Esports media: How it's broadcast to fans, and how traditional TV is getting involved

Sports Business International

Streaming websites are synonymous with esports viewing, and have been largely responsible for its rapid ascent.
http://www.sportbusiness.com/sportbusiness-international/esports-media-how-its-broadcast-fans-and-how-traditional-tv-getting
Twitch is by far the most important platform, averaging 10m views daily/400m views a month worldwide.
“Twitch owns the audience. To get reach you have to have a channel on Twitch,” says Malph Minns, Managing Director at sports consultancy Strive Sponsorship.
Other similar, but far smaller, esports video platforms include Azubu, MLG.tv, Hitbox, uStream, and StreamMe.
The biggest competitor to Twitch is YouTube Gaming.
“There are really only two places for successful content creation – Twitch and YouTube,” says Matt Hill, SVP Global Sports and Entertainment Consulting, at marketing agency GMR. “[Put] simply, Twitch provides the gaming audience the ability to take their highlights to YouTube, and YouTube provides a notification to [gamers’ YouTube] channels when the creator is live on Twitch. The relationship is competitive in the sense that the two video platforms are both attempting to be the ‘go to’ location for gaming video content.”
Each has its points of difference. YouTube attracts large global audiences, but lacked the ability to broadcast live until the launch of YouTube Gaming live streaming in September 2015, “a direct attempt by YouTube to dethrone Twitch,” says Hill.
“YouTube is adopting a very aggressive strategy to take share from Twitch in live streaming,” agrees Adam Mezhvinsky, founder of esports consultancy Quintessential Enterprises (QTE). “YouTube’s advantage is that is has a far wider social community for esports fans to share content with.”
According to Hill, a content creator can, and should, use both platforms, “as either one is a good choice when trying to grow your brand, and audience. YouTube now may be able to attract a wider, avid and casual, gaming consumer.”
Facebook, with 1.6bn users, is getting into the game by partnering with live video content providers, including Activision Blizzard Media Networks, to show live tournaments and news programming via MLG.tv’s Facebook page.
Television broadcasters have begun covering esports in a bid to reach its young male audiences.
The conventional route is a dedicated TV channel. In the US, ESPN began by streaming games on its website, expanding its offer to includes blocks of esports programming on TV channels ESPN2 and ESPNU. European pay-TV broadcaster Sky recently launched the Ginx.TV channel to air esports competitions.
Another route is invest vertically. Turner Broadcasting and WME-IMG have done this by creating the Eleague around CS:GO. Coverage is distributed on TV channel TBS and simulcast on Twitch. The project was recently expanded to cover The Overwatch Open, a tournament based on Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch title.

This time it’s different

Traditional TV has covered esports before. In Korea, OnGameNet aired the first television broadcast of an esports tournament – Starleague – in 1999. MTV covered the Cyberathlete Professional League World Tour in 2005. USA Network showed the Major League Gaming 2006 Pro Circuit. Sky partnered with DirecTV to launch the Championship Gaming Series in 2007, which folded a year later.
The latest wave of coverage is considered more likely to be sustained because the esports audience has become a more critical target for traditional TV networks. This is a demographic which is showing less and less interest in traditional TV pay packages and schedules. Broadcasters have more at stake in getting their approach right.
The esports audience has grown to a scale that broadcasters and advertisers cannot afford to ignore. But they are struggling to get to grips with its global scale and lack of structure. Unlike conventional sport, esports grew online and without geographic boundaries.
“The rise of social media, live streaming and expanded distribution options for broadcasts of top level competitions have enabled esports to break down geographical barriers in a way that many traditional sports have struggled with,” says Mike Sepso, SVP at Activision Blizzard Media Network.
“Esport is global so distribution has to be global and Twitch serves that for the core audience,” says Michele Attisani, co-founder and COO at esports content producer FACE IT. “The big opportunity for broadcasters is to engage with a more localised mainstream audience.”
Alex Varatharajah, analyst at Ampere Analysis, says the main issue facing traditional media in esports is competing with established providers like Twitch.
Duncan Stewart, Deloitte’s Director of Technology, Media and Telecommunications Research, says broadcaster investment has not been significant:
“A typical US cable company might air 1,000 channels, so airing a single esport channel is not an overwhelming commitment. So far, based on public information as well as some private conversations, the esport channels that have been launched have not seen blockbuster ratings. Part of the problem may be the human interest angle: people like knowing something about the person behind the player (think about how the Olympics always does that) and the people who play esports are sometimes not comfortable on camera.”

The importance of authenticity​

Some historical attempts to put esports on television failed because the programming was perceived as inauthentic. “Too much of the old content pandered to a mainstream audience and alienated the core esports fan,” says Minns. “The challenge for broadcasters now is to provide value to the core fan while also trying to bring new people on board.”
This is also a challenge for esports content producers such as FACE IT, Ginx.TV, and ESL, whose business model is to distribute content to as many outlets as possible.
“Even two years ago, the hardcore esports enthusiast would only be interested in watching content on Twitch as the purest way of consuming this content,” says James Dean, Managing Director, Turtle Entertainment UK, the owner of ESL. “The aim is to adapt esports to TV. The industry is in a trial-and-error phase just now. There will be no single winning format but authenticity will be key.”
Broadcasters are often advised to partner with a ‘native’ esports producer to better understand the audience. Hence Swedish media giant MTG’s acquisition of Turtle Entertainment, and Sky and free-to-air commercial broadcaster ITV’s investment in Ginx.TV.

Interactivity missing from TV​

A critical element which some observers suggest fundamentally undermines any attempt by TV to successfully deliver esports is the interactive nature of most esports consumption.
“The real-time chat function is a key part of any online broadcast, offering people a very direct way to engage with their favourite players,” says Dean.
Online platforms like Twitch offer viewers a rich set of statistics and the ability to switch between the video feeds of different players within the same game, or to switch to watch another game entirely. MLG.tv on Facebook offers viewers an ‘Enhanced Experience,’ which is an HD video stream with a feed of match statistics, live leaderboards, and insights based on the competition they are watching.
Such interactivity is increasingly possible on connected TVs, but more likely something that broadcasters will offer via second-screen applications or online services running parallel to the large screen broadcast.

Producing content for TV is different​

“Traditional esports coverage has been like calling a horse race,” says Minns. “The action has been confined to commentary of player-versus-player with little broad narrative. Contextual storytelling is what broadcast does very well. Esports on TV will see more pre- and post-game analysis, putting the game in context and explaining an individual player’s story.”
ESL’s Dean agrees: “As the esports audience has grown, we are finding that people are looking for more engaging content, which means developing ideas around analysis and commentary and side stories that creates additional editorial or storylines around tournaments. The question is how we blend this into a service which works on second screen and on TV for the millennial audience.”Attisani says educating viewers is key: “The biggest challenge with showing esports on TV is that viewers often won’t have a clue what’s going on. Education is vital.”
He suggests broadcasters could take direction from TV coverage of poker. “When poker was brought to TV the key presentation initiative was to show the competitor’s cards to the viewer at home with commentary about what each hand meant. Similarly, we have to explain what’s happening and why.”
An appraisal of the first season of Turner’s Eleague by rival esports broadcaster ESPN rated its production values “above that of other esports broadcasts”. It praised reaction shots of players and fans that provided emotional context to the in-game action, and the highlighting of the personal stories of some players, which “made the games more meaningful without sacrificing the pacing of the broadcast.” This allowed a newer audience to feel engaged with the players and teams, ESPN concluded.
There was criticism of the Eleague’s structure, however, with ESPN calling it a “drawn-out tournament” rather than a league, “with an unusually high number of teams and an unnecessarily inflated game count. As a result, it was difficult to become invested in any single game throughout the group stages, save perhaps the weekly Friday finals played on TBS.”
Eleague coverage is making a mark. An Eleague broadcast on 16 September 2016 drew 361,000 viewers, beating, by way of comparison, the 292,000 that watched the Premier League clash between Liverpool and Chelsea on NBC on the same day.

The role of publishers​
Since games publishers’ business is selling games, rather than selling media rights to competitions featuring their games, there are far fewer content restrictions around major esports events than with traditional sports.
For the time being at least, publishers see esports primarily as marketing. The more people who spend time with their games via esports, the more people are likely to purchase the game or, for free titles, make micro-transactions within them. Ovum forecasts that global revenue generated by online/micro-transaction PC games – including LoL or Dota 2 – will rise to $28.1bn by 2019.
Esports content producers, such as tournament organisers, meanwhile, make most of their revenue from sponsorship and advertising sold around video streams associated with their content.
“We create thousands of hours of content from 15 studios worldwide, so we have a huge amount of inventory we can sell around and a big incentive to try and break into the broadcast industry and get our content into linear and OTT platforms,” says ESL’s Dean. “It’s the reason MTG bought us.”
For publishers and esports producers, the interest of traditional media represents potential new revenue, either by extending coverage of the game title to a new audience or in selling rights to broadcasters. Broadcasters will look to make money from sponsorship and advertising around programming.
“While the bulk of esports revenue for content producers is made at the elite end where the top teams and players compete, it is extremely important for publishers to feed the grassroots,” says Minns. “Publishers make more from game sales and in-game purchases than they make directly from fans watching the game. At least, that’s where the current balance of money lies.”
Recognising the increased interest in esports, publishers have sought to adopt the format of established sports tournaments to further their appeal to television and sponsor brands.
Electronic Arts launched EA Majors based around Madden NFL Football, FIFA and Battlefield 1, explicitly intended to mirror the major tournaments in tennis and golf. There will be four Madden Majors a year, each with a $250,000 prize pool.
Valve scheduled four Majors for Dota 2, described as “a series of four marquee tournaments culminating in The International.” These Majors are backed up by open and regional qualifiers in multiple geographies.
Riot Games has hosted League of Legends championships across multiple territories for the fourth year in a row, including in France, the UK, Belgium, and Germany.
“Adopting the structure, and indeed the terminology, of established sports further reflects the sense that esports are pitching towards the mainstream,” says Ovum.

The esports viewer

PwC reports that one in five esports viewers watches weekly and consumes an average of 19 days of esports content per year. Asians and Hispanics tend to watch more (27 and 32 days respectively) and self-identified hardcore gamers watch 32 days.
Newzoo reports that esports enthusiasts spend 42 hours a month watching esports content, compared with 23 hours per month spent by football enthusiasts consuming football content. An average esports viewing session lasts 2.2 hours, according to Superdata. A large percentage of esports viewers (40 per cent say Newzoo) don’t themselves play the game that they like to watch, which is considered proof of a high level of engagement.
When it comes to what platform fans use, PwC says 57 per cent view esports via a laptop or mobile device. Only 32 per cent watch esports on TV. Newzoo research suggests that 67 per cent of US fans use laptops or PCs to watch esports video, compared to just 27 per cent for TV.

Capturing natural magic in 8K with Red EPIC-W

VMI

Shooting high resolution video to extract useable frames has become a handy and relatively common technique in live sports and feature film visual effects but Banana Split Productions has made ingenious use of it in order to capture the natural magic of a child’s performance.

http://vmi.tv/case-studies/article/127

The boutique commercials agency and production company is among the first to make use of the Red EPIC-W with HELIUM sensor for a TV spot and is arguably the first anywhere outside Hollywood to record 8K against green screen.

The creative brief for Hasbro toy brand My Little Pony depicts two young children at home enjoying a colouring book and letting their imaginations roam free as the My Little Pony world magically appears all around them.

Normally this would have been filmed over a couple of days, including one in a full green screen studio, but in order to the meet the tight turnaround date, Banana Split producer Anne-Maria Wilson and director Ian Sciacaluga decided to film it all on location in just a single day, arranging for a green screen to be set up in the basement of a suburban house in South London.

What may have been a risky decision for such a high profile project was nullified by the choice of acquisition source.

“When you are working with child performers not only are you limited by the time allowed with them but you never really know where the best moments of their performance will be,” explains director of photography Jonathan Beech. “Often the most naturalistic and magic moments are in the wides rather than the close ups. Shooting at the highest resolution possible with the safety net of being able to reframe in the edit was the essential luxury the EPIC-W enabled.”

There are other cameras with 8K sensors but what made the Red model particularly attractive to the team was its ability to output Avid files. The camera can also be switched to output Apple ProRes but an Avid format suited Banana Splits’ post production route. Files could be converted onboard the camera from Red Raw and seamlessly transferred to the edit making significant time savings.

The camera is able to simultaneously record 8K Red Raw and 4K Avid files speeding up render time by being in a edit-ready format and allowing the director the option of going back to the 8K source to extract those ‘one time only’ magic moments.

Despite having used Reds before, Beech made sure to run extensive tests with the new camera at VMI.

“We wanted to know how the menus and codecs worked, how the camera functioned under different circumstances and what we could and couldn’t do with it,” he explains. “There can be the odd gremlin in firmware with new cameras so we were just double and triple checking. We spent a whole day at VMI and the technicians there gave us all the knowledge they had which put us in good stead.”
As it turned out, the camera performed brilliantly with no technical issues at all.

A set of Zeiss Master Primes was chosen to complement the sharpness of the 8K image.

“At the end of the day you can always make a picture softer in post but you can’t really make it sharper,” Beech says. “As soon as I put the Prime lens on and looked at the picture I realised I was looking at a filmic image. The camera’s different grading options gives you more latitude at the top end of the curve for more detail in whites or blacks. Although we didn’t need to use the full dynamic range of the camera in this instance, it’s exciting to realise just how much flexibility in terms of grading options the EPIC-W offers. It seems limitless.”

The spot is being edited in house at Banana Split and airs on February 22

Big data is driving AI across media

KNect365 TMT

Access from devices to cloud AI APIs is the game changer providing highly powerful and scalable real-time capabilities for processing data. 

https://knect365.com/media-networks/article/0124a4ba-0517-450a-a5f5-171688248051/big-data-is-driving-ai-across-media?utm_campaign=Share+Widget&utm_medium=Article+Share&utm_source=twitter

The concept of ‘machines thinking like humans’, has moved beyond theory thanks to the increase in – and increase in access to – massive amounts of unstructured multimedia combined with the low cost of high-power, specifically cloud-based, computing. Essentially, if it weren’t for big data there would be no artificial intelligence.

“There’s a been a huge influx of data with everyone feeding sound, text and imagery over social media which has accelerated our ability to try to find ways to process and understand it,” says Ian Hughes, analyst at 451 Research. “Traditional processing and analytics are too slow since it doesn’t scale, so research has been pushed into AI as a way of dealing with data.”

Adoption is bound to grow as all media experiences become fully connected and new products are developed to provide more convenience, relevance and satisfaction to the user experience. Voice recognition is an early example.

“Speech-to-text services could become a ‘table stake’ in multi-language video markets providing automated subtitling over any video content,” reckons Nagra senior director product marketing Simon Trudelle.

“You can imagine that AI systems will be able to analyse, by facial recognition or object detection, the actual content for metadata gathering,” says Paul Turner VP, enterprise product management, Telestream. “Given that metadata is key to automated workflows, this could vastly expand our capability to ‘mine’ content for other purposes.”

Some 75% of Netflix’ usage is driven by recommended content that was itself also developed with data – reducing the risk of producing content that people won’t watch and proposing content that consumers are eager for. This groundbreaking use of big data and basic cognitive science in the content industry has shown others its potential.

“The world’s biggest content owners are going direct to consumers,” says Trudelle. “With Netflix and Amazon now in the top ten content creation companies worldwide, it could drive a paradigm shift in the media industry. With a growing stock of videos available, just relying on manually managed catalogues or curated lists to create TV or SVOD services has already started reaching its limits.”

The use of AI relies heavily on massive volumes of unstructured data – and a lot more has become available now that video-enabled consumer devices are connected. Capturing and managing TV/video platform data so it can be exploited by advanced predictive algorithms is becoming a key focus for the media industry.

“With early data mining you needed to be experienced in statistical analysis to take advantage of the technology – now we are able to put some AI tech into the hands of those who don’t have a Phd to make it work,” says ThinkAnalytics founder/CTO Peter Docherty. “We can also take advantage of elastic computing power to build and scale models and begin to develop more industry specific tools.”

Voice assistants such as Amazon’s Echo and Google Home record user voices in order to function, a logical extension of which is to have cameras on smart TVs and STBs relay information back to the operator about who is watching to improve individual profiling, content serving, ad targeting and automated product insertion (using tools like Mirriad).

This may appear more intrusive to the way in which Google or Amazon appropriates data from web searches, for example, and opens up a debate about how much data consumers may be willing to part with for perceived benefit or service discounts.

According to Bloomberg, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are already aggregating voice queries from each system's user base to eductate their respective AIs about dialects and natural speech patterns.

“The advent of cloud-based apps and APIs means 2017 will be about personalisation,” says IBM’s EU Cognitive Solutions & IoT executive Carrie Lomas. “It’s not just about knowing age and gender but knowing a consumer’s emotional response to products marketed to them. Cognitive computing enables media and brands to personalise their approach in a frictionless way.”

At Kudelski (Nagra’s parent), principal data scientist Pietro Berkes says machine learning (ML) algorithms are used to assist human decisions in all its core businesses including helping operators understand the behaviour of subscribers, predict churn and optimise their catalogue.

Its security division uses ML methods for “privacy-preserving user behaviour modelling and intrusion detection.” ML algorithms are also applied to help infrastructure operators better manage peak traffic situations and to detect and prevent fraud in deployed systems, he says.

Realistically, it may still take several years before new AI APIs become widely available and adopted by the traditional content creation and distribution value chain. “It’s really a new mindset that players need to have which asks ‘What if there were a cloud AI API doing this?’” suggests Trudelle.

That cultural reluctance may also inhibit AI’s adoption in production although similar benefits of sifting an overwhelming mass of data apply. Video from observational documentary shoots, for example, regularly achieve ratios of 100:1 swamping editorial. Auto-assembly and even auto edit-packages are available to package and polish raw multimedia though instances of use in professional content creation are rare.

“Making one cut of a promo was fine when TV was the only distribution medium, but today that’s not good enough,” says Oren Boiman, co-founder and CEO of Magisto, an AI-based editing software developer that claims 80 million users.

“If you are creating a trailer for a newspaper website, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube or Instagram, each one should be formatted differently,” argues Boiman. “You might target by gender, age or by country. With so many variants of the same source media required to optimise every impression online, doing so manually is extremely inefficient.”

Other examples of creation aided by AI are springing up. At last year’s Cannes Lions ad festival, a promo produced by Saatchi & Saatchi was reportedly scripted and directed by AI . Even the casting was done by a program that examined electroencephalogram (EEG) brain data from actors and matched them to the emotions it had detected in the song and its singer.

IBM challenged an ad agency to rate a video made by Watson alongside one made to the same brief by another team at the same agency. “They couldn’t decide which one was which but said they preferred the one by Watson,” says Lomas, stressing that creatives are still necessary to shape video and create campaigns “but AI techniques can take away the heavy lifting”.

IBM also demonstrated how Watson could be trained to examine patterns in trailers and horror movies to help create the official trailer for Fox feature Morgan, slashing typical production time from weeks to a few hours.

“It’s a common belief that AI will replace mechanical roles with creative ones,” says Berkes. “While that might be broadly true, the reality is more complex. The output of with tasks like creative filtering and automatic editing of movies must be ultimately evaluated by humans.”

Since ML systems need very large amounts of high-quality data to achieve optimal performance “data collection and curation requires substantial organizational efforts, he says. “The global shortage of ML experts represents one of the most important difficulties for companies wanting to enter the AI market.”

In response, the generic role of the ML expert will be replaced and complemented with more specialised roles. According to Berkes, these include engineers adapting known methods to new sets of data and tuning the model parameters; data scientists supporting ML engineers with big data cluster architectures and for the visualisation and evaluation of the results. Software engineers will also be needed to productise the resulting model.

The biggest losers in an AI ecosystem will perhaps be those in ‘assisting’ roles that can be replaced with automatic systems, rather like the way the traditional role of the ‘in-betweener’ in animated movie production has gradually been replaced by computer rendering techniques.

Even further out, say 2040, where will AI be? “We will have a completely different method of interacting with computers,” says Telestream’s Turner. “The ability to communicate with common language will be a paradigm shift that is as dramatic as the adoption of the mouse was.”

The rise of the mega-library

Broadcast

Getty Images’ deal with ITN Source unpicked

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/the-rise-of-the-mega-library/5113944.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=42957

ITN’s decision to hand over the licence and distribution rights for its news archive to Getty Images has alarmed researchers and raised questions about the shape of the industry.

“On the surface, a monopoly makes the research process faster as more content is made available through fewer databases and interfaces,” says

James McDonald, an archive producer whose credits include The Program and Ronaldo. “But the implications are very worrying,” he adds. “This is going to have a negative effect on smaller businesses and could force smaller archives to sell out to some of the bigger suppliers just as a way to get their content out there.”

The ITN archive comprises 1 million news clips spanning 61 years, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam war and the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami.

While ITN retains ownership, sales will be outsourced to Getty from July, leading to the closure of in-house clip rights division ITN Source and the loss of 30 jobs.

“ITN was looking for a long-term partnership that would grow its archive business and believes Getty Images is the right partner for the stewardship and dissemination of its archive content,” says Getty’s director of video content development Lee Shoulders.

“We will be able to leverage our global distribution platform and world-class sales force to expand the market for ITN’s video footage.”

ITN’s technical team will spend the next few months uploading hundreds of thousands of clips to Getty’s site. “Files will be temporarily uploaded to Amazon S3 cloud storage to facilitate the transfer of ITN’s complete library,” says Shoulders.

“In addition, ITN’s tape-based material will be made available as searchable text records through our analogue search and fulfilment workflow.”

What concerns researchers, though, is that vital knowledge possessed by ITN Source staff will be lost in transition.

“Getty’s footage collections are now going to be so immense and ever-expanding that it would not be possible for any one person to have a good overview of what it does, and doesn’t, hold,” says McDonald.

The personal touch

Paul Bell, the producer of documentaries including Senna and Amy, adds: “As a researcher, I want access to the material that I know is not on the website by finding the person who’s been with the archive the longest. Getty needs to make as much available as it can and keep the process transparent.”

For Carol O’Callaghan, a jury coordinator for trade association Focal International, “folk knowledge” is “lost in mega-libraries as staff cannot be familiar with the history of all the represented production companies”.

There are similar warnings from rival footage archives. “If no one from ITN Source moves with the archive and they rely on data transfer alone, that’s a recipe for disaster,” says Massimo Moretti, UK library commercial development manager at StudioCanal. “There will be a knowledge gap that they won’t be able to fill quickly.”

Alwyn Lindsey, vice-president, sales at Associated Press (AP), says archive owners underestimate the importance of personal interaction at their peril. “ITN personnel selling ITN’s own content would be knowledgeable and passionate – which is possibly a challenge for Getty.”

He implies that the link between ITN Source and the ITN newsroom, for planning ongoing news stories like Brexit, may be broken. “It’s not just knowledge of historical content that is important but also an understanding of what will be shot going forward.”

In response, Shoulders stresses that Getty’s ITN collection will be updated daily, “with agenda-setting news footage made available to our international customer base from 24 hours after it was first aired”.

Along with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ Corbis Images, the venture capital-backed Getty is credited with lifting image archives from a cottage industry to a global business by aggregating – through acquisition or licence – smaller collections, then digitising the assets and making them available for search on the web.

Getty’s purchases include Image Bank, Allsport and MediaVast. Since 2013, it has represented BBC Motion Gallery on behalf of BBC Worldwide, and in September it struck a similar deal with AP. A year ago, Getty acquired the rights to run Corbis, cementing its position as the world’s largest online image library.

“It takes a lot of investment to protect original assets and take them to market, which a larger company is better equipped to do,” suggests British Pathé general manager Alastair White. “The only way smaller libraries can survive is by getting everything online digitally and in HD.”

Getty’s dominance, and in particular the housing of BBC and ITN assets under one (foreign) roof, represents an existential threat, according to some. “By the summer, the gatekeeper of anything of importance in the recent history of this country will be not a public broadcaster, but an external agency,” says Bell. “If these assets were buildings rather than film, there might have been more government oversight.”

Licensing alternative

McDonald warns of “a considerable threat” to Britain’s audio-visual heritage – “not only in its exploitation by an American corporation, but in how accessible it is to film-makers to license, as Getty’s collection is tailored to sell to advertising and corporate productions.”

He adds: “They haven’t made the BBC’s collection any more accessible to film-makers than Motion Gallery was already doing and I don’t hold out much hope that their further acquisitions will be beneficial in that way either.”

The solution, he says, is to establish a publicly funded body in the mould of the French Institute National Audiovisual (INA), which licenses content from French broadcasters. “It strikes me as a much more ethical way to successfully license the content produced by our public service broadcasters.”

Others, though, see an inevitable and straightforward business move. “ITN Source has been an aggregator itself and the market continues to consolidate into a number of key players,” says Lindsey. “I don’t think a huge amount will change.”

AP is one of those players, recently acquiring rights to the British Movietone collection from Newsreel Archive.

StudioCanal’s Moretti anticipates little impact on the market, except a possible knock-on effect on fees. “If they adopt a very aggressive pricing policy, then the whole market value of a clip, regardless of its content, could reduce. It’s something I will have to monitor.”

Bell is also relaxed about the prospects. “Getty is a commercial library in the same way that ITN Source is a commercial library, so I can see that having Getty represent ITN is a good fi t from their point of view.”

There are unresolved implications for the future of collections represented by ITN Source. Broadcast understands that management of newsreels like Fox Movietone and British Paramount will revert to rights holders 21st Century Fox and Reuters.

Similarly, ITV Studios will take back control of collections from Rank, Korda, Carlton and Granada, ranging from the Carry On film series to Coronation Street.

Anticipating the move, and in parallel to ITN Source, Reuters began to sell its 1 million-clip archive through Reuters Media Express last September.

The wider challenge for archives like ITN’s, which accrue daily, is to process the rising tide of video.

Artificial intelligence tools such as voice, facial and pattern recognition are being introduced alongside basic timecode to automate metadata tagging, but there are doubts about whether any technology will be good enough to describe all the nuances of material on which archive producers depend.

“Machine cataloguing will always be a poor representation of emotions conveyed by a shot of a landscape, for example,” says O’Callaghan.

Getty uses an API that “significantly automates” content ingestion to its web platform. “This makes it very quickly available for customers to purchase and download,” explains Shoulders.

“Storage space costs and infrastructure have to be anticipated ahead of time so that we can keep up with such large volumes of daily intake. The ability to refi ne search in a way that we are displaying the most relevant content to a customer is a focus of ours, to ensure the correct clip can be found among the volume coming in.”

Ultimately, Getty’s swoop is a reflection of some major shifts in an industry striving to become more professional. “By doing that, you hope that it doesn’t become too streamlined and corporatised for researchers to be able to dig in the dirt to find the gold and gems,” says Bell. “If that is gone, you end up losing quite a bit of the archive world.”

ITN SOURCE: WHAT THE INDUSTRY SAYS

By the summer, the gatekeeper of anything of importance in the recent history of this country will be not a public broadcaster, but an external agency

PAUL BELL
DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER

ITN Source has been an aggregator itself and the market continues to consolidate into a number of key players. I don’t think a huge amount will change

ALWYN LINDSEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS

If they adopt a very aggressive pricing policy, then the whole market value of a clip, regardless of its content, could reduce

MASSIMO MORETTI
STUDIOCANAL

Getty’s footage collections are now going to be so immense… that it would not be possible for any one person to have a good overview of what it does, and doesn’t, hold

JAMES MCDONALD
ARCHIVE PRODUCER

Lost in Time: The Future of Immersive Media

Streaming Media 

A high-concept game show devised by members of The Matrix visual effects team, produced in Norway, and being sold by the makers of The X Factor could herald the future of multi-screen entertainment.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Lost-in-Time-The-Future-of-Immersive-Media-115656.aspx

Lost in Time is a mash-up of live action filmed on a green screen with audience participation and real-time graphics. spanning TV, gaming, mobile and e-commerce.

"We are pioneering a new category of digital entertainment called interactive mixed reality (IMR)," explains Bård Anders Kasin, co-founder of The Future Group (TFG), the tech masterminds and co-producer of the show with FremantleMedia. "The real and virtual worlds merge to produce a new environment where physical and digital co-exist."

"All the big TV evolutions have come about from technology," says Dug James, SVP of development production and part of the global entertainment development team for FremantleMedia. "The advent of mini-DV and portable camcorders enabled the first reality shows. Nonlinear editing and logging of rushes enabled on location rapid turnaround formats like Big Brother and text voting pushed interactivity with the Idol and Got Talent formats. Fremantle are always looking for those forward-looking tech changes that deliver new ways of entertainment or storytelling."

Nolan Bushnell, the founder of games developer Atari Corp. and a consultant to the project, claims that the fusion of gaming with TV can "bring a standard construct for new kinds of entertainment."

 Lost in Time follows three contestants as they are transported into different eras including the Roaring Twenties, Wild West, Space Age, Ice Age, Medieval Age, and the Jurassic period where they compete in a series of challenges against the clock with the aim of winning a jackpot prize. Viewers can also participate within the same virtual world via mobile app where they are able to play against the show contestants as well as other players from across the country in real time.

While the TV show can be enjoyed without playing the second screen game, the format is targeting family audiences for broadcasters concerned about shedding core viewers to OTT services and mobile.

TFG has spent two and half years and amassed $42 million in funding to develop the core technology which is based on Epic Games' Unreal Engine.

The nut that it's managed to crack is to synchronise computer animation with live action photography such that people are able to interact with virtual objects, or have physical objects interact with the virtual world, in real time.

It's a breakthrough that puts the company three years ahead of anyone else, according to co-founder Jens Petter Høili. "Various companies might have developed different aspects of the technology, but no one has put it all together in the way we have," he says.

The technique is becoming increasingly popular in visual effects filmmaking on films like Avatar or The Jungle Book where a director can direct actors against a green screen while viewing virtual backgrounds in real-time. TFG takes this a stage further—it is fully live-capable. The virtual worlds are created in advance and rendered live mixed with live action photography.

"A games engine wants to render in as few milliseconds as possible whereas broadcast cameras records at anywhere from 25 to 50 frames a second," explains Bård Anders. "To make this work for broadcast we had to work a way of getting frame rates from virtual and physical cameras to precisely match, otherwise this would not work."

Working with Canadian broadcast kit vendor and virtual set specialist Ross Video, TFG devised a means of binding the Unreal game engine with linear timecode.

To do this the team were granted access to the Unreal source code and reengineered it so that the rendered virtual image is genlocked with studio footage captured with SMPTE timecode.

To achieve a pinpoint accurate chroma key, a set of HD systems cameras have been customised to run 4:4:4 RGB rather than the 4:2:2 YCbCr compressed images of conventional broadcast.

Contestants and physical objects are tracked by 150 IR sensors positioned behind the green screen. This arrangement also enables motion capture in real time. Demos of this have included contestants mocked up as storm troopers.

"In a movie you'd put markers on an actor and remove them in post," says Bård Anders. "We don't have that luxury so we needed a whole new way of linking the IR signals with the camera tracking."

Even the speed and racking of the robotic cameras has been tinkered with. Such systems are typically designed for slow-moving tracking shots and gentle zooms in news room virtual sets not for filming people running or jumping around.

The cameras are loaded with Ross' software UX VCC which provides a bridge between the robotic and manual camera systems with a tracking output and the Unreal engine.

Accommodation had to be made for any change in the physical depth of field from focusing or zooming which will naturally distort the picture's bokeh (the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image). To do that profiles of each individual lens are fed to the UX VCC which in realtime replicates the distortion inside the virtual camera model.

"If a physical prop in the studio and a virtual prop are not aligned even by a fractional amount then the whole chain pulls apart," says Bård Anders. "The background optics of each lens which distort when you change focus need to be exactly matched in the games engine."

Production is being made in a 500 sqm/5381 sq ft studio on the outskirts of Oslo. This arrangement includes a Technocrane, automated ceiling camera, several SolidTrack markerless systems plus Steadicam units. A military-grade simulation platform is used for flying or driving game elements.

The idea is that broadcasters could either use this as a hub and fly in to shoot their version of the show or establish their own green screen base equipped with a package of TFG gear. Further production hubs in the U.S. and Asia are planned.

TFG will offer a package of pre-built virtual environments as well as a library of 3D assets for content creators to build their own worlds.

This allows a broadcaster to tailor the show to suit. A Chinese version of Lost in Time might include a future Shanghai or an ancient Han Dynasty world in contrast to a version produced for Argentina, for example.

The entire technical setup will be sold to broadcasters along with a licence to produce the format. Crucially, that required the system to operate within a standard production environment.

"We could produce over IP but Fremantle needed this to scale which means it has to be able to plug into studios throughout world," says Bård Anders. "It is also important for broadcasters to use this without needing to train people to a large extent when they operate it."

Familiar broadcast switchers and control surfaces are integrated, such as Ross Carbonite Black and the Ross UX VCC. Directors will have to familiarise themselves with the ability to select from a virtual infinite number of camera angles inside Unreal with which to replay highlights of a game from any angle.

As part of the current production contestants will be recorded in 3D using photogrammetry for insertion of animated avatars of their facial likeness at certain points in the games' storyline.

The need to standardise an advanced suite of technologies also explains the decision to produce in HD, although there is nothing stopping a 4K production except managing (and paying for) four times the data overhead.

"There is a balance to be struck when you increase the resolution between resolution and frame rate but with graphics hardware advancing so fast we don't anticipate this will hinder us for long," explains Øystein Larsen, TFG's VP of virtual.

The Oslo production began by using NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 cards and is now running on its latest GPU architecture, Pascal which are "40% faster" says Larsen.

Likewise, the first season of the show is not being made for virtual reality because of the small market penetration of VR goggles. A VR app has been tested on platforms including Oculus and is available for any broadcaster that wants it.

Nor will the first season, which airs on commercial broadcaster TV Norge from March, be live. Most of the 60 minutes of each show is pre-recorded, but through the use of the companion app viewers can interact with live elements incorporated into the broadcast—for example, competing against other viewers during the show to win real prizes.

"In our experience when you do something this new something always fails in the first season," says Bård Anders. "Nothing has failed yet, but we decided to remove one element of risk which is live production. However, this is possible and will likely happen from season two."

When it does, the format's possibilities begin to open even further. It would be possible, for example, for players of the mobile app to compete live with competitors in the studio and for the same virtual world played in by studio contestants to change and react according to actions of players at home.

"This production is proof of concept," says Bård Anders. "Once we've nailed this we can really start to let our imagination's fly."

The Matrix Connection

Bård Anders was a technical director at Warner Bros during the making of The Matrix trilogy when he came up with the initial idea.

"When we started to experiment with gaming technology in the production pipeline I thought at some point we have to be able to do this in real time," he says.

In 2012 he started-up The Future Group in Oslo by merging his startup with another tech company led by Høili, a serial entrepreneur who led the sale of Høili Group to private equity firm Industri Kapital in 2005 and founded several ventures such as EasyPark.

Bård Anders called Larsen—lead technical director at Warner Bros during Bård Anders' time there—to head R&D on the virtual systems.

Another Matrix VFX alumai with Larsen at Manex and ESC facilities, Kim Libreri is now CTO at Epic Games. The Matrix link continues with Michael Gay, who also worked on the trilogy with Bård Anders, Larsen, and Libreri and is now Epic's director of cinematic production.

"After 14 years we are all back working together again," says Bård Anders.

The Fremantle Connection

FremantleMedia will sell the show at sales fayre MIPTV in April. James emphasises that for all the technology the content itself has to be compelling to watch.

"We've spent a huge amount of time on how to tell real emotional stories. We knew this wasn't going to be a game show for gamers—this had to be for families. The tech has to be stable since it needs to perform day after day but we have to give viewers a reason to interact and we do that, we hope, by telling human stories featuring genuine personalities."

Another key for Fremantle is advertising and sponsorship. Product placement is a given with logos designed to mimic the virtual environment (e/g a Pepsi logo styled to fit a saloon in the Wild West).

TFG is also working with brands to create advertising spots using the Unreal Engine such that viewers need not leave the show's virtual universe.

"Instead of leaving the show at a commercial break, we enter another virtual world which is content or a story created by a brand," says Stig Olav Kasin, TFG's chief content officer and former TV producer of Norway's version of The Voice.

The app's games can be played offline when the show is off-air.

"Sponsors are attracted because they can go deeper into storylines of the game rather than just having a bumper, plus they can have the activation all week," says James.

Users can download the app to iOS or Android and invite friends to join through Facebook. "We are concentrated on using the biggest platform for today which is TV, but designed to transition the viewers and the format over to the mobile platform from tomorrow," says Bård Anders.

The Next Frontier

The patented platform underlying the production, which Bård Anders refers to as an "integration architecture," is branded Frontier and is being sold and distributed as a separate product by Ross Video. The market for this package are post facilities, studios and producers wanting to advance virtual set capabilities with the Unreal engine and produce IMR content.

"The most complex parts are the software which integrates with the hardware system and allows us to connect everything in the studio with the virtual graphics under control of a standard broadcast HD switcher," says Bård Anders.

Other customers might include producers wanting an off-the-shelf means to pre-viz content in realtime, rather than going to the expense of proprietary systems which are currently built for shows like The Jungle Book.

There are suggestions that Frontier be used to reinvigorate existing TV formats. Instead of constructing a new physical set, why not customise a brand new one with Unreal's photorealistic graphics?

Outside of TV and film, TFG is eyeing applications in industry, e-learning, medical and e-sports. For the latter, the tools could be used to insert game commentators into League of Legends, say to analyse moves by players from within the game itself. Kind of like Tron.

Amusement parks are another potential home, offering an advance on current 4D simulation rides by putting people inside story worlds like Harry Potter or the Star Wars universe.

"We've been approached by a lot of the biggest companies around the world," says Høili.

Another spin-off product is an augmented reality graphics system which could be overlaid on soccer matches, for example, and linked with in-game sports data from the likes of Opta. Users could then pull more data, such as stats, or analysis by touchscreen.

"What we are producing with now is like the first smartphone," says Bård Anders. "There will be a natural progression of this technology."

As depth cameras advance and GPUs accelerate the processing of 3D maps interfaced with animation software then the green screen could be removed and content could be created outside a studio.

A company called Owlchemy is already developing this. Using a ZED stereo depth camera, it is able to perform realtime mixed reality compositing using a custom shader and custom plugin to be able to green screen the user and depth sort them directly into the games engine itself.

The merger of platforms and formats is a clear trend and could signal indeed signal the future of media. Finnish talkshow Tilt introduced a virtual reality component last year. The series, which broadcasts on TV6 and is produced by indie Reflect, has its contestants compete in VR games.

French distributor Kabo recently acquired the rights to sell the format internationally alongside another Reflect format which makes e-sports games available for viewers to play on mobile, connected TV and VR headsets.

Unreal TV

Fremantle is not the only media company exploring Unreal for new entertainment formats since Epic made the game engine available for free.

"Games, architecture, engineering, design, education and automotive not so much separate as they are converging into a digital content creation industry - an industry in which everything is interoperable and where Unreal is the engine that links them all together in real time," Epic chief executive Tim Sweeney told the Game Developers Conference.

Nickelodeon is developing an animated kids show codenamed Project 85 using the engine. Unreal's user forum quotes Nickelodeon saying that "the flexibility of the tool allows us to take bigger risks as we can now iterate on the fly and push into areas that were once cost and time-prohibitive. Using Unreal, kids can watch our stories, play with our characters, and invite them into their living room like never before."

ILM X Lab is also using Unreal to create immersive content in the Star Wars universe.

NewTek and Unreal

Announced in September, NewTek said its Network Device Interface (NDI)—a video over IP production protocol—will be implemented for Unreal Engine 4.

Brian Olson, vice president of product management, is convinced of the importance of the convergence of gaming engines and linear production, as well as the impact on e-sports and e-gaming.

"The convergence of linear video production and gaming engines has been taking place over the past several years in an organic fashion," he says. "In a quest for more and more realistic rendering, producers turned to gaming engines to provide state-of-the-art real-time 3D rendering of virtual environments. Gaming engines have gone beyond what has been possible with traditional virtual rendering engines, which were basically character generators to begin with. Things like global illumination, real-time reflections, and real-time shadows are difficult to do with most traditional virtual set products. Manufacturers are only now trying to bring turn-key products to market that utilize gaming engines.

He expects colossal hard sets that take up thousands of square feet are going to be a thing of the past in most cases.

"Virtual environments created by gaming engines will be nearly as realistic and probably have more impact for much less money," he says. "Gaming engines will be even more prevalent in their native space. E-sports and e-gaming events will use IP video streams from actual electronic games and competitions for linear broadcasting and digital streaming. They key is getting video in and out of computers in an easy and high-quality fashion. That's where NewTek's NDI IP video standard really helps. Epic Games has implemented NDI in UE4 to help users with this problem."

The force is strong for Star Wars: Made GREAT in Britain

VMI

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was 2016’s top-grossing film at the UK box office, more than £1m ahead of its nearest competitor, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Both, though, are testament to this island’s world class filmmaking crafts as described by Rogue One director Gareth Edwards in a short film for the Star Wars: Made GREAT in Britain campaign, a collaboration between the UK Government, Disney and Lucasfilm.

http://vmi.tv/case-studies/article/125

All eight Star Wars films have been shot largely in the UK, and the campaign is dedicated to celebrating Britain's unique contributions to the series. 

Director and DP Matthew Beecroft worked with producer Alistair Audsley to a brief from agency Feref and the UK government’s Made GREAT In Britain campaign, to film Edwards in Paris.

He also made a companion cinema commercial featuring Rogue One star Felicity Jones, shot at Claridges.

“Rather than a standard interview I wanted to make the films as cinematic as possible with an aesthetic that would fit as close as possible to the footage of Rogue One (which was shot on an ARRI Alexa 65),” explains Beecroft. “I was also aware that our time with the talent would be limited so a lighter, more portable setup using the ARRI Amira made most sense.”

For the Made GREAT in Britain campaign online video featuring Edwards he selected Superspeeds. “Since we were unsure what we’d be presented with in terms of location and lighting restrictions I thought an extra stop or so would be useful.”

Beecroft swapped the Superspeeds for Cooke S2 / S3 Panchros and shot 4K UHD (3.2K) to meet the DCP requirements of the theatrical trailer.

This was a Star Wars: Made GREAT in Britain 55" commercial made for the Industry Trust for IP Awareness, the UK copyright education body, and released as part of its anti-piracy Moments Worth Paying For campaign.

“I didn’t want it to look too clinical so using older lenses, which have a warmth and organic feel to them, are sympathetic to the rendition of skin tones and worked really well with Felicity.” 

The kit on both occasions was sourced from VMI. “When you establish a good relationship with people, as I have over 12 years working with VMI, you just know that they will give you fantastic service, lots of options and that the kit you wish for is always available.” 

In the video, Edwards talks about the strength of the British character and the camaraderie sparked on set between cast and crew.

"What is it about Britain that seems to generate these people?" he asks. "We're quite polite – all those cliches, but I think that generates a really good artistic sensibility. We have to find another way of getting it out and I think that comes through art forms. My favourite being cinema.

"It's pretty phenomenal the influence we've had on global culture. We really punch above our weight."

BBC will "Reinvent" iPlayer

Streaming Media 

Facing competition from the likes of Now TV, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video, the BBC is setting out to make iPlayer the top OTT service in the UK

Catch-up service BBC iPlayer will be "reinvented" in a bid to be the top online TV destination in the UK within three years.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/BBC-will-Reinvent-iPlayer-to-maintain-relevance-115694.aspx

Specifically, new technology such as artificial intelligence, voice recognition and personalisation will be introduced to reassert iPlayer’s eminence as the gold standard of online TV services.

In an address to staff,  made public ahead of time by the broadcaster, BBC director-general Tony Hall will explain how he wants to "reinvent public broadcasting for a new generation."

He says, "iPlayer was the biggest revolution of the last charter. Now we need it to make the leap from a catch-up service to a must-visit destination in its own right."

At the end of 2015, iPlayer was used by almost a third of the UK population, ahead of Sky's Now TV and Netflix, both used by 16%, according to Ofcom.

However, the BBC feels it needs to make a leap ahead of competition from Amazon Prime and Netflix, both of which plan to spend upwards of $6 billion this year on content.

"Our goal, even in the face of rapid growth by our competitors, is for iPlayer to be the number one online TV service in the UK," Hall says. "That will mean doubling our reach, and quadrupling the time each person spends on it every week. And we want do it by 2020. That’s tough, but I know we can do it."

The revamp is already under way. Last July, the BBC launched BBC ID, a personalised app binding access to all its digital services including BBC channels, as well as its news and sports websites. BBC ID will surface content to users based on previous content radio/text/video choices plus editorially curated recommendations.

One can expect the BBC to embrace tech developments in virtual assistants and voice recognition, as per Amazon Alexa, to enhance personalisation.

The Corporation’s experiments in 360° video experiences continues. BBC Earth Productions, which produces natural history, science, and adventure programming for commercial arm BBC Worldwide, is reportedly planning to explore 'haptic' virtual reality and AR experiences. BBC Earth recently announced it had been working with Oculus Rift to create three VR experiences, including one enabling users to follow black bears in the Alaskan wild, also available on Samsung Gear VR headsets later this month. The BBC launched its first VR production, an animation depicting migrants crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, on the Oculus store last month.

iPlayer usage has never been higher. An average of 243 million monthly requests were to the service last year. BBC Three, the youth targeted network which was taken off air and made online-only last year, was said to have had "a good year" with the first episode of drama Thirteen proving the second most popular series, after episode one of natural history show Planet Earth II, with 3.23m requests.

Other changes, already enacted by all4, the digital service of Channel 4, could see whole series released at once for binge viewing.

Beyond entertainment, the BBC will put a stronger emphasis on "slow news"—meaning more in-depth analysis of topics and issues—to run alongside the "fast" breaking news and day to day events.