BBC Gets Audience Involved in Taster

Streaming Media

The BBC is embracing online feedback from audiences to help it shape new content formats by offering viewers a chance to comment on and rate works in progress.

http://www.StreamingMediaGlobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/BBC-Gets-Audience-Involved-in-Taster-101696.aspx

Much like Amazon Studios pilot season, BBC Taster, which launched today, corrals a number of experimental ideas with the aim of letting audiences direct which go further in development.

The launch forms part of a wider strategy by the broadcaster to shift more of its emphasis online. This includes the forthcoming premiere of 25 shows on iPlayer, shows which would previously have been aired first on linear channels.

In a statement, Danny Cohen, director of BBC TV, said: “We’ve always pushed the boundaries with our creative programming and innovative digital services. These two worlds are coming together and opening up new possibilities for telling stories. BBC Taster will help ensure we stay at the forefront and better serve audiences now and in the future. It’s an exciting opportunity for our world-class production teams to take more creative risks online, try their ideas out and put them in the hands of audiences.”

The background, of course, is increased competition from Netflix and YouTube as a result of the proliferation of mobile devices and consequent viewing of content away from the TV.

Tablets are in 44% of UK households, and 61% of UK adults own a smartphone—including 88% of 16-to-24-year-olds, according to Ofcom. BBC Online receives as much traffic from mobiles as it does from PCs. Social media also plays an increasingly important role among youth audiences, notes the BBC, with 75% of British 16-to-24-year-olds claiming to use social networking sites.

At launch, BBC Taster features ideas from online service BBC iPlayer, News, Radio 1, Natural History, Drama, Current Affairs and Arts.

BBC iPlayer Shuffle, for example is described as "a continuous video player" that will serve up content based on a viewer's previous searches; KneeJerk is a platform for improvised comedy taking its cue from the week's trending tweets, GIFs, and Vines. Body Language offers to mash up poetry with video and stills.

Another idea, which has long been in gestation at BBC Future Media, is to invite audiences of BBC World Service radio to crowd curate its archive of 36,000 programmes by tagging content they either like or dislike. There is also repackaged interview material which has not made it to broadcast and behind the scenes footage of a travel documentary series, repackaged for viewers to better select which part they wish to view on-demand.

Last week the BBC governing body BBC Trust launched a six-month evaluation of the closure of linear channel BBC3. The BBC previously announced its intention to move the entire channel online in order to save costs and, it argued, to better serve the channel's youth-oriented audience.

Independent production companies Hat Trick and Avalon have tabled a bid to take the channel off the BBC's hands and run it at an increased budget of £100m a year, up from the current £81m.

The corporation is also set to debut 30 to 50 hours of programming from BBC1, BBC2, BBC4, and its children’s channels on iPlayer and in advance of transmission.

“The competitive environment for BBC iPlayer is set to become significantly more challenging as major global VOD providers such as Netflix and Amazon establish a foothold in the market,” said the BBC in a statement.

“In order to compete (and thus retain our ability to deliver public value) BBC iPlayer must continue to improve, taking fuller advantage of the characteristics of the internet.”

NEP Carries Super Bowl Responsibility Over The Line

Broadcast Bridge

https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/1210/nep-carries-super-bowl-responsibility-over-the-line

There are select sports which attract an audience far beyond that of the immediate game or fan base. The Super Bowl is one such event. And all things being equal, it is on track to exceed last year’s record 111.5 million viewers to become the most viewed telecast not only of 2015 but of all time in the US.

It's an event that dominates the US TV schedule and dwarfs rival events like the FIFA World Cup domestically. Super Bowl XLIX will also be aired in 128 countries in 25 languages, racking up further eyeballs, even if the event overseas does not rate on a par with a World Cup or Olympic Games. All in, it's a lot of responsibility for NBC and NEP, the host producer and host outside broadcaster respectively, of this year's pictures.

“The Super Bowl has become more of an event outside of what happens on the field because it's a time when family and friends get together,” says Mike Werteen, co-president of NEP's US mobile division. “In the business, everybody compares their production to the scale of the Super Bowl because it is the most watched event in the US.”

NEP may send more resources to other events but no event entails quite the amount of pressure as the Super Bowl. It will have 27 trailers at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona by the end of next week, servicing domestic clients NBC, CBS (which hosts in 2016 with NEP as partner), DirecTV and ESPN as well providing the host feed direct for NFL Films which will transmit the pictures to international rights holders. NEP will have 70 engineers, drivers and specialist technical managers on-site.

All the domestic and world camera feeds for the pre-/ match and post-match will be fed into a central distribution hub (NEP's ESU truck) and made available for any broadcaster in the compound to access. One key discussion is around slo-motion coverage. NBC, says Werteen, is seeking greater clarity in replays. “There are two ways that can be done; one is by increasing the frame rate and there are a significant number of HFR cameras at the game. The second is to use 4K UHD and integrate that into the 1080i feed.

“Since every play is so important anything that enables the camera operator to stay wider so as to not miss any potential action, and then to have that available as a replay option, is important,” he explains.

“The sheer technical requirement, the logistics, the number of credential led staff has grown significantly over the past decade. The domestic game coverage, the world feed and the half time show – each is an individual production and all have grown in size and scale.”

NEP parked its first truck at the venue on January 12. It is providing a range of services for the shoulder programming for a number of content aggregators through the week leading up to the game weekend.

Planning has understandably been in the works for some time. “It was not coincidental that we built NBC a new truck [ND1] for NBC's Sunday Night Football coverage in the year that they are in charge of the host feed for the Super Bowl,” says Werteen. “We knew this was going to be an enormous year for them. Discussions about the level of Super Bowl coverage began two years ago.”

NEP's new flagship ND1 was on the road last summer and is planned to take the lead in Super Bowl coverage for 2016 (CBS host) and 2017 (Fox host). It is actually designed as four interconnecting trailers which can be configured according to a client’s requirement. Its HD infrastructure is connected to a Grass Valley Kayenne 9 ME mixer, Calrec Artemis and Apollo audio consoles and 100 channels of EVS recording on XT3s.

If anything says the event is not about pure sport it's the half-time extravaganza where coverage turns from sports to live pop concert. NEP is in charge of output for this too. Advertisers are expected to pay $4 million for a 30-second commercial in the slots leading up to the half-time break.

It's an exceptionally busy period for the company. This week it is in Aspen covering the Winter X Games for ESPN and it will send a further complement of trucks to Scottsdale Arizona for CBS coverage of the Phoenix Open PGA tournament, which runs simultaneously with the football game.

EE to test LTE Broadcast at Wembley; aims to make service ‘better than TV’

Sports Video Group

Mobile operator EE is lining up its next major trial of LTE Broadcast this summer and is set to feature 4K video for the first time. It expects commercial deployments of the technology in-stadia to begin from Q1, 2016. http://svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/ee-to-test-lte-broadcast-at-wembley-aims-to-make-service-better-than-tv/  SVG Europe understands which event is being targeted although EE will only publicly refer to the trial at Wembley as occurring ‘during a high profile sporting event’.

“We know LTE works,” says Matt Stagg, principal strategist, EE. “What we want to do now is lead on how good you can make the experience. We’re looking to do a very feature rich trial at Wembley that will stretch the use of the technology to enhance the experience of watching live sports.”

Features of the trial will include multiple replays, multiple camera angles and realtime statistics.

“We want to push the broadcast industry,” says Stagg. “We don’t see this technology as one which can just be used to do the same only more efficiently. We see LTE Broadcast as being able to improve on broadcast by making it a superb experience that people will see and will have to have.”

Further deployments at other large sports events such as Tour De France and London Marathon are anticipated by EE. By the end of the year EE also plans trials of linear TV over LTE Broadcast and predicts that by 2017 LTE Broadcast will start to be commonplace.

LTE Broadcast uses evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) to stream live and on-demand data more efficiently over a LTE/4G network than current one-to-one methods.

EE believes sports delivered over eMBMS will be a big driver for 4K mobile video. Furthermore, it believes eMBMS is the answer to ensuring premium live content is delivered at an economical cost to serve for live sporting events.

Further benefits, according to EE, include reduction in network demand during live events, the protection of other users from slow speeds, and guaranteed quality of experience for both HD and UHD.

“Everybody at the moment has done in-stadia tests and this is a solid application,” he adds. “But we see a bigger use case in delivering a feature-rich experience outside stadia. The issue is that there are spikes in the network around the streaming of live sports events in certain areas. A Saturday afternoon around Premier League football stadia, for example, exhibits high spikes in demand which has the potential to mean that no one gets a really great experience.

“LTE Broadcast can alleviate that but at the same there’s no need to have a broadcast version of what you can get today. Let’s make it better than TV.”

This can be achieved because LTE Broadcast can be used alongside interactivity achieved through unicast. “You could live stream the game over LTE and offer bespoke fan commentary, for example, multiple replays, camera angles, and all manner of other interactivity via unicast,” Stagg explains.

Maintaining continuity

While LTE Broadcast has been proven at numerous trials, predominantly in sports arenas over the past year, there are some aspects that need further work.

“We’re not sure if anybody has cracked the mobility aspect,” he suggests. “What happens when you move between a broadcast area to a non-broadcast area and vice versa. We need to maintain continuity – to swap between unicast and broadcast. That’s one area we haven’t tested.”

Another test is dynamic switching of streams within a cell. “One of the main advantages over previous iterations of mobile TV is LTE Broadcast’s ability to be able to switch between unicast and broadcast based on configurations that the operator has set. Once you see multiple people watching a live stream of an event you should be able to switch from unicast to broadcast to enable unlimited capacity for viewing the same live stream.”

There are a number of unique factors that need to taken into account when applying LTE Broadcast to ‘sports on the go’. Factors like the time of day and the popularity of the event change the demand profile but are easier to predict than the score or popularity during knockout stages.

Last year EE demonstrated LTE Broadcast outside a stadia and in the UK for the first time at the Commonwealth Games. The two-year collaboration involved the BBC, Samsung and Huawei. Three live HD streams were sent successfully to select handsets. The test included integration of Google Maps where users could click on a Google Map of the Games venues and receive specific streams from the venue. A new iPlayer App was developed exclusively for the demo.

The Wembley test will not be public but involve 20-30 handsets. Smartphones equipped with LTE Broadcast chips have yet to brought to mass market.

“There is a clear need to drive device density to realise the true potential of the technology,” says Stagg.

The largest LTE Broadcast trial was conducted by China Telecom and Huawei around the Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing last summer, at which 18000 Huawei eMBMS-enabled devices were handed out free-of-charge to Games volunteers and members of the athletes village.

Consumer handsets

Aside from equipment upgrades to the network’s core and possible software upgrades to cell towers, the main technical impediment to Broadcast LTE rollout is the lack of eMMBS capable consumer handsets.

4G LTE coverage is rapidly being rolled out by Vodafone, EE and other operators and will be ubiquitous across the UK by the start of 2016.

“We wouldn’t do a ‘big bang’ and turn everything Broadcast LTE at once. We’d go to specific areas around stadia such as around Wimbledon where all these spikes are.”

He adds: “Sports content owners and rights holders will have the opportunity to monetise content, network operators can drive up-take of current services and use these new experiences to differentiate their network.

“With this organic growth we can move toward other value add services over LTE Broadcast like public service broadcasting, mass software downloads, digital signage, traffic alerts, weather warnings, machine to machine communication. Anything where multiple devices require a download of the same content is broadcastable.”

There are standardisation issues that need harmonising. EE champions the Mobile Video Alliance, which it co-founded last year (and which Stagg chairs), with the aim of identifying, developing and advocating technologies that harmonise the delivery of AV content to mobile.

EE and Wembley

Meanwhile, EE struck a sponsorship deal with Wembley last year to help deliver the FA’s plans to make the stadia the most advanced connected sports venue in the world by 2016. It has begun a vast network upgrade programme at the stadium to ensure every visitor through the gates can stay connected, even with a 90,000 capacity crowd on event days.

It will shortly switch on its 4G+ network providing speeds of up to 300Mbps and then begin trials of 400Mbps network technology that the operator claims will make Wembley the fastest connected stadium in the world.

The vision to make Wembley the world’s best connected stadium goes beyond installing a world-leading network. Advanced mobile ticketing solutions are already in place, with EE customers also able to use contactless mobile payments at various concessions stands, and work is also ongoing with regard to more service and engagement innovations.

From early 2015 the iconic arch will ‘act as the digital heartbeat of the stadium’, says EE. The arch’s LED lights will react to significant moments such as goals scored and crowd noise, and fans will even be able to control them via social media.

BBC R&D tests virtual reality with BBC Philharmonic

Broadcast

BBC R&D has produced a virtual reality pilot of a BBC Philharmonic performance as part of ongoing tests into the format.

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/broadcasters/bbc-rd-tests-virtual-reality-with-bbc-philharmonic/5081926.article?blocktitle=Latest-News&contentID=2319

The experimental short, which is not planned to made publicly available, was shot last month and is being used to assess the value of VR content to licence fee payers.

“We’re following the same approach we took to 3DTV,” said section leader of immersive & interactive content Graham Thomas. “We’re not spending a huge amount of money but we are testing VR in particular programme areas to assess what works and what impact it has on other areas of work.”

Further tests have involved BBC 6 Music and a 360-degree live video stream to Oculus Rift headgear from the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow last year. Tests with the BBC Natural History Unit are under discussion.

“VR may work for some natural history, in rainforests or underwater, where you have the ability to look around and see your environment,” said Thomas. “However trying to film wildlife with very long lenses in a 360-degree virtual world may only make you wish for a pair of binoculars.”

BBC R&D’s interest stems from its work in spatial audio - creating cinema style surround sound with a standard set of headphones. It has devised a tool to help sound editors match spatial audio to 360-degree video and is using this to post-produce the VR music pilots.

“If you’re experiencing a concert hall in VR you need an accurate understanding of the relationship between what you are hearing in front of you and from each side,” says Thomas.

The VR research is also feeding into BBC R&D’s examination of higher dynamic range for better quality Ultra HD.

“In a 360-degree video of a sports stadia, for example, you are capturing a scene in all directions including areas of bright sunlight or dark shadows,” Thomas explains. “Whereas the iris of conventional cameras can be adjusted to pick out a range of contrasts there are currently restrictions on this in 360 coverage but there are areas of overlap we are exploring.”

In a separate VR experiment last June, BBC Future Media and London production firm Visualise filmed behind the scenes at the BBC newsroom with presenter Fiona Bruce.

Why Octocopters are better than Quadcopters

TheBrodcastBridge 
What is the point of having eight motors/propellers when wouldn’t four be more efficient?  And what is the difference between hobbyist and commercial drones? https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/1180/why-octocopters-are-better-than-quadcopters

Automation in a virtual environment

TVB Europe  - p24 

The question taxing the minds of broadcast CTOs is whether virtualised playout is as secure, as highly available and as cost-effective as existing hardware provision.

http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/tvbe_january_2015_digital_edition/0

UAV FAQs... What Producers Need to Know

Published in Shots 153

They're the new must-have piece of kit; but how viable are drones for professional film production? Have you taken your robot out for a flight yet? Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), this year's gadget-person's gadget, will have been found under many a Christmas tree and it's a fad unlikely to fade. Such is the buzz around remote controlled flying machines that seeing them in our skies could soon become as commonplace as having parcels hovered to your doorstep by Amazon.

http://www.shots.net/features/article/85979/uav-faqs...-what-producers-need-to-know