “We work very closely with brands and their agencies to establish the best way of presenting a story. Brands recognise that the best way of reaching this audience is to tell credible, authentic stories that fits our editorial tone and style.”

It is looking to increase its output and build audience in the US using KICK TV, the digital network it acquired from Major League Soccer at the beginning of the year. South East Asia is also on the company’s roadmap for expansion within the year.

“Our ambition is to become an era-defining sports media business,” he declares. “That said, we’ve a long way to go before we truely create a global football media business. There’s so much of a runway to go down just in football.”

Sky and Whistle social channel

The theme on launch of the Soccer AM social channel was around EA video game FIFA 16. Sky Sports/Whistle has also developed two regular scheduled programmes, a late night Friday preview of the weekend games using stats and data and a Monday morning review show featuring quirky stories from the weekend’s football action.

“What we liked about Whistle was some of the commercial opportunities they create by working with brands to create branded content opportunities,” says Gibbs. Whistle Sports has attracted LG, Sony, Subaru and Gillette to create custom brand campaigns.

From 2016-2020, Sky will also be able to take advantage of a new deal with the Premier League allowing it to show clips from every EPL game across its digital platforms, including in-match content and highlights.

As with Copa90, content is being versioned into different lengths for different channels. Elements from the longer format Friday and Monday shows on Facebook and YouTube are edited into shorter clips and distributed to other social networks during the week.

“We still want to keep the same quality and principles you would see in any Sky production but this is filmed much more on the fly,” Gibbs says. “It it is quicker, slightly raw. It is not people behind a desk in suits. It’s a different type of production mostly of 3-4 minute clips. We think both [production styles] work.”

Challenged as to whether Sky was late to the game in trying to reach millennials, Gibbs said, “Not at all. This is all about extending our reach across TV and digital.”

“Chaotic” MENA TV in Need of Regulation

IBC 

TV is widely recognised as a high growth prospect in MENA but monetisation of pay TV and free to air commercial channels remains a major issue. http://www.ibcce.org/page.cfm/action=library/libID=14/libEntryID=385/listID=2 

Remedial recommendations include improved cooperation between media regulators and telco operators, increased and better quality local content and a reliable pan-Arabic measurement system. Wider implementation of digital terrestrial TV (DTT) was also argued for during IBC2015 session ‘MENA Broadcasting & Digital Media: The road ahead,’ as was greater competition for premium rights in order to create a more functioning market.

“The TV industry is in a bit of chaos,” said Dr Riyadh Najm, the former head of Saudi Arabia’s state media authority. “Cooperation between telecom regulators and media regulators is poor. We do not have a transparent or reliable audience measure for viewers and listeners in the region. In addition, public broadcasters do not have attractive programming.”

MENA is one of the world's fastest growing regions in terms of the number of TV households, expected to grow at CAGR of 3% between 2011-2017, reaching over 53 million households by 2017, according to Deloitte.

However the ad market there has stalled. “The global TV ad market is growing in almost all regions except for Western Europe and MENA,” reported Santino Saguto, Partner - Consulting and TMT Industry Leader for the Middle East at Deloitte. There was actually a decline in media spend in MENA from USD $2587 million in 2010 to $2323 million in 2014.

“The average ad spend per person is $20 which is significantly lower than other countries,” explained Saguto. “This is related to the lack of regulation, to limited local content and to an oligopoly of advertising agencies in some countries which control the market. For all these reasons we can say that there is plenty which can be done in terms of increasing the overall size of the industry in the region.”

TV ad spend as a proportion of total media spend in MENA is among the highest globally, contributing 53% in 2014 (in Western Europe by contrast the figure is 29.1% where digital is higher). In MENA, digital represents only 10% of ad revenue.

Pay TV has long been a hot topic of debate, noted Saguto. “Why is pay TV value so much lower than the rest of world? Premium sport is the main driver for pay TV growth, however the cost for sports rights compared to their consumer affordability in the region - where only an estimated 10 million households can actually afford premium pay TV - makes it hard to find a business model to make pay TV work commercially.”

Al Jazeera's BeIN Sport (bankrolled by the Qatari government) is the MENA leader in sport pay TV, able to acquire high value premium rights but still failing to attract the level of monetisation in return. “It is much lower than international standards,” said Saguto. “Additional competition from traditional TV or from industry consolidation going after premium sports rights could help the growth of the industry.”

Dr Najm added that many consumers in the region are being “prevented from viewing sports they are interested in” because the rights are behind a pay wall. He argued that DTT should be encouraged to flourish.

Many Middle Eastern nations are still transmitting analogue TV, while those few which have adopted DTT (Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tunisia, Bahrain, Kuwait) are transmitting channels and programming “which nobody is watching,” said Najm.

He called for more DTT channels to be carried, “and with programming that doesn’t replace satellite but which gives our nations the chance to obtain broadcast rights on a country-by-country basis. He said, “I'm not saying DTT can replace satellite, which has a 95% penetration in MENA, but DTT can capture a good part of the growing TV audience. DTT is vital as the best way to address the public, and to preserve national identity and heritage.”

DTT is crucial for the Gulf states, Dr Najm said. “I really believe there is room for DTT despite the huge number of satellite channels on air. Broadcasters are not making use of the spectrum that is allocated to them, while regulation of DTH transmissions is extremely difficult for individual countries.”

Dr Najm is also a former president of the Arab States Broadcasting Union, but said ASBU could not act as the region’s content regulator. He explained that five countries do exercise some control over broadcast media (Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Jordan and the UAE) but that more regulation is needed.

“In most countries, different government bodies regulate the media. The prevalence of DTH also makes it tricky to regulate, since audiences for services will often be in a different country to the broadcast company's HQ.

“We have about 1,300 TV channels on satellite, 12% of those are public TV, and too many of them are controlled by or heavily influenced by special interest groups. This has led to chaos in the region as far as broadcast regulation is concerned.”

SVGE Analysis: Exploring the options for live HDR broadcast

Sports Video Group Europe

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is suddenly all the rage. By expanding the ratio between the lightest and darkest parts of the video image, live event broadcasters see it as an essential improvement in the viewing experience for Ultra HD. http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/analysis-exploring-the-options-for-live-hdr-broadcast/

BT Sports, for example, which launched its UHD sports channel in the rec.709 colour space, has said it plans to introduce HDR within two years. It is likely that other broadcasters, such as those in the Sky group, will launch a UHD sports channel in that time with HDR from the get-go.

That’s because when BT Sport was lining up the infrastructure for launch the options available to it for getting HDR from camera into the transmission chain were limited. That’s leaving aside the matter of how many – or how few – HDR-enabled TV displays are actually in homes, and forgetting for one moment that a standard for HDR to the home is slowly working its way through bodies like SMPTE.

Nonetheless the direction is clear. Consumer electronics manufacturers will be launching UHD screens featuring HDR as a default and there is unanimity that regardless of format – even SD – the picture looks better with higher dynamic range.

So what are the solutions on offer for the live broadcaster? There are several so let’s begin with Grass Valley, which claims to have been the first vendor with a ‘true HDR camera system’ for broadcast.

Grass Valley’s HDR approach

That claim is based on the Xensium-FT CMOS, which GV began developing a decade ago and which are fitted to its latest LDX 86 series cameras. Unlike traditional CCD images, CMOS can imitate the global shutter behaviour of a CCD, but is not sensitive to fast camera movements with short exposure time or to short light flashes. Consequently, it can capture at least 15 f stops and allows Grass Valley to brand the output as Extended Dynamic Range (XDR).

“There are cameras that claim to be HDR ready but they just have one extra f stop than a regular camera, which is 200% more dynamic range,” says Marcel Koutstaal, vice president, camera systems, Grass Valley. “But the LDX 86 supports 15 f stops, meaning at least 800% additional dynamic range than other HDR cameras, or 15,000- 20,000% more light than a regular camera.”

After a year of field trials GV has now implemented, into the camera head, Dolby’s PQ (perceptual quantizer) tonal curve, allowing HDR material to be encoded in a 10-bit signal. This function is more familiarly known as the gamma curve in CCD cameras. Since PQ is part of the SMPTE standard 2084, Grass Valley XDR can be viewed on Dolby Vision certified professional monitors. Incidentally, Dolby has a prototype display called The Pulsar that will theoretically show about 19 stops.

Of course, there is a hefty debate about which is the better route for transferring HDR through the chain. The main ones under consideration at standards bodies are SMPTE ST-2084 and the hybrid log gamma route proposed by the BBC and NHK. Both are seeking to define the OETF (Opto Electronic Transfer Function) – which in Dolby’s case is PQ curves – which converts light from a scene into 10-bit data. This data is converted back within the consumer display in a transfer function known as Electrical Opto Transfer Function (EOTF). This too is up for discussion.

It is important for public service broadcasters, in particular, to be able to reach the mass of households with plane old SDR screens as well as those lucky ones with UHD HDR sets without incurring any additional cost or visual degradation to any viewer.

“No matter what algorithms are chosen we have the flexibility in our software to work with whatever the industry or client’s want,” says Koutstaal.

There are knock-on implications. “As soon as you start mixing HDR sources with SDR sources you have to take great care since it impacts on other areas such as vision mixing,” he says.

During last year’s winter’s test at the European Athletics championship in Zurich, Grass Valley captured HDR in 1080p/50 in parallel with regular processed video output in 1080i/50, with both signals recorded live onto a K2 Summit 3G server. It has ongoing tests with UK outside broadcasters, including at forthcoming sports events, but can give no details.

To achieve XDR operation, the LDX must be equipped with an XF Fibre transmission system to deliver XDR outputs as well as simultaneous standard dynamic range outputs in parallel. The XDR software upgrade option is enabled through a temporary or perpetual eLicense which can be introduced to the camera via USB stick.

Sony solution

Sony’s main reference study in this area is the OB by Sky Deutschland of the German Super Cup between Bundesliga champion Bayern München and DFB Cup winner VFL Wolfsburg on August 1, which shot live 4K HDR to test screens. It too plans future tests with UK OB companies but isn’t at liberty to say more.

The Sky D test used HDC-4300 cameras to capture higher dynamic range as S-Log3 data, Sony’s version of the transfer function that maps the range of brightness onto a 10-bit digital representation.

The signal is taken by the base processing unit BPU 4000 and the output can be switched, recorded onto a Sony server and output from the truck. Monitoring of accurate colour evaluation is enabled by the Sony PVM-X300 Trimaster series.

“The production workflow with S-log3 goes to the point at which the customer decides the mechanism of distribution to the home,” explains Peter Sykes, strategic technology development manager, Sony Professional Europe.

Like Grass Valley, Sony is agnostic about which variant of transfer function it will adopt and support. “This is mainly a distribution discussion,” says Sykes. “We are interested in supporting that and will introduce the necessary adjustments into our product when agreement is reached. Our concentration is on doing everything we can to capture higher dynamic range.”

Skyes also pointed out that Sony cameras F65 and F55 have been able to capture HDR for several years, but only now has the display side of things catching up to view it all on.

PION LiveStream

Danish developer PION launched a GPU processor-based system capable of extracting greater dynamic range from the live broadcast in 2013, but admits its timing may have been a little unlucky.

“We may have been out there a little too early,” says Michael Jonsson, Pion CTO. “In 2013 no-one was talking about HDR or optimising dynamic range. We talked with BT Sport about it (and tested with NEP) but there was not such a great buzz around the topic as there has been this year. Things have changed so much over the past few months that we intend to go back and re-start the conversation.”

PION’s solution, LiveStream is, he says, “fundamentally” different to any other. Essentially, the software is able to extract higher dynamic range from images shot with existing low dynamic range cameras – no new HDR-enabled cameras required.

“Commodity technology is the enabler for us,” says Jonsson. “We are using off-the-shelf GPU technology powerful enough to process 30 frames a second at 1080p, or 60 interlaced in real-time.”

LiveScene – based on the company’s Live Camera Enhancement (LCE) technology – takes the live uncompressed feed from broadcast cameras, or an inbound compressed stream from ENG or event coverage and passes it through a software algorithm. The result is claimed to overcome common live production challenges caused by adverse conditions – such as lack of highlight and shadow detail, noise, and poor colour or contrast. A 3U Rack mount box with GPU, SDI I/O and XEON class multicore CPU is required to be fitted to the truck or studio.

“We are optimising the dynamic range by bringing down the highlights and extracting detail from the shadows,” explained Jonsson.

The company suggests that conventional real-time processing in live broadcast is limited to the camera processing configurable through the CCU or on the camera itself that only enables a set of very conventional parameters to optimise the camera for scene. LiveScene, by contrast, employs a sophisticated computational imaging approach to every single pixel correction with reference to surrounding frames and the global context of the content.

“We are probably the first to apply this kind of algorithm to live broadcast,” says Jonsson.

He says the system is also applicable to UHD. “The current system takes one channel in and one feed out. We are working on a updated version which will be able to process four HD SDI feeds in realtime or one feed of Ultra HD.”

The product is in test at Danish broadcasters Denmark Radio and TV2 and in use at a Nigerian broadcaster Channels TV.

Talking Technicolor 

Technicolor made a bold claim at IBC. “Pay TV operators rely on premium movies and live sports, and while Hollywood has proved it can make movies in HDR for cinema and the home, no-one is doing HDR for live sports – except us,” declared Mark Turner VP, business development & relationships.

The company demonstrated live capture at 4K p60 up-converted from standard dynamic range (SDR) to HDR using software called intelligent tone management (ITM). This is apparently the same algorithm used by Hollywood colorists but now running in real-time on a server.

The signal output of the demo was 1000 NIT P3 in a rec2020 container. “This is a close proxy to the UHD Alliance open standard for UHD,” said Turner.

Importantly, the upscaled signal is routed through an Elemental encoder which spits out a single stream to be received in HDR and SDR. “You can’t justify the cost of running two infrastructures so the distribution system needs to be combined,” he said. “The cheapest way of implementing HDR live is for the mix to happen as normal with the final mix upscaled. OB engineers can adjust the settings in realtime or apply different HDR settings to different sports.”

To receive HDR viewers will need a STB or TV set fitted with Technicolor’s decoder. Technicolor says it is talking with a number of vendors and that its own HDR-enabled STB is being tested by pay TV operators such as BT Sport and Sky. There will be a live test of the workflow at a major US sports event this autumn.

Ikegami and Panasonic

Ikegami can stream component RGB 444 direct from camera head to control unit of its Unicam 3-CMOS 2/3-inch cameras. “This enables us to produce uncompressed RAW data from a 4K native sensor matching the UHD colour space defined in ITU Recommendation 2020,” said the company’s Europe president, Masanori Kondo, at IBC. The 4K-native new Unicam camera is intended for 4K studio and field systems.

Panasonic is currently in development within HDR transmission technology but at this time does not have a specific application for live broadcast, according to Dean Offord, technical & operational assistant, Panasonic Europe.