The State of Video Advertising 2018

Streaming Media

The power and reach of digital video advertising is on the rise, but solving challenges with cross-media measurement and quality metrics top the agenda for the coming year.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-State-of-Video-Advertising-2018-123881.aspx

Digital strengthened its position as a medium for advertising in Europe as advertisers continue to follow users online, but TV viewing is far from dead.

Data from the “AdEx Benchmark 2016” study compiled by IHS Markit for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, published in mid-2017, revealed a 2016 online ad market value of €41.9 billion.

It suggested that, having overtaken TV ad spending for the first time in 2015, online advertising was leading TV by more than €7 billion across Europe in 2016.

“Mobile and video are the powerhouses driving the European online advertising market as we enter a post-desktop banner advertising world,” said Daniel Knapp, senior director TMT at IHS Markit with the release of the annual “AdEx Benchmark” study.

Ask a different lobbying group and you'll receive a different answer. Thinkbox, funded by UK commercial broadcasters, fielded a study from the Global TV Group suggesting that TV accounts for 90 percent of the average viewer’s video time and that, among millennials, TV is also the largest proportion of their video time at around 73 percent.

Most pertinent to Thinkbox is a stat that says TV accounts for 93.8 percent of video ad viewing, with the average person in the UK watching more than 20 minutes of commercials a day.

Sample findings of the survey say that in Spain, the average amount of time spent watching on a TV set has increased over the past decade to 3 hours and 51 minutes, and that millennials’ TV viewing increases as they get older and have kids. In Italy, 16- to 24-year-olds watch 2 hours, 13 minutes a day, and 25- to 34-year-olds with children are watching 3 hours, 23 minutes.

“Over the past decade, TV has proven remarkably resilient in an era of immense disruption,” says Matt Hill (right), Thinkbox research and planning director. “Despite the emergence of new SVOD services and online video platforms, TV consumption has remained steadfast around the globe. Life stage also continues to be a significant driver of TV viewing.”

A November report from Ampere Analysis appeared to back this up. While it identified the most valuable and fastest-growing type of consumer as “Content Connoisseurs” who tend to be of a younger generation and want to curate their own set of services, an equally key group of so-called “TV Traditionalists” should not be ignored.

Preliminary figures from Dovetail, BARB’s alignment of online viewing with traditional panel-based TV viewing data in the UK, also supports the trend. Almost 70 percent of online viewing is among people age 35 or older, it found, with those over 55 viewing more than any other age groups. Even then, online views were marginally incremental to total TV viewing, which remained dominant across all age groups.

While its figures do not yet take into account smartphones (only PCs and tablets), which might significantly affect the profile, BARB concludes that these devices are certainly not a replacement for TV.

Media investment agency GroupM’s data also shows that, for now, TV remains king with advertisers when global data is aggregated. It stated that TV’s share of ad investment was largely stable at 42 percent in 2016, with a small decline to 41 percent predicted across 2017.

Whichever side of the fence you sat on, however, there is convergence at play, with the following issues identified as requiring special focus to grow the total advertising pie:

• Cross-media measurement
• Viewability and brand safety
• Integration with programmatic tools

CROSS-MEDIA MEASUREMENT

This has been a massive issue for some time. Stakeholders on the buy-and-sell side want to be able to measure TV and digital more than any other media combination, according to the September 2017 “Digital Measurement Priorities Report” from IAB Europe.

“[T]he gap between ad models for linear TV and digital video is closing. The industry is getting closer to integration,” wrote Thomas Bremond, GM, international, advanced advertising, FreeWheel, in an article for Digital Marketing Magazine. “The greatest challenge remains measurement,” he said

The majority of those FreeWheel surveyed called for a new measurement solution, while 70 percent said they thought there would eventually only be three or four third-party measurement providers in the industry.

“There is clearly a need for a more unified approach that goes beyond viewability, to also look at ad performance and value,” Bremond added in an interview.

There are signs of change, with companies such as Médiamétrie calling for new measurement criteria. BARB’s Dovetail Fusion reports are to be published regularly from March 2018 (compiled by Kantar Media) and will deliver the UK industry’s first cross-platform measurement—although it is considered long overdue.

“Many media agencies have developed their own systems to estimate the combined reach of TV and BVOD,” said Hill in a November blog post. “But we’ve been in urgent need of an industry standard and I’m happy to say we now have one, and a very credible and revealing one it is too.”

Thinkbox debuted IPA TouchPoints in September, a planning tool aggregating data from a 5,000-strong media diary and questionnaire intended as a stop gap before Dovetail launches.

“The absence of close substitutes means that for now, those advertisers seeking this young adult TV audience can be willing to bear price inflation in proportion to its rising scarcity,” GroupM reported in “Interaction 2017,” its assessment of digital advertising worldwide.

VIEWABILITY AND BRAND SAFETY

Broadcasters made hay in 2017 with the notion that advertising online was a risky business outside of the safety net of a managed environment.

Everyone seems to agree that a move toward viewable rather than served impressions is important. In terms of contact quality, measuring the length of time an ad is viewed, particularly for video, is top.

“Improved standards certainly need to be agreed in the OTT space, but this plays to the broadcasters’ strengths and the reasons for their enthusiasm are clear: delivering a true premium QoS is their ace card— not just in terms of viewer experience, but for advertisers too,” says Tim Sewell (right), CEO, Yospace. “It’s the key differentiator between broadcasters and the likes of Facebook and YouTube, where 3 seconds is enough to count as an ad view.”

Unsurprisingly, Sewell points to dynamic server-side ad insertion (SSAI) as the as the most reliable and user-friendly method of delivering ad-supported online video, especially in the case of live channels.

“The leading providers of the technology are proving that SSAI works at scale, to audiences counted in millions, with the reliability that broadcasters demand,” asserts Sewell. “But achieving reliability is not quite as easy as you might think, especially when you consider that live events make up 70 percent of live online viewing in the UK, predominantly made up of sports coverage and ‘appointment’ TV—events in which very large audiences typically join the stream over a very short time period.”

IAB Europe is working on a cross-industry European Viewability Initiative that aims to improve the accuracy and consistency of measuring the viewability of delivered impressions. It thinks this will help to make digital advertising more directly comparable with TV where “opportunity for the consumer to view” or “opportunity to see” an advertisement is the accepted tenet for brand advertising.

“It is now more critical than ever to reinforce the quality of the digital advertising environment to ensure that advertisers have strong confidence, and underpin the delivery of free content,” said Townsend Feehan, CEO, IAB Europe, in a press release accompanying the September report. “Ensuring that viewable impressions are measured correctly and consistently across all markets in Europe is a key first step.”

GroupM downgraded its expectations on pure-play internet growth from 15 percent to 11 percent in 2017 after seeing some large advertisers pause investment on unmoderated user-generated platforms.

In a blog post, Lindsey Clay, Thinkbox CEO, defended TV as a trusted, high-quality environment for advertisers that is proven to work. “It has a huge variety of premium programming across every genre and can satisfy the demands of many thousands of advertisers simultaneously and for the long-term. Now more than ever these are crucial distinctions between it and a lot of other types of video.”

INTEGRATION WITH PROGRAMMATIC TOOLS

Programmatic (automated) advertising continued its strong growth and was an €8.1 billion market across Europe in 2016, jumping 42.7 percent from €5.7 billion in 2015. According to IAB Europe/IHS Markit, half (50.1 percent) of European display ad revenue was being traded this way.

Additionally, programmatic video grew by an exponential 155 percent and now accounts for more than 45 percent of total online video ad spend. Mobile continues to be the “most” programmatic format, with 65 percent of mobile ad spend traded programmatically in 2016.

Western Europe dominates this market with €7.5 billion programmatic revenues compared to €0.6 billion in the combined region of Central and Eastern Europe, although this figure represents a growth of 53 percent year on year.

However, Bremond says, “2017 has been a difficult year, with many questions raised about the brand-safe nature of programmatic video inventory. Programmatic needs rules and should be about automation—not simply be automatic. Publishers should focus on premium video content, where there is a direct relationship between the buyer and seller, and transactions take place in a saleable, brand-safe environment.”

The UK remains Europe’s market leader in programmatic. By the end of 2017, advertisers were expected to spend £3.39 billion on programmatic trading, up 23.5 percent from 2016, according to eMarketer data. This represents 79 percent of all UK digital display ad spending, and that proportion will reach 84.5 percent by 2019, eMarketer estimates.

DAI Boost for Broadcasters

The rise of connected TVs, VOD, and mobile video has breathed new life into the broadcast industry’s ability to monetize its audience reach. Sky’s AdSmart product is a trailblazer, delivering a 75 percent return rate for the pay TV giant. Channel-switching during a targeted advert reportedly reduces by 48 percent, based on 2015 numbers provided by Sky.

A pact between Sky and Virgin Media in June to integrate AdSmart into Virgin STBs gave the two companies access to 30 million targeted viewers in the UK and Ireland, and sufficient combined scale to compete with social media networks. (Facebook has around 35 million UK users.)

BT Sport has expanded its dynamic ad insertion (DAI) during football and rugby coverage with Yospace. The new deal runs until the end of the 2018/2019 Champions League.

Yospace made similar deals in 2017 with Sky in Germany, TV4 in Sweden, and Scotland’s STV, where the broadcaster was the first anywhere to provide targetable DAI in live streaming on Amazon Fire TV (after being the first in the UK to use the technology across live simulcast programs).

For commercial broadcasters like STV, the need to address targeted ads is more pressing than for pay TV operators, where subscriptions comprise the bulk of revenue. In the UK, on the back of an 8 percent fall in advertising in the first 6 months of 2017, ITV said it would introduce targeted trading. It had yet to do so at year end, with fellow broadcasters Channel 4 (C4) and STV driving this charge.

C4 has seen use of its All 4 service increase more than 20 percent year-on-year, to more than 60 million monthly viewers, and digital revenues climb 24 percent to £102 million. It began 2018 by offering personalized advertising with All 4 across every channel, including mobile, tablet, games consoles, and smart TVs.

C4’s decision to run commercials across its VOD services is a pushback to Facebook and Google’s duopoly of digital ads and confirms that traditional advertising channels can and will adapt to leverage the successes of digital.

Both STV and C4 require viewers to register their consent. That’s important since broadcasters will need to meet strict privacy rules before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation come into force in May.

The Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards-making group is attempting to harmonize addressable technologies by building on hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV), interactive TV software, v2.0. As well as benefiting free-to-air broadcasters, the DVB argues that standardization would make it easier for pay TV operators to deploy targeted advertising. Advantages include streamlining back-office requirements across OTT, broadcast, and service provider platforms.

The current HbbTV specification, on which Freeview Play is based, can support insertion of advertising over IP into broadcast streams, but doing so accurately is a key technical challenge. Nonetheless, the DVB believes a standard can be delivered by early 2019 and could even go global.

TV Alliance Takes on Google and Facebook

WPP—the world’s largest ad company—has persistently argued that Google and Facebook should be seen as media organizations as much as they are tech organizations and claim the duo already eat up 90 percent of every new pound spent on digital advertising.

In a bid to counter the threat from the Silicon Valley giants, a group of broadcasters led by Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1, France’s TF1 Group, and Mediaset in Italy and Spain banded together midyear to launch the European Broadcaster Exchange (EBX). The UK’s Channel 4 joined them in November, each taking a 25 percent share.

The joint venture aims to establish a European video-on-demand exchange to cater to the growing demand for multi-territory video campaigns at scale, initially traded programmatically.

It will be headquartered in London and begin trading in 2018. The combined VOD services of the EBX members (including C4’s All 4) claims to reach over 160 million viewers a month.

EBX aims to forge deeper collaboration between the broadcaster partners, driving forward technological development in online advertising and helping them to compete more efficiently with global competitors like Google and Facebook.

“The demand for multi-territory digital ad campaigns in brand safe and transparent environments is increasing. The video ad market continues to grow exponentially across Europe,” Jonathan Lewis (right), head of digital and partnership innovation at Channel 4, told the Guardian.

“This joint venture [EBX] is our answer to the current digital video landscape,” said the CEO of Mediaset Group-owned Publitalia 80, Stefano Sala, in an interview with Digital TV Europe.

“Many international companies have a strong demand for high-quality and brand-safe advertising environments in the video sector,” added ProSiebenSat.1 Group COO, Christof Wahl in the same article. “Our joint venture will offer them the opportunity to book pan-European campaigns in the premium video environment of an economic area with a population of over 250 million in an automated, user-friendly manner. This will allow us to gain access to additional advertising budgets that we were previously unable to address on a national level.”

Mobile Video Advertising

Whichever way you turn, mobile ads are on the up. Mobile advertising is projected to reach nearly $128 billion globally in 2018, per Zenith’s Media Consumption Forecasts report.

Ad views on smartphones (23 percent) and OTT devices (29 percent) continue to steadily increase in Europe, while desktop’s share of views, at 28 percent for 2017, decreased, according to FreeWheel.

IAB Europe figures record global mobile advertising growth accelerating 60.5 percent to reach $83 billion between 2015 and 2016, but with Europe behind North America and APAC at 19 percent (or $16 billion) of that total.

Ooyala’s research showed mobile devices attracting 58 percent of video views for AVOD services in EMEA, with tablets having the highest consumption of any other region at 12 percent.

“One of the best hunting grounds for pay TV and broadcasters is going to be in mobile because of the huge increase in consumption of live TV through mobile apps,” says John Tigg, SVP, Enterprise Solutions EMEA, Videology.

“Mobile continues to be a major growth driver of programmatic in the UK, accounting for more than three-quarters (78 percent) of total programmatic digital display ad spending in 2017; that figure will reach 86.5 percent come 2019,” according to an eMarketer press release. “The numbers for desktop, meanwhile, are declining— both proportionally and in real terms. Just 22 percent of programmatic ad spending, or £743.8m [$993m], will go to desktop this year, and those numbers will fall to 13.5 percent and £609.5m [$813m] in 2019.”

Nonetheless, some marketers are apparently intimidated by mobile programmatic. According to a study by iotec, one-third of respondents find mobile programmatic just as confusing as on desktop, but 41 percent found it more complex on mobile. Half (50.4 percent) identified transparent pricing as their primary focus. Despite these concerns, more than 60 percent of marketers plan to increase their ad spends in mobile programmatic over the next year.

F1 gears up for 4K UHD remote production and looks ahead to IP and HDR

Sports Video Group Europe

The world’s most popular motorsport gets the greenlight in Melbourne on 25 March under new management and an evolving suite of editorial products designed to reinvigorate storytelling and return to the visceral wheel to wheel action viewers may recall from the battles of Hunt v Lauda or Prost v Senna.

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/f1-gears-up-for-4k-uhd-remote-production-and-looks-ahead-to-ip-and-hdr/

Liberty Media completed its acquisition of Formula 1 in January 2017 and has been on a rapid path to re-connect the iconic global motorsports business with fans. Last season saw the introduction of UHD coverage from all 21 races, a decision already in train before Liberty took over, but this is the first season in which its strategy of reinventing the fan experience is put into action.

After “a lot of nervousness” this time last year, the UHD production ultimately proved “extremely successful” says Formula 1 TV systems Group Manager Trevor Turner.

The team did face teething problems in moving from a single coaxial HD-SDI environment to a Quad 3G-SDI one. Specifically, they found they were taking a hit on their ability to react quickly to changing production demands.

“We get frequent requests from production, for example, to throw feeds to a different monitor or add or change sources to the SAM Kahuna and Livetouch systems which we were prepared for of course, but it wasn’t as intuitive as we had become accustomed to with our previous system.”

With up to 24 fibred cameras around the track, pit-lane, heli-cam, RF cameras and on-car cameras, there are about 60 individual sources. That’s proved a lot for the new system to handle.

“In essence, the volume of sources and the variety of video formats we have meant sometimes the ability to react was a little slower than it might have been,” says Turner. “In the beginning working in Quad-3G felt like we had one arm behind our back.

“Ensuring that all of our sources were available both in UHD and 1080p where we needed them and being aware of the impact that the changes in production requirements have on the configuration was initially challenging. The flexibility of the Kahuna 9600 with upstream switching meant that the team were above to achieve the flexibility required between 720p, 1080p and UHD sources.

He continues, “We have a lot of sources which we upstream switch into Kahuna from the router and adding or changing a camera into the production that’s not in the format the mixer is expecting can cause a headache. It’s best that the Kahuna knows what format to expect on each input so some quick engineering footwork was occasionally required to convert sources upstream to avoid this.

“From about two thirds of the way through the season we had overcome these initial hurdles and ironed out the issues so that it just became normal again. Everything had bedded in and didn’t cause any more alarms.”

In the close season Turner’s team has been busy adding in more flexibility; “cross conversion cards and more ‘glue’ so we can better utilise the system,” he says. “There is always more we wanted to do so adding more glue helps us achieve this.”

There is also a completely new audio production area for 2018 as well as a new operational workspace for the Pit & Paddock operation.

However, the system is already reaching its peak capacity.

“We are already right up against the limits on our router,” says Turner. “Because we are running a

Quad 3G UHD system — and an HD 3G-SDI system in parallel too – the majority of sources require five inputs [on the router] and it doesn’t take more than the addition of another two to three cameras, for virtual graphics insertion for example, and the resulting monitoring and routing processes are right on the limit.”

Gearing up for remote production

For this reason, Turner is looking to the future and a remote over IP production.

This season Sky UK and Sky Italia will be producing their F1 coverage remotely, taking their unilateral camera feeds, audio and comms from the track back to their own facilities in London and Milan.

It’s a model F1 would like to replicate in the future but only once the technology has matched the complexity and scale of F1’s global operation.

“We are still an OB in the real sense and we are expanding more functionality back into our UK technical centre and leveraging the connectivity that Tata provides us to deliver more without having an impact on the number of travelling staff, amount of kit and freight costs.

“Because we made the technology choice only last year to produce UHD in the way we are, we will remain with that for a while until we’ve worked out the next steps.”

He explains that eighteen months ago, when F1 started to specify the equipment for UHD the rationale was not to move to IP because running a UHD signal over 2022-6 and 10G pipes meant compression and that was something they didn’t want to compromise on.

“Since then, 25Gig, 40Gig, 100Gig and faster IP networks have started to become available,” says Turner. “It’s clear that uncompressed video over IP video has become so much easier to use, and quicker to roll out [now that standards are in place], than most people expected and on a scale which we would need.”

IP standards are moving on at pace, connectivity has become more ubiquitous and Sky, as well as NEP in Australia, are proving how it is done.

“I would have no qualms about going over IP today but nor can we have all our eggs in one basket,” says Turner. “We have to think about disaster recovery and the ‘what ifs’. Even with the very best connectivity we need to ensure we have a wholly robust solution.”

Unlike leading soccer grounds around Europe, most of which are fibred and which will host 20 plus live matches a year, Formula 1 visits each Grand Prix circuit once a year, each in different countries with different challenges.

“We’re taking a measured approach towards remote production but we are not there yet. There are lots of parts in play.”

HDR complexity

Having experimented with HDR last season “We know how to do it. Our systems were bought with that in mind [primarily the Grass Valley LDX-86n cameras]. But it is not so straightforward,” says Turner.

For a start there are more variable lighting considerations at tracks than you’d find at the relatively more controllable environment of a soccer stadia. Weather at a Grand Prix could be sunny, rainy or cloudy – often all in one afternoon and at different parts of the circuit at the same time. Then there are the flood lit night races such as Singapore.

“We expect varying conditions in the places we operate but you have to be sure you understand how parallel SDR and HDR productions can deliver consistent quality, how to rack the cameras properly. And some cameras the production relies on don’t have HDR capability meaning that external convertors maybe required. The use of Format Fusion 4 software in the Kahuna makes this process much simpler.

“Then it becomes a question of global distribution. We could easily have HD SDR, HD HDR, UHD SDR and UHD HDR feeds to contend with. Processing and monitoring these various outputs for multiple broadcasters becomes highly complex to manage. We don’t really want to be putting a myriad of different versions out. Should our broadcast partners require HDR in the future, we want to approach it properly.”

Editorially, F1 promises a raft of enhancements in 2018, to deliver the sport’s visceral appeal to fans around the globe.

Audio has been enhanced with new microphone positions on the cars, and new microphone placements trackside. There will be greater emphasis on being closer to the action, on track and behind the scenes with new camera angles. There’s a complete and more inclusive graphics rebrand enabling the fans to better follow the action e.g. turn number watermarking, and all the cars will be fitted with 360-degree cameras for recorded content and packaging to F1’s digital platforms.

Another focus is fan engagement at the track where F1 is working hard to ensure that its fans are fully immersed and engaged with the event. Enhancing connectivity to mobile devices at the circuit is one aspect being considered and brings the key challenge overcoming the build out of physical and backhaul infrastructure networks to enable 100,000+ spectators to enjoy unprecedented access to F1 content.

This season also sees the launch of F1’s OTT service – F1TV. Launching in nearly two dozen markets it leverages Tata’s Ultra Live Video Delivery Network to deliver multiple live feeds directly to subscribers from trackside.

In the future all our computing will be done over 5G

RedShark News

We all know that 5G for all is on the very near horizon, but as recently shown manufacturers believe that the technology will be much more than 4G on steroids, and could in fact completely change the way we do our computing forever.

https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/5315-in-the-future-all-our-computing-will-be-done-over-5g

The recent Tradeshow Mobile World Congress was far more than a launchpad for mobile phones. Some 2300 exhibiting companies, ranging from network infrastructure vendors to car manufacturers, plus over 100,000 professionals headed to Barcelona for the week. If a product in any way connects to the internet, it was there and because connectivity and the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is deemed so critical to the future economy and social well-being of the planet, it is certainly a more important event than, say, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and arguably, given its more egalitarian environment, the World Economic Forum in Davos.

You could not escape the main talking point at this show of 5G, successor to the 4G cellular network, but one which delivers such a dramatic leap in performance there is unlikely ever to be a need for 6G. A combination of new spectrum, high densities of physical antennae and cunning network ‘slicing’ mean real-time holographic projection should become a reality within a decade.

Politics and power

Above and beyond media and entertainment, 5G is being promoted as the fundamental infrastructure driving the world’s future digital economies by linking together billions of connected devices into the IoT and delivering what some are calling the fourth industrial revolution.

Kathy Calvin, president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation, heaped praise on the mobile industry for being the first sector to strongly support the organisation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but stressed that providing reach and network access to the world’s underserved was only one part of the solution.

There were also strong endorsements of the mobile industry’s ability to tackle humanitarian issues and many calls for the industry to use its combined global superpower as a force for social and community good.

“The mobile industry is helping people in times of disaster, reducing inequalities, helping to preserve the world’s resources and we are positively impacting people’s lives every day,” said Granryd.

There was no mention, though, of how the industry should collectively tackle the rising mountain of toxic e-waste from discarded electronics goods which by 2021 will be a staggering 52.2 million metric tons - equivalent to about 7kg for every person on the planet. And lots of talk about how politicians should lay off nationalising telcos in a bid to get their hands on the 5G networks while giving the telco industry a regulatory light touch.

Ericsson’s chief Börje Ekholm put it neatly: “The critical infrastructure of previous centuries was rail, roads and air. In future, the world’s superhighway will be communications networks.”

Low light and AR handset advances

The headline acts at MWC remain the main consumer electronics brands. There were notable handset debuts, while Apple does its own thing, Google chose not to exhibit this time and Huawei is reserving its flagship launch until mid-March.

Trending is the incorporation of technology for boosting low-light imaging capabilities. Some models have dual-lenses - one with a larger aperture to capture more light, while the other improves the light intake and reduces distortion. Among them are ZTE’s Blade Z Max, an Android phone costing around £300 and the Samsung S9+. One of its lenses also has a variable aperture that will automatically switch between an f-stop of 1.5 in dark conditions and f2.4 for daylight. Sony went another route and is using an image processor developed with Qualcomm to enhance video from the 19MP camera in the Xperia XZ2 to reaches ISO levels of 12,800.

Smartphones remain one of the most widely used devices – but they will disappear as the processing and software are removed from the device and taken into the cloud (otherwise known as the network).

“Cloud computing over 5G will enable every single VR and AR terminal to be the most powerful device in the world,” said Cher Wang the co-founder of Chinese mobile and VR firm HTC. “Smartphones may look different from the shiny rectangles we know today and take on other forms as 5G reduces the need for device-based computing power. The screen may be away from the smartphone and displayed on our AR or VR devices – or even directly projected into our eyes.”

A hint of this is Google’s and LG’s aim to make their smartphones a hub for AI-influenced AR. LG unveiled V30S ThinQ which integrates AI features into the device’s camera. One feature analyses subjects in the camera’s frame and recommends the shooting mode. QLens, another AI mode, provides the ability to scan QR codes and perform image searches to see for example matching images of food and landmarks. And, of course, there’s an AI to give low-light photography a boost.

Google has made its Lens visual search tool part of Google Photos on all phones and intends to combine this with ARCore, where it could identify or annotate objects in the real world and provide a platform for AR app developers to create a Pokemon-style killer app.

Supercomputers in your pocket or not, one thing’s for sure: the power of mobile will be the network.

Feeling Groovy - Live streaming production

FEED

It takes more than a camera and a internet connection to create a successful live-streaming production.

p20 http://digital.feedmagazine.tv/issue_01/?

Whether it be for marketing purposes, as a supplement to traditional broadcasting, to increase access to live events or just for fun among individuals, live video is adding another component to the way information is communicated. 

But live streaming is not as easy as you might first imagine. Even the simplest content has an aspect of risk when it comes to live video. Any errors in the stream are difficult to hide given the live nature of the content, and most viewers won’t wait around if you have to cut the stream for even a few seconds.

The constituent parts include production, connectivity, encoding, CDN and delivery services. There are other elements too which many streaming media companies can provide including bespoke online video players and stream analytics.  

Production

These days there’s really nothing acceptable about a sub-broadcast quality stream for which the main equipment is indistinguishable from a standard TV outside broadcast. For standard shoots Streaming Tank – whose clients include i24News and Eurosport - use Sony EX3s, Sony PMW-300 and Canon C300s; and for larger, more complex events it has access to larger ENG cameras and capabilities for 4K capture. For bigger productions or locations with poor network signals, it even runs its own outside broadcast truck which adds access to a Dawson Tooway satellite as well as integrated connectivity, vision and sound equipment including BlackMagic Design’s ATEM Television Studio live production switcher and a BlackMagic HyperDeck Studio recorder. Streaming Tank use a mix of in-house kit and expertise plus external partners and freelancers to put together a video production service to fit the event; from lean 1-3 camera solutions right up to complex, dynamic shoots required for stadiums, festivals and outdoor events.

Connectivity

If you already have a video and sound team in place you may want to utilise connectivity solutions as a standalone service to get the onsite video stream from venue out to the internet.

“In the simplest set up this means having our own engineers on-site with our encoders connected to a stable broadband connection but that is not always possible so we work with a number of alternatives,” says Jake Ward, Business Development Director at live stream specialist Groovy Gecko.

These options include Satellite bandwidth: streaming media producers with expertise in IP over satellite can set up a broadband connection on site which is good enough to stream your webcast with full redundancy.

Satellite/Fibre acquisition: When the video signal is already being uplinked to a satellite or transmitted over fibre to BT Tower, producers can bring the signal down into a partner satellite acquisition centre and encode your webcast from there.

Mobile multiplexing: For webcasting on the move or in difficult environments then backpacks are the best option. LiveU’s units for example, merges together multiple 3G, 4G and wireless signals and outputs a high quality video stream that can be acquired at the streaming provider’s hub and encoded for your webcast. Smaller, lightweight units such as the LU200 permit camera ops to wear them and move easily. And more robust models like the LU500 can bond up to 8 network connections, while being combined with the LiveU extender and providing up to 20Mbps.

Streaming media producers will also partner with a CDN, or several of them for redundancy, to deliver the live stream anywhere in the world.

“Quite often, we’re working with a production company, they give us a TX, their live output from their camera mix and then it’s fundamentally being split (for safety reasons) into two or more encoders and those encoders are encoding that stream into a suitable video format,” explains Ward.

“Maybe we’ll add in other interactive elements like live polling on Facebook Live (perhaps showing a graphic that demonstrates that live poll). Those live streams. once they’re complete, are sent to what’s called a publishing point. That’s the point on a standard CDN, something like Akamai. It’s going onto the client’s own page, or more commonly these days a publishing point on something like Periscope or Facebook live or YouTube.

“Of course, you can run a very simple low stream off a single server that a company may be hosting but as soon as that hits a certain limit everything’s going to start to fall apart. From a CDN point of view, we use people like Akamai, which delivers a considerable portion of streaming and the internet so if that goes down and fails to work we’ve all got much bigger problems.”

How does a CDN work?

Content Delivery Networks are made up of a large number of server farms around the world joined together by ultra-fast connections. When a file is uploaded to a local server for viewing on-demand it is rapidly duplicated across all the CDN’s servers. If you upload a file in London once it is replicated, a user in New York will have it sent to them from a local server in New York.

This means that there are many copies of your content on servers around the world and that ensures 100% availability. For example, if servers in London was unavailable then users in London would be served their file from Frankfurt. There may be a negligible drop in performance but the file would still be available.

With a live file, the principle is the same and this means that we are able to offer almost unlimited capacity when streaming live. Each live stream is replicated across all servers so again the user has it delivered to them from their ‘nearest’ server.

This means when you webcast live with us, users don’t get messages saying the live feed is over capacity or fail to connect which ensures each user gets a truly great experience.

One advantage of working through a CDN is redundancy. “You have the output you want to broadcast going into two different encoders then publishing hopefully through two different internet connections to two different places on the CDN,” says Ward. “That means that if something on the CDN goes down and you’re publishing through London, and London has an outage. Your signal is still being sent via Bristol, via a different internet connection.

“On CDNs that seamlessly falls over, the audience don’t know that they’re suddenly on a secondary stream, the stream just continues as it was. Facebook and other social platforms only have a primary stream in, so we’ve done a lot of work to create a secondary work flow to enable that. For security purposes most of the social networks are looking at adding a primary and secondary stream which will have seamless cross over.

“If a live stream of a major brand goes down then it’s really serious. It really is not just looking at the technical solution, it’s looking at the areas of risk. You have to sit down in a planning meeting from a content point of view and a technical point of view.”

Most often, the issue with bandwidth is purely making sure it’s strong enough to handle a high quality stream. “Many clients tend to forget about the importance of a strong internet connection when it comes to getting live content offsite,” says Ward. “They also assume that a strong internet connection for things like web browsing means that it will be the same for live streaming, but this isn’t the case. They may have a speed of 100mb, but when a whole building full of people are draining the bandwidth, it often gets squeezed to considerably lower. We get around this when handling a stream by physically sending an engineer to test a venue’s broadband signal, regardless of what they tell us beforehand.”

Then there’s the added worry of the rise of live 360° video in 4K. On one hand, shooting 360° footage in 4K is clearly beneficial for the medium, increasing the quality and therefore viewer experience, but it requires more bandwidth. But you’ll want to ensure the average viewer is able to enjoy a stream even without a 15mb connection. Part of this involves degrading streams for those who lack the bandwidth to stream 4K.

Copyright permissions

Whilst most people can appreciate the importance of getting the right permissions to use copyrighted material, many are not aware of both how long this process can take, and how sensitive social networks are to any form of copyright infringement.

Both Facebook and YouTube have sophisticated monitoring systems to detect copyrighted material, and if something isn’t cleared properly, you can bet they will know about it. YouTube offers a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy, but Facebook is stricter. The site will automatically kill a stream in under 10 seconds if it detects any copyrighted material which we do not have the rights to use. 

“The problem is, these systems are so sensitive that even a copyrighted piece of music played accidentally or by someone else in the background could take a stream off air,” says Ward. “I’ve had situations in the past where the clients nailed this down, we’ve nailed this down, everything is copyrighted. But someone has driven past in a car playing a radio track, and I’ve got a strike on YouTube. Copyright is really a big issue at the moment, often not looked at by the brands and not cleared properly by the brands. It takes time. Facebook takes five or six days to clear a music track for use on a stream. If you’re trying to do something really quickly, you may hit problems.”

BAFTA 360

At the end of last year, Groovy Gecko live streamed the Virgin TV BAFTA Television Awards 2017. Interviews from the star-studded red carpet were delivered directly into Virgin Media’s Facebook page, in interactive 360° video. This allowed the viewer to look around the red carpet as though they were on it. The viewer could alter their view onscreen by physically moving their mobile device or using a mouse on a computer/ laptop.

“The beauty of a 360° stream is the amount of freedom it gives to the audience,” says Ward. “This makes for a highly interactive and immersive experience, far beyond that of a static, non-live stream. By combining the effect of live video and the 360° feature, viewers had extended access to an exclusive event and got to follow the celebrities as they walked the red carpet.”

After only an hour, Virgin Media’s stream had attracted around one and a half times more viewers than the live stream on the official BAFTA Facebook page which did not feature 360° interactivity.

“This suggests our 360° video was much more attractive to viewers than a simple live stream, which would simply not have afforded the same type of immersion for viewers,” says Ward.

StreamAMG deliver Championship football

StreamAMG take charge of the live web streaming for a string of European soccer clubs including Shakhtar Donetsk and AC Sparta Prague as well as institutions such as sessions of the UK Supreme Court and the European Council which unites a single video feed with 32 audio feeds.

It works with a growing number of Championship football clubs including Derby County to stream home matches internationally. In all these cases, StreamAMG is taking the produced feed and passing it through its own low latency encoder Lola. “We have two installed on-site at each football club we work for – a primary and a back-up,” explains Duncan Burbidge CEO StreamAMG. “We get handed the SDI feed from the OB supplied by the club. We take in that single SDI feed and create MPEG Dash and HLS versions and apply a DRM (digital rights management) licence within Lola.  We might also provide a personal stream for the club owners (Lola can handle 18 streams at once).”

All this activity is monitored remotely from StreamAMG’s network operations centre in Stratford. The feeds are ingest to the NOC from satellite and fibre links either direct or via BT Tower along with ISDN (all audio comms still use this old school telephony) before being rebroadcast via CDN.

“The ability to monitor all encoders simultaneously is a big plus,” says Burbidge. 

We’re doing HD standardly at 1080p. We could go UHD at 4-6 Mbps but we are not seeing demand for it. UHD would get more expensive and, given the kind of money you can generate from advertising and payperview, a big chunk would taken out by bandwidth required for UHD.”

Live social

The functionality of live social platforms has enabled brands to move away from simple live videos being delivered from a smartphone to professionally produced multi-camera interactive streams.

At the outset it’s important to consider what types of content will work best as live social streams. The important thing to remember is: just because something is happening live, it doesn’t mean that it should be a live stream.

There are only three reasons why content should be live:

1.    The event or content delivered via the live stream is of such importance to your target audience that they’ll want to watch it as it happens – for example, a major new product launch or a unique live event.

2.  The content of the live stream allows the audience to interact with the video content in a way that you wouldn’t normally be able to do, such as asking a well-known expert a question.

3.  Content delivered over social but connected to traditional broadcast channels. For example an advert on programme on TV which directs users to view a live stream for more interactivity.

“The data we’ve gathered from producing hundreds of live video streams for Facebook Live has shown that if content does not come under one of these three categories it is unlikely to deliver a large viewership,” says Ward. “Therefore, it should simply be delivered as on-demand content, as this reduces risk and allows the content to be more precisely crafted.”

Regardless of the content or topic of the video, Groovy Gecko suggests that, contrary to commonly held belief that social content should be short, with live social streaming, longer content is actually much more effective.

“The core audience who have liked and engaged with your brand page, are more willing to watch content for longer periods of time if it’s interactive, or can deliver a unique live experience,” suggests Ward. “Additionally, the nature of sharing and liking of live video posts means that longer streams work more effectively. Live streams also feature more prominently in user’s timelines when they are live.”

Groovy Gecko data suggests that streams that last over 20 minutes reach a much larger proportion of audiences.

BARB Delays Launch of Dovetail

Streaming Media

The eagerly anticipated cross-platform audience monitoring is on hold until BARB can combine two existing metrics into a single measurement

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/BARB-Delays-Launch-of-Dovetail-123763.aspx

Advertisers and broadcasters eagerly anticipating the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board's (BARB) cross-platform audience measurement Dovetail Fusion this month will have to wait a little longer

Scheduled to launch in March, Dovetail is intended to be the new gold standard for comparing programme ratings online and on TV. BARB now says it will be delayed.

"With regards to the Dovetail launch, it's taking longer than expected to produce multiple screen viewing figures – the outcome of Dovetail Fusion – to the standard the industry expects of BARB," it states. "At present, we're assessing the data ahead of a review with our Board later this month."

Following this review, a more detailed update on the launch plan is promised.

Project Dovetail was initiated in 2015 with the aim of combining the ratings agency's traditional panel data from 5,100 homes with data collected from connected devices.

Specifically, its goal is to generate census data for online TV viewing through a software code embedded in TV player apps used by viewers. More than 30 different platforms have implemented this software and have been audited to ensure the data meets BARB's standards. These results are already reported weekly in The TV Player Report.

The project will also use software meters installed on the PCs, tablets, and smart phones of panel members delivering information about what has been watched and who was watching.

Kantar Media was awarded the contract to establish a fusion methodology to blend the two sets of data. Apparently it is this fusion which is causing the delay.

A trusted and accountable multiple-screen audience currency is increasingly necessary to unlock further spend against video online and to shore up the value of ads placed against live/linear schedules.
A September 2017 study by IAB Europe found that 90% of European industry stakeholders believe brands would spend more on digital channels if cross-media measurement capabilities were improved.

BARB itself agrees. In a report published in January 2018, the agency admitted, "In a world of fragmentation, traditional TV viewing is declining … Far from being niche, SVOD services are now an established part of the television ecosystem."

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Marketing content in a fragmented advertising space

Knect365/ TV Connect

A trusted accountable currency and the rollout of addressable advertising go hand in hand for marketers and media agencies looking to optimise investment.

https://knect365.com/media-networks/article/6b751370-5f6c-4fdb-b2a6-4ef6da44977e/marketing-content-in-a-fragmented-advertising-space

When BARB admitted that “in a world of fragmentation, traditional TV viewing is declining” you knew the waters have been breached.

The UK TV ratings body made the comment in a January report into SVOD viewing that concludes, “Far from being niche, SVOD services are now an established part of the television ecosystem.”

Yet the report begins, “Television is still king.”

Both statements are true and speak to the dilemma facing the marketers of content and advertisers, as they seek the optimum return on production budgets and ad investment.

Driven by the rise in popularity of people watching online video, advertisers spent a record £699 million on video ads in the UK in the first half of 2017 – a 46% year-on-year rise, according to the most up to date Internet Advertising Bureau UK / PwC Digital Adspend report.

The time people spend watching short video clips appears to have almost trebled over the past three years (Sept 2014 to Sept 2017): from 51 minutes to 2 hrs 21 minutes per week, according to YouGov data.

“The time people spend watching online video has grown tremendously over the last few years,” says IAB CEO Jon Mew. “It’s little wonder that video is now the fastest-growing ad format as advertisers look to tap into the changing way people consume content.”

On the other hand, UK commercial broadcaster lobby group Thinkbox fields statistics showing that TV accounts for 93.8% of video ad viewing with the average person in the UK watching more than 20 minutes of commercials a day. Broadcast’s reach is strong across Europe too. Thinkbox’s survey suggests that in Spain, the average time spent watching on a TV set has increased to 3h 51 minutes; and that millennial TV viewing actually increases as they get older and have kids.

“Over the past decade, TV has proven remarkably resilient in an era of immense disruption,” asserts Matt Hill, Thinkbox Research and Planning Director. “Despite the emergence of SVOD services and online video platforms, TV consumption has remained standfast around the globe.”

But back to BARB. What is more telling about its arguably belated recognition of the importance and permanence of digital is that one of the world’s most trusted ratings services still has no cross-platform measurement in place.

Media agencies and TV marketers worldwide have been calling for a resolution to this issue for years.

In 2015, the average person watched 216 minutes daily of traditional consolidated TV (live and viewed within seven days of broadcast), according to BARB. In 2016, this fell to 212 minutes, a 2% decrease, although the total amount of time spent in front of the TV is unchanged. The reason for this apparent disconnect, reckons BARB, is that a fast-growing area of activity is “unmatched” viewing, a figure that has reached almost 19% in recent months. It puts most of this down to people watching programming via SVOD.

Cross platform conundrum

BARB’s Dovetail Fusion reports are to be published regularly from March (compiled by Kantar Media) and will deliver the agency’s first cross-platform measurement using digital view data from the likes of Sky and the BBC.

Yet BARB isn’t able to measure actual viewing to SVOD services without the cooperation of service providers like Netflix and Amazon Video.

The clamour for a trusted and accountable multiple-screen audience currency is necessary to unlock further spend against video online and to shore up the value of ads placed against live/linear schedules.

A September 2017 study by IAB Europe found that 90% of European industry stakeholders believe brands would spend more on digital channels if cross-media measurement capabilities were improved.

“The gap between advertising models for linear TV and digital video is closing, and the industry is moving towards integration. The greatest challenge remains measurement.”  – Thomas Bremond, GM, International, Advanced Advertising, FreeWheel

“The gap between advertising models for linear TV and digital video is closing, and the industry is moving towards integration,” says Thomas Bremond, GM, International, Advanced Advertising, FreeWheel. “The greatest challenge remains measurement.”

In the absence of an accepted metric to combine TV and digital a number of stakeholders have developed their own systems.

In the US, Google has made its traditional TV inventory available via DoubleClick, allowing advertisers to buy linear TV spots programmatically. “We’re in the golden age of video, and while this explosion of great content is great for users, it creates a lot of complexity for advertisers and publishers,” blogged Rany Ng, director, product management, Google, about the announcement.

Thinkbox offers IPA TouchPoints, a planning tool aggregating data from a 5,000-strong media diary and questionnaire intended as a stop gap before Dovetail launches.

IAB Europe is working on a cross-industry European Viewability Initiative which aims to improve the accuracy and consistency of measuring the viewability of delivered impressions. It thinks this will help make digital advertising more directly comparable with TV.

And just this month [February 2018] Discovery introduced ‘Total TV’ an approach for audience measurement during live events kicking off with Eurosport’s coverage of the recent Winter Olympics in South Korea. It includes engagement with content across all Discovery’s digital and social media properties.

“It neatly meshes data from different sources,” explained Chris Jones, Global Lead, Research & Evaluation at Publicis Media Sports & Entertainment, which helped implement the system. “Importantly, official audited data from television and online measurement systems are at the heart of the calculation. But clever use of survey research allows us to understand the cross-over in people who connect with the Games via both TV and digital/social platforms, meaning we can remove any double counting and determine the true pan-European audience reach of an event for the first time.”

Brand safe environment

A need for a cross-platform measure does not exist in isolation of another top priority for marketers, that of brand safety. Given the issues that befell YouTube and other unmoderated user-generated platforms in 2016, when ads were placed alongside brand inappropriate content (WPP-owned GroupM downgrading its expectations of internet advertising growth as a result), efforts are being made to give online advertising the safety net of a managed environment.

“It is now more critical than ever to reinforce the quality of the digital advertising environment to ensure that advertisers have strong confidence, and underpin the delivery of free content,” says Townsend Feehan, CEO, IAB Europe. “Ensuring that viewable impressions are measured correctly and consistently across all markets in Europe is a key first step.”

Tim Sewell, CEO at digital video distribution company Yospace, says: “Improved standards certainly need to be agreed in the OTT space, but this plays to the broadcasters’ strengths and the reasons for their enthusiasm are clear: delivering a true premium quality of service is their ace card – not just in terms of viewer experience, but for advertisers too. It’s the key differentiator between broadcasters and the likes of Facebook and YouTube, where three seconds is enough to count as an ad view.”

While brand safety and accountability issues are a wake-up call for digital, the march of ad spend onto Google and increasingly Facebook means traditional media needs to respond.

They are doing in this in several ways. Later this year four of Europe’s largest commercial broadcasters will launch a European video-on-demand exchange to cater for the growing demand for multi-territory video campaigns.

Traditional media fights back

European Broadcaster Exchange (EBX) is a joint venture between Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1, Italy’s Mediaset, France’s TF1 Group and Channel 4 in the UK. It claims to reach 160 million viewers a month across all member VOD platforms.

“Many international companies have a strong demand for high-quality and brand-safe advertising environments in the video sector,” explained ProSiebenSat.1 COO, Christof Wahl at launch. “EBX will offer them the opportunity to book pan-European campaigns in an economic area with a population of more than 250 million in an automated manner. This will allow us to gain access to additional ad budgets that we were previously unable to address on a national level.”

Pay TV operator Sky, which of course relies more heavily on subscriptions, is also feeling the pinch from the GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple). Its trump card Sky AdSmart has been in play since early 2014 and enables advertisers to target households based on factors such as age, location and life stage from a combination of Sky’s own customer data as well as info from consumer profile experts like Experian. This means that smaller advertisers can cut their cloth however they want and only reach (and pay for) highly specific households.

According to Sky the addressable service delivers a 75% return rate with channel-switching during a targeted advert reduced by 48%. Virgin Media recently integrated AdSmart into its STBs gave the two companies access to 30 million viewers in the UK and Ireland and more scale to compete with social media networks.

Elsewhere, Liberty Global is going on the offensive against GAFA with an aggressive pitch to advertisers of the veracity and scale of data harvested from its own platforms.

“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.

For commercial broadcasters the need to address targeted ads is more pressing. STV and Channel 4 have been most proactive with the latter beginning 2018 offering personalised advertising via All 4 across every channel, including mobile, tablet, games consoles and smart TVs. In recent figures the broadcaster reported more than 60 million monthly viewers to All 4 with digital revenues soaring 24% year on year to £102 million. A targeted ad service is overdue from ITV but this can be expected later this year.

Both STV and C4 oblige viewers to register their consent. That’s important since broadcasters will need to meet strict privacy rules before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation come into force in May.

The effectiveness of increasingly granular targeting goes hand in hand with technologies to automate the process of insertion in individual streams. According to IAB Europe/IHS Markit, more than half (50.1%) of European display ad revenue is now traded programmatically.

“Programmatic needs rules and should be about automation – not simply be automatic,” advises Bremond. “Publishers should focus on premium video content, where there is a direct relationship between the buyer and seller, and transactions should take place in a saleable, brand safe environment.”

Mobile and social strategies

Mobile continues to be a major growth driver of programmatic. With mobile advertising projected to reach nearly US$128 billion globally in 2018 (according to Zenith Media) and video set to account for three quarters of all mobile traffic by 2020 (per Cisco) content publishers must also look to tailor strategies around mobile.

It is in this context that Viacom, Turner, NBCU and Discovery separately partner with Snap Inc to create original content for Snapchat's Discover section.  In Viacom’s case the agreement also grants Viacom the right to sell Snapchat’s US-owned ad inventory.  Discovery’s pact will see bespoke user-generated content from the Winter Games published to Snapchat users across Europe. Engagement figures from this will be included in Discovery’s Total TV metric. Buzzfeed is creating NBCU’s bespoke content from South Korea in a tie-up which The Wall Street Journal estimates will net US$75m in new ad revenue.