How did Johnnie Burn become an Oscar-winning Sound Designer?

IBC

Oscar-winning Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on why being a runner is still the best route to success and how he creates the unsettling unorthodox worlds for Yorgos Lanthimos, Jordan Peele and Jonathan Glazer.

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Oscar-winning Sound Designer Johnnie Burn believes there’s no shortage of people wanting to come into the industry but that postgraduates often have a preconceived notion of what to expect that may not align with commercial pressures.

“Having a degree is a great way to get in but anyone who wants to succeed still has to maintain the attitude that there’s a lot to learn,” he says. “The learning you have from college will take you through the later part of your career much more quickly but unless you go and make tea, no one else in the company going to have that respect for you because they’ve all done it.”

Burn, who created the sonic world for films including Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest, runs Academy Award and Bafta-nominated audio postproduction house Wave Studios, having grown it with Co-Founder Warren Hamilton from a basement in 1999 to a team 30 people on four floors in Soho. The business also operates facilities in Amsterdam and Manhattan with an LA arm on the list to open.

“We do have initiatives to mentor young talent and take people in as runners all the time, often to give them a start in the industry whilst they figure which part of the craft attracts them. Some go on to become part of our own team,” he adds.

Burn himself is an advocate of the traditional runner route as still the best way of achieving success. “Absolutely, I would rather begin with someone who is keen and bright and probably someone who loves film,” he advises. “Get out there and take a piece of film that you admire and try to do it yourself. Think about not just the technical aspect of the recording was made but how sound is used to steer a narrative.”

Paying dues

Burn’s career is a typical tale of determination, long hours and passion gravitating from tea boy to apprentice, but it might not have happened if a childhood trauma had not temporarily deafened him.

“When I was 17, I wedged a water bottle under a running tap at my parent’s house,” he relates. “I was just going to leave it for a minute but I went for a run and forgot. When I got back, the bottle was only half full but when I touched it, it blew up into shards of plastic. I suddenly went deaf. I went to my bedroom which was filled with music kit and electronic gadgets. I turned them on, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I could only feel the wobbling of the speaker. I was convinced I’d permanently damaged my ear drums.

“About 20 minutes later my hearing came back but it focussed my mind and made me realise what I liked. I did a term of a business degree at university but I knew then that my passion lay elsewhere. I dropped out to get a job as a runner.”

His first big break came as a runner at the audio facility on the cusp of the digital revolution. He began splicing tape with a razor in the old style then got a chance to work on machinery like the digital synthesiser, Synclavier.

“I was interested in hip hop in the ’80s and I made bits of music myself but this was the most amazing version of all the stuff I had in my bedroom. So when everyone left at 6pm every night, it was mine to play with. I basically slept at work for six months without anyone knowing,” Burn relates. “I stayed up as late as possible playing with all the kit. One day a client from an advertising agency came in to record an actor’s voice for an Abbey National commercial but our sound engineer was off sick. I was there with a cup of tea and said I knew how to do it. And they let me. That led to other work with the client’s agency and basically got my foot in the door.”

Soon afterwards, he met Jonathan Glazer an up-and-coming director of music videos and commercials. Together they worked on numerous projects including the famed promos for Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity (1996), Unkle’s Rabbit in Your Headlights (1998), and the Guinness ‘Surfer’ ad (1999).

Having set up Wave Studios, Burn became the go-to sound mixer for dozens of music videos, collaborating with artists such as Madonna, Prince, George Michael, David Bowie, and The Spice Girls.

Then in 2003 he became, quite literally, the voice of Skype.

Back then, Skype was a tiny start-up and its Scandinavian founders had moved to London into the street next door to Wave. “Because they’d seen Guinness Surfer they asked myself and music producer Peter Raeburn to make them a ring tone and a log-in sound. We went round to their tiny room and they described this idea of an internet phone call. Peter suggested we should just say ‘Skype’ and so, back in the studio, we recorded 20 people saying the name which became the iconic sound. The Skype phone ring is me going ‘ring’ and I also mouthed the hang-up noise.”

Making movies

In 2004, Burn caught his second big break. “Jon [Glazer] called and said he had a film coming up.” Birth (2004) starring Nicole Kidman was Glazer’s follow-up to feature debut Sexy Beast and led to 2013’s Under the Skin, on which Burn acted as sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer.

“Jon had hidden cameras and mic in a van as Scarlet Johansson drove round Glasgow pretending to be lost and interacting with the public,” Burn relates. “I was in the back of the van with Jon and others looking at camera feeds on large screens and listening in.”

To present Johansson’s alien look at life on Earth, Burn also hid a mic on the end of an umbrella so he could yawn and stretch his arms without attracting attention but still get the mic close to people in the street.

“I captured this mesh of sound which just sounded so unusual it felt like it could be the world as it would seem to a being from a different planet. We were deliberately harvesting sounds from the real world that had anomalies and sounds you would not naturally put on film.”

It was this work that, years later, attracted director Jordan Peele to ask Burn to create the unsettling soundscape for Nope.

Burn is also part of the group of artists working with auteur Yorgos Lanthimos and has sound designed The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite and Poor Things.

“On The Favourite, we took a rough cut of the film and reenacted everything we saw on set including doors opening, footsteps down corridors and wind down chimneys but with Poor Things everything was so surreal the challenge was to record normal sound and present it as strange.”

For the sound of the ship’s engine, Burn used a heartbeat “because a diesel engine would have been boring,” he says. “The birds we hear in the woods are not the birds you would find in that environment. It’s all about world building with Yorgos so that the audience is not aware of the manipulation when in fact they are being treated to something quite odd.”

Sound of sorrow

Then of course there is The Zone of Interest, the chilling fable about looking anywhere else but at the atrocities committed next door.

“Jon and I saw it as two films: the one we see and one we hear. His script didn’t mention specific sounds. We only ever hear the camp, we never go inside it but we had to figure out how to have the camp only in sound. I panicked at the beginning since to have it all hinging on an enormous layer of sound felt an incredible responsibility. We wouldn’t know if the film was actually going to work until late in postproduction.”

The solution was to research the Auschwitz archive. Burn scoured witness testimonies that had used descriptive language to describe what they had experienced and drawings left behind by survivors.

He sourced correct sounds for the planes, motorbikes and guns of the era, understanding that the guns they used at Auschwitz were ones from the First World War because the more advanced weapons were at the front.

For the ‘family drama’ we see on screen, Burn hid dozens of mics around the house which was built to the exact specification of the camp commander’s house by Production Designer Chris Oddy.

“Normally in a film you want to capture the dialogue but here it was about capturing the sound of people in a house, their footsteps, teacups rattling. We did a sound mix of the film without any sound of the camp and then went through a process of adding the sounds of the camp. That process lasted over six months with Jon and Editor Paul Watts working in London, and myself at my studio in Brighton working from the library I’d built from the research that I’d made.”

A test screening with heads of department and distributors A24 led to some significant tweaks to the soundscape. “We had scenes which sounded quite pastoral with the sound of the crematoria only on in a couple of shots. It was Chris [Oddy] who suggested that it didn’t sound as industrial as it should. He said, ‘You’ve undersold the scale of what is going on.’ It came back to trying to represent the truth while trying to be respectful to events.

“We went back and put in more sound of the crematorium constantly operating like a machine in the background. It’s not only historically accurate but provides a shorthand that circumvents the need for more sensationalised sound.”

Burn says Glazer is “sort of a genius” to work with. “Rigorous, very hands-on and a really lovely guy to hang around with. We talk football and food. Looking back, he really was my film school. I had one of the best directors in the world telling me why he filmed a shot the way he had. I’ve been very lucky to spend an enormous of time with him. The downside is that he will not stop until something is perfect. I must be a bit like that too.”

BT repackages Broadpeak technology for more efficient live streaming

StreamTV Insider

British telco BT Group and French IP solutions developer Broadpeak have teamed up on a means of delivering live streamed video that claims to be more reliable, efficient and sustainable than existing methods.

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Announced this week, the companies said they expect a number of major broadcasters and content companies to trial the “breakthrough” technology this year.

Dubbed MAUD - Multicast-Assisted Unicast Delivery – the solution is in fact a rebadging of a technology that Broadpeak developed a decade ago, with a difference.

MAUD’s backbone is multicast ABR (mABR), a technology developed by Broadpeak in 2013 and commercially deployed a year later, combined with Broadpeak’s nanoCDN. Together these technologies are able to convert personal unicast streams to one (multicast) stream for delivery over the network, transforming the stream back to unicast in the player’s device, saving bandwidth in the process.

Customers already using this include France’s Bouygues Telecom and Telecom Italia.

Taking mABR a step further

BT Group has taken mABR one step further by integrating Broadpeak’s tech with content provider player applications, eliminating the need to modify customers’ apps, saving time and money.

“The basis of MAUD is our multicast ABR technology,” confirmed Xavier Leclercq, Broadpeak VP of Business Development to StreamTV Insider. “This is something we've deployed on a one to one basis with ISPs like Telecom Italia and with broadcasters to elevate their IP service. The limitation has been the fact that you need a relationship between the OTT provider that has the content and the network.

“With MAUD we are trying to remove this barrier. You don't have to onboard OTT providers since the platform is designed to dynamically get the content from the network when it becomes popular. It will seamlessly create a multicast stream and manage that all the way to the home player. The idea is to take multicast ABR and make its integration completely transparent to the player application.”

The deal is also significant in that it signals a wider trend among ISPs and OTT providers to move away from reliance on CDNs for live streaming content.

“Current CDN models don’t work very well with live. The fact is you need multiple terabits per second of capacity but you may only use it for a very short amount of time,” Leclercq said. “So, we’re starting to see the network being more relevant when it comes to distribution. At the end of the day ISPs know their network better than anybody else. Multicast ABR is a better technology because the network is doing the scaling rather than the CDN.”

He said the trend has been building over years as streaming replaces broadcast.

“We've seen ISPs build their own platform for distributing video using multicast rather than unicast because it’s more efficient.” 

Operators like Telecom Italia did this to run pay TV offer TIMVision, he noted, and having done so started to bring aboard OTT providers, such as DAZN, to distribute over its network.

Leclercq observed that telcos are also starting to move from legacy IPTV services streamed to the set-top box to distributing video to native internet-connected devices.

BT, for instance, recently rebranded its live TV and streaming platform BT TV as EE.TV (EE is BT’s mobile brand) and incorporated it into two new EE TV boxes, as well as bringing a set-top box experience to Apple TV 4K.

Also in the UK, Virgin Media relaunched its streaming service Stream on a Roku-style box without a TV tuner.

“Many ISPs are doing the same thing,” said Leclercq. “IPTV is a big cost. The set-top box is expensive. They are looking for a way to turn off IPTV and move to a more cost effective way of offering video services without the heavy set top box and hard drive and different tuners.”

The question is how do you transport vast amounts video over your network if it's not your video? If everything is over the top, how can ISPs deliver this with the right qualitative experience at the right cost?

“A main drawback with OTT video delivery is scalability. Since OTT requires unicast streaming whenever a subscriber requests a piece of content, an extra bandwidth resource is consumed in the network.  The cost can be prohibitive when handling popular sports content and even more if it is in 4K,” said Leclercq.

For Broadpeak and BT Group multicast ABR is the answer. Leveraging it can reduce traffic up to 85-90% in some parts of the network, Broadpeak claims.

“The end to end network will never be 100% multicast,” commented Leclercq. “For example, when you change [the] channel you need to get the first couple of chunks of video for a faster response or if you have packets being lost, which happens over WiFi, so you need some transmission over unicast but 90% reduction in traffic is possible and that will immediately reduce cost.”

He said the quality of experience also improves for OTT providers using mABR amplified networks. “We see a reduction of 89% on error rates [measured using third party Conviva data] comparing mABR distribution against traditional CDNs,” he said.

Ian Parr, broadband engineering director of BT Group, told StreamTV Insider, “Operators are facing the growing challenge of delivering more and larger amounts of live television over the internet, rather than traditional broadcast. We have reached the stage where we have extensive CDN caching in our network, and this is not sustainable as we lean into an all-IP TV future. MAUD will help by taking on the biggest driver of the demand for network and cache capacity - which is live (and particularly live event) based streaming.”

He added, “CDN and MAUD are complimentary. The MAUD solution will work with CDNs to achieve those efficiencies. We will continue to deploy caching to provide on-demand TV delivery, games downloads.”

Reduced rebuffering, enhanced sustainability

A key metric for OTT live sports streamers is the rebuffering rate: How often the screen freezes when you're watching a game. Broadpeak claims its technology reduces rebuffering by a factor of four.

“MAUD uses the same underlying technology. The transport is the same, the way the content is packaged and delivered is the same but how you get content in and out changes with MAUD,” he noted.

Sustainability is another plus since telcos don't need to build a physical CDN with banks of servers waiting for requests to be served.

“The issue with live is that it is nearly impossible to predict how popular the streams are going to be. If you wanted to do that, you might have to get a CDN, but it would be used for a couple of hours, once a year,” Leclercq explained. “This we think is not sustainable because you end up with lots of servers that are deployed, connected, powered doing nothing and you might use them one percent of the time. This is really bad in terms of sustainability.”

BT claims that MAUD uses up to 50% less bandwidth during peak events by reducing energy usage through the reduction of the number of deployed caches.  

BT further said in its announcement late last year that broadcasters, including the BBC, have been involved in evaluating the technology to support a range of live content.

Parr stressed that MAUD isn't specifically targeted at "broadcast clients" but at large OTT content delivery service providers who currently drive the need for huge peak network capacity when they deliver large events. The main benefits, according to Parr, will be network cost savings by avoiding having to build scale to meet periodic live event demand and the corresponding energy efficiency.

“Our partnership with Broadpeak will help us accelerate the delivery of the benefits of MAUD by integrating BT's MAUD intellectual property with Broadpeak’s current market leading mABR solutions,” he said.

Doors of Perception: How Consumers View the Possibilities for AR/MR

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New research by Amdocs reveals that consumers are eager for more advanced augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) experiences, particularly if Apple is involved.

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“The Era of Mixed Reality” report from Amdocs found that users are looking for these immersive technologies to enjoy gaming experiences first and foremost, with shopping and exercise not far behind. However, there is also a significant knowledge gap when it comes to AR and MR.

“Just like the iPhone turned the internet into mobile, mixed reality will disrupt how we interact with our surroundings and immerse ourselves in new experiences,” said Gil Rosen, CMO of Amdocs.

“But first, we’ll need to ensure networks, connected devices and the content that runs on top work together seamlessly. With immersive experiences, there is zero tolerance for lag or quality degradation, and to make it amazing, the entire ecosystem needs to evolve as one.”

A staggering 67% of consumers have limited understanding of AR and MR. Half of consumers (49%) haven’t used it at all in the past three months. While a third (33%) are aware that AR can be used to gain digital insights while shopping or traveling, nearly a third of consumers haven’t a clue what AR or MR is.

Those that do are keen to use Apple product or associate Apple with AR/MR experiences, Amdocs reports. More than half (52%) of consumers felt an association with Apple on AR and MR would make them more interested in it, with 38% saying they would be likely to buy an Apple product.

Sixty percent of consumers, according to this report, would prefer to use a mixed reality approach in favor of a full VR metaverse (40%). More than half of users would be interested in trying the new technology, depending on how much it cost.

Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of technology and head of strategy at Amdocs, added, “These findings uncover several essential factors, first and foremost being the need for better education around what’s possible from AR and MR experiences, as well as preparing networks that can better support in-demand, intensive and seamless experiences. As AR and MR experiences become more widespread, we’ll see the rise of new-found ‘experience bundles’ that capitalize on specific personas, coupling connectivity with entertainment, education, enterprise and more.”

Research: Peak TV Has… Peaked. So Here’s What’s Coming Next.

NAB

Born circa 2013, died 2023 — 10 glorious years marking the rise and death of Peak TV — is disinterred and examined in a new report, which also predicts what Hollywood and viewers can expect of the next phase of home entertainment.

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In a nutshell: the rise and the demise of Peak TV (roughly the period between House of Cards to the finale of Succession), was the result of a number of factors not least being an oversaturation of prestige drama and a content spent that jumped from $139 billion in 2014 to $243 billion by 2022.

One thing we can be sure of going forward: fewer premium series, more content like the network cable TV of old.

Variety Intelligence Platform has crunched the numbers, produced by data marketer Luminate, which were presented by VIP+ media analyst Tyler Aquilina at SXSW.

2022 was actually the year that TV finally actually peaked. Luminate data shows 2023 saw a drop in original series output across all major streaming platforms, plunging from more than 2000 titles in 2022 to just over 1600 last year (20% drop year over year) — following two decades of almost continuous growth.

Arguably, as Aquilina outlines, the boom in TV began in the early 2000s, when cable networks realized that they could make themselves more valuable to viewers and therefore gain bigger audiences, by creating slates of original programming that viewers wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else. Think The Sopranos, Sex in the City and Mad Men.

But 2013 was when Netflix entered the equation, bringing originals like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.

“This was a key tipping point in the history of TV because 2013 was the first time when the FCC measured an annual drop in US pay TV subscribers,” said Aquilina. “In other words, that’s when cord cutting really got going for the first time started being whispered about in Hollywood circles.”

Skipping forward to COVID-era 2021 and 2022, the amount of original content on streaming “just balloons” — but early 2022 also marks the first quarter when Netflix began losing subscribers as macroeconomic conditions bite.

“It’s enough to make everybody freak out and pretty much changed the calculus around streaming overnight. All of a sudden, Wall Street investors are paying a lot more attention to how much money these companies are spending and how much they’re losing on the streaming platforms.”

Studios like Warner Bros. were pouring billions of dollars into original content in order to compete with Netflix and racking up massive deficits in the process. This led to cuts in spending and that meant less TV shows.

VIP+ data shows that 2023 was the first year since 2013 when the number of original shows released on SVOD fell — from 1,000 in 2022 to less than 800 last year.

But that doesn’t quite paint a full picture. VIP+ and Luminate expect aggregate spend on TV content in Hollywood to go up this year. Only by 2% or $4 billion to around $247 billion, but a rise nonetheless, with Disney expected to be the biggest spender at around $33 billion.

“More significant than just how much these companies are spending is where this money is going. Because companies have shown they’re still willing to shell out for the right programming, which at this point mainly means sports broadcasts.”

Analysts and industry observers expect that spending on general entertainment TV is going to be flatter over the next few years meaning less money for TV and consequently fewer shows are going to be produced.

“The industry is headed for a contraction, there’s just not going to be the level of output that we had over the past decade,” said Aquilina. Factor in time spent by younger audiences on TikTok and other social media has a detrimental impact on time spent with streaming TV.

So how is TV going to change in this post-Peak TV environment? Apart from fewer originals there are likely to be a lot more shows based on popular IPs (like HBO hit The Last of Us) — shows that cater to existing fan bases.

“In other words, TV is going to look a lot more like current film studio slates with a lot of IP based blockbuster content, there’ll be a handful of prestige awards bait titles thrown in there to keep the Emmys coming in.

Shows like Mad Men, Atlanta or The Bear will have a much tougher time getting greenlit in this environment, he suggests.

The days of a large number of expensive to produce or creatively risky shows are likely over. “You can get more for your dollar with unscripted content like reality shows,” he said citing Netflix series Love Is Blind.

In tandem with that, expect more reruns of existing content — a trend that already supports a lot of streamed video consumption (think Friends, Grey’s Anatomy, The Big Bang Theory).

There’s going to be a greater reliance on international non-English language TV. For one major reason, it’s cheaper.

“These shows can be produced for less money internationally than shows typically cost in the US. They can be acquired for much less than you’d spend to create a new drama or comedy series shot here.”

Korean drama is the logical place to look for a hit but VIP+ points to shows emanating from Sub-Saharan Africa and India. That’s because with the Europe and US markets pretty saturated, major streamers like Netflix are targeting growth in other territories and are doing so by investing in local content.

“I wager that an Indian series may very well become the next Squid Game,” Aquilina said. “I think that in the next few years an Indian series really becomes the next big breakout international hit.”

How else will post-Peak TV change? The rise of AVOD and FAST, plus new provisions in the new writers and actors guild contracts, will see ratings reported from streamers who were previously black boxes when it came to exposing how their content fared.

That might be taken as a plus, at least for media companies with broadcast divisions. VIP+ highlights other silver linings too, although they are fairly thin.

For example, if peak TV was defined by supply far exceeding demand, “too many shows being produced and more options than anybody needed that could actually really benefit the health of the business in the long run,” Aquilina contends.

Because of that consumers may have an easier time finding something to watch — if there are fewer new options coming out every single week.

There may be fewer prestige dramas and comedies being produced, but this could benefit everybody in the industry. That’s because the post-Peak TV landscape will look a lot like the network TV of old: shows with broader appeal, shows with less extravagant budgets, shows with longer seasons, and shows with episodes released weekly.

“This is going to necessitate a less artisanal approach than many signature shows that the PTV era took and it’s going to mean a return to broader sensibilities that define network television. The new era of TV may result in far fewer classic shows, far fewer experiments, less daring shows, but there is a chance it could put Hollywood on a path to getting its business model back on track.”

Why the Next Business Model for Hollywood May Be Web3, Blockchain and the Metaverse (Again)

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Remember Web3? Or Blockchain? Or the Metaverse? If think that was just a fad and a phase, even a scam, then think again. The next generation of the internet is being built on this technologies and Hollywood can either ride the wave or drown.

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“At one point, the M&E complex and the technology complex were roughly equivalent in market power and negotiating strengths,” says Seth Shapiro, a two-time Emmy Award winner and an advisor at the intersection of media, technology and fintech.

“Maybe even, at the beginning, entertainment even had a stronger lead. But from a market cap perspective Big Tech has completely eclipsed the studios. I think among the M&E community there’s a sense of ‘how did that happen and what can we do about it from happening again?’

“The idea of this session is to talk about some of the ways that the NAB audience can leverage new technology to level the playing field and even gain a higher share of the spoils from whatever comes next.”

Shapiro is set to moderate “The Next Business Model For Hollywood” at NAB Show, asking Media & Entertainment to think again about Web3, blockchain and the metaverse. Hollywood is in the middle of a sea change, he argues, driven by these newer modalities with the continuous evolution of audience behaviors and the economics of a post-strike Hollywood. Featuring executives from AMD, Niantic, Theta Labs and XSET, the panel will take place on Tuesday, April 16  at 1:30 PM in Room W225.

The first generation of the internet, which began in the 2000s, was greeted with widespread skepticism by studios (among other industries) that people would ever want to — be able to — transact online. Clearly, e-commerce was a gamechanger which should have given M&E a better chance to reset the business model with the arrival of Web 2.0. But it did not.

“During this period technology companies like Google and Facebook supplied short-term cash to media companies for IP and then they applied that IP to help grow their audience,” Shapiro says. “As a consequence their market cap and their audience multiples logarithmically. While studios gained short-term capital they were in fact helping grow the long-term enterprise value of Big Tech companies.”

You would think that M&E would be twice bitten, twice shy as it heads into the next era of Web3. And yet…

“A lot of people view Web3 as just a garbage term,” Shapiro says. “They’ve all heard ‘metaverse’ and ‘blockchain’ and NFT so many times and they’re just inured to it. They think it’s just more hype. Well, some of it is hype and some of it is scam, but the absolute truth is that that was exactly the same at the beginning of Web1 and Web2.

“There were just as many scammers trying to rip off investors or consumers in Web1 and Web2 as with Web3 but the core technologies at the foundation of Web3 are inevitable. Future generations are clearly going to spend more time in in the metaverse, in virtual worlds and gaming environments,” he continues.

“The fact is people are already living more of their lives online. The digitization of currency and direct transactions between consumers and whoever they want to buy from whether it’s an influencer, creator or a studio is happening. Disintermediation is real and it’s coming for entertainment.”

Taylor Swift shopped her Eras Tour concert film to the studios, but the studio machine would only agree to release it in 2025. Wanting the film to be available as soon as possible for fans, Swift bypassed the studios and took the film straight to theaters.

Another classic example is the deal George Lucas struck with Fox for Star Wars in 1977. While the studio landed the film rights, the far greater piece of business was in the merchandise.

“Fox didn’t realize where the real value was but that’s what’s really interesting. So let’s talk about and look at the ways we need to change and think about IP to more effectively capture where the real upside is going to be. It is changing now and the models are changing fast.”

Then there’s AI. While generative AI, digital ownership, and the creator economy change the face of media and update the flow of revenue, how do writers, producers, and technologists set themselves up for the next wave?

“Together with blockchain infrastructure and virtual worlds AI will interlock to create the next great series of economic opportunities for tech companies and for media companies if they grasp what they need to do,” says Shapiro.

“The source of the IP will wind up in a much more direct relationship with the buyer of the product. That’s where studios have a huge opportunity. IP creators have a huge opportunity or risk being left behind,” he predicts.

It’s not as if M&E didn’t see it coming. The major record labels buried their head in the sand when new digital streaming technology enabled artists to connect directly with music fans.

“The triumvirate of blockchain, metaverse and AI is going to take other people out of the M&E equation the same way,” Shapiro says.

“The major record labels were essentially in the trucking and manufacturing business. Their real leverage was the fact that they could print your records and get them into the store. That’s all gone. Those pieces of the business no longer exists but in the process of that they’ll be new opportunities.”

That’s the optimistic note. In Shapiro’s view the root cause of many of the most successful businesses and business models of our time, including big tech, is IP.

“More often than not the traditional media business was involved in some sense in creating quality IP. But Big Tech has so far been adept at taking that IP and amplifying it in such a way that they acquire millions of users. Studios might get the license fee, which is what they asked for, but they didn’t get any of the upside in terms of all value generated from that transaction,” he says.

“Those who have the best ability to market and monetize IP will win. That means Hollywood, producers and M&E executives should make a real effort to learn the new tools and learn the new ecosystems that are coming so that they can more effectively monetize their content.

Quality AI Models Don’t Have to Include Controversial or Copyrighted Content, Right? Right?

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Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, there has been a fight over how large AI models are trained. In one camp sit tech companies such as OpenAI that have claimed it is “impossible” to train AI without hoovering the internet of copyrighted data. And in the other camp are artists who argue that AI companies have taken their IP without consent and compensation.

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Adobe’s approach is unusual for a major tech company in that it has tied its future to building generative AI products without scraping copyrighted data from the internet.

In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review, Adobe’s AI leaders are adamant this is the only way forward.

At stake is not just the livelihood of creators, they say, but our whole information ecosystem. What they have learned shows that building responsible tech doesn’t have to come at the cost of doing business.

"We worry that the industry, Silicon Valley in particular, does not pause to ask the ‘how’ or the ‘why.’ Just because you can build something doesn’t mean you should build it without consideration of the impact that you’re creating,” says David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s digital media business.

Adobe says it wants to reap the benefits of generative AI while still compensating people for the work that has gone into training data. It also argues that by not indiscriminately scraping the Web there’s less risk of bias and misinformation being output. Adobe’s model has never seen a picture of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, for example, “and it cannot be coaxed into generating political misinformation.” It has not been trained on any copyrighted material, such as images of Mickey Mouse.

On the other hand, tech companies like OpenAI argue that they are able to build more powerful AI models for the benefit of everyone, including artists. The misuse or mistakes in public GenAI tools can be used to improve the model, they maintain.

While Big Tech is the prevailing model for AI use, are Adobe and other supporters of content verification initiatives winning the argument?

Cinema Audiences Want That Engagement and Emotion. Here’s How to Rethink Release Strategies.

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This year, audiences flocked back to theaters for movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer, with recent research from Omdia predicting that theatrical releases will generate close to $50 billion globally this year.

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Jackie Brenneman, founding partner of cinema industry consultancy The Fithian Group, is optimistic about the future of the business, as she will outline during the NAB Show session, “SMPTE’s Future of Cinema: How Capturing a Musical Event for Global Audiences Enhances the Immersive Experience and Breaks Traditional Barriers,” part of the new Core Education Collection: Create Series conference track.

The panel, moderated by Carolyn Giardina, senior entertainment technology & crafts editor at Variety, will also feature Laurel Canyon Live president John Ross and independent director Sam Wrench.

“It’s still a very active and viable distribution platform for content owners and a place to experience something unique for consumers,” Brenneman says. “We just need to get a lot smarter at marketing it.”

“It’s not that music is specifically the future of cinema, but that the future of cinema is increased diversity of content appealing to all audiences,” says Brenneman.

It just so happens that Taylor Swift’s Eras tour concert film is tailor-made as a case study.

“It’s about marketing and awareness. So, the big differentiator and the reason we’re having this discussion surrounding Taylor Swift, was that the marketing strategy was so effective. In a single tweet she was able to alert hundreds of millions of people to her new movie, at a time when fans either couldn’t afford tickets or found her tour sold out.

“She used cinema as a means to go direct to fans. And it was just perfect timing,” says Brenneman.

“Of course, not everyone has such a great connection with fans as Taylor Swift but there are a lot of lessons to be learned. It showed that there is a way to really tap into fan desire and to do so affordably and effectively.

“With Barbie and Oppenheimer, the same idea applied. Fan-driven attendance and awareness is really key. It meant that marketing is both the challenge and the opportunity,” Brenneman elaborates.

It’s also important to understand that the movie theater industry has undergone a seismic change in the last couple of years.

For virtually the entire history of the movie theater business there’s been a large, fixed cost in getting any piece of content into a theatre. It would cost a thousand dollars or more to make and deliver a movie reel to a theater.

Studios had to be selective about which theaters they picked so as not to play too many competing films in certain markets. Since the switch to digital the industry introduced the virtual print fee (VPF) where the studios subsidized the cost of transitioning to digital projection equipment. Now those VPFs have expired.

“To all intents and purposes, they are gone so all of a sudden, we are in a true digital age of cinema,” Brenneman says. “That can and should mean more supply, better rates, and more flexibility to target audiences.

“We are just at the dawn of this. What the Eras concert showed is that you can make an offer to the entire market and allow exhibitors greater control.”

Prior to forming The Fithian Group, Brenneman was EVP and General Counsel to the National Association of Theatre Owners. In those roles, she was a frequent speaker and panelist at global exhibition events on the importance of data and optimism in shaping the narrative and future of the industry.

Recent research has shown how important social media (especially influencers or creators) is in driving awareness of new film and TV shows. Whilst this should be part of the media marketing mix, a reliance on social could exclude large parts of the population.

“We risk getting into this vicious cycle where we think only certain types of people go to the movies, because those are the only people that we are actually speaking to,” Brenneman says.

When you break down the demographics of big blockbusters its clear older audiences are coming in the same proportion that they were coming before the pandemic.”

Movie theaters, she will argue, have such a special place in the community. “Not all communities exist online. We know how to start to reach online communities but what about real communities of real people? A lot of influencing is done in the real world. Movie theaters are right there in the hearts of their communities. They can actually speak to real communities, offer promotions to local schools, or local senior centers, charities, and community groups.”

“If you’re able to tap into your local in-person influencer groups and market to them you can find the groups that would be most likely to see something like Taylor Swift or the Metropolitan Opera or whatever narrative feature or alternative content you are showing.”

A lot of recent discussion about the future of cinema pitted it against streaming which she says she never understood. “Streaming is an in-home option and far more of a competition to cable, but it got into consumer’s minds that home viewing was a replacement for cinema. Which is bizarre, because when people were going to Blockbuster every weekend and renting three movies and still going to the theaters no one thought to question its viability.”

Brenneman continues, “Post-COVID, and cinema has come back stronger. It’s clear they are not going to kill one other. Even while consumers have had their streaming habit entrenched while they were stuck at home when movie theaters re-opened, they started coming back in record numbers.”

That has to be because going to the movies is different than watching a movie at home. It is a completely different experience. This is not only because movies played back in IMAX-style large format screens and in enhanced properly calibrated surround sound are in fact a better and different experience than watching at home; there is also neurobiology research to back it up.

“Human beings didn’t evolve to actually regulate and feel and process emotions alone. We look to others to validate our response,” Brenneman says. “We don’t know how to feel when we are alone. We don’t laugh all by ourselves. We need to read the room and learn how to feel. The human emotional experience is a shared experience not an individual experience. We didn’t evolve that way.”

“Since almost all movies exist to allow you to have an emotional experience a movie theatre is the best place to experience that catharsis of emotional release,” asserts Brenneman.

“In addition, there’s still no cheaper way to get out of your house and do something chill, than going to the movies. People can talk about price all they want, but find me a cheaper, chill alternative to take a bunch of friends or family out of your house. There’s nothing better.”