VR's Two-Tiered Takeoff

Streaming Media 

Despite a year of content and production experimentation by studios and broadcasters, poor quality experiences could yet impede VR take-off

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/VRs-Two-Tiered-Takeoff-114846.aspx

From Hollywood to Isleworth, the entertainment industry is energised about the greenfield potency of virtual reality. There's been a vertiginous rush toward production of VR content and considerable investment in development across sectors as diverse as medicine, education, and entertainment. It's clear, though, that a two-tier model is developing in which VR, for the short term at least, will be dominated by low-cost headsets and arguably poorer-quality virtual experiences.

This is the difference between 360° video and what is being termed "full" or "true VR."

"True VR video is much more compelling once people see it, but many of the monoscopic 360° videos available are akin to a 2D video that has been pasted onto the inside of a fishbowl which you've put you head into," says Paul Jackson, principal analyst, Digital Media for Ovum. "It's great for landscapes and distance shots but quickly loses its magic as you get closer to objects or people. Also the resolution tends to be shocking—think a 1080p or 720p resolution, but stretched all around your head."

The installed base of VR headsets will climb to 81 million in 2020, according to IHS Markit, dominated by lower-cost models, which are basically "shells" into which people slide their smartphone—such as Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear. IHS suggests smartphone VR headsets' share of the total installed base will be 87% at the end of 2016 while Strategy Analytics puts the figure at 92% of units sold.

Strategy Analytics emphasises the big gulf between price and quality, stating that the experience of Cardboard versus HTC Vive "is as different as listening to a car stereo versus being in the front row of a concert."

Even though Google has now upgraded to Daydream View, for Android cell phones costing $79, this phone holder pales (if you believe the reviews) besides Sony Playstation 4 VR's $400 head-mounted display (HMD)—plus the PS4 machine.

"360° video is the lowest possible entry and is a not a truly virtual experience," says Technicolor entertainment technologist Mark Turner. (pictured at right) "To move you into another reality and give you a sense of presence the experience needs to be 3D and it needs an immersive audio feed. Some 360 videos are of fairly low quality production, and if done badly can done cause nausea. What we don't want to do is put people off. We need them to keep coming back for experiences so we can build the virtuous circle and hopefully step them in to VR experiences."

VR Production Challenges

He identifies production challenges for content creators who want to address as wide a market as possible without having to create content more than once. "You could have something truly interactive at the high end while producing content from the same assets down to a 360° video run on Facebook," posits Turner. "While video you easily scale to different devices, with VR the challenge is to scale the experience. Part of the the new workflow the industry needs to deliver for VR is how do this efficiently and at scale."

Nokia's Guido Voltolina—who has the intriguing job title "Head of Presence Capture"—describes the current state of activity in the VR market as "kinetic, innovative and exploratory."

"We are seeing two main trends: one regarding 2D 360° video, which is largely about delivering free content in order to introduce people to virtual reality, and a second regarding real immersive experiences that is already testing monetisation, although still with a limited audience."

However, if VR is to become widely adopted for media service delivery, it needs to move away from big wired headsets to a more seamless mobile experience. Smartphones have the great advantage of being ubiquitous TV consumption devices, in any format, from 2D to 360° and full VR.

"A fan may opt to wear a headset for a few minutes to engage with pre-match activity ahead of a big sports game or to enjoy the atmosphere in 360° video before beaming the match in 4K to a large TV set," suggests Fabio Murra, SVP marketing at compression specialist V-Nova.

A higher resolution of display than current VR devices is also necessary to ensure a realistic and immersive experience is offered to consumers.

"360° video and VR services need to start at least at 4K resolutions," argues Murra (pictured at right). He says V-Nova is experimenting with 8K, 12K and even 16K resolutions. "This will enable truly realistic VR experiences as well as neat features like the ability to zoom in and out of VR and 360° content. Without high quality, VR lacks life-like details and loses the core of its market proposition – its capacity to engage deeply with the consumer."

Affordable VR Headgear

All of this needs to be provided without consumers having to invest in expensive playback devices, without impacting the data bundles limit of mobile and ISP contracts, and for a reasonable fee.

"Headsets are making their way into people's homes, but it's going to take a while before a HMD is as much a part of the furniture as a remote control," says Sol Rogers, CEO/founder of VR content producer Rewind. "Great content will create demand for HMDs, driving growth, but while distribution is limited, many brands are questioning reach and return on investment, which limits the amount of content made. Even when distribution is there, many of the brands we work with may still choose to give away the content as it falls under marketing activity, which doesn't often bear a cost to the consumer."

With the exception of gaming, the audience isn't yet big enough to monetize content. Devices needs to be in millions of peoples' hands to make it a reasonable money-making opportunity. The dial on VR device sales is expected to move heading into the holiday season, driven by PS4 VR and Daydream.

While Samsung's Gear VR will have the largest installed base out of all the major branded headsets this year at 5.4 million, IHS predicts Daydream will become the most popular headset for VR by 2019 due to industry support and "a compelling $79 [€71] price point."

Consumer spending on VR entertainment is forecast to ramp from $310m this year to $3.3 billion in 2020 – however this will still represent less than 1% of overall entertainment spend worldwide.

VR Monetisation Models

To date most content providers are mainly focused on VR short-form pieces to complement their existing content, acting as a bonus feature. Syfy, for example, created a mini-series that acts as an extension to its traditional TV series Halcyon, with five VR videos that allows fans to be more interactive with the show.

Technicolor's Turner believes VR could monetized along lines akin to gaming where a viewer watches the first 5 minutes of a piece of content for free before a pay window pops up. "Or maybe you give consumers some value, such as a first episode for free, and then as they go into the content further the experience could be populated with micro transactions (similar to the in-game purchases of virtual skins, tools or weapons by which games publishers like Valve make revenue from e-sports).

"Since we can place people inside the content we do some much more contextual advertising models," continues Turner. "Billboards in the virtual environment could be linked to online media systems. It means different users will get a different experience. This can be done in much more natural, seamless way than a jarring 30-second ad break. So long as organisations are flexible enough to try new models of monetization and not just fall back into the old ones which may translate less well."

According to Futuresource Consulting analyst Michael Boreham, "News and documentaries may start as a freemium model but evolve to a subscription service. Similarly, drama is likely to evolve from free to either ad-funded or SVOD, while sports is likely to evolve to either pay-per-view, ad-funded or season-pass models."

Aside from specific pay-per-view transactions, live events are likely to be a "top-up" for pay-TV subscribers at probably $2-$4 (£1.50-£3) a month, he suggests.

This will likely be feature interviews, behind-the-scenes or locker-room recorded experiences until the technology and install base make it worthwhile to live stream a full game or concert from multiple angles.

"If you can be sat on the front row inches away from Beyoncé or Bieber, why wouldn't fans pay for that, when the technology is readily available in their homes?" says Michael Ford, founder,  Infinite Wisdom Studios which is being funded by the BBC to create a VR interactive proposal around live entertainment.. "It's only a matter of time before hardware access proliferates and so too does content demand."

While gamers may spend a significant amount of money on HMDs to watch immersive video, the real proposition for the majority of media consumers may lie in short, high-value content that can enhance an existing programme for a small additional fee.

"For instance, sports fans could have unprecedented access to the team's dressing room, with the possibility of listening to the head coach's pre-match motivational team-talk," says Murra. "Music fans might have the opportunity to immerse themselves in backstage proceedings, such as their favourite band members fine tuning their instrument before a concert is broadcast on TV or accessed via an OTT service."

Interoperability

Interoperability is another issue holding back the market. The stitching software is very varied and post producers are performing colour grades and editorial by looking at a flat screen image. "You can't do edits or sound in VR environments because the tools don't exist," says Turner.

Publishing VR content is tricky because of the fragmented market with multiple different headsets offering very different capabilities.

"There is no platform that works across all hardware," says Sol Rogers. "This is a drawback to the development of the VR industry because any content created has a limited distribution, and it is the proliferation of quality content that is the key to the growth of the industry."

Social is considered another key aspect, but one that is likely to be solved. VR is currently an insular experience and anathema to how sports fans in particular like to share a game.

At the Oculus Connect conference in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lifted the wraps on software that allows people to share the same virtual space. It's a work in progress but features Oculus Touch, the firm's soon-to-be-released 3D controller, to change an avatar's emotion. Future versions with facial tracking could do this automatically.

"Ultimately you will be able to create a live show with a person in the VR game having their view broadcast live onto green screen," says Colin Parnell, a producer at live event screen hire firm Fonix. "We're working on it. It is really hard to do but it will be cracked. I'm sure there are TV game show producers working on this right now."

Technicolor has built a multi-million dollar "experience centre" in Culver City, California bringing together kit—including cameras, renderers and headsets—with creatives and researchers to collaborate on a new form of storytelling which it admits may take many years to develop.

"It's relatively simple to move the gaming experience into VR because it is already a 360° experience, but how narrative moves into VR is a much more nuanced conversation and could last a long time," says Turner.

Futuresource expects 2017 to see further experimentation across multiple genres of content and also the introduction of monetisation. "We also expect the production of longer/full-length pieces of content (including full sports matches) more frequently," says analyst Amisha Chauhan.

An Object Lesson in Personalized Streaming Video Experiences

Streaming Media 

What custom content does each viewer want to see? As broadcast and broadband converge, object-based media is showing the way to the future, and the BBC is taking the lead.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/An-Object-Lesson-in-Personalized-Streaming-Video-Experiences-114655.aspx

One of the powerful arguments for delivering object-based, as opposed to linear, media is the potential to have content adapt to the environment in which it is being shown. This has been standard practice on the web for years, but it is now being cautiously applied by broadcasters and other video publishers using standard internet languages to create and deliver new forms of interactive and personalised experiences as broadcast and broadband converge.

“The internet works by chopping things up, sending them over a network, and reassembling them based on audience preference or device context,” explains Jon Page, R&D head of operations at the BBC. “Object-based broadcasting (OBB) is the idea of making media work like the internet.”

Live broadcast content already comprises separate clean feeds of video, audio, and graphics before they are “baked in” to the MPEG/H.264/H.265 signal on transmission. OBB simply extracts the raw elements and delivers all the relevant assets separately along with instructions about how to render/publish them in context of the viewer’s physical surroundings, device capability, and personal needs.

The nearest parallel to what an object-based approach might mean for broadcasting can be found in video games. “In a video game, all the assets are object-based, and the decision about which assets to render for the viewer’s action or device occurs some 16 milliseconds before it appears,” says BBC research engineer Matthew Shotton. “The real-time nature of gaming at the point of consumption expresses what we are trying to achieve with OBB.”

MIT devotes a study group to object-based media, and its head and principal research scientist, V. Michael Bove (right), agrees that video games are an inherently object-based representation. “Provided the rendering capacity of the receiving device is known, this is proof that object-based media can be transmitted,” he says. The catch is that this only works provided the video is originated as an object.

The BBC’s R&D division is the acknowledged leader in OBB. Rather than keep its research a secret in its lab, the company is keen for others to explore and expand on its research.

“We want to build a community of practice, and the more people who engage in the research, the faster we can get some interesting experiences to be delivered,” says BBC research scientist Phil Stenton. “We are now engaged with web standards bodies to deliver OBB at scale.”

Back to Basics: What Is an Object?

In the BBC’s schema, an object is “some kind of media bound with some kind of metadata.” Object-based media can include a frame of video, a line from a script, or spoken dialogue. It can also be an infographic, a sound, a camera angle, or a look-up table used in grading (and which can be changed to reflect the content or to aid visual impairment). When built around story arcs, a “theme” can be conceived of as an object. Each object is automatically assigned an identifier and a time stamp as soon as it is captured or created.

Since making its first public demonstration of OBB during the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the BBC has conducted numerous spinoff experiments. These range from online video instructions for kids on how to create a 3D chicken out of cardboard to work with BBC News Labs to demonstrate how journalists can use "linked data" to build stories. It has created customised weather forecasts, a radio documentary constructed according to the listener's time requirements, and most recently a cooking programme, CAKE, which was the first project produced and delivered entirely using an object-based approach.

All these explorations are a means to an end. “They illustrate how we build an object-based experience and help us understand if it is technically feasible for distribution and delivery for ‘in the moment’ contextual rendering,” says Stenton. “The next step is to extract common tools and make them open for others to use.”

In particular, the BBC is wrestling with discerning which objects are domain-specific and which can be used across applications, how those common objects can be related to one another, and what standards are needed to make OBB scalable.

Most websites are able to accommodate and adapt to the wide variety of devices that may be used to view them with varying layouts, font sizes, and levels of UI complexity. The BBC also expects a sizeable portion of both craft and consumer applications of the future to be based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, the tremendous flexibility afforded by that web tech is also a disadvantage.

“Repeatability and consistency of approach among production teams is extremely difficult to maintain,” says BBC research engineer Max Leonard, “especially when combined with the sheer volume of possible avenues one can take when creating new object-based media compositions.”

Object-Based Compositions

The BBC’s OBB experiments have relied on HTML/CSS/JS but have taken different approaches to accessing, describing, and combining the media, making the content from one experience fundamentally incompatible with another.

“The only way we can practice an object-based approach to broadcasting in a sustainable and scalable way at the same level of quality expected of us in our linear programming is to create some sort of standard mechanism to describe these object-based compositions, including the sequences of media and the rendering pipelines that end up processing these sequences on the client devices,” says Leonard. “The crux of the problem, as with any standard, is finding the sweet spot between being well-defined enough to be useful, but free enough to allow for creative innovation.”

BBC R&D has a number of building blocks for this language. This includes an Optic Framework (Object-based Production Tools In the Cloud) which, to the end-user, will appear as web apps in a browser, but the video processing and data are kept server-side in the BBC’s Cosmos cloud.

The Optic Framework aims to deliver reusable data models to represent this metadata, so different production tools can use the same underlying data models but present differing views and interfaces on this based on the current needs of the end user.

Optic uses the JT-NM data model as its core, and each individual component within it uses NMOS standards to allow for the development of tools within an open and interoperable framework.

Inspired by the WebAudio API, the BBC has built an experimental HTML5/WebGL media processing and sequencing library for creating interactive and responsive videos on the web. VideoContext uses a graph-based rendering pipeline, with video sources, effects, and processing represented as software objects that can be connected, disconnected, created, and removed in real time during playback.

The core of the video processing in VideoContext is implemented as WebGL shaders written in GLSL. A range of common effects such as cross-fade, chroma keying, scale, flip, and crop is built in to the library. “There’s a straightforward JSON [JavaScript Object Notation] representation for effects that can be used to add your own custom ones,” explains Shotton. “It also provides a simple mechanism for mapping GLSL uniforms onto JavaScript object properties so they can be manipulated in real time in your JavaScript code.”

The library—available as an open source— works on newer builds of Chrome and Firefox on the desktop, and, with some issues, on Safari. “Due to several factors, the library isn’t fully functional on any mobile platform,” says Shotton. “This is in part due to the requirement for a human interaction to happen with a video element before it can be controlled programmatically.” The BBC is using the library internally to develop a streamable description for media composition with the working title of UMCP (Universal Media Composition Protocol).

It has taken a cue from Operational Transformation, a solution to support multiuser, single-task working, which powers Google Docs and Etherpad. “With a bit of domain-specific adaptation, this can be put to work in the arena of media production,” explains Leonard.

The kernel of the idea is that the exact same session description metadata is sent to every device, regardless of its capabilities, which can, in turn, render the experience in a way that suits it: either live, as the director makes the cuts, or at an arbitrary time later on.

“It is the NMOS content model which allows us to easily refer to media by a single identifier, irrelevant of its actual resolution, bitrate, or encoding scheme,” explains Leonard.

“One of the substantial benefits of working this way would be to allow us to author experiences once, for all devices, and deliver the composition session data to all platforms, allowing the devices themselves to choose which raw assets they need to create the experience for themselves,” he says. Examples include a low bitrate version for mobile, a high-resolution version for desktop, and 360° for VR headsets.

In theory, this would allow the production team to serve potentially hundreds of different types of devices regardless of connection or hardware capability without having to do the laborious work of rendering a separate version for everyone.

The hardware for an object-based production, called IP Studio, is being adapted for IP by the BBC. From a production point of view, equipment from a camera to a vision mixer or archive can be treated as an object. “IP Studio orchestrates the network so that real-time collections of objects work as a media production environment,” says Page. So, in the BBC’s schema, Optic will output UCMP, and that sits on top of IP Studio.

OBB Goes Commercial

As a public-funded body, the BBC is driven to unearth new ways of making media accessible to its licence fee-paying viewers. Larger onscreen graphics or sign presenters in place of regular presenters to assist people with impairments are two examples of OBB intended to improve accessibility.

The BBC is also part of the European Commission-funded 2-Immerse with Cisco, BT, German broadcaster IRT, ChyronHego, and others. It is developing prototype multiscreen experiences that merge broadcast and broadband content with the benefits of social media. To deliver the prototypes, 2-Immerse is building a platform based on European middleware standard HbbTV2.0.

OBB is likely to be commercialised first, though, in second-screen experiences. “The process of streaming what’s on the living room TV is broken,” argues Daragh Ward, CTO of Axonista. “Audiences expect to interact with it.”

The Dublin-based developer offers a content management system and series of software templates that it says makes it easier for producers to deploy OBB workflows instead of building one from scratch. Initially, this is based around extracting graphics from the live signal.

Axonista’s solution has been built into apps for the shopping channel QVC, where the “buy now” TV button becomes a touchscreen option on a smartphone, and The QYOU, an online curator of video clips that uses the technology to add interactivity to data about the content it publishes.

The idea could attract producers of other genres. Producers of live music shows might want to overlay interactive information about performances to the second screen. Sports fans might want to select different leaderboards or heat maps, or track positions over the live pictures. BT Sport has trialed this at motorcycle event MotoGP and plans further trials next year.

Another idea is to make the scrolling ticker of news or finance channels interactive. “Instead of waiting for a headline to scroll around and read it again, you can click and jump straight to it,” says Ward. Since news is essentially a playlist of items, video content could also be rendered on-demand by way of the news menu.

This type of application still leaves the lion’s share of content “baked in,” but it’s a taste of OBB’s potential. “All TV will be like this in future,” says Ward. “As TV sets gain gesture capability and force feedback control, it allows new types of interactivity to be brought into the living room.”

The audio element of OBB is more advanced. Here, each sound is treated as an object to add, remove, or push to the fore or background for interactivity, to manage bandwidth, processing capacity, or for playback on lower fidelity devices.

Dolby’s Atmos object-based audio (a version of its cinema system) is likely to be introduced to consumers as part of a pay TV operator’s 4K/UHD package. Both BT Sport and Sky, the broadcasters dueling it out with 4K live services in the U.K., have commissioned their mobile facility providers to build-in Atmos recording gear. Sources at these OBB providers suggest that a switch-on could happen by this time next year.

Initially, a Dolby Atmos production would allow additional user-selectable commentary from a neutral or team/fan perspective, different languages, and a referee’s mic. It would also add a more “at the stadium” feel to live events with atmospheres from the PA system and crowd.

BT’s research teams are also exploring the notion of responsive TV UI for red button interaction on the big screen and targeting 2020 as time for launch.

“Today we tend to send out something optimised for quite a small screen size, and if you have a larger screen it is then scaled up,” Brendan Hole, TV and content architect at BT, told the IBC conference.

“We are asking what happens if the broadcast stream is broken into objects so that the preferences of the user can be taken into account. You can add or remove stats in a sports broadcast for example, have viewer selection of specific feeds. It could automatically take account of the size and type of screen or it could take account of the fact I have a device in my hand so elements, like stats, could be delivered to mobile instead of on the main screen.”

Others investigating OBB include Eko Studio, formerly known as Interlude’s Treehouse. It offers an online editing suite that lets users transform linear videos into interactive videos so that the viewer can choose the direction of the video.

New York-based creative developer Brian Chirls has developed Seriously.js an open source JavaScript library for complex video effects and compositing in a web browser. Unlike traditional desktop tools, Seriously.js aims to render video in real time, combining the interactivity of the web with the aesthetic power of cinema. Though Seriously.js currently requires authors to write code, it is targeted at artists with beginner-level JavaScript skills so that the main limitation is creative ability and knowledge of video rather than coding ability.

MIT put the groundwork into object-based media a decade ago. It has since moved on to holographic video and display, although some of the same principles apply.

“We are exploring holographic video as a medium for interactive telepresence,” says Bove. “Holosuite is an object-based system where we used a range-finding camera like Microsoft Kinect as a webcam to figure out which pixels represent a person and which pixels the room with the ability to live stream content of people separately from the backgrounds and with full motion parallax and stereoscopic rendering.”

For content creators, object-based techniques offer new creative editorial opportunities. The advantages of shooting in an object-based way is that media becomes easily reusable, and it can be remixed to tell new stories or build future responsive experiences that don’t require any re-engineering.

“Either we need to produce multiple different versions of the same content which is highly expensive or we capture an object once and work out how to render it,” says Page. “Ultimately, we need to change the production methodology. OBB as an ecosystem has barely begun.”

In Five Years the Problem won’t be Bandwidth but Knowing what to do with it

IBC

While IP dominated discussion at IBC, there is an equally transformative technology developing in parallel with profound implications for media communication.

In Five Years the Problem won’t be Bandwidth but Knowing what to do with it - See more at: http://www.ibc.org/hot-news/in-five-years-the-problem-wont-be-bandwidth-but-knowing-what-to-do-with-it#sthash.UbWUhsyN.dpuf

“Mobile is the biggest revolution broadcasters have faced. It is happening now, and we still do not see a huge, pressing desire to take advantage of this revolution among the broadcast industry,” declared Ben Faes, Managing Director of Partner Business Solutions for Google, at IBC2016.

Video over mobile is forecast to multiply exponentially in the next five years and represent 80% of all internet traffic by 2021. Not just limited to TV and film content, video is transforming social media too. Some 300 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, half of which is viewed on mobile devices. In addition, 75% of Facebook video browsing is performed on smartphones.

Facebook Live, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and gaming platforms such as Amazon-owned Twitch are all investing significant resources in live video delivery.

Such demand means that at a certain point, the existing 4G mobile network technology will be unsustainable. A new infrastructure is needed and it is being developed rapidly.

The broad outlines for 5G mobile communications have been agreed by organisations like EU 5G Public Private Partnership, initiated by the European Commission with manufacturers, telcos, service providers and researchers. A standard is expected by 2018.

Base specifications include regular mobile data speeds clocking 1Gbps, peaks of 10Gbps, a latency below 1 millisecond and very low power consumption that could see devices last a decade - spurring internet growth in emerging markets.

It’s a combination that will make high resolution, live, personalised media a reality. Applications like Virtual Reality (VR), which rely on real-time data tracking and communication, will be opened up by 5G. Real time 4K broadcasting and instant VOD downloads will also be enabled.

Beyond this, real-time holographic video is anticipated. Several operators demonstrated holography at Mobile World Congress last February, including South Korea’s SK Telecom.

“5G will be transformational,” Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO of Ericsson told the IBC Conference.  “It means we can change the production of content, change the way we distribute things. We will be able to create new content such as combining 8K with AR. This is not so far away.”

Whether there’s any benefit to viewing 8K on a mobile device is moot. The point is that bandwidth speeds will increase so dramatically that an unprecedented wealth of data will be available to mix and match applications like AR, VR, 3D, 4K, 8K in real time.

At IBC, Discovery Communications CTO John Honeycutt, said the broadcaster will be studying VR and AR as it heads towards Eurosport’s coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.

“We had access to an early Microsoft Hololens, and when you put it on you can start to imagine walking up the street with a map in front of you, with restaurant menus and personal reminders all while you’re having a Facebook chat,” Honeycutt said. “From a content consumption and a utility perspective 5G is a big deal.”

A clutch of European telcos, including Deutsche Telekom, Nokia, Telefonica and Vodafone, say they will begin conducting large-scale tests by 2018, with a launch in at least one city in each EU country by 2020. Before then, 5G will be demonstrated to the public at the 2018 Fifa World Cup in Russia and 2018 Glasgow-Berlin European Athletics Championships.

“Bandwidth drives content and content drives bandwidth,” Spencer Stephens, CTO, Sony Pictures Entertainment told IBC. “As we get more bandwidth we can do more things with it, but if people want to do more things with it there becomes a greater demand for bandwidth. For example, can you substitute point to point, the Netflix model of delivery to the consumer, with broadcast? Obviously point to point takes a lot of bandwidth but if we can get enough bandwidth to the consumer then we can change fundamentally how we deliver content.”

More profoundly, the technology is expected to allow the growing number of sensors to communicate with one another. Intel expects this number to hit 50 billion by 2020. This will drive the digitisation of every industry, from healthcare to manufacturing. Applied to the automotive sector, for example, 5G opens up the car as a mobile venue for content consumption.

“The promise of 5G is fantastic – huge capacity, available everywhere, at low cost,” David Wood, Deputy Director of EBU Technology and Development and Chair of the World Broadcasting Unions’ Technical Committee told Broadcast magazine. “It could precipitate social change on the scale of the web itself.”

The underlying technologies of faster bandwidth, higher-resolution sensors, greater storage capacities and incoming internet protocols will present a whole range of opportunities for media organisations. The question is how to take advantage of them and blend them into the media creation process.

"The industry is going through a period of experimentation," summed up John Ive, Consultant & Chief Technologist for the IABM. "Nobody has all the answers but we need to scale up what works well and turn off what doesn't. Having IT, TV, and telco people in one place at IBC is creating a very important dialogue about the sorts of creative applications we need to go to market." - See more at: http://www.ibc.org/hot-news/in-five-years-the-problem-wont-be-bandwidth-but-knowing-what-to-do-with-it#sthash.UbWUhsyN.dpuf

In Focus: can UK studios maintain the pace?

Screen Daily

The UK’s studio infrastructure faces unprecedented demand from Hollywood tentpoles and high-end television.

http://www.screendaily.com/features/in-focus-can-uk-studios-maintain-the-pace/5110984.article

http://www.screendaily.com/digital-editions/screen-november-2016/5110732.article?blocktitle=LATEST-DIGITAL-EDITION&contentID=41296

Pending the outcome of a feasibility study due next spring, a major new UK studio complex — second only in size to Pinewood — could open by 2020. The proposed 17-acre brownfield site in Dagenham, east London, was previously used as a location for Marvel’s Avengers: Age Of Ultron and Doctor Strange as well as BBC crime series New Blood. Barking and Dagenham local borough councils, the Mayor of London’s office and Film London are optimistic that a business case can be made for a public and private-financed, purpose-built production facility spanning up to 300,000 sq ft.

“Demand on the UK’s facilities and infrastructure is constant and increasing, as it has been since the modification of the TV tax credit [to match film’s 25% rebate on expenditure],” says Film London chief executive Adrian Wootton. “We have done extremely well to respond by building new space and liberating [warehouse] space in Bristol, Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland, but we are getting repeat requests from productions wanting to be within the M25. Property in London is at a premium and this site is one of the last big development opportunities for media in the capital.”

Valuable studio space has been lost with the 2014 closure of Teddington Studios, the redevelopment on a smaller footprint of BBC Television Centre (reopening next summer) and the demolition at the end of this year of Fountain Studios in Wembley — all for property development. Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios is also closed for refurbishment until 2018. While it largely catered for TV, the pressure on space has squeezed work elsewhere. Elstree, for example, has taken on a large volume of long-running BBC work including popular reality show Strictly Come Dancing.

“The shortage of stages in the southeast is forcing lower-budget indie features into warehouse buildings that are little more than sheds,” says Andrew Boswell, commercial director of Twickenham Studios. At the same time, high-end TV drama is soaking up capacity on existing soundstages. E!’s The Royals just wrapped season three at 3 Mills Studios; Sony Pictures’ The Halcyon is based at West London Film Studios; ITV’s Victoria is booked into Church Fenton Yorkshire Studios; Bristol’s The Bottle Yard hosts Poldark, having housed Starz’s The White Princess earlier this year; The Collection, Amazon’s period drama about a Paris fashion house, was one of the first shows to land at Pinewood Wales (Pinewood also invested in the show); and Netflix’s The Crown is being shot at Elstree.

“The Crown is shot as a feature, has similar budgets and uses the 15,000 sq ft George Lucas Stage, backlot and other smaller stages,” says Roger Morris, Elstree managing director. “We couldn’t fit in Paddington 2 [Elstree was home to Heyday Films’ 2013 original; the sequel has relocated to Pinewood and Leavesden], and we also couldn’t fit in two other big Hollywood films recently.”

London in demand 

While studios such as Elstree are enjoying the boom, Morris admits there is still a shortage of suitable stages in the M25 London area, “where most clients want to work and where the majority of crew, cast and skills are”.

“Capacity is under pressure and the biggest growth has come from high-end TV drama, which especially benefits the UK’s nations and regions,” says Iain Smith, British Film Commission chair and producer of Mad Max: Fury Road. “Movies need a higher maintenance level [than TV]. They tend to need more specialist crew as well as hotels and other amenities for talent, hence the urge to create a new London studio.”

“We know platforms like Netflix and Amazon would love to place an even more significant percentage of their production in the UK and we know US studios want to shoot more here too,” adds Wootton, who says Film London is being “very proactive and aggressive” about marketing UK infrastructure.

Boswell reports that with “Pinewood and Leavesden being full, combined with the pound to dollar exchange rate, we’re fielding enquiries from large-budget US films when we normally accommodate high-end indies and TV. People are desperate for space.”

Films that may have shot in the UK this year but for lack of space include 20th Century Fox’s Alien: Covenant and Disney’s Thor: Ragnarok. Both rerouted to Australia. Soundstages are absorbed as soon as they come on stream. In Scotland, capacity is more than doubling at Wardpark Studios to accommodate further series of Sony’s Outlander. A similar dynamic is happening in Belfast, where Game Of Thrones has been ensconced since 2010. HBO’s series occupies the 64,000 sq ft Paint Hall and two newer 21,000 sq ft sound stages, as well as the Linen Mill to the south of the city.

Demand has been accentuated by a fall in the pound, making the UK a “bargain bonanza” for US productions, according to Smith. “We had multiple studio feature enquiries for next year following the pound’s drop but we’re too busy to accommodate them,” reports Tom Avison, who runs east London’s 3 Mills Studios, over which there hangs a question mark. Operator London Legacy Development Corporation is mulling over plans to reallocate the 80,000 sq ft site as storage for museums that are due to open up in the Olympic Park. The nearby Dagenham proposal could be a pre-emptive move by Film London to offset such a loss. “The film industry has historically been based in west London yet the natural evolution of London is to the east,” says Avison. “We welcome a new studio since it will entice more crew to base near here.”

Even if all goes to plan, Dagenham will not be up and running for four years. Fortunately, it is not the only development in the works across the UK. Pinewood’s new owner Venus Grafton, which purchased the iconic studio over the summer for $423m (£323m), is pressing ahead with the second phase of a $245m (£200m) expansion. After opening five soundstages totalling 170,000 sq ft this summer, the next stage of development will double its capacity. “We have a masterplan for Shepperton that will optimise the 80-year-old land and facility,” adds Pinewood director of strategy Andrew Smith. “The biggest challenge the UK faces is ensuring that skills — such as set decoration — maintain pace with demand.”

Counter-intuitively, the requirement for physical space is rising as more budget and screen time is invested in VFX for tentpole titles. “We’re seeing the ratio of stage-to-workshop space increasing dramatically,” reports Smith. “Sets are getting bigger and require more build space.”

A 100-foot waterfall was a central feature of the jungle set at Leavesden for Warner Bros’ The Legend Of Tarzan. Seeking to capitalise on the Game Of Thrones halo, Northern Ireland Screen is beginning to market the new 66,000 sq ft North Foreshore Studios developed by the Belfast Harbour Commission for $24.5m (£20m). High-speed internet pipe Project Kelvin provides access to the US east coast for studios wanting to screen dailies. “The UK reached a tipping point a few years ago where there just wasn’t enough bespoke stage space to keep pace with the rise in TV drama,” says Andrew Reid, head of production, Northern Ireland Screen. “The Harbour Commission has had the foresight and confidence to address that demand.”

Scotland booms

Scotland attracted a record $56m (£45.8m) shooting spend in 2014 [the latest year for which figures are available]. Outlander alone contributed to growth of around 40% in the annual production spend in the country. “The need for more dedicated studio space is pressing,” says Smith. “The Scottish government and Creative Scotland have been very cautious despite attempts by many of us to persuade them of the opportunity they’re in danger of missing. Ten years ago, Scotland had the biggest amount of media activity outside the southeast. Now it’s lost market share to Cardiff, Bristol, Northern Ireland and Manchester/Leeds at the time of greatest opportunity.”

Planning permission for a $171m (£140m) Pentland Studios development outside Edinburgh is still with the Scottish government. Approval for the 86-acre site could mean construction of five stages totalling 130,000 sq ft, plus an exterior water tank and a film academy, begins early next year.

Hemmed in by residential property and rail tracks, Twickenham Studios is unable to expand beyond its 15,000 sq ft, three-stage capacity. However, Twickenham’s management is investing in picture post to match the site’s established audio facilities (Alien: Covenant will be sound-mixed there) and investigating opportunities of managing external studios either in the UK or abroad under the Twickenham brand. “We do need more stages and we’re in advanced discussion with an option in the UK,” reveals Boswell.

He does not exclude Liverpool, where developer Capital & Centric is spending $36.7m (£30m) on a 110,000 sq ft complex. The first phase of the project, including the soundstage, is likely to begin early 2017 according to Liverpool Film Office, which also says Capital & Centric will invite bids to run it.

Booked in the UK

Warner Bros Studios Leavesden: Ready Player One (dir. Steven Spielberg);  Justice League (dir. Zak Snyder); Paddington 2 (dir. Paul King);  Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2

Pinewood: Star Wars: Episode IX; Paddington 2

Longcross Film Studios: Kingsman: The Golden Circle (dir. Matthew Vaughn)

3 Mills Studios: Possum (dir. Matthew Holness); Untitled Wes Anderson Project

Twickenham: Victoria and Abdul (dir. Stephen Frears); Untitled AA Milne Project (dir. Simon Curtis); Finding Your Feet (dir. Richard Longcraine).

Smart Cities put the KSA on the map

AV Magazine

http://www.avinteractive.com/features/smart-cities-puts-the-ksa-on-the-av-map-20-10-2016/#share

In industrial, educational, resorts, financial or residential, new opportunities are beginning to materialise for the entire AV industry in the KSA, says Adrian Pennington.

The Middle East boasts innovation, resources and a favourable trade location with fast-growing and high-yield markets. The AV market specifically is on track to grow at one of the world’s fastest rates, increasing by 76 per cent from $1.57 billion in 2012 to $2.76 billion this year, according to InfoComm.

“The growing digital native generation is driving Middle Eastern organisations to raise the bar on AV, resulting in an increase in investment of the highest quality technology – from HD displays to projectors, digital signage, lighting, sound systems, media recording, streaming and webcasting technology, virtual check-in kiosks and security systems,” reports Eleuterio Fernandes, MEA sales director, Exterity.

Stability

Despite political turmoil in many areas, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has remained quite stable and investors view it as an attractive place to do business, largely due to economic diversification, market liberalisation and a growing private sector.

“Construction and oil and gas remain the centre of investment and have contributed to the strong growth that has consistently been taking place in the education, hospitality, healthcare, transport and military sectors,” says Fernandes.

Through its visualisation and 3D capabilities along with projection, the oil and gas sector is one that Christie is well known in, supplying its products for a range of environments from meeting rooms, training rooms and auditoriums to visualisation and exploration centres.

The country’s Eastern Province hosts the energy, oil and gas developments that are the large drivers of AV, while the western region reaps the benefits of seasonal upticks in AV activity, particularly during the months leading up to ‘Hajj’, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca (Makkah). The Saudi government mandates particular technical decorum requirements for all commercial businesses such as malls, hotels and airports.

“Deputy Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman has recently announced a vision for the future – known as Vision 2030 – where Saudi is looking at ways to reduce its reliance on oil. There are many facets to the vision including the improvement of social health and well-being, determined and long term economic reform and prosperity and its ability to draw upon its culture, heritage and importance to the global and Islamic community as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” says Joe Graziano, Christie’s regional sales manager. Saudi intends to increase its Umrah visitors alone from eight million to 30 million by 2030. “This will need hotels, infrastructure, a more effective and efficient transport system, healthcare facilities, places to eat and visit,” he adds.

“Retail space is expanding and retailers (local and international brands) are entering the market and competing hard to grab market share and increase customer experience so the opportunities are there,” reports Fawzi Mushtaha, country manager – KSA and Bahrain, NEC.

“The Saudi government is keen to attract companies to operate in the Kingdom,” states Clear-Com’s regional sales manager, Samer Mouwanes. Clear-Com works through Saudi distributor HavPro for the live market and systems integrators such as First Gulf Company, Saudi Media Systems and Al Faysaliyah. “There are opportunities for growth and large steps forward have been made,” adds Mouwanes. “However, there is still a lot more to be done in order for companies to make further investments in the region, especially as neighbouring Abu Dhabi and Dubai are advanced in infrastructure and much more open to western culture.”

Unsurprisingly, the Kingdom is very conservative. Music cannot be played in public areas, such as restaurants and shopping malls. However, many high end residences have installed their own private entertainment facilities with extensive state-of-the-art AV equipment, according to Mouwanes.

Economic pressures

Recent economic pressures have “definitely impacted the market” according to Sennheiser’s Mig Cardamone, sales and marketing director, Middle East. Spending has been curtailed especially in AV and entertainment: “Sales discussions have to be focused around the tangible benefits and the long term positive impact of the implementation.”

“Saudi always used to account for 30 per cent of sales in the Middle East but when the oil prices dropped heavily, the market came under pressure and sales went down,” confirms Crestron’s regional director, Vincent Philippo. “Recently we see signs the market is picking up again.”

AV education

Naturally, AV expertise varies significantly from country to country within the Middle East: “Education in the region is improving all the time and Saudi has some of the largest and most modern learning facilities anywhere in the world – awash with projection, flat panel displays, processing, collaboration tools, LED displays and every other AV component you can imagine,” maintains Christie’s Graziano.

“In Saudi, we emphasise education, both for partners as well as customers,” says Cardamone. Sennheiser conducts regular training days and ‘Sound Academy’ sessions. “This is to raise awareness about the kinds of solutions that are available in the market and the various benefits they can offer addressing challenges that might sometimes be overlooked. We also ensure that we cater to both end users and consultants as well as channel players, rental companies and installers.”

The biggest local vertical Crestron sells to is education. Indeed 90 per cent of Saudi universities boast Crestron in the classrooms. Education has been earmarked as a focal point in the country’s last budget, according to Sennheiser, with a number of institutions using advanced AV solutions to create a more dynamic and modern learning environment.

The Kingdom’s 94,000 mosques use the latest digital audio systems for the reproduction and broadcast of daily prayers. A notable Sennheiser project is at the Masjid al-Haram where the firm undertook a complete upgrade of the Mecca Mokabariah facility’s microphones to the latest digital models.

According to Hassan Alajmi, managing director, Labiib Solutions the most challenging issue is human resources and education in the industry. “AV is not taught in schools and the public doesn’t have a great understanding on the quality of different AV systems,” he says. “While we sell and install some of the best products and AV services in the world, the public is yet to understand the true difference between a poor and high quality installation.”

He elaborates: “One of the most important things to ensure in any project in Saudi Arabia is to understand who your client is and what their needs and exceptions are,” says Alajmi. “In Saudi Arabia, the young people make up a large majority of the population, but the money is with the elders so there can be a conflict of interests between the ‘money payer’ and the younger generation. It is important to find the right balance between the different clientele and understand whose needs you are meeting. In addition, Saudi Arabia is a very social country so many companies rely on word of mouth and good feedback to source new work and projects. It is therefore vital to provide outstanding customer service to all clients.”

Similar to the rest of the Middle East region, cultural sensibilities are important, notes Marco Fornier, regional sales manager, Barco. “The real key is to be close to the customer all the time, especially after sale.”

Barco has been present in Saudi for over 30 years basing an office in Riyadh since 2015. “Our go-to-market approach has been to establish long term relationships with trusted and reputable local partners to provide proactive support,” says Fornier.

The KSA’s sheer size presents a logistical challenge for sales and support, pre and post sales services.  ”Cultures vary from one area to another and it is important to manage knowledge transfer and to educate the clients and channels. It is challenging given the scale and the deployable resource,” advises Mushtaha.

The Kingdom is investing billions of dollars to build four new ‘Economic Cities,’ referred to as Smart Cities. The move is an attempt to diversify by moving GDP away from hydrocarbons (oil accounts for 94 per cent of the country’s export revenue).

Smart cities

Smart Cities are expected to support this trend, as well as create a knowledge economy – one that will provide KSA’s younger population with the skills required for professional and senior-level jobs. The Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) expects the strategy to contribute US$150 billion to GDP and create more than one million jobs by 2020.

Of the four projects Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) is one of the most ambitious construction projects in the world. It is hoped the $100 billion (€89 billion) city will be a magnet for global business and tourism to rival Dubai, home to two million people and one of the world’s biggest deep water ports intended to compete with China for manufacturing and India for logistics. It is not expected to be complete until 2035.

Opportunities for AV business at KAEC and others may, however, be being hoovered up by “low budget Chinese brands” in Philippo’s words.

Mobile communications firm Nokia and local mobile network operator Zain KSA are joining forces to help transform Jeddah into a Smart City. They will apply advanced networking technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud to connect and manage a wide array of devices, vehicles, homes and applications. Use of these technologies is intended to improve municipal services, enhance the business climate in Jeddah and create a better quality of life for the city’s nearly three million residents.

The plan includes the rollout of 5G, the fifth generation mobile network which promises speeds up to 1,000 times faster than current 4G networks and with negligible latency.

Tourism

Saudi Arabia has a distinctive tourism landscape and Makkah is at the core of this for both local and international travellers. Hajj visit numbers are expected to exceed five million by 2025. Infrastructure under development, such as the expansion of Jeddah’s airport which is expected to increase capacity to 80 million passengers by 2035, will further boost pilgrim numbers. KAEC is also being developed as a major religious tourist destination – targeting the 10 million Saudis that go abroad each year to enjoy world destinations.

“There are plans to make the Kingdom a tourist destination in the next decade which will bring more diverse business for the AV industry,” says Mouwanes, citing theme park installation opportunities.

Exterity says it has been particularly busy in and around Jeddah – a major settling ground for tourists and visitors during Hajj – with the developments of over 30 hospitals and 40 luxury hotels.

Case study: Fair mapping

Held recently in the Saudi Arabian coastal city of Jeddah, the International Book Fair attracted 440+ international publishers from 25 countries. Running throughout the show was a spectacular projection mapping installation measuring 165m wide by 11.5m tall – the work of BrightStar Events a local event engineering and management company and requiring three Christie Roadie HD+35K and eight Roadster HD20K units positioned at 15m intervals opposite a pavilion structure.

The projected content was inspired by the history of Arabian calligraphy. The complete show ran for an hour with a 3D mapping segment that ran for almost six minutes.

Case study: University solves reverb

The Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University enrolls 35,000 students in a campus that spans across Saudi Arabia’s capital city. Most of the university’s multiple lecture halls and auditoriums on both the men’s and women’s campuses struggled with intelligibility and reverberation issues, so a massive retrofit of the school’s sound reinforcement systems was called for. Spain-based engineering and architectural firm TYPSA recommended systems based around Renkus-Heinz ICONYX digitally steerable line array loudspeaker systems. Local Riyadh contractor/integrator Baud Telecom Company was the installing contractor.

Going into orbit: Digital Sputnik

British Cinematographer

In 2006, young Estonian director Kadri Kõusaar was starting to film her first feature and turned to the Kallas brothers, then running Tallinn-based kit supplier Duograaf, to source a technical solution. 

https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/digital-sputnik/

“We wanted to shoot at least 2K digital raw,” recalls Kaur Kallas. “My brother, Kaspar, remembered he'd seen a strange camera head in a faraway corner at NAB called Silicon Imaging SI2K. We decided to take a plunge and order one. What we got was a working prototype without a recorder and a non-functioning lens mount. This started our journey of building custom solutions for the film industry.”

If they could connect two SI2K camera heads to a recorder the Kallas' realised they'd have a small and mobile 3D camera system. By 2010 they had designed one weighing only 7kg without battery, while the competition weighed in at 35kg or more. It caught the eye of director Werner Herzog and DP Peter Zeitlinger who selected it to film his acclaimed 2010 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. 

It was around this time that the brothers began taking LED technology seriously. 

“We felt that the market would be ready in a few years to replace HMI and tungsten with LED lights and the technology was becoming available,” says Kaur Kallas. From 2010 the majority of our effort went into perfecting a LED lighting solution for replacing HMI.” 

Their solution was a system designed to be modular, lightweight, and energy efficient while maintaining high colour precision and flicker-free dimming. The individual modules are grouped to light fixtures and controlled by either iPad or DMX, allowing users to change a number of parameters like colour temperature. 

“Digital cameras see the world differently than our eyes,” he explains. “All CMOS chip-based cameras see RGB Primaries but they do not see the full spectrum. Based on that we selected RGB LEDs that emit light at the sweet spot of CMOS sensor RGB Primaries. We then create white light by mixing together RGB at high output which in turn gives the CMOS chips more chromatic information than traditional lights. Aesthetically, this means that the camera is seeing more colour depth and the images coming out of the camera are more saturated.”

Products range from the DS 1 powered by V-mount batteries for run and gun style to the DS 6 Frames, presented as a replacement for Dino lights or 2-4KW HMIs. It also manufacturers accessories including the DS Beam which turns six DS3 systems into a multiple fixture beam that can be attached to a truss.

“Our philosophy is to have the light module as a building block and use it in different configurations,” he says.

After the launch of its first product, DS3+, in 2013, it took about a year to get it into the hands of the right people; “those who could see the potential of light grading and how it can improve their workflow and the final image,” says Kallas.

Per D. Fasmer joined the team as head of sales in the U.S, concentrating his efforts on demoing and testing for leading DOPs. All this paid off in 2015 when the firm were selected to be the main lighting source for Independence Day Resurgence (Markus Förderer BVK) quickly followed by Star Wars: Rogue One (Greig Fraser ACS ASC), Queen of the Desert (again for Herzog and Zeitlinger) and Ghost in the Shell (Jess Hall BSC),

“It is definitely not easy to get access to high level professionals,” he says. “It helped that Peter Zeitlinger was teaching at cinematography in Munich and Markus Fröderer was his student a while ago. Additionally, Greig Fraser also knows Markus well and through these recommendations we got invited to the camera test on Independence Day Resurgence.”

Other major productions using DS kit include The Neon Demon (DOP: Natasha Braier); Jason Bourne (Barry Akroyd BSC), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Harry Braham BSC), Kong: Skull Island (Larry Fong ASC), Fast 8 (Stephen F. Windon ACS, ASC), Alien Covenant (Dariusz Wolski ASC) and Bright (Roman Vasyanov ACS).

“We are fast becoming a 'go-to' light source on many high budget productions. The light grading capabilities of our fixtures have played a major role in getting our fixtures on these jobs. Being able to grade the light to achieve the look you want instead of grading the image is not only a huge timesaver on set but also allows the cinematographer to achieve the desired ambience already on the set, thereby dramatically reducing post production requirements.”

He claims that if a production is shot entirely with LED lights it could result in power savings up to 85 per cent. 

“When using RGBW LEDs we have the possibility to create white balance light from 1500K up to 10000K plus we can mix in any primary or secondary colour,” he says. “Digitally controlled RGBW LED based lighting platform will make lighting into an exact science. Mobility and modularity will make it possible to shift the focus back to content creation instead of infrastructure management.”

The firm's manufacturing base is in Tallinn, Estonia which employs 22 people. LEDs are manufactured by Cree in the US. It mans showrooms in Stockholm and Amsterdam with the recently opened office in Sherman Oaks, LA. Rental partners include MBS Lighting at Pinewood in UK, Atlanta and Los Angeles; Cinelease, Xytech in New Zealand, The Netherlands' Het Licht, Norway Dasglys and Miracle Worker in Poland.

“All our fixtures are manufactured in EU according to our specs,” he says. “We do the final assembly, calibration and testing in-house to make certain that all the fixtures that we send out are up to our high quality standards. 

The lightweight and modular build of the equipment has found novel applications. A partnership with Intuitive Aerial and Swedish DP Simon Sjörén in 2014 filmed skiiers at nighttime shot by a Red Epic mounted on one drone, lit with DS LEDs on a second drone. The DS Heli System demonstrated a technique that might be used in a multitude of night exterior situations where a heavy toplight is needed for wider angled framings. 

While Digital Sputnik's focus has been on high profile features, "since they have the highest demand on technology" it is starting to look more at lower budget features and television drama already scoring success with True Detective and Hawaii Five-0 using its systems.

“Our focus is also enhancing the user experience and we are currently developing a new iOS-based management software which would allow for smaller productions to have the same level of central management which has been possible up to now only with a dedicated DMX controller board.”