ITU to ratify both BBC and Dolby HDR standards

SVG Europe

The persistent question mark hanging over the introduction of High Dynamic Range to the home is about to be settled. The two proposals before standards body the ITU have for a while been thought to be competing for the same prize. With diplomacy fitting of a United Nations agency, the ITU is understood to be ratifying both as standard on July 4.

http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/itu-to-ratify-both-bbc-and-dolby-hdr-standards/

The two recommendations for High Dynamic Range are Hybrid Gamma Log (HLG), devised by the BBC and NHK; and PQ [Perceptual Quantizer], which was principally developed by Dolby.

“These are two different, not competing, positions to solving two different problems,” says Andy Quested, BBC HD & UHD, head of technology. “Both solve their own problem elegantly. PQ is focused more on the display and is based on what we see in controlled environments like the cinema. The other acknowledges that broadcast TV is a bit of a wild west and that it is harder to control display characteristics.”

He adds: “The BBC NHK version is primarily designed with a live broadcast environment in mind and with a infrastructure through which a signal has to pass, which in the US can include multiple syndicated broadcasters.”

Dolby’s proposal is aimed more at HDR mastering for recorded content such as Hollywood movies and studio drama for home entertainment.

“We believe the market will sort out which format it wants, as it always does,” says Quested. “In the broadcast environment it is important to be able to interchange – or make a seamless conversion – between a PQ HDR with a HLG HDR so that programming of both types can be run on the same channel.”

Quested added that he felt HDR “vital” to the quality of a UHD picture and far more so than resolution.

The Digital Production Partnership (DPP) the standards body for file delivery organised by the main UK broadcasters will incorporate the ITU’s recommendations into its guidelines for UHD delivery.

Backwards compatibility focus

The BBC has been working with the Joint Collective Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) to standardise the required signalling in ITU-T H.265 (HEVC) compression, which allows both backwards compatible and ‘non-backwards compatible’ modes of operation for the HLG solution.

In a blog post the BBC explains that backwards compatibility is key for broadcasters as it allows a single UHDTV programme feed to serve both the new HDR enabled UHDTV sets, as well as standards compliant standard dynamic range (SDR) UHDTVs that have already been purchased.

“It will also save us money in TV production as only critical monitors need to be HDR capable, the vast majority of monitoring can continue to use SDR monitors and PC screens,” it states.

To demonstrate the concept of HDR and the technical capability of Hybrid Log Gamma BBC R&D shot tests including of from a RIB boat with BT Research and BT Sport capturing footage of the America’s Cup World Series in the Solent and footage shot at 2160p 100 fps at the rehearsal for the Eurovision 60th Anniversary Party at the Hammersmith Apollo with a camera loaned from Panasonic.

Other tests using HLG included Sky Europe’s broadcast of the DFL SuperCup in UHD with HDR, a trial by NASA in conjunction with Harmonic and the Vatican’s broadcast of the Ceremony of the Opening of the Holy Door, by the Pope Francis, in HLG HDR UHDTV – a broadcast which is shortlisted for an IBC 2016 Innovation Award.

Focal International Awards

Broadcast 

The Focal International Awards highlight outstanding restoration work and use of archive footage. Adrian Pennington takes a look at the films vying for the crown in six categories.

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/focal-international-awards/5104390.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=42957

The Focal International Awards, presented in association with AP Archive, celebrate achievement in the use of archive footage and restoration, in all genres and across all media platforms. The awards ceremony for programmes that aired in 2015 took place on Thursday 26 May at the Lancaster Hotel in London (after Broadcast went to press). It was hosted by former BBC chief news reporter Kate Adie. Here we reveal the inside story of some of the films on this year’s shortlist.

FACTUAL

Best of Enemies

Producer Magnolia Pictures

Main sources ABC News; Videosource; Getty Images; Hoover Institution; WNET; T3 Media

When rival Republican and Democratic pundits William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal went head to head on ABC News in 1968, it changed the nature of TV news debates.

Focal jury chair Alison McAllan describes it as “an unusual subject for a documentary, made viable by two such larger-than-life characters”.

The material used was “well chosen and frequently humorous”, said the judges, and the contextual archive “gives a fascinating political picture of the times”.

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Producer Firelight Films

Sources NBC; T3 Media/CBS; Chicago Film Archives; Cine Tamaris-Agnes Varda; Oddball Film

Focal’s jury commended the “enormous amount of work done by researchers” to obtain the 50 minutes of archive footage used in this feature-length documentary looking at the Black Panther Party, its significance to US culture and the impact of its derailment.

“Everyone has seen the Black Panthers marching in formation looking militant, but we wanted material that had not been seen before,” says the film’s director, Stanley Nelson.

When Nelson mentioned his Black Panthers project in conversation at a screening of another film, it led him to a Sony Porta Pak home-movie tape, made in the 1960s and stored in a cupboard.

“It was shot in Algeria and showed Panther leaders on the phone at the critical moment the party split,” he says. “It was just incredible to find this footage and make it central to the storytelling.”

The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution was shown in the UK as part of BBC4’s Storyville strand.

The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor

Producer Deep Focus Productions

Sources Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center; Dr. Haing S. Ngor Archive; Georgetown University; ABC News; Videosource; CNN

This documentary telling the story of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror through the eyes of Dr Ngor, whose experiences were recreated for Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, took an innovative approach.

“With next to no footage of the Cambodian atrocities available, the use of original animated sequences, combined with more general Cambodian archive footage, manages to convey some of the horror of the events and helps towards an understanding of why they unfolded as they did,” says McAllan.

CURRENT AFFAIRS

Clockwork Climate

Producer Artline Films

Sources BBC Motion Gallery; AP Archive; National Archives and Records Administration; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Museum of Innovation and Science Collections

“Our central topic is a theoretical research field, with little visual material except through CGI and computer models,” says producer Benjamin Landsberger.

For this exposé of climate control by American and Russian geo-engineers during the Cold War, 35mm source copies of secret atmospheric experiments found in US and Soviet military archives were transferred to digital HD. “The archive was carefully used with the original aspect ratios preserved,” says jury chair Mat Flasque.

India’s Daughter

Producer Assassin Films

Sources NDTV; Wilderness Films India; ITN Source; CNN IBC

The aftermath of the brutal gang rape and murder of a female medical student in Delhi in 2012 compelled producer/director Leslee Udwin to make this film.

“I was reliant on material shot for Indian TV in analogue 4 x 3, whereas our format was digital 16 x 9,” she says. “I had to trust that the content was more important and powerful than strong in style, and we went with what we had – raw and emotional, and technically variable. It was the right decision.”

The Queen of Ireland

Producer Blinder Films

Sources RTÉ; personal archives; Irish Queer Archive (Tonie Walsh); Invisible Thread Films; Gaze Film Festival

LGBT rights activist Rory O’Neill (drag queen Panti) is the focus of documentary approach that uses archive to illustrate a talking head,” says McDonald. “They achieve it quite excellently.” coBain: montage of heck Producers End of Movie; LLC Sources MTV Networks; Reelin in the Years; Universal Music; The Cobain Estate In this record of the life and death of Nirvana frontman this feature documentary that follows the lead-up to Ireland’s 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage.

“A very enjoyable film with some incredible archive from around the world – from home movies to newsreels and club footage,” the jurors stated.

“The wider issue of gay rights in Ireland was really well portrayed through the times and words of its larger-than-life central character.”

MUSIC

Amy

Producer On The Corner

Sources Universal Music Group; Family & Friends; Getty Images; BBC; Videoplugger, ITN Source

Director Asif Kapadia’s intimate portrait of the troubled singer is already a Bafta and Oscar winner.

What Focal jurors found remarkable was that the film is entirely composed of archive footage. “The audio interviews are used to bring meaning to the visuals, which is a reverse of the conventional factual documentary approach that uses archive to illustrate a talking head,” says McDonald. “They achieve it quite excellently.”

Cobain: Montage of Heck

Producers End of Movie; LLC

Sources MTV Networks; Reelin in the Years; Universal Music; The Cobain Estate

In this record of the life and death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, the mix of specially shot interviews with home-movie footage, recordings, artwork, photography and journals makes for “a voyeuristic” insider’s account, according to jury chair James McDonald.

He adds: “The use of animations was weird but appropriate.”

Eurovision at 60

Producer BBC Entertainment Production

Sources EBU; Pathé; RTÉ; ITN Source; ITV Studios; Getty Images

Featuring stories from more than 60 years of Eurovision, “the film totally achieved what it set out to do”, says McDonald, namely: “A fun but often poignant programme making great use of familiar footage without being repetitive.”

Footage includes a version of Lulu’s Boom Bang-A-Bang.

SPORT

Building Jerusalem

Producer New Black Films

Sources IMG; Sky Sports; ITN Source; Screen Ocean; Press Association

England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup win over hosts Australia is rapidly gaining legendary status and this production combines match action and original interviews to relive the moment.

“It’s an amazing story of success and single-mindedness, and brought together a cross-section of different characters,” says director James Erskine.

“We found all the ISO recordings we could to show the final from different angles and used the personal collections of [coach] Clive Woodward and [star player] Jonny Wilkinson’s family.”

Free To Run

Producers Point Productions; Yuzu Productions; Eklektik Productions

Sources Salmini Films; NBC News; ABC

This film exploring how running changed from an all-male sport to the all-embracing activity it is today took eight years to complete. That included two years of research plus “multiple layers of rights, lost masters or contracts and real detective work”, says producer Fabrice Estève.

Gathering first-hand testimony and forgotten archives, he uncovered footage of Kathrine Switer being attacked by the race director during the 1967 Boston Marathon, an incident previously known only through photographs.

“A truly remarkable documentary, where archive footage drives the narrative across five decades of sporting and social history,” says lead juror Massimo Moretti.

I Believe In Miracles

Producers Baby Cow Productions; Spool Films

Sources ITV Sport; BBC; Getty Images; Media Archive for Central England; ITN Source; Kino Library

This documentary tells how maverick coach Brian Clough took unfashionable Nottingham Forest to soccer glory and features interviews with his 1979 European Cup-winning side.

“The character of the team and their renowned management shone through in the archive to make a very entertaining watch with a great soundtrack,” says Moretti.

NATURAL WORLD

Beasts Behaving Badly

Producer Barcroft Productions

Sources Jukin; Viral Hog; Storyful; Newsflare; licensed YouTube clips

With its jokey presentation and jerky pictures, this series was radically different from the competition, says jury chair Carol O’Callaghan.

Five comedians provide voiceovers for handpicked clips of animals creating havoc, shot on CCTV, camcorder or smartphone.

Sourced largely from user-generated video, “it is probably agony to most people at Focal, who are wary of YouTube”, O’Callaghan concedes.

The Nature of Things: Jellyfish Rule!

Producer CBC

Sources Evergreen Studios; Howard Hall Productions; PhD Oleg Kovtun; Odessa National University; T3 Media; Nat Geo

This production licensed 13 minutes of footage from 19 sources. Five were commercial stock houses and the rest were independents, scientists and “fans of jellyfish”, says project researcher Gina Calix.

“Just because a major news broadcaster doesn’t have the footage covering an event, some unknown person may have it – so never give up,” she advises.

Calix discovered one short video documenting the massacre of thousands of farmed salmon off the coast of Northern Ireland, which was “exactly the event” that scientists were describing on camera.

Seeking images of an underwater invasion by the mnemiopsis jellyfish in the Black Sea in the 1990s, Calix contacted archivists in the region with the help of Google Translate to track down “a keen marine biologist at the Odessa University who had shot this actual event”.

Wild 24: African Savannah

Producers NHNZ; Nat Geo Wild

Sources NHNZ Moving Images; Aquavision; Getty Images; Londolozi Game Reserve

Representing a single day of animal behaviour across 25 countries, it was an “incredible luxury to be able to cherry-pick from such world-class collections”, says senior archive producer Lemuel Lyes.

He adds: “It was a monumental creative and logistical challenge to craft a unifying narrative, track the usage rights and edit content from multiple sources into a seamless show.”

ARTS

Arena: Night and Day

Producer BBC

Sources BBC; Apple Corp

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the BBC arts strand assembled a film made entirely from its own archive, featuring clips of people from TS Eliot to Amy Winehouse.

Jury chair Gintare Kriauceliunaite commends the “superb idea.”

“It’s a great collage of best bits – some unseen, some inviting to watch more, some just pure gold.

“The list of names is endless and the archival layovers are very smooth.”

By Sidney Lumet

Producers Augusta Films; American Masters Pictures; RatPac Documentary Films; Righteous Persons Foundation; Matador; Anker Productions

Sources Warner Brothers; CBS Entertainment; CBS News; Corbis

An interview with the director of Serpico and Network forms the heart of this career retrospective.

Focal’s jury highlighted the “good choices of archive clips and editing” used to weave together the themes of Lumet’s work. “It had to be put together in quite an unorthodox style to make very specific points and to enhance the interview footage,” says Kriauceliunaite.

Imagine: The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson

Producers Essential Arts Entertainment; Nitrate Film; BBC

Sources Mosfilm Cinema Concern; National Cinema Centre of Armenia; UTV Archive; Fuji TV Network; BBC Information & Archives

The uplifting story of Dr Feelgood guitarist and singer Wilko Johnson, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, tells a “tremendous story, with expressive use of archival footage and music, superbly realised by director Julien Temple,” according to the Focal judges.

For producer Richard Conway, the main challenge was to ensure that Temple could choose both rare and iconic film footage.

Conway says: “People’s empathy for the fi lm’s subject matter, and respect for Julien, helped enormously, as well as the professionalism of our brilliant archive producer, Miriam Walsh.”

Twitter NFL Feed Will Only Offer 'Low-Level Streaming': NeuLion

Streaming Media Global

Noting that Twitter's upcoming Thursday night NFL streams will provide a bare-bones experience, NeuLion calls it a sales tool for Game Pass.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/Twitter-NFL-Feed-Will-Only-Offer-Low-Level-Streaming-NeuLion-111220.aspx

Twitter's Thursday Night Football (TNF) games will feature “low-level streaming” that will act as a promotional tool for NFL Game Pass, says Chris Wagner, executive vice president and co-founder of NeuLion.

NeuLion provides the digital backbone to NFL Game Pass in the U.S. and abroad. The $99 per year service includes DVR controls, interactive score graphics, a video-on-demand archive of matches, 30-minute condensed match highlights, and exclusive camera angles. U.S. subscribers can listen to live audio streams of regular season and post-season games, while international subscribers can stream live video.

“Twitter's TNF will be low-level streaming,” says Wagner. “There will be nothing compared to the interactivity of NFL Game Pass where viewers can watch four games at the same time picture-in-picture. It's the difference between a Formula 1 car and a Ford.”

In April, Twitter paid $10 million to broadcast 10 games from the NFL’s regular season, and will include in-game highlights and live pre-game interviews on Periscope. 

Four of Twitter's TNF games will be shown on broadcast TV in the U.S. by NBC and CBS, while the remaining six will air on the NFL Network. All ten will live stream outside the U.S. on Game Pass.

“For the casual NFL fan it will be great," Wagner says. "We see it as a great marketing opportunity for a whole new set of fans who might want to sign up for NFL Game Pass.”

Twitter has 320 million active users, but claims a global audience of 800 million due to people who use the service without an account.

According to video encoder Telestream, Twitter is trying to turn a second screen experience into a first screen experience. Telestream Wirecast supports streaming to Twitter, Facebook Live, Twitch, and Ustream.

“It remains to be seen how many people will turn to Twitter to watch TV,” says Shawn Carnahan, CTO for Telestream. “It’s an experiment. The issue is the trade-off between image quality for an enhanced user experience. Twitter is betting that the enhanced social experience of watching NFL football on their platform will, for some, outweigh the benefits of a traditional TV viewing experience. Twitter is not aiming to be just a second screen; they are changing the viewing experience. For some this may be worth it. Time will tell.”

Carnahan noted that viewers don't need social networks to find major sporting events. "Organizations can use Facebook and Twitter to advertise their branded live streaming channel including the schedule of upcoming games and the fact that the channel exists—Facebook and Twitter do not get that ad revenue or visibility—the branded channel does. But they can use Facebook and Twitter to get people to tune in to their channel."

The NFL declined to comment on this story.

Rio 2016 Olympics: “8K is cinematic broadcasting” says OBS’ Salamouris

SVG Europe

The opening and closing ceremony, swimming, canoe slalom, rugby sevens, gymnastics, beach volleyball, diving, athletics, judo and football are among sports to be captured in 8K from Rio by the Olympics Broadcasting Services (OBS) team. Speaking to SVG Europe Sotiris Salamouris, chief technology officer, OBS said the aim was to learn as much about editorial language as it was to prove out the technology.

http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/rio-2016-olympics-8k-is-cinematic-broadcasting-says-obs-salamouris/

“As a result of this experiment we will have the capability to be screen agnostic from mobiles to very big screens,” he said. “8K gives us the opportunity to explore how close sports broadcasting can come to a cinematic experience. On the one hand we want to test technical quality and resolution but the idea is to explore how the editorial language changes with 8K. There is not a single approach which is why we want to test 8K on many different sports events.”

He confirmed that OBS plans to produce close to 120 hours in 8K from two mobile units. SHC-1 is an Ikegami-built video truck and there is a separate audio truck handling discrete signals for 22.2 channel audio. An ENG camera crew will also be deployed. While the live 8K broadcast will launch the test transmissions for NHK’s domestic Super Hi-Vision system, OBS has built a theatre at the IBC for broadcasters to view the live 8K feeds on a 350-inch screen.

The multi-cam production is based on the Ikegami SHK-810, light enough now to be hand held, with slow motion feeds up-converted from 4K for replays. “Again the idea is to produce as close as possible a full live 8K production,” said Salamouris. “4K up-converted is pretty close to 8K and it will give us another tool to assess how a live programme might be cut.” Graphics (data, results and timing) are added to the 8K video after being up-converted to the 8K format.

The production is forced to work with 16 x HD SDI signals around the trucks. “It’s a bespoke arrangement, predominantly SDI-based, and using twice the 3G capacity,” said Salamouris. “SDI has its limitations we all know but there are extensions – 12G even 24G coming for routing 8K. In the end we will probably have a mixed world where both IP and SDI signals will co-exist.”

“NHK/OBS are basically doing 8K as a 8 x 3G signal connection which is quite strange – because while this is bleeding edge it is like going back to being in an analogue truck,” said Kevin Salvidge, European Regional Development Manager, Leader Electronics. Leader’s monitors are being used to check the individual RGB of each camera signal.

Live coverage will not include the Hybrid Log-Gamma high dynamic range (HDR) standard developed by NHK and BBC. “We need to remain on SDR and 709 colour gamut for many practical reasons not least that the BBC and NHK proposition is very recent and challenging to deliver in a 4K environment, let alone an 8K one,” said Salvidge.

However, OBS and NHK plan to test one 8K camera featuring HDR/WCG function for the coverage of the Opening Ceremony. NBC will also experiment with this technology during the Opening Ceremony with a selection of 4K HDR cameras.

The Ikegami cameras record the media onto a Panasonic P2 solid-state AVC-Intra recorder with 16 P2 cards for post production of an 8K summary reel. This will also be shown in the IBC Super Hi-Vision theatre. Since memory devices have limited capacity, LTO (Linear Tape Open) which is capable of preserving a large amount of data will also be used as an ultimate device to store the 8K material.

SAM’s Danny Peters, Director of Creative Services, said the company is working closely with companies including NHK that use a Quantel Rio 8K 60P for sporting events like the Olympics. “This year, SAM will continue to help NHK with its productions by adding 8K 120fps support on the Quantel Rio,” said Peters.

“Tests so far have proved 8Ks value in capturing wide scenes with an amazing level of detail,” said Salamouris. “Combine this with a relatively short viewing distance and viewing angle of 100 degrees on consumer TVs and you can feel the immersive experience. This is still an experimental period but technically it is very close to an applicable technology. We will see it soon in the coming years.”

Analysts Futuresource Consulting says that since the consumer side of the business is still sorting 4K UHD out, it believes the jump to 8K is a bridge too far at this moment. “The demand curve for 8K will follow a similar pattern to 4K. That is, starting out in ultra high end niches like CAD/CAM, simulation, military and medical where there is a genuine requirement for picture quality,” Futuresource analyst Chris Mcintyre-Brown stated.

“Adoption beyond these verticals will be ‘pushed’ down by the panel industry as production switches to 8K. Given only 1% of the market was 4K in 2015, this is some way off.”

For Futuresource’s Adam Cox, the prognosis is equally sceptical. “From a video production perspective, 8K is a long way away except within the world of digital cinema,” he says. Hitachi Kokusai launched an 8K system camera at NAB (created for the NHK trials), but the list price of $600K means that very few companies are going to be able to experiment in the short to medium term. Simply put, there are no even relatively inexpensive ways to acquire 8K content at the moment.”

For an alternative point of view take a look back in history at a precedent for when broadcasters chose to leapfrog resolution standards. While the US was first to launch into HD in 1998 Europe’s broadcasters opted to sit back a few years and wait to implement an arguably greater step change in quality over PAL than 720p with 1080i. The 8K production ecosystem is being rounded out, screens are coming to market and content is coming, albeit in limited from the Olympics. As IP is implemented then a move to 8K production should be relatively straightforward.

Virtual Reality Olympics

Following a first test of a 180-degree VR experience at the Lillehammer 2016 Winter Youth Olympic Games, OBS will continue exploring VR possibilities in Rio. It plans to live stream in VR at least one event a day during the Games. These include Athletics Artistic Gymnastics, Mens semi final Basketball, Beach Volleyball, Fencing and the opening and closing ceremony.

“We are offering this as an end to end production of white label content to rights holders,” explains Salamouris. It will deploy four rigs with eight cameras and produce three 360-degree live streams which will be viewer selectable as well as a curated 360-degree view.

Once more the focus for OBS is on editorial presentation. “The language for VR is under development. The experience is unique and there’s a big momentum and interest coming from many different areas, but we don’t know what will be the best way to offer this to a sports audience.

“We want to position cameras close to the actual action so viewers have an opportunity to be in an immersive environment where the action is happening and also we will place cameras in positions where it might be called ‘best seat in the house.”

The Lillehammer test enabled OBS to better understand the positioning of the VR cameras (i.e. as close as possible to the field of play to increase the feeling of “being there”) and refine its production plans for Rio 2016. Adds OBS, “We do not pretend that our VR coverage in Rio will be as mature as our standard coverage, but we are endeavouring to offer a completely different type of opportunity and experience and for an event like the Olympic Games where it’s all about experience, providing an opportunity for people around the world to have a sense of being there is of extraordinary value.”

The multilateral HD production of the games is expected to yield over 7000 hours of coverage and will include feeds from 14 cablecams (a Games record), two drones (used for example over water slalom events rather than in stadia) and point of view action cams on equipment (such as sailing vessels). There are even plans to include POV cams on athletes, such as canoe slalomists.

Object-based broadcasting

Broadcast 

Interactivity in live sport and music broadcasting could be the next game-changing technology upgrade.

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/object-based-broadcasting/5104154.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=42957

Stripping a programme of its constituent elements and allowing viewers to compose their own version might sound like a bizarre thing to do, but technology is close to making this a reality.

Live content already comprises separate clean feeds of video, audio and graphics (a still image, a caption) before they are ‘baked in’ to the signal on broadcast. Object-based broad casting (OBB) simply extracts more original raw elements, treats them as data and lets a user’s web-based device adapt the broadcast according to context, such as screen size or viewer preference.

“The internet works by chopping things up, sending them over a network and reassembling them based on audience preference or device context,” explains BBC R&D head of operations Jon Page. “OBB is the idea of making media work like the internet.”

With the 4K Ultra HD chain largely solved, R&D teams have pinpointed interactivity of the live experience as the next game-changing tech upgrade.

BT Sport, Sky Sports and the BBC are all investigating OBB. BBC chief Putting the viewer in the driving seat technology officer Matthew Postgate has championed the idea, calling it “profound” and “little understood”.

“It’s about moving the whole industry away from thinking of video and audio as hermetically sealed, and towards a place where we are no longer broadcasters but datacasters,” he says.

Larger on-screen graphics for the visually impaired, or sign-language presenters in place of regular presenters to assist the hard of hearing, are two examples intended to improve accessibility. The BBC has demonstrated this with an object-based deconstruction of a weather forecast. Recordings of presenters delivering the forecast in front of a green screen were aligned with a data stream containing weather icons, animation data and subtitles, then delivered as a package for rendering on the client device.

OBB is likely to be commercialised initially in second-screen experiences. “The process of streaming what’s on the living room TV is broken,” argues Axonista chief technology officer Daragh Ward. “Audiences expect to interact with it.”

Axonista offers a content management system and a series of software templates that it says makes it easier for producers to deploy an OBB workflow instead of building one from scratch. Initially, this is based around extracting graphics from the live signal.

Its solution has been built into apps for shopping channel QVC, where the ‘buy now’ TV button becomes a touchscreen option on a smartphone; and at The QYou, an online curator of video clips that uses the technology to add interactivity to data about its content.

The idea could attract sport and music producers in particular. Makers of live music shows might want to overlay inter active information about performances for the second screen. Sport fans might want to select different leaderboards, heat maps or track positions over the live pictures. This works particularly well for data-intensive sports like Formula One or MotoGP, where members of the same family might want to check different aspects of the race in progress – a scenario that BT Sport is actively investigating.

In entertainment or daytime shows streamed to a second-screen app, an OBB workflow would enable onscreen tweets to be clicked on, replied to, or favourited. “The production workflow is unchanged and it means audiences can fully participate in a social media conversation without leaving the show itself,” says Ward.

Another idea is to make the scrolling ticker of news or finance channels interactive. “Instead of waiting for a headline to scroll around so you can read it again, you can click and jump straight to it,” he says. Since news is essentially a playlist of items, video content could also be rendered on-demand by way of the news menu.

This type of application still leaves the rump of content ‘baked in’, but offers a taste of OBB’s potential.

“All TV will be like this in future,” predicts Ward. “As TV sets gain gesture capability and force-feedback control, it allows new types of interactivity to be brought into the living room.”

The audio element of OBB is more advanced. Uefa is to trial object-based audio during live Euro 2016 matches from France this summer, using the Dolby Atmos audio system. It will be generated within the Telegenic outside broadcast facility, which is handling Uefa’s host 4K production, and services featuring it are likely to be introduced to consumers as part of a pay-TV operator’s 4K/ UHD package.

Dolby senior product marketing manager Rob France says broadcasters are keen to give subscribers more choice – for example, of commentary from a neutral or team/ fan perspective, in a different language, or a feed from a referee’s mic.

“Object-based audio brings more immersiveness for sports content, such as the sound of the PA and crowd, and also delivers greater personalisation by giving consumers more choice,” he adds.

The BBC’s ambitions are wider. Since making its first public demonstration of OBB during the 2014 Commonwealth Games, under the project name IP Studio, it has conducted numerous spin-off experiments. These range from online video instructions for kids on how to create a 3D chicken out of cardboard, to working with BBC News Labs to demonstrate how journalists can use ‘linked data’ to build stories.

The BBC believes object-based media is essential to harness the full potential of the IP-based broadcasting system to which the whole industry is migrating. It says the aim is not just to produce traditional content better or cheaper, but to pave the way for genuinely new experiences.

Object-based media can include a frame of video, or a line from a script. When conceived around story arcs, a ‘theme’ can be conceived of as an object. Each object is automatically assigned an identifier and a timestamp as soon as it is captured or created.

“The idea is to see if new types of content are possible and to minimise the incremental effort to get more content produced,” explains Page. “Instead of laboriously creating multiple versions of content, as we do now, an object-based production might be able to output more content more efficiently.”

BBC R&D’s Squeezebox, for example, enables users to adjust the duration of a news story using a slider control. The application aims to assist producers wanting to re-edit content rapidly to a different length, or to iterate multiple durations from a single edit. “Trying to do that with fully bespoke editing would be impractical,” says Page.

In object-based broadcasting, he adds, even broadcast equipment can be treated as an object. “A camera is a thing, an archive store is a thing, so is a vision mixer, and they are all connected over IP,” he says. “IP Studio orchestrates the network so that real-time collections of objects work as a media production environment.”

Multi-day, multi-site events like Glastonbury or the Olympics are some of the clearest applications for a workable IP Studio, offering chances for greater coverage and viewer customisation than was previously practical.

The next large-scale public trial of IP Studio will take place around the Edinburgh Festival in August. “The aim is to link the delivery side of IP Studio with the audience experience,” says Page.

Coming down the track is virtual reality, in which the individual viewer’s interaction with the media will change in space. This creates all sorts of challenges, but BBC R&D has been working on it since developing 3D virtual tracking system Piero in 2004, running through its work stitching together 360-degree video, and now into OBB.

“Either we need to produce multiple versions of the same content, which is expensive, or we capture an object once and work out how to render it,” says Page. “Ultimately, we need to change the production methodology. OBB as an ecosystem has barely begun.”

Euro 2016, Then Olympics, Set to Break Live Streaming Records

Streaming Media Europe 

Official streams may reach peaks of 15-18TB per second for the Rio Olympics, but the IOC is banning social streaming from the games, without saying how it plans to police or punish fans who use Periscope, Facebook Live to share the games

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With every successive global sports event, the amount of live streaming grows, and this summer will be no exception. Akamai, the CDN delivering live streams for multiple broadcasters from both the UEFA Euro 2016 soccer tournament and the Rio Olympics, is predicting "massive" streaming activity which will smash records.

"We are expecting both of those to set new records locally and globally," says Ian Munford, Akamai's director of product marketing, media solutions. "During London 2012 online traffic peaked at about a terabyte (TB) per second. We expect peaks globally of between 15-18TB per second during Rio to set new global records in terms of online streaming traffic."

He added that predicting peaks in demand around the Euros [10 June – 10 July, in France] was a little harder given that matches occur on different days and different time of day. "We expect peaks of between 10-13TB per second" which in itself be a record until the Olympics begin on August 5.

Akamai has partnered on previous Olympics with NBCUniversal, which says it plans to stream 4,500 hours of Rio 2016 coverage on its NBC Sports Live Extra mobile app and website which will also be made available on in its Comcast X1 video service.

Akamai will post a micro-site for both thet Euros and Olympics providing a running total of viewing numbers and viewing time, among other stats. According to Munford, this will be more like overnight ratings rather than real-time analytics.

The BBC is promising to stream each individual sport online, and Canada's Olympic broadcaster CBC will stream 2,000 hours from Rio via a dedicated app. This will include the ability for fans to choose from a variety of camera angles. It will also be among the rights holders that will take the official 360-degree virtual reality experience from inside the Olympic stadium and on the field of play through VR headsets, and iOS and Android devices.

"Any organization looking to deliver high-quality scaled events needs to plan how to deal wih very large peaks of audience," says Munford. "It's a bit like a power surge. Peaks can be unpredicatable."

Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), the games' host broadcaser and division of the IOC, has been planning to make streaming services a major part of its offering. It has been developing its second-screen offering and will deliver an enhanced version of the Olympic Video Player (OVP – first introduced for Sochi) for the Rio Games, including access to more content and data.

It is notable, though, that the organization is intent on banning use of social media streaming apps in Rio. It has issued a rule—applicable to accredited personnel—which states that "Videos of Olympic events and competitions can be taken by accredited persons but must not be shared or posted without the consent of the IOC. Broadcasting images using live-streaming apps such as Periscope is also prohibited."

While the IOC encourages use of social media, like Twitter, it is not clear if these rules on streaming hold true for any non-accredited person such as a spectator.

Short of preventing everyone who visits an Olympic venue in Rio from using a mobile phone, such a ban would be hard to police, and it's unclear what action will be taken if a member of the crowd is using Facebook Live to live stream the 100 metres final.

Wi-Fi access within crowded venues is notoriously poor ,so sheer bandwidth capacity issues could save the IOC from having to take action in any case.

"The IOC are not going to be able to prevent everyone entering the Olympic stadium from using their mobile phone," says Mark Blair, vp of EMEA at video player developer Brightcove. "This should be treated as a business issue."

Going forward, the industry view is that sports bodies and broadcasters should embrace social media streaming as an inclusive crowd sourced tool rather than trying to cut it off.

"Rather than a big brother approach, it makes much more sense for a broadcaster to create an app for fans to download which make it easier for them to stream," says Chris Knowlton, vice president and streaming media evangelist at Wowza, whose media servers power Periscope. "You might have a curation committee moderating all the live streams and encouraging action. You could challenge fans to send in streams via your app so that you control the experience."

Visual Pioneers: How UK effects are fuelling production

British Film Commission: UK In Focus

The UK is a magnet for directors seeking the highest quality visual and special effects but it's been a success story four decades in the making.

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For the first time, this year, UK expertise dominated the Academy Awards for Visual Effects. Double Negative and Milk won for Ex Machina, beating Cinesite (The Revenant) and MPC and Framestore (assisted by The Senate), for The Martian. Another nominee, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was supervised by British artists stationed at ILM London and included the practical effects prowess of Chris Corbould [see sidebox].

Far from a fluke, home-grown vendors have headed four of the previous nine VFX Oscar winners. The trail blazed by Framestore, on The Golden Compass (2007), continued with lead VFX responsibility by Dneg for Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), Gravity (2014, Framestore) and Interstellar (2015, Dneg again).

“One of the benefits of the UK is that we are collectively very integrated,” says William Sargent, Framestore CEO and co-founder. “Foreign directors rely on British crews, from carpenters to VFX artists, because UK craft teams exhibit lateral thinking and collaborate as a very cohesive unit. Quite simply, studio executives, directors and DPs like working here.”

It was London's status as a European centre for producing commercials in the early 1990s that incubated the first visual effects businesses. The Mill, Cinesite, Framestore and MPC (Moving Picture Company) became involved in film VFX as optical techniques were replaced by digital technologies.

“The approach to the work remained the same as these companies moved from VFX for commercials into VFX for features,” says Cinesite, MD, Antony Hunt. “Focused on innovation and creative excellence, on very high end technical accompishment, and importantly, on businesses that were well managed and financially responsible,”

The Mill signalled Soho's arrival on the international scene with Britain's first VFX Oscar for Gladiator in 2000, but unarguably the moment that reshaped the landscape was Warner Bros' decision to produce the Harry Potter franchise on UK shores. This underpinned the industry and showcased the abilities of British artists to Hollywood.

“The local VFX industry went from being peripheral to really becoming a global centre,” says Alex Hope, who founded Double Negative with several MPC colleagues in 1998.

“What was a cottage industry at the start of Harry Potter was fully grown up a decade later,” confirms Milk, CEO, Will Cohen.

The impetus snowballed with the introduction of tax breaks, beginning in 2005, which further incentivised overseas producers to place more of their production budget in the UK. In 2015 some £1.4 billion was spent on feature films here, a staggering 83% of which was inward investment, helping propel the value of the UK's creative industries to £84 billion ($119bn).

“There is a tendancy to panic about where the next tax break is coming from but even if places like Canada emerge as a centre of excellence you can't replicate the organic growth of the UK overnight,” says Cohen. “The UK is very stong in creative and digital industries.”

For example, the compositing systems which became the defacto standard for digital graphics in the 1990s were developed by British firm Quantel. Geography has played its part too, in particular the unique tight knit film community of Soho.

“The proximity of rivals within walking distance has helped to keep expertise and innovation at a high level and means ideas and skills evolve fast,” says Hope. “All of us compete fiercely for work but once awarded we all ensure the project comes first. That's a hallmark of British VFX culture and fundamental to its growth.”

“We aren't afraid of stabbing each other in the back but we also club together and understand that anything coming to the UK is good for everyone,” says Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor, MD and founder, Bluebolt.

In the itinerant life of a VFX artist, where lead supervisors and senior animators chase jobs from Montreal to Sydney to LA, the prospect of setting down roots in a capital where work is plentiful proved too good to miss. Studios also gain in the knowledge that freelance talent is not dissipating after a major production but staying put.

This is increasingly valuable as the complexity and scale of productions has rocketed. Where Gladiator contained less than 100 VFX shots, Star Wars: The Force Awakens featured 2100, a volume which is fast becoming routine for tentpole titles.

“VFX tends to refer to the very visually obvious use of effects on screen but quite a bit of what we do is invisible, such as digital extras, set extentions and environments,” explains Sargent, who dubs this work digital production. “With large productions regularly carrying 2000 shots, facilities need scale (of artists and infrastructure) even to win partial awards.”

Framestore spans the Atlantic with 1000 people in London, New York, LA and Montreal. Double Negative is even larger with around 4,500 employees and offices in Mumbai, Singapore and Vancouver to keep productions going around the clock.

Recent demand for TV visual effects has risen with the renaissance in episodic drama. “Drama producers value VFX because it suggests production values of ambition and scale,” says Cohen, who led the team at The Mill and then Milk to deliver movie-style VFX for Dr Who. “Where TV VFX were once considered cheap or shoddy, the dividing line between feature film and TV is now very fine and Who can claim to have embedded that in UK TV production culture.”

While facilities like Milk started out specialising in TV before branching into features, giants like Dneg have opened dedicated TV divisions. It is working with Andy Serkis' Ealing-based performance capture studio Imaginarium to bring high production value photoreal animated characters - like Star Wars' Snoke (on which Imaginarium worked) - to the small screen.

“The aim is to fuse compelling performance capture with post-production to create intriguing new stories and formats on a TV budget,” says CEO Tony Orsten. “This is a set of skills that the UK as a country will be able to offer this year.”

While the handful of shops with overseas operations scoop their share of summer blockbusters (Dneg worked on Captain America: Civil War, Star Trek: Beyond and Jason Bourne; Cinesite has Independence Day: Resurgence and X-Men: Apocalypse; Framestore has Jungle Book: Origins, Geostorm and Dr Strange and all are creating Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them) a vibrant clutch of mid-size outfits are also picking up business.

“The larger facilities were only doing the big, punchy blockbusters but the smaller films deserved as much care and we felt we could do that without the big overheads,” says Ainsworth-Taylor who spied a gap in the market for indie films and high-end TV.

Landing VFX for Game of Thrones season one instantly put BlueBolt on the map. It completed BBC flagship drama War and Peace and has Brad Pitt-produced Netflix satire War Machine, Fox sci-fi Morgan and Scott Free's eight-part drama Taboo booked in.

Adam Gascoyne and Tim Caplan launched UnionVFX as a duo in 2008. “Most of the big houses concentrate on their relationships with the studios but we felt that forming stronger bonds with directors would give us a slightly different angle and a chance of winning work,” says Gascoyne.

With successive jobs for directors the calibre of Danny Boyle, James Marsh and Kevin Macdonald the approach has paid off. Now staffing 50, the outfit recreated 1940s New York including the interior of Carnegie Hall for Stephen Frears' Florence Foster Jenkins and has Bastille Day and Bridget Jones' Baby in the pipeline.

If there was a question over the UK's ability to sustain the same level of VFX work in the aftermath of Harry Potter, this has been roundly answered. Extending film tax relief to 25% of UK spend and reducing the minimum UK spend required to earn rebates for TV has cemented the country's financial commitment to attracting the biggest shows.

Disney’s pledge to produce six Star Wars movies over the next 10 years looks set to follow Potter as a movie franchise helping hot house yet more innovation.

“What British VFX companies have done is to constanty push against the envelope creatively and invest heavily in R&D in the confidence that there is work out there,” says Hope. “In making that considerable investment and building the know-how and infrastructure, we are giving artists the tools to continually do groundbreaking work.”

Special Effects Supervision: Keeping it real

There was a time when VFX threatened to consign special effects to history. Chris Corbould pins that to 1995 when he was overseeing a tank chase in St Petersburg for GoldenEye.

“There was a feeling among VFX supervisors that everything would soon be done digitally,” he recalls. “Instead, as the scope of films got bigger, there was a knock-on effect. My crew on GoldenEye was 40 but these days a typical size is 100.”

In a medium saturated with digital effects, Corbould is prized for his ability to stage, say, a 120 ft long rotating corridor in Inception, an underground train crash in Skyfall or flipping an 18 wheeled articulated lorry on its head down a narrow Chicago street (The Dark Knight), all on-camera and without the aid of a single post-production pixel. It was he who suggested the real-life tank chase for Bond (he has worked on fourteen Bonds from The Spy Who Loved Me to Spectre) and his team which placed explosions in the desert around the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He is currently working on Star Wars Episode VIII.

“Certain directors prefer to capture as much as possible on camera and then manipulate the image in post,” says Corbould, whose career began at the pre-dawn of computer graphics in 1978. “The script is the blueprint, but then it's a question of how we can we make it better. My job is to come up with ideas and then hire a great team of people to make it happen.”

The Corbould brand is shared among four brothers, each in the business and pre-eminent in their field.

“Fortunately, we never actually pitch for the same film because we tend to work on different genres,” says Chris Corbould. “I love doing more contemporary films, Neil likes the more gritty action and war pictures (credits include Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, World War Z and Alien: Covenant) and Paul fell into the world of Marvel (Captain America: The First Avenger, Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange).”

The fourth sibling, Ian (who is second eldest after Chris), took on Jungle Book: Origins as his first sole supervision.

The Corboulds are tasked with creating everything from atmospheric effects like fog, rain, snowstorms and pyrotechnics like explosions through to designing and operating mechanical hydraulics, robotics or pneumatics for sequences such as the groundbreaking mesh of physical with digital effects in Gravity.

“This was a game-changer because even seasoned VFX supers in Hollywood couldn't work out how it was done,” confides Neil Corbould, who won his second Oscar (after Gladiator) for the film. “Sometimes animated objects just don't feel right and the audience won't be fooled. If you really fire an object 100 metres, the speed, trajectory and weight of impact will be real in a way that computer artists can find hard to replicate.”

According to Chris Corbould, it is the blend of CG with practical effects which keeps this defiantly analogue craft in constant demand. “The biggest advantage is in the actor's reactions,” he says. “You get a very different reaction from actors against a 360-degree green screen opposed to when live pyrotechnics are shooting off.”

The family has trained dozens of British based crew in the art, some of whom are already snapping at their heels. Steve Warner, mentored by Neil Corbould, was a Bafta and Oscar nominee for The Martian.

“There are so many specialised courses now, from welding to driving forklifts, modelling and CAD, there is without doubt talent in the UK, primed here and now to take this work forward,” says Chris Corbould.