AI-Generated Video Is Happening. So What Does That Mean?

NAB

article here 

In the past year algorithms became a lot better at generating illustrations, art and photoreal scenes. The pace of development is unrelenting, meaning that this year we should expect AI-generated video tools. The implications of this are as exciting as they are challenging to the creative community.

A tour through the recent history of AI and its ability to churn out convincing and commercially viable illustrations, photographs, and paintings has been sketched by Wired.

Will Knight, the magazine’s senior writer, primes us to expect higher quality AI-made images and perhaps the emergence of AI video generators in 2023.

Researchers have already demonstrated prototypes, although their output is so far relatively simple. Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Google, Meta and Nvidia are all working on the technology.

“AI elicits a special kind of anxiety for the film and TV industry’s creative classes,” Joshua Glick, Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College, writes in another article for Wired.

“The question is whether feature-length films made by text-to-video generators will eliminate the skilled labor of screenwriters, graphic artists, editors, and directors.”

Glick is doubtful that Hollywood studios will launch a major lineup of AI-generated features any time soon. More importantly, he doesn’t think audiences are ready for AI-generated feature narratives either.

“Even as text-to-video software continues to improve at an extraordinary rate, it will never replace the social elements crucial to the product Hollywood makes and the culture that surrounds both gaudy blockbusters and gritty dramas alike,” Glick thinks.

He believes the human influence on the creation of film and TV shows is what makes storytelling on screen tick and something that AI can’t (yet) emulate.

Of more pressing concern, he notes, is that studios will use algorithm-driven predictive analytics to greenlight only those projects they believe are sure to make money, leading to less diversity of form, story, and talent.

AI has already made its way into the creation of filmed stories. This is most notably the case in VFX. The Wētā FX software Massive, for example, has helped effects artists capture the seemingly “unfilmable,” especially on the macroscale.

Beginning with the creation of digital hordes of orcs and humans for the realistic combat in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’ (2002) Battle of Helm’s Deep, Massive has since been responsible for expansive collections of lifelike entities, from the shiver of sharks in The Meg (2018) to the swarms of flying demons in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021).

There are further examples of AI use ranging from the “synthetic resurrection” of iconic actors to performance capture assisted CGI characters. AI tools are so useful that “synthetic imagery is sure to become central to preproduction,” Glick believes. For instance, “screenwriters will be able to use AI-generated imagery for their pitch decks to evocatively establish the mood and feel of a project and position it within a larger genre.”

Likewise, concept artists will benefit from the back-and-forth tweaking of prompts and visual outputs as they flesh out a film’s narrative arc in the early stages of storyboarding. Generative AI might also expand the “previs” process of transforming flat images of material environments and character interaction into 3D approximations of scenes.

Extending this further, the use of AI in film and TV production might require a new set of skills able to guide AIs to desired results. Glick envisions a broader reframing of authorship as VFX supervisors, computer scientists, concept artists, engineers, and animators “become increasingly responsible for the movements and expressions of the characters on screen, as well as the look and feel of the world they inhabit.”

Far from ushering in the death of cinema, AI can help film the “unfilmable” and make cinema more collaborative:

“Never before has an amateur or seasoned professional been able to build such an elaborate project on such a small budget in such a short amount of time.”

This theme is taken up by Rex Woodbury, who writes about all the ways AI is set to disrupt industries in his article on Substack.

“Generative AI is the most compelling technology since the rise of mobile and cloud over a decade ago,” he declares. “We’re at an AI inflection point… underpinning a Cambrian explosion in innovation.”

He draws a direct line between tools like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut for editing, smartphones and GoPro cameras for action shots, drones for aerial shots, and YouTube and TikTok for publishing and monetizing video to AI as the next innovation that will democratize the creative industries.

“Just as AI amplifies creativity, AI amplifies productivity,” he says. “We see this in the tools that give writers and marketers superpowers, like Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, and Lex, [to help brainstorm ideas].”

He predicts that generative AI will soon collide with other maturing technologies, such as VR and AR and imagines text prompts that generate immersive, three-dimensional virtual worlds.

“Within the lifetime of someone born today, we’ll see every part of human life, work, and society reinvented by AI,” he theorizes.

It’s also likely that AI will help evolve an “internet of me” — of which TikTok represents the starting rung… customized content created just for me and you.

“The world is shifting to personalization, and AI is the fuel on the fire. All of a sudden, a ‘1-on-1’ experience is replicable at scale — and today’s AI applications are still rudimentary compared to those we’ll see in the coming years. Think of every Craigslist category — education, books, home decor. Each one is ripe for reinvention.”

None of these writers dismisses the very real ethical and legal issues surrounding AI’s pervasion of society. But it’s more a matter of figuring out how to live with AI, than banning it outright. That genie has long left the bottle.

“Leaps forward in technology often walk a fine line between deeply-impactful and dystopian,” Woodbury says. He lists the major ethical issues we need to work out, among them:

§  Who is responsible for AI’s mistakes?

§  Who is the creator of an AI work? Is it the AI? The developers? The person who wrote the prompt? The people whose work was used to train the model?

§  How do we determine what’s human-made vs. machine-made? Where does the line that separates the two even exist?

§  How do we get rid of AI bias?

§  How do startups differentiate themselves and build a moat?

§  Where will value accrue in the ecosystem, and how should value creation be distributed?

§  Will AI be a net job creator or a net job destroyer? How do we retrain workers who are displaced by AI?

That’s a massive list. Perhaps we need an AI for that.

“Poker Face:” The Sunday Mystery Movie But It’s Streaming

NAB

To make new television, it helps if you’ve watched a lot of old television. That’s a lesson evident in Poker Face, the crime-thriller series created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne, which makes its debut Jan. 26 on Peacock.

article here 

Lyonne, (creator, star of Russian Doll), is Charlie Cale, a woman employed by a casino with a preternatural ability to tell when people are lying.  

As Johnson, the writer and director of Knives Out and Glass Onion,  explained to Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times, the self-contained installments of Poker Face are a deliberate throwback to a style of TV storytelling that Johnson grew up with in the 1970s and ’80s.

“That’s when I had control of the television,” Johnson said. “And it was typically hourlong, star-driven, case-of-the-week shows.”

They weren’t only detective programs like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, he said, but also adventure series like Quantum Leap, The A Team, Highway to Heaven and The Incredible Hulk, which were notable for “the anchoring presence of a charismatic lead and a different set of guest stars and, in many cases, a totally different location, every single week.”

Those ever-changing elements kept things fresh and surprising, he said.

Poker Face is not a whodunit but an “open mystery” because the audience start out each episode by seeing who did it, how, and why, before Charlie begins to investigate. Johnson himself calls this The mystery subgenre a “howcatchem” where it's very much about the detective versus the guest star of the episode, as Johnson also confirms to Collider: "These are not whodunits, these are howcatchems. Show the killing, and about Natasha [Lyonne] vs. the guest star."

As Collider then points out, the benefit of these types of shows is that a viewer can jump in at any time, without wondering or worrying if they need to see the previous episodes to understand the story or the plot.

Of course, Columbo is the key reference point and acknowledged part of Daniel Craig’s character Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out mysteries. He told Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall that he binged the entire series during lockdown.

“My big revelation from bingeing it is, I wasn’t coming back for the mysteries. Although the mysteries are fun, I was coming back to hang out with Peter Falk. And in that way, I feel like those shows have as much in common with sitcoms as they do anything else.”

He added, “It’s not really about the story or the content. It’s about just hanging out with somebody that you like, and the comforting rhythms of a repeated pattern over and over with a character that you really liked being with. That’s kind of what I saw when I watched Natasha in Russian Doll, that made me think this could be interesting.”

Lyonne also said that she loved characters such as Columbo, Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue.

Speaking at NBCUniversal’s TCA press tour, Lyonne said that Charlie is “floating above a situation trying to crack a riddle, but also an everyman who has their nose to the grindstone and figuring out the sounds of the street”.

Once Johnson had decided to make her a human bullsh*t detector, rather than a detective or a mystery writer, he realised he had a problem but this became the key to unlocking how the show might unfold.

“How was the show just not over within the first five minutes, if she can tell when people are lying?” he told Rolling Stone. “I had her give a speech in the pilot about how it’s less useful than you think because everyone’s always lying. It’s about looking for the subtlety of why is somebody lying about a specific thing. And we found really fun ways to play that at different episodes going forward.”

Although Johnson is red hot and you’d think people would be biting his hand to work with him, he says pitching a more old fashioned TV format got push back. 

“I was unprepared for the blank stares. And then the follow-up questions of, “Yes, but what’s the arc over the season?” I think there is right now this odd assumption that that’s what keeps people watching, just because there’s been so much of that in the streaming world that I think people equate the cliffhanger at the end of an episode with what gets people to click ‘Next.’ But TV before incredibly recently, was entirely in this episode mode. So I know it can work because I grew up tuning in every day for it.”

One reason it’s harder to do episodic case-of-the-week stories is the expense and the production challenge. For example, you keep have to bringing in new guests and visiting new locations.

“Holy crap, it was a headache,” Johnson admits to Rolling Stone. “I don’t think we even realized what we’re up against. No standing sets. No recurring characters besides Natasha and occasionally Benjamin Bratt. But we’re very purposefully going for the Columbo approach of big fish guest stars. So every single one of these episodes, we try and get somebody very exciting to play either the killer or the victim. And it was a lot.”

Indeed, the cast list across the season includes Adrien Brody, Ellen Barkin, Nick Nolte, Stephanie Hsu, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ron Perlman, Chloë Sevigny, Lil Rel Howery, Clea Duvall, Tim Blake Nelson, and many more.

Asked at a question and answer panel at the Winter Television Critics Association Presentation, whether he writes specifically to those guest stars he replied: "In the room, sometimes we'd have a placeholder actor, and it would end up being them, or surprisingly someone else. A benefit of this subgenre is that it is the guest star's episode, and you see them go head-to-head with Natasha."

Johnson continued to sing the praises of television in front of the ballroom full of television reports and critics — saying he preferred the “pace” of this newfound process vs. film. Each hour-long Poker Face episode took about three weeks (one for prep, two for shooting) to complete. Compare that with making one film over the course of “several years,” as he put it.

“I loved that in each episode we’re in a different environment, it’s a whole new cast— it’s like making 10 mini movies,” Johnson said. “I literally dove into it like it was one of my movies. I really jumped completely into the deep end of the pool.”

Johnson has previously directed for TV, notably on two episodes for Breaking Bad including the show finale ‘Ozymandias’. Episode two of Poker Face which he directed, was shot in Albuquerque, telling Rolling Stone:

“I haven’t been back there since we shot ‘Ozymandias.’ It was so much fun being back in town. A lot of the same Breaking Bad crew were on our crew, and it felt like a little homecoming.”

 

 

 

 

 

Behind the Scenes: The Woman King - Battle hardened?

 IBC

 “Who doesn’t love an historical epic?” says Polly Morgan, BSC, ASC. “Especially one wrapped up in so much action and drama and heart and in an environment we know so little about.”

article here

Who doesn’t love an historical epic indeed. Modern classics Gladiator and Braveheart laid the template for action drama where the audience roots for the heroic underdog against an imperial oppressor.

The Woman King does this and a whole lot more. It’s a slice of our past that until recently would have been confined to the history books and, if retold by Hollywood at all, handed to the only gender it believed could handle action spectacle.

Instead, Sony Pictures’ historical epic about female warriors living and warring in the west African kingdom of Dahomey in the early 19th century is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (The Old Guard) and filmed with her handpicked team of mostly female heads of departments.

Morgan was in Louisiana shooting the Netflix drama Where the Crawdads Sing when Prince-Bythewood invited her to join the team. She put together a pitch deck of colour, light and camera references drawing on the Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish painters for inspiration.  She used travel photography out of Africa to help convey atmospheric elements like smoke, flame and water and discussed the options with her director.

“Shooting on Arri Alexa 65 we wanted to light the movie with firelight and ambient daylight, to draw people into the environment in a way that Braveheart and Gladiator did,” she says. “It had to be visceral and textural with a painterly quality, not sharp, glossy and digital. For me, looking at those masters of art evoked the kind of filmic feeling we were after.”

On location in South Africa

They shot principally in and around Cape Town, supplemented by scenes in KwaZulu-Natal in the north of South Africa. This region is dry, especially in the summer, at odds with the tropical and lush climate of Western Africa. With production designer Akin McKenzie Morgan worked hard to ensure that both locales would be a fine substitute for Benin (formerly Dahomey).

“In Cape Town this meant masking everything that said ‘South African’, making sure each frame leant into the fact that it wasn’t dry or too dusty, that we gave it a tropical feel. Shooting exteriors are always a challenge in trying to match colours and control the light in a changing environment.”

The remarkable vistas of KwaZulu-Natal helped contextualise the movie but put the production in a remote location that required taking all crew, generators and equipment. The film’s opening night-time battle is shot here and showcases the athleticism of the actors who had intensively trained to perform many of the stunts themselves.

“We conceived this action sequence in longer takes to be able to move from one performer to another, so the camera had to move 360 degrees,” Morgan explains. “As the camera does this dance with the action I had to do the same with lighting by dimming lights up and down with the movement so that nothing became flat or over lit. I had to make sure I had enough depth in the negative so I could see everything I needed to see in front of camera. It took a lot of rehearsal to get right.”

Another challenge was to light the many night scenes for a period when there were no electric light sources.  “I wanted to make sure I really exposed the faces of our Black actors well. I don’t want to over light or flat light them or take away the mood. I wanted to lean into the contrast, between the daylight and the fire or the moonlight and fire, and to do it in a way that retains darkness and shape.”

Lighting for skin tonalities

With a majority Black cast, Morgan was conscious of making sure every actor was given due attention to the way they were lit. “Historically some [filmmakers] haven’t done the best job in lighting properly for dark skin,” she says. “In our movie you have super rich dark skin such as Sheila Atim ranging to lighter dark skin like Thuso Mbedu’s. For me it was about figuring out how to capture these tonalities in a way that would highlight the beauty of Black skin.”

She was intrigued to discover ongoing research on the issue being made by Cape Town based company Digital Melanin. From them she learned that photography has been technologically biased toward Caucasian skins.

“From a light meter to a camera sensor every exposure tool is based on 18% middle grey,” she explains. This harks back to a decades’ old photographic tool used by American masters like Ansel Adams for exposing landscape prints. “Eighteen per cent grey is matched with lighter skin tones so when you are exposing everything is related to Caucasian skin. The aim of Digital Melanin is to help cinematographers everywhere to light dark skin with accurate tonality. It’s not one size fits all.”

Ideally, this approach encompasses a production-wide embrace of wanting to see people correctly on screen. Make-up artists, for example, have a role to play in learning about the best application for different skin tones. Other notable cinematographers like Tommy Maddox-Upshaw, ASC are making vocal and visual statements about this approach to tonality.

“It is important for everybody to have this conversation and not be shy of shooting Black skin or nervous about broaching this topic,” Morgan urges. “Filmmaking is blossoming in its diversity and that adds to the richness of the stories we are telling.”

Diversity and richness

The Woman King also makes a powerful statement about the role of women behind the camera.  For Morgan, who began her career over twenty years ago, it’s a sign of significant change but also of progress yet to come.

“When I started out, I desperately wanted to be a DOP and there were very few women I could see who represented that career choice and showed me that that could happen,” she says. “Not only that, but the few women I did see also didn’t have kids. They didn’t have that balance of work and family life. It was such a male dominated industry. Sometimes I forget how far we’ve come, and also how much farther we’ve got to go.”

Morgan, who was born and grew up in the UK and studied film at AFI in Los Angeles worked her way up from a PA and camera assistant to lensing major shows like Lucy in the Sky and A Quiet Place Part II. For most of her career she has been the only woman on a set. Even now, when she starts a new movie the lead actor – male or female – will often confide in her ‘You’re the first female DP I’ve ever worked with.’

“I know every single female cinematographer working and I am contacted frequently by a new wave of female cinematographers, so at times I think there’s a lot of us doing it, but actually the numbers are still small,” Morgan says. “To do a movie like this where young woman can see women on screen being celebrated and empowered is important. We depict physically powerful women that are not only action figures but who are also dealing with themes that women deal with in their lives – pregnancy, sisterhood, mothers and daughters, rape and abortion, the sale of human life.

“We’ve had a lot of feedback from young Black women saying that The Woman King is inspiring to them because they’ve never been seen in this way before. It’s very powerful to have made this movie which I hope will inspire many more women to move forward in their careers and in their lives.”

There’s work to be done. Morgan reports that camera departments now are generally more gender balanced, although electricians and grips tend to be male preserves. “The tide is slowly changing,” she says. “Some women are getting into gaffing and gripping, which is exciting. Women are seeing that there are career choices here for everybody.”

Strength in depth - Systems Integrators

InBroadcast  p46 Jan / Feb issue

article here 

Moving to cloud, the evolution of signal networking standards and the broadcast quality demanded in the enterprise are keeping systems integrators in high demand. 

Philipp Glänzel, General Manager & CTO, Qvest (Dubai) 

 

We saw high demand in 2022 for customers requesting cloud solutions and believe that this trend will continue in force in 2023. With this demand also come challenges for both customers and system integrators, since many cloud offerings are SaaS based and follow a subscription model. This has implications for integrations with foreign infrastructures that have different security policies, as well as the need to change integration interfaces in an agile and fast-moving environment. At the same time, new offerings and services will become available frequently and subscriptions can be cancelled easily. 

Integrating with changing environments in a flexible, secure, and cost-effective way will become an essential requirement for our customers in the near future. A strong technology stack will be the key differentiator. Crucial factors will be supporting these requirements with the capability of establishing reliable hybrid integrations in both on-prem and multi-cloud environments within successfully established tech ecosystems. We are sure that those environments will have the ability to flexibly adapt – compared to others that remain monolithic and slow to adapt to new operational requirements. 

Qvest has heavily invested in the past years to increase and empower its experienced team of experts. We are proficient in consulting, designing, implementing, and maintaining modern technology stacks for customers. Thanks to this experience and expertise, the Qvest team has delivered several projects of different scale around the globe. In combination with qibb, the integration platform for professional media workflows and automations, we believe we are a strong partner and enabler for customers to master the challenges ahead. 

 

 

Fintan Mc Kiernan, CEO – South East Asia, Ideal Systems 

A quick disclaimer: I’m not paid, sponsored or in any way supported by VizRT.  But I am going to talk about NDI. Many people see NDI as a proprietary standard owned by VizRT. It is, but that shouldn’t stop anybody using it.  

There has been a lot written about the move from traditional SDI to IP using the SMPTE 2110 standard and much less written about the move to IP using the NDI standard. Part of the reason is the concentration of broadcast equipment manufacturers in in the US, Canada and Europe. Obviously, they focus on their local markets first, before APAC. This is where themes, trends and challenges from the broadcast equipment business point of view diverge. 

Take the live sports production market. In Europe, you have the massively funded soccer leagues in the UK, Germany and Italy, and in the US you have America Football, Basketball and Ice Hockey all leagues with huge cash inflows, and fan followings. This has a trickledown effect into TV sports productions and ultimately their equipment budgets for OB trucks, stadium cameras and live sport production systems.  

These rich well-funded sports markets are well catered for by broadcast kit manufacturers. However, where the wheels come off is in APAC. Specifically, I refer to the South East Asian market, where sports franchises are typically dramatically under funded with smaller fan bases and lower revenue streams and yet still desire to produce high quality live sports content.   

This is where new broadcast technology can help a lot. Simply by moving from either SDI or SMPTE 2010-based sports production systems to NDI and SRT the cost savings awe have experienced are in excess of fifty percent. In some cases the savings are significantly more.  

This is great news for Asian sports franchises. Leveraging these new technologies, they can achieve high quality live sports production at a fraction of the cost of what is currently being paid in Europe and America. There are still technical barriers, for example, there are no camera manufacturers making native NDI ENG or studio cameras, but using NDI converters is a good enough workaround for now, especially as the quality of production grade native NDI PTZ cameras has emerged as a great force for live sports and events.  

In 2023 the continued acceleration of new technologies such as NDI and SRT across APAC will help broadcasters do more for less, which is an ideal message from a systems integrator! 

 

Mike Bryan, Technology Director, dB Broadcast 

  

One of the main themes we see in 2023 is the continuing evolution of IP standards, how both clients and vendors evaluate and interpret these to fit their own purposes, and the inevitable challenges this brings.  

While the industry has come a long way over the last five years, the complexity of the standards that have developed and how they fit clients’ organisational and workflow aspirations/capabilities are still not fully-aligned. The resource availability gap (gulf?) that’s being created by the lack of people joining our industry, plus competition with the wider IT sector, is an ongoing area of concern that collectively needs to be addressed to ensure we all have the best opportunities to deliver and support the technology infrastructures needed.  

The overall cost of ownership, in particular ongoing running costs, is now at the forefront of business cases, coupled with growing awareness and expectations around sustainability. Designing and implementing good technology solutions that are sustainable and cost-effective to run is becoming ever more critical. 

At dB Broadcast we continue the evolution of our design and implementation tools to be more efficient and consistent with the configuration of IP systems, thus enabling our workforce and ultimately our clients to achieve more with the resources available. But also to provide detailed analysis of power, heat and ongoing revenue elements and making this intrinsically part of the design process to ensure clients receive the best overall cost of ownership for the systems we are delivering.  

Supply chains remain in a state of flux and whilst many vendors are predicting that through 2023 things will improve, we are not out of the woods yet. Unfortunately, we suspect there are still likely to be casualties of the global supply issues we are facing, so being mindful of the overall health of vendors and hardware delivery times is critical to the timely completion of projects. 

 

Rob Adams, Worldwide Sales Director, TSL 

  

We will see an ongoing focus on sustainability, for example with auditing and management needed to save power consumption. This can result in increased uptime, decreased costs and improved capital investment cycles. Productivity concerns will remain. This might be partly addressed by the implementation of centralised resources that enable remote production and/or home working by a distributed workforce. 

  

We expect to see an increasing demand for bridging technologies that enable hybrid workflows to interface new IP solutions to augment existing baseband infrastructure. Linked to that is the accelerating trend of audiences migrating to consume content that is streamed to all demographics. Increasingly that content will be provided and monetised by the content creators and decreasingly so by broadcasters and rights holders. 

  

Finally, as has been the case in the past two recessions it’s likely advertising spend will decrease. As this recession bites the market will seek out more affordable solutions. This will be at odds to supply chain pressures that will continue to bring uncertainy to product availabilty and purchase price volatility. Those things will drive vendors to focus their technology innovation. At the same time, some broadcasters will simply opt to maintain existing assets. 

   

TSL‘s user interfaces across audio, control and power centre around a highly intuitive user experience (UX) and allow configuration and control from remote positions. We have also already successfully deployed many of our control solutions in the cloud. 

  

Our new, award-winning control solution X-Connect interfaces existing SDI infrastructure with ST-2110/2022 IP workflows. Our affordable and proven control solutions enable dynamic content insertion typically via SCTE for both traditional broadcast and streamed content and 2023 also sees the  lauch of our new intelligent networked power distribution unit and our new MPA1-MIX-NET-V-1 AoIP audio monitor which comes complete with a comprehensive webpage and SNMP support, allowing remote configuration and control. 

  

 

John Roche, Managing Director, Creative Technology (Ireland) 

We are in the middle of an exciting period of broadcast innovation which is developing from within the corporate market. To meet their evolving needs, corporations are creating a whole new world of broadcast infrastructure, which sees the convergence of traditional broadcast technologies and IT. Companies like LinkedIn, Accenture, Ernst & Young, PWC and Microsoft are dedicating a lot of resources to creating the infrastructure and utilising centralised production to send content to their facilities around the world. In many ways, corporations are rewriting the broadcast rulebook: traditional broadcast racks are sitting side-by-side with IT racks, and signal flows and cable runs are being re-defined. 

The standard for high-end broadcast content in the corporate market is astounding.  With this evolution, the required skillset is also changing. Professional grade equipment is being used, and there’s more involvement than ever from IT departments. To support these needs, broadcast engineers from Creative Technology’s Systems Integration division are training corporate IT and AV engineers, accelerating this process. We’re finding the skillsets we have within NEP Group, which includes CT’s Systems Integration division and NEP’s Integrated Solutions, are more valuable than ever.  

Economically, it makes a lot of sense for corporations to have the resources and expertise to produce their own broadcast quality content. This not only has potential cost savings on external studio fees, but allows for more flexibility in scheduling and the convenience of being able to make last minute changes. 

Backed by NEP Group’s global resources, CT’s Systems Integration division is in an advantageous position to support these new world corporate broadcast needs. One example of this is the ability to utilise NEP’s global buying power, which can help mitigate many of the supply chain issues seen today. Combining global resources with industry-leading engineering experience and expertise delivers the solutions to make it happen for our clients, anywhere, anytime and in any way they need to work.  

 

Christoffer Kay, COO, Dan Technologies  

A lot of operational and technical innovation took place across the media market during the coronavirus lockdown. We are seeing a strong resurgence of investment in every category from broadcast right through to the educational, corporate, live-events and multimedia sectors. Customers are increasingly asking us to help build scalable businesses with the flexibility and agility to meet evolving viewing behaviour.  

An associated need they are seeking is the ability to spin channels up and down quickly to support specific events. Project planning conversations have also moved in the direction of reduced footprint, less hardware and more software-defined infrastructure. IT/IP solutions are in growing demand for their ability to support any style and size of workflow.  

The NDI protocol makes IP live production more cost-effective and versatile than ever. Virtual studio technology has also become increasingly compact and flexible, combining latest-generation studio robotics and graphic rendering systems. The transition from HD to UHD continues with HDR progressing from aspirational to routine. 

Among recent projects that have helped our customers overcome some of these hurdles is the upgrade of Studio 5 at Al Jazeera's Doha headquarters. The timeline was tight but we had worked with AJ in the past so knew that we could meet the challenge. The project embraced the complete rebuild of the AJ Arabic channel main studio with a fully redundant SDI/IP hybrid system as the first step in a migration to full SMPTE 2110.    

Datos Media, another Danmon Group company, recently completed a cloud software platform allowing Xarxa Audiovisual Local to share content between local televisions in Catalunya.  Datos Media led the project, designing the platform and managing the development of the solution. Fully deployed in Azure, the platform has been programmed from first principles by local software company Ebantic, integrating with market solutions such as File Catalyst transfer acceleration software and Hiscale transcoding.  

 

 

 

In TV and Film, It’s Payback Time

NAB

Given that $26 trillion of new wealth created since the start of pandemic went to the richest 1%, reports charity Oxfam, that billionaire Donald Trump’s organization was found guilty of tax fraud  but fined a paltry $1.6m and that Elon Musk made history by losing a record $165bn but is still worth $178bn you’d be forgiven for hating the rich just a little bit. Hollywood is banking on it.

article here

With seemingly little irony - given the wealth of senior studio execs and owners at streamers like Amazon and Apple - it is open season on the ultra rich.

Several recent movies, and at least one TV show, set their sights on the oligarchy pulling the strings of the world, “promising brutal, if only imagined, comeuppances that us plebs could cheer on from the pit,” notes Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair.

The main ones being called out for this meme are the 2022 trio of Knives Out sequel Glass Onion, The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness which all pit outsiders unseating the so-called elites for our viewing pleasure.

“The consequences they suffer in these films feel like the world is beginning to right itself, suggests Mashable, “a triumph seemingly impossible off screen. Throughout each movie, the filmmakers create feelings of disgust at these archetypes of privilege and power. We don't feel jealousy of their success; it's righteous anger at the unfairness in how they achieved it and delight at their fall from grace.”

True enough, but hardly new. You could read 2000’s Gladiator, itself a retread of sorts of Spartacus, about the working class heroically fighting back against the oppressed and privileged. For which also read the populist narrative of RRR in which plucky Indians defeat the British raj in style.

Gladiator director Ridley Scott is reportedly advanced on making a sequel to his Oscar winning Roman epic, so look for more of the same.

One to watch before then is Squid Game 2, the Korean satire that took the world by storm in 2021. The show was a naked assault on capitalism in which very few winners of the game of life actually survive.

Also out of Korea was Parasite, garlanded with the Best Picture Oscar (much to Trump’s displeasure) in 2020. This was a transparent metaphor for the under class taking revenge on those complacent enough not to see their riches as reason enough for attack. The director, Bong Joon-ho’s had form. In Snowpiercer (2013) his movie set on a train – later adapted into a TNT TV series – was an Us against Them attack on the layers of class and privilege that extends throughout every society.

In Glass Onion, The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness the ultra-rich squander their privilege.  The villain of Glass Onion manages to escape the pandemic by stowing away on his own private island in a literal bubble of his own making. Miles Bron, is of course, a thinly veiled Musk-type of techpreneur who is revealed as being not that bright after all.

Ruben Östlund’s Cannes Palmes D’Or winner Triangle of Sadness targets the relationship between money, power, and beauty, getting quite ugly in the process, found Mashable. It's never subtle, but its most direct condemnations of greed are voiced by the superyacht's American captain (Woody Harrelson). As passengers gorge on truffles, sea urchin, and heaping spoonfuls of caviar, he has a hamburger.

“The central set piece, an operatic spew of vomit and other fluids on a doomed private cruise ship, is grotesquely amusing—even cathartic,” finds Lawson.

Mark Mylod's target in The Menu are customers who think nothing of paying over $1000 for a lunch. Meanwhile in the real world, groceries cost 11% more than they did a year ago. The Chef (Ralph Fiennes) plots the deaths of his guests, as they quite literally get their just desserts. 

An example on TV is HBO’s deliciously entertaining The White Lotus which took its second season to a fabulous resort in sun-drenched Sicily.

Creator Mike White, aired an interesting theory that his show is concerned with the psychology of being astronomically rich. Here, the rich are eating themselves.

“When you’re wealthy and you don’t have situational problems that have to do with money, then your problems become existential,” White is quoted in the Washington Post. “You have all of the tools to figure out your life, and you can’t figure out your life,” White said, adding that “if you’re in paradise and you feel like something’s missing or you’re melancholy or you’re tortured, you know it’s not the ambient nature of what’s going on — it’s something in you.”

For all the rage against the machine, most of these stories don’t actually leave the billionaire’s in tatters. In Squid Game it is the dog eat dog world of capitalism that sees the working class killing itself for a rich master’s enjoyment.

Vanity Fair’s Lawson also finds the results less than satisfying.

“I’ve no doubt that Triangle of Sadness despises witless, unfeeling wealth as much as it says it does, but it has disdain for everyone else too,” he says. “That’s not really the righteous us vs. them fantasy I went looking for. I realize that may be the point, but still.

Fiery as the finale of The Menu may be, it feels awfully narrow, to Lawson “even safe,” he says. “The film strides up to the idea of bloody rebellion and then gets scared of its deepest implications.”

Glass Onion is too “Twitter-speak snarky to register as anything truly condemnatory,” he critiques It’s a goof: teeming with pop-culture references to imply urgency, but never transgressive.

And of The White Lotus, he says, it’s less concerned with skewering the rich since it is also “also guiltily glad to be along for the trip” in terms of showing the audience Instagram friendly luxury and Love Island like bodies.

Lawson calls for a show that truly upends the status quo rather than simply gesturing toward it. “I want to see the rich really eaten, chased from their mansions, and reduced to rubble,” he says.

Perhaps something like The Purge (2013) in which is the wealthy family being attacked without and within by an unleashing of violence mixed with Barbarian, Disney’s breakout horror from 2022 in which a smug Hollywood star gets his comeuppance in the underworld of Detroit.

 

Mobile Video Overview: Data, Downloads and “House of the Dragon”

NAB

We’re spending up to five hours on our mobile phones every day, with exclusive sports content serving as a crucial on-ramp for new users, according to mobile data analytics provider Data.ai.

article here

Its “State of Mobile 2023” report further explores a boom in downloads that saw mobile services downloaded a record 255 billion times globally last year. As a result, mobile ad spend is on track to hit $362 billion in 2023, after surpassing $336 in 2022, despite tightening marketing budgets.

Adding coverage of major sporting events can be a “highly effective-albeit expensive-way” to add new users to popular streaming services, is one is one takeaway.

Globally, streaming of the World Cup matches and top cricket tournaments in India drove the biggest download spikes.

In the US, the World Cup also drove large adoption spikes for Peacock TV and fubo TV, while streaming deals with the NFL helped Peacock TV, Paramount Network and Amazon Prime Video.

FOX Sports and Canada’s TSN GO also saw “huge increases” in adoption as a result of their FIFA World Cup coverage.

DAZN and ESPN are the “clear standouts” in terms of consumer spending in the sports app category, earning more in 2022 than the rest of the top 10 sports apps combined. Nearly all of ESPN’s revenue comes from the US, while DAZN has managed to monetize across more markets by casting a wide net in terms of its sports coverage in different markets. Some of DAZN’s content includes Serie A in Italy (where frequent blackouts don’t appear to have dented its popularity) and Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan, as well as pay-per-view boxing.

five hours in the top mobile-first markets. Cr: Data.ai

Sports betting apps downloads peak at the start of the NFL season each year and the Super Bowl. The report found that sports betting installs reached 4.3 million at the start of the 2022-2023 NFL season, up 8% year-over-year and more than four times the total from September through October 2018. FanDuel emerged as the market leader in 2022, with BetMGM, DraftKings, and William Hill vying for the number two spot.

Data.ai observes that sports betting apps over-index for a male audience in the 25-44 age range, a similar demographic to those likely to use financial apps, for example, for cryptocurrency trading.

Non-sports content that created the biggest download spikes included Euphoria (HBO Max), Halloween Ends (Peacock TV) and House of the Dragon (HBO Max).

The United States market may be saturated by OTT providers but there’s still room for growth in Europe and Asia. That said, many European markets became more concentrated between 2020 and 2022, largely explained by the massive launch by Disney+ in the region. The report finds that OTT (over-the-top) apps such as Netflix and Disney+ grew 12% year-over-year to $7.2 billion.

“Look for other OTT providers to attempt to emulate Disney+’s successful global expansion,” is Data.ai’s note.

Spending on other apps (non-gaming) increased by 6% year-over-year to $58 billion, largely driven by subscriptions and purchases in OTT, dating, and short videos. Downloads increased 13% year-over-year to 165 billion.

Shortform video apps, led by TikTok, dominated consumer attention in 2022. Users of these apps streamed a whopping 3.1 billion hours of user-generated content daily, up 22% year-over-year, and spent $5.6 billion, up 55% year-over-year, fueling the creator economy.

“TikTok’s recent success was well beyond that of other Entertainment apps,” the report finds. “Over the past 10 years TikTok has more than twice as many downloads as the next closest app, YouTube.”

Other findings in the report: Time spent per day has reached five hours in the top mobile-first markets.

Downloads of mobile apps grew to 255 billion (+11% YoY), and hours spent peaked at 4.1 trillion (+9% YoY). Meanwhile, consumer spending across all app stores, cooled to $167 billion (-2% YoY) for first time ever due to decline in gaming spend, which was previously bolstered by pandemic conditions. However, non-gaming mobile services and subscriptions reached record spend.

“For the first time, macroeconomic factors are dampening growth in mobile spend,” says Data.ai CEO Theodore Krantz. “Consumer spend is tightening while demand for mobile is the gold standard. In 2023, mobile will be the primary battleground for unprecedented consumer touch, engagement and loyalty.”

Audiences are Heading to FAST, But Will the Ad Dollars Follow?

NAB

Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) channels are poised to capture a dominant share of ad spend by 2027, yet at the same time there remains a concern that as TV viewing shifts from linear to streaming, ad dollars may not follow.

article here

These seemingly contradictory findings appear in a new report from research firm TVREV, “FASTs Are the New Cable Part 2: Advertising,” which concludes that the shift of advertising to streaming is “still not guaranteed,” despite huge tailwinds in its favor.

There are many reasons for that, but on a very macro level, they can be boiled down to this: a lack of standardization that impacts just about every aspect of the streaming ecosystem, from planning to measurement to transparency to privacy.

“This is partly because the whole ecosystem is so new, and partly because the different parties (buyers, sellers and middlemen) rarely attempt to work together, each believing that they alone have the key to everything,” say analysts Alan Wolk and Mike Shields in their summary to the report.

Ad Revenue Predictions

First up, predictions for where ad spend will go over the next few years. Per TVREV’s report, US ad revenue generated by FAST services is expected to rise from an estimated $10.4 billion in 2022, to $15.6 billion and 17% of total TV ad spend this year, to $33.8 billion and a 35% share by 2025, then to $42.6 billion and a 42% share by 2027.

SVODs with ad-tiers like Netflix are projected to see advertising grow from $11.3 billion and a 13% share of total TV ad revenue in 2023 to $24.5 billion and a 25% share in 2025, and to $26 billion and a 26% share by 2027.

By comparison, broadcast TV’s share of ad spend will fall from 23% in 2023 to 15% in 2025 and 13% in 2027, and cable’s share will drop from 47% in 2023 to 25% in 2025 and 19% in 2027.

Brands will see FASTs as a replacement for cable and SVOD as a replacement for broadcast networks, “and so the FAST/SVOD split will continue along the same lines… more or less,” Wolk and Shields said in a statement. They also expect FASTs to capture a significant share of local broadcast dollars, noting local advertisers will want to take advantage of lower CPMs and precise targeting that goes beyond geotargeting.

“FAST services today are where cable was 40 years ago,” said Wolk. “There’s not only more inventory available on the FASTs than on subscription services, but they’re also a great reach vehicle. The most-desirable and hardest-to-reach consumers are spending most of their time on streaming, and the FASTs will be how brands can best reach them.”

FAST Growth in Europe

This isn’t the only report charting the huge leap in FAST popularity. Amagi, which provides streaming services infrastructure, has surveyed the European market and confirms that FAST continues to outpace industry predictions. It latest Quarterly Global FAST Report reveals that growth between Jul-Sep 2022 in Europe saw an increase of 99.97% in ad impressions and over 51% in hours of viewing.

It highlights the penetration of internet Connected TV (CTV) a key marker of FAST channels adoption and that in this respect the UK is the most advanced country in Europe with rates as high as ~85%, making it possible to reach almost 94% of internet users via connected devices. Other major European markets including France, Italy and Spain also showed stella growth in FAST adoption – in Italy in the same period growth was 502% year-on-year.

Srinivasan KA, Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer, Amagi is quoted: “We see FAST continuing to accelerate in a challenging macro environment, and we anticipate the trend to continue, making it an attractive time for content owners to get into this market.”

Sports: The Missing Piece

The great unknown, as TVREV puts it, is sports rights and how quickly they go to streaming, which services they go to, and whether — like Apple’s deal with the MLB — they are available to non-subscribers for free or for a reduced price. Some of that was answered by NFL’s Sunday Night ticket, which was landed by YouTube in a $14 billion seven-year deal meaning that “even more money will go to streaming,” TVREV says.

If other major sports properties were to go behind a subscription paywall, at Amazon Prime or Apple TV, for example, “that could send CPMs through the roof, resulting in SVODs taking a much greater than currently projected share of ad revenue.”

But back to the main caveat of the TVREV report, which canvassed ad executives who all seemed to say how difficult it was to buy advertising on streaming, or more accurately, to buy advertising on streaming across multiple platforms.

“Brands have gotten spoiled by how simple it is to buy linear TV and the various players in the streaming ecosystem have not made it easy by setting up walled gardens and generally refusing to coordinate their efforts,” say Wolk and Shields. “This is counterproductive and the resulting confusion has kept ad dollars from flowing to streaming at the same rate as eyeballs.”

Measurement remains a sticking point. Every service seems to have its own flavor of measurement making it tough to do any sort of apples-to-apples measurement. The lack of transparency around streaming on CTV is another huge issue.

As TVREV outlines, programmatic buying makes it difficult for advertisers to know where their ads ran. Given the importance of context, this is a huge sticking point between agencies and certain FAST services, especially given how completely transparent linear TV has always been.

Overfrequency remains a problem, in which the same households see the same ads over and over; while segueing from third party cookies to a cookieless world prioritizing privacy, ID Resolution and first party consent data is early days.

“Where streaming sits within all of the new digital privacy regulations is still unclear,” Wolk and Shields write. “How to take advantage of first party data when viewing is done on a household level is still unclear.”

Addressing the Issues

It’s not like the industry is standing still. There are technologies and initiatives in train to deal with these issues and an acknowledgement that work needs to be done.

For example, measurement companies are getting smarter about how they refine the data they get from Smart TVs. “Major media companies are starting to use alternative currency providers, meaning we are likely looking at a small group of accepted measurement providers for streaming TV.”

TVREV suggests that programmers are aware that transparency is an issue and many are working to actively make it less of one by giving advertisers insight into the genres and channels their ads run on.

The growing acceptance of universal content IDs is also helping to increase the level of transparency on streaming by, among other things, giving programmers a way to identify a show that does not rely on device ID.

Overfrequency is being nipped in the bud. FASTs associated with major media companies have put protocols in place to ensure the same ads don’t appear over and over.

Privacy issues are being ironed out. This is the area where a lot of work still needs to be done, state the analysts, especially around understanding the privacy concerns of a household versus the privacy concerns of an individual.

“The good news is that the industry realizes this challenge and is working to create solutions, it’s just that there are still numerous opinions as to what that should look like.

Contextual targeting may solve a lot of these problems. It helps with both transparency and privacy, as advertisers will target viewers of certain genres, not the viewers themselves.

“Contextual can even help with measurement, since ACR (automatic content recognition) data measures what is being viewed ‘on the glass’ and contextual targeting just asks that someone in the household is watching that content, with less concern as to ‘who.’ ”

While there is still much about advertising on FAST channels that needs to be sorted out, the general outlook is quite positive. Rather than dismiss or ignore advertiser’s complaints, programmers and ad tech companies are actively working on solutions, so that as the ecosystem evolves and grows, the dollars will continue to flow.

“FASTs will become the cable to SVOD’s broadcast, a place to reach audiences they’d otherwise be missing and to target viewers on programming they can’t find anywhere else.”