MAM: From Centre Court to Second Screen

Broadcast

Traditional MAMs are too slow for fast turnaround sports, but asset management remains vital to exploit digital rights for second screen and for archive. A look at how four sports producers use MAM.

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Wimbledon and Rugby World Cup

IMG manages the archive rights for both the AELTC for Wimbledon and World Rugby for this summer's World Cup. Asset management workflow is similar in both cases.

“The live feeds are recorded into EVS and logged and clipped using EVS IP Director as live and sent to Avid for quick turnaround,” explains Dave Shield, SVP Global Director of Engineering & Technology at IMG. “Where heavier editing is required the material resides on near line Avid ISIS and accessed for browsing via Avid Interplay Production Asset Management or by IPD.”

Finished programming is sent to the archive. “For Wimbledon this means keeping whole matches as well as finished daily highlights packages and any digital clips published online. The MAM is not really used in live production, it comes into its own as a media management process at the end.”

IMG's MAM is from Ardome, software acquired by Vizrt and incorporated into its latest MAM Viz One to which IMG will be upgrading by year end.

Henley Royal Regatta

For the first time since 1968, boating extravaganza Henley Royal Regatta was broadcast live. Earlier this month, eight hours a day over five days of action was live streamed to the Regatta's YouTube channel under production command of Sunset+Vine Digital.

“The workflow is similar to the one we employ for Crufts,” explains James Abraham, S+V's digital strategy director.

Working with facility partner Timeline, S+V ingest RF feeds from drones, hoists, Thames-side positions and ENG cameras, plus onboard GoPros into a nearby flyaway gallery where the world feed was cut by editorial director Michael Cole. Streaming specialist Nexus Entertainment encoded the content, published online and provided a duplicate stream for producers to assemble a 20-minute daily highlights show and individual clips of all 200 races.

Logging for the event was nowhere near as complicated as the mammoth data collection that went into S+V's host broadcast of the Commonwealth Games - but just as important.

“The track is a well-defined straight mile so we know where we are in a clip and we've known the names of teams, coxes, coaches and schools for months to prepare stories,” says Abraham. “We took expert advice to understand who was playing for a Team GB place and where any hysterics might come from.”

Metadata is held with the video in perpetuity. “It is important to us and Henley that if someone rows for a school today and they make the Olympic team for Tokyo 2020 then we are able to find that footage and react to it.

“There are a lot of assumptions that Henley is simply a posh day out – a perception which used to exist about Wimbledon,” he adds. “It is possible to elevate the sport to a wider audience and show that this is not about lifestyle but a true bluechip sports event that represents one of the pinnacles of rowing. Henley needed to invest in broadcast in order to raise its brand profile and an internet-based solution helps them reach a wider audience. The story we are telling is able to give context to the athletes and that is only possible with an editorially-led approach to asset management.”

US Golf Majors

US media management and distribution company T3Media has honed its MAM over a decade in live sports and claims major US golf tournaments as clients. For these events it negotiates with the host broadcaster to access select feeds (from up to 100 cameras ringing the course) and pulls them into EVS servers which amount to 20TB or 300 hours over four days.

The archive is used to post produce tournament packages and acts as a repository into which rights holders can dip at any time including augmenting coverage in the build up to the following year's tournament.

According to T3Media, the host broadcaster (Fox Sports in the case of the US Open in June) is able to access the archive in some cases faster than from their own EVS recordings. T3Media also produces around 700 clipped highlights (such as a Rory McIlroy birdie and all the approach shots), encodes and publishes those to the organiser's live mobile app in about 15 minutes.

The heart of the operation is T3Media's Library Manager which gives users access to frame accurate previews of every piece of archived content, and tools that create search terms to quickly locate a specific moment.

“The software provides the means to load, review, and add frame accurate metadata to assets,” explains explains Greg Lose, T3Media SVP product and engineering.. “Users interact with the tool’s video player to create custom category timelines (such as scene, legal, descriptive or trivia) and vocabularies and can use it to edit, preview and export metadata. The tool supports both title-level metadata (such as title, talent roster) and frame-based metadata at the moment of its creation (such as sports play-by-play, scene detection).”

It's a process which could be elevated in partnership with tennis federation USTA for whom T3Media also works. “We would take the data feed produced by IBM detailing the speed, type and tracking of a shot and sync that to our metadata with the video,” explains Lose. “Then we'll hire loggers to input subjective description like 'Prince Charles spectating' or 'fantastic backhand' to the scientific metadata. The more we enrich the metadata the greater the possible search and discovery of those time-based moments.”

UEFA Champions League

Deltatre provides two platforms for rights holders of UEFA's production of Champions League. One is a browser-based on-demand clips distribution solution called Livex. The other is a full archive management system of content called Legacy. With up to eight matches per night, this represents a considerable operational and technical challenge.

Legacy's MAM based components are EVS based and Deltatre provides the workflow around it for contributing video content and integrating match-based metadata to auto-populate the system.

Deltatre also create video assets and related metadata that populates Legacy, such as match highlights, pre and post-match content. Editorial team's use Legacy content to then populate UEFA digital media channels (.com, social, YouTube).

The archive runs from 1992 to the present and houses all CL matches including additional ISO angles, pre/post match footage. Users are able to select footage and pull down content in a variety of formats from broadcast through to digital mezzanines, stored at Interoute in Geneva.

“All match assets are searchable on Legacy to enable the creation of fast turnaround editorial content as distinct from fast turnaround match highlights,” explains Pete Burns, Delatre's UK commercial manager. “Editorial means the creation of packages like 'goals against former clubs' or 'late winning goals' or 'great comeback compilations' during the game for playout at halftime or post-match because we have access to this wealth of content.”

Legacy combines match video with metadata which Deltatre collects on behalf of UEFA. This data feed contains automated data, such as player tracking to generate heat maps, with stats such as 'shots on target' which are logged manually by Deltatre staff in the stadium. All the data is validated to check for any inconsistencies at the company's Turin HQ before being synced with the video in Legacy.

“For fast turnaround match highlight content the traditional MAM is not really used because of time constraints,” says Burns. “We are seeing a move toward a ecosystem using Forscene (cloud-based clip assembly) that allows us to combine live video with graphics (from Deltatre's own Magma graphics platform) with data in realtime, overlaid with commentary to create match highlights. If you are creating highly reactive fast turnaround editorially-led programming it makes sense to use the archive MAM.”

Since off-the-shelf MAMs are less suitable for such near live content creation, sports producers including Deltatre prefer to develop their own bespoke MAM software.

“There's no doubt that sports archive is valuable but the real value is in live or near live content,” says Burns. “Broadcasters want to enhance their main coverage with access to a wider selection of clips and content for second screens platforms, such as web, mobile and tablet.”

That is the focus of Deltatre's latest initiative which captures a variety of camera angles, graphics and data feeds via EVS C-Cast to enhance broadcasters digital coverage. Already in use by Sky Sports forThe Ashes, the full extent of the service will be applied by UEFA from the start of the 2015-16 Champions League.

UEFA is also introducing audio watermarking, a process that involves embedding audio stamps into one of the audio tracks of the live feed. The idea is that these stamps will enable broadcasters to further market their second screen experience.

For instance, a Lionel Messi goal would be audio watermarked linking the match action to a series of relevant additional content available on the viewer’s second screen, such as further information about the player, an opportunity to view a selection of his previous Champions League goals or an Adidas e-commerce promotion.

The Evolution of MAM

Broadcast Tech p28

Media Asset Management systems are gaining increasing functionality as file-based workflows and multiplatform delivery becomes standard across the industry.

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You could ask ten different users and a dozen different vendors what they understand media asset management (MAM) to be and you'd get different answers. MAM used to simply connect storage to a layer of software with information about its contents but asset management has become fundamental to pretty much every part of production, post and distribution.

This creates its own problems, not helped by the way different MAM system vendors market their product. Where does a MAM stop and a PAM (Production Asset Management) start? Or a GAM (Graphic) for that matter? Others use terminology like media logistics or workflow orchestration. Is MAM a library management system or a end-to-end content lifecycle platform?

“Vendor driven categorisation of MAM is meaningless,” declares Petter Ole Jakobsen, CTO at Vizrt. “Our view is that MAM is changing from the task of storage to one of getting content from in-point to out-point in the fastest way and also to store it for eternity.”

Service providers have pressing need to launch channels quickly and to repurpose material for outlets including OTT on-demand and catch-up, create international versions, box sets and promos to support it all. That means knowing where content is and getting access to it fast.

“Service providers used to come to us and say 'we want some intelligent storage for our content and to deliver it to a single point,'” says Lesley Marr, COO, Deluxe Media Europe. “Now the requests are about the whole supply chain delivering to multi-platforms and not about one area or piece of kit.

“These are not new requirements but demand has massively increased as services have become outsourced and aggregated,” she says. “ITV, for example, has a VOD platform it manages in house, linear playout managed by Ericsson, content preparation managed by Deluxe, and global content produced and distributed by a range of providers. How do you tie all that together and get some intelligence in the supply chain in order to find an asset?”

A few year back MAM vendors had strengths in particularly business areas or workflow, whether that was around news, production, programme prep or archive - to the extent that some facilities ended up with multiple MAM systems or, at the very least, a lot of overlapping technology that brought about a notion of siloed cultures.

“A siloed approach is typical of the way software has been developed in the broadcast industry,” says Tony Taylor, CEO, TMD. “There can be no argument that the future will be around file-based workflows in data centre environments. This depends upon metadata: acting on it, reacting to it and enriching it as it passes between and through facilities.”

If smart MAM is better understood as metadata then gathering it starts at the camera, journeys through the production stage, incorporates mastering and formatting into deliverables such as DPP files and its retrieval from archive afterwards.

“MAM is moving further away from technical standards and deeper into the business domain where each organisation is different,” says Nick Ryan, CTO and co-founder, Nativ. “In terms of metadata, MAMs generally aim to support over-arching metadata standards (for example EBUCore) whilst also trying to provide mechanisms for flexible custom schema definitions. Rights data is even more complex and standalone rights management systems are needed and hence integration starts to play a part.”

A layered approach

It may be helpful to conceptualise a multi-platform workflow in terms of layers. At the bottom are hardware like servers, encoders and transcoders, and the content delivery networks. Above that is a control layer, which tells the hardware what to do with each piece of content. Above that is the business layer where executives examine the economics of the operation to make commercial decisions. In the middle lies asset and workflow management.

“Put simply, a CEO should be able to look at one screen – familiar to them because it is in the enterprise management layer – and make a decision to, say, put a particular programme on iTunes,” says Taylor. “That decision should pass automatically to the workflow management system which will draw on the technical metadata to determine precisely which processes are required, and implement them at the right time, again fully automatically.”

Vizrt says its latest developments will extend reach into the control room for video management ahead of playout and into post with deeper Adobe After Effects workflows.

“MAM is no longer about news or sports programming, it is also about promos and playout and live production,” says Jakobsen. “It doesn't make sense to have a number of different video management systems when the goals is to get to air really quickly.”

Is it desirable, though, to implement a one-size fits all MAM when such a system is probably not going to be 'best of breed' in all areas?

“A MAM that claims to do everything won't be doing anything to 'best in class' standards,” says Ryan. “QC, transcode, format conversion... these are all things where specialist vendors come into their own. Integration allows for existing infrastructure to be migrated gradually: customers don't want to hear that investing in new MAM capabilities means that several other tools they have invested in and standardised on will no longer be used.”

This doesn't mean that the service as a whole can't appear to the end user as one system and is where workflow orchestration together with integration come to the fore.

“Focusing on a single system interface may not be the most best approach,” advises Ryan. “Users across the organisation in operations, legal, technical or craft edit need to access the system via an interface that is appropriate and familiar to them.”

Taylor says its “ridiculous” that the media industry can think about multi-platform delivery in anything other than a single workflow environment: “Conceptually, you are delivering your content to your audience. It is one concept, so how can it be anything other than one workflow environment?”

Broadcast engineers have always chosen the right set of functionality and performance for a specific installation and this is unlikely to change. “As we move into the IT-centric and Cloud era, we have to find ways to maintain and simplify that choice,” argues Taylor.

Some MAM vendors make a virtue of a service-oriented architecture that allows their software to easily hook into that of third party storage, edit, QC or playout systems while maintaining consistent metadata.

“The new generation of MAM feature centralised catalogues and a core infrastructure that have workflow and task-specific tool sets for each business area enabling media organisations to deploy a single MAM for individual parts of the business or enterprise-wide,” argues Ben Davenport, marketing director, Dalet.

“The ability to integrate tools from a range of vendors is perhaps the most critical element in any installation,” he says. “The tool set requirements are significant and also constantly changing. The industry may talk of 'swiss-army-knife' media processors but there is very rarely a single tool that will handle all requirements and even more rarely one that will do so well.”

With workflows this complex what clients seem to prioritise is transparency. “They need to understand where they are in the process,” says Marr.

box: What is an asset?

The notion of an asset has changed. With linear delivery, an asset often equates to a single episode of a series and the challenge is to ensure that the individual asset passes through the workflow in time to go on-air. In a multi-platform world, the thing being monetised may actually represent a number of episodes or an entire series.

“The nature of the workflow therefore changes quite significantly with concepts of 'bulk' work orders and grouped encode and distribution,” suggests Dalet's Davenport.

The traditional assets of MAM encompassed video, audio and images. Now closed captions and subtitles have also become primary assets.

“Considering all the ways in which captions could enter a workflow and all the manners in which legacy captions could be stored, the tool set required just to handle this critical piece of ancillary data is massive,” says Davenport. “The role of a smart MAM is to make this underlying number-crunching completely transparent to users, ensuring that they can focus on business level and creative activities.”

Is Lean Back 2.0 the Future of Multiscreen Viewing?

Streaming Media Europe

The future of TV is personal and lean back, says 3 Screen Solutions (3SS), which aims to be the company driving that ambition. Its idea is to track all available content on a platform, extract it from 'silos,' and make it available for search through a single query.

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"Lean Back 2.0 [as 3SS brands it] combines the relaxing and passive nature of linear TV with the time-independence and sheer variety of VOD in a seamless way," says co-founder and MD of Business Development Kai-Christian Borchers. "To do that, broadcasters need to create personal channels out of search and pull content out of silos into a linear order, like a playlist, which becomes the viewer's own personal channel. The service will require profiling of the user and be based on user behaviour connected to social recommendations."

3SS is part way there with at least one client. The company served as prime developer and system integrator for the viewer interface for Swisscom TV 2.0 to which over 500,000 Swiss households are now interacting (taking custom from UPC Cablecom's Horizon) and winning the Best Multiscreen TV Service award at TV Connect earlier this year.

"With Swisscom we developed a true seamless multi-screen environment in which users can navigate and search between the big screen, tablet, or smartphone, consume content on any device, pause it or swipe to another screen and continue watching," says Borchers. "What is not yet achieved—and where we think the market needs to move—is to make all content silos searchable and to create a user experience that is not driven by the brands which want to protect their own silo, but driven by the user."

The keys to monetizing the OTT sector are metadata and rights, which 3SS believes currently don't "talk" to each other as they need to.

"Broadcasters have metadata about content purchased from Gracenote or Rovi, they have other more limited sets direct from satellite, other silos of metadata for VOD probably provided by rights holders, and others for catch-up and another for OTT," says Borchers.

"If you really want to build a superior service, you have to take all these and put them together and match up the metadata," he argues. "Current hybrid search and recommendation engine systems are blind in the sense that even when they are looking at content from different silos they are not aware of it. You need to know that the Titanic movie on TV is the same Titanic as the VOD offer, is the same as a a 'making of' documentary in catch-up, for example. But because these are several different data-sets, they will be shown as two separate results or recommendations."

As a result, he says, many platform operators are sitting on a "metadata train wreck" in which good money is flowing away after bad as providers struggle to develop a ‘joined-up’ content strategy.

He continues: "As a user I don't want to search a TV channel. I want to see who has a particular piece of content regardless of the channel or service. Everything should be integrated. It's very important to align this metadata to provide a proper customer experience."

He concedes that 3SS does not yet have such a product on the market but says it knows what it takes to build it. One hurdle is that the content aggregators who provide OTT services to broadcasters and operators do not want their offerings to be comparable.

"Netflix doesn’t have an interest in you seeing that this movie has been running on TV and is available in the catch-up library," he says. "Neither do most private broadcasters. They don’t want their client to be moving out of their world but to keep it in their own world."

This is where rights come in. Under 3SS' schema metadata is extracted from copyrighted material, and then manipulated. "The system would need to know who this content belongs to, and am I allowed to mess around with it?"

3SS was founded in 2009 by co-partners Borchers, Ulrich Beutenmüller, and Rudolf Maiterth to provide software, applications and engineering support to service platforms and equipment providers.

It has grown mainly in Europe's German speaking territories—Germany, Austria, Switzerland—winning business from the region's big pay-TV players including Kabel Deutschland and Unitymedia, German publisher Bild. Some 60 percent of its business is in front end development, with the other 40% being back-end integration.

"We founded the company as a systems integrator or software developer because we realised client's requirements for front end interfaces has always been driven by the need to for customisation," says Borchers. "Each cable provider or OTT provider wants to have a specific look and feel so we felt it impossible to operate on a product base."

For German-based Rovi-owned entertainment platform Nowtilus, 3SS designed, developed, and integrated a Video Download Store for Warner Bros complete with TVOD, EST, and DTO functionalities. It has also designed and developed the TV interface based on Android STBs for Swisscom brand Wingo providing live TV, TV Guide and replay. For Zattoo, 3SS conceptualised and implemented a STB front end built on ABOX42 middleware and connected to the Zattoo playout system for linear OTT channels. It built a client-server web-application used by Netgem to manage all its VOD platforms.

For KabelKiosk, Eutelsat’s OTT/IPTV offering for cable operators (which in 2014 was acquired by M7 Group) 3SS carried out all the OTT Integration (integrating with Kaltura) as well as the PC front end and the integration of billing and VOD (integrating with ROVI). It has also recently worked with a major mobile service provider in the U.S. to implement VOD solutions for two mobile phone brands, the names of which 3SS can't share publicly.

With its HQ in Ludwigsburg (near Stuttgart), privately-held 3SS employs 150 people, of which 110 are developers based at "near shore" sites in Romania, Ukraine and Moldova which are less expensive and therefore one key to 3SS' competitiveness). It also has commercial offices in Switzerland, Germany and the US.

In the last six months it has begun to expand further afield. It has rebranded from "a geeky techie company" to a "much more professional look and feel" with Swisscom as its reference client.

"We did a lot of consulting with Swisscom in the beginning since they were not used to developing on their own from scratch," explains Borchers. "They'd worked with Microsoft Mediaroom (now part of Ericsson) but realised that being a small operator in a small country with less than 1m subs for IPTV was not a focus at Redmond. They needed a solution tailored to their local requirements. In addition, customer satisfaction was low and the (Mediaroom) licence fee was high. Swisscom were asking how they could be more independent of these large systems providers and be more flexible in release cycles. The answer was to try Android."

In two years 3SS developed a Android-based multi-screen solution that Borchers believes "sets a new benchmark at half the cost of other providers. Within three months we can bring new features to the STB and mobile devices for Swisscom, a cycle which is unheard of in the industry."

Smart Dubai Aims to Lead the World in Connectivity by 2020

IBC

Dubai has fired the starting gun in the race to be the world's first United Nations' approved Smart City, with 5G mobile broadband a key component of its mission.

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The Emirate will be the first city to assess the efficiency and sustainability of its operations using key performance indicators developed by the ITU-T's focus group on Smart Sustainable Cities.

The two-year pilot project is a collaboration between Smart Dubai and the ITU - the UN agency responsible for information and communications technology (ICT) - and will contribute to the international standardisation of Smart City indicators.

“UAE is home to some of the highest ICT penetration rates in the world,” said Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, Director General of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of the UAE. “We are creating the conditions necessary for the government and industry to capitalise on this ICT ubiquity to build smarter, more sustainable cities that are highly responsive to citizens’ needs.”

As part of the plan, Dubai's two major telecoms operators are competing to deliver the region's fastest mobile broadband speeds.

Etisalat and du are upgrading their network to advanced 4G technology (4G LTE-A / 4G+) which is a stepping stone en route to establishing a 5G network.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is named as a partner in both telco operator's efforts.

Earlier this month, du beat its rival to the introduction of a first LTE-A network, claiming its service will offer customers broadband speeds of up to 225Mbps. It has also had a paper on 5G standardisation approved by the ITU.

Saleem Al Blooshi, du's EVP for Network Development and Operations, said the milestone “strengthens Dubai's position as it works towards becoming a Smart City.”

5G prototypes and trials are predicted to begin by 2018 with commercialisation projected from 2020.

That's a significant date for the Emirate because in 2020 it will host the World Expo, a five-yearly event first held in London in 1851 and designed as a showcase of technological wonder.

Under the theme ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future’ Expo 2020 Dubai will be held at the Dubai Trade Centre-Jebel Ali, a 438-hectare site under construction, including a gated 150-hectare exhibition zone. It will be the first Expo held in the Middle East.

Among the other visitor attractions planned to be open by 2020 are IMG Worlds of Adventure, 'the world’s largest temperature-controlled indoor themed-entertainment destination; Legoland Dubai, Bollywood Parks Dubai and the Dubai Safari Project.

By 2020, it is estimated that 6.5 billion people worldwide will use mobile networks for data communications and that 100 billion additional items — such as water metres, medical devices, and home appliances — will also be connected via mobile networks.

5G is expected to be able to deliver data speeds in the range of 10 to 50Gbit/s, which is 3,000 times the speed of current 4G networks. It is a foundation platform for the Internet of Things allowing billions of devices to connect to the internet at very low latency. Among the applications thought possible with 5G, for which there is currently no standardisation, are driverless cars, remote surgical operations and holographic video.

Already one of the world's best physically connected nations, with Al Maktoum International expected to be the world’s largest airport with capacity for 160 million passengers by 2020, Dubai aims to lead in online connectivity too.

Is Vice the Future Face of News?

IBC

When Sir Martin Sorrell, the Chief Executive of WPP, the world's largest advertising agency, was asked how best to understand the new media landscape he referred to Vice.

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“They understand how millennials think, what content millennials want,” he said.

WPP owns a 10% stake in Vice so perhaps there's an element of self-interest. But 'old media' investors are lining up to grab a slice of this hot property.

21st Century Fox paid $70 million for a 5 per cent stake, Disney chairman Bob Iger, MTV co-founder Tom Freston and Disney/Hearst-owned network A+E Networks have joined suit helping to value the 21-year-old youth publisher over $2.5 billion and rising.

Vice began as a punk magazine in Montreal and moved online seven years ago. It attracts the broadband generation to channels including Motherboard (covering technology), Noisey (a music discovery channel) and a food channel called Munchies.

It already had a reputation for gonzo-style journalism posted from hotspots of war and crime, before it formalised those video reports into Vice News in March 2014. Vice News has since become the fastest growing such channel on YouTube, gaining 1.1 million subscribers and 175 million video views as of early 2015.

Characterised by Vice founder Shane Smith as “the CNN of the street”, in its most recent deal it extended a partnership with HBO which will see Vice produce a daily news programme and have its own branded channel on the HBO Now streaming service.

“Basically, as a news organization Vice is no different than anybody else,” Kevin Sutcliffe, Vice Media’s Head of News Programmes for Europe told Chatham House, The Royal Institute Of International Affairs earlier this year. “You’ve got to trust us. Getting it wrong is extraordinarily damaging. So it’s very old fashioned, that’s one of the basic bases of journalism.”

Its success, with that of fellow news disrupter Buzzfeed, is no surprise to Vice executives who believe traditional news organizations hold a misguided assumption that millennials are not interested in learning about the world.

“A great American word is to bloviate, which is basically to sit around chatting all day long on the news channels,” said Sutcliffe, a former editor of Channel 4 current affairs strand Dispatches who was hired to launch the channel. “Vice News is absolutely a response to that. We have a form of journalism that is immersive, raw, embedded and authentic.”

Sutcliffe, who has criticised BBC journalism and current affairs as “institutionalised” and “beige”, said Vice disagreed that youth audiences were apathetic about news.

“It’s just how it was being presented that was the issue... formatting is out of date, it’s run its course, it talks down to people, it is not representative of 16 to 35 year olds. It skews very old and that’s because it doesn’t speak to them,” he argued.

“With that in the back of our minds we tried to make what we think is a different form of television news and documentary. What does that look like? It looks like ‘Ambushed in South Sudan’, a film where two of our journalists go on a journey with the South Sudanese army to take a town. It’s a 25 minute film in which you experience this army trying to take a town and then retreating under fire. It’s an experiential documentary where you learn more about Africa, African wars, African people. It’s very up close, it’s very personal. That’s a hallmark of Vice News’ journalism: you’re in the mix with the story, with the journalist, with the people you’re meeting. It’s character driven and it’s immersive.”

That seems to have touched a nerve by attracting large audiences to documentaries about the coup in Mali, the Ukraine conflict and, most notoriously, a documentary which embedded Vice News with the Islamic State.

“It was a global moment in terms of media because we remain the only media organisation to have got inside and been able to film with the Islamic State and got out,” said Sutcliffe. “That showed how we operate, which is a very raw and unmediated way.”

That Vice News is online is also an advantage since it is not tied to a particular schedule or format. “People now want authenticity,” said Sutcliffe. “News now does not break in a newsroom. News breaks on Twitter. We’re posting a lot of editorial every day, from around the world, from our writers and a range of video. If you actually look across our output, there’s an incredible range. We’re not competing with a BBC or cable news. We don’t need to fill their hours.”

Kevin Sutcliffe presents 'Online News Case Study: How Vice News is changing the paradigm' at the IBC Conference. Also see ‘The Big Talking Point: The internet era of TV is here, right? So how well is TV tackling the key issues?’

Reinventing the IBC Big Screen Experience

IBC

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As digital cinema approaches market saturation it promises to deliver new, exciting and enhanced presentation options and exhibition business models ranging from immersive audio to motion simulation, but at the cost of greater complexity in mastering the Digital Cinema Package (DCP).

Even a typical studio title demands over 100 versions of the DCP but this can rise up to 450 versions for major releases. The basic DCP will be versioned for territories and include copies for subtitles, dubbing and language titles. DCPs will also be mastered for individual projection system and theatre qualities like aspect ratio (flat or scope); resolution (2K, 4K); audio type (5.1, 7.1) and 3D (which requires its own set of 3D subtitles).

Further complexity is now being added with enhancements to presentation driven by growth in premium large format exhibition.

These include object-based audio formats (Dolby Atmos, Barco Auromax); versions for motion simulators (D-BOX, 4DX, X4D); versions with wider colour gamut and greater luminance (or brightness to showcase laser projected films).

Emerging presentation formats like Barco Escape require multiple DCPs tailored for multi-screen projection. Higher Dynamic Range (providing a wider range between the whitest whites and blackest blacks in a picture) is another creative option being promoted by Dolby. Disney/Pixar's ‘Inside Out’ and Disney's ‘Tomorrowland’ are the first titles to be mastered for Dolby Cinema, a presentation format that includes HDR and Dolby Atmos projected using Christie 6P laser projection.

Different frame rates are also open to filmmakers and distributors. Peter Jackson's ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ was the first major release made at 48 frames per second, an aesthetic choice which sharpens the picture by doubling the frames from the century-old standard 24fps. Although the two later Hobbit sequels were also available in 24fps and 48fps versions, HFR has not been widely adopted but nor has it disappeared. Director Ang Lee is reportedly shooting his next feature ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ in 3D, 4K and either 60 or 120 fps. VFX pioneer Douglas Trumbull wowed IBC last year with presentation of a 3D, 4K, 120 fps laser projected short film.

While final distribution to cinemas is on hard drive, via fibre network or satellite, DCP administration and creation has become vastly more complicated. A facility like the new joint venture Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema is typically given two weeks to create all DCPs for any title including a manual quality control screening that ensures the mastering has been completed correctly.

“The margin has dropped out of distribution and the cost has shifted to producing and handling the DCP,” says Richard Welsh, CEO, Sundog Media Toolkit and SMPTE Governor for EMEA.

The problem is exacerbated by having to distribute to the bulk of theatres with older digital cinema equipment which have not kept pace with many of the new DCP enhancements.

A single venue may receive a dozen different DCPs alone, replete with a separate electronic key to unlock the encrypted film which is bespoke to individual players and projectors.

“The full cost savings anticipated by moving to digital have yet to be realised,” says Welsh.

An industry-wide shift to SMPTE-DCPs is an attempt to streamline the process. While the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) spec (first published in 2005 and better known as Interop), succeeded in getting digital cinema off the ground, the fast evolving nature of the technology makes SMPTE's proposals more suitable for incorporating new developments.

Early digital projection equipment installed in cinemas require an upgrade to playback SMPTE-DCP version movies. UNIC (International Union of Cinemas) and EDCF (European Digital Cinema Forum) are working with Dolby, Deluxe, Sony and others to ensure full conversion.

Down the line, DCPs with Augmented Reality components are possible, viewable in cinemas using a type of glasses.

The next step out from this, with prototypes already in the labs, is holographic projection, a form of 3D immersion visible without glassware.

Immerse yourselves in the latest attempts to re-invent the 120 year old cinema medium with an A-list panel of industry practitioners at the free to attend IBC Big Screen Experience conference sessions.

Computer gaming: virtual sport built for virtual production

IBC

The marriage of IP production with internet viewing was always supposed to expose niche live events to a wider viewing public but few would have bet on computer gaming becoming the next mainstream spectator sport.

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While debate will rage about whether virtual games are on par with more obviously athletic sports, electronic -- or eSports -- is a phenomenon with rapidly growing revenue streams that have attracted venture capital firms, major brands and broadcasters. “If you are a traditional media outlet trying to deal with massive change in Millennial viewing habits you have to be looking at eSports to capture this new audience,” says Ian Sharpe, CEO, Azubu.

SuperData pins the worldwide eSports audience at 134 million, rising to 153 million next year.  “The intersection of technology, fandom and interactive entertainment is presenting [the industry] with new ways of sharing great experiences on a global scale,” it states.

According to market researchers IHS Technology, 2.4 billion hours of eSports video were consumed online in 2014, a figure expected to hit 6.6 billion in three years by which time the sport's global value will exceed $1 billion (SuperData). Home gamers have posted clips of their work online for years. Now games are watched live on dedicated gaming sites. Teams, some organised in leagues such as the European Gaming League (EGL) and Electronic Sports League (ESL), play strategy games like StarCraft 2, multiplayer online battle arena games like Dota 2, and first-person shooters like Counterstrike.

The two largest networks are Major League Gaming's MLG.tv, which specialises in Call of Duty contests, and Twitch.tv for which Amazon paid nearly $1 billion last year. Competitors include Gfinity, Azubu and Dingit. The success of Twitch, which records a monthly audience in excess of 100 million, recently forced Google to launch YouTube Gaming with an emphasis on live streaming (currently in beta).

Programmed to stream on such sites are matches broadcast live from venues in front of fans. Among the biggest is the World Championship Finals of League of Legends which drew 45,000 people to South Korea's Sangam Stadium last year. Publishers like Riot – owners of League of Legends -- organise these events in support of their intellectual property for which a nascent market in broadcast rights has emerged.

The world's first dedicated eSports stadium is being built in China with 15,000 seats and in the UK, Gfinity teamed with Fulham's 600-seat Vue cinema to run a weekly programme of matches – live streamed – from March until September [see Cinema 2020 at the IBC Big Screen Experience].

Production of the broadcasts are also growing in quality. Native digital content from within the games are ripe for streaming. On top of that, POV cameras capture shots of the gamers (their facial expression and hand movements); wider positions show the venue's spectators watching talent on giant screens and replay systems are available to the live show's producer. Mics on the gamers can pick up their reactions and commentary and VTs of player personalities can be inserted pre-show or during the show.

Vision mixers commonly used in outside broadcasts compile graphics, audio mixing and special effects with the stream published to social media and converted to H.264 for distributing online. All of the feeds can be controlled remotely over IP, which Red Bull Media House does from the dedicated eSports studio it opened last year at its US headquarters.

German-based ESL, owned by Turtle Entertainment, runs its own web channel (ESL.tv) to promote the ESL league and produces all the content in-house. Azubu (pictured), which buy rights to live stream tournaments, uses a combination of Amazon Web Services cloud, Akamai CDN and Brightcove online video player to service its subscribers.

“Higher production values are needed in order to take live event e-sports streaming to the next level,” believes Sharpe. “We need on-ramps into esports so that casual viewers can understand what it is all about. Stats are great at showing how people rank and are performing and giving an indication of what is happening. Commentary is another key and so is being part of the crowd in the experience. That means an emphasis on social media to contextualise the game. eSports are still creating that language and working out how to communicate that language.”

Unlike other sports, eSports affords the opportunity to chat in realtime with players while they are streaming. “This potential proximity is another reason for esports' popularity,” says Sharpe. “What we have to do is create a good experience for showcasing these personalities and build a solid global programme.”

Again unlike other sports and thanks to live streaming, e-sports has a chance to develop an instant global presence. Instead of isolating players in national leagues, networks like Azubu are intent on opening access to players in Brazil, or Korea to Europe and vice versa.

“There is a realtime transparency between gamers and the fan community which is unique,” says Sharpe.

With the global video game industry expected to top  $100 billion in 2015, according to Gartner (far in excess, incidentally, of the global box office for feature film of $36.4bn, according to the MPAA), the industry is primed to move into the mainstream of sports consciousness.

Its primary home will be online but that didn't stop ESPN partnering with Red Bull to broadcast The International 4 — the annual world championships of Dota 2 – from Seattle's KeyArena on ESPN 3 last year. Viewing on a flat screen is one thing but just around the corner is virtual reality. Early 2016, Facebook is to debut VR device Oculus Rift and Sony will bow Morpheus, its VR headset for PlayStation 4. This Christmas, game developer Valve will launch its own visor-style, head-mounted display called Vive.

While Samsung GearVR (co-developed with Oculus) and Google Cardboard are already on retail, the latest entrants will work from a PC not a smartphone and are expected to deliver the next level in virtual experience. EGL's mission is typical of those at the centre of eSports' growth. Earlier this year it partnered with advertising agency BBH – which eyes EGL as a marketing platform -- to turn gaming into a global sport to rival football and Formula 1.