MWC 2023 Preview: 5G, Sustainability and revenue models

IBC

article here

The fact is that 5G has not been the roaring success it was expected to be, certainly with consumers, there’s arguably not been enough progress on sustainability and while 6G has become a regular discussion point, the world seems on the point of bifurcating west and east, putting the future of the global internet at risk – all key questions that will be on the mind of exhibitors and attendees at MWC 2023.

More than 80,000 people are expected to attend MWC this year, topping the 61K who made it to the 2022 event, where sustainability is top of the agenda. The key MWC 2023 themes are 5G Acceleration, Reality+, OpenNet, FinTech and Digital Everything.

MWC 2023: Doubling down on green

On the one hand energy efficiency is now rated the top priority by telcos with 80% rating it important or extremely important to their planned upgrades, in the most recent Global Trends 2023 report from MWC owners and telco lobby group, the GSMA.

This speaks primarily to a cost savings and environmental story for operators. For equipment vendors, it underlines the fact that power efficient kit is now a competitive selling point.

But the report is mixed. The GSMA claims telecoms is among the leading industries in terms of climate commitments but in the next paragraph says less than half of operators have committed to the UN Race to Zero pledge.

Renewables account for 9% of energy consumption among operators, per GSMA, although there’s considerable variation by region. European operators use renewables for the majority (70%) of their energy; African and Asian groups (including China) are at less than 10%.

On the plus side, climate impact disclosure is now commonplace with the majority of operators worldwide reporting on CO2 emissions. There is less uniformity on policies related to e-waste. The GSMA says increasing these reporting rates will depend on investor pressures, consumer attitudes, and reaching a consensus on accepted KPIs.

Climate change will be highlighted at MWC2023, notably in an address shared by the CEOs of Vattenfall, Telia and Vodafone and, in another keynote, by Alejandro Agag, Founder & CEO, Formula E talking about racing electric SUVs.

But as Iain Morris of Light Reading, remarked, “Green is [being] promoted by executives who will just have flown hundreds or thousands of miles to do what could be done online or via an old-fashioned phone call. For an industry with a dodgy track record on the environment the optics are hardly ideal.”

He cited research from Omdia (a Light Reading sister company) that reveals emissions from China Mobile soared 111% between 2018 and 2021 and points out that Western operators may only appear to perform better “because they rely heavily on a controversial market-based methodology when reporting their Scope 2 emissions – those stemming mainly from the electricity they buy. This system means they can report massive cuts simply by acquiring cheap renewable energy certificates that make no real-world difference.”

Morris also calls out the lack of diversity among attendees to MWC. Despite the efforts made to foreground women and people of colour in its conference, the exhibition floor will be predominantly white, male and middle aged.

Both charges could be equally levelled at any trade show. The diversity issue will probably take at least a one generation to shift out white middle-aged males into retirement and before the efforts of education and recruitment programs bear fruit.

An uncomfortable aspect of the recent ISE show, also in Barcelona and likely to be replicated at MWC2023, was the prevalence of younger women hired by exhibitors to act as stand ‘guides’ or badge zappers. If they were employed for the same job, younger men were less obviously doing so.

MWC 2023: 5G - Show us the money

5G is in danger of being seen as a damp squib. While the industry heralded the first billion 5G connections by the end of last year, the promised supercharged economic uplift and whizzbang applications have yet to materialise.

“You will struggle to find a market that has seen a real and sustainable growth in ARPU in line with 5G launches,” Matthew Iji, director of modelling and forecasting at GSMA Intelligence, explained to Mobile World Live, the content arm of the GSMA.

The industry remains upbeat, arguing that it is only now with the rollout of 5G Advanced that the technology’s benefits will be realised.

New network and service deployments will drive 5G “beyond vanguard markets” in Europe, North America and Asia, said Peter Jarich, Head of GSMA Intelligence. “New use case development beyond [faster mobile broadband] which has driven early 5G success will see 5G get closer to realising its full potential: think further cloud, edge, slicing and maybe even API monetisation momentum.”

If any great return on their multi-million Euro investments is to be made by operators it will be in the enterprise. Yet the GSMA’s own research identifies only 5% of operators having defined an enterprise metaverse strategy. While consumer interest in the speed of 5G is considered positive – it doesn’t extend much further than that.

“Speeds are not what will ultimately sustain pricing premiums (and therefore revenue growth),” the GSMA reported. “A ‘wow’ factor is required to attract new customers or incentivise existing ones towards higher spend.”

XR is a candidate here, with the potential to usher in a new age of (immersive) consumer experiences that benefit from 5G’s advanced capabilities in areas such as speed, latency and capacity.

However, a GSMA Intelligence Operators in Focus Survey suggests AR/VR is a not a priority among operators. Sales of AR/VR headsets remain flat and a reduction in headset pricing and an increase in content are needed before AR/VR moves to the mainstream.

It reiterates its expectation of a “flurry of metaverse/XR content developments” in 2023, with gaming, video and music at the forefront. There’s a metaverse summit at MWC 2023, based around the enterprise and a keynote on the topic with speakers from Web3 platform developer Dimple and Sebastian Borget the co-founder of virtual world Sandbox.

There’s also a first ‘immersive storytelling space’ at the show and a focus on the growing relationship between mobile and sports ecosystems, in collaboration with Barcelona FC.

MWC 2023: Can the splinternet be avoided?

The gap between 5G’s game changing promise and its prosaic reality is of concern if the industry is going to persuade investors including national governments to bet big once again on 6G.

The sixth-generation wireless network is now being pitched as the missing component in the 5G topology that will finally deliver transformational improvements for real-time internet applications such as driverless cars or remote surgery.

According to Light Reading doubts are creeping in among governments and the investment community about whether another ‘G’ is worth it.

“The 5G experience has been a long-overdue wake-up call,” wrote Iain Morris. “It began with the usual publicity frenzy about new revenue-generating service opportunities (remember self-driving cars and robot surgeons?), few of which have materialised.

“Politicians joined in, telling voters 5G was an economic game-changer. Somewhere in this process, the realisation struck that 5G was basically 4G on caffeine – a bit faster, a bit more cost-efficient, but (despite all the money spent) no great cause for excitement.”

This matters if investment is to be galvanised for 6G. Already, there’s a race to reach 6G milestones with South Korea predictably stating its intent to beat the rest with commercialisation as soon as 2028.

China is also piling R&D into 6G development. The country is smarting from having its leading mobile tech developer Huawei outlawed from much of the national communications infrastructure in the US and Europe. The current geo-political situation has exacerbated cooperation on global standards with some observers pessimistic that a unified internationally recognised 6G will ever be agreed.

Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm admitted as much during an interview last year; “If the tech world is fragmented East and West then it is going to mean competition between two ecosystems.”

Standards body the ITU has been attempting to avert a splinternet in which core tenets of a shared and interoperable Internet are no longer available around the world.

The GSMA will hope to play a role in bringing the industry together. Huawei is far from ostracised at MWC2023 where more than a dozen executives have been given speaking platforms. China Mobile’s president and CEO is also keynoting.

In the absence of definitive proof that the company is, like TikTok, syphoning data back to Beijing, it is right to continue to engage with the Huawei which after all is one of the world leaders in 5G technology. That it has achieved that feat on the back of state funding continues to feed the fear of those who believe that reliance on network components engineered in China puts the West at a long-term disadvantage.

MWC 2023: Quantum preparation

The next giant leap in computing is on the horizon and operators are being asked to get ready for it. Quantum computing leverages the duality of qubits to calculate sums at speeds unimaginable with today’s electronic systems.

At the same time there is a risk that future Quantum computers can break the security of the internet and mobile networks, according to the GSMA.

A cross section of the industry has contributed to a white paper assessing the threats and potential of Quantum compute to the telecoms.

While saying there’s no need to panic, the paper recommends that the mobile industry prepares for the adoption of Post-Quantum Cryptography.

Luke Ibbetson, Vodafone Group Head of R&D said: “This industry-first whitepaper is an important step towards securing telco networks against future attack by quantum computers. The transition towards standards based post-quantum crypto algorithms will take time and has to start now.”

 

MWC 2023: AWS, Microsoft, and Google Partner with Mobile Operators to Scale Web3 from Cloud to Edge

Streaming Media

article here

Mobile telecoms operators are uniting with major cloud providers in a bid to make it easier to unlock the full potential of the edge compute revolution. The aim is to enable greater interoperability between carrier networks and between networks and the cloud via APIs to accelerate development of applications such as immersive mixed reality experiences and Web3.

The Open Gateway initiative, unveiled today, is signed by 21 telcos including America Movil, AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Liberty Global, MTN, Orange, Telefónica, Telstra, and Vodafone with the support of Microsoft, Google, and AWS.

Significantly, given the threat of a West/East “splinternet,” the signatures include China Mobile.

Operators will gain revenue with services running over 5G networks and cloud providers can extend access to consumers and markets over mobile broadband. The plan is to build and work on APIs by way of CAMARA, an open-source project co-developed by the Linux Foundation and mobile operators body GSMA.

“The ambition is to establish a common layer to expose network capability,” said José María Álvarez-Pallete Chairman & CEO, Telefónica, keynoting MWC 2023 in Barcelona. “Through standard APIs we will create another standard, just as we did with the GSMA did with mobile broadband’s ‘G’ standards. This is no longer a telecom network. It is a massively decentralized and distributed super computer—the most powerful one in the world. A supercomputer available to everyone everywhere.”

In the last ten years data traffic over mobile networks has grown 27x worldwide. Some analysts predict another 24x explosion in the decade ahead.

“The cloud will not be able to cope with all the traffic that Web3 is generating,” said Álvarez-Pallete. “We need an open ecosystem in a single line of code. This is the time for collaboration between telco, big tech and industry players to create the future to interconnect customers.”

Connectivity may be the foundation of everything digital but telcos now need to deliver low-latency programmable and cloud edge networks.

“This means the industry needs to do more than transform,” said Álvarez-Pallete. “We need to reimagine ourselves from copper, 2G, 3G, and 4G to full IP fibre and 5G networks.”

That “reimagining” also needs to take telcos from hardware-based reactive networks to software-based smart networks, from minutes of voice to gigabits per second and from tailor-made ecosystems to “a global system of interconnected platforms.”

He said, “We need to reimagine ourselves from telco service provider to bidirectional tokenized platforms, from commercial bundles to a digital supermarket and from carriers to a Web3 company.”

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in a recorded insert to the keynote, “The role of digital technology and connectivity has never been more important. As computing becomes embedded in the real world every organization will need more ubiquitous and decentralized computing fabric. At MS we are focused on extended that fabric from cloud to edge. That is why the Open Gateway is very important.”

Nadella pointed to the partnership between AT&T and Azure as a step to providing a unified interface across operator networks.

In a press release, Ishwar Parulkar, Chief Technologist for the Telco Industry at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said, “GSMA Open Gateway is a significant step in enriching the cloud developer experience. Developers using AWS’s more than 200 services will also be able to leverage APIs from telco operators. This allows the developer community to create new applications, and for telcos to open up new models of consumption and monetisation for their networks. We believe this will help accelerate innovation in the telecom industry.”

Google was not named in the official Open Gateway release but was given the chance to express its support with another video in the keynote. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, talked about the synergy between Android devices and carriers. “There are over 3 billion monthly active Android devices worldwide used by companies working to build applications for smartphones, wearables and automated cars. Carriers are some of our most important partners. Our industries support each other. Our work in this space is a testament to our believe that participation and mutual benefit is the only way to build a successful ecosystem.”

He cited a pilot deployment of 5G core network functions on Google distributed cloud edge in Austria. Calling it a “noble initiative,” telco analyst Paolo Pescatore said, “It’s an important further step for operators to collaborate together to open up new streams collectively but the devil is in the detail. We’ve seen previous initiatives fail.”

European Telcos Bark that Netflix and Big Tech Must Pay Fair Share–But Their Bark Lacks Bite

Streaming Media 

Calls for major streamers and big tech to pay their “fair share” for carriage of their services over mobile broadband networks are nothing new, but operators are ratcheting up pressure as the industry enters the next phase of 5G, AI, IoT, and Web3 expansion.

article here 

Speaker after speaker at Mobile World Congress heralded a new era of cooperation and openness with US-based big tech at the same time as pleading for the heaviest data traffic streamers to pay their way—and urging regulators to step in if they do not.

Mats Granryd, Director General of GSMA laid the groundwork in the opening address in Barcelona. “We are working toward an open digital ecosystem [in which] telcos are becoming supercomputers. However, we need a much more balanced ecosystem. It means everybody collaborating with their fair share of effort.”

Beyond vague and possibly empty threats at not being able to deliver next-generation mobile broadband infrastructure without greater financial contribution, it is not clear what leverage the mobile industry actual has.

“I don’t want to go to my customers and say ‘You have to pay for your Netflix streams in future,’” said Deutsche Telekom’s CEO Tim Hoettges in a keynote. “Why can’t the streamers and hyperscalers contribute a little bit to the effort and infrastructure which we are building here in Europe? A fair share discussion is one which we should have in the open among all players.”

He suggested that just six companies generate more than 60% of traffic on Europe’s telco infrastructure and called for a “partial regulation” in this area; otherwise, he said, “we will produce the network where we have all the capital cost and all the profit goes somewhere else.”

Figures from Deutsche Telekom suggest that in 2022 European operators spent Euro55 billion on network infrastructure in Europe and hyperscalers—meaning Alphabet, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple—spent Euro19bn on the European continent. Eighteen billion Euro of that was in data centers and just 1 billion Euro in connectivity.

“Is it a fair deal that all these hyperscalers and streamers are using our infrastructure for free?” asked Hoettges. “Shouldn’t there be a fair sharing between the money we invest in the infrastructure and the one they are monetizing?”

Orange claimed that five of the largest “online traffic generators” account for 55% of daily traffic on European telco networks. This represents approx. Euro15bn in cost born by European telcos each year.

“The entire sector is at a crossroads,” said Christel Heydemann, CEO, Orange.“It requires huge investment that some telcos are no longer able to fully absorb and are selling assets off. It is paradoxical that infrastructure is better value as a standalone business than within the telco sector.

“My peers would agree that regulators and policy makers have a major role to play to balance this unsustainable situation. After all, it is in our common interest that telcos keep investing to support new digital services.”

Heydemann said that more than Euro 600 billion had been invested into the continent by telcos to drive connectivity over the last decade.

“It is time to recognise that the telco industry has invested massively and played a huge role in the economic uplift of countries. Fair play rules start by acknowledging the unbalanced situation today.”

She called for a new European framework that would deliver a fair contribution from what she called the “large online traffic generators.”

“[European telcos] are all willing to set the proper commercial framework with large online traffic generators,” Heydemann said. “Such a framework would allow value creation for everyone and to further accelerate the digital services our customers need. Therefore, we welcome a public consultation to tackle this.

“We are not asking to change European net neutrality principals nor are we asking for a new tax mechanism but we do believe that the fair and direct contribution to network costs will help create the better conditions we urgently need to keep investing privately rather than requiring public funding.”

There was some skepticism about all these from seasoned mobile industry observers.

Andrew Collinson, Executive Director & Chief Research Officer, STL Partners said that telcos pleading for someone else to pay for it all is a familiar theme.

“I suspect these arguments are more about creating a better environment for investment. I don’t think they will get Google to pay for mobile data. It is about getting into the minds of regulators and governments. It’s more of a warning to the EU and member state governments that mobile technology investment is necessary to coping with the big themes of the next ten years like climate change and regionalization.”

Paolo Pescatore, Founder at PP Foresight noted that the debate was around “the fair share of costs, how data is being used and consumed, and who should fund that.”

For Deutsche Telekom, the exploitation of telco networks as a dumb pipe is symptomatic of an existential threat to Europe’s telco operators. He pointed out that fragmentation and competition within the European market was leaving operators at a massive disadvantage on the global scale. “We have to rise above petty state hoods. We need a single European market. We need one European digital identity and one European spectrum policy to compete against American and Asian markets.”

He claimed per capita spend in 5G in Europe was the lowest among other mature markets, and blamed the regulatory framework, too much competition, and a lack of spectrum in some countries, rather than operators.

He also noted that 92% of Europe’s data from mobile networks is not stored in Europe “but on servers outside the continent or on servers owned by foreigners.”

That’s a problem, he intimated, if the next big growth in revenue and services is going to be from leveraging data with AI.

“Dependency is easy, sovereignty is not,” he says. “We have to wake up. Politicians and telcos have to get out of our comfort zone. Do you believe that in five years MWC should take place in Europe or in the US? Will European telcos even be relevant in future?”

How Media and Entertainment Is (Gradually) (Finally) Rightsizing

NAB 

The media and entertainment industry is being reconfigured into an economic model that more closely matches actual consumption and spend. With that in mind, the recent run of projects cancellations, staff cuts, and production spending curtailed should be seen as more temporary dip than long-term decline.

article here

“While we don’t want to gloss over the sobering facts, it’s important to note that they’re not a death knell for the industry but rather another pressure point when considering how you’re deploying budget,” says Michael Kammes, senior director of innovation for MediaSilo.

The storage and collaborative workflow technology vendor has dissected and analyzed industry data and come up with a snapshot of spend that it says indicates increasing cost consciousness. 

Overall production in film, TV and commercials saw a decline of nearly a quarter in Q4 2022 compared to a year earlier. TV saw the biggest drop of 24.2% year-on-year. The final quarter of 2022 saw a stark drop in production days of television to 3,733 from 4,925 in Q4 2021. Unscripted shows didn’t see the same drastic drop, but MediaSilo notes that this content is also cheaper to produce and therefore under less pressure when considering spend.

“The main takeaway is this is a regression to the mean. The back half of 2020 and all of 2021 and really the first quarter of 2022 was an anomaly and a great anomaly when it comes to the projects that we’re worked on, the money that was being spent.”

The company reports a drop of 16.2% in feature films (Q4 2021-Q4 2022), which is less of a drop, but notes that there are far fewer films than television shows produced overall. Commercial production saw the most significant drop of 33.7% in the same period.

Meanwhile the media industry saw nearly 4,000 jobs slashed in 2022.

Even the games industry is not immune to budget cuts. While downloaded and boxed PC games grew by 1.8%, the broader industry dropped 4.3% between 2021 and 2022.

“While this information does not illustrate a rosy picture, it’s important to note that 2021 was an anomaly,” says Kammes. “We see 2022 as a corrective year following the market’s two years of lockdown-fuelled growth, and while the numbers aren’t great, the projections and views in the industry are not as dire as we may think.”

The company cites recent multimillion dollar deals for content signed at Sundance by Netflix ($20 million for Fair Play) and by Apple ($25 million for Flora and Son).

“The main takeaway is that the changes we’re seeing are a regression to the mean,” says Kammes. “The industry is being reconfigured in a way that actually matches spend and consumption. But commerce is still happening, and global content expenditure is projected to increase by 2% over the next year.”

 

 

Broadcast Management For 2023: Value, Innovation, Investment

NAB

5G, AI, and cloud are hitting tipping points for mass adoption, with disruption and possibility likely to impact media and entertainment first, according to analysts at McKinsey.

article here

In its predictions of tech trends to watch, McKinsey highlights AI “decentralization” — the trend of expanding access to advanced AI technologies that were traditionally available only to players with access to massive, centralized proprietary data sets.

“Products such as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT have enabled a wider set of enterprises as well as individuals to access and interact with deep learning models that otherwise would be restricted to institutions with very large datasets,” the consultancy says.

The implications are enormous — and will likely disrupt M&E first.

“The big challenge and opportunity for companies in 2023 will be to take advantage of these decentralized AI capabilities,” McKinsey advises. “The goal should be to have AI-driven intelligence built into every part of the technology stack.”

It also believes that the combination of advanced mobility, advanced connectivity, and applied AI will be multiplicative, not additive.

The analyst cites research that companies are looking to move about 60% of their IT estate to cloud by 2025; and more than half of companies report they’ve adopted AI in at least one function in their business.

“These aren’t the sexiest investments, but automating processes, investing in data foundations, cleaning up tech debt, and continually renewing the IT architecture are needed for the business to have a chance of taking full advantage of the new technologies coming online.”

Most corporate forays into the cloud to date have been limited to simply moving applications from their own servers (often referred to as “lift and shift”), or building test and development environments to try out new programs. But now is the time to think bigger and smarter.

McKinsey urges companies to focus on building out strong cloud foundations that allow them to take advantage of the most important benefits that cloud provides (e.g., scaling applications or automatically adding capacity to meet surges in demand).

That requires putting in place strong cloud economics capabilities, called FinOps. Recent McKinsey research has shown that companies tend to not really focus on cloud costs until they break $100 million, “which is not just a tremendous waste but also a wasted opportunity to generate value,” the consultancy says.

“FinOps capabilities can monitor and track spend, determine the unit economics for various cloud usage scenarios, and translate the business’ consumption needs into optimal cloud offerings and pricing arrangements.”

Companies should also take the opportunity to automate security as they migrate applications to the cloud. This is because businesses themselves as well as cloud service providers are “upping their own security game,” for example, by automatically scanning code uploaded by developers and rejecting code with vulnerabilities.

In another trend, the analyst says that CTOs will need to master the art of doing more with less. This is less of a blunt attempt to wring more productivity out of R&D teams than a bid to use talent better.

“The trap will be to ask your tech people to simply do more,” analysts warn. “Instead, try getting them to do less — less admin work, less bureaucratic work, less manual work. There are huge amounts of productivity there for the taking.”

Specific steps include adopting more automation to remove manual tasks that weigh down engineers. Even relatively simple fixes, like cutting down on meetings, says McKinsey, can free up substantial time.

 

What’s Next for Live Streamed “Experiences”?

NAB

Live streaming gigs rose to the foreground during lockdown and are now big business with companies like Live Nation promoting live streamed experiences for music fans who couldn’t, or choose not to, attend the concert.

article here

Performers like electronic musician deadmau5 have been doing this for well over a decade, helping to pioneer the experience. In doing so, the Canadian DJ, whose name is Joel Zimmerman, has taught himself a lot about streaming technology from hardware switchers to the latest codecs but nothing in his view has come close to replacing performing live in front of a crowd.

“I wasn’t thinking there’s going to be the total shift of my career from now on… that I’m just going to be a streaming act,” he said, keynoting the Content Delivery Summit for Streaming Media.

“There’s much to be said about being in a venue with an actual human. That’s some level of interaction and communication. [That said] streaming just lends itself so easily to [not] requiring big travel demands or set ups.”

For years, deadmau5 used Twitch or Mixer to stream live but during the pandemic he launched mau5trap, a proprietary streaming service. He also joined video streaming platform StreamVoodoo as an equity partner.

“All musicians and artists need a solution like this today and for the future,” deadmau5 explained in a 2020 press release. “I was working on bringing my shows online and starting my own streaming platform to connect with my community. Not just for me, but for all musicians in the world.

“After the pandemic began, we needed a solution for video quality with excellent sound, beyond anything that has been done before. We tested every other provider offering and I didn’t find what I was looking for. StreamVoodoo is phenomenal for live concerts and streaming sessions at scale with no latency.”

To the StreamingMedia audience, he claimed there was a lack of a video-centric streaming platform: “Zoom was not built with video in mind,” he said.

A primary issue is latency. “If [the stream] is struggling to keep up within two milliseconds and it’s having a hard time doing that, then that just breaks it.”

He remains concerned about achieving the same live alchemic interaction between the musician and audiences in a stadia in an online environment.

“You go see the Foo Fighters and see no show is the same. Maybe the setlist stays the same, but there’s always some story, there’s always some back and forth between Dave [Grohl] and the crowd and all the other guys. So that’s like something that that is there in the moment, for those people that are right there.”

He implies that if the streaming experience isn’t right then viewers are “just a fly on the wall… you’re not inclusive into that experience,” he said.

“A ticket holder [who has] invested in you, in that moment in time, to have exclusivity of that moment and being in the audience and being in the crowd,” is a missing element in some live streams.

Hosting live concerts in the metaverse with real-time rendering is a potential answer. He explains, “I don’t foresee the future being a camera’s perspective of something because then you’ve just locked it to whatever they give you. I’m at a concert and then I want to walk around that front row. So we’re going to need some kind of volumetric representation of that so that I can go and do that.”

He tells StreamingMedia that he gets his inspiration for live streaming from live streamers on Twitch such as TheSushiDragon. “This kid, you got to look him up. He’s got this warehouse in Montana and just every new gadget, every new little handheld toy, every kind of IP camera or follow camera robot.

“He’s just built this huge playpen and he does live editing, live streaming, and uses all peripheral technology to do these great live edits.

“So I’m finding all these characters, you know using all this different tech. You just got to kind of find what works for you.”

 

Reworking the Workflows for Live Streaming

NAB

Live streaming is often painted as a trade-off between resolution and latency. The bandwidth simply isn’t there to support both. It’s a simplistic equation at best and one that doesn’t match the reality of streamers who are constantly experimenting with the parameters to find the service that best delivers the experience different audiences expect.

article here

“We’re all over the road when it comes to how we’re quickly adapting to the quality for live versus on demand on our service,” said Michael Fay, VP, Software Engineering Disney Streaming Services, in a revealing panel on the topic convened for 2022’s NAB Show Streaming Summit.

“I think that that speaks to the challenges of what the future of live and linear is going to look like. When we produce a pay per view UFC event, for example on ESPN, we stand up an entirely new and unique workflow, and we set the bitrates for that particular event based on what we think the quality of the stream needs to be.”

Fay is responsible for Disney Plus, Hulu Star, Star+ and ESPN+ online distribution strategy on their senior technology team.

“The point is that when it comes to live versus on demand nothing is set in stone,” he continued. “We’re still trying a variety of different things to figure out what is the right answer for our subscribers. That includes live, that includes linear and that includes video on demand.”

Disney is forecasting more growth in live, he said.

“We’re willing to rewrite the book when it comes to live and linear and figure out what’s working. So even a mature brand like Disney Plus is still figuring it out.”

Take bitrates as one metric of service performance. We learn that Hulu’s live adaptive bitrate is 6.9 megabits average while Hulu’s VOD bitrate is 5.6MB/s average. “So, our live content broadcasts domestically at a much higher quality than our on-demand content for Star+, which is available internationally.”

However, ESPN’s VOD bitrate is 9.8MB/s on average and ESPN live content is 6.8MB/s. “Completely inverse of what Hulu is. Then our theatrical content at Disney Plus is 12.8MB/s — a real quality theatrical experience. The reason I share that with you is because the rules for us are changing and we don’t have a rule of thumb for how we treat live versus how we treat on demand.”

Or take latency as another metric. “We ran it up the flagpole and said, ‘How do we want to handle latency?’ And I’m just speaking specifically to a complex nature of a live production for scalable, very large multi-million concurrent connection audiences. The decision that Disney made was we will take higher quality over faster startup times or ultra low latency streams.”

Fay said, “We would rather give the audience in a football match a crystal clear Chyron or lower third than be within 3 seconds of the broadcast program over the air. We made that decision.”

Disney could have chosen to run on WebRTC and reduce the latency and give everybody the same stream within three or 4 seconds but opted for a higher quality audio-visual experience instead.

He said, “We find that our subscribers care more about having an awesome high quality experience than they do about having a low latency experience. And that goes for breaking news and that goes for sports.”

Magnus Svensson, Media Solution Specialist and Partner, Eyevinn Technology (also the panel moderator) agreed with Fay, “Because if you ask a viewer if they will pay extra to get a few seconds lower latency or if they will pay extra to get better quality streams for 4K and HDR, I think we all know the answer. The viewers will pay for quality. Very, very few will pay for getting five or two seconds lower latency. These users are probably somewhere else doing live betting.”

Speaking for US-based hybrid broadcast and broadband TV delivery service Evoca TV, Imran Maskatia, VP, Product Development, said, “We don’t get complaints on latency, honestly. I also don’t think it has to be latency or quality. I think there’s an art form and every delivery mechanism is different. I think there there’s a happy middle ground where you can achieve both quality and less latency.”

Ironically perhaps, the Disney executive said he envied the relative simplicity of a Netflix since it doesn’t have a live product. He indicated that having live and VOD services meant the potential existed for the company to introduce more interactive features at the cost of complexity.

“I don’t count anything as being dead and, you know, keep a flexible and open framework so that if data integration with a particular live program for sports or breaking news needs to be incorporated, you’re capable of doing that and your services able to do that.”

The panel also discuss the shift of live production infrastructure from on prem to cloud concluding that this won’t happen for most of the industry for at least five years and perhaps up to ten years.

“I believe that it’s a generational thing,” said Fay. “Younger software engineers and younger hardware engineers are going to be more tolerant of the cloud than older broadcast engineers who are getting into the streaming space, who want to see the red led flashing to know that that thing is working.”

Maskatia added that legacy investment was also an impediment to change; “there will be a purchase point at some point in future where people will switch from on prem to cloud, but it won’t be immediate. It will be when the cost is cheaper.”

Looking further ahead, the panel consider the extent to which streaming services can go beyond the capabilities of broadcast and introduce personalization and interactivity.

Pierre-Louis Theron, VP, Product Management, Content Delivery, Lumen Technology, said that it had to bring real value. “What exactly it is to potentially watch something together in the metaverse. We don’t really have any idea yet. There’s been some examples (such as Watch Groups). It’s probably working for some content, not for some other content. I don’t think we have yet figured it out.”

Fay suggested that the next iteration of Disney Plus “is where you’re getting like all these Pixar characters and you have your own avatar, you have a whole Pixar experience.”

How Ad-Supported Streaming Services Could Be the Future of TV

NAB

Ad-supported streaming services are the future of video consumption, finds the latest report by Parks Associates, as OTT and traditional linear TV merge with the rise of FAST services.

article here 

The white paper, “Optimizing Video: Enhancing Content Performance for OTT Success,” also says that streaming is giving niche content providers a platform to reach millions of consumers.

“As consumers continue to move away from traditional pay TV services, they will first seek out options to watch the content they want in ways they are accustomed to—a relaxed, lean back experience,” says report author and Sr. Contributing Analyst, Parks Associates, Thomas Schaeffer. “While most would say that they would prefer not to see ads, many are willing to accept them in exchange for free or lower-priced options.”

Some 87% of US internet households now subscribe to one or more streaming video services, and 20% subscribe to eight or more OTT services, the report finds.

This represents substantial growth compared to five years ago. However, competition is fierce. There are over 300 OTT video services in the US alone, in addition to thousands of FAST channels.

Content sellers and video services are experimenting with new ways to attract and retain subscribers, as well as introducing hybrid business models and partnerships.

Rise of Niche

Niche services, such as Shudder, PokerGO and Curiosity Stream, are seeing a “significant opportunity” to compete as consumers become less loyal to media brands when adding and removing services to accommodate their viewing habits.

Recently, mainstream media organizations have launched niche offerings. TelevisaUnivision’s ViX Spanish-language service, for example, is currently distributed through a variety of partners such as Prime Video, Roku, LG, DISH TV and SLING TV.

“Ad-supported streaming, particularly FAST linear channels, can be used to distribute content that has relatively limited audience appeal, and could never justify its own channel on traditional broadcast or pay TV,” says Schaeffer.

Examples include Dogs 24/7 and Cats 24/7 on Pluto TV and NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) TV on Tubi and The Roku Channel.

Per Parks: Advertising rates for these niche channels are likely lower due to smaller audience size, but they can allow content owners to generate some revenue rather than no revenue for content that might otherwise languish in a vault somewhere.

Content continues to be a key driver for subscriptions, with 48% of consumers referencing content availability as the primary reason for subscribing to an additional service.

Further, it is content variety and relevancy which Parks finds are the primary triggers for signing up for and cancelling services — but price is now a much more significant factor.

“Except for Netflix and Prime Video, consumers are likely to churn if the content library isn’t engaging or relevant and prefer services that offer content across a wide range of genres,” writes Schaeffer.

Elsewhere the report says that outside of Netflix, which carries an average subscription length of 48 months, nearly half of OTT subscribers are hopping from one service to the next multiple times over a 12-month period.

With OTT video advertising expected to reach $119 billion in 2023 much is at stake, with most of it riding on a service’s ability to understand and predict viewer behavior and content engagement.

Parks highlights the need for subscriber engagement data as an increasingly valuable asset for media organizations to assess, demonstrate, and predict the value of a service’s catalog.

“The ability to validate content performance enables content sellers and streaming services to buy and sell a greater variety of licensed content, optimize pricing, and satisfy audience demand.”

The report also forecasts that subscription revenue for OTT services in the US will increase from $34 billion in 2021 to over $46 billion in 2026.

 

Five key trends to mitigate costs in 2023 with Chuck Parker, CEO of Sohonet

copy written for Sohonet 

article here

Filmmakers are struggling with critical pressures today including significant cost inflation in key areas of production. Cast, crew, studio space and fuel, flights and food have all been affected Covid protocols and contingencies are also adding 5-10% to budgets. Productions are writing inflation protection schemes into budgets while working to raise money and secure behind-the-camera talent to get to principal photography. 

Crew shortages at all levels are especially threatening to the sector. Following a decade of extremely cheap and easy debt, the burden on producers has grown acute, and the wage inflation associated with scarce talent has only worsened this situation.

The British Film Institute (BFI) found that the speed and volume of demand for local production has exacerbated the strain on the UK’s indie sector in particular. It cannot compete with larger international productions from accommodating the rising cost of production to signing cast and crew and ultimately to reaching audiences. 

Sohonet CEO Chuck Parker explores how all these rising costs might be mitigated.

1) Remote collaboration saves real money with tried and tested tools and workflows

The biggest and arguably most immediate reduction productions can make is slashing the cost of travel and accommodation, which has automatic benefits to sustainability policies and can make a real impact on the estimated 30% cost to every production.

Luckily, the tools to enable remote editorial are battle-hardened and will only get better. Better still, decisions about hybrid or entirely remote editorial are embedded into discussions at the point key crafts board a project.

The benefits are not all one way. Certain creatives (showrunners, directors) want their editor close to set even during principal photography. Reading the room with all its nuances in gesture and mood is something that remains tricky if not impossible to replicate when video streaming. Post creatives are flexible and will do as the job requires but the fact that choice is now part of the conversation gives those who prefer to work where they want a better life balance. 

So whilst remote can definitively cut production cost it would be shortsighted it were not tied in to workflows supporting in-person collaboration when possible.

2) Virtual Production accelerates – but creates its own time and cost challenges

Significant savings on travel and carbon footprint can be achieved using virtual production. Volume stages are cropping up everywhere to satisfy demand to shoot locally – but being booked out as soon as they launch as demand for space continues. 

VP is also the fastest developing area in our industry with technology, techniques and best practices still emerging. While the crew tasks and skill sets required for a VP shoot may differ to conventional production, the actual number of crew involved may not, in its current phase, be markedly different. 

Consequently, the cost per day of shooting remains high. It may be one reason why several high-profile productions that might have been ideal for VP shoots (HBO’s House of the Dragon, Disney’s Andor, Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) have eschewed the volume for the tactility of conventional location filming.

The current cost and complexity of virtual production needs to improve for it to become the first choice for production, with location shooting an aesthetic choice for those with the highest budgets or most prestigious auteurs.  However, capacity and pricing are impacting the decisions as much as the changes in pre-production required to be successful in this creative approach.

3) Cloud workflow adoption remains hampered 

The ability to push raw original camera files (OCF) from set to cloud for instant access by creative talent anywhere will bring sweeping benefits to production. True OCF will condense time scales and thereby cut costs and, by collapsing the traditional linear process, enable real-time geographically dispersed creative collaboration. Sounds like Nirvana!

But the catch is we are not there yet. Camera to cloud today is delivered as a proxy stream that can speed editorial and shot reviews but only real OCF pushed from set to cloud can revolutionise post. Even as workflows develop for OCF to be pushed in near-time to cloud editorial, there are still cost challenges to tackle.  It is counterproductive as it stands today to put your rich data files in the cloud when many of today’s workflows start by egressing the data to local post operations and then uploading that data back to the cloud, resulting in additional time and costs for production.

The migration to public cloud workflows is the right direction of travel for the industry but adoption is still slow. In particular, larger scale projects are finding end-to-end cloud production problematic to manage on top of exorbitant penalties for egress between cloud providers.

At issue here is the continued lack of interoperability between major public cloud vendors. Studios would like their productions to be able to hop seamlessly from provider to provider, following the sun, taking advantage of economies of scale to render creative vision across multiple cloud providers, but such workflows remain stymied while cost effective interoperable data exchange is locked out.

4) AI / ML and ChatGPT promise practical benefit and a radical future

Automating workflows and jumpstarting the creative process using artificial intelligence/ machine learning is fast entering the equation. It’s too late to be worried about technology usurping jobs, and similar to other industries, AI/ML is more likely to unlock use cases for volume that was previously not economical. AI/ML is already in the wild all over our industry and we should be open to embracing it, looking to redesign roles and workflows and to create with it. 

Media companies are adopting AI tools for everything from storyboarding in pre-production to streamlining asset management and powering search and recommendation engines for service subscribers. AI is already proficient at tackling time-consuming tasks like de-noising, rotoscoping, and motion capture tracking removal. Footage restoration, colourisation, categorisation, facial recognition, metadata enhancement and integration are all areas that are likely to benefit from AI/ML integration. Currently, the use of AI/ML in localization and versioning is likely to yield the most cost-saving benefit for Studios.

Longer term, expect generative AI text‑to‑image algorithms to evolve into text-to-video tools with such fidelity that it is no longer inconceivable that entire feature films from AI-generated script to audio performances with photoreal video will be made entirely in a machine. 

 5) Streamers cut their cloth to look like TV

The squeeze on cost of living translates into constant cancellation or rotation of streaming services and has caused major SVODs to rush to offer cheaper ad-supported alternatives. The goal for most is to reduce churn and increase revenues to sustain multi-billion-dollar content costs without decimating the existing linear TV and cable subscriber base, while the hard-core streamers (Apple, Amazon, Netflix) have no legacy revenue streams to protect. 

Netflix expects to have 7.7 million unique viewers for its Basic with Ads tier by the end of the year after launching in a dozen markets. It also estimates that this tier could generate $1.9 billion in ad revenues by 2027 in Western Europe alone.

 Virtually everyone agrees Netflix’s ad play will be successful. The question is whether getting into advertising changes a company which has closely guarded its own data and prided itself on forging a distinct path in the cutthroat world of entertainment.

It’s not just a Netflix dilemma though. Fundamentally the shift from pure SVOD into ads brings streaming TV closer to broadcast TV models. The popularity of linear free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels is another move in this direction as is the shift from fragmentation into aggregation. Consumers, for reasons of cost and convenience, seem to prefer one place to access live sports, music, gaming and news alongside premium TV and film

While Netflix has bolstered its gaming division, it is tech giants like Apple and Amazon as well as the muscle of Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery, which are jostling to bundle an array of digital entertainment in one place. The major difference between broadcast and streaming remains interactivity. Expect applications utilising ultra-low latency at the network edge such as gaming and Virtual reality to begin to take-off from 2023.

As the industry moves past the pandemic, charts the course of the return to the cinema, and fights for the hearts and eyes of audiences, the challenges facing entertainment companies are not just to thrive but, in some cases, to survive. While the domestic box office in 2022 is expected to land around $7.8 billion and up from 2021, it’s still 35% less than 2019. The economic impact of WFH may not be the overall solution, but it does offer creative and financial opportunities that will play a critical role in the delivery of content.

 

Riding to the rescue - remote production

InBroadcast 

p20, article here

The lack of available bandwidth, budgetary constraints, sustainability and the ability to do more with less – can remote production models solve it all? 

Micheal Pfitzner, VP, Newsroom Solutions CGI 

Working remotely requires having the right collaboration tools in place. Access to information and communication systems that work seamlessly both on-prem and in the cloud is important for journalists to research, plan and deliver their stories. Solutions that facilitate remote production maximise efficiency and improve cohesiveness across TV, radio and online, allowing journalists to work together as a true team, regardless of location. 

CGI integrated Microsoft Teams with OpenMedia, its enterprise newsroom solution, to couple team communication with the news production workflow. We also created our cloud-native ReporterApp for reporters in the field to stay connected to their newsroom and collaborate on stories to support the production process directly, from wherever they are situated. The customisable and open widget architecture allows for flexibility in workflow adaptations and enhances collaboration between editors and presenters allowing them to monitor their news production stories, rundowns and topics, saving time and boosting efficiency. 

 

Chris Merrill, Strategic Marketing Director at Grass Valley 

The challenge for many is having to do more with less. There are many events to cover, but the resources are limited. It’s difficult to get all the gear needed at the right place and the right time due to the increase in number of events compounded by supply chain restrictions in delivering gear. Furthermore, it is increasingly difficult to find talent to run the production. Remote production is seen as the primary answer to solving these issues. The biggest hurdle for adopting remote production is delays in the production chain that are visible to the operators as well as the program audience. 

AMPP’s patented time management technology is a big step forward in enabling a production workflow that feels real-time to the production team. Unchaining individual workstations from external time is possible because today, we are able to operate faster than real time using technologies that did not exist when frames-per-second timing was implemented. Frame syncs are replaced by memory buffers. AMPP adjusts buffer depth to match the timing offset required for each essence. Following this design strategy, any live production task can be carried out in what feels like real time and assembled in a linear fashion to create programming that exceeds audience expectations. 

 

Kurt Heitmann, CEO, CP Communications and Red House Streaming 

The main challenges we face on a regular basis are the lack of available bandwidth and budgetary constraints. We solve the data challenges with our bonded cellular networking and mobile IP solutions. Our bonded cellular solutions combine multiple cellular networks to stream robust, reliable streams from anywhere, ensuring plenty of bandwidth with very fast connectivity - and affordable data rates - for live video. Back at our Red House Streaming Production Center, we also now have a varied network infrastructure of 1Gb and 10Gb pipes to seamlessly manage live remote production content coming from and going to any locations globally. 

Our new Spark HD trailer was built for remote productions and is very cost-effective. This is a standalone multi camera HD production trailer that can be on site or can send multiple streams back to our control room in Saint Petersburg, FL. For REMI productions, we can encode multiple cameras and stream the signals to any location using onboard SRT encoders.   

 

This is a very affordable mobile unit for budget-conscious events and customers, including high school and college sports, worship services, concerts, and live conferences. If an on-site mobile trailer is not an option for any reason, we can ship our ProductionSTREAM flypack on short notice, which include our all-in-one camera systems and an audio VPN. This is the approach we took for the recent Cayman Islands Classic, which is a basketball tournament.  The individual cameras and announcers were streamed back to our control room and produced at our Red House Streaming Production Center. 

  

  

 

Ronen Artman, VP of Marketing, LiveU 

The way remote production workflows are set up varies from production to production, but driven by the necessities of the pandemic, adoption has dramatically increased. With LiveU, customers can reduce costs and produce reliable high-quality live events from a centralised studio control room instead of on-site production and/or satellite trucks. It allows people to think and work differently, enhancing the dynamic nature of a production and extending the reach of what’s possible to capture.  

As well as cost reduction, sustainability issues are increasingly a key part of customer conversations, with remote production central to these. We allow organisations to lower their carbon footprint as there’s no need for large teams and production trucks to travel to the site. It’s absolutely at the heart of what we do with our products and services fundamentally suited to this approach. 

We’ve closely aligned our suite of services – and industry partnerships – so customers can produce their content in a physical studio, in the cloud or in a hybrid workflow, dovetailing with their remote production. Leveraging the cloud, customers can deliver a more cost-effective, and sustainable live production together with the highest quality video performance.  

We’ve also continued to enhance our remote production workflow, increasing the capabilities of our technologies – like our Tally Light system, IP Pipe, which provide real-time remote control over network-based equipment, Audio Connect for real-time communication and Video Return, which allows crews to see what’s live on air.  

Remote production is very much the future.  

Chris Scheck, Head of Marketing Content, Lawo 

A highly anticipated trend, as far as Lawo is concerned, is that SMPTE ST2110-based IP infrastructures are now going mainstream in the broadcast, AV and corporate worlds. Networking has been an import topic for years. Combining that with software-defined hardware offers a huge flexibility boost. And adding in open-standards wide-area (WAN) connections means that some gear no longer needs to travel to the venue. 

In Germany, Belgium and in many other countries, stadiums are connected to permanent ST2110-based networks that link them to the production-hub-cum-data-centre as well as to other stakeholders, using bi-directional essence transportation. Temporary or long-term bandwidth issues for video essences are increasingly addressed via lossless and efficient compression strategies. The ultimate goal is to make more efficient use of both processing resources and crews as well as to drastically reduce carbon emissions and travel times. 

A relentless focus on the user experience and a clear vision of where the industry is headed will be more important than ever. Operators expect fast and agile tools; they need almost instant scalability; they appreciate the ability to set any and all devices from a single location with just the right amount of parameter complexity; and they wish to protect their network and content from intruders. This is being addressed with Lawo’s HOME management platform for IP infrastructures. 

In the light of shrinking budgets, and with a view to serving operators even more efficiently, the software-defined approach for video and audio hardware is bound to evolve beyond the current horizon. And staying on top of looming paradigm shifts, shaping them as they materialise, will be more important than ever before. 

 

Steven Bilow, Product Marketing Manager, Telestream 

Remote production over IP has proven its value, reliability, and quality. Top-tier broadcasters have successfully delivered some of the world's largest events using these technologies and techniques. While there are many moving parts to orchestrate, now that the path is established, more productions stand to benefit from reduced costs, streamlined workflows and enhanced sustainability. One of the many challenges with remote production is in regard to media transported over the public internet using popular technologies like SRT and RIST. While these technologies closely watch the health of the transport stream, they cannot discern the quality of the actual media being transported. To ensure the quality of the media, additional monitoring is required.  

To ensure the quality of remotely produced ST 2120 IP streams, tools like the Telestream Inspect 2110 probe continuously validate content, timing, and network health using an exception-based technique which is easy to use and understand. This provides error detection, diagnostics, and a clear indication of anomalies on any number of incoming and outgoing ST 2110 feeds. Because IP troubleshooting is more complex than point-to-point fault isolation, engineers need to be available to focus on analysis instead of searching across monitor walls in the hope of finding anomalies. Inspect 2110 allows for ‘monitor by exception’ reporting that only alerts engineering when there is something to be concerned about. When an error is detected, engineers or operators can dive deep into the impacted streams with the Telestream PRISM media analysis platform simply by clicking “view in PRISM” from the Inspect 2110 interface. This level of integrated monitoring and diagnosis is unique in the industry and is a critical part of modern quality monitoring for remote productions. 

 Graham Sharp, CEO of Broadcast Pix 

The technical challenges surrounding remote productions are getting solved with the increase in available network bandwidth and the move of many applications to the cloud or hosted environments. In my opinion, that still leaves two challenges:  

Number one: The change in the business model that remote production enables, i.e. the SaaS or pay-as-you-use transaction model. 

And two: The change in skill set as engineers and operators need to become familiar with networks and IT technology rather than video. 

The former makes it easy for a user to transition, as there are no large upfront hardware costs, but harder for the suppliers as they see their revenue decrease; the latter is a training and ease of use issue. 

Broadcast Pix are working on both. We provide network training to our staff, resellers, and users - and are always available to dial in to help set up a production. The business transition is more difficult to manage and has been slower as our clients review their budgets and get used to the monthly or annual transaction model. However, I believe the pace of change will accelerate over the coming few years! 

 

Satoshi Kanemura, President, FOR-A Americas 

There have never been more options for live and remotely produced content than there are today. But what works best from a cost, workflow, and performance perspective? If you’re looking to transition to OTT distribution, the set up involved, as well as the many formats and protocols can seem dauting. Then there are the CDN costs. Using a subscription-based model, those can escalate quickly. There are the multitude of protocols: HLS, SRT, RIST, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC, RTMP, RTSP…. And the current buzz around FAST channels includes live productions, particularly sports. With all these options, it can become confusing as to which is the right direction for your organisation. 

In terms of transitioning to an IP infrastructure from SDI for live and remote production, we believe starting with a software-defined architecture is the best approach for a cost-effective migration. Adding new functionality through software means the customer can configure the system to their needs, without additional hardware investment. It also means that hybrid production, using a variety of signal formats, can be easily accomplished.  

Our solution, SOAR-A (Software Optimised Appliance Revolutionised by FOR-A), is a live remote production system with sub-second latency, synchronised A/V, and expandability, on a highly secure platform. SOAR-A boasts an expandable IP-based architecture and supports the conversion and delivery of SD, HD, 4K and NDI to ST 2110 signals. Compatible with WebRTC and using RIST, the entire SOAR-A workflow enables REMI production and gateway-free streaming.    

Never buy something for a single purpose that you can’t build upon. You may be using it to handle only video and Dante signals now, but you can expand that over the course of how your system, control room, and programming grows. Once you’ve purchased the main hardware, you can keep expanding that to include so much more. With SOAR-A, you can build for the future. 

 

Rick Seegull, SVP Technology & Business Development, Riedel 

With supply chain challenges, talent shortages and concern for our environment, our customers are looking for ways to create systems that will scale in size and functionality with the resources they have and repurpose equipment going forward. They are looking for lightweight, space-saving, and low-energy solutions that are available while adding and not compromising on capability and quality. 

Our products are designed with environmental impact and ease-of-use in mind while innovating technology to push the bounds of sports and other applications. Simplylive, a recent Riedel acquisition, provides software-defined remote and distributed production tools, eliminating the need for massive rooms of equipment and extensive travel costs (dollars, time, environmental impact) of operators.  These proven production tools allow operators to be anywhere and allow the system to scale up or down easily.  

In addition, Riedel concentrates resources on user interfaces, which is evident in the 1200 Series Smartpanels. These multipurpose control panels condense separate functions onto one user panel, displacing several disparate single-function panels. Software apps allow the panel to be an intercom, a routing panel, an audio monitoring device, or all the above, reducing space and bridging several workflows, and to be repurposed as facilities grow or change. Finally, Riedel’s MediorNet-IP Muons are the ultimate in small-form-factor functionality, placing encoding, decoding, gateways, and other signal processing on an SFP, ideally utilized in VirtU frames or COTS IP switches. 

 

Raúl Alba, Director of Solutions Marketing Media & Cloud, Avid 

One of the biggest challenges we hear from broadcast customers is making high quality content available to everyone who needs to work on it in a timely fashion, wherever each team member is based. Another important challenge is ensuring that all team members are coordinated and aligned, and work efficiently together. Broadcasters able to meet these challenges – with teams set up to work from anywhere – can benefit from a global talent pool, and the ability to reduce their real estate costs in prime locations. 

Avid’s Edit On Demand product as offering a different way to consume Avid products. It is deployed in the cloud as a service, and accessible from anywhere, to enable collaboration across the media production process.  

Edit On Demand provides a full SaaS-based virtual post-production environment in the cloud—complete with cloud-optimized Media Composer software and Avid NEXIS storage.  Broadcasters can easily ramp up projects at a moment’s notice, with no cloud expertise necessary. 

For remote production, MediaCentral Stream handles compressed IP ingest from anywhere, and playout to anywhere.  Web-based MediaCentral Cloud UX with Collaborate (web, mobile and applications) enables task creation, project tracking, and content sharing.   

For more sophisticated production environments, Avid’s Media Production in the Cloud initiative provides a complete end-to-end set of workflows that can be adapted to the needs of any media company. 

 

Daniel Robinson, Head of Research and Development, Pebble 

We’re seeing more broadcasters navigating the challenges of hybrid cloud playout as they move towards a virtualised environment for their operations. They want the confidence of on-premises with the flexibility of the cloud, as many of them aren’t ready to jump into an all-cloud solution. Maintaining a hybrid approach offers the flexibility to keep options open for broadcasters, be it for future expansion or the ability to launch pop-up/event channels more easily. Continuing with on-premises operations in parallel with deploying cloud solutions maintains the assurance of bringing channels to air - reliably.  

Our solutions are built around the need for a dependable and gradual move to the cloud and IP.   Pebble Remote is a web-based control and monitoring solution, where broadcasters can secure remote access to their playout environment; critical for systems that comprise of multiple channels and playout sites.  

Pebble Control is a self-contained, scalable, and easy-to-configure IP connection management system. It enables broadcasters to make the leap to an all-IP facility without the need to deploy a bespoke enterprise solution. We have recently announced a new product owner to drive forward plans to develop next-generation functionality of Pebble Control, to continue achieving interoperability whilst leveraging open standards.  

 Oceans, Pebble’s next-generation technology platform, is built for all clouds, but equally happy on-premises. It allows broadcasters to deploy, manage, host and upgrade their broadcast workflows and services from a single intuitive unified interface, now and in the IP future. 

Igor Vitiorets, CTO, slomo.tv 

All remote solutions should produce good quality video content, but not diffuse the areas of responsibility of the personnel involved. Technicians and cameramen must stay on site. PTZ cameras even with AI control cannot fully replace humans, especially at large and important events. At the same time, the workplaces of some personnel such as directors, sound engineers, broadcast producers and replay operators can be easily moved from OB van to a remote location. The remote workplace requires a broadband and fast Internet channel with minimal latency and the ability of the server to work in this mode. Slomo.tv replay servers with make this possible.  

The challenge is to protect broadcasting from various issues related to unwanted, unlawful or improper behaviour by participants, viewers or third parties. Inappropriate footage on the air can result in termination of a broadcaster's advertising contracts, fines, or revocation of the license. A specialised ‘security system’ is needed. 

To protect the broadcaster from undesired issues, we have developed LB Sentinel, a live content control solution based on Simple R servers. The LB Sentinel solution delays the signal and provides the ability to overlap both audio and video with different AV clips on air. Since audio and video clips can be different, and buffer delays can be adjusted from 2 to 60 seconds, these ‘overlaps’ look organic, and do not disrupt the viewing experience.  

An AI-based detection system can be connected to the LB Sentinel, but experience has shown that trained personnel are currently much more reliable. The system can run on two servers in parallel, which provides maximum security for the most important events.