Broadcast
The rise of the machines continued as AI tools were used for
a multitude of tasks, while an episode of C4’s Electric Dreams marked a
turning point for 8K.
Video captured at 8K has been
on the industry margins for a while, but few would have expected it to break
out as soon as this year.
No longer confined to the
ambitions of the Japanese government – state broadcaster NHK will launch the
world’s first 8K Super Hi-Vision channel a year from now – the format is making
its way into mainstream production.
The first feature to be
produced in 8K was Disney’s Guardians Of The Galaxy: Vol 2; in TV, The
Commuter, an episode of Sony Pictures’ Channel 4 series Electric Dreams,
used the format too.
Red cameras were used on both
shows. Not content with having one full-frame sensor capable of acquiring 8K,
the manufacturer later launched an improved option called Monstro.
More remarkable were tech
debuts of 8K broadcast cameras from Sony and Sharp. Initially intended to flesh
out NHK’s 8K production capacity – which already includes cameras
from Ikegami, vision mixers, audio consoles and giant LCD displays – they
will find uses closer to home.
The hitch is that, outside
of Japan, few people will see 8K in all its glory. Digital cinema
projection still operates in 2K as standard and distributing the mammoth fi le
sizes to consumer displays will require serious compression.
Leapfrog to 8K
This is being worked on.
European consortium 8K SVIP intends to help broadcasters leapfrog directly
from HD to 8K using codecs from Belgian firm IntoPix (the same scheme used
by NHK).
Finishing systems
from SAM, Blackmagic and more already work in the format and Avid has made
a version of its DNxHD codec available for editing 8K material.
The arguments for shooting 8K
today are similar to those used at the outset of previous image upgrades.
Shooting at extreme
resolutions will make everything look better, from cinema all the way down to a
YouTube video viewed on a smartphone, even if the final resolution is lower.
“8K was a creative choice
since it allowed us to use older lenses to degrade the image for the look we
wanted,” says director of photography Ollie Downey of his experience
lensing The Commuter.
“The actual data, when
compressed for post-production, was little different in size to that of 4K.
What seemed so unrealistic in shooting 8K for a TV project suddenly became very
doable.”
Advanced analytics – the use
of algorithms to decode data and serve meaningful insights – has morphed into
Artificial Intelligence (AI), but the distinction is worth underlining. The
ability for machines to self-reflexively learn from themselves or other
machines and datasets remains some way off.
Nonetheless, AI-branded tools
are proving increasingly important for media companies, helping to automate
repetitive tasks, from compliance to language versioning.
AI developer Dimensional
Mechanics markets algorithms that can detect adult content in archives or
user-generated media in real-time, while Lyon-based broadcaster Euronews
employs an automated quote-checker to separate authentic content from fake news
on social networks.
Finnish firm Valossa AI has
launched a product that packages face recognition, dialogue and mood analysis
to enable content owners to extract more information from archives.
Start-up OnFrame’s
cloud-based platform will allow users to create their own automated workflows
for analysing, tagging, searching and repurposing live camera streams.
Voice recognition, introduced
into the Sky Q set-top box, is seen as the method that will primarily be used
to discover content and interface with TV and mobile devices in the
future.
“Cognitive computing is the next revolution in
sports technology,” says IBM sports marketing and innovation executive Sam
Seddon.
During Wimbledon, IBM
showcased how its AI ‘Watson’ trawls the internet to pump out relevant
social media responses. It also automatically created game highlights based on
analysis of crowd noise, players’ movements and match data.
“In many ways, TV is an ideal
industry for AI, because so many of our activities are highly programmatic,”
says Niall Duffy, EMEA partner segment lead, media & entertainment, at
Amazon Web Services.
“We like to think that this
is a creative industry, but in reality, once a creative idea is conceived,
there are fairly strict processes that bring that concept to life.”
London-based Jukedeck, for
example, offers machine-written royalty-free music for TV. An audience of
industry pros at the HPA Tech Retreat in June couldn’t distinguish between
music created by the Jukedeck computer and tracks composed by a human, showing
that the line between science and art is already blurred.
Piracy is an unfortunate fact
of life, but direct hacks into production servers became a worrying new trend
this year.
Episodes of Netflix
series Orange Is The New Black were stolen from supplier Larson Studios
and released online in April, and Disney was subject to an alleged breach a
month later as hackers sought to capitalise on industry panic. But it was the
hack of Game Of Thrones in August that sent Hollywood into overdrive.
Criminals threatened to leak
script details, including a detailed outline of the season seven finale, with
the warning ‘Winter is coming – HBO is falling’, and gained access to
Time Warner employees’ Twitter feeds.
HBO resisted the $6m
(£4.45m) Bitcoin ransom and the material was leaked. But encouragingly,
GoT still recorded high live viewing and download figures, suggesting that
spoilers won’t deter fans from watching event television as it plays out.
With no part of the
production and distribution chain immune, the Digital Production
Partnership (DPP) has issued a security checklist for producers, post houses
and broadcasters.
Those demonstrating
commitment to the programme include Arqiva, Base Media Cloud, TVT and The
Farm Group.
“These are risk-assessment
forms devised to create the space for companies to discuss the issue honestly
and to admit they don’t have this process yet but they are putting it in
place,” says DPP chief Mark Harrison.
Arguably, the industry faces
a bigger threat from piracy of live sport, where the practice is
euphemistically called ‘content redistribution’. August’s mega boxing fight
between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor was watched illegally by close
to 3 million people, according to online security company Irdeto.
US cable and satellite
broadcaster Showtime said that around 4.5 million watched the official stream,
but at $99 per view in HD, that black market is an eye-watering loss of
potential revenue.
The industry response is
multi-layered, ranging from consumer education to law enforcement, with
the Premier League striking a series of significant blows against the use
of Kodi set-top boxes to view unlicensed streams.
With pirates using
increasingly sophisticated and professional presentation techniques, the onus
is on live streamers to ensure content is delivered to a high standard. A good
portion of potential pay-per-viewer customers for Mayweather versus
McGregor were reportedly
deterred by the service’s inability to complete their transaction on time.
4K content gap
4K UHD maybe be growing but
is certainly not taking off at the same rate as HD did before it. That’s clear
from the rising number of 4K-capable streaming devices and TV screens sold in
the UK compared with the volume of content that can be viewed on them.
Around 2.6 million UK
households (10%) will own a 4K set by the end of 2017, but analysts such as
Ampere research director Richard Cooper say there is a widening content gap.
This is because larger file
sizes continue to make post-production expensive, while connectivity into and
around consumer homes is typically not fast enough.
Broadcasters aren’t prepared
to invest in the uplift required for content production and distribution of 4K,
in part because consumers aren’t showing much interest in the format.
High Dynamic Range (HDR),
however, is considered to have more bearing on the perceived quality of an
image than resolution. On show at IBC in September were a vast number
of HDR upgrades, including monitors and practical test and measurement
kit. Even so, rollout is not fast. Just 7% of production companies are being
asked to deliver in HDR.
HDR is an even more difficult
consumer message to convey, and therefore monetise, than 4K resolution,
according to analyst Futuresource.
It may require the impetus of
an all-UHD/HDR Fifa World Cup, which will be produced and delivered live from
Russia next summer, to kickstart enthusiasm for the format – and the necessary
upgrades to internet connections into the home.
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