IBC
Soccer leads women’s sports into bidding wars, AI driven by the market,
an Olympics in front of crowds and opportunities for the neurodiverse – all
trends to spot in the new year.
article here
The 2023 FIFA Women’s
World Cup final in August attracted record viewing figures pretty much
everywhere, underlining a breakthrough year for women’s sport.
Spain defeated England 1-0
in the final in Sydney, with a record 12 million viewers watching in the UK on
BBC One (higher than the men’s Wimbledon final last July which peaked at 11.3
million).
In Spain, 5.6 million
watched the final, and it peaked at 7.4 million viewers, with data published by
Barlovento Comunicacion saying that 56.2% of the Spanish television audience
were male.
The tournament contributed
to an increase in women’s sport viewing figures this year, according to data
from the Women’s Sport Trust (WST). International women’s sporting
events were watched by viewers for nine hours 58 minutes on average, the WST
found. including Golf’s Solheim Cup, England women’s cricket team and the
Netball World Cup.
Led by football, women’s
elite sports are expected to break through the billion-dollar revenue mark for
the first time in 2024, according to Deloitte.
“There is still more to be
done in translating international success into [regular] viewing,” the WST
said. Which is why broadcast rights for women’s sports are reaching all-time
highs.
The new deal for the
National Women’s Soccer League is a case in point. The NWSL secured US$60m per
season for 118 live matches from CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon and Scripps Sports -
forty times the $1.5m previously paid for women’s soccer.
This will be a template
for a bidding war beginning January 2024 for a fresh round of rights to the
WSL.
The current deal for £8
million per season was signed in 2021 and shared between Sky and the BBC. The
number of WSL games televised will likely increase and could lead to Sky and
TNT Sports (formerly BT Sport) sharing live rights, as they do for the Premier
League.
TNT Sports meanwhile is
doubling down on women’s sports coverage. It has licenced rights from DAZN to
co-broadcast UEFA Women’s Champions League games, including the final,
announced a new deal to broadcast 20 games from Women’s Premiership Rugby each
season and continues to cover cycling’s women’s World Tour (via Eurosport) and
the Tour de France Femmes.
Ahead of Olympic year the
International Olympic Committee also wants to get ahead of the curve.
“Historically, televised sports have predominantly focused on male athletes,
and the teams working behind the scenes have often been dominated by men as
well. While some progress has been made in getting women into producer-type
roles, there remains a glaring underrepresentation of women in technical
positions, particularly as camera operators.”
It’s a challenge that
Olympic broadcast unit OBS is OBS is determined to address with a training
initiative aimed at increasing the number of women in venue production teams.
Neurodiversity
breaks concrete ceiling
The film and TV industry’s
treatment of disability was slammed this year by His Dark Materials screenwriter
Jack Thorne. In the MacTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh TV Festival he accused the
industry of “utterly and totally” failing disabled people and called for new
quotas to improve representation.
“The TV world is stacked
against the telling of disabled stories with disabled talent,” he said.
Line of Duty star Tommy Jessop and his film-maker brother
shone a light on just how hard it is to break into Hollywood when they pitched
producers with a Down’s syndrome superhero movie. Their efforts were recorded
in a BBC documentary. Voices like his and Thorne’s are changing the inclusion
debate.
“I am starting to see that
cultural shift slowly begin to open up more opportunities to deaf actors…I am
seeing more doors being opened,” said Troy Kotsur, the Oscar winning star
of Coda (2022) at a recent Variety conference on the topic.
UK indie Making Space
Media, struck a production deal with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine for
unscripted content centred on “the largest and most overlooked a misrepresented
community on the planet.” Making Space co-founder, the Bafta nominated wheelchair
enabled presenter Sophie Morgan also formed disabled-led talent management
agency C Talent.
Over and above on-screen
and BTS roles, businesses see benefits in widening their employment net. By
2027, a quarter of Fortune 500 companies will actively recruit neurodiverse
talent with conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia to improve business performance,
according to a report by analysts Gartner.
“Neurodiversity and
cognitive diversity are superpowers for organisations,” said Gartner’s Leigh
McMullen. “When you have cognitively diverse people, they see problems in
different ways. They see opportunities in different ways.”
Female editors
clean sweep Oscar
The Best Editing Oscar
race could be dominated by female talent. The shortlist is likely to include
three-time Academy Award winner Thelma Schoonmaker who’s latest and 22nd film
with Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon, confronts the
mythology of How The West Was Won. The 83-year old will be no sentimental pick.
She deserves to be rewarded but will face stiff competition from Jennifer Lame
who propelled the ticking time bomb tension of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer from
scenes heavily with dialogue and light on action.
Maestro, another biopic, of conductor/composer Leonard
Bernstein starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, has scenes cut to
Bernstein’s music by editor Michelle Tesoro while period epic, Napoleon,
was cut by Ridley Scott’s regular editor (and Oscar winner for Platoon)
Claire Simpson (she is also editing Gladiator 2) with Sam Restivo.
A full hand of five female
nominees could be completed by Hilda Rasula who worked with Cord Jefferson to
make idiosyncratic and well received indie drama American Fiction.
Spamming this possibility are strong contenders like Nick Houy who cut billion-dollar
box office hit Barbie and Greek editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis
for Yargos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, described as a twisted
‘Frankenstein’ gender-bender.
Either way, after decades
of going under the radar, female editors are very much top of the game in this
category.
In AI, the
market now rules the science
One year on from the
release by OpenAI of ChatGPT and it’s clear that AI was the big story of 2023
and will be the big story next year and then some. ChatGPT itself has done many
things including raising mainstream awareness of AI itself, but arguably its
biggest impact has been in creating a market, essentially from scratch, for
Generative AI tools.
“Before ChatGPT there was
no AI market,” observed Alberto Romero. “No startup was founded to build
AI tools or built on top of AI tools. AI was purely a R&D discipline. Now,
it’s the opposite: AI is an industry first and then a science.”
OpenAI is now going
further and it launching a platform for creating and discovering custom
versions of ChatGPT.
The company says it will
offer “custom versions” of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose.”
These ‘GPTs’ can be made with no coding experience, and can be as simple or
complex as you like.
It is an ambitious vision
for expanding OpenAI’s business by selling its technology directly to
consumers. On the flipside, users will get paid for making chatbots sold on the
company’s marketplace.
As Gerrit De Vynck of the
Washington Post pointed out, “Paying users for the best chatbots evokes the way
YouTube built its multibillion-dollar empire by sharing ad and subscription
revenue to incentivize people to make videos on its site. Open AI envisions
people spending more time directly in its own app, building their own tools and
using those made by others.”
It is also an indication
that OpenAI intends to compete with Big Tech companies, rather than serve as a
provider of back-end technology for them. The wrinkle there is that Microsoft
has a multibillion-dollar deal for access to OpenAI’s tech and the
OpenAI store neatly circumvents Apple’s app store.
More than 2 million
developers are using OpenAI’s tools to build their own AI products and
businesses, and more than 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI,
the company said. About 100 million people used ChatGPT every week.
More than one commentator
observed that the public presentation, in a giant venue in San Francisco,
fronted by (once ousted then returned) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, had more than a
little of the Steve Jobs’ fanaticism about it.
“If you give people better
tools they can change the world,” Altman said, explaining how people without
technical backgrounds could make their own niche AI assistants. He
continued: “We will all have superpowers on demand.”
Said Romero, “ChatGPT
wasn’t a technical achievement but a jump in usability, accessibility, and user
experience. It proved, like no other tool in history that AI was no longer a
feature embedded in larger software products, but an entire industry. In turn,
this started a gold rush like we haven’t seen since smartphone apps or the
dot-com bubble. Until now, science was in charge, now the rules of the market
govern the advancement of AI.”
A battleground for 2024 is
where the market comes up against the regulators, with the key legislation in
GDPR and AI Act going through the EU and a likely benchmark for protecting or
curtailing the risks of AI misuse worldwide.
Excitement
Ahead of Olympics 2024
After the last Summer
Games was played in solitary confinement thanks to the pandemic, we should be
excited for atmosphere of an Olympics on European soil. The French authorities
though will be on red alert for security scares in the capital.
Paris’ most iconic
locations and landmarks will serve as the stage for the XXXIII Olympiad, with
OBS, the host broadcaster, planning to produce more hours than ever - some
11,000 –- including more athlete-centric coverage, behind-the-scenes material,
pre-and post-competition.
OBS will also deploy cinematic
lenses for the first time, with shallower depths of field to help convey the
athletes’ emotions. It will increase its use of data including the number of
multi-camera replay systems as well as dynamic graphics such as live biometrics
data and augmented reality overlays.
Cloud-based tools enabling
live signal distribution and remote production will enable OBS to achieve “more
with less”, it says. Cloud will offer broadcasters “smarter, more agile, and
highly efficient solutions” while reducing physical space and power demands at
the venues and the International Broadcast Centre. As a result, Paris 2024
stands to benefit from substantial cost and carbon savings, the IOC claim.
With Australia deciding
the host of the Commonwealth Games too expensive and with Winter Olympics
increasingly devoid of actual winter conditions (will the Italians need to pump
artificial snow into the Alps when it hosts the next Games in 2026?), we should
all hold them to account.
Hollywood
Green Lights Gaming IP
The success in 2023
of The Last of Us and feature animation The Super
Mario Bros. Movie not to mention the reality show Squid Game on
Netflix has convinced Hollywood that games can finally be adapted in a way that
speaks to both fans of the original and lean back newbie viewers alike.
“Hollywood is looking to
games for new IP that they can expand and monetise, and game companies are
eyeing TV and film collaborations to help make their IP work harder and offset
soaring game development costs,” notes Deloitte TMT.
It’s not just about
capitalising on IP though; it’s about creating a new form of entertainment that
captivates audiences across multiple platforms. High-performing gaming IPs are
expanding across media formats, reaching broader audiences and increasing their
overall franchise value.
“Gaming platforms are
giving users the tools to create their own games, which could lead to a boom in
quality content, but could be a threat to their own business longer term,”
noted Jana Arbanas, vice chair of Deloitte, in a statement. “And fans of top franchises
will see their favourite characters and stories in both games and movies. It’s
a crucial time as the industry finds new and profitable ways to keep audiences
engaged.”
The eagerly awaited Squid
Game 2 could also be released by this time next year having started a
ten month shoot in July 2023. A third outing is already in the works. Green
light. Let the games begin.
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