Codecs: 4K and 8K

IBC

An 8K-ready badge will be the latest must-have accessory for products on the show floor this IBC. Among them will be solutions from Sony, Cinegy, SGO and Red.

https://www.ibc.org/4k/compression-the-silver-bullet-for-making-4k-and-8k-fly/4165.article

It’s seen as premature by some but the industry is turning its attention nonetheless to a future beyond 4K. Among them is the DVB Project which has completed a study into the next steps towards an 8K broadcast standard.

“The next big thing in broadcasting will be 8K resolution,” says Erik Otto, CEO at Mediaproxy, a provider of software-based IP solutions. “Some broadcasters are already looking at 8K transmission as the next step on from both HD and 4K.”

There are multiple pieces of the puzzle that need resolving from both content production cost and business model perspectives. Not least are doubts about whether consumers will discern the visual difference of a vastly higher resolution without a vastly bigger living room TV.

But the biggest stumbling block lies in distribution.

“Physical media is on the decline; people are not buying Blu-ray as much as they used to, they want to stream or download content,” says Insight TV CEO Rian Bester.

The 4K-only channel is expanding rapidly and is already shooting some productions such as Endurance: 24 Hours of Spa, either whole or in part in 8K to understand production challenges and to future-proof its catalogue.

“8K requires a lot more bandwidth and this presents an even greater challenge,” Bester says. “These hurdles will really hamper 8K’s foothold."

VVC

The race is on to design a more efficient compression scheme to current standard HEVC that will deliver immersive media formats, like VR and AR, for which an 8K source is considered essential.

The frontrunner, and perhaps the only horse in the race, is Versatile Video Coding (VVC), a development of the Joint Video Experts Team and MPEG.

Currently under development, it is aimed at achieving up to 50% compression efficiency compared to HEVC while maintaining video quality.

Early signs are promising. In recent tests BBC R&D found that VVC performed 27% better than HEVC when processing HD and 35% better than HEVC for 4K UHD.

“The one thing that stands out and will make the biggest difference, not just for 8K but for 4K, is VVC,” says Bester. “It is the silver bullet that is really required to drive things forward because whether the content is 4K or 8K, it addresses the bottlenecks like CDN costs and the bandwidth required to deliver. If it can do that without deteriorating the quality then that is the silver bullet that we need.”

Thomas Wrede, VP of new technology and standards in the video business unit at satellite operator SES agrees: “For an economic broadcast of 8K television the industry needs the new VVC codec.”

NHK’s commercial 8K service uses 100Mbps, but recent trials have shown live sports content at 85Mbps and VoD at 65Mbps. Content-aware encoding, a system which examines the video source and optimises encoding at playback, can reduce the bitrate for OTT delivery to between 30Mbps and 35Mbps. Those are the bitrates that were measured and demonstrated in public, at the French Open in a demonstration organised by France Televisions, Orange and vendors including Harmonic.

“A new codec like VVC will decrease the bitrate by half, but we will have to wait until 2020 when the MPEG specification is finalised and then 2022 to see it implemented in the first devices,” says Thierry Fautier, VP of video strategy at Harmonic.

MediaKind SVP technology Matthew Goldman also points to better video coding efficiency to reduce the required distribution bandwidth.

“It will likely need to be two to three times that of compressed 4K, which in turn is already two to three times that of HD. Think Versatile Video Coding and beyond.”

Supposing that VVC does hit is 50% target improvement over HEVC there remain doubts about its cost to the user community.

Immersion

Since VVC is an evolution of standards and technologies already used in HEVC and other codecs it will not come for free. There are concerns that VVC will be equally burdened by royalties and patent pool opacity as HEVC.

What’s more it is highly unlikely that UHD-2 – the ITU specification for 8K – will be treated purely as a higher resolution format.

Far more important for most pundits, is a mix of attributes of which resolution is one designed for immersive experiences such as personalised broadcasts to mobile devices (where the user can pan and scan within the 8K content) and free viewport (such as Intel TrueView).

Top of the list is High Dynamic Range but this also includes higher frame rates (up to 120p) all of which push up bandwidth requirements.

Display devices need upgrading too with HDMI 2.1 a prerequisite to take 8K 120p content from a player device to the screen. Only the 2019 flagship TVs from brands like Samsung currently support this.

It is likely that 8K will start with satellite using the DVB S2X standard for optimising the transponder throughput then will quickly move to IP delivery to connected TVs where OTT providers see the format as a market differentiator.

“We need to agree on a standard for 8K,” urges Fautier. “Japan has done that for broadcast applications (for Super Hi-Vision via NHK), but a standard is needed that includes support for IP delivery (VoD and live) via all type of networks, including 5G, on all devices, including TVs, smartphones, and tablets.”

The entire end-to-end ecosystem needs to improve technologically for 8K to become viable en masse. IBC2019 will show that work has already begun.

Catching the Perfect Ride with Bethany Hamilton

Studio Daily

Director-Cinematographer Aaron Lieber Captured the Surfer Ripping the World’s Most Dangerous Waves

Since first making headlines in 2003 for surviving a shark attack when she was 13 years old, Bethany Hamilton has become one of the most recognizable surfers in the world. In 2011, she was the subject of the movie Soul Surfer, a dramatized account based on her autobiography.

https://www.studiodaily.com/2019/07/catching-perfect-ride-bethany-hamilton/

Now, feature documentary Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable highlights her ambition to compete at the highest level of the sport, riding some of the most dangerous waves in the world. Filming those mammoth waves is also no easy feat — but director-cinematographer Aaron Lieber made it look easy.

Lieber, who previously made a documentary about female surfer star Lakey Peterson, began shooting footage of Hamilton in 2014 and crowdfunded the initial short film into a 90-minute feature destined for theatrical release.

“I was on the road a lot of the time following Bethany, but I didn’t have the luxury of a big team, so I had to select a camera package that was lightweight and yet lent a cinematic film quality,” Lieber explains.

“I chose Red Epic Dragon for those reasons and, as importantly, because it enables me to do so much in post. Recording at 6K means I can shoot a bit wider than I normally would, then keyframe later.”

Lieber paired the Epic with Canon EF glass, housed in lightweight carbon fiber for filming in water, with interviews shot using Zeiss lenses.

For Unstoppable, Lieber shot 49 interviews, conducting them himself while running audio and pulling focus. “I tended to pull a little further back, knowing I can reframe or adjust in post to spice it up. I didn’t have the budget for a big lighting package either, so the dynamic range of the Epic also gave me more options in post to pull color and make the shot come to life.”

The ability to capture an action sport at variable frame rates was also vital. Lieber recorded sequences at 6K 72fps, 4K 120fps and even 2K 240fps. He also used a Panasonic GH4 and GoPro for run-and-gun shots and more intimate moments when a larger camera might have detracted from the moment.

“For me, Red is the backbone for cinematic presentation and to make the film feel big enough for that theatrical experience,” Lieber adds. “The quality of the footage is so high it carries other cameras that aren’t at that same level.”

One sweeping land-to-sea aerial shot captures the scale and skill of Hamilton’s achievement. It shows her ripping it to the end at Pe’ahi, also known as Jaws, on the island of Maui, where waves can reach upwards of 80 feet. “It’s one of the pinnacles of world surfing,” says Lieber.

The 90-second single shot begins far above in the clouds and drops down until it hits the surf below, all the while picking up Hamilton as a small point of focus and gliding down until she kicks into the huge wave.

“This was a critical moment in Bethany’s surfing comeback,” he explains. “Jaws has been filmed many times, so I wanted to capture the scale of the challenge in a way that had never been done before. I came up with the idea of using a helicopter. So, we hired a great heli pilot, Don Shear, and camera-operator Mike Prickett and put the Red on a Shotover gimbal.

“The night before we all had a meeting to talk about safety and the execution I had in mind. The idea was to start by hovering over the land and then, as Bethany begins her ride, to have the heli move from the cliffs over the water and track down to meet her on the wave then, as she kicks out, to finish above her.

“They confidently said yes — even though no one has ever done it!”

On the day, Hamilton had already surfed and was resting but decided to try for one last catch. Pilot Shear had made one pass overhead to get his line of approach just right.

Lieber himself was in the water shooting with a Red and had arranged additional angles from Red operators on a jet ski, as well as another one on the beach.

“With action sports, once things get going, there are no chances for any do-overs,” Lieber says.

When Hamilton went for it there was no time for communication between the helicopter and ground crew.

“It all came together in this perfect shot (in 5K 60fps). It was all done on instinct and skill.”

Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable is currently in theaters.

This new FaceTime effect is both clever and freaky at the same time!

RedShark News

One of iOS13's new features is one that corrects your eye contact during FaceTime calls. It's most certainly clever, but is it a bit too freaky as well?

https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/6513-this-new-facetime-effect-is-both-clever-and-freaky-at-the-same-time

As a journalist I’m increasingly asked to make interviews via Skype, WhatsApp or FaceTime but two things really get my goat. One is the quality of the service which even over a decent WiFi connection still causes almost unworkable buffering and crashes (Skype being the worst culprit). The second is that I’m generally typing what my interviewee is saying. Even with my very best touch-typing skills (clue: not that great) I’m basically heads down over the keyboard which isn’t a good look when you are trying to elicit information from someone.

In short, I prefer a good old voice call.

Apple has come up with an answer, by artificially re-instating the line of sight between callers using FaceTime.

The new feature, FaceTime Attention Correction, makes it look like you’re staring directly at your front-facing camera during calls, rather than at the device’s screen. It simply looks like the person calling is looking right at you, instead of your nose or your chin.

Apparently, the effect is being achieved using ARKit to grab a depth map/position of your face, and then adjust the eyes accordingly.

If you didn’t know about it then you’d probably never guess the effect was being applied. Plus, you can turn the function off.

The feature appears to only be rolling out to the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max but will get a wider release when iOS 13 officially goes live, later this year.

It isn’t something the internet has been clamouring for but now it’s here perhaps this will become the new socially accepted norm.

Except that of course you won’t be looking into someone’s eyes. The effect will be faked.

Will that interfere with social discourse? If eyes are the windows to the soul then meaningful conversation will grind to a standstill.

Extrapolating that, future AI/AR enhancements could make it appear as if we’re really truly listening to someone (a loved one?) when in fact we’re picking our nose or yawning.

Why not change the location from where we actually are, at someone else’s home or on the beach, to appear at home or on the train. It could change our clothing or remove other people from the background.

It need not even be you on the call but someone pretending to be you (I haven’t worked out why that would be needed but Mission Impossible has been trading off such deep fakes for years).

The truth is already up for debate so when we can manipulate and change any part of an image in realtime in pixel perfection where do we draw the line and how do we separate real from simulacra?

Or does the simulacra become the new truth?

We’re straying waaay too far from what is after all a tiny tweak to make video calls a little less weird.

Now, can someone sort out how to make video calls work consistently without crashing, bugs or delay my life will be complete.

BritBox Launch Will Pile More Pressure on Netflix

StreamingMedia

BritBox, the "Best of British" SVOD from ITV and the BBC, will launch in the UK by the end of 2019 as a last-ditch attempt for the broadcasters to mine their extensive back catalogue—but it could be too little too late.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/BritBox-Launch-Will-Pile-More-Pressure-on-Netflix-133165.aspx

With more than 10 million UK subs Netflix has a massive head start. Nonetheless, with popular content likely to be withdrawn from the service, it's possible that Netflix has the most to fear from the arrival of another competitor.

"The long-overdue move is too little too late," says independent analyst Paolo Pescatore. "However, Netflix has the most to lose. New providers will all want to pull their own programming off Netflix to differentiate their own offerings."

ITV will be the driving force behind the direct-to-consumer joint venture after taking a 90% stake.

BritBox will cost UK users £5.99 ($4.70) a month, undercutting the basic Netflix fee in the UK by £3. The streaming platform is already available in North America for $6.99 a month (with a different content catalogue).

Content will comprise titles such as popular reality show Love Island and acclaimed BBC drama Gentleman Jack with original programming promised.

"Pricing is punchy and the content offering looks attractive," says Pescatore. "It represents a great channel for British-produced content."

It is likely to include content currently on Netflix, including series such as the original The Office and the Emmy-nominated drama Killing Eve and comedy Fleabag.

ITV is expected to transfer content from catch-up service ITV Hub to BritBox after 30 days, while the BBC is likely to do so after shows have been available on iPlayer for 12 months.

This strategy risks being undermined if the BBC makes all its programming available for free for at least a year on iPlayer—a decision which was given a provisional greenlight by regulator Ofcom.

Claire Enders of Enders Analysis says, "The fact that shows will be on iPlayer for 12 months, plus the transition to a much longer licence period [for showing programmes for free] on ITV Hub and 4oD, poses the question how many people will have missed these shows first time around to want to pay to watch them again."

It's being pitched as a supplement to Netflix as video service stacking takes off.

"Key to success will be differentiation against their existing broadcaster VOD/catch-up TV services (ITV also has its ad-free service, ITV Hub+) and how it educates potential subscribers of these differences," says David Sidebottom, principal analyst at FutureSource. An obvious differentiator is the vast content libraries both broadcasters can make available. But with BBC's decision to extend content availability on iPlayer for up to 12 months after original broadcast, it will mean it can't rely on newer BBC content to bolster BritBox's proposition."

UK broadcasters have been seeking to stem the tide to SVODs for a decade, ever since the UK regulator denied them the chance to launch their own platform.

For commercial public service broadcaster ITV, such a move is more pressing, with TV ad revenue under threat from stagnant TV viewing audiences.

BBC iPlayer's share of the domestic market has declined from 40% to 15% over the last five years.

Futuresource estimates that there are currently around 21 million SVOD subscriptions in the UK. BritBox would need fewer than than 1 million subscribers to become the number four player behind market leaders Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Now TV.

Imperative, though, will be a compelling content slate—the first exclusive commission won't drop until next year. The budget of £65 million ($51 million) over two years is peanuts compared to the multi-billion dollars of rivals. 

"BritBox is expected to eventually lead to the dilution of BBC and ITV title availability on leading SVOD platforms," says Sidebottom. "This further justifies these leading SVOD services' increased investment in original programming.

The service will also need wide distribution and partnerships with cable, pay TV, and telco providers. Talks with broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 are ongoing, alongside those with potential distribution partners such as Sky Virgin and Talk Talk.

"To be truly successful BritBox will need more content from other UK broadcasters," says Pescatore. "[If it gets that] it will fare much better and generate far greater appeal among consumers.

"The bottom line is that Netflix has a huge lead in the UK. Users will think twice about signing up to another TV service. So, it needs more content, support from other broadcasters, pull programming off Netflix and partner with telcos for distribution. The latter has been key to Netflix's global success with an inferior local catalogue."

There are those wondering whether this be the thin end of the wedge for the BBC's wholesale move to a subscription model. The answer to that is that the BBC already has a subscription dynamic called the licence fee.

Says Sidebottom, "Both ITV and BBC will be mindful of the fine balance between providing added value to this subscription service and the performance of existing offerings, whilst appeasing license fee payers."

Says Enders, "The concept of [public service broadcast or PSB] is different to SVOD since it gives people more choice in terms of news and current affairs, radio services, and the BBC website. It creates culture across the UK.

"The UK has the highest viewing numbers for drama in the world," she adds. "BritBox will only compete with drama-driven services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Sky Now. It will never replace the PSB."

Shooting RED 8K for Danny Boyle's Yesterday

Creative Cow 
What if you woke up one day and realized you’re the only one who remembers the music of The Beatles? That’s exactly what happens to Jack, a struggling singer-songwriter, in Danny Boyle’s romantic comedy with a twist (and shout), Yesterday.
https://library.creativecow.net/pennington_adrian/shooting-danny-boyle-yesterday-red-8k/1
Boyle’s film is based on a story by Jack Barth and screenplay by Richard Curtis. 
Produced by Working Title, the Universal release tells the story of Jack (former Eastenders actor Himesh Patel) who wakes up after a freak bus accident during a mysterious global blackout to realize he is the only one who can remember The Beatles and their songs. The hopeful musician decides to capitalize on the situation, and he claims the songs as his own. The film co-stars Lily James (Baby Driver) as Jack’s best friend Ellie, with cameo appearances from Ed Sheeran and James Corden.
“Yesterday is a romcom with a fantastical element to it, so our challenge was to deliver an aesthetic which is at times delightfully inappropriate but always fun,” says Christopher Ross BSC, who lensed Danny Boyle’s acclaimed TV miniseries Trust as well as features including Black Sea and Dad’s Army.
As with Trust, Ross selected the RED HELIUM S35 8K sensor and asked DIT Thomas Patrick, who also collaborated on Trust, to manage the project including the extraordinary amount of data to be captured for the film’s main concert sequences.
One of these was filmed on the beach at Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk, England, with 6,000 extras. Filming also took place at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. 
The biggest challenges were the multi-camera shoots at Wembley Stadium and Cardiff’s Principality Stadium during live performances by Ed Sheeran on his Divide tour.
“In our story, Ed invites Jack to play a few songs on stage (including “Back in the USSR” and “I Saw Her Standing There”) in front of 80,000 people, so we hatched a plan with Ed’s team to photograph Ed on stage from a variety of angles and then put Himesh into those angles,” Ross explains. 
Filming was done at night at the end of Sheeran’s performance. Boyle and Ross attended several of Sheeran’s shows to understand where to place cameras without obstructing any audience views and for Ross to study the lighting design.
“We chose moments that we thought would best suit our story,” Ross explains. “We picked 30-second to one-minute segments of Ed’s songs that we would then loop the lighting cues over and over again while Himesh was on stage knowing that we could pull the audience from certain shots at certain timecodes that would match with the other shots.” 
Eleven RED cameras were deployed for three nights shooting at Wembley and an astonishing 17 REDs covered each of four performances in Cardiff.
“I drafted in extra help for Wembley and Cardiff where there were three download stations working away almost constantly,” says Patrick, who works with DIT and digital dailies company Mission. “It was a challenge, but I was quite specific with a plan for RED MINI-MAGs and reloads, and the careful prep meant it was much easier at the time. Mags of certain capacities were labelled and ordered for specific parts of each concert with reloads and collection planned well before shooting.”
Each day of shooting the concerts would generate between 10TB and 15TB data for which a lot of SSDs were needed.
“It was tough finding the balance between what would be ideal, and what wouldn’t bankrupt the movie,” Patrick says. “I wrote out a fairly in-depth plan of timings, reload times, contingency, and turnaround times. I worked with the lab to give preference to clearing the 1TB mags first as I knew we needed those back in circulation quicker to allow for the concert portion of those shoot days. That way we could save on sourcing more of those.”
Mission Digital built a huge viewing station housing 10 FSI monitors, all colour calibrated, for Patrick to monitor on-set with Ross, while receiving pictures from every camera via Cobham wireless remotes managed by the Mission Digital team.
Most of the film was recorded in 8K at 8:1 compression, but concert footage went down to 5:1 to give the VFX team at Union VFX a bit of extra information in comping Himesh into the scene.
The additional overhead when shooting 8K also provided a better-quality master in 4K. This decision was also made to cover the 2:1 aspect ratio of the Panavision PVintage lenses that were employed. Based on Panavision Ultra Speed Primes, this lens set was rehoused using elements of original glass from the ‘70s and ‘80s with which Ross had a favorable experience on Trust.
“What I like about the RED HELIUM is its ability to give me a slightly idiosyncratic colour response – kind of like using a roll of Fujifilm NC-400 from back in 2005,” Ross explains. “I quite like embracing quirky color response. I wanted a look that was not a clinical representation of the world.” 
He continues, “To try to make our film as universal as possible we wanted to ground the look of the film in a very particular reality without making it too glossy. That’s why we made the choice of lenses. The PVintage are all quite quirky and don’t really color match in terms of magenta fringing or response to flares. That’s something I wanted to embrace because I feel like part of what makes a production glossy is its homogeneity. I wanted us to be forced to take footage into the grade that doesn’t quite match. There’s an energy to that I wanted to capture.”
Shooting at 8K made the most of the wonderful character of the lenses from Panavision, with the added advantage of a cleaner image when downscaling from 8K to 4K in the DI. 
“My usual method when working with such idiosyncratic lenses is to match at the camera end,” explains Patrick, who used Resolve on set to manage dailies. “On this movie, however, it wasn’t practical. To add any more processes for the camera team on set combined with the nature of some scenes being fast moving and fluid in terms of lens choice and camera position meant it wouldn’t have been a consistent workflow.”
It was set up as a RED IPP2 colour workflow. Patrick implemented a system where mags went through his on-set rig for color work in Resolve before transfer to the download station. 
“I’d create a project each day and match things up with primary tweaks, which allowed for more precise and considered matching than a Livegrade CDL would. I was matching lenses on the fly with LiveGrade, but mostly just for on-set monitoring. 
This project was given to assistant DIT Jon Fenech before a split or wrap, for him to relink his backed-up media to and make an extra check through. Fenech sent this to Mission Digital’s west London lab for them to create dailies using the Resolve project. Ross viewed dailies in Pix and 5TH Kind.
“There were no worries about transfer of color info or compatibility,” Patrick reports. “This kind of workflow is just about timing really. Finding time to grade between setups without delaying backup for Jon.
“Things were kept rather simple after prep. I just kept checking with the lab and having offline media sent back to me to check, and monitoring online dailies for any issues. Archive and delivery to Goldcrest was on LTO.”
Online, VFX, conform and grade was made at Goldcrest Post under supervision of Senior DI Colourist Adam Glasman. He had helped devise the basic show LUT originally for Trust and now transplanted to Yesterday.
“It is essentially a simple Rec709 conversion very similar to RED’s own IPP2-709 LUT with medium contrast and medium highlight roll off,” Glasman explains. “Danny and Chris wanted a fairly naturalistic, slightly documentary look. Where we contrasted it a little was in making a distinction between scenes shot in East Anglia and those in Los Angeles. The East Anglian sequences have a night-time sodium feel to them – warming, yellow but restrained. The color for the LA section is vivid, more saturated.”
The ultimate visual goal was to amplify the fantastical reality of the situations that the main characters find themselves in. “Bringing those two together means having to be beautifully unconventional,” Ross says. “If we’ve succeeded in any way it’s because we found a route through the conventions to a kind of fun way of seeing the film.”

Global media groups seek control over the content value chain

Videonet

As if it needed underlining, the recent announcements that Netflix is moving into Shepperton Studios and Sky is creating a new Europe-wide development and production capability called Sky Studios demonstrate that we are in the midst of a golden age of TV content production. These moves also indicate a rethink of many of the basics of how media businesses manage their content pipeline.

https://www.v-net.tv/2019/07/17/global-media-groups-seek-control-over-the-content-value-chain/

“Competition for content is at unprecedented levels, driving stakeholders to be involved earlier in the process,” says Jack Davison, EVP, Consultancy at the content consulting firm 3Vision. “The traditional TV market structure continues to evolve from what was once nation-based TV services to truly global media groups, controlling all stages of the content value chain,” adds Richard Cooper, Research Director at Ampere Analysis.

Netflix has sought economies of scale in taking permanent and exclusive production space at Pinewood’s Shepperton stages near London. The long-term lease, reportedly over a decade, is a vote of confidence in the viability of the UK’s film and TV tax breaks, as well as a sign that the streamer plans to double-down on its originals content strategy.

“Netflix is increasing its production presence around the world, with a view to not only satisfying local market tastes and demand, but also producing content with international appeal,” says David Sidebottom, Principal Analyst at Futuresource Consulting, the market research and insights firm.

Netflix ordered 153 original shows from European producers in 2019, double that of 2018, and 221 productions in total from a budget north of $1bn. Netflix’s annual spend of $12bn has forced other media companies to invest more on making shows in order to keep up.

Among them is pan-European Pay TV giant Sky which, with the backing of Comcast, will double its investment in original programming from £500m ($650m) to £1bn+ over the next few years. This will be delivered by Sky Studios, a new Europe-wide development and production unit that will create productions for Sky channels, NBC broadcast and cable, and Universal Pictures, as well as for other distribution outlets.

“Sky’s originals strategy was driven by a desire to secure great content but through its distribution arm and European platforms it can make the ROI calculation easier,” says Davison. “Now, as part of the NBCU family, there are even more ways to justify its content investment.”

Sky must strive to compete with the seemingly bottomless pockets of the global tech-giants to create the bingeworthy international programming that is essential for subscriber acquisition and retention for its Pay TV platforms and SVOD services. Cooper argues, “Through deepening investment in content creation, Sky becomes less dependent for high-quality, high-profile programming from what are increasingly its direct competition.”

Disney, WarnerMedia and Apple are among the companies building SVOD services that compete, armed with exclusive and fresh content. In the case of Disney and WarnerMedia these services will also use content that has been repatriated from Netflix (though Pay TV deals with the likes of Sky remain).

AT&T will launch HBO Max next spring with content like Friends from the WarnerMedia stable returned at vast expense from Netflix, plus seven original series including a Dunespin-off from Blade Runner: 2049 director Denis Villeneuve.

While Netflix’s content acquisition (as opposed to production) had slowed even before studios started withdrawing content from the market, 3Vision thinks there will still be plenty of opportunities for the SVOD pioneer to find and acquire third-party content. “New window continuums, co-exclusivity and straightforward deals are likely to still be possible for many,” says Davison.

Sidebottom predicts: “Moving forwards, non-scripted content may become more relevant, whilst the sports rights battleground will be redefined. Both [content categories] face the challenge of moving beyond local relevance and rights, to global.”

With competition ramping up, the multi-billion dollar outlays will be unsustainable for some. While subscribers are already paying for multiple SVOD bundles, the industry should be braced for push-back. Ampere suggests that the dominant players —Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu—are already stretching people’s spending limits and so creating the risk of viewer payment fatigue.

An emerging strategy to deal with this is more ad-supported services. Amazon’s rebrand of its IMDB movies and TV service, now called Freedive and ad-supported, is an example.

8K has a mountain to climb, but 4K overcame the same list of challenges

Videonet

The roll-out of 4K has a long way to go before it is anywhere near ubiquitous, but 8K is seen as the obvious next step and natural technological progression. It will be the talk of the town at IBC, just as it was in April at NAB , with both enthusiasts and naysayers passing comment. In truth, it is the pragmatists who are worth listening to most closely.

https://www.v-net.tv/2019/07/17/8k-has-a-mountain-to-climb-but-4k-overcame-the-same-list-of-challenges/

The answer to whether we need 8K depends on where you sit in the value chain. TV brands see 8K as the next big thing to upsell at retail – though beware the mess they made of 3D. Component suppliers like 8K because it demands higher performance components and subsystems. Content creators appreciate the archival value and oversampled information of 8K capture.

Content distributers see 8K as a market differentiator, particularly for OTT delivery (as Japanese-owned Spanish streamer Rakuten plans later this year). Consumers might be persuaded of the ‘4K on steroids’ immersive quality of the visuals.

Piers Moore, Global Insight Director at Kantar’s Worldpanel division (which is focused on consumer panel research), suggests any transition to ITU spec UHD-2 is not imminent. “As proven with 4K, there are three keys: price, content and consumer buy-in,” he says. “The price is too high to make it viable for a large consumer base. There isn’t the 8K content, so AI is needed to upscale lower resolution content, but that still doesn’t give you the full 8K experience. That leads into consumers not believing it is worth the price, and without the price being aligned with consumer perception it is hard to sell.”

These concerns might be condensed further: there is virtually zero native 8K content, production costs are exorbitant, let alone the bandwidth for distribution, which no-one outside of the Japanese government’s NHK-run project is prepared to underwrite. And what is the point anyway, since you cannot see the extra resolution? To which the reply is: “Yet”.

“In reality, these are nearly the same benefits and concerns that were voiced 5-6 years ago as we started down the UHD transition path,” argues the newly formed cheerleader for 8K, the 8K Association. “Clearly, these concerns were overcome.”

If we ignore the fact that the bulk of global transmissions are SD (some 60% of Globecast customers in Europe, for example), then 4K UHD has indeed been cracked. So, what’s next?

From a broadcast point of view, it seems like 8K will be introduced by the back door. Several manufacturers exhibiting at IBC, Sony and Blackmagic Design included, view the corporate video market as leading the 8K charge, principally for digital signage. Blackmagic Design’s marketing at NAB centred on 8K even if its 8K-ready video switchers and standards converters operate in SDI in defiance of the leaner, flexi-workflow possibilities of IP. That’s because transporting 4K UHD over SMPTE ST 2110 in live production remains tricky and not necessarily as rock-solid as coax.

“As a manufacturer, we can certainly see the benefits of 8K,” confirms Craig Heffernan, Technical Sales Director EMEA at Blackmagic. “It is crucial when it comes to future-proofing content and down-sampling with better quality. Shooting at such a high resolution also gives editors and VFX artists more data to work with, and an opportunity to zoom deeply into images and reframe without losing as much information.”

There is also interest in Virtual Reality projects. With an 8K frame, it is easier to pull out regions of interest, whether that is  for standard 2D delivery or 3D work. The greater the resolution within that VR sphere that can be stitched together, the smoother the stitching itself. This makes  the whole experience much more realistic for the viewer.

“Content providers will not  be the only sources of 8K material,” suggests Juliet Walker, CMO at Globecast. “UGC, like family videos, GoPro sports footage and also next-generation gaming console-generated video will bring 8K content to the home.”

Even so, 8K television sets are not expected to fly off the shelves. You can buy an 82-inch Samsung 8K telly at PC World today for £10,000 but only 56 million homes worldwide will own an 8K TV by the end of 2025, according to Strategy Analytics.

8K over mobile is a non-starter. Matt Stagg who heads up BT Sport’s mobile division says, “The optimum format for the small screen is HD HFR (high frame rate) and HDR (high dynamic range). We don’t advocate 4K, other than for casting to larger screens in the house (over Wi-Fi). This is the strategy for BT Sport and it should be for every operator.”

He is saying this partly to cap data costs for both consumers and operators as 5G is rolled out, but also because of the genuinely held view that the industry should concentrate on better pixels rather than more pixels.

But home TV screens are getting bigger – about an inch a year according to some reports. Overall sales of 8K TVs are expected to be concentrated in the 60-inch and above screen size categories. More significantly, the fundamentals of TV display R&D are changing. If costs can be brought down, technologies like microLED promise millimetre-thin modular designs, perhaps filling whole walls. The wallpaper screen real estate could be divided for multiple smart home functions.

And why stop there? After all, 8K at 7680×4320 pixels is equivalent to around 33 megapixels and there are relatively affordable still cameras on the market today that record 100 megapixels or more. “8K does not represent an upper limit but it is at the limit of what is commercially practical today,” says William Cooper, who runs the strategic consultancy informitv. “There may be diminishing returns beyond that.”

The DVB has just completed a study mission designed to bring together information on media formats beyond UHD-1 4K, with a preview of results being released at IBC. “These formats have the potential to be commercially viable in the coming years,” says Peter Siebert, DVB Head of Technology.