HBO Uses AI to Combat Buffering

Streaming Media

Conviva says quality internet streams are only possible with intelligent realtime detection, and HBO is using Conviva's new Video AI Platform to do just that with HBO GO and HBO NOW.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/HBO-Uses-AI-to-Combat-Buffering-with-Convivas-Help-120449.aspx#

Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be a hot topic at IBC, with AI algorithms making the first meaningful contributions in media around real-time analysis and early warning of video delivery problems.

One company tackling the challenge is Conviva, which goes so far as to say that there's no getting away from the fact that to deliver TV over the internet you need artificial intelligence.

It is introducing an alerts program into its Video AI Platform to automatically detect and diagnoses service delivery issues. What's more, it has HBO on board as a reference customer.

"Publishers currently spend a considerable amount of time and effort to configure and monitor manual alerts to detect service delivery issues," explains Dr. Hui Zhang, co-founder & CEO of Conviva in a release. "This often requires large operational teams, who most times are not able to find nor configure every possible alert. Furthermore, these teams must spend valuable hours diagnosing the root cause of each and every issue. From our work with the world's largest publishers over the past ten years, we recognized the need for a solution addressing these pain points, leading to the development of Video AI Alerts."

The premise of AI as an efficient tool for OTT is acknowledgement that the internet isn't fit for purpose when it comes to video.

"Unfortunately, too many things can go wrong between the video server and the consumer's screen," Conviva states "Only AI can sort through the millions of permutations of possible problems to discover the ones that matter most as well as what will have the most impact on improving viewing experience."

Conviva's tool is underwritten by the Video AI Platform's detection and diagnosis artificial intelligence models. These models use analysis of billions of video streams reported by more than 2.5 billion sensors embedded within video players across Conviva's publisher network. According to the firm, this graph captures the relationships between entities within a publisher's catalog of content and the infrastructure used to deliver it – "much like the social graph that captures connections between various people and their interests. This graph is what enables the intelligence behind Video AI Alert's real-time diagnosis of root causes".

Hui Zhang says Video AI Alerts continually compares quality of experience (QoE) and engagement metrics against recent norms, and instantly detects anomalies.

"These alerts notify publishers of the issue, root cause, and likely solution thereby speeding resolution time," he says. "This eliminates the need to set filters and configure alerts based on static threshold values, reducing video stream disruptions and viewer dissatisfaction – this is not possible with manual alerts."

HBO's site reliability lead Vikrant Kelkar is on hand to explain that in one case, a stream "had been misconfigured and without the full stream URL reporting with each alert, we would not have been able to see nor diagnose the cause of this issue."

HBO is now using the AI alerts for streams of HBO GO and HBO NOW.

Artificial intelligence will contribute as much as $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030, according to a recent report by PwC. $6.6 trillion of this would come from increased productivity as businesses automate processes and augment their labour forces with new AI technology.

However, much of what is suddenly branded as AI in media is in fact the evolution of the data analysis solution market.  For example, AI can play an important role in improving accuracy and reliability for placement, it can combating redistribution piracy with proactive search and identification of illegal re-broadcasts and machine-learned predictive algorithms can use feedback loops to improve the relevance of the prediction engine over time.

Another important area is in network management. Bandwidth is not limitless and is a significant portion of the expense of operating, especially for OTT.

"Today's CDNs and protocols are very wasteful of bandwidth (your device will always pick the highest available bandwidth whether it's needed or not at that particular time," says Tim Child, CCO and co-founder at MAM vendor Cantemo. "Analyzing the video as it is transmitted and then using the data to determine the required bandwidth can help network operators make more efficient use of bandwidth, lowering costs and improving quality at the same time."

Fighting piracy on all fronts in the Middle East and Africa

Knect365

Professionalised OTT piracy is the biggest threat facing pay-TV providers and content rights holders globally. In the MENA region – world’s fastest growing TV market – operators are fighting back.

https://knect365.com/media-networks/article/0b955f63-0648-4471-a687-cecf1f4d2316/fighting-piracy-on-all-fronts-in-middle-east-and-africa?utm_campaign=Share+Widget&utm_medium=Article+Share&utm_source=twitter

The competition for entertainment hegemony in the Arab world is fierce. The regional TV and video market is growing at unprecedented speeds with most countries forecast to double the penetration of services by 2020.

Yet, video piracy is rife. A report by advisors IDC, Piracy in the Middle East and Africa, estimates illegal content distribution costs the industry more than US$750m every year.

“Piracy in MENA impacts the pay-TV industry immensely,” says Mohammad Al Subaie, executive director of commercial affairs at Al-Jazeera sports network beIN. “Piracy causes millions of dollars of losses to organisations, governments and deprives legitimate industries like regional content creators from return on their investments.”

"Piracy causes millions of dollars of losses to organisations, governments and deprives legitimate industries like regional content creators from return on their investments."

IDATE DigiWorld forecasts that the TV market in Africa/Middle East will grow 30% between 2016 and 2021, from €10.3 billion to €13.3bn. This momentum, which is driven largely by sub-Saharan Africa, represents the world’s fastest-growing TV market, not only today but also for the five years to come, states IDATE.

With a young and fast-growing population, a growing middle class, a solid medium-term economic outlook – despite the turbulence caused by falling oil prices in the Gulf States – the socio-economic variables point to a positive future for the region’s audiovisual sector. This positive outlook is manifested in increased TV ownership levels and progress in cellular network rollouts, with the bonus of creating a massive new base of screens for watching video.

IDATE predicts the number of TV subscribers will double in five years, apace with the rise of OTT video services. However, these typically low-cost OTT services are contributing, along with still massive levels of piracy in the region “to driving down the price of pay-TV plans”, says the analyst.

Piracy is, in fact, no more prevalent in the Middle East or the wider African continent than in any other region, but there are region-specific issues.

“A lot of people from MENA have emigrated to other countries, and that has created a lot of demand for content from them in the regions they’ve moved to,” says Christopher Schouten, Senior Director Product Marketing at Nagra. “Pay-TV operators have adjusted by licensing ethnic content, but they aren’t as successful as they’d like to be, because people can simply stream their channels from home using pirate IPTV services. The same is true for foreign immigrants and workers in the MENA region, so that is also harming MENA businesses.”

Another factor harming MENA businesses is the reticence of foreign operators to license MENA content for local distribution because of the prevalence of pirate versions of those channels being available already.  “Much of that content is FTA in MENA, but paid in other regions, and that makes it particularly difficult to trace pirate leaks,” notes Schouten. “There is no watermarking or fingerprinting available on FTA content. Expats are really driving piracy globally.”

Content theft occurs in the region in the same way it does in the rest of the world: illegal set-top boxes, both for IPTV streaming and for traditional satellite services using internet Key Sharing. Because of the lack of internet penetration in some countries, Internet Key Sharing and control word sharing on legacy CAS systems is probably a bigger problem in MENA, but content sharing is increasingly quickly.

Professional and illegal

“Pirates are entrepreneurs as well as criminals,” observes Khaled Al-Jamal, Head of Sales, MENA, Irdeto. “They know what appeals to their market. Control word sharing still appears in the region.  We recently worked with MultiChoice Africa and the Egyptian law enforcement teams to close one of the largest pirate networks for control word sharing that we’ve encountered. The pirates were recently sentenced, providing a clear message that piracy of any type is an offense and will not be tolerated.”

Nonetheless, as little as 2 to 3Mbps is sufficient to access hundreds of pirated pay TV channels and movies from almost everywhere in the world in HD or near HD quality.  “This, combined with the ease, simplicity and low-cost nature of pirate OTT devices, means that we’re facing a wave of piracy bigger than we’ve ever seen before,” warns Al-Jamal.

Indeed, the main challenge is that many pirate OTT services have a professional looking website and service, often offering support and money-back guarantees, with bundles to appeal to specific markets and sometimes even content that is not otherwise available in the MENA region.

The experience often fools consumers into believing the service is legitimate. Pay-TV operator face potential subscriber churn to cheaper illegal services as a result while rights holders risk loss of revenue as alternative sources dilute the value of their content.

“They are a bigger threat to pay-TV than ever before because they’ve got so advanced that many consumers assume they’re legal solutions when they’re not,” says Schouten. “In that sense, piracy can be seen more like a competitor than an enemy. Since people are willing to pay for exclusive content and a high-quality user experience that makes it easy to find the content they love, pay-TV providers need to work even harder to deliver a cutting-edge, innovative content catalogue and feature set.”

Consumer attitudes to viewing pirated content don’t help. A recent survey conducted by Irdeto found that more than half of respondents polled in MENA (59% in Egypt and 53% in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)) admitted to watching pirated video.

“Millennials are among the most likely to illegally consume content, with 62% of 18- to 24-year-olds in the GCC and 64% in Egypt stating they watch pirated video,” says Al-Jamal.

Content redistribution

While content theft is overwhelmingly focused on redistribution, consumption habits of pirated content in the MENA region are evolving. Irdeto’s research found that laptops remain the favourite device for consuming pirated video content, for 33% of respondents in the GCC and 35% in Egypt smartphones or tablets are their most frequently used devices to watch pirate content.

It’s not just the millennials that are leading this shift. In fact, MENA is an anomaly in so much as the gap between 18- to 24-year-olds and other age groups is the smallest when it comes to the preferred device (mobile – which includes Android/iOS smartphones and tablets).  Globally, 26.9% of 18- to 24-year-olds prefer to watch pirated content on mobile devices; compared to just 13% of over 55s. Yet, over 55s in the Middle East seem to have millennial tendencies with 30.9% using mobile devices for their pirated content and 37.6% for the 18- to 24-year-olds.

“It’s a clear indicator that operators in the region must continue to innovate to provide all of their consumers with packages that include cross-device content they desire,” stresses Al-Jamal.

Premium security today means 360-degree protection trusted by content owners, from protecting broadcast and on-demand services, to end-to-end piracy control and watermarking.

“Pay-TV providers looking to secure rights to UHD content and early release movies need to have a watermarking solution,” says Al-Jamal.  With consumers’ increasing expectations around OTT, it is crucial for operators to be able to reach consumers on any device, while securely delivering premium content and a great user experience. A software-based security solution will allow operators to do this.”

The implementation of forensic watermarking is a vital part of the security chain, but one that requires a long-term plan and commitment to be effective.

“Invest in anti-piracy services with a partner who has a broad enough portfolio to attack ALL kinds of piracy, whether on the web or behind IPTV pay walls,” urges Schouten. “Work with your CAS provider to implement these technologies and create a closed-loop system that can quickly shut down live streaming content so that destabilize confidence in pirate solutions.”

Educating consumer about the damage that piracy causes has a role to play. IBCAP in the US is an excellent example of this. It created a humorous but effective campaign warning consumers that if they buy illegal boxes and services, that they are at risk of wasting their investment, because legitimate content providers will work with content protection companies to take these services down.

“Often, we choose critical moments (like the middle of a sports match) to disrupt these services so that consumers realize that they risk missing out on the content they love the most,” explains Schouten. “This has a strong educational impact and dissuades them from experiencing such disappointments again in the future.”

Knowledge gap

There’s a positive response to education from Irdeto’s survey. Of respondents who view pirated content, 46% in Egypt and 47% in the GCC said they would stop or watch less pirated content if they understood the negative impact of piracy on the media industry. The survey found that nearly a third of consumers in MENA (29% in GCC and 30% in Egypt) don’t know whether it is illegal to share or produce pirated video content. The number of respondents unsure if it was illegal to download or stream pirated video content was similar, with 33% unsure in the GCC and 32% uncertain in Egypt.

Al-Jamal explains: “There is a clear knowledge gap in terms of the legality of piracy. In order to combat this threat, the media industry must not only educate themselves about their pirate competitors, but also educate consumers about the damage that piracy causes the content creation industry.

“Arguably, the most important task in the fight against piracy is the identification of illegal activity and pirated content through effective tooling that searches for and identifies watermarked content, which is crucial to revenue and copyright protection. The additional challenge for operators therefore is to know what content is popular on pirate sites.”

Action is doubly difficult since piracy is global. “To combat illegal streamers located in Russia but delivering the service in the Middle East, local operators need to work with security specialists and other worldwide content protection organisations,” says Chrys Poulain, Sales Director, MENA at NexGuard.

MENA can be a particularly difficult environment in which to enforce intellectual property rights because it lacks a homogeneous set of laws and regulations related to piracy across the region (which the US and EU have).

“The enforcement of copyright is not always a top priority,” says Schouten. “Some countries treat it very seriously, some not at all. Because there’s not a lot of high-value content coming out of that region (eg global, blockbuster movies, high-value sports, etc), it’s generally not taken as seriously.”

Working with industry bodies

There is change afoot. The UAE-based MENA Broadcast Satellite Anti-Piracy Coalition, launched by satellite broadcaster OSN in 2014, for example, has helped remove over 86,000 illegal videos from YouTube and Dailymotion, taken down nearly 2,300 advertisements of pirated boxes on online markets, and reported 829 free-to-air channel copyright infringements to satellite operators and distributors.

Sophie Moloney, OSN’s general counsel and head of content protection is quoted in The Gulf Times saying, “We have a whole generation of under 30s who have come to expect content to be made available free and that’s why we need to join forces across the entire Arab world to educate people to the realities of how movies, series and sports get funded. Not only that but we need to work together to fight criminality that takes advantage of this illegal demand.”

Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Entertainment – in charge of overseeing all facets of the country’s entertainment industry – is being urged to reinforce protection for the Kingdom’s burgeoning pay-TV market. Consultants AT Kearney predict growth from 750,000 to 2.68 million households by 2020. The huge appetite for local talent and international content has also helped the Kingdom lead with the highest per capita consumption of YouTube in the whole world since 2012.

“This leads to a fundamental question for content protection specialists: how can the Kingdom ensure that it provides legal platforms to consumers who are – intentionally or unintentionally — accustomed to accessing their video content illegally or on YouTube?” poses Poulain.

“In countries like Saudi Arabia where the notion of copyright remains loose, we believe it is paramount to track illegal redistribution sources,” says Poulain. “However, we can go beyond simply punishing pirates. We can use the original copy being re-streamed as a platform to issue informative messages about copyright infringement and provide legal alternatives — effectively enabling us to reach not just the pirate, but also all the viewers of the illicit stream.”

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. To effectively combat online piracy, operators, telcos, broadcasters and publishers must combine state-of-the-art forensic watermarking technologies that identify the source of pirated content and allow for its immediate shutdown, with proactive enforcement and investigative services aimed at identifying and prosecuting the parties involved in large commercial streaming piracy networks. Global partnerships are necessary with law enforcement, industry bodies and agencies as well as consumer and technology providers.

“Moving forward, the challenge for the Middle Eastern content industry will be to combine these organisations with innovative and affordable services that leverage social media channels like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and find better ways to track pirates and inform the general public,” says Poulain.

In doing so, the MENA media industry can ensure that it provides a perfect environment to support the creativity of the content industry, while enabling consumers to access content in a legal and user-friendly way.

Classical music gets unconventional treatment

Internationally acclaimed pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi takes inspiration from the elements of nature in his latest stunning work so any recording of his electric live performances have a lot to live up to up.

VMI

London-based indie Magenta Films took up the challenge, working with large sensor Canon C300 cameras  to lend a cinematic sheen but with B4 mount lenses and adapters to provide a greater depth of field.
The Italian composer especially wanted Magenta to capture a complete performance of his latest album and most recent touring concert ‘Elements – Live’.
http://vmi.tv/case-studies/article/132
"The way the performance flows has been really well thought out and our job was to give a faithful representation of that,” explains Magenta managing director and producer/director Alexander Freidin-Goss. “Ludovico’s lighting designer [Francesco Trambaioli] has really outdone himself on this tour and the lighting and the projections are simply breathtaking.”
The lighting design, however, was intended for the stage and a live audience rather than for filming and this is where the camera choice was particularly important.  
“For the projections to work as well as they do the band themselves can sometimes be slightly dimly lit and to an extent we wanted to keep that slight element of mystery,” says Freidin-Goss. “But we also had to had make sure we catered for audiences at home.”
Five Canon C300s (two with HJ40 lenses and 3 with HJ22 lenses) were selected with IBE and Arri B4 mount lens adapters to permit B4 mount lenses to work with the PL and EF mounted cameras. A full complement of tripods, camera monitors and memory cards were also rented from VMI. 
“I've been shooting on the C300 and now the MKII for years and it was very much a format we were comfortable with,” says Freidin-Goss. “Obviously, suddenly using the B4 adapters with HJ22 and HJ40 lenses did add a layer of intricacy as what is essentially a compact camera become something of a studio camera but it performed really well. It also helped that our camera team was fantastic." 
He elaborates, “Having the depth of field of the C300’s large sensor coupled with parfocal ENG lenses was really handy in a live setting. We did consider using Arri Amiras for a while but having witnessed the show being performed many times before, I was a little concerned that perhaps we should just stick with the incredible low-light of the Canon cameras.  We were really happy with the footage.”
Freidin-Goss had used VMI on occasion for several years, usually on smaller scale projects. “I’d always thought of them as really friendly and professional but what really struck me was their willingness to help out in preproduction, allowing us ample to carry out camera test at their head office in London,” he says. “It was great dealing with Alasdair Wilson. There was a lot of mind changing and re-arranging but he was great. We also really enjoyed chatting to Mike White during our camera test. It’s fair to say VMI were a part of the crew.”
Filming was done in three chunks at the end of July 2016. Two concerts were shot in front of a packed Royal Festival Hall and then, on a separate day, Ludovico and his band performed all the tracks just for the film crew. 
“Being on stage that way really allowed us all to feel at one with the music which obviously was creatively fantastic, allowing us to capture unique shots we would have struggled to get on the night but also on a more personal level it was just a wonderful experience to have Ludovico and his band just play for us. It really made us all feel connected to the music. That afternoon was one of those really special moments that I think everyone in the crew will remember. 
As much as Magenta’s brief was to give a faithful representation of the concert there was also room for to add a little added drama through pacey editing. This is particular evident on the tracks ‘Logos’ and ‘Numbers’ where the editing helps heighten the drama. 
He toyed with the idea of shooting the whole production in C-Log but in the end decided to run with standard rec 709 colour spaces to save some time. 
The project really came together during the grade which was done at Narduzzo Too by Vince Narduzzo. It was slightly daunting as he works from a projector so I was able to see the concert projected on a really large screen,” reports Freidin-Goss. “Every time there was a cut from one performance to another I could tell, but after the grade the two halves are almost indistinguishable.  The final film really flows effortlessly."
Magenta’s film Elements Live is released on DVD and will be shown on Sky Arts on September 11.

Live Social Video is the Future, says Streaming Tank

Streaming Media

Streaming Tank uses Chinese investment to build its own video player and expand East, and continues to push ahead in live VR and 360° streaming.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Live-Social-Video-is-the-Future-says-Streaming-Tank-120385.aspx

Live streaming specialist Streaming Tank has ambitious plans to expand into China and to develop its own streaming media player.

The UK-based outfit has had an eventful year since co-founder and CEO Chris Dabbs parted with the company in December 2016.
"Chris moved to the U.S. in 2014 to set up our New York office, which has been very successful, but we came to share a different vision for where the future of the business was headed," says co-founder and director James Wilkinson. "Marriages sometimes have to come to an end. We had great run of it. It's my company moving forward."
Part of Wilkinson's vision is development of a video player which Streaming Tank will run internally at first and then look to commercialise.
"We are building our own live streaming player that responds more intuitively to how people interact in a live environment," he says. "Live social video is changing the dynamics. Media agencies are coming to us and saying that they find it hard to justify using Facebook Live because engagement with the audience, targeted feedback, and interactivity is not where they want it. That's the piece we are working on with other companies.
"We want to help the targeting and analytics side so that media agencies can see what people are doing on social while watching live and are then able to change the story depending on the platform it is being watched on be that Facebook Live, Instagram, Periscope or Sina Weibo. We want to react if a social influencer is active. For instance, we have a team cutting up content for social media in real time. Live social video is the future of streaming."
Streaming Tank can count MacDonald's, KFC, Nike, and Mercedes among top-tier brand clients, as well as live streaming of red carpet premiers from  Leicester Square (Wilkinson spoke to Streaming Media from the Empire cinema ahead of the UK premier for Darren Aronofsky's Mother!) but Wilkinson knows that competition is intense from the likes of Groovy Gecko, Stream AMG, and Stream UK and J B Cole. Indeed, he poached Stream AMG's technology director Izzy Benge to lead the player development effort as CTO.
"Technology from Blackmagic Design, LiveU, and NewTek has been great for our industry, allowing anyone to get involved in live event broadcasts with flyaway set-ups," he says. "But at the same time it has commoditized live streaming. It means we have to innovate to stay ahead of the curve."
In April, the 13-year-old firm made its first acquisition. Outside broadcaster 42Live gave direct access to a roster of clients in news and sports. Chief among these is Discovery Communications-owned Eurosport, for which Streaming Tank now delivers feeds from snooker and World SuperBikes events.
The company was early to adopt VR, testing stitching and capture technologies from Nokia, Koncept VR, and Visualise. It now offers a full end to end live streaming 4K 360° package with Nokia Ozo.
"While a lot of companies are focused on on-demand VR projects and spending 6-8 months in development we're happy to do live VR," Wilkinson says.
It worked with M&C Saatchi during the Olympics in Rio 2016 to deliver a VR video conference for journalists in London with British ex-athletes Sir Bradley Wiggins and Sir Steve Redgrave in Brazil.
"The technical precedent for this project was something we were keen to set," says Streaming Tank's Phil Andrews, who delivered the onsite tech. "Other 360° apps before were focused on pulling their content from a CDN or having it pre-installed for on-demand. Our challenge was to get this going directly into the headset, live with a delay of 2 seconds, having audio and video in sync."
Wilkinson is the first to admit that VR has yet to go mainstream but says that if done right it is the perfect medium for engagement. He says, "It's not good for sharing a beer with a mate and watching the ball game but it is perfect for certain townhall corporate message, e-sports, and gaming."
Some e-sports VR streaming deals are in the works he hints but it is China which has his attention.
"The Chinese are a long way ahead of the curve when it comes to live VR in terms of the investment they are making in the technology and in the installed base of users. That's why we are intent on pushing a lot of our tech and services out to China."
With funds already raised from Chinese investors (and more to follow), Wilkinson plans to open a China office, either Shanghai or Shenzhen, in the next 12 months and to chase that with a new European tech hub in Dublin by the end of 2018.
"This is an exciting period and its great to be involved in a lot more of the production and engineering of the live stream," he say

Ericsson Unveils MediaFirst Content Processing

Streaming Media

Firm's media unit continues to innovate while looking for a buyer; MediaFirst Content Processing promises low latency via distributed cloud infrastructure.
http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/Ericsson-Unveils-MediaFirst-Content-Processing-120351.aspx
Ericsson, which has put its media and broadcast services division under the hammer, continues to innovate, this time with what it claims to be the first software-based, multi-application media processing platform targeting the contribution market.
Choosing IBC as the launch pad, but like many companies hoping to cut through the noise by shouting about it now, MediaFirst Content Processing is presented as having superior low latency, and the ability to repurpose processing functions to deliver increasingly immersive video experiences.
The first application intended for the platform is UHDTV HEVC contribution decoding. By combining COTS servers with Ericsson hardware acceleration, service providers can efficiently future proof media processing applications, the firm contends.
Paired with Ericsson's AVP HEVC contribution encoders, MediaFirst Content Processing provides the an end-to-end solution for UHDTV or HD HEVC contribution. It supports either ASI or IP inputs and 4:2:0 or 4:2:2, 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed outputs via a range of industry standard connections.
Arpad Jordan, head of media processing & delivery, media solutions at Ericsson, says: "MediaFirst Content Processing will offer a way for contribution service providers to deliver revenue-generating, immersive viewing experiences like UHDTV at an affordable cost. Better yet, they will be able to repurpose media processing applications and optimize cloud architectures."
Future applications will support emerging contribution use cases—VR perhaps—and enable the benefits of cloud within a distributed cloud contribution architecture, Ericsson said.
The company is also intent on pushing its Unified Delivery Network (UDN), a solution connecting content providers with the last mile reach of service providers for content delivery. Operated in partnership with Hutchison Global Communications, Telstra, AIS, and Vodafone, the solution offers a more managed service for telco video delivery than using public CDNs.
"Most notable operators have already built or bought their own CDN over the years," explains Yves Boudreau, head of ecosystem and partnerships, UDN. "Primarily this was used to deliver their own traffic. However, some have started wholesaling some capacity to select content providers. The major limitation to this approach is simple:  Even the largest of operators still only operate in one or a few countries: they aren't truly global. There are some exceptions to this rule, but most service providers are at best national. Content and application providers demand global coverage.  Ericsson UDN is a unique partnership model that tries to address this problem - operators can pool their assets and resources together to create a global platform deep in the operators' network to deliver higher quality and better performance."
We expect customer announcements around UDN at IBC.
These products and services emanate from the firm's media division, which is has been up for sale since May. According to Bloomberg, Ericsson AB is working with Morgan Stanley to explore a sale of its media solutions business. Separately, the Stockholm-based company hired Goldman Sachs to find a buyer for its broadcast and media services unit.
Bloomberg speculates that growth in Ericsson's media units has been hampered by a decline in legacy product lines that has outpaced the rising revenue contribution from new products. The business is tentatively valued at $534 million.

The Future of Film

Digital Studio

While most attention was focussed on the red carpet and the critical reception for movies in competition at the Cannes Film Festival some eyes were looking toward the future of film.

http://www.digitalstudiome.com/article-11147-the-future-of-film/
At Hewlett Packard this starts from envisaging how the world will look – and thus what computing needs might be - not just a few years hence but decades down the line.
HP works with sociologists and futurologists to predict the future based on macro socio-politico-economic trends and then uses these anchor points to guide HP’s long term roadmap.
Leading the whole effort is CTO Shane Wall who terms the sum of this vision ‘blended reality’. “The goal is to create experiences and applications that work seamlessly and where the technology disappears into the background.”
HP trains this vision on healthcare - for example in the potential to have an AI assisted brain command over prosthetic limbs for amputees; and for end to end digital manufacturing, notably just-in-time 3D printing using polymers and then metals.
The future of film and entertainment is a small subset of these global problem solving goals but nonetheless an intriguing one.
“Rapid urbanisation which will see over 60 megacities by 2050, will profoundly change where we live and how we live,” says Wall. “There will be demands on resources, how we get rid of waste. It will force us to look at problems and experiences in a different way.”
There will no longer be mega theatre complexes containing a dozen cinema screens, he predicted. Instead one might find single cinemas focused on the experiential shared experiences.
This was a theme taken up by Anish Mulani, President and COO of VFX and animation facility based Prana VFX house Prana Studios. Prana plans to reinvent the theatrical experience with massive screens encompassing entire theatres, animatronic dinosaurs, and actors performing live on stage.
“The whole canvas of the theatre will be used to tell a story,” he explained. “The moment you walk in, every wall will be covered with giant projection. There will be moving seating and sensory effects like wind and heat. Life size animatronic creatures and characters relevant to the story such as pirates, aliens and dinosaurs will be there with you.”
The giant size of the auditoria, with panoramic screens in excess of 40 metres, and display resolutions up to 24K - or 12 times that of 2K conventional exhibition - are also intended to attract audiences.
Prana Studio is also developing dome-style theatres featuring 180-degree field of view and reclining seats. “The seats would be able to change angle so that you could view a stage and see actors performing part of the story live as part of the overall experience,” he said.
“We imagine 25 or more sites worldwide within the next decade,” he said. “The main issue is the cost of rendering images at such extreme resolutions and in 3D that content will initially be short form.”
The proposals build on existing theme park projects at Universal Orlando’s Islands of Adventure ride, Skull Island: Reign of Kong – for which Prana created the six-minute movie in 24K resolution – and the Chimelong Ocean Kingdom attraction in China which features a curved screen 88 metres wide and 18 meters high – the world’s largest film screen. Prana created the short 5D experience that accompanies it.
“Cinema exhibition is moving toward ultra-scale large format experiences while conventional movie releases will be streamed for projection within people’s houses,” Mulani predicted.
Interactivity is a clear theme of media and entertainment 2050. “The emergence of the Gen Z population which are the first born who know nothing but being able to interact with content on devices seamlessly will impact how we make and view entertainment,” Wall said. 
Stories might exist as transmedia – with different parts of the same story experienced on different platforms and devices – often simultaneously.
Wall also pointed to “accelerated innovation” or a speeding up of Moore’s Law. “If smartphones today are 30 times more powerful than PCs were a decade ago then they will be 30 billion time more powerful still in three decade’s time.
“With VR we are operating at the equivalent of DOS 3.0 or punch cards,” he continued. “VR has limitations today. It separates us from what is out there. But the potential is for total body, total sensory immersion. We will be able to craft images using lightfields that capture every angle and nuance of light in a scene for us to reconstruct holographic moving images. These are the technologies which will become our clay [for creating art and new media].”
The VR short ‘Tree’ is an example of how artists and filmmakers are pushing boundaries with the technology. It puts the user in the position of a tree which grows from a seed to become one of the tallest in the forest.  “For us, smell is super important,” explains co-creator Winslow Porter of New Reality. “We developed custom scent tracks that are sequenced with the visuals to enhance the experience. It’s strange we are using organic molecules alongside such hi-tech.  Scent is associated with memories which we can trigger by tapping into the olfactory sense.
“VR can be impactful in ways we don’t fully understand right now but it will be able to change hearts and minds,” he added. “There is an obsession with simulating reality in VR when we should be looking to surreality. We can be a person from the past, or a lion or a pyramid.”
Winslow also forecast the end of linear narrative. “A director might be able to frame the shots and a cinematographer light them but we are entering an age when the viewer becomes the editor and the protagonist,” he said.  “When we have thousands of people participating in the experience what happens to narrative then – they could be building the world as they play and explore within it.”
That’s the near-future scenario sketched out in the novel Ready Player One and being adapted by Steven Spielberg in his forthcoming feature.
Keys to immersive content
The story’s concept of game-playing and education in a multi-verse of virtual worlds has become a must-read text at the Technicolor Experience Center where Marcie Jastrow, senior vice president, immersive media and head of the centre is helping to build a pipeline for immersive AR/VR and mixed reality content. There are six keys, she outlined. These include the need for high quality content, for social sharing experiences and for the user experience to be intuitive. Also on her list is “episodic cadence” which means a way to keep people coming back for more. “It has to be disruptive enough that it is different from current media and most important of all is the story. It has to entertain.”
Jastrow suggested that studios could soon sell VFX assets like characters and computer generated worlds as products to consumers for VR experiences. “Often when studios build these assets for a film they are simply archived and never used again,” she said. “What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality offers is the potential to use these assets again. What would it be like if rather than playing with a fluffy toy, you could gift your children one of those assets to play with and interact with in a VR or AR environment? It is all about extending the experience of the film through interaction.”
HP at the movies
HP tracks its association with the movie industry to 1938 when audio oscillators built by David Packard and Bill Hewlett were used by Walt Disney to produce stereophonic sound for Fantasia.
The compute brand has sponsored the Cannes Film Festival for several years but more importantly its hardware is installed at movie studios and VFX facilities including at Technicolor and DreamWorks.
“Roughly 50% of materials and devices in the world are designed on a HP work station,” claimed HP president personal systems, Ron Coughlin. “That’s why our motto is ‘keep reinventing’.”
HP’s EMEA director Nick Lazaridis candidly admitted that gaining visibility was the principal reason to have a presence at Cannes – but then that’s why everyone else comes here.
Its technology is onboard the International Space Station, Studio Liebeskind used its workstations to architect the Freedom Tower in New York and HP claims to be the number one computer provider for education around the world.
It launched the Sprout which chimes with its idea of blended reality. Combining a scanner, depth sensor, hi-resolution camera and projector into a single device, Sprout allows users to take physical items and merge them into a digital workspace. The system also delivers a collaboration platform, allowing users in multiple locations to collaborate on and manipulate a single piece of digital content in real-time.
The firm is also one of a number of companies making mixed reality headsets for Microsoft with Windows as the operating system.
Dreamworks VR tool
Dreamworks views VR as a production tool just now rather than a content media. “It used to be that storyboards were the only way we could vizualise films,” says Kate Swanborg, head of technology communications and strategic alliances, DreamWorks Animation. “Now we are using multiple different techniques including motion capture and VR – living storyboards – which allow directors to iterate in a 3D space.”
More prosaically, like other animation houses Dreamworks masters its films for distribution in 2K simply because doing so in 4K is still too expensive.
“Unlike live action, every single pixel is digitally rendered and there’s no real way to upscale it. It’s a huge time and money expense and it’s not clear we can could recoup the ROI on that.”
For just one feature animation, Dreamworks creates 350 TB of data which is managed on HP workstations souped up with multi-cores and Nvidia Quadra graphics processors and DreamColor displays. To highlight the challenge,  takes 80 million CPU hours to render one film which comprises half a billion files or 25 billion pixels. That doesn’t include archives.
As much as Dreamworks’ films are essentially data, each production team also physically prints every single asset including characters, environments and storyboard. “We pin them on the walls of our studio so that artists can immerse themselves in the tactile images,” she said. “That’s part of our process to determine if a scene is working.”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another key area of interest for the future of film. Mulani suggested that AI would be used in Hollywood to read scripts. “AI will read, doctor and polish scripts. When AI becomes as powerful or more powerful than the human brain it will be able to analyse a script within minutes and give you ten different analysis of where it could be altered,” Mulani says.

Protect to prosper - piracy in MENA

Digital Studio

At the end of last month (May 2017) German media company Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland shuttered its pay-TV channel RTL International, having failed to reach necessary subscriber levels despite only launching in January 2016.
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It blamed the failure on illegal streaming sites. “First analyses clearly show that a major reason for this [lack of subscribers] is the success of globally acting piracy platforms streaming the broadcast signals of many domestic German channels over the internet illegally and in many cases free-of-charge,” explained Stefan Sporn, SVP International Distribution.
This is among the most drastic but far from the only impact of piracy which is surging in demand and wrecking the global market.
In MENA, over half of viewers in Egypt and in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) admitted to watching pirated video content, according to research carried out by security firm Irdeto.
TV content piracy and illicit downloads caused French rights-holders a $1.47 billion loss in 2016, with 13 million internet users involved in the practice, according to a study from EY consulting.
Pirate torrents remain highly popular, with Pirate Bay having 234.5 million visits in February 2017 alone.
Kodi, a legal set top box platform with over 35 million active users worldwide, is the latest to be hijacked by pirates forcing Sky and BT to take legal action in the UK.
Piracy has become such a big industry that it almost has to be looked at as competition, according to Rob Pinniger, associate director for content security, Virgin Media. Speaking at TV Connect in March, he added that pirate services are reaching scale and can even look like they’re legitimate, charging monthly subscription fees.
“It’s important that the TV industry unites to combat this form of piracy because it loses more than $90billion a year globally in revenue to this and other kinds of content theft,” advises Christopher Schouten, senior product marketing director at content protection and multiscreen systems firm Nagra.
Live sports most at risk
Piracy takes many forms, from key sharing of broadcast services to content sharing of live events and premium VOD titles over the net. A quarter of those surveyed in the GCC by Irdeto and 31 per cent in Egypt stated that they are most interested in watching pirated movies currently shown in cinemas.
The issue is particularly acute around the high value properties of live sports, more and more of which are pouring onto OTT platforms. Live sports were the second most popular illegal streamed content in GCC, with 23 per cent in Egypt.
Research by Sport Industry Group (SIG) into the viewing habits of the younger generation in particular, finds that piracy has become normalised among this generation while the take-up for traditional subscription services is far less than among older viewers.
According to the survey, 54 per cent of millennials have watched illegal streams of live sports and a third admit to regularly watching them, compared to only 4 per cent of over-35s.
Eighteen to 24-year-olds are also half as likely to have subscriptions to pay TV services such as Sky or BT Sport (12-24 per cent).
“Unless we are careful we will have a generation of young people who consider pirated sports content to be the norm,” said SIG chairman Nick Keller. “That’s a significant challenge not just for rights holders but the whole sector from sponsors and athletes to ticketholders.”
Millennials influencing change
Irdeto’s research into MENA also revealed that millennials are among the most likely to illegally consume content. Additionally, 20 per cent of 18-24 year-olds in the GCC and 23 per cent in Egypt pirate more than once a week.
The survey also uncovered an interesting shift that is occurring in the region regarding content consumption habits. While laptops remain the favourite device for consuming illegal video, mobile devices are growing in popularity. Of those surveyed, 33 per cent in the GCC and 35 per cent in Egypt stated that smartphones or tablets are their most frequently used devices to watch pirated video content.
“Millennials are influencing major changes in how consumers watch pirated video content in MENA,” said Khaled Al-Jamal, Irdeto’s director of sales. “This shift to mobile devices to consume pirated video content serves as a signal to the media industry that further innovation is required in MENA to meet consumer demand.”
The innovation he speaks of is a combination of offering affordable content with a comprehensive anti-piracy strategy.
However, there’s no guarantee even the first part of this will work. According to Ampere Analysis, most viewing of illegal streams is among people with low income (and therefore can’t afford to view) and/or who live with others (so that their control of the TV is limited).
“These are demographic issues rather than a fundamental business threat,” says Ampere Research director Richard Broughton. “Making multiplatform streams available is important for operators so that they can reach consumers on different devices.”
In addition, millennials may be more likely than older generations to use online-only services such as Sky’s Now TV but figures are still small, with only 5 per cent taking up the option (according to SIG’s survey). Meanwhile, only 2 per cent of respondents between 18-24 said they sourced their sports entertainment through clips on social media.
The study’s findings follow a crackdown on piracy by the English Premier League with the League determined to preserve its lucrative broadcast rights.
The EPL was granted a court order to stop matches being streamed for free on Kodi boxes. While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, its open-source nature means add-ons can be developed by third parties that make paid content illegally accessible.
This decision meant that the UK’s Internet Service Providers are obliged to shut down the source of illegal streams.
The Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) declared that the use of Kodi software to watch pirated streams was becoming an “epidemic” last September.
No silver bullet
According to Irdeto, Kodi boxes are particularly prevalent in the UK. It reported that 11 per cent of UK viewers who admitted to watching pirated streams said they did so via a Kodi box.
There is no silver bullet to resolve the problem. A first step is to secure the stream with encryption (and/or conditional access systems (CAS) in set-top boxes) and add digital rights management (DRM) to authenticate usage.
Video management platform Kaltura, for example, encrypts content as part of the ingest process or on the fly. Then it adds a Universal DRM which is integrated with Google Widevine, PlayReady and Apple Fairplay for content protection which Kaltura says will work regardless of the browser, device or platform being used.
“DRM makes sure that those watching content have relevant access rights,” says Arik Gaisler, Sr. director of product, infrastructure. “This is the approach taken by most pay TV broadcasters. “To overcome DRM it would need to be hacked in a deeper, sophisticated way.”
DRM and CAS do a good job of ensuring that only legitimate viewers can access content through paid services. But once the video is displayed, it is still vulnerable to re-streaming through numerous methods, including camcorder capture and screen-scraping in which data is copied in realtime and re-broadcast as a live stream.
“Traditional access control works up to the point where the customer starts watching the content,” argues Alistair Cameron, European sales director of content protection firm NexGuard. “From that point, all bets are off. Most pirates will pay for a subscription or will buy the pay per view.”
Illegal uploaders can turn a profitable business by selling ads around the site or in some cases selling a subscription service.
A report by the UK’s Digital Citizens Alliance estimated that in 2013, piracy websites generated $227million from advertising.
“Some sites are so professional even down to the small print of terms and conditions,” says Cameron.
By embedding an invisible forensic watermark (from firms like NexGuard or Verimatrix) in each video stream, content that is improperly re-distributed can be traced back to its source. “By knowing the source, immediate action can be taken to interrupt the pirate stream while the event is still going,” he says.
As further back-up, monitoring and analytics technologies are required. “HTML-based video players allow you to look at reference urls to get an idea of whether the content is being accessed in unusual places or whether stream volumes are in line with expectations or if you have a leakage,” says Mark Blair, VP, EMEA at video player developer Brightcove.
Once illegality is verified operators have some choices. Sending cease and desist notices works in some cases, legal action in others.
“The problem is that when people do take content down it will respawn quite quickly on a new website,” says Blair.
In the U.S. the Recording Industry Association of America is calling for the country’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to be updated. Currently, ISPs in the country that remove copyrighted content when alerted by rights holders get legal immunity or so-called safe harbour. But the RIAA and others including the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists say this process is not sufficient, as the pirated copy reappears instantly, requiring yet another takedown notice.
Instead they want the DMCA to demand a time window of days or even hours within which content must be removed.
The use of automated content identification technology could be a solution to prevent repeated uploading of pirated content. But it’s not so simple. Google, for example, said that, in January, more than 99 per cent of links it was asked to remove — 16.5 million URLs — weren’t even in its search index. YouTube filters content with its Content ID system, and Facebook, Dailymotion, SoundCloud and Twitch use Audible Magic, a copyright compliance service.
Irdeto argues that even all these measures are not enough. It calls for the media industry to educate consumers about the damage that piracy causes the content creation industry.
Its survey in MENA indicates that, of the respondents to its survey, 46 per cent in Egypt and 47 per cent in the GCC would stop or watch less pirated content if they understood the negative impact of piracy on the media industry.
“The amount of respondents who were unsure if it was illegal to download or stream pirated video content is around 33 per cent,” said Al-Jamal. “There is a clear knowledge gap in terms of the legality of piracy. This must be addressed through education on the illegal nature of piracy in order to reduce its impact on the content creation industry in MENA.”