How robots are set to move into every facet of our working lives

TechInformed

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Robots in the workplace, and workers’ suspicions of them is nothing new, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis documented the rise of the machines (and their ultimate demise) way before the Terminator franchise and I, Robot became box office smashes.

Yet for years workers remained assured that the reality of robotics was far more mundane, taking the form of heavy automated and caged industrial equipment used to assemble cars or manufacture packaged goods in a factory.

Yet robotics usage today is neither of these things, according to the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which predicts that “today’s robots are designed to work alongside, move amongst, and be worn by human workers”.

Robots are also key to the future of work outside the factory floor, spanning industries from travel and hospitality, healthcare and assisted living, education, and even traditional offices.

It is why the industrial robotics market is projected to grow from $15.7 billion in 2022 to $30.8bn by 2027; and the global robotics market to reach $74.1 billion by 2026, growing at 17.45%, a year.

Apart from industrial robotics arms, more form factors have emerged in recent years, such as Collaborative Robots (cobots), Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS), and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

A common denominator across all these types is their ability to perceive and make sense of their surrounding environment. According to ABI Research, this autonomy is enabled through ML models such as object detection, localisation and collision avoidance, motion planning for navigation and manipulation, pose estimation, and sensor integration.

Industrial robotics

 

Both AGVs and AMRs are deployed in warehouses for intralogistics, an application that includes various sub-applications such as material handling, machine tending, as well as bin-picking. This has industry-wide usage ranging from automotive, chemicals, electrical and electronics to food and beverages; and is “currently booming”, according to analysts.

As a result, the intralogistics market for mobile robots in manufacturing is expected to grow from $9bn in 2022 to top $36bn by 2030 according to ABI Research.

Recent strains on supply systems and product gaps have highlighted the need for better supply chain efficiency. Various industries have also been affected by labour shortages caused by safety regulations and sickness.

“Assembly lines will be supported by industrial robotics and automated solutions, and smart factories will become ubiquitous,” says Analytics Insight charting the rise of the ‘Smart Factory’. “As a result, we anticipate operations that are faster, more efficient, and more precise, with fewer inconsistencies.”

AMRs are increasingly being programmed to perform work, like moving heavy products, alongside human employees. These cobots are marketed by vendors as your “ideal co-worker,” their introduction intended to fill gaps in the labour force, boost productivity (robots can’t walk out over pay) and (apparently) to be actively welcomed by existing staff.

“The addition of robotics and automation to the manufacturing industry has sparked concerns about possible negative impact on the workforce,” admits Locus Robotics which makes autonomous solutions for the warehouse.

“What manufacturing trends are showing is just the opposite – robots and people working together, collaboratively, in factories and warehouses can get more work done, faster and more safely.”

Locus AMRs, the company insists, not only make workers more efficient, but they help to improve the workplace by reducing fatigue and improving safety.

These claims of robotic efficiency are backed up by the stats – albeit ones cherrypicked by Locus. For example, in traditional ‘order fulfilment’ roles – the physical act of walking to pick product –  accounts for 50% of the entire process, eating up valuable time and money.

If a human worker typically picks between 60 and 80 orders an hour, an automated system can pick up to 300 in the same time frame, according to Westernacher Consulting.

Locus Robotics quotes its customer Kenco testifying to improvements in productivity. “We were at 30-40 units per hour per picker,” said Kristi Montgomery, VP of Innovation, R&D. “We’re now in the range of anywhere from 120-150 units per hour. We’ve also increased our volume and throughput and increased our visibility to what’s happening on the floor.”

Another study, by MIT for BMW in 2015, found that robots and humans working together are 85% more productive than humans working alone.

Your ideal colleague?

 

Cobotics are also servicing other aspects of daily life. In a trend that jump-started under Covid-19, increased hygiene demands opened the door for cleaning and disinfection service robots.

“Demand for the quality of customer service and guest experience has never been higher, but there is a labour sourcing crisis that is stopping service providers from delivering,” says Stefano Bensi, GM of SoftBank Robotics UK. “Add to that the general level of anxiety concerning cleanliness and hygiene, and we can see that many industries have an opportunity to take advantage of [cobotics].”

An autonomous robot vacuum, like Whiz from Softbank Robotics, can be used to automatically clean the floors of entire office buildings, healthcare facilities, residential buildings, and school campuses.

Like Locus, SoftBank claims that cobots don’t replace human jobs, but allow staff to focus their hours on higher-value activities. While leaving repetitive tasks like vacuuming for the bot “existing cleaning staff can then relocate their time to higher-value services like disinfecting, deep cleaning, and polishing.” Cleaning teams using its product report a 25% boost in efficiency, it claims, not least in “preventing overtime costs” to achieve the same results.

“Many organisations are implementing robot manager roles that allow their team to gain new and in-demand technology skills–engaging and rewarding work,” SoftBank asserts in a recent blog. “It’s a formula that’s proven to work well in manufacturing, where the presence of robots works to create new, higher-paying jobs.”

SoftBank further claims that physical robots, including its vacuum cleaners, “have an unmistakable charm” that adds to a “positive employee experience.”

There is a widespread perception that automation may eliminate jobs but Deloitte found that 74% of executives responding to its 2019 survey believe their workforce is either supportive or highly supportive of their intelligent automation strategy. The perceived level of stakeholder support tends to grow significantly as organisations add more automation into their business.

In this survey, 32% of executives whose organisations are piloting automation said their workforce is unsupportive, compared to just 12% in organisations which are implementing or scaling it up.

There is, though, a cost-saving for companies in junking the janitor for a robotic hoover. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that there are 2,384,600 building cleaners in the United States and that companies are spending about $60bn on them annually. This is exclusive of the insurance amount that has become expensive, as the janitorial industry records one of the highest numbers of occupational injuries.

Factors like these are boosting the demand for cleaning robots, says analyst Mordor, though another analyst notes that high cost of installation, coupled with the high cost of maintenance of the robot vacuum cleaners, is hindering market growth.

Service bots

 

The ageing population, in which the over 65s will account for 16% of the global total by 2050 [source: UN], is one of the primary factors for the significant growth in deploying robots everywhere from hotels to assisted living facilities to office parks. These robots can be used to run errands like delivering food on demand.

The last-mile delivery and retail robotics market is expected to grow from less than $1bn and $1.3bn in 2022 to $16.2bn and $8.4bn by 2030, respectively, according to ABI Research.

Spend on all types of service bots might reach $70bn by 2032, predicts IDTechEx.

“One of the most important problems which we are trying to solve with these autonomous delivery robots is around labour shortages,” Ritukar Vijay, co-founder and CEO of robot-maker Ottonomy.IO, told TechCrunch.

According to Vijay, Ottonomy’s proprietary contextual mobility navigation software enables Ottobot to navigate through crowded and unpredictable environments.

Fitted with 3D lidar sensors and cameras, Ottonomy’s robots can manoeuvre through crowds indoors and out, delivering food, parcels or equipment in compartments that are as large as a standard shopping cart.

The firm has run pilots at Cincinnati airport allowing passengers to order food and retail items from an app and have them delivered to them at their gate. It has also conducted pilots with US retailers offering customers a contactless curbside pickup coordinated by an app where the robots bring orders to customers’ vehicles.

“We’re not replacing people because the fact is that the labour shortage is so high that there’s already a crunch in the staff with our current customers,” Vijay told Fox Business. “What’s happening is we are enabling the minimal staff to do more and making sure that the end customer is not paying for the extra service.”

So far, Ottonomy has not met the fate of Amazon’s recent attempt to automate home delivery. Development of the retail giant’s bot Scout was halted due to a failure to meet customer expectations.

Moving forward, ABI Research expects AMRs and quadruped (four-legged, dog-like) robots to become more prominent in delivery, data collection, security and cleaning.  Mention of quadruped robots might raise an eyebrow, but anthropomorphic bots are on the march too.

Humanoids everywhere

 

“We are able to build intelligent anthropomorphic machines capable of interacting with humans and adapting to surrounding environments,” says SoftBank which developed ‘Pepper’ a humanoid robot intended for customer-facing roles such a in retail, hospitality and banking.

Pepper incorporates a natural language engine and Machine Learning to communicate by voice and its ‘personality’ can be customised to fit the brand using it.

A partner in the project, automation specialists Sprint Replay, says the robot’s human-like appearance makes it a magnet for people; “In a public space, Pepper easily attracts a crowd of people and, thanks to its abilities, the robot is able to entertain and keep their attention, describing a product and providing a wide range of value-added services.”

Billionaire entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter Elon Musk is placing a bet that such social robots will soon become integral to our lives.

At Tesla’s AI labs, the tech entrepreneur is building a humanoid robot dubbed Optimus (presumably after the heroic Transformers character, although Optimus itself resembles Terminator). Musk claimed in October that it could eventually end poverty.

While less sophisticated than Boston Dynamics’ parkour capable Atlas robot, Optimus is significant given Musk’s history in bringing future tech into the present. It’s intended to do menial labour tasks and would likely be deployed in Tesla factories – at first.

“The foundation of the economy is labour,” Musk said in an earning call last January. “Capital equipment is distilled labour. So, what happens if you don’t have a labour shortage? I’m not sure what an economy even means at that point. That’s what Optimus is about.”

Developers at Tesla can port the same computer vision technology behind its self-driving cars into the robot. It also employs a complex four-bar hinging mechanism similar to the human knee that adapts an actuator’s differing needs for strength or speed depending on how far the knee is bent. Basically, it can lift far greater loads than any human.

“We are trying to follow the goal of fastest path to a useful robot that can be made at volume,” Musk said at the October presentation, estimating that the Tesla bot could be commercially available within three to five years costing around $20,000.

“This means a future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty, where people, you can have whatever you want, in terms of products and services. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it.”

Some analysts think it is these robots rather than its automotives that will give Tesla greater long-term profitability.

“We wouldn’t be surprised to see it becoming the primary driver of the stock price towards the end of the decade,” New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu said. “Imagine Optimus as a start-up today: It could be valued at several billion dollars, maybe even a few tens.”

FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022: Behind the scenes of stadia rigging

IBC

The FIFA World Cup Quatar 2022 may be less than three weeks from kick off but for some facilities providers the journey to Qatar began six years ago.

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Gravity Media is intimately involved in the FIFA World Cup Quatar 2022 tournament preparations in a number of areas. In work that began in 2016, it teamed with Belden to systems integrate the broadcast infrastructure solutions across four venues, including the redevelopment of the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha and the all new Al Bayt Stadium (where England play USA), Ahmed Bin Ali Stadium and Al-Thumama Stadium.

Gravity Media has had a permanent operation in Qatar since 2007, servicing the burgeoning demand for live sport, entertainment, conference, and cultural event coverage across the region.

“We have a long-standing local presence and know how to navigate the commercial and technical challenges,” says Edward Tischler, Gravity Media MD – EMEA.

“The broadcast infrastructure is designed to allow production teams to plug and play,” says Edward Dowdall, who runs Gravity’s Qatar office. “All racking and cabling is future proofed for long-term, sustainable use.”

While the stadium contracts were commissioned by the construction groups and will be a permanent legacy after the FIFA World Cup Quatar 2022 packs up, Gravity also won three projects from Host Broadcast Services (HBS), the regular host broadcaster of tournament.

The biggest of those is to outfit each of the eight stadia with equipment for Technical Operations Centres (TOCs). This includes all of the connectivity infrastructure to bring in all host feeds from diff host broadcaster units and standardise it and prep for onward distribution.

“The TOCs are centred around IP gateways from Grass Valley into the wider IP fabric of the host broadcast,” says Ollie Bianchi, Gravity’s head of projects.

In parallel, Gravity is providing a turnkey production system for infotainment at every venue. This includes RF and line cameras, on pitch presentation and replay. Aside from the RF gear this is also designed for legacy.

Gravity’s third project for HBS is to equip a studio and the live production of events at the FIFA Fan Fest, an area of the corniche in Doha to which 40,000 spectators are expected to flock and watch matches on giant screens, or up to 12000 fans a day. ‘A’ list stars are also lined up to perform. Feeds will be cut in a gallery at the IBC.

This Fan Fest is unique for a World Cup in that it will be the one and only venue for fans of every team to meet, view and interact around live matches outside of the stadia. Consequently, FIFA/HBS has put a lot of emphasis on gathering live footage from the venue.

Gravity has also been tasked to supply a number of broadcasters including BBC Wales, Fox Sports USA and Telemundo with facilities (such as technocranes, jimmy jibs) and local crew for unilateral coverage. For Fox Sports it is installing RF receive and transmit sites.

The company normally has seven permanent staff in Doha, a number which will rise to nearly 200 during the tournament.

“At the end of the World Cup our involvement in the region doesn’t stop,” says Tischler. “We will look to build on in the same way that Qatar wants to attract additional events in the region.”

The first match of the FIFA World Cup Quatar 2022 kicks-off on November 20 when Ecuador takes on the hosts at Al Bayt Stadium, in the first of 64 games, culminating in the final on Sunday December 18. The international match feed will be in 4K HDR, with ENG material in HD, from which various distribution flavours will be transcoded.

As 5G Moves Into Mass Adoption, XR, 360 and 4K Video Come With It

NAB

As 5G uptake in many parts of the world has now passed from early into mass adoption, Ericsson ConsumerLab — leading purveyors of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to service providers — claims that users are taking the first steps into the metaverse.

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“The transition from immersive services to metaverse experiences is now underway,” the telecom company states in its report, “5G: The next wave.”

The report, which tracks more than 49,000 consumers in 37 countries, is said to be representative of the opinions of 1.7 billion consumers worldwide.

Among the findings: 5G users continue to be more engaged with immersive digital services than 4G users and there are now twice as many 5G users engaging with at least three digital services compared to 2020.

The biggest increase over the past two years in time spent by 5G users has been on AR and enhanced video such as HD/4K multi-view video or 360-degree video.

The threshold for passing early adoption into mass adoption is 15% penetration, Ericsson states — a figure that 5G rollouts have now surpassed.

What’s more, inflationary headwinds don’t seem to deter many consumers from paying a premium for handsets and subscriptions, provided 5G lives up to its billing.

Notably, new adopters are more likely to be looking for widespread availability of 5G coverage before signing up.

Per the report, some 30% (510 million) express an intention to upgrade to 5G subscription in 2023. Intention to upgrade is likely to vary across markets based on market maturity and inflation concerns, and high growth markets will drive the majority of sign-ups.

That equates to around 1.67 billion 5G subscriptions globally by the end of next year. The report found that 5G users are already spending two hours more per week on AR apps than 4G users, compared to one hour more per week on AR than 4G users back in 2020.

5G users also believe that by 2025, two extra hours of video content will be consumed weekly on mobile devices, of which one and a half hours will be on mixed-reality glasses rather than smartphones.

Globally, six in 10 smartphone users believe 5G is essential for the metaverse to be realized. Half of 5G consumers who already use XR related services believe AR apps will move from smartphones to XR headsets within two years.

Jasmeet Singh Sethi, head of Ericsson ConsumerLab, says: “The shows that the next wave of potential 5G users have different expectations from the technology compared to early adopters. Overall, consumers see engaging with 5G as an essential part of their future lifestyles.

“It is interesting to note that 5G is emerging as an important enabler for early adopters to embrace metaverse-related services, such as socializing, playing and buying digital items in interactive 3D virtual gaming platforms.”

For service providers, Ericsson says its research underlines the need to respond to different levels of market maturity, and to cater to the expectations of the next wave of mainstream consumers in markets where 5G levels have gone beyond 15% of the population.

Increasing 5G availability for current users could quadruple customer satisfaction, the report advises, even while “perceived availability” is a far better metric of consumer satisfaction than extent of 5G population coverage.

 

Convergence, Change and the Current Landscape of Media Technology

NAB

The media and entertainment industry would appear to be in a perilous state given the current macroeconomic headwinds, a supply chain pressure that won’t go away, and the hold on investments driven by rising energy prices. A new survey published by broadcast tech vendor trade body IABM may not make CTOs sleep easier at night, but there are some silver linings.

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According to IABM’s “State of MediaTech” report, aside from the “geopolitical decoupling evocative of cold war times, exacerbation of pandemic-induced and the potential return of stagflation, there are many reasons to believe the future will be different.

“COVID-19 has reshaped consumption patterns irreversibly, particularly for younger generations. The same applies to businesses such as MediaTech companies. While digital transformation may not be as rushed as in COVID times, it is still underway with no going back.”

Digital transformation manifests in various ways and is increasingly blurring the lines of demarcation between Media & Entertainment sectors, with games becoming the epicenter of this shift. The report notes an increasing number of media businesses have launched initiatives that combine data and interactivity “to improve engagement with younger generations as well as augment and diversify their revenue streams.”

Here’s why: The report finds that consumers, presumably younger generations, have become less concerned about content values (picture quality), and are more interested in others such as interactivity.

This impacts video streamers who may need to diversify their content experience to keep pace.

In a letter to shareholders (albeit from Q3 of 2021) quoted in the report, Netflix identifies its main competition:

“We compete with a staggeringly large set of activities for consumers’ time and attention like watching linear TV, reading a book, browsing TikTok, or playing Fortnite, to name just a few. As one example of this dynamic, on October 4, when Facebook experienced a global outage for several hours, our engagement saw a 14% increase during this time period….”

One area of convergence gaining significant traction in the US is the closer marriage of live sports broadcast with the sports book. Disney has its eyes on this prize.

“While multiplatform television and streaming will continue to be the foundation of sports coverage for the immediate future, we believe the opportunity for The Walt Disney Company goes well beyond these channels,” said Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek in February this year.

He outlined the strategic importance of the metaverse and sports betting.

“It extends to sports betting, gaming and the metaverse. In fact, that’s what excites us, the opportunity to build a sports machine akin to our franchise flywheel that enables audiences to experience, connect with and become actively engaged with their favorite sporting events, stories, teams and players.”

Digital first players may get there first though. David Gandler, co-founder and CEO at fuboTV says:

“Online sports wagering is a highly complementary business to our sports-first live TV streaming platform. We believe there is a real flywheel opportunity with streaming video content and interactivity. We not only expect sports wagering to become a new line of business and source of revenue, but we also expect that it will increase user engagement on fuboTV resulting in higher ad monetization, better subscriber retention, and reduced subscriber acquisition costs.”

There are other touchpoints for convergence too. The rise of virtual production is one. Here, VFX for film and TV merges with computer games to drive real-time storytelling. Unreal Engine experienced a 40% rise in downloads in 2021 alone while in-camera visual effects (ICVFX) stages were counted at 250 worldwide at the start of 2022 — up from less than 12 a year earlier.

Convergence also increases latency in production, leading media businesses to look to the edge.

Major media clients like Fox are demanding this. When AWS expanded its Local Zones by 32 new cities in February this year, it did so in close proximity to Fox production hubs enabling the studio “to deliver cloud resources directly to our artists, allowing them to craft their vision without the limitations of traditional remote solutions,” Christian Kennel, VP of Post & Production Technology at FOX Entertainment, explains.

Media tech businesses continue to transition to cloud-based and data-driven workflows, as well as a move to SaaS on the supply-side. For example, with AWS, German broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 “is improving the time to market [for] new applications, and introducing advanced analytics and machine learning.”

Globo’s transition to the cloud included the migration of 100% of its data centers to the cloud and the increasing use of machine learning services. Meanwhile, Disney+ is expanding its use of AWS’s services to include more than 50 technologies, such as machine learning, database, storage, and content delivery.

This requires vendors to adopt or adapt IP-based and virtualized technologies. While some were “born” that way (such as Blackbird, the browser-based edit system), hardware companies at the camera end — the part of the chain arguably least simple to move into software — are shifting that way too. For example, Atomos, maker of monitor-recorders, is evolving its gear into software-enabled products and applications.

“The preference for best-of-breed technology is also driving multi-cloud usage, though lack of integration and standardization between providers is increasing complexity for media businesses,” the report notes. However, it also says, “the old [legacy tech workflows] remains very much the cash cow, with most seeing it as still crucial to future success.”

Publicly-funded broadcasters are at particular risk of being left behind. For example, the BBC has had funding frozen, and its license fee may be scrapped altogether in 2027 — leading to it shedding 1,000 jobs, shutting down two channels, and reducing programming output.

France Télévisions will have its license fee scrapped in favor of VAT funding, making this funding more volatile and dependent on political cycles.

Flat or declining funding is a problem if PBS is to make the move to cloud. Irish pubcaster RTÉ in a February 2022 says in a letter to the Irish government after it is criticized for live streaming issues:

“On-demand and live streaming technology requires extensive investment and infrastructure to deliver parity of service with linear broadcast services, which have been in operation for many decades, with continued investment of significant capital funding to the level of tens of millions… In addition, further evolution of the service needs additional specialist skills which will require increased operating expenditure.”

Vendors are feeling the squeeze — and inflation is real. Tech vendors are highly reluctant to talk about having to raise prices but those with public stocks have no choice.

“The high and global inflation has clearly a negative impact on our BOM (bill of material) costs and on our remuneration costs,” Serge Van Herck, CEO of sports replay server and asset management systems EVS, says in an August 2022 earnings call. “We have started compensating for the impact of those increased costs by applying price increases. We expect that we will need to continue adapting our pricing to the raising inflation.”

In 2021, one of the main risks for the industry was linked to the scarcity and price of electronic components. Compound that risk with inflation and a highly uncertain global geopolitical and economic outlook, there is, as in other industries, huge unclarity within the future.

 

Staying Power: Anthony Richmond BSC ASC

 British Cinematographer

With over 90 credits to his name, Anthony Richmond has cemented his status as one of the industry’s iconic characters on both sides of the Atlantic. The cinematographer recalls his favourite moments from his decades-long career and the characters he met along the way.

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He’s worked with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lean, filmed Bowie as an alien and shot The Beatles’ fabled performance on the Apple Corps rooftop. Anthony Richmond BSC ASC has led an extraordinary life but says he walked on the shoulders of giants. 

“I couldn’t have had the career I’ve had without the help of John Wilcox, Nic Roeg, Freddie Young, David Lean,” he says, “So, giving back to the next generation of cinematographers is my duty and a pleasure.” 

Nearly 80, Richmond passes on his vast film experience to students as chair of the Cinematography Department at the New York Film Academy in Burbank. 

“It’s a very good MFA program but a film school degree is no guarantee of a career – and nor is it necessary if we’re honest. You can become a cinematographer by way of working your way up much like I did, although I’ll admit that is harder these days.”    

Working-class background 

Richmond’s father was a taxi driver with two great loves in life: football and films. “Both were like a religion to him,” Richmond says. “I remember watching Shane (1953) and loved the way it looked. I thought ‘My God I would love to do that’ but I knew no-one in the industry.” 

Leaving school aged 15 he got a job as a messenger boy at Pathé News. “I’d run up and down Wardour Street carrying cans of film. I was offered a chance to become a newsreel cutter. I didn’t want that, but I did get an ACTT [The Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians] union ticket and that helped me get a job as clapper boy at Danziger Studios.” 

Danziger’s production Call Me Bwana (1963), starring Bob Hope and Anita Ekberg, was Richmond’s first screen credit. He performed similar duties as freelance on features including From Russia with Love before a meeting with budding cinematographer Nic Roeg BSC changed his life. 

Judith, starring Sophie Loren and Peter Finch, was “a terrible movie” but Richmond gravitated to the second unit which was being photographed by Roeg in Israel for DP John Wilcox. “They were a lot of fun, so when Nic invited me to join his next movie I jumped at the chance.” 

This was Doctor Zhivago, the Russian Revolution romance from which Roeg was fired by director David Lean after a month. Lean, however, demanded that Richmond stay. 

“He said it would be good for my career,” he says. “I really disliked Lean for firing Nic and Lean soon learned how I felt from someone on the crew but he and Freddie Young BSC (who took over as DP to win the 1965 Oscar) took me under their wing.”  

Zhivago was an epic 50-week shoot in Spain. “We sometimes made just one shot a day, but I learned more from [Lean] than anybody. A wonderful director and a master craftsman.”  

Incredibly, his apprenticeship continued under François Truffaut for whom Roeg was shooting Fahrenheit 451. He focus-pulled on Casino Royale (“doing all the stuff in the casino”) and was 1st AC for Roeg on John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd in summer 1966. 

In October that year, when director Basil Dearden was looking for a DP for his David Hemmings crime comedy, Only When I Larf, Schlesinger recommended Richmond.  

“I was living in Nic’s apartment and get this phone call out of the blue. I told Basil I’d never been a lighting cameraman. He just said, ‘Would you like to have a go?’. And that was it. It’s an inconsequential story but that was my big break to being a DP. I was only 23.”

Sympathy for the Devil 

Perhaps because of his work with Truffaut, when fellow New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard came to town he hired Richmond. One Plus One, a behind-the-scenes look at the Rolling Stones developing ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, is a career highlight.  

“Godard was my hero. He was very left wing, bordering on communist and he hated the producers,” he says. “I liked him.” 

Footage of the Stones recording ‘Beggars Banquet’ at London’s Olympic Studios was mixed with staged acts of political rebellion. “It was very low budget with no script,” Richmond says. “A car would pick me up in the morning and Godard would be there smoking cigarettes and he’d literally write on the packet what we’d do that day.” 

In typical rock ’n’ roll fashion, the filmmakers didn’t know when the Stones would show up to record. “Sometimes they wouldn’t come in until midnight – but we always knew where each of them was going to be because [recording engineer] Glyn Johns has set up the mics. We surrounded the stage with 8×4 plywood sheets so we could track an Elemack dolly. I operated a Mitchell BNC with a dolly grip and focus puller. Jean-Luc would tell the grip to push the dolly around the stage and I would find an image. If I felt the dolly stop, I’d stay there. It was really exciting. It was the first time I think anybody had filmed the process that a group goes through to record a song.” 

Remarkably, Richmond was to follow this with a fly-on-the-wall making of The Beatles’ album ‘Let It Be’ directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1970. Peter Jackson leaned almost exclusively on footage shot by Richmond for his recent documentary Get Back. 

“They are two very different stories,” Richmond says, protective of his friend’s film. “Michael’s was a dark, sombre piece that shows the group breaking up. Get Back was based on 50+ hours of supposedly of unseen material – I’d seen it! They took the original neg and restored it. It has a very digital, very bright look to it.” 

Shooting the group’s epochal performance on the rooftop felt momentous. “We rolled 14-15 cameras including five 16mm on the roof itself. I was operating one looking up at Lennon the whole time. It brought that part of London to a standstill even if the people in the street couldn’t see anything because of the angle of the roof.” 

Walkabout with Roeg 

A year later, Roeg asked Richmond to shoot second unit on his first solo directing project, Walkabout (1972).  “It was all exteriors with no lights or generators. It was an amazing job, not least for the experience of travelling all around Australia from Alice Springs to Darwin and the Northern Territory.” 

Next up was the unsettling puzzle of Don’t Look Now for which Roeg wanted Richmond as DP. “I was amazed, and I had some trepidation about shooting a movie for someone who had been a cinematographer,” he says. 

The only piece of advice Roeg gave was ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark’ which was not only technically astute but spoke to the film’s supernatural narrative. 

“This was another low-budget movie with a very tight schedule. When night shooting, we had no condors, and we couldn’t use big arc lights. We put 10ks up on balconies, but I had to let it go dark. It’s fabulous movie. Not because I shot it, but it still stands up today.” 

Richmond won the BAFTA for best cinematography and ensured the continuation of a “wonderful relationship” with Roeg.  

“He was an older brother and then a great friend. In Venice we shared an apartment and were always talking about film. If you want to know what a director has got in mind, then talk to them about cinema.”    

They made five films together, the most iconic being The Man Who Fell to Earth. “Bowie wasn’t Nic’s first choice. He wanted [author] Michael Crichton who had acted a bit but when he pulled out, Nic talked Bowie into being the alien. He’d just seen a BBC documentary Cracked Actor about Bowie’s drug and alcohol addiction. 

“Part of the brilliance of the film was that Nic hardly directed Bowie. They’d rehearse lines but didn’t give too much direction. Bowie was still doing drugs every now and again. At times you could see he was just about holding it together.”  

Richmond framed Bowie’s androgyny with startling composition in New Mexico landscapes with added lens flare. “In those days everybody tried to get rid of flare, but we had this scene where Bowie comes out of a pawn shop and sits by a river, the sun was so low and we just went with it. It looked ethereal.” 

Coming to America 

His first brush with Hollywood was the The Eagle Has Landed, a 1976 World War II thriller starring Sutherland and Michael Caine directed by John Sturges in what transpired was his last film.  

“He was the epitome of what I imagined an American director to be,” says Richmond of meeting Sturges at Claridge’s. “Tall, hunchback, wearing a big cowboy hat and suede leather jacket with tassels. Drinking whisky out of the bottle. We got on like a house on fire. 

“He told me, ‘While in prep you can take as long as you like but when we’re filming if I like ‘take one’ we’re moving on’. That drove Donald crazy. He’d come off the back of Fellini’s Casanova where they’d do 20-30 takes. He always wanted to do one more, but John wouldn’t have it.” 

Sturges and Richmond re-teamed to adapt another WWII action story. They went to Munich to prep and in the North Sea on an actual U-boat that had been sunk by the British during the war and repatched for service. 

“I’ve never been so scared than being out at sea on that boat shooting plates,” he says. “There was a scene in the script set on another U-boat that Sturges refused to take out which ultimately meant that he departed the project.” [Wolfgang Petersen and Jost Vacano made the film as Das Boot]. 

On location in Greece to shoot The Greek Tycoon (1978) for director J. Lee Thompson about shipping magnet Aristotle Onassis, he formed a friendship with star Anthony Quinn. Later, he also couldn’t pass up the chance to work with Robert Mitchum on the horror film Nightkill (1980), becoming good friends.  

Having moved to LA and married Nightkill actress Jaclyn Smith, Richmond became resumed his friendship with Quinn, Mitchum and the legendary actor “Charlie” Bronson “until the day they passed” and remains pals with Michael Caine, perhaps because they share Richmond’s working-class roots. 

“Caine is the only one who got me a movie. When shooting Eagle, he asked if I wanted to do a movie with him. I said it wasn’t up to me, it’s the director who hires me. He said, ‘Do you want to do it or not?’” 

That encounter led to shooting action caper Silver Bears (1978) on location in Lugano, another of the 90 varied features he has lensed. Other notables include Candyman for Bernard Rose, Stardust for Michael Apte, Rough Riders for John Milius, Indian Runner for Sean Penn, Ravenous for Antonia Bird, Men of Honour for George Tillman Jr, Agnes Browne for Anjelica Huston and the hit comedy Legally Blonde. 

“It’s a wonderful job being a cinematographer and it used to be a lot of fun. Perhaps it’s more corporate now,” Richmond reflects. “Some directors are very involved in composition and others are totally interested in performance. I’m lucky I’ve got on extremely well with every one of them.” 

Some would say luck had nothing to do with it. 

Streaming, Broadcast and Planning the Platform of the Future

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While many broadcasters are attempting to straddle the divide between streaming and linear platforms, Microsoft believes the industry is reaching a crossroads.

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“We’re at a tipping point where [broadcasters] are having to decide between fully committing to streaming or keeping their linear platforms,” Simon Crownshaw, director of worldwide media and entertainment strategy at Microsoft, says to Technology Record’s Alex Smith. “Most organizations are trying to make sure that their streaming platform is where most of their content lives and appear first. There’s no doubt that we are going to be experiencing content beyond just a flat screen.”

While streaming is upending the economics and consumption habits of the traditional TV industry, there are ways that broadcasters can respond.

Crownshaw points to ATSC 3.0, the latest version of the Advanced Television Systems Committee Standards, which is being rolled out in North America.

“ATSC 3.0 will allow live broadcasts to reach up to 4K picture quality in high-dynamic range, at up to 120 frames per second, reaching the picture and sound qualities available from European standards,” Smith explains. “It will also provide broadcasters with more sophisticated metrics on audience data, depending on regulatory limitations, and the possibility of delivering emergency alerts during a crisis.”

Another development Crownshaw highlights is the broader use of 5G and 5G devices (including TVs) where creators and viewers can leverage those networks across the value chain. “We will see more devices with embedded 5G technologies including standard TVs and cameras, without a doubt,” he said.

Furthermore, the life cycle of content has been significantly compressed, limiting the time it can capture the attention of viewers.

“Content is talked about for 24 hours and then it’s already gone, whereas in the past it would have been talked about for weeks or even months. Broadcasters are going to have to take the step of using technology like artificial intelligence to serve content up to users in the most relevant way,” Crownshaw notes.

Crownshaw predicts that “winning is not going to be defined by how much content you can throw out the door, it will be about how you connect the dots between those pieces of content to stay relevant in the daily lives of the people consuming it. Technology that can facilitate that relationship, taking advantage of the cloud’s ability to scale anywhere, is what I see as the future.”

 

The Manchurian App: How TikTok Hypnotized the West and Reshaped the Internet

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We know that TikTok is the world’s most popular social media but the contention is that it has secured an unrivalled grasp on culture with e-commerce, news, politics and even internet search in its sights.

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That it is owned by a Chinese company only adds to the concern in some quarters about what it’s domination truly means.

“There can be no denying that TikTok has become a world-shaping force,” says a Washington Post article that details the extent to which the ByteDance-owned app has taken over the internet.

“In five years, the app, once written off as a silly dance-video fad, has become one of the most prominent, discussed, distrusted, technically sophisticated and geopolitically complicated juggernauts on the internet,” essays Post reporter Drew Harwell.

TikTok’s website was visited last year more often than Google. No app has grown faster past a billion users, and more than 100 million of them are in the US. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day — more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined.

Two-thirds of American teens use the app, and 1 in 6 say they watch it “almost constantly,” a Pew Research Center survey in August found.  It’s the most widely used app among children according to a Qustodio report. And while half of TikTok’s US audience is younger than 25, the app is winning adult convert too. Industry analyst eMarketer expects its over-65 audience will increase this year by nearly 15 percent.

TikTok’s popularity is largely attributed to its ability “to turn entertainment into an endless game.”

“Every swipe could bring something better, but viewers don’t know when they’ll get it, so they keep swiping in anticipation of something they might never find,” says Harwell. “It’s satisfying enough to keep people interested and so unsatisfying they don’t want to stop.”

Investment analysts at Bernstein Research wrote in an August report. TikTok has replaced “the friction of deciding what to watch,” the researchers said, with a “sensory rush of bite-sized videos … delivering endorphin hit after hit.”

And unlike YouTube and Instagram, where creators are forced to compete with established influencers’ polished productions, even the simplest, silliest or most spontaneous TikToks can become massive hits.

“We’re talking about a platform that’s shaping how a whole generation is learning to perceive the world,” Abbie Richards, a researcher who studies disinformation on TikTok, tells the Post.

That’s a problem if you worry about the real use its Beijing-based tech parent is collecting. As the article explains, the algorithm TikTok employs, gradually builds profiles of users’ tastes not from what they choose but how they behave.

Says Harwell, “While Facebook and other social networks rely on their users to define themselves by typing in their interests or following famous people, TikTok watches and learns, tapping into trends and desires their users might not identify.”

The charge levelled at TikTok bosses is that they work in a country “skilled at using the web to spread propaganda, to surveil the public, gain influence and squash dissent.” That crisis of trust has led to an ongoing debate among US regulators: whether to more closely monitor the app or ban it outright.

The Post reports many users already are self-censoring, adopting a second language of code words — “unalive,” not dead; “procedure,” not abortion — in hopes of dodging the app’s censors and preserving their chances at online fame.

Drew Maxey, a high school literature teacher in St. Louis, tells the paper he worries about how students’ desire for viral attention have already shaped how some of them talk and behave. He’s even started changing his wording, too; on some book videos posted to the site, he won’t even say the word “death,” anxious it might stunt his reach.

“Everything they need, they get from TikTok,” Maxey said. “Yet we’re training a whole generation of people not to say what they actually mean.”

Such concerns are amplified when you consider that TikTokers are increasingly using the app as a visual search tool; 40 percent of Generation Z respondents to a Google survey this year said they had opened TikTok or Instagram, not Google, when searching for nearby lunch spots. (One tweet in June, “I don’t Google anymore I TikTok,” has been ‘liked’ 120,000 times.)

And as Americans’ trust in news organizations has fallen, TikTok’s role as a news source has climbed. One in three TikTok viewers in the United States said they regularly use it to learn about current events, Pew Research Center said last month. In the UK, it’s the fastest-growing news source for adults. The Post’s own TikTok account has more than a million followers.)

After cornering the market on entertainment, TikTok has begun offering its model of behavioral tracking and algorithmic suggestion to advertisers, “promising them a way to know which ads people find most compelling without having to ask,” says Harwell.

Result: The company’s ad revenue tripled in 2022, to $12 billion, according to eMarketer, and is expected to eclipse YouTube at nearly $25 bn by 2025. In the US, the cost to advertisers for TikTok’s premium real estate — the first commercial break a viewer sees in their feed, known as a “TopView” — has jumped to $3 million a day.

Influencers paid to promote goods in their videos now make more ad money on TikTok than Facebook: roughly $750 million, US estimates from Insider Intelligence show.

While TikTok has grown, Facebook has reported losing users for the first time in its 18-year history. In response, Meta has reshaped its own algorithms in its rival’s image not only in developing short-video copycats — Meta’s Reels (also see YouTube’s Shorts) and in “swapping out networks of friends and families for feeds of strangers chasing viral glory,” says Harwell.

“You don’t tell TikTok what you want to see. It tells you. And the internet can’t get enough.”

And all this may only be scratching the surface of TikTok’s potential. According to the Post, it has tested features for interactive minigames and job résumés. It started selling concert tickets. It built a live-streaming business used for meal-cooking showcases, lottery scratch-offs, tarot readings and apartment tours. And it tested a shopping feature that would let viewers buy products from QVC-style live streams in a few quick taps.

All of this power in the hands of a foreign power is spooking US politicians. Top branches of the government and military have banned it from government-issued phones.

“Members of Congress insist it could be a Trojan horse for a secret Chinese propaganda and surveillance machine. Even as the app has transformed into a public square for news and conversation, TikTok’s opaque systems of promotion and suppression fuel worries that China’s aggressive model of internet control could warp what appears there.”

A forthcoming editorial will discuss this supposed Manchurian Candidate, trailed under the banner ‘As Washington wavers, Beijing exerts control.’

Streaming Success Means Personalization at Scale

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The evolution of streaming has come full circle, from being complementary to traditional TV to providing a superior viewing experience than broadcast. And as viewer preferences continue to change and shape the industry, providers will need to offer services that those viewers demand.

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To be successful, technology vendor Edgio’s Kim Ferar believes streamers need to deliver consumers a fault-tolerant and always-available service.

“An outage or failure of a critical feature from ad insertion to the CDN can be catastrophic to a content owner’s business on any given day, which is even more amplified when streaming a significant live event,” Ferar says. “As streaming audiences grow and evolve, streaming providers must work with a technology partner that can also scale their streaming operations without degrading the viewing experience with buffering or ad slate.”

Ferar has identified four “essential components” to ensure a streaming business can scale. These are: dynamic personalization, rich API integrations, FAST channels, and support.

On the first, she says personalization is crucial as no two viewers are the same. “Even though they may be tuning into the same content, they’re likely in different locations, using different devices, experiencing different network conditions, as well as having different interests, viewing behaviors, and more.”

Streaming experts gathered for a round table discussion hosted by The Wrap said they expect the looming recession will push consumers into FAST, “long stereotyped as a haven for a financially struggling Gen Z audience.” As premium services pivot to include ad-supported tiers to offset subscriber churn and slower-than-predicted growth, FAST services like Pluto, Tubi and Amazon’s Freevee are well-positioned to begin including premium content into the mix. Watch the entire conversation in the video below:

The ability to dynamically change or customize for each viewer opens numerous opportunities to tailor the experience — including personalized content and ads, time shifting, blackout rules, content replacement, and content protection, as well as optimizing the viewer experience with refinement tools and comprehensive data for monitoring and troubleshooting.

FAST channels have soared in popularity because viewers don’t want to be locked into cable TV-like contracts and don’t want to take out a raft of monthly subscriptions either. Ferar advises streamers to look for a tech provider that has capabilities for a highly efficient, automated way of creating and distributing FAST channels. This includes the ability to schedule live and VOD content with ad insertion and to be able to extend your audience reach to multiple endpoints, including Facebook and Twitch or vMVPD and OTT platforms.

A typical streaming workflow consists of multiple vendors — piecing all the parts together, ensuring they work in unison. Maintenance and troubleshooting are critical for success. APIs are the key here and to automating workflows, allowing businesses to integrate with vendors and partners across their streaming ecosystem and scale operations.

The pressure rises when supporting live events, since this adds a new layer of complexity to streaming. Audiences scale up quickly, often to millions of concurrent viewers watching across multiple devices and geographies. Ferar urges prospective clients to select a partner that offers managed services like onboarding, preparation, acquisition, and live event and post-event services, as well as one that can develop custom solutions.

 

“Armageddon Time:” Studying James Gray’s Anatomy

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To really appreciate the new film Armageddon Time, it helps to understand the director James Gray and his back story.

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On the surface a coming-of-age film, not far removed from last year’s sleep hit Licorice Pizza in its nostalgia for the 70s and 80s, Gray’s Armageddon Time is a memory play depicting a mournful chapter from the writer-director’s youth.

The filmmaker talked about his most personal project yet starring Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway and Anthony Hopkins and the pain of losing final cut on Ad Astra to multiple outlets.

“The truth of the matter is, you always have to do some condensing,” Gray told MovieMaker’s Tim Molloy about writing the film. “But it’s not far off at all. I tried to stay as personal as I could with the material. I tried to get the details right… to get the plates that we ate off of, and we did; the hat that my grandfather wore, and we did; the chandelier that we had in the dining room, the wallpaper, the kitchen appliances. And those are just the surface elements, of course. 

He added, “It’s not autobiographical, really, Autobiographical means [the characters would] have my parents’ names, and would wear exactly what they wore. It’s a little bit of a fantasia of my youth. So it’s personal, but not really autobiographical in that way.”

Born in 1969 and raised in Queens to a family of Holocaust survivors (his grandfather changed the family surname from Greiszerstein when he arrived in the U.S.), Gray shot exteriors just a few blocks away from this childhood locale.

According to Gray via IndieWire, his childhood house looks more less the same as it did 42 years ago, “but the gate that his father built to box in the garbage cans is the only physical evidence that remains of his family.”

Gray says, “When I was growing up in that neighborhood, it was very much an Archie Bunker kind of place. It was a white working-class WASP population, with those nauseating slave statues on a couple of the lawns. Today you go back there and it’s almost exclusively Asian and Orthodox Jewish people, and so in some ways there was a kind of archaeological quality to what I was doing.”

Indeed, IndieWire thinks the film is “perhaps the most lucid and damning film ever made about the specifically Jewish experience of assimilating into the same conditional whiteness that a previous generation had to escape.”

That’s because, religion aside, the other theme of the film is race and the adult run irrational power dynamics that youngsters like Gray seemingly had to navigate. The narrative drive of the film is a friendship between eleven year olds Paul (Michael Banks Repeta) – a cypher for Gray - and Johnny (Jaylin Webb) who is Black. Together they steal an Apple computer from their school. Paul gets away scot-free, while Johnny remains incarcerated. It’s based on a true incident that still plays on Gray’s mind. Did it really play out like that?

“That was our ultimate plan,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I stole Star Trek blueprints from Bloomingdale’s, and we got caught. Very expensive blueprints from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And it was like $50, which in 1979, 1980 was a fortune.

And then he ended up in jail?

It ended up with us in this room at Bloomingdale’s with their security people and, basically, he stayed behind. My father got me out of there. I never did see him again. [Revisiting that moment] was a way to use the past to reflect upon the problems of the present. And on a plain, personal level, the loss of that friendship was painful for me.”

With the exception of Paul’s doting and wily grandfather (played by Antony Hopkins) the adults don’t come off well in this film.

“Armageddon Time holds Gray’s striving parents accountable for their compromises, but it also loves them for their tenderness, says IndieWire. “Of course I wanted to memorialize them,” Gray says of these characters (his father died of COVID earlier this year). “I wanted to say that despite all their flaws — and they had many — there was beauty in them to me.”

Most of the people who are portrayed in the film are no longer alive to see it, “which adds to the feeling that Gray made the movie to exorcize many of the ghosts that have haunted his entire body of work,” Gray said.

One person who doesn’t appear but looms over the picture is Donald Trump. In one of those quirks of fate, Trump’s father Donald did feature in the young Gray’s life albeit tangentially and he is portrayed in the film, rejecting handouts to the poor while giving them to his own children.

This is a considered a return to form for the auteur after Ad Astra which I for one feel was unjustly maligned. That it didn’t quite achieve the ethereal quality of classic sci-fi is perhaps down to Gray’s ceding control over final cut in return for landing a larger budget. That’s certainly the way he sees it and he is adamant once bitten twice shy.

“When you don’t have final cut, and when the ideas of others are more important than yours, and you’re the writer-director, then the waters get very muddied,” he opined to MovieMaker, “and the work is necessarily compromised. Some of that comes down to budget — what the perceived risk is. But I made that choice to give up final cut on Ad Astra, which was a terrible mistake. And so I vowed that, if a film has my name on it, particularly as the writer director, I can’t have that happen again.

 By contrast with a far smaller budget and with just three weeks planned for theatrical release before heading to streaming, Gray says he didn’t compromise a single composition for the small screen.

“The truth is something like 45% of Americans now have home theaters — some outrageously high number,” he told MovieMaker. “So very few people are going to see it in the wrong aspect ratio now. It’s not like 1986 where everyone watched it 1:33. Very few people are going to see it on a very small screen. There are people who are going to watch it on the iPhone, but no amount of compositional help can accommodate for watching your movie on an iPhone. The screen is too small. The biggest closeup in the world is not going to help you out.”

Incidentally, the new film’s title comes from the Clash song ‘Armagideon Time.’ “I was hugely into the Clash by 1981, so it seemed to fit,” he told THR. “Then I remembered Ronald Reagan always talking about Armageddon. He was always mentioning the world ending. It was cultural trauma. That weighed on kids in 1980. In the Reagan interview clip you see in the movie, he’s actually talking about Armageddon as a result of homosexuality, which is crazy. He’s talking about Sodom and Gomorrah.”