Metaverse 2030: Play Economy, Marketplace or Monopoly?

NAB

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/metaverse-2030-play-economy-marketplace-or-monopoly/

Now that Facebook has gone Meta, what impact will this have on the nature of the metaverse? For some, it’s the first step in a dystopic road to ruin, and, for others, Facebook can be sidestepped en route to building a mirror world which is far bigger than any one company.

Campaign Asia asked for the views of execs from the advertising world and their responses are illuminating, not least because they differ quite wildly.

Tom Simpson, SVP APAC, AdColony for instance, imagines that by 2030 the metaverse will have enabled “the play economy.”

The key innovation here will have been the creation of platforms that no single entity controls, yet everyone can still trust, via blockchain technology.

“Anyone is able to build and connect with each other without permission from a central platform. People have become the platform. New economic models such as play-to-earn and a revitalized maker economy [will grow] from this. The global village is a happy place, built on play — after all the metaverse emerged first from gaming. Crucially, we own our data and digital footprints using the provable digital scarcity of data and NFTs.”

His view is on the utopian end of the spectrum. “With content producers no longer chasing click-based sensationalism, the entire environment online has changed — people spend more reflective time on what makes them happy, and quality content has made a comeback. Play has returned as our dominant way of knowing, understanding and creating meaning. This is the global village. This is the metaverse. This is the play economy.”

The Mill puts itself in the camp of those looking towards developing a “decentralized or open metaverse.”

“That involves a diverse range of creators, developers, artists, educators and perspectives, so the metaverse platform and content of the future isn’t just dictated by the tech giants of silicon valley and brands with money to spend,” explains Aleissia Laidacker, global director of creative technology at The Mill. “The metaverse future I see is a hybrid, virtual and physical reality that offers a new kind of accessibility to data, entertainment, art and experiences, much like the internet did upon its inception.

Sounds great… except that this conception of the metaverse is all designed to sell us stuff. If it’s not controlled by Big Tech, the metaverse is still big business and in thrall to capitalism.

“We’re less likely to see ads to unlock experiences in the metaverse, and more likely to be invited to take part in meaningful experiences that allow us to engage with brands in new ways,” says Laidacker.

Both Wilfrid Obeng, CTO at AudioMob, and Jonathan Edwards, head of data and transformation at Dentsu Solutions APAC, make the eminently sage observation that the metaverse will probably be a mix of utopia or dystopia; just like reality.

“I equally believe that initially, the metaverse will be a place to dip into rather than continuously occupy,” says Obeng. “We are not going to suddenly see reality abandoned. But the idea of a persistent shared virtual space without the limitations of reality has so many exciting implications.”

Privacy, safety, wellbeing, security, accessibility, and so on are critically important here — more so than ever before. Obeng warns that the metaverse should not be developed in silos and calls for independent guidelines “so we can apply what we’ve collectively learned as part of our forward journey existing as a digital society.”

Edwards says the metaverse “will be the same cat and mouse game with some people trying to exploit new opportunities, whilst others try to stop them.”

He says it’s up to us all to use the metaverse as a tool to live in “a less tribal manner.”

“That shift, from today’s identity-lensed politics and a willful ignorance of what has advanced human well-being to date, rests on education,” he says. “We need the skills and mindset to analyze whether something is fair, logical or even true, lest we condemn ourselves to bring out the worst in our nature. Facebook is very unlikely to achieve that. They will probably play a significant role in the metaverse — But I envisage others, not least government, shaping how we live in such a reality.”

To trim the rise of a metaverse monopoly, the Dentsu executive predicts the emergence of both privacy- and identity-management services in the coming years. Both will be a result of growing data consciousness, he says.

“Privacy management will reduce complexity for people in selecting which data to share with who… and ultimately should be capable of predicting which exchanges its user will and won’t make. Identity managers will serve a dual purpose — to authenticate exactly who you are, and to mask who you are in real life, depending on the digital scenario. An identity manager should enable people to choose which state — fully known or unknown — they are in and when. A privacy manager will govern the points in between.”

 

Why filmmakers should be exploring the ‘metaverse’

Screen Daily

The film industry should prepare to engage audiences in the next iteration of the internet, according to former Digital Domain exec John Canning.

https://www.screendaily.com/features/why-filmmakers-should-be-exploring-the-metaverse/5165025.article

Funding, distribution and filmmaking are already being explored in the ‘metaverse’, considered to be the successor to the 2D internet, in which people use virtual reality headsets to enter digital environments.

Canning, who will speak on a panel at the Geneva Digital Market today on how to apply innovative technology to independent productions, told Screen that the industry should get ready for the coming wave.

“The Metaverse is the next big frontier of the internet and the framework is already being built,” said Canning, who recently stepped down as executive producer of new media and experiential at Digital Domain, the US visual effects firm and production company co-founded by Avatar director James Cameron

“Producers at studio majors and independents should be asking questions of what the metaverse is, how they can get involved and what it could be before these becomes really pressing issues.”

Digital Domain created some of the VFX for Steven Spielberg’s Ready, Player One, in which the metaverse was portrayed as a vast network of artificial worlds called the Oasis.

This fictional depiction is now becoming a reality, with Facebook’s parent company – recently rebranded as Meta – set to hire 10,000 people across Europe to develop the metaverse, believing it will house the evolution of online communication, commerce and entertainment.

Both studios and independent producers are also taking steps into this world. ViacomCBS is exploring how all of its intellectual property – from Star Trek to Nickelodeon – can be reimagined in the Metaverse. Music artists like Ariana Grande are performing live concerts to audiences wearing VR headgear in game worlds like Fortnite.

Fans of films ranging from James Bond blockbuster No Time To Die to independent releases such as pandemic production Zero Contact can buy digital merchandise as producers experiment with digital mechanisms like Blockchain to fund and distribute content.

New tools needed

Other building blocks to the metaverse include Universal Scene Description (USD), originally devised at Disney-owned animation house Pixar as a way to for its artists to collaborate using film-quality virtual assets, scenes and animation. It is an open-source language which enables digital assets – including avatars – to work in conjunction with each other across the internet and across VR headgear.

“We need an entire suite of interchange standards and tools, protocols, formats, and services which enable persistent and ubiquitous virtual simulations,” said Canning. “It’s arguably the most important aspect of the entire metaverse project.”

The digital executive is next set to join US technology firm AMD to head up the chip developer’s relations with content creators and who this week announced it had secured a partnership with Meta.

Canning is also a leading expert on ‘digital humans’ – online avatars that he suggests could be used in the future to represent individuals across a range of platforms.

“Digital Domain is increasingly being asked to create characters for VR, AR and XR experiences,” said Canning. “What’s interesting to me is that when all of these environments are interconnected, everyone will be represented digitally with a consistent digital version of themselves.

“Today, we present different versions of ourselves digitally – one for Facebook, one to LinkedIn, another to TikTik and so on. That is because online platforms are not joined up. The metaverse presupposes that we will be able to transfer a digital representation of ourselves from one environment to another without friction.”

Behind the scenes of Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast

IBC

https://www.ibc.org/features/behind-the-scenes-of-kenneth-branaghs-belfast/8077.article

Kenneth Branagh’s biographical family drama reclaims the city in an era where the streets had no name. Editor Una Ní Dhonghaíle speaks about cutting the drama.

Lockdown gave Sir Kenneth Branagh the time and space to unlock a memoir of his childhood growing up in Northern Ireland. The result is a love letter to Belfast and its citizens set just before ‘the Troubles’ in 1969 and, given the film’s title, an attempt to reclaim the city’s name from its association with a more violent recent past.

“Most stories of Northern Ireland on screen concentrate on the fear and division instead of the friendship and love that existed prior to the Troubles,” says the film’s editor Una Ní Dhonghaíle. “We wanted to give a voice to that unspoken truth.”

The film in fact begins with a riot, an event later viewed as the prelude to three decades of political and sectarian violence. But conflict is not where Branagh’s heart lies. This drama is about a family in a shared working class community which is semi-autobiographically Branagh’s own.

“By telling this story through the eyes of a child Ken doesn’t have to get involved in the complexity of Northern Irish politics,” says Ní Dhonghaíle. “You couldn’t do that in a three-hour film let alone 90 minutes. We do have a little bit of archive for context but if we put in too much then you’d have to explain more and more. There are so many sides to Northern Ireland, you can’t get away with just doing one side. Belfast is Ken’s experience of Northern Ireland as expressed through the character Buddy.”

Nine-year old Buddy (Jude Hill) lives with his Ma (Caitriona Balfe) and Pa (Jamie Dornan) and near his Granny (Judi Dench) and Pop (Ciarán Hinds). In fact, the whole neighbourhood is one close knit community, Protestant and Catholic alike.

“When you’ve got great friends on your street and you’re in love with the girl in your class and your parents are telling you they want to emigrate to London,” Ní Dhonghaíle says, “that’s your big problem, not what is going on at the adult level.”

The most obvious inspiration seems to be John Boorman’s Oscar nominated 1987 picture Hope and Glory drawn from Boorman’s memory growing up during World War II. Ní Dhonghaíle’s immediate attention was drawn to the script’s affinity with Dennis Mitchells’s Morning in the Streets from 1958 documenting working class communities in Liverpool and Manchester.

“He was one of the first filmmakers to record dialects and accents from around Great Britain not just received pronunciation,” she explains. “The poetic realism of that piece links to Belfast, whether Ken referenced it or not. He has captured the authenticity of the era and the vernacular of the people.”

Distant Voices Still Lives (1988), another evocation of working class family life in 1950s Liverpool, and Cinema Paradiso, reflected when Buddy’s family visit the local picture house in Technicolor awe (to see One Million Years B.C. and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), are other tonal relatives.

The film was shot on a set designed by Jim Clay in the grounds of a school near Longcross Studios, Surrey where Branagh and Ní Dhonghaíle as well as the film’s DP Haris Zambarloukos were working on the final stages of sumptuous Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile.

The lower budget Belfast was shot under Covid conditions in September 2020 with the editor working remotely from her home in Dublin. She would send cuts to her assistant in London who prepped the clips for Branagh to view on an Avid and large screen in his house.

“After the first assembly of the film Ken decided to take out all the music we had from the period apart from that of the authentic voice of a Belfast man – Van Morrison. Ken chose all the cues. He knew which songs resonated with him even though the songs may have been written in the 1980s or 1990s.”

The film features eight classic Van Morrison tracks and a new song written for the film prior to the shoot. “It was a good decision since it meant I could focus on sound design – adding in sounds of Belfast harbour, the sound of the sea essentially the sound of the city.”

Aside from the riot scenes where he deployed two cameras, Branagh staged most of the set-ups with a single camera. “The stillness allowed the sense of memory to breathe,” Ní Dhonghaíle says, although this gave her little room to cut in terms of coverage and put the emphasis more on constructing the story.

“If we moved a whole scene we found we could strengthen the story or create a better flow of the film. There is one scene concerning Pa going back to England that we moved to later which had a more visceral, emotional resonance for any parent who has to leave their children.”

She adds, “When you are no longer in the same room as your director, because of Covid, you have to devise a strategy where you can forensically interrogate your rushes to make sure you’ve found the best part of the story to tell. Ken’s confidence in own film makes him a gracious collaborator.”

The story is also personal to Ní Dhonghaíle whose father has lived an extraordinary life that bears witness to the themes in the film.

Danny (Donal) Donnelly was just 17 when he was interned without trial in 1956 and jailed for 10 years essentially for being a civil rights activist (he was never a member of the Provisional IRA). On Boxing Day 1960, aged 21, he escaped from Belfast’s Crumlin Road prison and avoided recapture despite a massive manhunt with the help of members of both republican and nationalist communities. Donnelly, who was christened the ‘invisible man’ by the authorities because they couldn’t find him, was pardoned in in 1986 (long before the Good Friday agreement). In 2014 he retraced these events in a documentary The Invisible Man, which Una directed.

“His is a story of hope because what shines through is the friendship of ordinary people, mainly women, who helped my father to safety,” Ní Dhonghaíle says. “I grew up in Dublin and dad always spoke about the friendship between Protestants and Catholics. That resonated with me when I read Ken’s script.

“I found that Pop was very much like my dad - always with an easy turn of phrase, a great knowledge of poetry, the effortless ability to break into song or verse to emphasise a point. The film also depicts great intimacy and kindness between the generations where grandparents and parents lived in terraced streets around the corner from one another.”

Donnelly, now 82, recounted his story in the book ‘Prisoner 1082’ in which he wrote that had politicians attended to the civil and social injustice of the 1950s in Northern Ireland then in all probability the Troubles would not have happened.

“Critics [of Belfast] might question whether Catholics and Protestants could have lived as neighbours and acted with such humanity and compassion but my dad’s story is a validation,” says Ní Dhonghaíle. “He could say he lived through it.”

Donnelly has also seen a test screening of Belfast and - invited onto our Zoom call to talk about it - describes Branagh’s depiction as “unusual in so far as it’s coming from a soft unionist point of view.”

He says, “Usually, on screen we see the extremes of Republicanism or occasionally the loyalist story but never something like this. It’s an enchanting gem in my opinion.”

Untapping The Potential Of Sports DTC

The Broadcast Bridge

The media industry is in the midst of a wholesale move toward streaming, first in the entertainment sector and now in sports. Over the next 10 years, more than 50% of audiovisual revenue will come from over-the-top (OTT) services. According to Strategy Analytics, OTT revenues will surpass pay TV for the first time in 2024. Much of the momentum over the next decade will come from live, and in particular sports, with rights holders expanding on current DTC experimentation by placing more of their properties online and by traditional pay-TV like Sky and Comcast substituting satellite and cable with leaner fitter faster IP delivery.

https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/17658/untapping-the-potential-of-sports-dtc

This article looks at the trends and technologies impacting the sports market as investment shifts dramatically to OTT.

Initially, OTT D2C services consisted of VOD libraries such as Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. Today, we are seeing more live streaming offerings from players including DAZN, Amazon Prime, F1TV, and ESPN+. In parallel, broadcasters have been building up their offerings with live and time-shifted services mostly targeted at second screens.

We’ve also reached the point where OTT service providers are simultaneously streaming multiple live events, such as a boxing match, F1 race, and football games, to the main screens.

Telco and cable operators, such as Bouygues in France and Sky in the UK, are launching pure streaming services. As opposed to using complex set-top boxes, they are targeting connected TVs.

“This trend of moving video delivery to streaming will continue to accelerate, and in time audiences will tune out legacy broadcast systems like satellite and terrestrial TV,” says Xavier Leclercq, Vice President Business Development at Broadpeak.

COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of streaming in many households. Netflix grew faster during the lockdowns and ended up about six months ahead of its own growth plan.

Another effect of the global health crisis is the renewed consumer interest in having a high-quality broadband connection. As broadband became a lifeline for work, school, entertainment, and more, many customers upgraded their packages to get higher speeds. This means that larger pipes are now available to deliver streaming services, and the capacity of the access network is less likely to be an issue.

“While D2C in sports feels relatively emergent, it’s important to recognize that there have been many globally successful models in place for some time,” says Steve Russell, Chief Product Officer, Red Bee Media. “So, what is new? My sense is that the risk-reward balance has tipped. More consumers are willing and able to access and pay for D2C offerings, and simultaneously the bar has been lowered in terms of time, risk and cost to get a service to market.”

OTT Sports Are Thriving

For D2C launches, Covid has arguably been both an accelerant and a deterrent. Ampere Analysis notes that, in some cases, broadcasters and rights sellers have extended broadcast deals to maintain stability and this has tied up significant rights for a long time, such as the Premier League in the UK. In other cases, however, tensions have been heightened between broadcasters and rights sellers. Mediapro, for example, cancelled its reported €780m contract with France’s Ligue 1 and caused a decline of around 42% in the league’s broadcasting income. Similar situations may prompt rights holders into a change in strategy, particularly where their valuation of the product is different to that of the broadcasters.

It’s easy to see why OTT sports distribution platforms are thriving. Streaming enables native content personalization. It is easier to insert targeted advertising in video streams than a broadcast. Tapping into these new and more lucrative revenue sources is a significant opportunity for all parties, whether it is the rights owners directly monetizing their content, an OTT distributor such as a TV channel, or a telco or cable operator.

Nadine Patry, Products & Solutions Marketing Director at Viaccess-Orca says, “OTT is easier to deploy than traditional broadcast infrastructure, offering direct access to users, enabling better insights into user behaviour and consumption with analytics, offering new interactive experiences, and opening up new revenue opportunities such as targeted advertising and on-demand content.”

Streaming of sports content can bring viewers new experiences, including live content with watch party and multi-view features to drive better viewer engagement. PCCW Media in Hong Kong for example created a Watch Party for its Now TV customers during the UEFA EURO 2020 championship. 

“Most importantly, the next generation of viewers, aged 18 to 24 years, prefer watching pure OTT services on mobile devices,” Patry adds. “We often talk about cord-cutting, but today we see cord-never growing. More and more consumers are not subscribing to pay TV, and they enjoy OTT services, with on-demand content and the pay-per-view model. In fact, pay-per-view services are growing everywhere. Users are willing to pay to watch a specific event. For instance, an MMA match can be sold for up to $30.”

It is worth noting that D2C in sports is not just about the most watched games and sports. It is also a unique opportunity for smaller sports organizations to find their audience. Given that perspective, the OTT model (in particular one which is as-a-service) has reduced adoption barriers and enabled niche sports organizations to embrace video streaming.

“More generally, says Eric Gallier, VP, Video Solutions at Harmonic “sports organizations also have the opportunity to leverage a broad range of content for their D2C presence, beyond what would already be available on TV, including untapped archives, youth competitions that would require retaining rights, or new editorial forms (i.e., game highlights, storytelling content). D2C is also a way for sports organizations to address underserved markets.”

Russell reports that many of Red Bee’s customers see DTC as a complementary offering – a way of monetizing a differentiated offering and creating far closer fan engagement while accessing the “data gold” on viewing behaviors. Some rights holders see D2C as a strategic “hedge”, others as a fully-fledged core offering. “Of course, there is no universal answer – perhaps the most high-risk play would be to avoid the D2C opportunity altogether,” he says.

 

Technical Challenges

Going from traditional TV broadcast to an OTT direct to consumer product is a significant jump. There have been several failed attempts at going D2C with sports already and there are technological and distribution risk, which can damage a sport reputationally.

Some of these issues are ironed out – in particular the technological one. Ampere analyst Ben McMurray thinks the gap is starting to bridge and OTT / D2C is becoming a more appealing strategy.

“Where competition is high and the value of broadcasting rights is being driven up, rights holders will likely continue to sell their rights, but where competition is low and broadcasters underbid, going D2C is a real option, especially out of market,” he says.

Streaming issues are something that DAZN has been scrutinised for in Italy after acquiring rights to all Serie A games (with 30% non-exclusive). There have been frequent problems with the quality of service, but this has been attributed by DAZN to an adjustment period. This type of adjustment is something we might expect if other tier 1 events go OTT, particularly in a territory like Italy where the transition to fast, fibre broadband is still a work in progress.

As they grow, OTT services face a trade-off: on the one hand, provided the capacity is available, OTT services could pay for more to ensure that capacity limits are not hit when demand on their network increases; on the other hand, however, any capacity not used could be seen as inefficient, as it’s only certain games that will cause network congestion. 

 

Buffering And Congestion

“Almost every service that has tried this has suffered a system failure early on, but as time goes on the services will get better at anticipating demand and finding the right balance between cost-efficiency and seamless experiences,” says McMurray. “For tier 1 events, we are only starting to see OTT players acquiring the rights and placing a huge bet on being able to build direct-to-consumer relationships. These events will put a country’s internet infrastructure through the test of scale, and there will be failures along the way. But equally all these failures will serve as lessons in how to prevent a repeat of those situations.”

On a global scale, the internet is not yet ready to support a shift where everyone starts “watching TV” online. With that said, it is still possible to stream large scale live events to millions of viewers worldwide. For live events, it’s rarely the video distribution and streaming quality that will cause problems. The challenges usually lie in authentication, payment and getting access to the stream.

“The streaming platforms need to be scalable enough to handle millions of users trying to access the event more or less at the same time,” says Anders Wassén, Head of OTT Development, Red Bee Media. “To achieve this, you need to build a complete workflow, prioritizing scale, and resilience. Streaming platforms that are built correctly, will be ready to handle millions of viewers on live events.”

Latency Tackled

This includes latency, perhaps the biggest bugbear sports streamers need to solve. Latency mainly exists because of the buffer introduced in the video players. Since content is delivered over the top, without guarantees from the networks, a safety net is introduced to absorb some of the network problems.

There are technical innovations that mitigate or solve latency issues in streaming, but there are different pros and cons depending on the solution.

“You need to carefully evaluate the real need when selecting technology to lower latency, Wassén says. “Unless you need real-time interaction or live betting you don’t need sub-second latency.”

He says you could achieve “acceptable latency” for most scenarios by only adapting the normal adaptive bitrate distribution parameters. For cases that require even lower latency, there are open standardized protocols for most devices and platforms.

Broadpeak’s ‘cure’ for latency is similar. The key to reduce latency is to deliver the streams over a more deterministic and reliable network. There are two ways to do that, Leclercq explains:

Reduce the distance between where the content is served and the end user. This involves distributing the CDN capacity closer to the consumers to avoid potential problems. By reducing the network distance, you reduce the probability of something going wrong. We see customers deploying more caches, closer to the consumers, because in the video world proximity means quality.

Leverage multicast technology, not in the shape of legacy IPTV delivery to a set-top box, but by combining multicast with adaptive bit rate technology (ABR) to scale streaming to any device in the network. With multicast ABR you benefit from the scalability of multicast combined with the versatility of ABR. This allows distribution of live streaming content with maximum quality and minimum latency.

While the individual components of the delivery chain can be improved to reduce latency most observers believe it will take time and considerable technological innovation before OTT services can compete with ‘traditional’ DTT, DTH or cable distribution.

Harmonic, however, suggest that with DASH and LL-HLS, “it has been proven” that the overall latency from the camera to the display by the end device is the same – around 5 seconds – as current traditional broadcast latency.”

“We are confident that in 2022, more and more sports streaming services will implement these low-latency streaming formats,” says Gallier.

Buffering has also dogged the live OTT experience, a function of OTT’s ability or not to scale on demand.

“There are multiple factors that need to be considered,” says Prasoon Thakur, Business Development Executive, Online Video, Telstra Broadcast Services. “Tens of thousands of subscribers is purely a function of scaling the platform end-to-end. Whereas the buffering is related to quality of network. Maturity of network deployment and quality of bandwidth plays a very important role in delivering good quality content in the right format to the subscriber. An unreliable service provider with an unmaintained network can lead to poor viewing experience. However, it’s usually the OTT provider or content producers that end up taking the flack for that.”

Buckle In For The OTT Ride

Many players have already made significant investments in OTT for sports, including leagues and federations, clubs (a trend that started in the U.S. but now extends to Europe), broadcasters (with sports services such as ESPN+ and Eurosport Player), telco operators, and pay-TV aggregate bundles of content and channels. Streamers like DAZN (reportedly in advanced negotiations to buy BT Sport) are offering sports-only aggregation services while the likes of Amazon are buying sports rights (like NFL and tennis majors).

Simply, in a more connected world, the audience expects content to be accessible everywhere at all times and at a price point that makes sense. Forcing viewers to sit in front of the television to watch live sport in real-time as the only option for consumption is not realistic and will hamper the growth of sports in the future. Sports must keep up with media consumption trends if they want to stay ahead of the competition, not just from other sport rights holders but all content in the market, from gaming to entertainment and other media. 

 

No UHD on Your UHDTV? Maybe LCEVC Can Solve the Conundrum

NAB

As of March 2021, around 44% of US television households have a 4K-capable TV set. The numbers will be similar in other countries. Yet viewers are starved of UHD content because broadcasting it remains uneconomic.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/no-uhd-on-your-uhdtv-maybe-lcevc-can-solve-the-conundrum/

That’s the case made by V-Nova, inventors of an MPEG standardized codec that the company claims is the answer to the problem.

The argument is that UHD has remained impractical for broadcasters since the bandwidth requirements of UHD channels are too high. In addition, they would still have to separately broadcast a full HD version for the large number of viewers who don’t have a UHD TV.

Rick Clucas, SVP innovation and technology at V-Nova, explains to EE Times that legacy digital video codecs were designed around single-channel transmission. The industry developed high efficiency video coding (HEVC) in 2012 to reduce bandwidth requirements, but HEVC could only be used to transmit services aimed at new devices since legacy receiving devices would not be able to decode them.

Recognizing the problem, MPEG began the search for a new codec that might deliver UHD while consuming less bandwidth.

The result was MPEG-5 Part 2 low complexity enhancement video codec (LCEVC) (also enshrined as ISO/IEC 23094-2), the core of which is technology from V-Nova.

“LCEVC also brings along an interesting ‘psychological’ challenge to an industry that is used to making and selling new equipment with each new standard,” says Clucas “LCEVC is ‘low complexity,’ which means that although it can be implemented in hardware (and surely will be in the future), it can also do what no other video codec had done before: be implemented by using existing hardware blocks via a new device driver.”

The same blocks V-Nova is using to implement in current generation chips also exist in older chips, giving the opportunity to retrofit LCEVC on a large number of existing TVs and set-top boxes via an over-the-air update. This, says Clucas, “enables UHD TV to come to terrestrial broadcast TV today, without the need to wait for everybody to have purchased new equipment.”

He explains that, with LCEVC, a UHD channel would have a “base” video of 1080p — so any device that is not LCEVC aware would still get 1080p video. LCEVC data typically adds 10-20% on top of the lower-resolution base video, so indeed the combined new channel (base plus enhancement data) is significantly smaller than a full-resolution channel broadcast without LCEVC.

“Most importantly, for broadcast services you don’t need to broadcast two channels at the same time. I believe that being retrofittable on many existing devices and backwards compatible on the rest will foster greater sales of new UHD equipment, thanks to greater availability of high-quality UHD content.”

By making the delivery of UHD content commercially viable for terrestrial TV, LCEVC succeeds at what any new codec may find impossible to achieve: reducing the bitrate enough so that broadcasters could afford to send whole new UHD channels on top of their legacy full HD ones.

 

Because Black and White Is Also a Color

NAB

Black and white as an aesthetic choice in this day and age is generally still a badge of the arthouse film and an artifice not lost on Academy voters who nominated Roma and Cold War in 2018 and Mank in 2020.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/because-black-and-white-is-also-a-color/

This year, they’ll likely have more to judge with films as varied as The French Dispatch and Being the Ricardos employing several black-and-white sequences, while Passing, Belfast and The Tragedy of Macbeth being shot almost entirely without color. In TV, even the opening scenes to WandaVision were in black and white which may have confused younger viewers into adjusting their set.

Like WandaVision, this current crop are all period movies that use the old-fashioned format to evoke a bygone era, but even C’mon C’mon, which takes place in contemporary times and has Joaquin Phoenix as a radio journalist crisscrossing the country with his nephew, was filmed in monochrome.

To understand why everyone is going grayscale, the NYT talked to the cinematographers behind three of the season’s most striking black-and-white features.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

For his new spin on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the director Joel Coen wanted to strip the play down to its barest essence. The result is a fast and ruthless reimagining leached of all color, shot in a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio.

“It’s meant to bring theatricality, and to lose temporality,” the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel said. “It’s not about the 1700s, and it’s not about Scotland, either. We’re giving an abstraction, but a very creative one.”

All that austerity makes a striking visual impression, but Delbonnel said it was simply in service of the play’s language. The same creative rules applied to the actors Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand who must rely on body language and delivery not scenery or props.

Though this Macbeth was made in the spirit of minimalism, Delbonnel often brought in the boldest lights he could muster.

“The whole movie is lit with theater light, like you’d see at a Beyoncé concert, which has very, very hard shadows,” he said. “In color, it would be unbearable, but in black-and-white, it looks amazing.”

Passing

Based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, Passing is about two light-skinned Black women: Irene (Tessa Thompson), a well-respected but restless doctor’s wife, and Clare (Ruth Negga), her childhood friend who has been passing for white. A chance meeting in a hotel tearoom reunites the two after years spent apart, and cinematographer Eduard Grau chose to flood that initial encounter with a striking amount of white light.

“This is the brightest I’ve ever done a scene in my life,” Grau said. “You don’t see that a lot, especially in dramas, to have such a bright scene without a lot of detail in the whites. It also came from the fact that we didn’t want to clearly show to the audience at first whether our characters were white or Black or mixed race. Everything is so bright that it’s difficult to tell.”

Belfast

Kenneth Branagh’s first feature as director, Dead Again, used black and white as a mechanism to differentiate the story’s flashback sequences. He’s also used black and white, again as a flashback, in the opening to next year’s glossy big screen adaptation of Death on the Nile. Before then though he’s written and directed Belfast, loosely based on his own upbringing in the city.

“There is something really lucid and clear and at the same time ethereal and mysterious inherent in black-and-white photography,” cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos BSC told NAB Amplify. 

“I feel color is often better at being descriptive — you can see it’s autumn because of the red leaves in shot. But since filmmaking tends to be about narrowing the focus for the audience, about how and where they see things, black-and-white is a fantastic way of capturing emotion.”

He shot the film in color because he felt that gave him greater control over the image. “In the DI, especially with black-and-white, I like to be able to assign where in the grey scale something is whether that’s a sky, clothing, a face. By having color you can key it, matte, it and be more precise.”

Black and white also has the effect in this film of accentuating the glorious technicolor of movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which are vivid memories for Branagh as played out through the eyes of the film’s young protagonist.

“Color is so brilliantly descriptive in film, and even the color of someone’s eyes gives you so much information,” Zambarloukos told the NYT. “But I often find that when I’m making films with Ken, we’re trying to remove information for the audience and present them with what we want them to see.”

 

Why Streaming Providers Need to Integrate Social Into Their Strategies

NAB

Watching a movie on Netflix is a passive one-way lean back experience watching high quality video which we all love, right? Wrong. Millennials want interactive social connection and if SVODs don’t offer it… well they’ve been warned.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/why-streaming-providers-need-to-integrate-social-to-their-strategies/

That’s the key takeaway from Deloitte’s latest annual Digital Media Trends survey, that also finds that if streaming providers are seeking a long-lasting marriage with subscribers, it now looks more like a dynamic game of speed dating.

The report that cements the understanding that pandemic has accelerated online entertainment, with an estimated 21% boost in consumer spending on subscriptions in the first half of 2021. But people — especially younger generations — are managing costs by adopting ad-supported options, looking for discounts and bundles, and moving on and off services to meet their content needs. For streaming video providers, keeping these subscribers is harder than ever.

At the same time, consumers’ attention is being frayed by the continued aggregation and innovation of content on social media — mostly a mobile experience, and entirely free — and by the increasingly social experiences available in video games, which are also often free-to-play.

Combating Churn

The survey revealed that 84% of respondents now pay for a SVOD service, and the average household has four subscriptions — figures that have remained largely unchanged over the past year.

People still prioritize new original content, a broad content library, and a low enough cost to subscribe. But they are getting better at developing strategies to optimize costs and content. For providers seeking to retain them, the overall churn rate — the number of people who have cancelled, or both added and cancelled, a paid SVOD service — has remained stable at about 38%, although it varies from service to service.

The top reason people cancelled a paid SVOD service was due to high cost, suggesting there will be more growth ahead for ad-subsidized and free ad-supported subscription tiers.

The second most common reason was that they finished the show they signed up to watch. Consumers, finds Deloitte, are enjoying the benefits of easy cancellation, choosing to turn the tap off rather than leaving it running when they don’t need it. This “churn & return” behavior is most common among younger generations: Almost half of Millennials and 34% of Gen Z respondents cancelled and then resubscribed to the same service later.

However, providers looking to reduce churn by adding friction to unsubscribing should know that the second-largest frustration people have with SVOD services is when they make it harder to cancel.

Get Cuter with Social

The use of social media and online services is widespread among US consumers and is a daily activity for many. About 90% of respondents cited using at least one social media service, and the average person uses five different services. This number increases to seven for Gen Zs and millennials, with about a quarter of each using 10 or more different services.

We’re not only watching more videos on social, especially short videos made by average users and influencers. M&E options are migrating onto them, and social commerce is booming.

“It’s clear people still want to enjoy socializing with friends and family, even if that means the experience is online and the interaction is from within their home,” says Deloitte’s Jana Arbanas, leader of telecom, media & entertainment. “Streaming video in its current form doesn’t satisfy this social desire, so to meet this need, consumers are spending increasingly more time on other forms of online entertainment. Given this, streaming companies need to evolve their offerings into connected social experiences in order to keep subscribers interested and engaged… whether through partnerships, acquisitions, or simply establishing a really effective social media department.”

Virtual worlds, real interactions

Gaming and game-related content, such as live streams and video, continue to compete for entertainment time. And, for many gamers, these activities have become social too. The survey reports 65% of respondents as frequent gamers, playing at least once a week. Gen Zs and Millennials play closer to 13 or 14 hours weekly.

Game companies have “inadvertently” become immersive, interactive social media services. When Deloitte asked gamers about important factors related to their gaming experience, more than half said ‘having positive interactions with other players’ and ‘being able to personalize my game character or avatar’ were important, followed not far behind by ‘chatting or socializing with other players and meeting up with friends online to play together.’

“Younger generations have grown up connecting through digital networks, engaging with digital and interactive entertainment, and relating to the world through a social lens. Gaming is meeting these expectations with unique, immersive experiences that can put players in the starring role. For streaming video providers, understanding social gaming and creating strong relationships with gamers may be critical to future growth.”

Deloitte’s Prescription

In the near term, SVOD players should address churn and retention among diverse segments in different markets, and shift from measuring subscribers to understanding how to unlock the lifetime value within their customer bases.

In the future, says the consultant, they should better address how customers are paying attention to and how they are choosing to engage and be entertained.

“Streaming video will likely continue to be a dominant force, especially as leading services are now pursuing global markets. However, any social elements are deferred to the “second screen” — mobile — which, for many, is really the first screen. Interactivity on SVOD is an early experiment.

“It may or may not make sense for SVOD to offer social and interactivity directly in their services, but they will likely face greater competition in courting younger generations and keeping them as lifelong subscribers if they don’t integrate a social element in some way.”