GoPro rival first to launch 4K 60fps action cam

Red Shark News 

Chinese developer Yi Technologies has teased a new 4K action camera ahead of CES which it claims will be the first to shoot at 60 frames a second.

http://www.redsharknews.com/production/item/4247-gopro-rival-first-to-launch-4k-60fps-action-cam

60fps is, of course, pretty useful to the sports video market where faster frame rates can make motion appear less blurred, while at the same time giving editors more options for slow motion.

Specifics of the Yi 4K+ are being kept under wraps until the show next week, but it’s a fair bet it will be near identical to Yi's 4K 30fps model which contained a Sony IMX337 sensor and squarely targets GoPro’s Hero 4.  That model, costing just $249, included a 2.19-inch display, two hours of battery life and the ability to stream video over WiFi.

The GoPro comparison is the company’s own. On release of the Yi 4K last summer it published a side by side spec sheet and YouTube video of footage shot with both cameras. 

Indeed, Yi describes itself as a “challenger brand." In a press release for the 4K+, CEO Sean Da said: “CES 2017 is an important milestone for us as we look to demonstrate our full product line and reveal novelty solutions.”

For ‘novelty’, perhaps we should read ‘novel’. In November the company launched the mirrorless Yi M1 built around a Sony-designed 20MP four-thirds CMOS sensor with zoom and prime lens options, and the Yi Erida drone which will also be showcased at CES. 

The drone can fly at 75mph and will support 4K — perhaps with the Yi 4K+ action cam. In addition, Yi also has a partnership with Google to develop a VR camera rig for its Jump platform, aping GoPro’s Odyssey VR rig.

Meanwhile, GoPro’s Hero5 Black version, launched in September currently supports 4K 30fps, so it would be reasonable to expect GoPro to be lining up higher frame rates in version 6.

VFX: Cause and Effect

Screen International

With the exchange rate in their favour, the UK's visual effects houses have never been in greater demand. But how is the sector coping as Brexit looms and investment heads East?

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Not only are British facilities routinely nominated for major awards they regularly compete with each other for the prize. Last season, D-Neg and Milk took home the best visual effects Oscar for Ex Machina, fending off Cinesite and ILM (London-HQ for Star Wars). Most buzz in the category this year is around Disney’s The Jungle Book, for which MPC completed 85% of the work, Doctor Strange (where Framestore played a large hand) and Fantastic Beasts for which every sizeable UK shop contributed shots. Not all the work on these projects was completed in London, however. The biggest houses farm work to offices in different territories dependent on where studios want to locate postproduction to maximise financial incentives. Framestore, MPC, Cinesite, for example, operate substantial divisions in Montreal which attracts postproduction with a whopping 41% tax subsidy. D-Neg and Cinesite also share shots with subsidiaries in Vancouver. Portions of The Jungle Book were routed to MPC’s Bangalore wing. “The scale, complexity and profile of work was unprecedented for us,” says CEO Mark Benson. “It will become a reference point for photoreal characters and sets.” Nor are these facilities necessarily British. MPC is owned by French group Technicolor, D-Neg by India’s Prime Focus and Framestore recently exchanged a controlling stake owned by Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund for Shanghai-listed Cultural Investment Holdings. Not that this necessarily matters - the heart of the creative operation tends to remain in London - but it serves to highlight the global nature of the VFX industry where facilities require offices in different time zones to operate round the clock. It’s also symptomatic of a business which is increasingly looking East. “Twenty years ago this was a North America focussed industry,” says Framestore CEO William Sargent. “Studios which then extended into Europe and Australia now think of themselves as truly global content producers. South East Asia is a significant and growing part of the market so we are just doing what our customers are doing and positioning the business for the next twenty years.” Indian or Chinese companies already own large US facilities Rhythm & Hues and Digital Domain while producers based there are beginning to spend money with UK firms to obtain higher production values. Cinesite and Milk and Framestore are all working on Chinese features. The visual effect business also relies heavily on globe-trotting freelance talent.  “The quality of work the UK produces is a function of the multi-cultural influence of our talent,” says Benson. Forty percent of MPC’s London staff are non-UK nationals. “Any change in our ability to engage with talent on a global basis could represent an issue. As an industry it is important we make that crystal clear.” This post-Brexit concern reverberates across town. “UK facilities are staffed with many Europeans, particularly in animation, and if any kind of restriction is placed on being able to work here it would have a big impact on our ability,” says VFX supervisor Tim Burke.  “The talent pool will shrink enormously if that’s the case,” says Adam Gascoyne, co-founder, Union FX. “For a small to mid-sized company like us the costs of sorting out visas just adds another layer of difficulty.” At the same time, Canada is introducing legislation to cut red tape and make it even easier for VFX companies to recruit high-skilled foreign workers. Milk CEO Will Cohen believes that the creative industries as a whole should be voicing more alarm: “I would urge everybody to send a message to the government about the harm any new labour laws could do to the booming creative industries.” In October, trade body UK Screen merged with Animation UK to make a more forceful representation to the government. “We need to employ the best of the best because we’re working on the best of the best,” says Neil Hatton, CEO, UK Screen Alliance. “The UK needs to do more to cultivate home-grown talent schooled in art and science.” While the exact deal with the EU remains the main cause for uncertainty, the devalued pound has pushed even more US investment toward UK shores. Studios can buy VFX expertise 20-30% cheaper than before the vote. “The reality is that VFX across London is more vibrant than ever,” reports Cohen. “We’re not all trying to leap on the same thing and cut each other’s throats to get it. We’re all busy.” Cohen says Milk bid for projects almost every day of the year - a far cry from the unpredictable norm. This could be the cumulative effect of wider recognition for a facility which followed up its Oscar with a BAFTA for BBC show Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and an Emmy for Sherlock. “We are working with a Hollywood VFX supervisor on their first major TV series and having to talk them through the challenge of handling 4K,” says Cohen. “In areas like this TV VFX is technologically ahead of features [where 2K is standard].” Not only is high end drama, fuelled by HBO, Netflix and Amazon, creatively more ambitious, the budgets are rising too.  “Framestore has a very strong heritage in TV having won 14 Emmys so effectively we’re going back to our roots,” says Sargent of the company’s decision to return to TV. It’s first new job was on National Geographic’s Mars. “The high end TV market is beginning to get the budget and ambition we are dealing with in film.”  Like Milk, Union FX divides its work between features and TV (Bridget Jones’s Baby, Outlander, Mars). “We’ve seen a big increase in the amount of TV work without actively chasing it,” reports Gascoyne. “TV surpasses film in some cases in terms of ambition. Certainly the expectation of audiences is higher.” Technicolor performs most of its TV VFX out of Mr X in Toronto but bolstered its UK drama presence by partnering with boutique Munky in October. It is Virtual Reality (VR), though, which the group is betting will drive business. It invested millions of dollars in a R&D center in Culver City which divisions like MPC can tap into. “There’s a fantastic opportunity to take assets from film or TV and repurpose them in immersive environments,” says Benson. MPC’s VR projects include The Martian. “The [R&D center] enables us to be at the forefront of delivering the tools and forging new storytelling methods. We’ve only scratched the surface of what the medium will enable.” Milk is on the verge of revealing its first VR project - one that could lead to several more, says Cohen: “There are no standards, format wars are looming and the potential audience with headsets is currently limited but we see VR as something very exciting to be involved in.” Framestore runs a dedicated VR studio but Sargent is pragmatic about its prospects. “VR is going to be slower than everyone is assuming. It’s not cheap, it’s time consuming, the only commissions are from marketing departments and without an audience it’s difficult to get a return on investment.” Cinesite is eschewing VR to focus on animation. It is working on several productions, both as an animation service provider and also developing its own property. A slate deal with 3QU Media will see the release of its first collaboration, Charming, next Spring; Gnome Alone, also for 3QU, is currently in production. A partnership with SPA Studios has produced the holiday season feature Klaus. “We are trying to get an animated feature off the ground in London,” reveals MD Antony Hunt. “I envisage growth not just in VFX but as a media company.” Cinesite is arguably the largest independently owned VFX house in the world. Since a private equity-backed management buyout from Kodak in 2013, it has expanded into Canada to build animation and take on features work including Captain America: Civil War and Independence Day: Resurgence. “The Chinese keep knocking on our door but we’re happy to continue to grow organically,” he adds. Upcoming UK VFX projects MPC: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (Disney); Ghost in the Shell (Paramount); The Dark Tower (Columbia); Alien: Covenant (Fox); Blade Runner 2049 (Columbia/Warner Bros.) Cinesite: Robin Hood: Origins (Lionsgate); Mary Poppins (Disney); Logan (Fox); Power Rangers (Lionsgate), The Commuter (StudioCanal). TV - Black Sails series 4 (Starz); American Gods (Starz) D-Neg: Blade Runner 2049; Annihilation (Paramount); Dunkirk (Warner Bros); Fast 8 (Universal); Cure for Wellness (Fox); Baby Driver (TriStar); Pacific Rim: Maelstrom (Warner Bros); Wonder Woman (Warner Bros); Life (Columbia); Justice League Part One (Warner Bros) Framestore: Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 (Disney); Paddington 2 (StudioCanal), Beauty and the Beast (Disney) Milk: TV - Doctor Who series 10 (BBC), Sherlock series 4 (BBC), Decline and Fall (BBC) Union FX: T2 Trainspotting (TriStar Pictures); Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight); My Cousin Rachel (Fox Searchlight); The Snowman (Universal); Victoria and Abdul (Focus Features)

Fantastic Feats

Screen International For the first of Warner Bros. planned five film follow up to the Harry Potter franchise, the visual effects team transposed J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world to 1926 New York. 026 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/launch.aspx?eid=377b08c9-f076-4dc1-b4a0-b3793864163f Set in 1926, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them introduces Magizoologist, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), on an expedition to New York City, carrying endangered magical creatures inside a special suitcase.  “One of the lovely things about the world of Potter was that even though it was magical it felt grounded in realism,” says Tim Burke, who with Christian Manz were the project’s VFX supervisors. “That was always our goal with Beasts. We wanted to create an environment that would allow the audience to feel they hadn’t seen anything like these creatures before yet not so fantastical that they couldn’t exist in the wild.” Taking a cue from vintage Harold Lloyd film Speedy, which depicts the hustle and bustle of New York in 1928, Stuart Craig’s production design grounded the tale “in a city in chaos, where everybody is busy building a new life,” says Burke. CG background plates of New York were blended with studio work at Leavesden and footage shot on location in Birmingham and Liverpool. Burke and Manz, who both worked on the Potter films along with director David Yates, divided the film’s set-piece sequences (the suitcase and the climactic Oscurus) between them with Framestore anchoring the work of nine facilities. A number of creatures featured in the script and Rowling’s book but the $180 million production had scope to imagine a larger menagerie. “David was clear that each creature should be included for a reason, rather than just forming part of the background,” explains Manz. “This meant giving each one a character as well as a look. As we went from 3D model to animation (led by animated supervisor Pablo Grillo) and back again over iterations we were able to develop stories for them which fitted the purpose of the script. Since we were also briefed to design a lot of the action sequences this meant the look, the characters and story were evolving at the same time.”  The Niffler, a small, furry rodent with a duckbill which robs a bank in the opening scene, had appeared in Potter book Goblet of Fire. Inspiration for its animation came from video of a honey badger raiding a refrigerator and a cupboard for food.  For the Erumpent, also mentioned in the Potter books, conceptual artist Rob Bliss drew on rhino, hippos and bison. Again the aim was not to make the creature too fancy despite a liquid sack with electrical current on the Erumpent's forehead.  “We wanted to give her a slight feminine quality without being too cartoony,” says Burke. “We found footage of a man in the midwest of America who kept bison and had invited one into his house. It was amazing how this large beast suddenly moved cautiously, daintily in the living room.” Inside the case The zoo hidden inside Newt’s suitcase demanded a complex melding of environments, creature design and camera choreography. “The idea was to show as wide a variety of creature as possible in their natural habitat,” explains Manz. “We planned to have Newt walk through a safari which we would shoot on location. When J.K Rowling saw our presentation she suggested that it would take a wizard more powerful than Voldemort to have created it - and Newt is not a great wizard. So, we had to pare our ideas back and came up with more of a ‘Heath Robinson’ approach in which Newt had patched each creature’s pen together.” The touch stone were museum and zoo dioramas. “We wanted distinct spaces where the creatures might feel at home and could roam, centered around Newt’s shed. The first reveal of the world inside the suitcase was to be of the shed, and then we take the audience outside to reveal even more.” Designed as a single 10-minute shot to achieve an experiential or dreamlike state, the sequence worked more coherently when cut, although sections of the longer shot remain. After working out which elements would be digital and which physical elements needed building, the VFX team blocked out the camera moves on a soundstage. “The pre-viz was pretty close to the final timing and set-up of the shot,” says Manz. “[DP] Philippe Rousselot was very happy with the camera moves we’d designed.” Acting opposite computer-generated beings tends to involve simple devices like a tennis ball on a stick to help actors establish an eyeline. Since Newt’s relationship with the beasts, with which he is supposedly friends, was so important to actor Eddie Redmayne, puppets were used in pre-production.  These ranged from simple maquettes of a stick-insect-like Bowtruckle, to glove puppets of the Niffler and a full scale version of the Erumpent built as a 17ft wide 20ft high carbon fibre frame and operated by the puppeteers behind the War Horse character in the stage play. Newt’s mating dance with the Erumpent was worked out between Redmayne, a choreographer and the four puppeteers who took their cues from animation studies. Splitting VFX heavy projects between post houses is not unusual and was a necessity for Beasts because of the many different types of work required including the design of the MACUSA (Magical Congress of the United States of America), seventeen different creatures and set extensions. The suitcase sequence alone married the work of five facilities.  “When we started the Potter films it was believed that only facilities on the U.S west coast could handle this level of complex work but over a decade of Potter confidence in UK companies has grown and grown,” says Burke. The first Harry Potter film in 2000 contained less than 15% of UK produced VFX. By the final film’s production in 2010, more than 85% of the effects were done in Britain. “It got to the point where you didn’t want to give all your work to one big U.S. company because then you’d be tied to their schedule and there was no guarantee they would put their best people on all aspects of it,” he says. “What we can now do is cherry pick the best talent from around the world to do specialist shots rather than overloading one facility.” “It’s also an aesthetic,” adds Manz. “By plugging into different cultures you get different ways of working. You get a European sensibility.”  Beast’s 1500 shots were shared among Soho’s Framestore (Niffler, Erumpent, Blind Pig bar), MPC (a gigantic feathered snake Occamy, the Billiwig fly), Cinesite (a magical dinner in the Goldstein’s house), D-Neg (Obscurus, the giant Thunderbird eagle, New York’s destruction and building repair sequence); Cinesite (dinner in the Goldstein’s house) and Milk (origami rats, Macusa Wand Office). Canada’s Rodeo FX, Image Engine and LA’s Method Studios also contributed. “The main challenge is consistency,” says Manz. “It’s making sure that all the moving parts fitted together, which for the suitcase didn’t happen until the final week of post because there were so many elements. David [Yates] had to have a lot of faith in us.” Conjuring Obscurus The hardest concept to pin down was that of the malevolently evil force Obscurus, described in the script as simply ‘repressed magic’.  “For pre-viz sequences we used various particle or fluid effects or sometimes just shapes which helped us develop the storyline but it didn’t tell us what it was,” explains Burke. Actor Ezra Miller, who played troubled witchfinder Credence, had prepared for his role by developing a “contorted physical performance of anger and rage with this incredible guttural noise”. “We played around with a video of it on Avid, retiming, reversing it and tried to create a broken rhythm,” he says. “David immediately liked what he saw.” Even then, D-Neg had quite a task to translate the actor’s performance into animation. The facility wrote bespoke tools for each scene featuring the Obscurus since it needed to move and react differently at scenes in Times Square, a subway and in the air  “Hopefully we managed to convey emotion through an animation that didn’t have any face or character at all,” says Burke.

OTT An "Unstoppable" Force

Streaming Media

Streaming Forum returns to London in February, and this year will focus on OTT.  Among those speakers is Dan Finch, the CEO of  TVPlayer and Simplestream who will be keynoting on day 2 of Streaming Forum. We sat down with Dan recently to ask him about his predictions for OTT in 2017, and the conversation quickly turned to live video, which is driving OTT adoption across multiple devices. What follows is a lightly edited version of that discussion.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Streaming-Forum-Preview-OTT-An-Unstoppable-Force-115459.aspx

What would you identify as the major trends, technologies or events in live video during 2016?

OTT has been an unstoppable force this year and is on par to continue a strong growth trajectory. The projected four-fold market increase to $32 billion by 2019 helps exemplify how improvements in user interface and bandwidth infrastructure flexibility have encouraged consumers to steer away from traditional DTT content delivery. The demand for live video content over multiple devices has grown and the social media giants have been swift to feed this hunger. With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram growing in popularity as live streaming end points, it is important for content players to syndicate to them in order to extend their consumer reach. This will be particularly applicable for sports content in the next few years, as 63 percent of sports fans have expressed willingness to pay for an OTT subscription to watch their favourite teams and players.

Have we reached a tipping point where OTT is simply the best way of serving live video?

Live video over OTT platforms is definitely at a tipping point. Consumption of this content is evolving due to the very nature of the OTT market, which, compared to linear content delivery, has a low cost-of-entry and offers a rapid time to market. As a result, more niche content providers and broadcasters can, and have, entered the market using the cloud without the large-scale, high-cost overheads and infrastructure typically incurred with traditional linear content delivery. At Simplestream, we're also driving up the quality of video delivery by ingesting assets directly before they're played out over traditional linear platforms, providing better audience targeting and improved monetization opportunity. Through our flexible, end-to-end Media Manager technology, we are helping this shift over to live OTT video by reducing costs and simplifying the syndication of content that works with current workflows.

Sports aside, what other types of content do consumers want live streamed and where's the evidence for this?

Viewer hunger for live streaming content is abundant beyond sports. GlobalWebIndex found that live funny/entertaining videos rank the highest in viewer popularity (53%)—followed by breaking news stories (41%), music/concerts (38%), educational talks (29%), brands/commercial videos (26%), celebrity videos (22%) and vlogging (19%). As live OTT video continues to expand into more of these areas, the need for these content players to optimize with a unified workflow that reduces costs and increases the quality of live content delivery is more crucial than ever.

How you would assess the growth in interest and ability among consumers to live stream video to social media?

We expect Facebook Live to grow in the coming years. We are seeing a lot of interest in using it as an avenue to build awareness, driven by Facebook's established market position and ability to help content owners reach niche audiences through its rich data on user needs and wants. There is an OTT opportunity to effectively harness this platform, but it has to be part of a larger strategy to deliver in ways that provide better direct monetisation.

This is where Simplestream comes into the fold by providing established syndication services that act as a bolt-on to having a direct-to-consumer service. Delivering a seamless UX that is compatible with multiple devices, monetizing the service effectively, and providing high quality streams that can be delivered with a short turnaround time to the viewer are among the end-to-end offerings that help content players of all sizes optimize their live video delivery. Time will tell on the true market impact that live OTT video will bring next year, however, with big players increasingly and effectively optimizing with streaming, the potential is vast.

What are your predications for the evolution of live streaming?

Live streaming will boom as a result of impactful technological advancements in multi-platform delivery, coupled with a growing consumer hunger for live content regardless of location. We therefore anticipate the introduction of more streaming services available on more devices with more diverse content for viewers.

Live sports streaming, specifically, is unquestionably on the rise, as the 2016 European Championship saw record views over OTT platforms. England's 2-1 win over Wales attracted 2.3 million viewers to the BBC Sport website—more than doubling the broadcaster's previous highest live OTT viewing figure. This change in the way people watch their favourite sports will ultimately help open up the market to increased diversification, allowing more niche markets to develop more readily—think skateboarding, surfing and darts as promising examples.

The relationship between viewer and broadcaster will also become more intimate. As the financial cost and turnaround time in delivering content reduces, more specialized and niche broadcasters can harness the means to effectively engage with their audiences. Facebook Live is a prime example of simplified content delivery: All content players need is a good-quality smartphone with an internet connection, and suddenly thousands can tune in. Monetisation, however, remains a crucial piece of the puzzle. With platforms like Facebook Live generating and delivering live content to a plethora of socially-syndicated devices, the need to ensure effective delivery to drive monetisation efforts is important – especially to mobile. A recent report from Ooyala found that 51 percent of video is now viewed over mobile devices, illustrating a clear need for effective multi-platform content delivery.

Multi-device delivery, however, can still be a challenge for many broadcasters and content providers. By efficiently plugging into current workflows, Simplestream can help reduce the turnaround time and overall costs of streamlining content to its audiences across multiple devices – and can even get the break-even point down to as low as 2,000 subscribers.

How much 4K live or recorded content is being streamed ? What will make the dial turn upwards on this?

4K live content will continue to grow as the demand for 4K TVs increases. Unsurprisingly, the availability of UHD channels is concurrently increasing—from 50 in 2015 to a projected 237 by 2020, according to a recent SNL Kagan report. The predominance of 4K video content delivery is inevitable given the ongoing expansion of OTT platform options. In order for live 4K/UHD streaming to continue succeeding, however, delivery must be effectively managed and monetised. As the costs incurred to create and deliver this pixel-rich content are naturally higher, however, the availability of cost-effective solutions is paramount to the success of UHD content creation for content players, and its concurrent adoption by consumers.

Live OTT Warrants Advertising Premium, Says Massive CTO

Streaming Media 

Massive is one of the leading OTT video app and UI developers, and its work with a variety of content publishers gives it unique insights into the state of over-the-top video as we wrap up 2016 and move into 2017. We spoke with MassiveCTO Max Ramsay to get his views on the growth of live streaming and the implications of 360° video, 4K, and HDR, among other trends.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Live-OTT-Warrants-Advertising-Premium-Says-Massive-CTO-115470.aspx

What would you identify as the major trends, technologies or events in live video during 2016?

2016 has seen an explosion of live video in social platforms such as Facebook Live, along with the continued presence of dedicated platforms like Periscope. We also saw news reports in October 2016 of Instagram testing live streaming functionality. Live has made its way into social media such that anyone can now broadcast themselves anywhere, anytime.

The major OTT services are also embracing live delivery by introducing more live streaming channels to expand their reach beyond televisions into internet-enabled devices. Audiences are getting used to live video being easy to both create and view.

Advancing technology is improving the usability and accessibility of live or pseudo-live, which is now being truly integrated into the user experience of applications rather than being treated as a standalone area or section.

Why is live appointment to view seems still the most prized content?

The lifeblood of live has traditionally been advertising. With so much choice available and the ability for audiences with personal video recorders to skip over ads, live content—especially content with intense online social engagement—ensures that audiences watch every second, including any advertising. If you have engaging, high-quality live content, you can still charge a premium for advertising.

Is OTT now a better way of serving live than traditional broadcast?

Broadcast technology cannot move fast enough to keep up with online. While a broadcast standards might take over a decade to go from idea to ratification and then mass-market penetration, the same can happen in a few years in the OTT world. It used to be that live broadcast television provided the best quality video experience, but that changed as soon as Netflix and YouTube started streaming 4K.

At Massive, we are privileged to have had front-row seats for the last twenty years watching the story of live streaming and OTT unfold. Over this period we have invested heavily in R&D across areas ranging from the psychology of interface usability to efficient application delivery. Our experience tells us that this next phase of the story is only just beginning.

At the moment, we see many exciting technologies on the horizon – particularly emerging standards that allow services to be even more decentralised, and video and player applications delivered even more efficiently.

Even with the current state of technology, audiences are getting used to live streaming with its existing quirks and the trend is clearly towards a constant improvement in the user experience.  This is just as much a question about content availability. As long as the content is compelling and the technology does not detract from the experience, usage and audiences will grow.

We believe we will see the technology and audience expectations meeting in the middle. So much more can be done for online streaming and applications to truly interact with audiences compared to traditional broadcast. As an industry, we have hardly scratched the surface.

What non-sports content do consumers want live streamed and where’s the evidence for this?

The demand for live OTT now extends beyond sports into all content genres. Audiences today feel compelled to experience everything as it happens—either to not feel left behind or be involved with an online community through social media. Reality television, music gigs, theatre, e-sports, and other events are well positioned to take advantage of this.

Just this year, Massive launched Comic-Con HQ for Lionsgate. Lionsgate partnered with Comic-Con International on the new service that includes live coverage from the Comic-Con events alongside a catalogue of other original short-form content, movies and TV series from Lionsgate and other studios. It enhances the experience for fans not able to attend any or all of the Comic-Con events. There are so many live activities happening simultaneously that it’s impossible to see everything in person. The service added over 100 panels shortly after they finished the San Diego event.

What will be the impact of Facebook’s live strategy?

Facebook and other social networks have turned anyone into a live broadcaster. There may be something unpredictable about how "being there" creates a visceral experience for audiences. New media has a long tradition of changing the rules of politics. We could be in for some exciting times – or, like 90s VR and 3D TV it could amount to absolutely nothing.

How do you see the evolution of live streaming in 2017?

2017 is going to see consolidation and improvement of existing technologies. As for future trends in the long to medium-term, the elephant in the room is 360° video enabled by the inexpensive VR headsets that will soon be widely available.

This is an emerging medium and traditional filmmakers are enthusiastic to become the discoverers of the necessary new techniques required to make this a mass-market art form. They have an opportunity to emulate their pioneering heroes from the golden age of cinematography. Tracking alongside this is 360° video’s ability to place someone at a live event.

One thing is for sure, 360° video, 4K, 8K and HDR’s increased colour depth and brightness are going to increase demand for bandwidth, and this is just the uses we can imagine now. High-speed connections to the home are going to be needed and any government or operator not imagining this far ahead is limiting their future options and our potential as an industry.

It is worth nothing that within the user interface field that Massive operates, we are less concerned with the type 4K, 8K and 360 etcetera, and more fixated on the effective management and scheduling of live events and blending them with a catalogue to create unified experiences.

How much 4K live or on-demand content is being streamed? What will make the dial turn upwards on this?

Netflix, Sony, and Amazon are flying the flag for 4K together with other streaming services from major broadcasters, content owners and operators – such as Massive’s client Bell Media through their Discovery Go  service on Samsung UHD TVs. That being said, the industry is on track to move swiftly past 4K, to 8K, with 16K appearing as codec efficiency increases imminently.

Post sector in rude health

Broadcast

The boom in large-scale, big-budget scripted commissions is giving a boost to UK post houses, with increasing demand for UHD, HDR and VFX work.

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/post-sector-in-rude-health/5111972.article

The ‘rude health’ in which the post sector found itself at the Media Production Show in June has arguably improved even further since then.
In part, this is a result of exchange rate changes since the Brexit vote. Revealing its financial figures for the third quarter, the government said that a 0.1% rise in GDP was “primarily driven by motion picture, video and TV programme production, sound recording and music publishing activities” – which are growing at “a very strong rate of 16.4%”.
Brexit has, however, left tax relief and overseas workers’ rights up in the air. Trade groups have been given reassurances about the former but continue to lobby government about the importance of free movement, particularly for VFX talent.
“We need to employ the best of the best because we’re working on the best of the best,” says Screen Alliance chief executive Neil Hatton. “The UK needs to do more to cultivate fresh talent schooled in art and science.”
UK Screen joined forces with Animation UK to form the UK Screen Alliance for more forceful representation of sector interests.
“It’s a two-speed economy,” Hatton adds. “Facilities primarily focused on domestic TV are suffering on rates and margins [Blue 2.0 was 2016’s biggest casualty]. That’s partly down to ITV throttling back, uncertainty at Channel 4, and the ongoing effect of the pensioners’ licence fee settlement at the BBC.”
Where there is a boom, it cannot be attributed to Brexit alone. High-end TV tax relief continues to induce multiple US network and streaming platform commissions – like Netflix’s lavish 10 x 60-minute royal drama The Crown. The second series is already in production.
Molinare, which handled post for Left Bank’s series, says 2016 was a “bumper” year. Envy reports “a very good year with turnover increasing” and Halo, winner of Best Post-Production House at the Broadcast Awards 2016, is “optimistic for another year of growth”.

High-impact series
Encore director of operations Johnny Whitehead says 2016 was “the year that cemented the arrival of high-impact series”. Citing BBC/AMC coproduction The Night Manager, he adds: “The budget and production values meant the project was groundbreaking in ambition and quality.”
With 4K commissions predicted to increase steadily through 2017, High Dynamic Range (HDR) is the technology that has the community most excited. “The benefi ts are amazing and it presents an opportunity to grade and deliver content in an enriched and more realistic fashion,” says Whitehead.

Molinare general manager, operations, Rowan Bray adds: “DoPs are excited about its potential and we are already delivering HDR as part of our feature film deliverables.”
For Halo business development manager Matt Locke, HDR is “the big leap” in the visual impact of content that consumers are anticipating, while The Farm head of drama Harriet Dale reckons that by the end of 2017, 50% of the facility’s dramas will be UHD, with some HDR.
As a result, facilities are having to adjust their workflows, “whether that’s adopting [US film association the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’] ACES pipelines, performing multiple passes where both SDR and HDR versions are required, or in grade adjustments to correct unwanted highlight detail that may detract from the composition of the image”, Dale says.

Game-changing tech
The potential for creative teams to collaborate anywhere, with no hardware and on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis, is a genuine game-changer that is beginning to alter the business and workflow models for post.
“Everybody is making the shift from capex to opex so they can burst up and down as required, but it’s still early days,” says Hatton.
Phantom Sun Post Production bookended its first trading year offering remote editing services for both series of CITV’s Bear Grylls Survival School.
“Instead of running a facility, we set up pop-up suites at production companies or in our office in Manchester, or facilitate craft talent to work from home,” explains co-founder Eben
Clancy. “There’s far more acceptance of remote working, but connectivity is the real key to unlocking its full benefits.”
Base Media Cloud founder and managing director Ben Foakes says: “2016 is the tipping point in terms of people actively investigating cloud.”
Partnered with Aspera, the company has provided a range of storage, asset management and file-transfer solutions for Aurora Media’s Formula E production since February.
“Companies that have previously invested in lots of on-premises hardware are looking to go fully virtualised,” says Foakes.
When The Farm was forced to leave its Soho Square HQ for a new 90-suite, 33,000 sq ft facility on Newman Street in August, it may have hammered another nail into Soho’s coffin.
“Rent costs aren’t the only cause for companies leaving Soho; London is expensive generally,” notes Rushes managing director Joce Capper. “As the industry has evolved, there is less need for us all to be together in Soho. Many of the buildings simply aren’t suited to modern facilities, where large, open-plan spaces are required, with the ability to house much larger teams of people and equipment.”
Rushes’ parent Deluxe will relocate its media services business to Perivale in outer London by next summer. However, the group’s creative brands will stay in the centre.
“Increasing rent and rates is a big challenge for all facilities but I don’t think there’s that much difference in rent between Noho and Soho,” says Whitehead. “There’s a tremendous talent pool in London and for it to retain its global reputation for excellence, it needs to have an identity. Soho still helps to provide that.”
Envy was one of the first facilities to make the move to Fitzrovia more than a decade ago. “We were told we were brave being on the ‘wrong side’ of Oxford Street,” says managing director Dave Cadle. “Currently, I think a central location is important for clients and staff alike.”
Molinare established a site in Shoreditch at the end of last year, but rent was not the deciding factor. “This expansion was to build on our client base in that area and we’ve doubled the suites at that site this year,” says Bray. “Post-production is a client services-led industry, and currently the majority of clients want to be in Soho.”

VFX for TV 
VFX for TV is providing both a steady income and a creative challenge far removed from a decade ago – hence the return of Framestore to the fray. The 1,000 shots it delivered for National Geographic’s six-part docudrama Mars marked its first foray into episodic TV since 2009.
A move back into TV was among the factors that influenced Framestore’s decision to put itself up for sale in February. Another was planned expansion into the fast-growing Chinese and Indian film markets.
In a year when Double Negative and Milk’s work on Ex Machina beat Star Wars: The Force Awakens to the Best Visual Effects Academy Award, investors flocked to acquire the double Oscar-winning Framestore (The Golden Compass; Gravity).
In November, Shanghai-listed Cultural Investment Holdings took a 75% stake, valuing the facilities group (which has overseas sites in LA, New York and Montreal) at £150m.
Further consolidation in the post sector came when VFX artist Gary Brown and members of his team at boutique Munkey became part of Technicolor, the French owner of MPC and The Mill.
UK facilities are likely to rejoin the battle in the forthcoming awards season. Framestore, Cinesite, MPC, D-Neg and Milk shared shots on Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. Framestore was also involved in Doctor Strange, while MPC created the bulk of creature and landscape effects for Disney’s The Jungle Book.

Dock 10: Investing for growth

With half an eye on the expiry in 2020 of a 10-year contract with the BBC, Dock 10 consolidated its position as the north’s dominant postproduction facility.
“We’ve reached a plateau in terms of the market for traditional broadcast work, including long-term contracts with indies, so the question for us was whether to open a base outside of MediaCityUK or to acquire instead,” explains head of post Paul Austin.
In April, central Manchester commercials VFX boutique Edit 19 relocated to The Quay, a new post-production hub at Dock 10, and promptly won a deal to provide graphics for the opening sequence of the BBC’s Euro 2016 coverage.
“We lacked high-end motion graphics and they lacked client exposure,” says Austin. “We were able to gel those together. On the back of that successful model, we acquired 422.”
The Peel Group-owned business also jumped aboard the VR bandwagon, completing immersive shorts for the BBC’s final run of The Voice UK.
“VR is a market that we think will emerge over two to five years and the idea is to try to get a grip on the technology before we miss the boat,” says Richard Wormwell, head of 360 production. “The addition of Edit 19 means we can incorporate a lot of VFX tools and workflows into 360 projects.”
It is currently working on a Sesame Street VR with the BBC.

SVOD Is the Clear OTT Winner

Streaming Media 

Amazon Prime Instant Video's expansion and the introduction of BritBox drive home the point: SVOD will be the leading OTT business model for the foreseeable future.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=115421

Amazon's global launch of Prime Video and the announcement by UK broadcasters BBC and ITV of a U.S. launch for a new streaming service BritBox should seal the deal for subscription on demand. SVOD has won.

"In retrospect, if you were starting out a few years ago pushing video OTT then it is blindingly obvious that SVOD would be the most successful online video model," says Ovum senior analyst Tony Gunnarsson.

It is still early days, but the world has already been sliced up between the all-powerful Netflix and a handful of local or regional competitors. Multiple pay-TV OTT initiatives around the world indicate that OTT video is becoming increasingly core to service providers' product portfolios.

The Q1 2017 launch of BritBox is one example. The venture pairs BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, with commercial network ITV and U.S. network AMC (which partners with the BBC for cable channel BBC America).

BritBox will offer a collection of British content including dramas that have long been unavailable in the U.S. such as New Blood, season premieres of Cold Feetand Silent Witness alongside popular soaps such as Eastenders and Holby City, which will be available 24 hours after their UK broadcast.

ITV and BBC classics such as Brideshead Revisited and Fawlty Towers will also feature on the service.

Amazon = SVOD + TVOD

Amazon's global rollout has been flagged for some time. Although it is undercutting Netflix's per-month fee, it differs from Netflix in a couple of important respects.

First, Amazon is going after the high-ARPU streaming market by offering transactional VOD sales across both electronic sell-through and digital rental, which is music to the ears of Hollywood studios.

"Where Amazon has been particularly innovative is in its risk-taking, quietly placing TVOD content alongside SVOD catalogs for subscribers," says Gunnarsson. "Encouraging SVOD subscribers to spend extra on transactional content has been hugely successful, to the point that Amazon is now stealing TVOD market share from Apple's iTunes (which was the market leader in TVOD until recently)."

Amazon will aim to replicate this on a global scale in 2017. "That presents an opportunity for broadcasters to license both new and old content to Amazon on a TVOD basis, which should allow for more lucrative deals than traditional SVOD rights," says Gunnarsson.

Secondly, Amazon's strategy has been to focus more on partnering than competing with content owners. Through its Streaming Partners Program in the U.S., Amazon is hosting other SVOD services within its Amazon Video service on a revenue-share basis. As a result, according to Ovum, Amazon is a key earner for pay-TV SVOD services such as Showtime and Starz, as well as for more genre-specific services such as Smithsonian Earth and CuriosityStream.

The introduction of the Streaming Partners Program in Europe, though, will be very different in character from the U.S. model. "In the UK and in Germany, Amazon is unlikely to be able to offer the premium channels that Sky has, so the impact of smaller, genre-specific services such as CuriosityStream is likely to be negligible – even if they would gain much larger audiences," suggests Gunnarsson.

Global SVOD on the march

More broadly, with global OTT TV and video revenues set to reach $64.78 billion by 2021 according to Digital TV Research, the driver is SVOD. The researcher forecasts SVOD revenues to reach $25.71 billion in 2021, up from $11.13 billion in 2015. Based on this, it predicts that SVOD will contribute 40% of total OTT revenues in 2021; double the 20% recorded in 2010.

Some of this growth was spurred by Netflix's ambition to establish operations in 200 countries by the end of 2016. Now, with just under 100 million subscribers, its success has led to an SVOD bonanza with countless new SVOD services launched globally in 2015–16.

"SVOD, as per Netflix, is really a textbook example for ensuring customer loyalty and is the main factor in driving SVOD from nowhere a few years ago to being the major online delivery and revenue model it is today," says Gunnarsson.

One indicator of the preference of SVOD is the uptake of services. Ampere's consumer survey shows that in countries such as the U.S., UK and Germany SVOD households are approaching two SVOD services per household.

"One of the main characteristics of SVOD consumers is their love of content which drives their need for immediacy of access uninhibited - which is what SVOD services allow," says analyst Daniel Gadher. "A potential opportunity for growth in AVOD platforms could be to target more casual viewers, who are less deterred by advertising."

Churn management will be a key issue for all SVOD services in developing loyalty and maximising revenues, particularly for 'dipping in and out', according to Futuresource Consulting.

For Netflix, in its key markets, up to 40% of current and previous subscribers have cancelled their subscription and re-started in the last year, according to Futuresource's Living With Digital survey  from summer 2016 .

"Netflix's main strategy to manage this "dipping-in & out"is its huge investment in original content and the subsequent scheduling of this, ensuring that there is always something for subscribers to watch," says David Sidebottom, principal analyst at Futuresource.

The Rise of the Multi-SVOD Home

Ad-funded video services tend to enjoy broader demographics than subscription VOD services, which skew to younger, wealthier individuals, Gadher points out. "Catch-up video services in particular often have a larger older consumer contingent."

Findings from consultancy firm Decipher's Mediabug report shows that around 32% of the UK online adult population have either Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video, or NOW TV and that almost a third of this group subscribe to more than one. More than half of Amazon Prime Instant Video subscribers and Sky's NOW TV subscribers also subscribe to Netflix. And 1.9% of the online adult population in the UK subscribe to all three.

In most markets, SVOD penetration is higher amongst pay-TV subscribers than free-to-air (FTA). Decipher found that 84% of UK homes with all three SVOD subscriptions also have a pay-TV package.

According to Futuresource, Netflix penetration is reaching almost one-third of UK pay-TV households but less than half of this is among FTA homes, although the gap is much narrower in the U.S.

"Pay-TV users take SVOD to widen their options," says Sidebottom. "There is evidence in the U.S. that SVOD is starting to impact pay-TV subscriptions, partly due to the maturity of the sectors, with pay-TV reaching saturation and over half of U.S households having at least one SVOD service.

Based on all of this, what strategy should pay TV broadcasters be adopting to secure their future?

"We'll see a number of strategies play out across pay-TV operators—with some opting to solidify their position with continued investment in premium content that consumers are willing to pay for, such as premium sports and first-window films," says Sidebottom. "Others—particularly in the telco space where video forms just one component of a wider multi-play proposition, will continue to the develop the trend of becoming virtual pay-TV aggregators, utilising third party digital video services such as Netflix to enhance a FTA or basic-tier channel proposition."

While the U.S. leads world SVOD consumption (valued at $8 billion with 110 million subscriptions) EMEA forecasts published July 2015 by Digital TV Research show that by 2020 video and OTT TV revenues will reach nearly $2.65 million with 60% of the total revenue made going to those services offering SVOD.

Latest research from the EBU's Media Intelligence Service supports this rise. It expects SVOD subs to reach 50 million European homes by 2020. Currently, nearly 11% of all European households have a SVOD subscription with the biggest uptake in the UK, Netherlands, Ireland, and across the Nordics.

More than a quarter of British consumers (13.9 million or 27% of the adult population) are SVOD users, according to research published in November by YouGov and Zuora (a provider of subscription commerce, billing and finance solutions). The rising popularity of these services has a huge effect on TV viewing habits, as almost half said they now rarely watch 'normal' (broadcast TV) anymore. That's 12% of the UK adult population. Looking only at millennials aged 25-34 that subscribe, this number increases to almost two thirds (58%) of subscribers.

On average, UK subscribers spend £17.53 ($21.70) per month on video streaming services, which may suggest that many sign up to multiple services simultaneously due to a lack of price and content options which would suit subscribers' more individual viewing needs.

Decipher suggests that pay-TV subs in the UK have not only increased, but SVOD is growing faster among Pay homes—and in particular those with Top Tier packages—than any other.

Its Mediabug report suggests that the total pay-TV base in the UK has grown from 61% to 69% of the population since 2012. During this time, SVOD usage in pay-TV homes has grown from 10 to 45 per cent. Decipher says this indicates there's a growing number of UK consumers that are increasingly comfortable with both pay-TV and SVOD. It found that top tier pay-TV subscribers are adopting SVOD at a rate that far outpaced the other tiers.

The same research shows that traditionally Free TV homes are resistant to the lure of SVOD growing from 9 to 28 per cent over the same period. While there are homes that use OTT apps and SVoD subscriptions to top up Free TV, it's a much smaller segment than previously imagined and is not impacting the market for pay.

"Consumers sit along a spectrum of engagement with media entertainment, and are increasingly mixing and matching services to get the content they want, both live and on demand," commented Hamish McPharlin, director of Decipher Media Research.

According to e-commerce specialist Cleeng, SVOD services have played the most significant role in changing viewing patterns. "Not only do SVOD services allow consumers the opportunity to tailor video content to their personal needs, but they also allow people to enjoy the content on a multitude of devices.

"It is plain to see the OTT and SVOD industry is an ever-evolving beast that is gaining more commercial power each and every day."