If TikTok is killed off, how long will short form video live?

IBC

As unlikely as it may seem, the noose is tightening around Chinese-owned social media phenomenon TikTok. Were to be outright banned what impact would this have on the short form video creator community? 

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With north of one billion monthly users and annual revenue in excess of $10bn plus a reach which touches virtually every aspect of business and culture, TikTok is the most influential social video app on the planet.

Yet it could be switched off in the Western world as concerns mount about user data flowing back to Beijing. As draconian as it seems, pressure is growing on regulators to act. This is particularly acute in the US as it enters the presidential election cycle and where government divisions, nineteen states and dozens of college campuses have already outlawed its use.

“TikTok is under scrutiny for good reason, but it's not a foregone conclusion that it's terminal,” says Tom Morrod, Co-founder, Caretta Research. “It seems likely that there will be some limitations imposed in the US and Europe, but there may be a couple of reasonable steps that TikTok can take to avoid being banned outright (which feels pretty extreme, in my opinion). The platform could either form under new ownership in the US and Europe, or accept more regulation of data flows and privacy.”

US politicians and media executives (including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been sounding the alarm and calling for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from stores. A move to ringfence data from its 80 million US users in US-based Oracle servers has not assuaged doubts.

The FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, claimed last June, that the Bytedance-owned app was “looking at everything from search and browsing history, your keystroke patterns, draft messages, biometric data, including voice print and face print that could be used in facial recognition down the road.”

The noose is also tightening in Europe where TikTok is the subject of two EU-wide privacy probes for sending data on its 250m+ EU users to China. It must also comply with extensive new requirements on content moderation under new digital rulebook, the DSA, from mid-2023.

French President Emmanuel Macron has called TikTok "deceptively innocent" and a cause of "real addiction" among users, as well as a source of Russian disinformation.

Aside from spying allegations, the app is warned to have “consequences on the brain capacity of its users” notably children, a concern which French daily paper Le Parisien headlined on December 29.

In China, content on the site tends to be longer form and its algorithm promotes education content  including maths and engineering. In the West, TikTok is accused of making its algorithm more addictive and feeding its audience with ‘digital fentanyl.’

According to the Pew Research Centre, two-thirds of 13-to-17-year-olds in the US use TikTok. 

“It should be divested or banned in the US,” says Harry Gestetner, co-founder of creator monetisation platform FanFix. “TikTok is proven to be syphoning data to the Chinese government. There are fears it could be used to spread propaganda or at very least being used to dumb kids down.”

There are legitimate concerns about privacy violations. “Many users have complained that their accounts were hacked or deleted without warning or explanation from TikTok itself,” says Guillermo Dvorak, Head of Digital at media and behavioural planning agency Total Media. “While these complaints may not be true (some of them seem fake), they could still create an atmosphere where regulators feel compelled to take action against the app because they think it's unsafe for users' data privacy rights.”

However, as Morrod points out, it is not consumers but regulatory concerns that are threatening TikTok’s future. That suggests that TikTok style short form is successful and in demand.

So what happens if that is taken away?

Who stands to gain most if TikTok is killed?

There are certainly no shortage of companies that would seek to capitalise on the market for short-form video if TikTok were squeezed out.

Snap, Meta and YouTube all launched or doubled down on short form video to counter TikTok’s success.  YouTube Shorts just surpassed 50 billion daily views, up from 30 billion a year ago.  Twitter could revitalise Vine. Others include French snap sharing site BeReal and Triller, a music based social platform.

“There are lots of contenders, but no obvious alternative right now because it requires a particular configuration of audience, content and algorithmic management in order to make it work properly,” says Morrod.

He says that network effects will tend towards “natural clustering of users” and so the audience that creates and consumes short-form will tend to stay primarily in one platform until something allows that audience to naturally fragment. That could be as a result of different demographics on TikTok vs Facebook or different content types on TikTok vs YouTube).

Morrod adds, “It there is a regulatory change, some good marketing and investing in key influencers could result in any number of companies becoming the new home for that audience, but it's likely to consolidate on a single platform.”

Meta, in theory, has the most to gain from TikTok’s potential demise. It expanded short form video product Reels onto Facebook a year ago, designated a $1 billion creator fund to encourage the creator community to produce for it, and grew to more than 140 billion plays across Facebook and Instagram a day by October.

“That’s a 50% increase from 6 months ago,” said Meta’s CFO Susan Li on the Q3 2022 earnings call. “Reels is incremental to time spent on our apps. The trends look good here and we believe that we are gaining time spent share on competitors like TikTok.”

Others aren’t convinced.

Amy Gilbert, Head of Social at London-based social media agency The Social Element, says, “Meta hasn't found a way to connect with younger consumers or make Reels as profitable yet, and given their focus on the Metaverse, Reels seems like more of a necessary evil for them rather than a pillar of what the platform stands for.”

Like Caretta’s Morrod, she believes the biggest challenge that Meta (and others) face is recreating the unique algorithm and vibrant community that has made TikTok a household name.

“Despite Reels' algorithmic features, they still fall short in delivering content that truly resonates with users,” she says. “In comparison, the short-form algorithms on platforms like Snapchat and Pinterest often feel too formulaic. Instagram does a slightly better job at balancing a mix of creators and friends, but nothing can match the personalisation offered by TikTok.

“This platform has been able to learn more about its users, and as a result, introduce them to new creators, perspectives, and products they may not have discovered on other platforms.”

Dvorak thinks the biggest winner of a potential TikTokk demise would be YouTube, reasoning that Alphabet’s company may be able to gain back some of its lost market share. The biggest on the other hand will be creators.

“If TikTok were to either haemorrhage users or be outright banned, the impact on the creator community would be devastating. For many, TikTok was an opportunity to find their voice for the first time. If TikTok were to disappear, or if it were forced to change its format so drastically that it became unrecognizable from its current incarnation, it would be a huge loss for creators. They may have to seek new platforms to distribute their content on if they don't want to lose out on all that sweet, sweet ad revenue.”

Creators are already diversifying

FanFix seem convinced that action will be taken against TikTok, in the US at least. It was launched 18 months ago to help Gen Z creators develop and monetise communities from their TikTok following as a rival to what they saw as existing platforms like Patreon which were not serving Gen Z.

FanFix co-founder Simon Pompan, however, believes creators will simply move to other social media platforms with FanFix continuing to serve them. Meta Reels is the platform most likely to win out, they say.

“We’ve seen that creators like to diversify their revenue stream away from any one social media,” explains Pompan. “A big goal for TikTokkers is pulling that following off TikTok onto Instagram or Snap or converting their content into longform on YouTube, or streaming on Twitch. Meta has improved Reels in recent months and we can see more and more creators shifting attention to it with less focus on TikTok.”

Despite TikTok’s runaway success it doesn't follow that the market is universally trending towards short form content.

“Certainly, the dramatic collapse of Quibi suggests that short form might not work in certain formats or with certain audiences,” Morrod says. “Even if some of the alternative platforms do manage to get the content right (more user-generated rather than episodic) and invest in an appropriate algorithm they still might not have the right audience (seemingly, 'kids').”

The creator community is resourceful enough to figure out how to diversify their income by being on other platforms, creating merch and partnerships, and even setting up shops on Amazon.

For that reason, Gilbert says the biggest loss [of TikTok] would be on the rest of us. “The departure of TikTok would be a significant blow to the social media community and the unique atmosphere that makes it so special. It fills a void that other imitators aren’t able to do. Its algorithm helps bring new voices to the spotlight and keeps the internet fun. If TikTok goes away, we'll miss out on that social experience we want to be having and our ability to discover and connect with others because nobody does it better.”

While the drive for innovation may remain, the absence of TikTok would create a void that other platforms would vie to fill with a captive audience.

“A ban on TikTok could bring about the birth of a new generation of short-form video platforms, ones that learn from TikTok's success and bring something fresh to the table,” she says. “Regardless, a ban on TikTok in the US would be a game-changer for the future of short-form videos and could have ripple effects throughout the tech industry.”

China trims TikTok power at home

Banning TikTok is not without precedent. The Indian government has banned it since 2020 along with dozens of other Chinese apps on national security grounds, following border clashes with China. 

In the US, any similar move need to take into account First Amendment concerns.  “An outright ban, especially one targeting Chinese companies writ large, risks looking like Sinophobia,” says reporter Alex Palmer in the New York Times article “How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis.” 

Ironically in China, TikTok’s success is considered a threat to the Communist party for its potential to offer unfiltered news and views. that the state there has taken considerable steps to control.

 “The company is caught in the middle between the old era and the new — too Chinese for America, too American for China,” says Palmer.

“[In the US] TikTok is considered a Trojan horse — for Chinese influence, for spying, or possibly both. In China, meanwhile, a broad crackdown has sought to rein in high-flying tech companies and their founders, out of fear that, with their influence, independence and popularity, they were becoming alternative power bases to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Founder Zhang Yiming has taken a back seat from his role as CEO, while the Chinese government takes more control. According to the NYT, the Chinese state recently took a stake in a ByteDance subsidiary — the implications are unavoidable. 

“The Chinese government took one of three seats on the subsidiary’s board, wielding a level of influence incommensurate with its nominal stake. To turn a blind eye to the potential risks posed by a company like TikTok is to ignore the political, economic and social infrastructure of control that the Chinese government under Xi has spent more than a decade constructing.”

 

ISE2023 Show: Content, eyeballs and money

IBC

The organisers of the ISE show in Barcelona this week couldn’t have wished for a more successful event, writes Adrian Pennington.

Attendance on the first day (24000) was reportedly a record for any event at the Fira centre which also hosts Mobile World Congress. The final total of 58,107 attendees, up from the 43K who made it in 2022, feels like it will continue to trend upward and soon surpass the 2019 peak of 81000.

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“The AV business is back from the road to recovery,” said ISE Managing Director, Mike Blackman. “We see it on the showfloor with a huge amount of product launches. We see it in the size of stands. We see it in the number of people and we hear it in their conversations.” 

Aside from putting on a well-run show, the reason lies in the breadth of industries that digitised media now covers.  

“ISE is as relevant to my colleagues running the America’s Cup - in hospitality, the visitor experience, the big screens - as it is for me looking at broadcast communications equipment,” said Stephen Nuttall, the Head of TV for the America’s Cup in a keynote. “You might get my TV team going to some of the other conferences but the whole of our team would come to ISE.” 

Whether the market is B2C or B2B, brands are becoming professional broadcasters in their own right. 

 “The differences between broadcast, film, live, AV and game production is starting to be less important than the commonalities,” said Marcus Brodersen CEO of graphics software company Pixotope. 

“What excites us the most is that we see many industries leveraging techniques from professional media production. They all need to easily and rapidly create high bandwidth visual communications.” 

Brodersen also pointed out that the technology historically flowed from the high end then trickle down to commodity use. “But the high-end workflows for film and TV have not changed that much,” he said. “We increasingly find that is the so-called lower group of commodity corporate AV that is driving a lot of innovation which then trends upwards.” 

 

The convergence of video 

In a sign of just how converged the broadcast, film and AV technology fields have become, Spanish media giant Mediapro Group chose the show to announce a major Euro 3 million investment in virtual production. 

Tatxo Benet, Managing Partner, MediaPro said, “As a traditional broadcaster we were the original audio-visual company. Now banks, theatres, schools, automotive – everyone is becoming a AV company.” 

With an eye on producing more content using virtual production techniques, MediaPro will open four new studios between now and 2026 in Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Miami. Each will combine large LED walls with chroma screen facilities. 

“There is no broadcast, only content and eyes – and money,” Benet said. “The AV sector will be huge in the future because it will be in every big company in the world.” 

Benet was speaking at ISE’s inaugural Content Production and Distribution Summit. Programme chair Ciaran Doran, said, “Whether you’re a mainstream broadcaster, a newbie influencer or a brand looking to become a broadcaster this is one of the most important times in our industry. The Venn diagram of how AV has overlapped with broadcast is bigger than ever and much more intense.”  

Virtual Production will be increasingly used for all high-end visual communication, said Brodersen. “VP will be ubiquitous. Virtual production will eventually be indistinguishable from live production.” 

For instance, VP can be programmatically controlled – “something possible with online media but less so with traditionally produced content,” he said. 

It can also be produced just-in-time. “In a way, VP content is never ‘locked’ and can be adjusted at any time,” he said. “All video based content will eventually have the visual impact of high end feature films combined with the connected and scalable nature of online content and the immersive and social experience of video games.” 

To underline the point, Brodersen was joined on stage by Stephan Ukas-Bradley, VP Solutions, Americas, ARRI and Stacia Pfeiffer, VP Producer, Lux Machina – two executives once more likely to be found at media and entertainment focussed events. 

 

Realtime revolution 

The future of live events is immersive, interactive and here now, according to experts convened by show co-owner AVIXA. 

“We are experiencing a realtime revolution,” said Will Case, Director of Innovation at NEP Group company Creative Technology. “The ability to change content and have content react in realtime is what gives us amazing experiences.” 

Pfeiffer of Lux Machina identified the rise of branching narratives such as Netflix heist drama Kaleidoscope or experienced at a museum or live event. “The audience becomes a player in the story,” she said. “As creators we can start to consider our audience more of a character and sometimes a protagonist.” 

Sarah Cox, Founder, Neutral Human cited ABBA Voyage as a prime example of what to expect from events in future. “We can’t all create ABBA Voyage but as more venues open that contain all the infrastructure necessary to digitise the audience experience they can start to offer [those tools] for artists to create blended experiences in a more cost effective way.” 

There was also advice to those embarking on immersive adventures. “If you’re looking to start up a creative studio your second hire should be a coder,” said Cox. “Creativity and technology innovation happen at the same time now. Iterative prototyping is what pushes innovation forward.” 

Case highlighted the arrival of immersive audio as the missing ingredient for immersive experiences. “Audio always played second fiddle to the big screen but to create true immersivity everything has to work together. Spatial audio connects you with the experience. Now it’s all about what you can do with it.” 

The video games industry may be where Epic Games’ business originated three decades ago but its presence at the show is a sign of huge potential for licensing Unreal Engine and software like MetaHuman Creator to the AV community. 

“From architects to CAD design to retail installations our software is already being used extensively outside of games,” said Epic’s Business Director for Broadcast and Live Events, BK Johannessen in the opening ISE keynote. “NASA use Unreal in their training sims. There are many vendors who would like to integrate a realtime engine into their product to build industry specific use cases.” 

Jean-Michel Jarre 

French electronic music wizard Jean-Michel Jarre was at ISE in the company of speaker manufacturer Coda talking about how immersive audio technology can finalise realise his aural vision. 

“I have always been interested in the relationship between sound and space,” he said. “When I started with Oxygene [in 1976], I was trying to expand the space with my music.” 

But there was a problem, he said. “When you compose for a symphony orchestra you visualise the orchestra in front of you. In a recording studio you have to deal with speakers in front of you. In a concert you have a PA system in front of you. Artists have long had a two dimensional relationship with music. 

“The problem is that stereo doesn’t exist in nature,” Jarre continued. “When a bird sings, it sings in mono. It is the environment around us and our ears which create perspective in sound. But with today’s technology, musicians can at last create music as we experience sounds in day-to-day life.
It is like being inside the music.” 

For Jarre, technology and art go hand in glove. “Without the violin there is no Stravinsky,” he said. “Without the camera there is no Almodovar, no Jean Luc Godard, no Tarantino.” 

He said that he composed [2022 album release] ‘Oxymore’ in 360-degrees and treated an audience to a mix of tracks played back over Coda’s new SPACE Panels. 

Barcelona seeks to become creative home 

With the city confirmed as the home of ISE until at least 2025, Barcelona is using the show as part of a wider strategy to brand itself as Europe’s creative hub. 

The 37th edition of the prestigious yacht race the America’s Cup, for example, will be hosted by the city from Autumn 2024. The Disseny Hub, the city’s institute for culture, will soon host its first experiential exhibition of digital art. 

“What ISE represents is what Barcelona wants and needs,” said deputy mayor Laia Bonet. “A re-industrialisation of the city that fosters quality jobs and initiatives at the intersection of culture, digital innovation and sustainability.” 

ISE returns in January 2024. 

Gearing up for a world without traditional broadcast TV

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The momentum towards an all (or overwhelmingly dominant) internet-TV future is gaining momentum. The soaring rise in popularity of Free Ad Supported TV (FAST) channels is a clear signal that video delivery is going online-first.

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The relaunch by ITV of its streaming hub ITVX (including a notable shift to VOD-first for scripted drama) and the tangible growth of live streamed sports (e.g on Prime Video, AppleTV+) are further signs that the tipping point has been breached. Traditional ‘internet’ services like YouTube are also quickly becoming ‘TV’ services. Even TikTok is launching a TV app.

“Imagine a world that is internet only,” BBC Director General, Tim Davie told the RTS in December. It isn’t hard to do – but it’s proving harder to achieve from an advertising standpoint. “There’s still a lot of live linear viewing but it is all been delivered online,” Davie added, suggesting that in little more than a decade, traditional broadcast TV and radio will be switched off and content choice will become infinite.

This future is here now. It is one where smart TVs – already in more than two-thirds of UK households - will have a critical role to play as the main entertainment gateway into the home. It’s one where consumers will slide seamlessly between OTT, CTV, SVOD, ATVOD, PVOD BVOD and so-on calling it all simply ‘telly’.

We call it Advanced TV. That’s a deceptively simple term that encapsulates all non-traditional TV delivery. But as you can tell by the bewildering alphabet soup of acronyms,the industry is a long way from speaking the same language.

Silos exist in every area of the marketing industry and it’s no different when it comes to Advanced TV.

From a technical perspective, Advanced TV is dominated by big broadcasters with walled gardens, and fragmented further by new ad platforms (Netflix and Microsoft; Twitch and Amazon, YouTube and DV360), all of which means that the sort of holistic view we’d love to see across the TV industry isn’t possible just now.

There are legitimate concerns. Given the tight GDPR restrictions, players are understandably cautious and protective of obtaining and sharing customer data. The ability to gauge the effectiveness of Advanced TV campaigns is holding back investment. Compared to the long-established buying and measurement patterns of the traditional linear TV advertising, Advanced TV advertising is a far more fragmented and opaque space.

What is agreed by broadcasters, content providers, agencies and brands alike is a need for common measurements and a gold standard currency that integrates all linear and nonlinear viewing in the UK.

The good news is that this is changing.

That Netflix signed up to Barb’s live and overnight ratings is a significant stride forward. The full launch of CFlight in 2023 (a major measurement-focused collaboration between the UK’s leading broadcasters) will be another big step. Likewise, the progress of Project Origin, the ISBA-backed initiative to build a cross-media measurement platform, shows that as an industry we’re moving in the right direction.

Advanced TV is democratising TV advertising for a whole slew of digital-first brands. Furthermore, Advanced TV offers a bridge between traditional brand-building TV campaigns and interactive sales activation.

Over the next year we will see further progress in forging a new industry built on a common language, common goals, common technologies and a common desire to create a bigger, bolder Advanced TV serving the needs of agencies, advertisers, broadcasters and the entire viewing audience.

Creating a perfect recipe for the head of the kitchen in Iron Chef Mexico

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Culinary TV shows are always pressure cooker environments, but the hottest kitchen of all is Iron Chef. The reality format, based on a Japanese original, pits professional chefs against a resident master ‘Iron Chef’ in a cook-off against the clock to win the mythical ‘katana’ and earn the title of ‘legendary chef.’

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The latest edition, produced by Netflix, takes the battle to Mexico where seasoned pros challenge three of the country’s most acclaimed chefs, Roberto Solis, Gabriela Ruiz, and Francisco Ruano, to cook five dishes in one hour built around a specific theme ingredient.

“In the kitchen, it is organized chaos,” says Julián Baños the show’s technical director and head of D Vision, which provided the filming equipment used on the show. “To watch these master chefs make five dishes in only one hour with ingredients they may be unfamiliar with is exhausting and incredible – but we have to capture absolutely everything.”

Baños was hired by Executive Producer and Showrunner Oscar Botia, and was in talks with Executive Producer Eytan Keller, who directed Iron Chef America, to design the look of the new show to be shot in Mexico City to draw upon the rich flavors of the country.

“Eytan was very clear that we had to do Iron Chef Mexico – not remake Iron Chef America,” says Baños, who collaborated with directors Ricardo Villarreal and Daniel Piza Ruiz, and lighting designer Felix Peralta on the creative. “He wanted a strong cinematic look with dramatic lighting but also wanted to shoot a lot of the show handheld, to feel raw and dynamic.”

In preproduction, Baños set up a stage with food and a lighting grid to test a variety of cameras on the Netflix list of approved models.

“This show is full of colorful food, so the ingredients need to pop,” Baños says. “The skin tones are always important to get right plus we’re using saturated lighting from LEDs. These were the three pillars of our test and three things that are really hard to balance.”

There’s no faking the hectic nature of the show’s centerpiece competition. The Iron Chefs and their challengers really do just have one hour to cook five dishes. With no second chances, Baños determined this necessitated eleven cameras operating simultaneously in the Kitchen Stadium.

“That’s why we chose KOMODO,” he says. “We knew KOMODO had a much better dynamic range - in the order of a stop or two - than some other cameras we tested. The global shutter played a key part in the decision. If we’re going to be emphasizing the shakiness of a handheld camera, you want to retain as much resolution in the image as possible.”

Three KOMODOs were assigned to each of the chef teams and their two sous chefs. One KOMODO was trained on the host, another on the judges and two were placed on cranes. Another roving KOMODO operator recorded additional material. All cameras were paired with Zeiss Compact Zooms and Zeiss Supreme Primes.

Meanwhile, RED MONSTRO captured the plating shots and RED GEMINI was selected for all chef interviews. “MONSTRO gives you amazing resolution and color,” explains Baños. “It’s perfect for bringing a very natural look. You can ‘taste’ the plates with your eyes.”

The MONSTRO was paired with the Laowa Probe 24mm, a Laowa 12mm and a regular Zeiss Macro. They used Zeiss Supreme Primes with the GEMINI.

“GEMINI is very good with skin tones and the interview room was a bit darker,” says Baños of the selection. “GEMINI is great at working in darks. It’s also very tolerant to noise.” 

To maximize visual quality and give editorial scope to punch into shot in post, they shot 6K REDCODE RAW to R3D raw files using MQ compression. With all the culinary action for each episode shot in a single day, it equated to 20-24TB per day for which local postproduction house Nonstop Studios allocated 300TB for the whole show.

“When the chefs are competing against the clock nothing can fail from our point of view. The KOMODOs have a 150-watt battery that lasts up to two hours, so that was a bonus and covered us for the show’s most critical element. We also arranged a Formula One style pit stop strategy to change media on the fly.

“With a well-calibrated sensor achieved through black shading, you can use neutral lenses and all you need to do is check the white balance and you’re basically good to go,” explains Baños. “We added a LUT that brought down the mids (luma value) slightly and added a little bit of saturation, so everything looked more graceful. The KOMODO allows you to saturate the camera with LED lighting but you never get outside of the color gamut - that is what none of the other cameras we tested were able to do.”

Iron Chef Mexico demonstrates how far Mexican cuisine extends beyond the tacos, burritos and fajitas of Tex-Mex exports. From Indigenous cultures to the Pacific seaboard and the flavors of the Yucatan peninsula to Spanish and Asian influences, Mexican cuisine is rich, varied and surprising. Themed episodes tasked the chefs with creating deserts incorporating chilies and dishes using cacti.

“Cacti grows everywhere here, and you might think it’s all the same,” says Baños, “but that’s like saying all mushrooms are alike. There is so much variety in flavor and its s wonderful to see how ingenious these chefs are in creating food that may sound strange but is shockingly good.”

 

Anatomy of a miracle: Recreating the dramatic cave scenes for Thirteen Lives

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The world held its breath for three weeks in 2018 as a team of divers attempted to save 12 young soccer players and their coach trapped miles underground in a water-filled cave. The heroic rescue succeeded against all the odds in what director Ron Howard has called “a triumph of volunteerism” in contrast to the “triumph of professionalism” which characterized his previous clock-ticking account of real-life survival, Apollo 13.

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The seemingly impossible outcome was solved due to the ingenuity, skill and bravery of groups of diverse people putting their lives and livelihoods on the line for one common goal.

“The event itself is very well known, almost everybody knows what happened and how it ended but the missing link is what happened inside the cave,” explains Thirteen Lives’ cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. “We wanted to fill in the missing link.”

Mukdeeprom is a Thai native who received international acclaim for shooting 2010 Palm d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and the Academy Award-nominated 2017 feature Call Me By Your Name.

He says he was drawn to the story by Don Macpherson and screenplay by William Nicholson, because of the way it respected the truth of events. “There is no superhero,” he says. “Our aim was to create a similar look and feel to that which audiences would have had experienced watching on the news but with cinematic quality.”

The filmmakers could draw on some of the copious smartphone and action-cam footage recorded by onlookers and divers at the time. However, the heart of the action for Thirteen Lives takes place in the cramped, dark, highly dangerous tunnels often underwater for which there was next to no first-hand source material.

They did, however, have the expertise on set of two of the lead divers on the rescue, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, who are played by Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell in the film.

“The underwater part was very important and we had to focus on this first,” says Mukdeeprom, whose main concern was that the caves – rebuilt in large tanks in Queensland to be as realistic as possible – had no light source.

“Our set was open at the top so I could light from above with very soft fluorescents and then adjust the lighting scene to scene based around sources from headlamps or working lights [that the divers brought into light various parts of the chambers.”  

He selected a large format camera to give context to the environment augmented with a smaller, lighter camera for a variety of point of view, over the shoulder and detail shots.

“In this environment, because the operator has to work up close to the divers, there are so many shots that the LF couldn’t give us. We had to have a camera handy enough that someone can just grab and use. Andrew Rowlands [A Camera] suggested the RED KOMODO and I agreed with him.”

The KOMODO’s small 4-cubic-inch form factor, weighing only 2.1 pounds made it ideal for the grab-and-go situation. Though tiny, the 6K camera includes a global shutter sensor and maintains the high standard of image quality and dynamic range required.

KOMODO was used extensively for cave interior shots of boys on the rescue gurney with the camera attached to the gurney as well as wide shots looking down at the boys and their rescuers as they moved from the cave to the open air. Many scenes used the KOMODO in an underwater housing to shoot wide angle close ups and diver to diver shots. “Sometimes Andrew let the actors who were diving grab the camera and take their own reaction shots.”

The space was so tight that this worked really well, and several shots filmed by Farrell and Mortenson or Joel Edgerton made it to screen. “Colin Farrell loved shooting Viggo with the KOMODO underwater. He was one our best underwater camera operators!”

Footage was recorded RAW with a LUT which was devised by Adam Glasman, senior colorist at Goldcrest Post, applied for video monitoring set.

The story’s pivotal moment occurs in chamber nine of the cave when the divers eventually discover the team cold, hungry, scared but safe sheltering on a small rocky shelf. It was also one of the first scenes the production shot.

“This was the most difficult set in terms of emotional complexity,” says Mukdeeprom. “We had to stick to the facts and create the right emotional balance between relief at discovering the boys with the realization of what whether it would ever be possible to bring them out alive.”

This documentary-style extended to the whole aesthetic of the movie, while scenes depicting the chaos underwater were influenced by the language of the horror genre.

“Since the Thai boys were first time actors, Ron decided on minimal rehearsal. He didn’t want any marks. Of course, they and the actors have to move to be convenient for camera but, we let them move where they wanted in the scene, and we captured it.

While Rowlands was tasked with filming wides Mukdeeprom looked for other angles or actions that might be useful in telling the story in the edit. In many spots in the underwater cave sets they were able to jam the KOMODO into tight spaces and get shots of divers that would be otherwise not possible.

“KOMODO was very helpful in some of those really tight spaces. It allowed me so much more freedom to let these shots unfold.”

Filming the make-shift base camp outside the Tham Luang caves presented its own technical difficulty. Since the rescue took place during monsoon season, they needed to turn Village Roadshow Studios in Australia’s Sunshine State into a lush, muddy jungle with stormy skies.

“In Queensland, the weather tells you to be on the beach, not a film set,” says Mukdeeprom. “I was always fighting the sun, so we had to black it out. We had a 70m x 30m fly swatter (canopy) to block some of the light which was still not big enough for the area we needed to cover. We had to move scenes and plan the shot according to the direction of the sun. We’d shoot scenes in a corner where there was most shadow. We had rain towers beneath the fly swatter. Managing all of this was very complex.”

 

CES 2023: Controlling the Connected Home and Media Delivery/Distribution

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Smart TVs now represent the most important point of entertainment aggregation, control, and data collection in the connected home, according to a new report from Parks Associates, “2023 Top Insights – Smart Home,” based on findings from the Consumer Electronics Show.

The research analysts report that annual home service spending is $340 billion across home phone, internet, mobile, security and video services, amid continued growth of value-added services and connected devices in the home.

Consumers now place more value on their home’s internet service than previously. Increases in connected device ownership, increased streaming video, and a large remote workforce have further strengthened the importance of home internet.

Parks reports that consumers are seeking new bundles and services incorporating multiple service offerings, including home internet, pay-TV, landlines, mobile phones, and home security. The rise of these bundles, including broadband value-added services, has more than offset the decline in traditional bundles, it finds.

Such bundling and aggregation offer the traditional TV broadcaster “a path forward to reimagine video offerings in a multi-channel, multi-platform world,” the analyst says.

Data about consumer viewing via connected TVs allow providers to offer an improved experience with more relevant and personalized experiences for the viewer. Meanwhile, advertising partners can execute targeted marketing campaigns based on specific interests and behaviors. Parks cites new technologies promising to bring the “shoppable ad” vision to reality on TV through T-commerce experiences.

Content remains king — that is, the most significant factor influencing consumers’ viewing decisions regarding retention, engagement, and customer acquisition, per Parks’ report. Of this, live content has become a key component of many OTT service offerings and a staple of the consumer video portfolio, with good reason.

Sports programming, the biggest and most valuable component of live TV, is migrating from traditional broadcast television to internet streaming channels. Parks thinks that this transition makes it challenging for sports fans to locate content but that this creates opportunities for providers if they can attract fans with a bundled experience.

Internet service providers, meanwhile, are “modifying their relationships with pay-TV, treating the service as a value-add to home internet, and transitioning away from legacy cable head ends to cloud-based infrastructure and streaming TV services.” The goal is to reduce operational costs and widen service appeal, says Parks.

The analyst also notes that piracy is a real problem, potentially costing more than $67 billion dollars worldwide. It expects streaming services to experiment with new ways to protect content and to explore business models that can help recoup lost revenue from password sharing.

This Is What’s Next for AI: Content, Coding… and Western Civilization?

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On New Year’s Eve, OpenAI president and co- founder Greg Brockman (@gdb) tweeted: “Prediction: 2023 will make 2022 look like a sleepy year for AI advancement & adoption.”

The most well known AI tools are those from OpenAI, such as image generator DALL-E 2 and text generator ChatGPT, but the tech is advancing so quickly that by the time a certain industry has grasped the implications of the latest development, another has emerged to leapfrog in sophistication.

“Now it’s beginning to head toward video, and then it’ll go 3D,” Mark Curtis, head of innovation at Accenture’s Interactive division, tells Patrick Kulp at Adweek. “We’ve had to continuously rewrite this trend over the last month and a half because new stuff was coming up. And I worry that everything we’re going to say is going to be irrelevant by February.”

While imagery and text were the big leaps forward in 2022, there are many other areas where machine learning techniques could be on the brink of industry-transforming breakthroughs including: music composition, video animation, writing code, and translation.

“It’s hard to guess which dominoes will fall first, but by the end of this year, I don’t think artists will be alone in grappling with their industry’s sudden automation,” says Vox’s Kelsey Piper.

He predicts we’ll soon have image models that can depict multiple characters or objects and consistently do more complicated modeling of object interactions (a weakness of current systems).

“I doubt they’ll be perfect, but I suspect most complaints about the limits of current systems will no longer apply.”

Piper also suggests better text generators — ones that provide better answers to nearly every question you ask them. That may already be happening. Microsoft is reportedly planning to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine.

“Instead of providing links in response to search queries, a language model-powered search engine could simply answer questions.”

Marketers also say 2023 will be the year that brands and agencies get serious about how synthetic content can be deployed to serve bottom lines and augment human creativity.

 “The things that agencies should be doing is beyond experimenting with this; they should be calculating now what it means for their business,” Curtis tells Kulp.

Generative AI, he added, “is a tool humans will use to kickstart creative thinking or to create the base level of something, which they then adapt continuously, or to move more quickly. …It is not an answer to everything, but it does radically shift the economics of a lot of what we do in creativity.”

Agency BBDO has experimented and agrees that the ad industry should be thinking more about the various ways it could revolutionize how creatives do their jobs.

“In my mind, it doesn’t appear that many of the people commenting on this have even used the tool,” Zach Kula, group strategy director, tells Adweek. “If they did, it would be obvious it’s not even close to replacing creative thinking. In fact, I’d say it exposes how valuable true creative thinking actually is. It puts the difference between original creative thought and eloquently constructed database information in plain sight.”

Experts say it’s likely that technology like voice cloning, synthetic imagery and generated copy could align in the next year to allow marketers to create full realistic-seeming videos out of whole cloth with AI.

According to Kulp, those capabilities could make it easier for marketers to make targeted, personalized video ads aimed at different segments at scale.

In addition to possible upsides, generative AI also has a host of risks that any marketer needs to be aware of, including the potential for accidental copyright infringement or plagiarism. Brands are already preparing defenses against fake content such as auto-generated user reviews or defamatory content generated at scale.

Within five years, 80% of enterprise marketers will establish a “dedicated content authenticity function” to root out AI-generated misinformation, according to industry analyst Gartner. The consultancy also projects that 70% of enterprise CMOs will list “accountability in ethical AI” among their top concerns as more regulations and risks develop.

In fact, 2023 will be marked by a tightening of regulations around AI. In the US, Microsoft (an investor in OpenAI), GitHub and OpenAI are being sued in a class-action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law by letting Copilot, GitHub’s code writing service, regurgitate sections of licensed code without providing credit.

In Europe, the EU’s proposed AI Act could limit the type of research that produces AI tools like GPT-3, experts have warned. According to a TechCrunch article by Kyle Wiggers, so could more local efforts, like New York City’s AI hiring statute, which requires that AI and algorithm-based tech for recruiting, hiring or promotion be audited for bias before being used.

“Next year will only bring the threat of regulation, though — expect much more quibbling over rules and court cases before anyone gets fined or charged,” Wiggers says. “But companies may still jockey for position in the most advantageous categories of upcoming laws, like the AI Act’s risk categories.”

Brockman’s tweet is actually alarming given the rapid advance of the technology and the failure of rules and ethical considerations to keep pace with it.

“I think a slow, sleepy year on the AI front would be good news for humanity,” Wiggers says. “We’d have some time to adapt to the challenges AI poses, study the models we have, and learn about how they work and how they break.

“And… we might have time for a more serious conversation about why AI matters so much and how we — a human civilization with a shared stake in this issue — can make it go well.”

Synthetic content generators are going to seem trivial in comparison to the broader sweep of AI which is to effectively mimic human intelligence. A human-level AI would be what Max Roser, founder and director of Our World in Data, describes as a machine, or a network of machines, capable of carrying out the same range of tasks that humans can.

Not so long ago the stuff of science fiction, the date for such a development actually happening has been brought a lot closer.

According to a number of experts and surveys, including by the Metaculus community and research by Ajeya Cotra, who works for the nonprofit Open Philanthropy, there is large agreement that the timelines for achieving human-level AI are shorter than a century, and many have timelines that are substantially shorter than that.

In Roser’s article, the majority of those who study this question believe that there is a 50% chance that transformative AI systems will be developed within the next 50 years. In this case, Roser says, it would plausibly be the biggest transformation in the lifetimes of our children, or even in our own lifetimes.

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