How Creators Should Reset Their Social Strategies

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For every TikTok star raking in millions, there are thousands of other creators who can barely make ends meet. There’s a solution to that and it involves creators weaning off social media and establishing their own leaner but higher value community of followers.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/how-creators-reset-their-social-strategies/

A new report analyzing the business model of 1,600 creators advises them to invest time and effort building niche communities on a single platform, where growth and profitability are less reliant on scale.

One of those platforms is the report’s sponsor, Mighty Networks.

“What came through loud and clear is that creators are not ever going to leave social media,” says Mighty Networks founder and CEO Gina Bianchini. “This is not about ‘hashtag delete Facebook.’ We are talking about people being much more mercenary about social media in pursuit of finding meaning, and being much more of a missionary when it comes to their own community and their own, direct model. They are putting ownership front and center.”

The report suggests a manifesto of action for those looking to get off the treadmill of mass daily social media posts for little reward. It’s neatly outlined by Nicole Laporte, writing at Fast Company.

1. Own, Don’t Rent

Creators should wean themselves from reliance on Facebook and Twitter and head to platforms like Kajabi, Substack and Gumroad, where they can own their own content through subscriptions, memberships, and tips. According to the report, 57% of creators see direct revenue through features like subscriptions as more crucial to their future than social platform revenue.

“In this model, Big Social serve as feeders and funnellers, not feudal overlords,” says Bianchini.

2. Niche Not Broad

The report says that for a creator to earn $1,000 a month, they need either 229 Substack subscribers, 224 Patreon supporters, 100,000 Instagram followers, or 2 million monthly YouTube views.

The reason? Smaller, more targeted audiences that are as much about joining a community as following an individual are ultimately more valuable to creators. That’s because creators are able to connect followers to each other and unite them in a passionate cause, per se, as opposed to giving them a place to simply ‘like’ or leave a comment about content.

3. Community Not Audience

New, independent creators are more interested in building hubs where people gather and communicate as opposed to places where people drop by to click a few thumbs-up buttons.

“Through memberships and subscriptions, creators can offer their community members more — specifically more opportunities to engage and more events to attend that are all aimed at bringing the group closer,” writes LaPorte. “This means creators are less beholden to a model where they are having to constantly entertain audiences with an endless stream of content.”

According to the report, while creators feel they have to post five to seven times a day on Big Social platforms in order to generate enough revenue to live on, one community platform generated $1,000 a month with just two to three posts per week.

“The allure of platforms like Facebook and Instagram for creators has been the instant ability to plug into those platforms’ networks,” says LaPorte. “But the idea now is for creators to build up their own networks, using their own tools.”

Again, the idea is not just to serve up content to an array of social media sites, but to build a primary online hub that followers will come back to again and again because of its community atmosphere. These communities need not have massive social media followings. The report says that on one platform that allows creators to build their own direct-to-consumer following, the platform’s top 250 revenue-producing users had a median social media following of just 8,500.

Bianchini reasons that once people make this calculation — that “it’s easier to be successful with a smaller number of people” — the size of the creator economy will balloon from its estimated size of 50 million creators to several times that.

 

Smart TV Sales Strengthen as Device Market Fragments

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Ownership of PCs and tablets continues to fall in most countries, while Smart TVs are gaining ground as high-quality in-home viewing becomes a must-have.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/smart-tv-sales-strengthen-as-device-market-fragments/

That’s the top level finding from eMarketer’s “The Global Media Intelligence Report,” compiled by Insider Intelligence, Publicis and GWI from analysis of 100,000 consumers in 43 markets during the first half of this year.

In all but a handful of countries, smart TV ownership rose by several percentage points YoY. In many cases, that lifted penetration above 50% for the first time. Japan was the most striking outlier; just 9% of internet users there owned a smart TV this year. But that share had grown from 7.5% in 2020 — a significant proportional increase.

The pandemic has undoubtedly played a role, as TV still reaches more consumers worldwide than any other content-based medium. Yet the share of internet users watching digital video now surpasses the share watching live TV in many parts of the world.

It’s worth noting that GWI included YouTube in its list of tracked video services for the first time this year, and the popularity of that platform will have boosted figures for digital video viewing in virtually all nations surveyed.

More interesting, in some respects, are the substantial increases in penetration of SVOD worldwide. This is largely predictable, given that lockdowns fueled digital video viewing across the board. SVOD usage was already rising in most countries in 2020 but enjoyed another big boost in 2021 — as if many internet users who resisted the appeal of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other providers last year finally gave in to temptation as the pandemic continued.

The penetration of desktops, laptops, and tablets has dropped virtually everywhere, per the report. While several countries in Asia-Pacific — including China and Japan — saw modest gains for both devices and PC ownership also rose in India, UAE, and Vietnam, “these are all countries where PCs and tablets entered the mainstream after mobile phones, and remain aspirational, particularly in middle and higher-income households,” writes report editor Karin von Abrams.

Rates of smartphone ownership were much the same as in 2020 and almost uniformly high.

Broadcast radio has held up surprisingly well with time spent tuned in largely unchanged since 2020 despite digital audio alternatives. However, fewer internet users listened to online radio, audiobooks, and other digital audio content.

This decline may be partly due to GWI removing Google Play Music from the list of audio services tracked because the service was discontinued. Yet music streaming occupied more time this year in almost every country. In addition, internet users in most nations devoted at least 30 minutes each day to podcasts—a new metric in the 2021 survey.

Aaron Goldman, chief marketer at Mediaocean, said: “It all adds up to a landscape that isn’t just shifting from one channel to another, but massively diversifying. This year we’ve also heard a lot of chat about what could turn out to be the seeds of the next wave after ‘smart tech,’ with conversation stirring about the metaverse. [This report] shows that marketers will always need to take an omnichannel approach. The challenge will be to manage and measure that work everywhere from good old paper to the science fiction virtual spaces of the future.”

 

WFW Studios Strengthens Production Services with Sohonet

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For more than 50 years, William F. White International Inc has equipped Canada’s film and television industry with the most extensive and technologically advanced rental inventory in the country. 

https://www.sohonet.com/our-resources/blogs/wfw-studios-strengthens-production-services-with-sohonet/

Since 2019, it is also Canada’s leading supplier of first class studio space servicing everything from tentpole features for the content giants such as Netflix, Amazon, and Disney to experimental proof-of-concept web shorts from the industry’s rising stars.

Its twelve state-of-the-art studios encompass over 30 sound stages and more than 1.4 million square feet of production-ready studio space in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto. WFW Studios offer premium, full-service facilities with mill and paint shops, furnished offices, boardrooms and script-reading rooms that crucially come equipped with 10 gig fibre-optic connectivity from Sohonet.

“I worked with Sohonet while at Pinewood Shepperton, UK and know how good the technology is,” says Doug Sandland, Director, Information Technology, WFW Intl Studios. “When I came to WFW four years ago I decided to reach out to them again.”

“We have 10 gig in every facility for a reason,” Sandland explains. “We aim to offer our clients anything and everything. It used to be the case that productions would transport media to another facility but, we decided to give them the option to keep it in house at WFW Studios. We have multiple tenants at each studio and with 10 gig we can facilitate all of them to upload and stream high data payloads for VFX and raw Camera Files.”

What’s more, the group had this even before COVID.

“Lots of things have changed since COVID but we were lucky we had Sohonet in place. Now demand has gone through the roof. Remote working is simply part of how films and shows get made now.”

“Filmmakers and producers want the freedom to work away from set. It means a director or an editor, a colorist or a DoP can be anywhere in the world and, provided they have an internet connection, we can stream content to them live from set.”

The Sohonet Media Network (SMN) provides dedicated, uncontended connection to distributed teams and partners with guaranteed bandwidth speeds. It enables workflows such as on the fly color correction by a colorist who could be located tens or hundreds of kilometers away in their facility. Creative decisions can be made by VFX supervisors and editors in concert with directors and DPs slashing wasted time and maximising time on location. Fewer key crew need to travel to set, reducing carbon emissions and costs as well as keeping everyone safe.

“With this bandwidth we have set the benchmark for the industry in Canada,” Sandland says. “Many other major studios offer bandwidth connectivity but few, if any, have our service offer. Having superfast, secure high bandwidth links is an essential part of modern production infrastructure and something our clients rely on us to deliver.”

 

Sport Production & Technology Summit 2021: NEP CTO Pete Emminger talks esports, attracting talent and why there will always be a place for trucks

SVG Europe

The newly appointed CTO of NEP, Pete Emminger, gave his first public interview since being appointed to the role in July at SVG Europe’s Sport Production and Technology Summit.

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/sport-production-technology-summit-2021-nep-cto-pete-emminger-talks-esports-attracting-talent-and-why-there-will-always-be-a-place-for-trucks/

Emminger shares oversight (with CEO Brian Sullivan among others) of one of the main technical production partners in the industry yet as he told the audience, it is the people that count.

“It’s the astronauts, not the rocket ship which matters,” he said, speaking with SVG Europe editor, Will Strauss. “Investing in people is one of our priorities and that means ongoing training and forums to access new technology as well as diversity initiatives. If we invest in the right people, it will pay.”

Emminger is responsible for leading the global technology group, overseeing overall technology strategy, and technical design and build of its products and network operations. The group is also responsible for R&D and prototyping, supporting NEP’s ongoing commitment to innovation. Prior to his role as global CTO, Emminger joined NEP in May 2021 as SVP, product management for live production, where he focused on identifying and building strategic product plans for live production.

“When I was 18 I thought I’d be a theatrical set designer,” he explained by way of introduction. “If you think about it, the audience experience for that job is key to everything else I’ve done, including at NEP. I gravitated to the more technical side of projection mapping and film projection, and that progressed into a career in live events. My starting point is the content and then asking what do customers need to make that content for their audience.”

Prior to NEP, Emminger was at Blizzard Entertainment, where he built and led the Global Broadcast group, developing key internal capabilities at Blizzard in support of BlizzCon, Overwatch League and Call of Duty League. Prior to that, he owned a live event production company for 13 years.

“Esports is a hyperconnected environment where everything is interchangeable and connected and focused on enabling the audience experience,” he said. “Every live broadcast production today is connected to multiple locations. There is no longer a true air gap production. For example, a leg of the Extreme E race series took place in Greenland in one of the most remote and least connected places on the planet. After satellite backhaul we took everything as data over IP into our production control rooms in both London and the Netherlands to produce the live feed.

“Productions and production technology and networks are increasingly interconnected and that affords the content producer greater synergies in cost reduction and streamlined workflows and also huge opportunities to make more value from the raw material they generate at source.”

That said, NEP, which has its roots in outside broadcast trucks, doesn’t see any end in sight to on-site workflows.

“There will always be a place for trucks,” he said. “Yes, a lot of workflow is moving to the cloud but being onsite has a lot of value. We continue to make significant investment in our truck and OB fleet. We are designing this infrastructure to tie together in order to deliver on projects that require interconnection of multiple sites and multiple locations. We are designing trucks to be interconnected.”

“There will always be a place for trucks. Yes, a lot of workflow is moving to the cloud but being onsite has a lot of value”

He continued: “From vendors we’d like to see a continued migration from hardware-dependent solutions to software-defined ones that enable more flexible workflows. Additional production capacity is what content creators expect and we do too.”

Emminger also highlighted the current move to 100Gig networks “with 400Gig not that far away – maybe two to three years away – this [connectivity] is something we are looking at.”

Given Emminger’s esports expertise, Strauss asked what conventional sports could learn from its growth. “How exactly you link the live event with the broadcast is one thing that esports does better than most sports. It’s about having an environment where, when something happens in a game, you want the exact same action in the stadium and in the home,” said Emminger.

Perhaps synchronising VAR or TMO in venue with live broadcast can be improved. “For a lot of sports that is fairly disconnected,” he added.

What about transferable skills between esports and more traditional sportscasts? “There are workflows in esports such as game observers whose skills can transfer into remote camera work much more easily than asking a camera operator in broadcast to work inside a games engine,” he said. “They are different skill sets. That said, those in the traditional broadcast space conversant with interconnected graphics and third-party data workflows are much better at transferring those skills into esports where operators are used to heavily customised game data.”

NEP technology was and still is powering many esports live events, including at the Blizzard Arena in LA. “In NEP where we support major esports publishers, we try to move teams between projects,” Emminger said. “It happens organically and on a daily basis.”

This mix of interdisciplinary skills within the corporate environment is, for Emminger, key to attracting talent into the industry. “Ongoing diversity initiatives will also help, but I find that what works most of all in terms of talent retention is to be fun. You can forget about having fun amid all the pressure, but if it’s not fun, why do it? Likewise, if you’re not interested in sports why do it. I happen to think sports is a lot of fun.”

Sport Production & Technology Summit 2021: Bringing the Olympics back home

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When the Olympics was cancelled last year, Ron Chakraborty, lead executive, major events at BBC Sport, had to decide whether to continue to plan for a rescheduled Games by sending an entire OB team or do it remotely.

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/sport-production-technology-summit-bringing-the-olympics-back-home/

Having deployed remote galleries for the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics and for the Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast, the corporation is used to having a production gallery back in the UK.

“We decided to bring operations back to the UK to manage the risk to the team of COVID,” said Chakraborty, speaking at SVG Europe’s Sport Production and Technology Summit last week, on a session chaired by SVG Europe editor, Heather McLean.

Two groups were set up; a set of 100 production and technical teams with some production management to go to Tokyo and the larger remote and presentation set up in the UK.

They had to stay nimble as the IOC released updates to the Games rule book on tests and visas in the run-up to the starting gun.

Back home, it quickly became clear that the BBC’s sports facility in Salford didn’t have a big enough ready-made studio or operations environment to handle the scale of an Olympics.

Luckily, dock10 did and it is next door. “We went across the road to dock10. It was a combination of them saying what do you want and us saying what have you got,” he recalled.

Dock10 studio 3 became the main presentation studio, studio 4 housed all post operations and studio 10 catered for commentary, including 10 off-tubes.

The biggest technical casualty was derailment of plans to broadcast at least some of the action in 4K HDR. The requirement to backhaul 4K streams back to the UK for production was deemed too costly in terms of bandwidth.

They had more luck with the studio presentation. “Usually, the plan is to give a sense of being there,” said Chakraborty. In Rio 2016 the BBC had a set-up on Copacabana Beach, for example.

“It was [BBC director of sport] Barbara Slater who pointed out that the time difference with Tokyo would mean that all our daytime output would be prime evening time over there. That would create a very dark background which wasn’t great. So early on we had decided on a virtual set,” he added.

The physical set design and build at dock10 was by Toby Kalitowski at design house Scott Fleary and the virtual studio was designed by Jim Mann at Lightwell with Moov executing production.

“The amount of work that went into the virtual Tokyo skyline alone was incredible,” said BBC Sport creative director, motion, John Murphy.  “It was still being tweaked up to the moment we went on air.”

Contribution was via 10Gb fibre connections managed by Telstra to the UK which connect into the BBC network in London and were then delivered to the MediaCity studios.

The main change was the temporary replacement of a router with enough capacity to handle 33 sports, plus ISO feeds and mix zone to deliver the live feed and segmented coverage to news and nations and regions.

“We put in a new router and promised to replace the existing one exactly as we found it,” said Murphy.

There were issues: commentators who normally rely on being adjacent to the field of play had to work from banks of screens. The Olympics Village remote camera was “okay, but lacked the energy” of an ENG crew.

On the plus side, whereas a normal Olympic production would work with a handful of pundits on site, the BBC was able to pull in a wider variety of contributors live over Zoom.

“We were able to include relatives of athletes competing in Tokyo, seamlessly over Zoom and live in a way not possible had we done this even a year earlier,” Murphy said.

The Tokyo experience also provides a template for the Beijing Winter Games in early 2022; which is just as well since no-one wants to reinvent this wheel.

“The time-zones are similar so we’ll operate a similar catch-up editorial model,” Chakraborty explained. “Presentation will all be back here to manage risk.”

While the BBC does not have rights to the Olympics beyond 2024 (when UK rights revert to Eurosport) Chakraborty said that LA and Brisbane, the Summer Games in 2028 and 2032 “feel like remote” operations.

“Paris merits a big discussion,” he said. “Salford is two hours by train from London and so is Paris, so on balance the costs could be similar.”

Since the summer, the BBC has installed its own permanent, smaller green screen virtual set at the BBC Sport facility in Salford. It has already been used to host tennis and Match of the Day.

“Not everything we do going forward will be from a virtual studio but the fact that what we now have our own green screen studio in Salford gives us far greater flexibility to present multiple sports,” Murphy said.

On the other hand, the XXII Commonwealth Games, which run from 28 July to 8 August 2022, will have coverage hosted by the broadcaster in Birmingham.

Chakraborty said: “As much as you want to show off the virtual tech it makes sense for us to be there in the heart of Birmingham for that.

“I’d add that working with virtual sets is a lot of hard work. The problem is you need the launch date of the event to give you that end point. You can always tweak the design in Unreal. At some point you need to draw a line under it.”

Opportunity and complexity: Discovery talks Wildmoka workflow

In a separate session at the summit, Discovery testified about the services provided by cloud-based ‘media factory’ Wildmoka to aid its Summer Olympics effort.

“We produced 3500 hours of content over two weeks needing to reach 50 markets in 19 different languages,” explained Robert Hodges, director of audience and content strategy at Discovery. “We needed to make sense of that and distribute to a multitude of platforms.

“At the start of 2021 we looked at who would be the best provider to help us do that. What we didn’t want to do was take all the feeds and content and deliver it to a different platform, which creates its own complexities. We were looking for a tool to layer over the top of our global video platform.”

He continued: “I want to get all this content from A to B in all required aspect ratios to all different end points, including Eurosport’s digital experience on our app and our website which is localised in terms of language and content, alongside that of all third-party syndication platforms and rights partners. We don’t want multiple workflows. We wanted one that delivers the same content to all end points.”

Using the media factory from Wildmoka, Hodges said Discovery was able to train its editors and those of its media partners to select any feed in any language, clip the video and deliver it in the required format.

“The scale we were able to deliver in digital shortform was extraordinary. We discovered that we can onboard our partners in France or the Nordics and they can use the platform in the same way at no extra cost.”

Eurosport reached close to 400 million digital users across the two weeks of the Games. “From my simplified point of view everything worked. At no point were we not able to deliver clip A to destination B.”

Discovery says it is now looking at how it can go deeper with Wildmoka into automation, subtitling and integration with its internal platforms.

 

Sport Production & Technology Summit 2021: Pace of technology change leaves skills behind

SVG Europe

It almost goes without saying that the pandemic accelerated the introduction of automated and remote production workflows and web-based technologies, but a lingering side effect has been to exacerbate an industry-wide skills gap.

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/sport-production-and-technology-summit-pace-of-technology-change-leaves-skills-behind/

The issue was top of mind for executives speaking during the Sport Production Leaders Briefing at SVG Europe’s Sport Production and Technology Summit on 28 October.

Sky Germany SVP of sport production Alessandro Reitano, moderating, issued a call to action. “This is a war of talents,” he said. “Cloud, IP, SaaS and data have all helped us continue to work and deliver live to air this past 18 months, but now the focus is on people and skills.”

Sky Sports executive director of production services and operations Inga Ruehl validated this. “The organisational, cultural and skills piece is very important. There’s a real challenge around talent in the industry. We have some amazing people, but we need to train, upskill and bring in more.”

Mediapro CTO and operations manager Emili Planas Quintana said his company was competing with major tech companies like Google. “The shortage is a major problem not just for ourselves but for the industry as a whole. The problem is how we can get everyone in the chain involved, from technicians to producers and TV directors. Everyone needs to learn what they can do with these new workflows.”

Trevor Turner, F1’s head of new technologies for broadcast and media, said that the abstraction from the technology that comes with virtualisation and kit like surface panels can oversimplify what is a highly complex set of signals under the hood. “We need to know every last mile of our connectivity from track to facility otherwise you leave yourself open to risk. We do have a relatively young team and train them up quite quickly and allow them to follow their aspirations because that’s the best way for people to ask questions.”

Formula One has begun taking steps forward from remote production into cloud and IP 2110 workflows. It is building a new fixed installation at its UK facility and it started out with an ST-2110 roadmap with a new MCR last winter.

“There was nervousness about our team not knowing enough about IP to monitor feeds for distribution to the world,” admitted Turner. “We don’t have the time or opportunity to put more formal courses together so we rely on manufacturers to handhold us. Initially our engineers were wary of the tech but over the course of the race season they are now much more comfortable with it.”

By the same token, Turner called on those on the network side to understand core broadcast skills. “They need to know why PTP is important to us and why we are concerned about proper orchestration, the impact of latency change on the network and the implication of lost packets. It cuts both ways.”

He added: “By being early adopters of technology we find we can retain most people because they can see a roadmap to stay with us and progress their career. It is recruitment that’s tough.”

It is not just technical skills from IT though. Quintana gave an example of the changing skillsets of camera shaders. “When we work in UHD HDR the shaders need different skills. We need to teach them away from waveform – the traditional way of operating in SDR – to become less technicians and more creative people. The type of people with the right sensibility come from cinema but it is complex to operate live systems and they lack the technology knowledge. We need talent with both skillsets.”

Sky’s Ruehl agreed: “It’s not in our business to be an educator although we have been doing training in pockets, such as in sound. We find we’re having to slow things down right now because of the skills challenge. Yes, people want to work in sports but it’s traditionally appealed to certain groups and we’re not seen as a place for all. We need to do more to proactively go out and attract the younger generation into the industry.”

COVID, of course, has permanently changed workflows and the executives talked about how their operations have shifted from the initial scramble to using remote and automation and hybrid in a more concrete fashion.

Ruehl spoke for everyone when she said: “We did in six months what had been planned for two to three years. Our tech teams were having the time of their lives; no-one was saying you can’t do this. We relied on the technology we already had to reduce the number of people we physically move around and now we’re pushing it further.”

Turner explained that F1’s ability to rapidly adopt remote production in the early phases of the pandemic was due to having laid the groundwork with tests including at Barcelona in 2020, before the calendar was cancelled.

“Fundamentally, our philosophy was not to change workflows. We have a successful formula for Formula 1 built over 20 years into a slick operation. When COVID struck we had to plan to restart, to safely send a lower number of people, and what we did was effectively scale our Barcelona test. We still have to send cameras and audio and have people produce and manage that, but the secret is connectivity and better compression techniques to get the volume of material back to the UK for production. The pandemic also accelerated our use of cloud to distribute signals; we’re still at the beginning of that journey.”

Level playing field

Quintana suggested that the use of remote web-based production and distribution tools had levelled the playing field between what was nominally a tier 1 and a tier 4 sports production value.

“The fan doesn’t know or care about tier 1 or 4. A tier 4 customer also doesn’t want an incident on their stream. This is the challenge. At end of the day whether you are switching 20 or 50 cameras for tier 1, the tier 4 single camera stream must also be of high quality.”

That said, the challenge will be how to manage new remote production workflows alongside the traditional OB. “Probably for tier 1 we will use some remote production for some specific workflows but overall things will not change much for the next two to three years,” Quintana added.

The panel came around again to skills and culture and the task facing an organisation needing to bring everyone with them on an IP transformation.

Reitano said: “The problem is pressure on budgets plus the need to attract new target groups and you have to tell the editorial team to adapt to new workflows basically to achieve more with less.”

Ruehl tied this into the global issue of sustainability. “People feel proud if the things they do have a lesser impact on the environment,” she said. “But there is – or was – a whole attitude around travel. Editorial didn’t want to stay back home, they wanted to go to the venue. This is changing. There is greater understanding that there are so many ways of delivering content but we have to find cheaper and more sustainable ways of doing that.”

Sport Production & Technology Summit 2021: Reflections on global industry transformation

SVG Europe

After the great lengths the industry went to to keep sports on air during the pandemic it was a time for reflection, commendation and assessment of what comes next as the European sports broadcasting and production community convened at SVG Europe’s Sport Production & Technology Summit 2021.

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/sport-production-and-technology-summit-reflections-on-global-industry-transformation/

It wasn’t lost on those attending the summit at Stamford Bridge, home to Chelsea FC, that this was a welcome occasion to get back in the room with friends and colleagues.

Hosted by sports reporter and TV presenter Natalie Quirk and sponsored by Panasonic, the conference and networking event was capped by the Sports TV Awards, sponsored by Canon, honouring the outstanding companies, teams and individuals that pushed sports broadcasting and production forward under perhaps the most challenging conditions ever.

Attendees had a chance to hear first-hand from thought leaders from Sky Sports, F1, NEP and Mediapro in extended round table conversations. Many shared similar experiences of guts and innovation in getting live sports back to air and now face the task of cementing the technologies and workflows that will continue to deliver remote and hybrid productions.

The sheer speed of change enforced by the pandemic has driven the adoption of IP and cloud workflows and tools, but this has also left a gap in skills that needs addressing.

Delegates also had a chance to hear the thoughts of SVG Europe sponsors about how their product and solutions strategies are responding to the ongoing evolution of sports broadcasting and production workflows.

Chris Clarke, CEO and co-founder, Cerberus Tech, said that his company had perfected the idea of self-service (or self-provisioning) where tools and services are accessed over IP and in the cloud.

“Many of the core functions like IP distribution and transcoding is a commodity function. We should be able to open that up to button pushers anywhere. That’s how we think IP and cloud will scale.”

M2A Media, another cloud native company, noted that more premium sports brands have adopted cloud workflows over the past year and this trend was only set to grow.

Marc Risby, managing director and CTO, Digibox, made the point that vendors and users now face decisions on keeping, pruning and prioritising the technologies that were adopted in haste at the beginning of lockdown.

“Companies, including ourselves, need to harden their systems and decide what to keep. It’s clear to us that SRT is going mainstream for delivery over the public internet, that NDI has taken a big leap and IP has suddenly been pushed forward much quicker,” he said.

Hawk-Eye deploys both hardware and specialist operators at venues and has had to reappraise its approach. “We were forced to think about doing so in completely different ways,” said Rasmus Larsson, product director, Sony Sports (Hawk-Eye Innovations and Pulselive). “When we move to IP and cloud we are minimising the space between linear and digital, and that enables us to do things we couldn’t do before using more automation and combinations of AI/ML and tracking technology.”

Per Lindgren, CTO, Net Insight, said: “In the move to cloud we need reliability, quality and security as well as better synchronisation of data, video and audio, but I think the bigger shift is not one of technology but one more related to business models. Vendors have to offer more flexibility on price and move towards software as a service business models because that is what customers want.”

Telstra’s head of global sales Anna Lockwood talked about the company’s rapid transformation to meet customer requirements. “We knew cloud and internet was something customers were asking for. We acquired MediaCloud in June this year that gave us a suite of significant software-defined and cloud-based capabilities, more than 70 cloud experts and a new MCR in London Docklands that is equipped with the capability to support major global companies and events.”

When the pandemic hit it wasn’t just broadcasters that were cut off. The fanbase was locked out of venues too. “We worked with a lot of broadcasters to make their broadcast more engaging by bringing the audience in and making them feel part of a community,” said Karl Kathuria, customer solutions director, Never.no. “It’s created a shift to an interesting format that gives people a chance to make their voice heard.”

Super Cup

BT Media & Broadcast showcased the connectivity it designed, installed and managed for BT Sport’s host production of the UEFA Super Cup on 11 August from Windsor Park, Belfast. Matters were complicated by the lack of native connectivity at the venue and the short timeframe in which to turn this around.

Laura Tressler, head of sales and client management, explained: “We needed to deliver 22 Gigs of bandwidth to carry 46 visions and data feeds in under 30 days from a venue that was not fibred. Typically, it takes 45 days to design, transport, install and test links for an event of this scale.”

The logistics of travelling trucks across the channel was another consideration but one that might be ameliorated with future advances in software defined networking (SDN). “In the future we see a time where we can reduce trucks on site by introducing flight case solutions and SDN which will allow us to preconfigure kit and optimise bandwidth in a better way,” said Tressler.

America’s Cup

Telstra Broadcast Services spotlighted its delivery of the America’s Cup, originally planned to be raced in Europe then diverted to Auckland when COVID hit.

“We had to reinvent,” said Steven Dargham, head of major events at the company. “We put in a remote production capable network that allowed us to ingest 44 video sources (including two on chase boats, two on helis and 10 on each boat) and deliver to 150 counties and 50 broadcasters as well as live streaming for Facebook, YouTube and the America’s Cup website.

“We took a multilayer multiservice approach, deploying a high-speed, high-bandwidth media fibre network and on top of this a remote operation from Sydney. We also deployed media edge kit to do H.264 and H.265 and devices capable of Zixi, RIST and RTMP.

Telstra said it was the world’s most watched event in 2020 with 941 million viewers across all screens (a record for the America’s Cup) representing a 3.2% increase in dedicated viewers compared to the previous race in 2017.

Roadmaps

Executives also cast forward to 2022. On Sky Sports’ roadmap, virtual production is the next big area of investment; Mediapro plans to expand its HDR experience to other sports, increase the number of AR graphics in live production and “to change the mentality of SDI fans about discovering the magic of the IP world”, according to CTO and operations manager Emili Planas Quintana.

HDR is also on the cards at F1 and it’s at an advanced stage, with its most recent test during the United States GP in Austin, Texas. “There is still some work to do around making sure our SDR product looks great,” said Trevor Turner, F1’s head of new technologies for broadcast & media. “We have a huge variety of camera sources from cars to helicams [needing to co-opt into the workflow] to achieve an HDR and SDR quality product while controlling it all from the UK.”

“It’s close,” he hinted.

SVG Europe Sports TV Awards

The level of innovation and ingenuity demonstrated by the entries to the Sports TV Awards 2021 illustrated the capacity for innovation within Europe’s sports television industry.

Chair of judges and SVG Europe advisory board member Peter Angell said: “The quality of work and entries were incredibly high in-spite, or probably because of, the challenges of the past 18 months. All of the judges were looking to award those that have led by example, experimented, taken risks and ultimately achieved results that contribute to the forward momentum of our industry as a whole.”

Following an introduction by Ryan Kamata of awards sponsor Canon, the winners were revealed.

These included Sky Sports, StudioCoast, SimplyLive, Grass Valley and LiveU for the Outstanding Production Achievement – Innovation of the Sky Virtual Production Suite.

“We took something that nobody had seen before and went on air with it,” said Kevin Ramsey, director of Sky Studios who commended Sky’s operations people for the speed of deployment and ingenuity in getting the channel back on air during COVID.

The One Planet Award for Sustainability was won by IMG Studios’ Green to Screen initiative which targets net carbon zero by 2030.

“The biggest lesson we’ve learned is that we are not in competition [with other companies in the industry],” said Sarita Neto, Premier League Productions, production executive, and chair of IMG Productions & Studios Green to Screen. “If we can’t work together we can’t achieve anything.”

Winner in the Outstanding Production Achievement – Event category was Sky Sports’ remote football production achieved with partner NEP; while Salsa Sound and Manchester City FC took home the award for Outstanding Audio Innovation with its vCrowd Virtual Crowd sound solution.

WSC Sports beat out Sky Sports, LFC, Deltatre and BT Sport to the Outstanding OTT Experience honour for creating the automagical highlights behind the NBA Playoffs.

“Rarely does a game-changing product come along that immediately delivers on its promise, but this entry has managed exactly that,” raved the judges.

BT Sport’s United Initiative was justly praised for its commitment to diversity, especially women, and is a joint effort with RISE and Newham College.

“It’s important to change the face of the industry which is otherwise ageing and has a particular [white, male] face,” said Fatou Jeng, BT Sport, principal, broadcast regulation. “A lot of people are leaving because the pathways aren’t open to them. We need to encourage more women to come into the industry.”