Cable Congress: The Multi-Gigabit Home Needs Multi-Gig WiFi

Streaming Media

For service providers to deliver VR, 8K, and other next-gen video services to the home, they'll need to offer gigabit or higher wi-fi. Also, Ben Keen looks at Netflix's dominance in Europe with an eye towards China.

The need for totally reliable "every room, wall-to-wall" high-speed wi-fi is essential for the longer-term survival of service providers as they look to extend new applications over IP like VR, 8K video, and utility management in the smart home.

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4568505641372932731#editor/target=post;postID=3321142613963106559

 That's the chief concern expressed by leading operators and vendor partners meeting at Cable Congress in Dublin.

"Now that the gigabit service to the edge of the home is a reality, the in-home experience is exposed," said John Higgins, chairman, Global Digital Foundation, speaking. "Currently, wi-fi remains the major driver for call support but increasingly 'television' connects to more than TV sets. How can service providers deliver on the multi-gigabit home promise and improve overall customer satisfaction?"

Yupeng Xiong, chief planner of Huawei's Access Product Line, Huawei said the Chinese mobile operator wants "unbreakable" wi-fi in the home in order to rollout new services.

ARRIS CEO Bruce McClelland said, "We are in an IP world already. What we see is the main screen's continued evolution as the device that acts as an aggregator for services and devices in the home. But really robust wireless connectivity in residences is a problem still to be fully solved."

Liberty Global said that in its recent survey the single most critical element for consumers of media services in the home was the need for better wi-fi.

"Connectivity is high—at more than ninety per cent—but this is not good enough," said Nicolas Forineau, director in-home connectivity product for Liberty Global. "Consumers want wi-fi everywhere in the home, wall to wall, and they want complete reliability—which [the industry] does not have today."

While some smartphones can draw down 500Mbps, devices will emerge in the next couple years capable of 1Gbps (5G speeds). Consequently, consumers will expect to experience gigabit connections. 

"The gigabit home is in actuality the gigabit burst home," said Charles Cheevers, chief technology officer of customer premises equipment for ARRIS. "We're not yet planning to run servers pumping gigabit speeds into the home all the time. But we do need the network to sustain high bursts extended over wi-fi." 

He said adaptive bitrate was fine for certain partners, but not for service providers which bear the brunt of consumer service issues.

"Netflix has about 14 different profiles to squeeze video into the home anywhere from 25Mbps to 700Kbps, but service providers have to have quality," he said.

"You don't want to use ABR as a fundamental part of your architecture," says Cheevers. "You want to use it only when you need to. The issue is that 80% of connected devices in the home are connected over wi-fi. There are five devices on average in every home and that is increasing. You probably need two access points each running 25Mbps over wi-fi for coverage. You need to manage those points so they don't interfere with each other. This has to be in place before we can even think about live streaming VR around the home." 

He suggested that a set of industry agreed service standards for in-home wi-fi was important. "Monitoring the service is critical," he added. 

The first step for cable operators is to upgrade their networks to either fibre to the Home and/or DOCSIS 3.1 "and then we are able to get video over IP around the home over wi-fi," Cheevers argued.

The latest iteration of the cable broadband standard, DOCSIS 3.1, will deliver 10Gbps upstream and 1Gbps upstream, and the forthcoming Full Duplex DOCSIS will be able to deliver 10Gbps up and down.

Swedish cable operator Com Hem is testing 1.2Gbps symmetrical broadband in Stockholm ahead of a planned commercial launch next year.

Jeff Binder, EVP of home and entertainment at T-Mobile U.S., said the industry was 2-3 years away from IP being the dominate transport media for video.

"I think satellite goes away. It will be support narrow band IoT but it is clearly not the most ideal delivery infrastructure for on-demand nonlinear content. Satellite doesn't work well with mobile devices. A single IP stream, on the other hand, can serve mobile phones, tablets, TV sets, new glasses from Google, you name it. Those are the realities of the technology." 

He also predicted a more significant merger of the home TV with the mobile device. T-Mobile U.S. is planning to launch a new streaming television service after buying Layer3, which Binder co-founded. 

"Right now, mobile and TV don't know one another. There is no actual social engagement for entertainment or utility management. Increasingly, you will see the experiences between the smartphone and the big glorious 60-inch display in your home. This is not about search and discovery either. It is now about connecting all those other things in your life and in your home. So, these devices need to work in a unified way. Without IP you cannot do that. The legacy infrastructure simply won't support this marriage of experiences."

Netflix Dominates in Europe

Despite the importance of broadband, pay TV is still growing in Europe, said IHS Markit. However, the big growth segment within pay TV has been OTT TV in recent years. Despite this, OTT TV has been additive to pay TV in Europe rather than resulting in the kind of cord cutting that has taken place in the US.

Netflix now has more video subscribers in Europe than any other single provider, but Sky is still the leading player in revenue terms, followed by Liberty Global, with Netflix third.

Netflix has 46% of Europe's online video subscriptions, followed by Amazon with 16%, but pay TV operators also have a significant share.

Independent analyst Ben Keen (formerly at IHS Markit), shared figures that showed Netflix is on track to outrank NBCU as the biggest spender on content. 

Currently, the streamer spends $8 billion annually in contrast to NBCU's $10 billion (a big chunk of which is sports).

Last year the major tech players—Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Apple, Facebook—collectively injected $18 billion into content. 

The analyst pointed to iQiyi, a Chinese OTT provider already spending more than the BBC on content (over $2 billion a year).

"The Chinese are coming," he said. 

Software Transition 

Earlier at the event, Doron Hacmon, chief product officer, Liberty Global declared the need for the cable giant to transition to a software company. 

"We have to support 85 different set top boxes across our group. Scaling, updating and iterating that complexity is simply unsustainable. We have to become a software company."

However, he offered no solutions to this transition.

Codec wars: The battle between HEVC and AV1

IBC

A new codec designed for delivering OTT content that is championed by the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Google, threatens to challenge the dominance of HEVC.

https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle-between-hevc-and-av1/2710.article

Encoding and compression is vital to the economics of video production and delivery but rarely causes much of a storm.

That’s changing as the current market leader, HEVC, is challenged by a new generation of codecs potentially capable of delivering improved video playback at greater efficiency and crucially, at lower cost.

Video compression has been dominated for as long as anyone can remember by standards bodies Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ISO/IEC.

MPEG-2 was the de-facto format of digital TV signals before MPEG delivered a more efficient scheme, MPEG-4/ H.264 AVC, in 2004. MPEG-4 cut the bandwidth needed to deliver programming by half, and its successor H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) published in 2013 managed the same 50% saving trick again.

However, HEVC has not taken off in the same way previous standards have because MPEG was not alone in its development. The joint patent holders of the technology have demanded licence fees which many in the industry consider either too high or too vague to justify investment.

In particular, HEVC adoption has been low for use in streaming and is why some of the largest tech companies - Amazon, Netflix, Google, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Nvidia and AMD among them - formed the Alliance for Open Media with the aim to create a royalty-free alternative.

That alternative, called AV1, has now arrived and it is claimed to be up to 30% more efficient than HEVC. The code for the codec is on the point of being frozen and encoding vendors are poised to release the product based on it at NAB next month.

HEVC cost and complexity

The cost of HEVC is significant. Licences are required from three main licence pools MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media - which represents the interests of Ericsson, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp, and Sony.

While MPEG LA only charges per decoding units capped at U$25m a year, HEVC Advance caps its annual unit charge at U$40m and demands royalties for streaming, capped at U$5m a year. This ‘tax’ on distribution hits streamers like YouTube and Netflix and can be charged on a title by title basis.

The third major pool, Velos Media, has not yet declared its royalty rate. To make matters more complex, there are multiple other HEVC IP owners (such as Nokia and Technicolor) who have not yet joined a pool or announced a royalty policy.

“The problem with HEVC is that you don’t know what you will have to pay,” says Martin Smole, Engineering Director Encoding, Bitmovin. “One things is certain is that it’s significantly more expensive than H.264. The uncertainty is [around HEVC] certainly blocking adoption.”

NAB will offer the first chance for encoding/transcoding vendors to demonstrate the capabilities of AV1, providing a first thorough look at the codec’s quality, and decoding and encoding requirements, including comparisons with HEVC.

Bitmovin, which will have AV1 product in Las Vegas, says the new codec reduces bandwidth demands by up to 30% while still retaining or improving picture quality.

“In our tests with AV1 the efficiency is up to 30% better especially for higher resolution and higher bitrates and much better than HEVC,” says Smole. “It is less efficient for smaller resolutions.”

Others are more circumspect. Thierry Fautier, VP of Video Strategy at Harmonic and President of the Ultra HD Forum (a UHD standards promotions body including Dolby, Comcast and Ericsson) says the claims made for AV1 have yet to be verified by independent sources.

“The AV1 reference encoder is [as of today] a hundred times slower than an HEVC one,” says Fautier. “That will likely improve in the hands of encoding vendors but I still expect the additional complexity of the encoder to be around ten times vs HEVC.”

In addition, it will take some time for AV1 hardware decoding capability to be integrated into devices like set top boxes and mobile phones. Those chips have to be manufactured and added into consumer product – a process likely to take at least two years. Consequently, AV1 hardware decoders will not see mass volume before 2020, Fautier predicts.

Fautier also advises that the final ‘free’ cost of AV1 “has yet to be proven in court” since there may be challenges to the code if companies feel their patents have been infringed.

AV1 software encoding, on the other hand, is ready to go. Mozilla has already provided a successful browser implementation of AV1 for Firefox Nightly (powered by Bitmovin). HEVC is not supported by Google in Chrome or by Mozilla.

Content Aware Encoding

Clouding the future of HEVC further are new techniques able to extract more mileage from the legacy MPEG4/H.264 AVC equipment.

Content Aware Encoding (CAE) which uses machine learning to compare content against known parameters for a given device and/or media player type, can boost the picture quality and reduce the distribution cost are proving to prolong the life of AVC.

AVS2.0, a codec created in China, is being investigated by the Ultra HD Forum for integration in its future specifications. This codec can be used for OTT and broadcast.

With an installed hardware encoder base of 2 billion, HEVC is not going anywhere soon. It is tuned for broadcast, whereas AV1 is tuned for OTT. What’s more HEVC is right now the best codec for handling 4K UHD and HDR video.

HEVC was also given a boost last autumn when Apple threw its weight behind the codec, agreeing to support it for the first time in Safari and Apple iOS products.

“Netflix has stated that as soon as AV1 is available, it will initially support AV1 in browsers and then on connected devices once hardware support is available,” says Fautier. “Netflix is currently paying HEVC royalties, and if it can reduce these costs by using a different codec, without impacting the QoE, that’s a win-win situation. Apple knows it needs to be ready for AV1, especially if it wants to support Netflix services in the future.”

Logically, both HEVC and AV1 – along with another Google-led royalty free codec option VP9 – will exist side by side for the short term but unless HEVC patent holders lower their cost and become more transparent on licence structure there would appear only one winner.

 “One thing is clear: If HEVC patent licensors thought they would have a nice ride to the bank, they now know that is not going to be the case,” says Fautier.

“As an industry, we hope that the HEVC licensors come up with a reasonable and fair solution to resolving the patent licensing issues.”

Bitmovin believes AV1 will become the standard for the future world of content which relies on large resolution video, VR and AR applications.

Others aren’t so sure and believe an entirely new codec is needed to handle the massive data demands resulting from 5G and ultra-high bandwidth low latency streaming.

“For VR (6DoF) and 8K we need a new codec,” says Fautier. “AV1 is not designed for that.”

MPEG is already on the case. Together with teams at ISO and ITU it has formed a Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) to study the need to include ‘omni-directional’ video coding technologies in a future video coding standard. It is basing its work on HEVC. Expect news of its progress at NAB.

Virgin Media plays aggregation but not with Amazon

Knect365 for Cable Congress

Virgin Media has ruled out adding Amazon Channels to its service line up but will ramp up its SVOD bundles. 

https://knect365.com/media-networks/article/32ecda25-ecbb-410b-86c4-7e2aa4d61ac6/virgin-media-plays-aggregation-but-not-with-amazon

Chief executive Tom Mockridge said, at Cable Congress, “Amazon’s primary business model is as a retailer. We are also a retailer. We are not thinking of bundling in Amazon at this time.” 

The cable and broadband TV provider was the first in the world to integrate Netflix onto its platform – a deal made late 2013 shortly after Mockridge joined. 

Netflix is now the third most popular channel on Virgin Media services in the UK and Ireland. 

“We see ourselves as a content aggregator,” said Mockridge. “A real point of difference [between VM and rivals Sky and BT] is the way we offer our customers choice of third party apps like Netflix and more of our own apps.” 

The company launched a dedicated kids TV app last year. 

However, Virgin is working with Amazon Prime Video to produce The Feed, the cablenet’s first original commission. Due in 2019, The Feed is a 10-episode sci-fi drama co-produced All3Media International, which is owned by Virgin parent Liberty Global. 

Virgin and Liberty hold exclusivity for the show in their respective European territories. 

Mockridge poured water on the idea that Virgin is pursuing more exclusive content.  “It’s more a marketing strategy than a programming strategy,” he said.

In wide-ranging address, Mockridge referred to the pending Disney-Fox / Comcast-Sky mega-mergers. 

“Consolidation has always been a feature of our industry, ever since John Malone cabled local communities. Virgin Media is the result of 600 local franchises. Consolidation also sends a very strong message that fundamentally subscription-based businesses are very, very attractive properties.”  

He confirmed that Virgin Media would transition its V6 TV box to the Horizon user interface, common to Liberty Global operations in the rest of Europe and Latin America, and in partnership with TiVo (designer of the current UI). 

Mockridge recently signed Virgin up to Sky’s ad-targeting service AdSmart. 

“Historically, Virgin Media has spent a lot of time competing with Sky and generally coming off second best – but our real competitor is BT. We are the only alternative builder of networks in the UK. But even with BT there are is a lot of co-operation. You have to know which fights to pick.” 

The CEO also issued a call to arms for gender equality, saying that it makes business sense. 

“We have got to be serious as an industry about bringing women into senior executive positions. It’s a hot topic at Virgin Media. If we want to get that breadth of talent we have to go to that talent.” 

In 2019 you'll be able to get a 4G signal on the moon

RedShark News

Space is being commercialised – or as the spin would have it – democratised. It’s certainly being televised. With 3D printed rovers, a member of the original Apollo team, an online site retailing orbital transport and $20 million cash up for grabs, are you sceptical or excited as the new space race heats up?
https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/5316-in-2019-you-ll-be-able-to-get-a-4g-signal-on-the-moon

In July 2019, it will be fifty years since the Eagle landed on the Moon and while the anniversary will be widely celebrated, there can be few better ways to mark the occasion than to go there again. Virtually at any rate.

For Elon Musk’s SpaceX launching a rocket into Earth orbit is the easy part as it ramps up plans to send a human crew to Mars, but when this one lifts off in 2019, it will carry vehicles and telecommunications equipment to touch down on the Moon’s surface.

The mission is being run by German engineering and science company PTScientists and sponsored by telco giants Vodafone, Nokia who aim to supply the first 4G network on the moon, supporting live HD broadcasts from the lunar surface back to Earth.

This will include live streams of footage from the area around NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar roving vehicle, which was abandoned in the Taurus-Littrow valley in 1972 – the last time humans walked on the Moon.

The stated goal of PT (short for part-time) Scientists is to show that it is possible to build a sustainable business in space exploration.

Chief executive and founder Robert Bohme, said – with no understatement - “In order for humanity to leave the cradle of Earth, we need to develop infrastructures beyond our home planet. We will establish and test the first elements of a dedicated communications network on the moon.”

More pertinently, it stands to win $20 million from Google if it succeeds. Google launched the Lunar X-Prize challenge in 2007 and invited a race to land a privately-funded rover on the Moon’s surface, drive 500 meters and send the pictures back.

PTScientists plans to broadcast to a global audience via a deep space link beaming back to its mission control centre in Berlin.

Other cash prizes will be awarded by Google for achievements such as ‘travelling an extra distance’ and ‘detecting water ice’. 

PTScientists has developed the Autonomous Landing and Navigation module – (ALINA) which can travel from Earth orbit to lunar orbit under its own propulsion. It’s capable of delivering two rovers, or up to 100 kg of payload, to the lunar surface. Using it, the group says it will transport third-party payload and experiments to the Moon “at affordable prices”.

If you want to buy some capacity, then 1 kilogram will cost 800,000 Euros and a bit less per kg if you want more weight.

Nokia has built an ultra-compact network for the trip that will be the lightest ever developed – weighing less than one kilo.

The pair of Lunar Quattro rovers is sponsored by Audi, developed with contributions from German carmaker Volkswagen and the rovers are 80% 3D printed to cut costs. The 4-wheel drives come with tilt-able solar panels, rechargeable batteries and bespoke HD cameras which use a CMOSIS chip and Schneider-Kreuznach lenses.

The cameras have a focal unit as well as a filter wheel allowing the team to create spectral and/or focus-stacked images. The cameras are also capable of taking HDR images and stereoscopic 3D video.

The plan is to drive them (remotely of course, from Berlin) to within 200 meters of the Apollo site from where they should be able to send back images of the old lunar rover.

NASA has asked for no landing closer than two kilometres and no probe to go closer than 200 metres, to preserve the area for posterity. 

Once it has completed its soft landing on the Moon, ALINA will be used as an LTE communications base-station.

PTScientist partners include German space agency DLR and German broadcast communications tech company Riedel.

Its leadership team boasts Dr Jack Crenshaw who worked on the original Apollo program at NASA where he performed seminal work on the circumlunar trajectory – in other words getting a rocket to orbit the Moon and back to earth in a figure-8 pattern. Can you think of anyone better as the project’s Senior Adviser on Flight Dynamics?

And of course, the company has its merchandise sorted. You can buy pens, pendants and T-shirts branded, ‘Hell Yeah, it's Rocket Science!’ from the Mission to the Moon fan club.

Liberty takes on GAFA with AI-influenced data platform

Cable Congress / Knect365

Liberty Global is going on the offensive against tech giants Google and Facebook by working collaboratively with broadcasters and the veracity and scale of data harvested from its own platforms.

https://knect365.com/media-networks/article/f28cefea-4636-41df-b24e-49175bf9894b/liberty-takes-on-gafa-and-barb-with-ai-influenced-data-platform

“There are lots of fears about how big the threat GAFA has become and how regulation doesn’t seem to apply to them but they don’t have the rich data about how customers behave which we do,” Laurence Miall-d’Aout, VP, Data and Advanced Advertising, Liberty Global told Cable Congress. “That is our data and it is up to us – and the cable industry as a whole – to harness this data better.”

The cable giant is developing Liberty Insights, presented as a single platform encompassing aggregated consumer data from its 24 million customers, accessed over 14 million devices and uniting 15 billion viewing hours combining customer and viewing data with third-party data.

It will use Machine Learning to offer insights on advertising and programming to broadcasters within its stable on a local and macro level.  

Broadcasters are increasingly looking to exploit data from user sign-ins and subscriptions in the hope this will lift their fortunes in an advertising market dominated by the major tech platforms. This data will be used to generate the kind of personalised content recommendations that are familiar to customers of streaming services, while it will also allow for more relevant advertising, according to Liberty Global.

“Our first party data can measure against GAFA,” Miall-d’Aout declared. “We are an alternative to Facebook and Google.”

It is one of a multiplicity of industry initiatives seeking to fill the void left by standard TV audience measurements which have struggled to keep pace with advertiser demand for accurate and reliable cross-platform metrics.

“We cannot replace Nielsen and BARB,” she said. “They still use very small panels which really tell you nothing about what people are watching. We think with data we can compliment it.”

Like commercial TV broadcasters, the cable co. is looking to turn the concerns marketers such as P&G and Unilever have about brand safety into its advantage.

“A lot of brands turning away from digital money and we are pushing that money back to DTV,” she said.

She said Liberty offered the attributes which had enticed brands to digital platforms in the first place, namely: scale, data, attribution (accountability) and the ability to trade easily.

The company is rolling out addressable advertising in its various territories. With TV3 Group, the Irish commercial broadcaster it owns, Liberty will likely launch TA this year, through the partnership between Virgin Media and rival Sky [Sky AdSmart] announced last June. [TV3 is on track to rebrand its three channels – TV3, 3e and Be3 - as Virgin Media Television in the second quarter of 2018].

“We have opened up Virgin Media in the UK and Ireland where addressable ads are the beginning of the creation of a new marketplace [for addressable ads].”

It has made similar moves in Belgium with cable broadband services provider Telenet.

“As an ecosystem we need TV to stay relevant,” insisted Miall-d’Aout. “We need those TV broadcasters to make money and to that they can recoup some of their traditional business [from the tech giants] and that’s where our data can play a role.”

“We have been historically very poor in creating a unified data sets. The data sets in our organisation have been collected in silos making it difficult to change overnight to a culture based around AI and ML.

She added that the Liberty’s advanced advertising and data unit was on the hunt for ‘data scientists’ to help it adapt.

“I believe if we create our own data platform we can defend ourselves against GAFA,” said Miall-d’Aout. “We can use the data to launch new product, gain new audiences, derive new data and drive innovation.”

She added: “Seventy percent of the Big Data initiatives are not profitable. We have the opportunity to change that at Liberty.”

Liberty Global has operations in 12 European countries under the consumer brands Virgin Media, Unitymedia, Telenet and UPC. In addition, it owns 50% of VodafoneZiggo, a joint venture in the Netherlands, as well as significant content investments in ITV, All3Media, LionsGate, Formula E racing series and several regional sports networks.

The incredible speeds of 5G could change entertainment and computing forever

RedShark News

The amazing speeds promised from 5G could completely revolutionise not only how we interact, but how we do our computing in general. And it's only around a year until it becomes a reality. 

https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/5318-the-incredible-speeds-of-5g-could-change-entertainment-and-computing-forever

The convergence of astonishing rises in computer processing power with the next cellular network 5G is making this a particularly fevered time in future media. The jaw-dropping bandwidth of 5G means there’s less need to cache computer processing in hardware, on your person, on your set-top box (no need for them), or in a post production suite.

Instead, processing will be sorted in the cloud.

8K video is already being lined up for a demonstration over a 5G network at the Olympics in just a couple of year’s time. And it will be Virtual Reality 8K video too. Streamed live. It is simply inconceivable with current technology.

In some respects, 5G still means many things to many people, but the shorthand for its technical performance is nailed down.

The 1Gb/sec speeds and virtually zero delay (plus longer battery charge times of a month) promises to open the floodgates to new technologies that have been in development over a decade but require bandwidth unobtainable with current network technologies. Streaming of 4K UHD movies in seconds, for example, to your mobile phone with no need to download and store. Actually, it will mean interactive 4K UHD video giving users the ability to switch between UHD views of a live tennis match, for example. You can expect this to be demonstrated at the O2 Arena later this year when O2 builds a localised 5G pilot.

While we will be waiting until 2019-2020 when 5G is operational on a nationwide level, pronouncements from Mobile World Congress (MWC) make it clear that it is ready to roll.

“If 2016 was about proof-of-concept demos and 2017 about trials, then this year is squarely focused on bringing commercial products to market,” said Alok Shah, an executive at Samsung Electronics America.

The agreement of a set of 5G specifications in December by standards body 3GPP has accelerated the activity. These give operators the framework to build 5G networks on top of existing 4G infrastructure. Another set of specs, due out in June, will provide the blueprint for building 5G without leaning on 4G.

The scramble to build devices

As of yet, no consumer device is capable of communicating in 5G, which is why there is now a mad scramble to release one.

Huawei announced its first 5G chip that should be able to download data at 2.3Gbps. Qualcomm’s latest processor, Snapdragon 845, is powering flagship phones including the Samsung Galaxy S9+, but we must wait for the integration of its successor, the Snapdragon X24, into consumer products for 5G capability. Intel has its own 5G modem for connected devices like cars and drones and has allied with Microsoft, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to install 5G modems in their laptops by late 2019.

North American mobile carriers like AT&T expect to have coverage by 2020 while Japan, South Korea and China will probably get there sooner. Indeed, of the 1.2 billion 5G connections predicted worldwide by 2025 by mobile operator’s body GSMA, half will be in Asia. Europeans won’t be far behind, with Nokia and Ericsson conducting trials with operators like Orange and Vodafone.

“We are on the cusp of hyper-connectivity where Ultra-HD video, 360 video, augmented reality, holograms, avatars and more will transform the way we communicate and consume media,” prophesied Mats Granryd, Director General of the GSMA.

For example, during MWC Telefónica, Huawei demonstrated Virtual Reality over 5G and expects such applications to be introduced to gaming, education, entertainment, e-health and industrial design.

It is Augmented Reality, though, which marks the next big shift in mobile devices. The reason is that there is a far wider potential user base for AR than there is for VR. Android alone has over two billion active devices and ARCore, its augmented reality SDK for Android, which launched just a week ago, is already supported by 100 million of them. Sony Pictures plans an AR game with a Ghostbusters theme that lets users fight and capture ghosts from the movie franchise.

Meanwhile, Amazon has introduced AR View to its Android app for devices that support ARCore. Combined with the installed iPhone base of half a billion primed for Apple’s ARKit, AR is ready with a flick of the switch.

AR would not be possible at this scale without 5G.

Attention at the wireless industry’s largest annual shindig has noticeably shifted from theory and planning to nuts and bolts implementation. You can bet that in a year’s time the chatter will be around practical and commercial applications.

Documenting a race against time for Africa’s elephants

VMI

The fate of Africa’s elephants, under immediate threat from poaching and an irrevocably changing habitat, should concern us all but filmmaker Lizzie Daly is intent on making a difference.

http://vmi.tv/case-studies/article/136

The up and coming wildlife biologist and broadcaster, who has worked as a presenter on Cbeebies, CBBC, National Geographic and BBC Earth Unplugged, regularly makes her own films with the aim of inspiring more people to produce educational wildlife videos through online vlogging.

Her passion for highlighting the conflicting needs of wildlife and growing human populations is clear in her current project which documents the work of elephant conservation organisation Space For Giants. 

While living and researching alongside rangers in Kenya’s Laikipia reserve, Daly is documenting efforts to protect the elephants by making an online series for the charity to help them expose the issues and develop their social media presence.

“I am producing a 10-part diary style online series showing what life is like in Kenya with elephants and people now living side by side due to a growing human population,” she explains. “Conflict between people and wildlife is at an all-time high. Elephants are trying to find food by crop raiding but in doing so they are destroying livelihoods. In an effort to save their crops people are doing all they can to get rid of the elephants but as a result, are being killed. On top of that elephants are being poached, poisoned and killed by humans.”

Daly is presenter, co-producer (alongside Space For Giants), filmmaker, editor and script writer for the whole series.  She performed similar multiple roles last year in South America documenting the wildlife of Panama, filming crocodiles underwater in the Everglades and elephant seals, orcas and southern right whales in Patagonia.

On both occasions VMI sponsored her with a portable shoot package including Canon 5D Mk3, Canon 70-200mm zoom, a Canon 2x Extender and a GoPro Hero5.  

“I wanted to produce a high quality film using professional equipment that was also fairly easy to carry as well as durable since I am out in the bush for extended periods of time,” she explains. “VMI provided it all for me, for which I am most grateful.”

She continues, “The kit has been fantastic. The zoom lens has been essential in capturing great footage of wildlife. A lot of the crop raiding, where humans face up to the elephants, happens at dawn or dusk and the Canon 5Dx has been really great for this. I’ve used the extender for situations where I have to stay particularly far away. Some of the confrontations with wildlife can get pretty hostile so it helped in documenting the goings on as well as getting even better captures of the native wildlife of Kenya.  It has been great in every type of environment out in the field.”

Daly is using the GoPro to film footage which require even more fleet of foot. “Some of the activities are quite high action such as running with the anti-poaching rapid response unit running from an attack dog. The terrain is incredibly bumpy and so I need a camera that will allow me to capture the shots showing this in between filming.” 

Daly says she’s always had a passion for conserving elephants but being on the ground with Space For Giants has revealed the full extent of the problem.

“There just simply isn't enough space. The series is being filmed in an attempt to find out whether we can coexist alongside elephants for the long term.”

She’s also her own production assistant too, downloading the 2 x 32GB memory cards each day and backing them up onto a pair of hard drives. She plans to edit on Adobe Premiere Pro and publish the series on the Space For Giants’ YouTube channel as well as shared across all social media sites. Having already starting post production Daly says the first episodes should go live at the end of April. 

“As VMI supply kit to a lot of Natural History projects, it’s great to be able to give something back,” says Gary Davis, Manager at VMI Bristol. “Although we deal in only the technical equipment side of projects, it’s our client’s passion for what they do that always drives us to help them to achieve the very best they can.”