Behind the scenes: The Man in the High Castle

IBC

Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle imagines what the world would be like if the Axis powers won World War II. With the fourth and final season streaming in November, IBC365 spoke with cinematographer Gonzalo Amat about creating the show’s retro-futurist look which took its initial cues from executive producer Ridley Scott’s own dystopian noir Blade Runner.

https://www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/behind-the-scenes-the-man-in-the-high-castle/4382.article

“Ridley has always pushed us to be edgier with our work,” explains Amat. “Prepping for series 3 and 4 he’d say things like ‘use less fill’ or ‘be bolder’ which encouraged us to pursue bolder ideas. Sometimes, guest directors would wonder about close-up shots but we always reassured them by saying, ‘Ridley loves that bold stuff - no need to worry about the conventional shots.’”

Scott has been insistent on a cinematic look to the show from its debut in 2015, urging the creatives to stay away from the visual language of regular TV.

“We’re constantly asking ourselves what we’d do if we were doing a movie,” says Amat who has lensed half of the 40 episodes, with James Hawkinson shooting the other half. “We don’t use zoom lenses so you have to actually place the camera for the prime lens that you have instead of zooming in. The use of wide shots and close-ups are not common for TV. Audiences are very visually sophisticated so they notice and value the effort.”

Blade Runner remains the “bible” in terms of look design, to which has been added references for each season and episode. Season 1 and 2, for example, also drew on The Conformist and In the Mood for Love while seasons 3 and 4, were inspired by Japanese cinema.

“The simplicity of blocking the actors and efficient use of the wide shot was something we recovered from Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi’s films,” says Amat. “Just in general, we looked at great films from great authors, including a lot of Kubrick’s films all the way to current filmmakers like David Fincher. I personally looked at The Road to Perdition and Revolutionary Road (shot by Conrad Hall) as inspiration for these two seasons. Films like The Assassination of Jesse James guided me on how to approach available light, and Bridge of Spies and The Lives of Others were helpful on how to approach period looks on a budget.”

He continues: “My purpose for seasons 3 and 4 was to go back to the basics. To be more expressive and connect with the characters, we created bold frames, graphics, and simpler lighting. We used single source rather than fill light. With more hard lighting in the background and no sunlight on our actors, these were some of the basic concepts used that I have loved since the show’s conception.”

The Philip K Dick adaptation holds particular resonance for Amat who was born in Mexico City to Spanish immigrants.

“My wife’s parents grew up, lived, studied, and worked under Franco’s regime and, as a child, I spent a lot of time in Spain immediately after Franco died,” he says. “Their stories of those times have definitely been an element I used to portray an attempt of having a normal and hopeful life under an authoritarian regime.”

Amat grew up in Mexico in the 70’s and 80’s under the PRI which ruled uninterrupted from 1929 to 2000 and again from 2012 to 2018.

“I have my own account of living in a regime with no democracy, and a government controlled media,” he says. “[MITHC] has felt very personal because of my experience. The fictional world of Nazi and Japanese occupation in the 1960’s feels very similar to Spain during the same time period. In my own research, I have used references from Spain, including family pictures and accounts, from those times.”

While the first series was shot with a Red Epic because they needed 4K footage, they subsequently shifted to the ARRI Alexa, despite its 3.2K resolution. According to Amat, the main reason was the better low-light sensitivity of the Alexa which led to using less lighting on the scenes.

“Working in natural light as much as possible is vital for this project but given the tight turnaround times it can be tricky. Our locations team and production designer [Drew Boughton] have been great about always thinking of windows, orientation, color of walls, and so on, before we even go scouting. It becomes a lot easier if you do that work ahead of time.”

Season 4 is shot on Alexa Mini, instead of the Alexa SXT, so the DPs could make use of the camera’s internal ND filters and its smaller size.

The show is shot on sound stages in Vancouver with various scenes shot on locations in the Californian desert, in British Columbia, farmlands in Denver and various national parks.

“The Nazi-occupied East Coast of the show is designed with de-saturated colours, almost black and white with no red, except for the Nazi iconography. In the Japanese-occupied West Coast, there are more pastels with green, aqua, and warmer tones but they are faded and also de-saturated. In the Neutral Zone, we used faded earth tones and textures reminiscent of Americana. In season 3, which takes place in 1963, we played with the palette inspired by 1960’s US culture which incorporated more colour and sun. With season 4, there were some newer looks too but they were confined within the original design so it still feels like the same show.”

Down the mine shaftThe mine caves sequence in the S3 finale, ‘Jahr Null’, for which Amat is Emmy nominated this year (Hawkinson won an Emmy for his work in 2015), required three different locations, one of which was an actual mine. Amat’s goal was to shoot with the actors’ headlamps and nothing else.

“You can’t put any lights up in the mine since it’s a one-way tunnel so used the headlamps and lanterns from our actors and, with their help, they lit the scene. We used atmosphere smoke and haze in order to create the level of darkness needed and to allow the lights to shine. Our gaffer constructed a makeshift handheld light that worked by bouncing light off of the walls of the mine as the actors moved, recreating a natural movement of light.”

The following tunnel sequence required the visualization of a giant gateway to a multiverse.

The VFX team, led by senior VFX supervisor Lawson Deming, are also nominated for their work on this episode. Jahr Null, or Year Zero, refers to a social engineering plan to erase all traces of American history and identity. Tasks ranged from digitally remodeling cities like New York to appear as an earlier time with added sinister details, to the destruction of the Statue of Liberty in favour of another monument called the New Colossus.“We had to have numerous meetings about what this tunnel was as a concept and then to make sure that the look of the scene matched the concepts of quantum physics within the story,” he says. “I wanted to achieve lighting that felt almost like plasma. We decided to put a mirror at the end of the tunnel with circle lighting right above it. We then created the effect of space travel by using a blast of light that collectively used more than a million watts. It was a complex setup, but fortunately we had a lot of very talented people come together to execute it.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly when shooting on location, many businesses objected to hanging Nazi flags and Fascist propaganda so much of this was added in post.

“In the last couple of seasons, I’ve been experimenting with playing difficult scenes in a different way,” Amat says. “Where for example we have a disturbing scene, and you play it like a normal scene, so not darker, moodier, just normal. Sometimes the audience finds it more powerful when you make something disturbing into a piece of normal life.”

Games engines are changing the rules of production

RedShark News

Virtual Reality in conjunction with realtime rendering of graphics using games engines have become the new must-have accessory to cutting edge production. Its use has advanced from a tool to help pre-vizualization of select action or visual effects intensive sequences to being the medium through which filmmakers collaborate in a virtual environment mixing live action; digital puppetry with CG backgrounds.

https://www.redsharknews.com/production/item/6602-games-engines-are-changing-the-rules-of-production-this-is-the-new-cutting-edge

Two films this year exemplify the approach. In the wildly kinetic, ultra-cool John Wick three-quel, a climactic set-piece sequence takes place in a room high up in the Continental Hotel where ceiling, floor and interior is made of glass.

The cinematography by Dan Lausten echoes that of Roger Deakins’ work filming a glass filled room in Skyfall and recalls the house of mirrors shoot out from John Wick 2 (itself a homage to Orson Welles’ climactic scene in The Lady from Shanghai).

Just to make it even more difficult, in John Wick Chapter 3 – Parabellum there are giant LED screens playing back vibrant colours inside and outside the glass room.

“[Director Chad Stahelski] wanted this idea from the beginning, and we spent a long time talking about how to achieve it,” Laustsen told IBC.  “They built the set about 800 x 400 ft in a studio. It was really complicated to light, so we shot tests with the big LED screen on the outside. When you have glass surrounding you 360-degrees you have to be very careful to avoid lights and other equipment being in picture but we had the experience of handling something similar from John Wick 2.”

What differed from the JW2 was the use of VR to prep the scene. This included a full design of a 3D version of the glass office that the key filmmakers could view in real-time in VR goggles way before the actual location was constructed as a physical set.

According to concept illustrator Alex Nice, this virtual version even included proxy fighters, and the ability to mock-fight in VR. This was all built and played back in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4.

The benefit of being able to virtually walk around a complex set was not just beneficial to the production design but to the stunt-fight co-ordinators and to Laustsen who was able to ‘pre-visualise’ how to shoot the scene, such as where to place the camera and how to light it, to a far more accurate and realistic degree than before.

The team even built in a virtual camera which allowed for scene capture, depth of field and lens selection within the game engine. What Lausten saw and the decisions he made while wearing the VR headsets was able to be relayed to crew by displaying it on a monitor.

This technique, however, was an exception for a film which makes a virtue of shooting as much as possible, including star Keanu Reeves’ stunts, in-camera.

Not so The Lion King, which has arguably pushed the boundaries of virtual production further than any project to date. Entirely animated and featuring singing, talking animals, Disney’s feature is designed to look as if it were shot for real as a live action.

That meant giving the filmmakers, including director Jon Favreau and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, as close to an experience of shooting a live action movie as possible for the entirety of the production, but within a VR environment.

Once again, UE4 was the engine of choice into which highly detailed CG landscapes (designed from real Kenyan safari vistas) and pre-built character animation had been ported.

The filmmakers did everything from location scout the CG panoramas, blocking the scene with virtual and real actors (whose performance was shot on a stage then translated into animation by facility MPC) to selecting camera angles, shooting multiple takes for coverage and modifying lighting.

Making the shots feel real was all about emulation. The production created physical representations of traditional gear because Favreau believed it would help the film feel like it was photographed, rather than made with a computer. There was an emulated Steadicam rig and an emulated handheld camera rig. There were cranes and dollies. There was even a virtual helicopter, operated by Favreau himself.

“Instead of designing a camera move as you would in previs on a computer, we lay dolly track down in the virtual environment,” Favreau explains in the film’s production notes. “Even though the sensor is the size of a hockey puck, we built it onto a real dolly and a real dolly track. And we have a real dolly grip pushing it that is then interacting with Caleb [Deschanel], who is working real wheels that encode that data and move the camera in virtual space. There are a lot of little idiosyncrasies that occur that you would never have the wherewithal to include in a digital shot.”

The Lion King can claim to be the first time filmmakers walked around as if on a real set – in sync and in real-time using VR – communicating to each other, pointing things out and manipulating things together.

Francesco Giordana, Realtime Software Architect at MPC calls it “a real milestone to be able to put multiple people into the same space at the same time collaborating this way – where new multi-user workflows meet old school cinematography and filmmaking.”

The significance of this approach, is not just the ability to see and manipulate the virtual in realtime, but the marriage of digital with the analogue or conventional film grammar down to mimicking the tactility of actual camera equipment.

“When we're in VR, it gives you the visceral feeling of being there,” says three-time Oscar winning Rob Legato who is the film’s overall VFX Supervisor. “The whole concept of virtual production and virtual cinematography is about imparting your analogue live choices and not the ones that we have to think about for a long period of time. So, you want to have something that you have instant feedback on. If you line up a camera and something moves in the background, you might change your composition based on live input – that you react to immediately without having to think about it.

“The closer the technology gets to imitating real life, the closer it comes to real life. It's kind of magical when you see it go from one state to another and it just leaps off the screen.”

The film’s virtual production extended techniques developed on The Jungle Book. Where Avatar broke ground by giving the filmmakers a window on the VFX world — they could see the CG environment in real time during production as if they were looking at it through the camera’s viewfinder — The Lion King inverts that idea by putting the filmmakers and their gear inside a game engine that renders the world of the film.

Physical devices were custom built, and traditional cinema gear was modified to allow filmmakers to ‘touch’ their equipment— cameras, cranes, dollies — while in VR to let them use the skills they’ve built up for decades on live-action sets. They don’t have to point at a computer monitor over an operator’s shoulder anymore.

“That was all hugely valuable to the stunt-vis team,” adds Nice, “because then they can really get a sense of things like the stairs and where walls were, and where things were obscured. It actually becomes a really helpful storytelling tool and planning tool way ahead of time. The sooner that you have these guys being able to spatially map out this environment allowed them to do their magic for the film.”

GLOW’s DP and colorist adapt look of new season for Vegas setting

PostPerspective

Netflix’s Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) are back in the ring for a third round of the dramatic comedy, but this time the girls are in Las Vegas. The glitz and glamour of Sin City seems tailor-made for the 1980s-set GLOW and provided the main creative challenge for Season 3 cinematographer Chris Teague (Russian Doll, Broad City).

https://postperspective.com/glows-dp-and-colorist-adapt-look-of-new-season-for-vegas-setting/

“Early on, I met with Christian Sprenger, who shot the first season and designed the initial look,” says Teague, who was recently nominated for an Emmy for his work on Russian Doll. “We still want GLOW to feel like GLOW, but the story and character arc of Season 3 and the new setting led us to build on the look and evolve elements like lighting and dynamic range.”

The GLOW team is headlining the Fan-Tan Hotel & Casino, one of two main sets along with a hotel built for the series and featuring the distinctive Vegas skyline as a backdrop.

“We discussed compositing actors against greenscreen, but that would have turned every shot into a VFX shot and would have been too costly, not to mention time-intensive on a TV schedule like ours,” he says. “Plus, working with a backdrop just felt aesthetically right.”

In that vein, production designer Todd Fjelsted built a skyline using miniatures, a creative decision in keeping with the handcrafted look of the show. That decision, though, required extensive testing of lenses, lighting and look prior to shooting. This testing was done in partnership with post house Light Iron.

“There was no overall shift in the look of the show, but together with Light Iron, we felt the baseline LUT needed to be built on, particularly in terms of how we lit the sets,” explains Teague.

“Chris was clear early on that he wanted to build upon the look of the first two seasons,” says Light Iron colorist Ian Vertovec. “We adjusted the LUT to hold a little more color in the highlights than in past seasons. Originally, the LUT was based on a film emulation and adjusted for HDR. In Season 1, we created a period film look and transformed it for HDR to get a hybrid film emulation LUT. For Season 3, for HDR and standard viewing, we made tweaks to the LUT so that some of the colors would pop more.”

The show was also finished in Dolby Vision HDR. “There was some initial concern about working with backdrops and stages in HDR,” Teague says. “We are used to the way film treats color over its exposure range — it tends to desaturate as it gets more overexposed — whereas HDR holds a lot more color information in overexposure. However, Ian showed how it can be a creative tool.”

“The goal was to get the 1980s buildings in the background and out the hotel windows to look real — emulating marquees with flashing lights,” adds Vertovec. “We also needed it to be a believable Nevada sky and skyline. Skies and clouds look different in HDR. So, when dialing this in, we discussed how they wanted it to look. Did it feel real? Is the sky in this scene too blue? Information from testing informed production, so everything was geared toward these looks.”

“Ian has been on the first two seasons, so he knows the look inside and out and has a great eye,” Teague continues. “It’s nice to come into a room and have his point of view. Sometimes when you are staring at images all day, it’s easy to lose your objectivity, so I relied on Ian’s insight.” Vertovec grades the show on FilmLight’s Baselight.

As with Season 2, GLOW Season 3 was a Red Helium shoot using Red’s IPP2 color pipeline in conjunction with Vertovec’s custom LUTs all the way to post. Teague shot full 8K resolution to accommodate his choice of Cooke anamorphic lenses, desqueezed and finished in a 2:1 ratio.

“For dailies I used an iPad with Moxion, which is perhaps the best dailies viewing platform I’ve ever worked with. I feel like the color is more accurate than other platforms, which is extremely useful for checking out contrast and shadow level. Too many times with dailies you get blacks washed out and highlights blown and you can’t judge anything critical.”

Teague sat in on the grade of the first three of the 10 episodes and then used the app to pull stills and make notes remotely. “With Ian I felt like we were both on the same page. We also had a great DIT [Peter Brunet] who was doing on-set grading for reference and was able to dial in things at a much higher level than I’ve been able to do in the past.”

The most challenging but also rewarding work was shooting the wrestling performances. “We wanted to do something that felt a little bigger, more polished, more theatrical,” Teague says. “The performance space had tiered seating, which gave us challenges and options in terms of moving the cameras. For example, we could use telescoping crane work to reach across the room and draw characters in as they enter the wrestling ring.”

He commends gaffer Eric Sagot for inspiring lighting cues and building them into the performance. “The wrestling scenes were the hardest to shoot but they’re exciting to watch — dynamic, cinematic and deliberately a little hokey in true ‘80s Vegas style.”

Pay TV urged to package content for cord-cutters and super-fans in response to DTC growth

Videonet

The direct-to-consumer trend sweeping the recorded entertainment content market first began in sports, and the momentum towards franchise and club owned OTT is accelerating, according to new research. The development puts further onus on Pay TV operators to protect exclusive access to the most prestigious live sports and innovate packaging and pricing to fight against the real and present threat from global Internet giants like Amazon Prime.

https://www.v-net.tv/2019/08/21/pay-tv-urged-to-package-content-for-cord-cutters-and-super-fans-in-response-to-dtc-growth/

The insights form part of a new report by NAGRA, the Kudelski Group-owned Pay TV and OTT solutions provider, which assesses the impact standalone sports streaming services are having on Pay TV. “Tier-one sports rights are critical to the future of Pay TV providers, who are increasingly consolidating their investments,” the report states. Operators are urged to look at different ways to package this content to make it more attractive to cord-cutters and to support super-fan needs.

The report, titled ‘The Global Market for Premium Sports OTT Services’, notes that an increasing number of sports rights holders are launching premium OTT services to drive additional engagement and revenues from their most loyal fans. More than a third of the world’s top soccer clubs, and six of the top ten largest leagues and federations, now offer premium OTT streaming services.

Of the new rights holder-owned services to hit the market, nearly half were launched in the past two years, a statistic which underlines the rapid growth seen in the OTT sports sector. Among the most recent and most ambitious is the international OTT platform debuted by English Premier League (EPL) champions Manchester City. ‘Man City for TV’ ‘ live streamed several of the club’s pre-season fixtures and shows live matches of its Women’s and Academy teams along with bespoke content.

Nuria Tarre, CMO at Manchester City, said: “By becoming a central hub for Manchester City content, we want to push the boundaries in technology and sports consumption and provide an immersive entertainment experience for our loyal fanbase, wherever they are.”

In North America, all four of the major sports leagues have long operated their own streaming services that show live and archived games both domestically and internationally. Of Europe’s top domestic soccer competitions, four of which rank inside the world’s top ten leagues and federations by revenue, only Italy’s Serie A currently transmits live match action via its own OTT service. Spain’s La Liga already operates LaLigaSportsTV, a free service that provides coverage of Spanish sports content but has yet to stream live La Liga games. The EPL is reportedly considering launching its own streaming platform.

Another property that ranks among the world’s top ten by revenue, but which has yet to be shown via a standalone streaming service, is the UEFA Champions League – although UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, announced the launch of UEFA.tv in June. That service will initially offer live match streaming from UEFA’s women’s, youth, and futsal competitions in certain markets, as well as carrying a channel dedicated to the Bundesliga, German soccer’s top club competition.

At the club level, half of the top ten soccer sides by revenue, and a third of the top 25, now operate a paid OTT service, the NAGRA report notes. These services typically offer complementary programming such as behind the scenes footage, interviews and original shows, as well as live coverage of non-first team matches or pre-season matches.

Formula 1’s F1 TV Pro is an exception to the general rule of leaving the best content out of the direct-to-consumer offers, featuring live races in markets where they have retained digital rights.

While many more clubs and leagues are investing in DTC services, the NAGRA report notes that rights holders “must weigh the benefits of DTC revenues against the risk of diminishing the value of the rights packages they sell to distributors”. It adds: “To date, [rights holders] have mainly chosen to leave their rights deals intact and focus instead on creating supplementary, value-added content for loyal fans.”

Tier-one sports could be lured away from Pay TV by global digital giants, which have the deep pockets to outbid operators like BT Sport or NBCU in future rights rounds. However, their strategies remain unclear. To date, Google and Facebook have focused more on partnering (e.g. YouTube’s Champions League partnership with BT in the UK, in which it shows live matches free-to-air), whilst Amazon has acquired some tier-one content, including a small package of EPL content in the UK.

As Pay TV providers increasingly focus on tier-one rights they are leaving a gap for lower tier rights to be snapped up by OTT sports aggregators including DAZN, Eleven Sports and FloSports. These disruptors, as well as clubs with DTC offers, are experimenting with different pricing and packaging models, which is something Pay TV operators need to emulate.

The report urges Pay TV providers to “evolve their service offerings in response to agile challenger brands who are offering innovative viewing experiences for sports fans.” There is some evidence this is happening. Some Pay TV operators are experimenting with skinny bundles to attract consumers unwilling to pay for full-fixed contracts. These bundles come in a variety of flavours, from OTT-only bundles of a whole Pay TV package to sports-only bundles such as Foxtel’s Kayo Sports in Australia.

However, skinny Pay-TV bundles tend to be the most expensive. The report compares DirecTV Now (AT&T TV NOW)’s premium OTT offer in the U.S. of $50 per month to club services like Manchester City at £1.99 ($3) per month and the NBA, which offers a single game for $6.99 and a last quarter pass for $1.99.

Most of the major players have a wide range of tiered prices and packages and there is considerable innovation, the report warned. ‘Innovative pricing and packaging models are critical [for Pay TV] to attracting cord-cutters and younger viewers.”

ITU-led ‘future of TV’ discussions emphasise importance of open device market

VideoNet

Broadcasting has proved resilient, but preserving the essence of what it represents in an era of personalised app-delivered media is exercising the minds of heavyweight industry authorities. The ITU has corralled a wide range of these into a series of investigations into the future of television, the most recent meeting taking place in Geneva in June.

https://www.v-net.tv/2019/08/21/itu-led-future-of-tv-discussions-emphasise-importance-of-open-device-market/

Top of the agenda were ways in which broadcasters can lobby governments and work with device manufacturers to shape the future media landscape to be open, interoperable and to enshrine principals such as accessibility.

“The TV industry is not driven by traditional economics anymore, which raises concerns about public access, local culture and privacy,” warned Tom Morrod, Research Director, Consumer Services and Technology at IHS Markit. “The traditional industry should be supported by governments in order to compete with these companies.”

Taking heart from statistics showing that the TV set is becoming the main screen for streaming as opposed to the laptop or PC, the starting assumption is that the media landscape may be shifting but old patterns remain. “Traditional broadcasters will have to adapt but are well-placed to do so,” said Peter Siebert, Head of Technology at the digital TV standards development group, DVB. “OTT have challenges too, in terms of establishing a trusted brand and providing the same quality of experience.”

The EBU claims that European broadcasting is the driving force of the European creative sector. Sarah Turnbull, Senior Legal Counsel at EBU, said: “There are concerns in terms of safeguarding national culture, social cohesion and democracy through public service media content. As the European media ecosystem goes online, it is important that Public Service Media have their role in online spaces and enable citizens to access high-quality content.”

Initiatives here include revising the Audio Visual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) to level the playing field for broadcasters and on-demand services. Proposals include reinforced obligations for on-demand services such as the protection of minors and a rule that 30% of catalogues must be dedicated to European audiovisual works.

Pascal Chevallier, Director, Technical Affairs at Digital Europe renewed calls to complete the European digital single market “in order to counteract protectionist forces and proceed towards an inclusive world digital single market.” He added, “Product interoperability is becoming very complex [which] may result in 27 different flavours of the same rules and raises concerns for the industry.

“To achieve a real single market, and therefore to compete with the U.S. and China, European stakeholders should engage to ensure that implementation does not have hidden technical impacts or that the various regulations do not overlap or [have a] disproportionate burden.”

Interoperability, or lack of it, between broadcast and broadband, is a concern in Spain where a third of TVs sold annually are HbbTV-enabled. “Manufacturers are often not interested in updating the software of devices they sold recently and this creates frictions with broadcasters who want to get new services to market,” claimed Xavier Redon Hernandez, Senior Product Manager at Cellnex Telecom, the technology provider behind the LOVEStv hybrid broadcast broadband platform operated in Spain by RTVE, Mediaset and Atresmedia. His prescription to ensure interoperability across systems and devices was for constant conversation with manufacturers.

Harmonisation is the driver behind the DVB Project’s DVB-I. Since OTT services are typically deployed through apps, and problems arise when users have to install many of them – while broadcasters need to maintain apps on multiple platforms – DVB-I is an attempt to do for IP services what DVB-T/C/S did for the passage from analogue to digital.

It appears that China is experiencing similar issues. “In China, there is a big problem of fragmentation within the terminals, as middleware or hardware specifications are not harmonised,” explained Haifeng Yan, Principal Engineer at chip maker Hisilicon. “This means that it is costly to develop new services and difficult to deploy them, and there is no unified security scheme.”

An initiative called TV Operating System (TVOS) aims to build a ‘smart media terminal operating system’ that delivers UX consistency, development efficiency, cross-hardware platform, security and sustainability. It has 120 members including operators and chip vendors and has the backing of the Chinese government. TVOS is also pushing for recognition as an international standard through ITU-T SG9 (Study Group 9) and can apparently be made compatible with other standards such as DVB-I and HbbTV.

Can TVOS be implemented in Europe? “It is up to the manufacturers to find an agreement on the delivery arrangements, but as long as receivers comply with recommendations there wouldn’t be problems,” Yan said.

ITU-T SG9 is further developing a new recommendation that defines the basic requirements and interfaces between cable TV operators and OTT providers. The group is examining Gigaband networks and aims to evolve to what it calls the era of extreme TV/video and ultra-fast broadband. This standard may also embrace AI for use in scheduling, leveraging archives or text-to-speech accessibility.

Andy Quested, Chair of ITU-R Working Party 6C highlighted the importance of accessibility, pointing out, “Access to media is a right, not an inconvenience.” An aging population across Europe makes accessibility systems ever more necessary.

The UK’s DTG, not part of the ITU meeting but an underwriter of its ambition, argues that if we are going to start mapping a future for TV across devices, we need an ordered framework. The organisation divides this into Quality of Interoperability (does something work and does it do what it should?), Quality of Experience (which emphasises the value of attributes like HDR and pushes the industry to deliver the very best for the consumer), and Quality of Security (looking ahead to Smart TV vulnerabilities of the IoT home).

Focusing on the last point, the DTG endorses the UK government’s Code of Practice, which shifts the onus for secure Internet-connected devices and apps from consumers to manufacturers, designers and suppliers.

“Innovation in consumer electronics devices, in partnership with service providers, will shape the future television experience,” declared DTG Chief Executive Richard Lindsey-Davies. “Understanding emerging developments, together with a view on how these might be implemented are critical if the viewer experience is to be protected, and industry and government are to derive the maximum economic and social value of the unique opportunity that lies ahead.”

iSize Claims Massive Performance Savings for its Debut AI Codec

Streaming Media

London-based startup iSize Technologies is launching an AI-powered encoding platform which it claims boosts bitrate savings by 70% versus virtually any other codec solution. 

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/iSize-Claims-Massive-Performance-Savings-for-its-Debut-AI-Codec--133770.aspx

The company says it has "extensively tested" its patent-pending SaaS, called BitSave, and further claims it will make encoding up to 500% faster than competing cloud encoding solutions. 

The company claims BitSave is the industry’s first proprietary machine learning (ML) solution for "substantial bitrate or quality gains in video compression particularly for video encoding on 'resource-constrained' devices" (drones, action-cams, smartphones, are mentioned).

It is codec independent so will work with AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, and VP9. The currently available version of the platform provides for H.264/AVC encoding, with other encoders coming soon. 

The debut of the product will be at the IBC Show in Amsterdam in next month. 

"Advanced machine learning is now beginning to disrupt content delivery, and we believe we are the right team to allow for such advanced technologies to enter the market in a manner that is backward compatible to existing video encoding and transport standards," says iSize Technologies CEO Sergio Grce. "BitSave resolves high-bitrate quality issues by providing the capacity, performance, and know-how to cost-effectively deliver a high-quality experience for both VOD and live streaming customers."

While it has not been benchmarked against the machine learning capabilities at the core of V-Nova’s Perseus Pro codec (which drives V-Nova’s P.Link Dual UHD/8HD video encoder and decoder), iSize is targeting BitSave at the exact same territory of MPEG-5 Part 2 Low Complexity Enhancement Video Codec (LCEVC). This codec-agnostic enhancement is claimed to improve compression, or video quality at a given bitrate, while reducing processing power consumed and is based on Perseus Pro.

"Future coding standards, like the ongoing VCEG/MPEG JVET standardization to create the next generation codec that will replace HEVC, will undertake a lengthy development process that will typically culminate in 30%-40% bitrate saving for the same visual quality," explains Grce. "However, the expected timeline for delivery of the first working codecs for MPEG’s JVET current standardization is scheduled for after 2023—at the same time, the HEVC standard has still not reached large rollout to date."

On the other hand, current machine learning solutions like Magic Pony (owned by Twitter) and Wave One offer disruptive performance for still-image coding.

"Such solutions face substantial barriers when moved to video due to the unresolved challenge of incorporating temporal prediction and their deployment complexity," says Grce.

That’s where iSize comes in.

Its improvements are achieved by incorporating a proprietary downscaling-upscaling technology as a pre- and post-processing stage of a standard codec pipeline. 

Instead of abandoning the existing codec pipeline (as proposed by autoencoding solutions, such as Magic Pony), iSize’s encoder-side solution downscales the input content with a custom-designed filter. The iSize decoder-side solution upscales the decoded low-resolution video to obtain the final result. 

It says it has measured video quality via industry-standard metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF.

"Our IP offers 20% to 40% rate saving or quality improvement (2-4dB of PSNR) over AVC/H.264 and HEVC at marginal complexity increase for the decoder and complexity reduction for the encoder," says Grce. "Unlike other machine learning efforts in this space, our solution is deployable today and can be used on top of any standards-compliant or proprietary video codec architecture with minimal increase in complexity."

In fact, iSize goes further and suggest that operators with existing HEVC encoders will find efficiencies boosted by up to 70 percent using its technology. iSize says it has the data to qualify this.

It further claims to offer "the most competitive and simplest encoding pricing model" in the market. It charges £0.01 + VAT per minute of content encoding (audio included) for all resolutions up to 4K "50% cheaper than existing solutions at enhanced resolutions."

For example, a 10-minute HD video clip encoded at 5000Kbps and 3000Kbps with H.264/AVC costs £0.20 + VAT. 

"We have tuned our encoding such that, when selecting a bitrate value, the provided video quality will correspond to the visual quality of well-known video encoding services at that bitrate," Grce explains. "However, in the vast majority of cases, our actual bitrate will be 20% to 80% lower than that value, thereby offering this saving at no compromise in visual quality—in fact, in many cases our visual quality will be even higher than that of the other services that do not offer such savings across the range of bitrates."

iSize says it is piloting and testing BitSave with companies in VOD, streaming and broadcasting and has partnered with CosmoCDN, a CDN provider currently piloting in several regions of Africa to demonstrate its impact.

In the workflow integration with CosmoCDN, iSize receives the VOD content as well as live feed (utilising SRT) and transcodes it using the iSize engine. The VOD ABR content is sent to the storage Origin for CosmoCDN, while the live feed goes directly to the CDN’s edge servers.

CosmoCDN streams the content to end users, at the same time caching it in the SSD drives. Customers receive an embedded URL from iSize that includes the player and the CosmoCDN streaming URL. This code can be used in a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, etc.

Additionally, there is a tokenised plugin which generates a token to allow watching the content, so that only authorized users can use the service.

The startup is comprised of a team of five and boasts PhDs in video signal processing, ML, and advanced networking systems.

Grce holds an MSc from London’s Cass Business School and previously worked in investment banking.

Technical director Yiannis Andreopoulos (who is also Professor in Data and Signal Processing Systems at University College London) counts 17 years of experience in video coding with more than 150 research papers, three patent applications, and ten contributions to JPEG/MPEG standards.

CDN G-Core Labs Plots U.S. and Global Expansion

Streaming Media

Luxembourg-based G-Core Labs makes no bones about wanting to become one of the top five providers of cloud and edge services worldwide and says it could already be first among equals.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/CDN-G-Core-Labs-Plots-U.S.-and-Global-Expansion-133757.aspx

It is prepared to put its content delivery network to the test against competitors like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

"The most important technological task of any OTT service and TV channel is to provide the 100% seamless experience of live broadcasting or transmission of video content on demand, without delay and buffering," says Dmitry Samoshkin, G-Core Labs vice president of products. "Global content delivery networks, cloud media platforms, and hot storage are capable of solving this challenge to overcome oceans and continents in a few milliseconds to broadcast video with the necessary bitrate on any user's device, regardless of its location."

Founded in 2011, G-Core's first backbone network consisted of seven data centers located in six cities (Munich, Seoul, Singapore, Ashburn, Va., and Novosibirsk and Moscow, Russia). This grew to 23 points of presence (POPs) in 2013, and following relocation of its HQ from Vienna to Luxembourg in 2015 G-Core launched its first global CDN, chasing this with last year's debut of a cloud solution for live and VOD streaming on the back of over 50 POPs and 100 cache servers present on five continents.

"The idea to develop the company on an international scale came about five years ago, while working on a project for Wargaming.net (publisher of mass online games like World of Tanks and World of Warships).

"When Wargaming.net couldn't find a suitable CDN solution in terms of quality and price, we took on the task of providing a seamless online battle experience for players around the world," he continues. "Compared to providing live broadcast of a TV channel or an episodic series delivered OTT service, this was an even more ambitious goal: an online tank battle with the participation of hundreds of thousands of simultaneously playing gamers located in Chicago, Moscow, and Paris, every millisecond is important."

The resulting partnership became the defining one for the company's development. To deliver such heavy video content, G-Core Labs built its own high-speed CDN, which was used by 190,000 simultaneously playing users in 2013—winning itself a Guiness World Record in the process (apparently the only cloud service provider to have been so garlanded). "After that, we decided to develop a universal international CDN service for the delivery of video, broadcasts, web applications, software, advertising and websites," explains Samoshkin. It claimed a new record in 2014 when its CDN sustained a load of 1,114,000 simultaneous players. 

"The main challenges were connected with the design of a network architecture, the development of a traffic balancing system, the provision of high-quality internet connectivity in the regions of presence, as well as the improvement of network performance. This is a separate big task which we deal with regularly," he says.

Media Platform 

The company promotes its Media Platform product overthe CDN of rivals by claiming three main differences: its global coverage; the integration of CDN and media platforms; and the offer of features that it says its competitors don't have. 

Taking these in turn; G-Core Labs' CDN has a presence on every continent, including the U.S. where it operates in more than 10 locations. It claims average response times of 28 ms in New York, 29 ms in California, and just 19 ms in Denver. A new POP is planned for Atlanta by end of this year.

Samoshkinclaims "the best network performance in the Americas and the best in Europe, Russia and the CIS" based on reports from Citrix it cites in various blog posts. 

"The total throughput of our network exceeds 7Tbps, [and] we have more than 4,000 peering partners, so we are ready for any peak loads," says Samoshkin."But what is especially important is that our CDN is integrated with a unique cloud media platform of our own design, which allows you to create—at virtually zero infrastructure costs—your own TV channel, online movie theater, or streaming service, broadcasting your content to any user device with the minimum possible delay."

He says that setting up any live or VOD stream takes no more than 5 to 7 minutes. Media Platform combines transcoding, CDN, storage and a cross-platform player for delivery and monetization of online entertainment.

The main distinguishing feature of it is "its integrity and the presence of all the necessary functions for high-quality broadcasting" says Samoshkin. "There are a lot of solutions on the market that deal just with small parts of video broadcasting. One company will only transcode, a second provides an HTML player, the third gives only statistics and analytics, others are engaged in content protection and bypassing ad blocking. And then you also need to find a CDN operator to deliver your video without delay, with whom you could integrate all these services. This is time-consuming and costly.

"By contrast, we have everything combined into a single service and with one intuitive personal account and API, which radically reduces the time losses and financial costs of broadcasting." 

CDN Considerations

He argues that the most effective CDNs have "edge ideology"—an architecture with many points of presence of cache servers distributed around the world. 

"The second parameter is the response time in a particular market. If your audience is located, for example, on the U.S. East Coast, in Central Europe, or Russia, it is important for your CDN operator to not only have local points of presence in these regions, but also to provide a good response time in comparison with other content delivery operators." [For example, see G-Core's blog post about its presence in France.]

Another important selection factor, in Samoshkin'sopinion, is the additional services of cloud provider, which are already integrated with its content delivery networks. For example, a developed CDN often also allows you to enable effective protection against DDoS attacks. He gives the example of U.S. video game publisher RedFox Games, which faced DDoS attacks when entering the Latin American market. "Pirates didn't want the copyright holder of the popular games Black Desert, RF Online, and Rumble Fighterto appear on the local market, so they organized a series of powerful attacks. However, thanks to the capabilities of our CDN network and the unique technologies of intelligent filtering of network traffic from G-Core Labs, we managed to effectively handle all unfriendly actions of competitors."

He goes on to say that the market also expects a standardization of HTTP3 by Google. Its integration into the CDN network will allow, in G-Core Labs' estimation, a 15% improvement in download speed compared to HTTP2.

"Large media companies are organizing tenders for the purchase of CDN services and will select 2-3 content delivery providers, in order to receive maximum coverage in all regions of presence. As a rule, the issue of integrating different CDN networks is solved using a high-quality network traffic balancing tool."

Company clients include Michelin, Avast antivirus, Tinkoff Bank, and the Wargaming publisher.

5G set for slow-burn uptake

DTVE

Operators are approaching early 5G rollout to deliver efficiency savings and enhanced broadband with the more exotic consumer apps lined up for phase two. 

https://www.digitaltveurope.com/longread/5g-set-for-slow-burn-uptake/

There is no immediate ‘killer application’ for 5G. Its early consumer commercialisation should be seen as a way of evolving and expanding the established business of service providers. The prosaic objectives, at 5G’s birth at least, are a successful coexistence with existing network infrastructure and applying the lessons hard learnt over the previous decade.

“The early days are primarily to support some areas where there’s always been a limit to what 4G can do, in stadiums and train stations, for example,” says Matt Stagg, director of mobile strategy, BT Sport. BT-owned EE has launched 5G in six UK cities with ten to follow by end of the year. “5G will enable a much better experience in those high footfall areas.”

First-off-the-block launches by the likes of EE in the UK and Vodafone in the UK and Spain are using a ‘non-standalone’ deployment focused on using the combined power of 4G and 5G to boost mobile broadband (enhanced MBB) 

Stagg adds: “We’re addressing urban centres where there’s a high population concentration. You have to be aware that [EE] is still heavily investing in 4G networks, so it’s about being able to provide the best experience for our customers.”

Many of Vodafone’s rivals, such as Movistar, Orange and MásMóvil in Spain, will not launch commercial 5G services until at least 2021. Telefónica is also taking a pragmatic approach.

“They are keen to wait until the technology progresses and to learn from launches in other markets before jumping straight in,” says Kester Mann, director, consumer and connectivity, CCS Insight. “There is consumer benefit in faster, more reliable broadband but 5G will be around for many years and the marketing kudos from launching early is only worth so much. Most operators see far larger revenue opportunities for 5G in the enterprise. The consumer use case is more opaque.”

Orange, for example, has run trials in several countries but is waiting for devices to be ready and available in more brands before commercialisation in 2020. “In some markets we’re waiting for regulators to release spectrum,” says Jean-Pierre Casara, 5G innovation expert at the company. “We expect the smartphone experience will be better but not a huge jump. 4G is good for many, many use cases. What is interesting is to go beyond that with partners and unlock innovation yet to be imagined.”

Operators are also wary of repeating the mistakes that blighted previous generational uplifts. Vodafone CEO Nick Read admitted that MNOs had only themselves to blame.

“As an industry we don’t collaborate well enough and in terms of customer need we are not fast enough,” he told MWC in February. “We were protectionist around text messaging revenues and let OTT players move take over the rich messaging space.”

Beware the dumb pipe

In 2008, 3G smartphones were hitting their stride and revenue for operators in Western Europe was at its peak. At the same time, mobile broadband was developing, and a significant amount of service revenue was lost.

“Over that period, cell operators in Western Europe collectively lost over a quarter of their service revenues while traffic over the networks grew 50-80% a year,” says Stephen Carson, director of business strategies at Ericsson. “The massive increase in traffic was not matched by revenue growth. The only way to keep pace with demand and not go backwards financially is to serve that traffic more and more efficiently. 5G is a big step in that direction.”

5G eMBB will deliver a significant reduction in cost per bit compared with 4G MBB, and this will continue to reduce (thanks to increased spectral efficiency, higher network utilisation, greater user numbers and higher average speeds). Access to new and wider spectrum also delivers efficiencies.

“The challenge for operators, particularly in Europe, is to have some sort of value proposition and some service that they are in control of rather have it taken OTT,” says Carson.

“The telco reality is that they have to provide ever increasing bandwidth capacity while not ending up a dumb pipe,” agrees Kaltura’s SVP Product Marketing, Gideon Gilboa. “This is a difficult balance to manage. They are looking for ways to ensure the total cost of ownership makes sense by making reasonable commercial propositions balanced with big investments in the network.”

Video is the king of content demand and it will be long into the future. NSR predicts that by 2022, 82% of all IP traffic will be video.

Video is also a prime mover for 5G with upwardly revised predictions by Ericsson that 5G coverage will reach 45% of the world’s population by end of 2024. This could surge to 65%, as spectrum sharing technology enables 5G deployments on LTE frequency bands. Where 60% of data traffic is video today, it believes that close to three quarters will be video in six years’ time.

“In some territories operators are trying to get around unlimited tariff structures,” notes Carson. “You can have all-you-can-eat data plans so long as the video is 480p. The bigger picture is that video will rise in volume and in quality and open up immersive experiences – but we’re at a very early stage yet.”

Raising ARPU

“Not matter how much bandwidth there is or how much the cost per bit comes down, spectrum is still finite,” Stagg says. “If you have payment models where a consumer pays for all their data then streaming 4K quickly becomes expensive. Where the operator such as EE offers all-you-can-eat video passes where a lot of content is zero rated, then the operator pays for bandwidth.”

Early reports suggesting that 5G services would be priced significantly higher than 4G appear to have been overplayed. According to Futuresource Consulting, many operators offering 5G for either the same price or only a small increase over 4G. 

“Given the limited coverage of 5G, handsets are likely to be on the existing 4G network for the majority of the time currently, so [exhausting data caps] may not be a major concern in early adopters,” says analyst Simon Forrest.

“Primarily, the question is whether operators could raise ARPU by delivering video over 5G. But since video is regarded as part of the mobile data service, consumers are initially unlikely to consider delivery over 5G as a major differentiator. This would challenge operators wishing to improve the monetisation of such services. However, there are advantages to being able to receive uninterrupted live broadcast streams, especially sports and live events, which present revenue-generating opportunities if packaged appropriately.”

Partly to keep costs down, BT Sport argues against 4K over mobile since no-one can see the extra pixels, even on a UHD smartphone. 

“We believe the optimum format for the small screen is HD HFR [high frame-rate] and HDR,” says Stagg. “We don’t advocate 4K other than for casting to larger screens in the house over WiFi. This is the strategy for BT Sport and it should be for every operator.”

5G also opens an opportunity to drive fixed line subscriptions to the home by connecting a 5G router to the set-top box or smart TV in the living room and delivering enhanced TV over the last mile.

“We ran some field trials in Romania last year for last mile delivery of high-speed broadband in the mmWave spectrum which worked very well,” says Casara. “It’s probably more a use case in eastern Europe where cable and FTTH are still limited outside of the main cities.”

Cable providers too can put 5G cells into street cabinets and cover the last 500 yards where replacing coax with fibre or enhancing it with DOCSIS 3 is a less viable option.

Stagg urges the industry to be agnostic to the underlying technology and provide “the optimum experience at commercially viable cost. If it’s going to cost a million pounds to dig up a road and we can use a wireless tech that delivers better capacity to the home then this is a good use case. We’ve done a lot of testing on wireless routers. We need to decouple the underlying tech and use whatever makes most economic sense and provides the best experience.”

Tipping point

Arguably it will be the introduction of the full next generation 5G core network, enhanced device chipset capabilities, and increased availability of 5G-ready spectrum which will kick-start more exotic consumer applications. 

EE has scheduled this phase 2 rollout from 2022 and promises “truly immersive mobile augmented reality, real-time health monitoring, and mobile cloud gaming.” It is also a vital step to the convergence of fixed, mobile and WiFi “into one seamless customer experience.”

A report by Ovum, commissioned by Intel, suggests 2025 will be the ‘tipping point’ for 5G in entertainment and media. By then, 57% of wireless revenue globally will be driven by the capabilities of 5G networks and devices, rising to 80% by 2028 by which time M&E experiences enabled by 5G will generate up to US$1.3 trillion or almost half of the projected US$3 trillion in wireless revenues overall.

Augmented reality is top of the list. BT Sport has AR sports related experiences for both at home and in stadia in the works.

“The potential is huge,” Stagg confirms. “The ability to enhance sport is phenomenal by, for example, overlaying stats of players taking a penalty – live.”

Early AR experiences are imagined via smartphone but BT Sport is casting future interaction toward some form of lightweight glasses.

Telcos are also trialling virtual reality harnessed with 8K capture live streamed over the network. Orange’s partnership with France Télévisions took this to the next stage at Roland-Garros with a demo mostly to devices spread over the stadium.

“We wanted to push the envelope on bandwidth and see how live 8K encoding would cope,” says Casara. “We concluded that 8K is a good format to start with for VR using tiling technology to encode and send just the parts of the image the viewer is looking at.”

Audible AR could evolve in tandem with 5G ‘hearable’ devices that overlay spoken information from an AI-enabled voice assistant to augment the real-world environment in real-time.

“With 5G connectivity and location-based awareness via an on-board GPS, spoken direction will become an essential skill for hearable products, capable of directing users through spoken step-by-step instructions,” says Forrest. “Advertisers will be quick to harness the opportunity to speak to wearers, conveying precisely timed and relevant information based upon geolocation.”

Given that 5G requires densification of the network infrastructure, it becomes possible to more accurately identify the locations of consumers via cell tower connection.

“This may lead to advanced advertising and improved targeting, perhaps delivering information and advertising based upon time of day and location to generate uplift in engagement,” says Forrest.

In parallel, this should open up more flexible pricing models to target the generation of consumers who don’t want lengthy fixed-term contracts. 

“This generation is used to bite-sized video and Netflix-style subscriptions and want the same from their connectivity provider,” says Adam Davies, product manager, Synamedia. “We’ve been talking about being able to build those flexible consumer models for years and with 5G, service providers have the network to make localised, personalised and flexible video packages happen.”

Next-gen entertainment 

Intel predicts that AR and VR will deliver cumulative revenues of US$140 billion between 2021 and 2028.  

Immersive and new media applications which don’t even exist today are estimated to generate US$67 billion a year by 2028 – equivalent to the value of the entire global media market in 2017, including games, music and films.

Perhaps the most significant new consumer application twinned with 5G is cloud gaming. Some see it as more of a game-changer than video since real-time multiplayer gaming isn’t possible, certainly over mobile, without it. One of the first games to tap into this is Harry Potter: Wizards Unite from Niantic which claims to render AR in tens of milliseconds. 

Synched with this is the need for edge computing in which logic is moved out of the device into the cloud. If you can process more encodes and transcodes there you can create thinner client apps, effectively streaming from the edge with less rendering on the device.

However, Forrest suggests that the industry is confused over what could be done with a 10Gbps low-latency WiFi network versus what should be done with a 10Gbps low-latency 5G mobile network. 

“The parallel development of WiFi 6 – 802.11ax – promises to closely match the performance of 5G for local/indoor communications,” he says. “This provides an alternative choice for networking of VR, AR and other applications, especially given that high-bandwidth 5G services are carried over mmWave frequencies that won’t easily penetrate walls, so indoor coverage will be close to non-existent.”

The 5G network will be meshed with the Internet of Things, allowing operators to rollout new consumer services hooked into smart cities. Apps for parking, waste disposal, real-time traffic management and the leisure/tourism industry can all be introduced as part of a wider city-wide data grids.

For EE, this falls into Phase 3 of its 5G rollout, from 2023, when “ultra-reliable” low latency communications, network slicing and multi-gigabit-per-second speeds are introduced. This phase will enable the “tactile internet” it predicts, where a sense of touch can be added to remote real-time interactions.

“Everybody is talking about new immersive AR/VR forms all the way out to volumetric 3D holograms but in order to have such experiences you need six degrees of freedom to look all around you and see superimposed data on reality,” says Carson. “You need extreme low latency and a shift of heavy compute processing to the edge to feed all the calculations for rendering. You might also need new forms of compression.” 

5G may not even be good enough in the next decade to cope with the plans telcos have scoped out for it. 

“The increasing number of new applications such as VR/AR, autonomous driving, IoT, and wireless backhaul as well as newer applications that have not been conceived yet, will need even greater data rates and less latency than what 5G networks will offer,” states NYU Professor Ted Rappaport, in a paper published by the IEEE.

US government agency the FCC recently voted to grant licences for research into submillimetre wavelengths in the terahertz frequency range to unearth 6G bandwidth capacities. 

If the risks of working in potentially radioactive frequencies are overcome, then 6G – and ultimately 7G and beyond – promises such high capacity and instant data transmission that – it has been speculated –  it could deliver artificial intelligence to wireless devices operating at the speed of the human brain.

In focus: 5G AS A DTT replacement? Not yet

5G will play a role in eventually replacing digital-terrestrial broadcasting although this is expected to be neither short term, a top priority or universal. 

“The requirement is free-to-view, not free-to-air,” says Matt Stagg, director of mobile strategy, BT Sport, who notes the resilient popularity of the linear broadcast schedule. “But as viewing shifts OTT and broadcasters looks to move more things to IP we’re going to reach a point where, with fewer viewers on terrestrial, DTT becomes cost prohibitive. If your percentage of viewers goes down yet your costs of maintaining the broadcast network remain, at the same time as CDN costs rise, then inevitably things will change.”

Operators and broadcasters are collaborating on projects to investigate the overall benefits and efficiencies of 5G broadcast or Enhanced TV (enTV). Examples are 5G-Xcast (a Horizon 2020 and 5G-PPP project); Finland’s 5GTN+ programme; and 5G Today, ongoing in Bavaria, operating trial broadcasts over 5G using the 700MHz spectrum. “One of the objectives is to identify the best solutions to exploit the enhanced capabilities of 5G, notably using the new radio interface [5G-NR] for broadcast TV and digital radio services,” explains analyst Simon Forrest of Futuresource Consulting. “Television over 5G is especially interesting for Europe, as there is an immediate deployment potential using the 700MHz spectrum band previously occupied by terrestrial services.”

The 3GPP Release 14 specs already meet all EU digital TV broadcast requirements; technical studies conclude this is approximately twice as efficient as DVB-T which would open up spare capacity in the spectrum for alternative use cases. “In this instance, the remaining DTT frequencies (470MHz to 694MHz) could be reallocated to 5G, with TV broadcasts migrating from DVB to 5G broadcast technology,” says the analyst. “This consumes less bandwidth, leaving the remaining spectrum free for mobile use.”

Gideon Gilboa, SVP, product marketing, Kaltura notes moves among DTH providers to switch services from satellite to IP. Among them, Sky’s launch of Sky Q over IP in Austria and Italy and a DirecTV DTV package with an IP only connection. “5G is an enabler for more video to IP and in that sense, we see the trend to IP continuing and maybe even accelerating the transition,” he says.

Even in the case of 5G and its capacity, unicasting to the entire nation is still too costly for live events especially at high bitrate 4K/8K.