IBC2025: Supply chain efficiencies won’t save sinking legacy media

Streaming Media

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One word dominated conversations at broadcast equipment show IBC this week – and it wasn’t AI.

Efficiency is on everyone’s lips. With little genuine tech innovation around the legacy media business and the vendors who supply it are battling to survive by stripping cost and speeding processes. Applying artificial intelligence to pretty much everything seems to offer the only hope for broadcasters needing to balance the books before their audience is vaporised by streamers, social media and YouTube.

Delegates arrived at IBC this year in a state of flux, unsure of the direction to turn as tumbling economics and AI frenzy turn the industry inside out. 

Broadcast kit trade body IABM set the scene: “This marks the second year we see a progressive decline, with a softening in market confidence and an increase in negative sentiment following a peak in 2023,” said its Head of Knowledge and Insight, Chris Evans.

The impact of Covid, global conflict and tariffs (real or threatened) have put media into a tail spin – but arguably these macro forces have only hastened the inevitable.

“The streaming wars are over. Netflix has won. Let’s move the fuck on,” media cartographer Evan Shapiro told IBC.

The IABM highlighted French broadcaster TF1’s first of its kind ‘partnership’ with Netflix (to allow the streamer to distribute its programming) as a strategy that could be replicated.

“Limiting content distribution alienates the next generation of audiences, for whom content is more important than platform,” said Evans.

The traditional media market is “stagnant” according to Shapiro “while Netflix has doubled its value from $200bn to over a half a trillion dollars.” He was referring to the challenge faced by studios like Disney and WBD which retain (currently) the weights of a linear business.

For Shapiro, the real battle is no longer between streamers but between traditional media and what he called the “big tech Death Stars” - YouTube, TikTok, Amazon.

“Big tech is big and it’s in a dominant position, but it’s not in control. The audience is.”

Reaching that audience before it deserts entirely to social and streaming is the headache facing broadcast media executives.

“Media production has been done the same way for 60 years,” said Lewis Smithingham, EVP at strategic consultancy Monks. “The biggest change has been the way we have to deliver. Audiences are more fragmented and they are across a wide number of locations. We cannot use a straight line of sight any more since there is no primary platform.”

His proscription was ‘Cloud Native Agile Production’.

“We can use software running in the cloud to get to these new audiences – because software moves at a much faster rate. There is a misconception with cloud that it is expensive. Well, yes, if you leave it on the whole time. If you leave your aircon on the entire summer it is expensive. What we need to do as an industry is take the efficiencies in traditional IT and bring it into production.”

It seems strange that we’re even talking about a reticence to move to cloud but it only demonstrates the huge lift and shift operation that most broadcasters and studios are still going through.

“We now have real world experience of helping broadcasters navigate the shift from satellite and fibre to an IP first infrastructure,” said Stephen Stewart, Executive Member, IET Media Technical Network. “We’re not just talking about cloud-based disaster recovery - now cloud is beginning to redefine broadcast.”

Vendors like Imagine, Avid and Grass Valley have shifted their hardware based products of a decade ago into cloud. Noting this, Marc Aldrich, CEO, Zixi said, “The elements that were once purpose built are now into the cloud. The industry is going through a massive transformation but cloud introduces a level of agility that allows you to achieve greater efficiency than ever before. “

Martins Magone, CTO at Latvian-based SaaS cloud playout vendor, warned against co-opting existing hardware into the cloud. “It will not work. Microservices are the key.”

Anastasia Melnikova, Solutions Architect, Gcore which offers CDN, hosting and edge cloud services said if broadcasters wanted to stay competitive they needed not just cloud but AI.

“The AI infrastructure and the streaming structure is converging,” she said. “The direction of travel  is that broadcasters will have one cloud provider that can do CDNs, encoding and all the digital AI models for subtitles and content moderation.”

Examples of how AI is now delivering efficiencies in the media supply chain abounded at IBC. Warner Bros. CTO Avi Saxena was among those talking up the impact of AI in-house at the company.

AI is to scale subtitling. Tech built on Google’s Vertex AI development platform is automatically converting video content into text to make HBO Max’s captions more accurate. This cuts costs relating to generating captions by up to 50%, while creating new file captions can also take up to 80% less time, he revealed.

“If we did ten languages before now we can do 20 languages without blowing up the cost and without taking two years to do it. We are using GenAI in very carefully chosen approaches where it makes sense but still keeps the core of our business safe.”

Tubi is doing something similar by using multi-modal AI to extract rich semantic scene-based metadata from its catalogue of 300,000 titles.

“Folks spend a hundred hours a year on streaming services finding something to watch,” said Blake Bassett, VP of Product for Tools & Infrastructure, Tubi. “Humans are hit by 7GB of information every day – this is the same amount that people used to consume in a lifetime. But if you know a lot about your content and a lot about your audience you can then accurately infer what other content they might like using AI and surface fresh content.”

In tests this using AI to tag and surface content outperformed third party data. “We’ve seen double digit increases in watching, conversion and retention,” he said.

Tubi are using similar multi-modal AI to match the right ad to the right person at the right time. “Do that in a way that works for brands and audiences and we can charge an elevated rate to advertisers.”

All of the talk about AI at IBC concerns efficiencies in the supply chain. Very little concerned GenAI’s ability to create content itself. In fact, this issue was studiously avoided as a ‘no comment’ by vendors like Adobe when asked. That’s because GenAI and content creation is a sensitive issue.

It’s kind of deemed okay if captioning and translation teams lose their jobs under the mask of ‘AI efficiency benefits’. Such folk fly under the radar. No-one here is yet grasping the nettle of front line artist redundancies even though the freelance market is being decimated.

“Using GenAI for final pixel content creation is the biggest dilemma at Warner Bros, said Saxena. “We build around content creators. We have IP, we work with actors and we want to be very respectful of that. We're moving very cautiously so as to not alienate the bread and butter of this business. We still think generative AI is not going to replace talent.”

Yet making film and TV is as expensive or even more expensive than ever. Mike Darcey, former COO at Sky TV turned industry commentator highlighted this is the next big bottleneck.

“The cost per hour of big shows is getting beyond the budgets of many ad-funded broadcasters. There are still powerful commissioners who decide what to greenlight and what risks to take which means many creative ideas do not see the light of day,” he said in a IBC keynote.

“We need to consider the possibility that it will no longer cost $100m to make a movie, or $10m an hour for high end TV. It might soon be $10k or less, which would seem to mean it would be open to almost anyone with a good idea. It’s brave to exclude that possibility entirely.” 

IBC2025: An industry being taken over by creators

Streaming Media

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“We consider broadcasters as creators,” YouTube told an audience of traditional media at IBC in Amsterdam this week but it is far from clear if broadcasters fully understand the implications.

At IBC, a trade show for technology that underpins the business of TV, the rise of YouTube, the growing professionalisation of content creators and the attempts by vendors to court them was a notable trend.

Fish where the fish are

A billion hours of YouTube is watched on TVs every day and broadcasters need to figure out how to adapt.

“The biggest myth is that YouTube cannibalises TV,” said Justine Ryst, MD, YouTube France. “What we observe is that YouTube is the best ally to TV. Our job is completely different to TV. We do not commission content nor own IP. We offer a global playground for creators with tools to analyse and monetise your audience with global reach.”

She added, “We consider broadcasters as creators.”

Self-described ‘Media cartographer’ Evan Shapiro urged broadcasters to wake-up to the facts and change.

“We now have a melding of mainstream media and the Creator economy into what I call the Affinity economy,” he said. “It's a whole new set of rules. What's fascinating is that traditional media tends to dismiss, the Creator economy, or be afraid of it, but if they really understood that - if they embraced the Creator economy, they could dominate it. But they just choose not to right now.”

For people under the age of 35, YouTube is far and away the number one television device, Shaprio added. “In second place is Netflix and number three is TikTok. I think that the traditional media players don't understand that these Generations matter, and then if they don't adapt and change they're going to lose Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha forever.”

There is some movement. The IABM reported at IBC that the emergence of YouTube as the top TV viewing platform in the US in the past six months (and second behind iPlayer in the UK) is not just driven by the creator economy.

“Broadcasters are leaning into the platform as an opportunity to increase the reach of their content, and commissioning original, digital-first material designed for these platforms,” said IABM analyst Chris Evans.

In the UK the leader is Channel 4 which has grown its audience on YouTube by 169% since putting volumes of content, including long form, on the platform a year ago.

“Younger audiences are moving digital first and while we would like them to come to our app the marketing cost and effort became too hard,” said Grace Boswood, Director of Technology & Distribution the broadcaster. “We fish where the fish are. That’s the logic of our YouTube strategy.”

She admitted that some C4 execs remain sceptical of the YouTube partnership. “To make it work it has to be 1+1 =3,” Boswood said. “We sell our own advertising around our longform content on YouTube with a revenue share that allows our sales team to do their job. They can sell at a better rate than YouTube’s team making it financially positive for us and the risk of experimentation worthwhile.”

The broadcaster remains selective about what the content it publishes outside of its own platforms. Tentpole show Great British Bake Off, for example, remains on TV.

“The discovery of Channel 4 on YouTube is what we need to work on. The more data we get about the audience on the platform is vital.”

Vendors accessorise the iPhone

Broadcasters are not alone in attempting to reach younger demographics. As video technology democratises the business of media creation its leaves vendors scrabbling for margin. Is it possible to retrofit broadcast gear for the creator market?

Several exhibitors were launching new product at IBC directly targeting the TikTok generation.

“The creator market is huge,” declared Peter Barber, CEO at video monitor and recorder maker Atomos. “We're seeing the evolution of the creator market. Creators who once filmed everything on their phone now want to increase their production value. They realise that if they want their video to look better than the next creator, they do that with more professional cameras.”

Atomos has expanded its range of products targeting creators to include a cloud platform for media storage, backup, sharing, and review (ATOMOSphere), a video co-processor for smartphones (Ninja Phone) that lets you record from professional HDMI cameras and the ability to live stream straight into Grass Valley’s AMPP production environment, all from a mobile setup.

The ecosystem is built around the iPhone and it’s not the only company which is now accessorising for Apple.

Blackmagic Design introduced the Camera ProDock, a sub-$300 device with a variety of connectors that attaches to an iPhone and enables additional production flexibility from storage and audio to batteries – helping turn the iPhone into a more professional video tool.

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max can already record 4K at 120 frames a second. “With the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max you are now getting optics and capabilities that extends over and above many traditional hardware cine cameras, but because the iPhone only has one USBC connection point you're either going to use that to charge the phone or for one other accessory,” said BMD’s Simon Westland.

Blackmagic also has an app for the iPhone that gives users greater control over parameters like frame rate and white balance.

Adobe has just launched an app for Premiere Pro editing on an iPhone which includes multi-tracks  and audio waveforms. “In a field like social media, where every millisecond counts for your audience to stop them from scrolling, you can edit with precision,” said Jason Druss, Adobe’s Sr Product Marketing Manager. “You can take b-roll and literally put it over a track.”

Fussing with timelines on a small screen might seem anathema to pro editors used to working on Avid or indeed Adobe Premiere’s desktop version but you’re only showing your age, said Druss.

“If you're of the younger generation it’s just quite natural. For those of a certain generation, myself included, you'd think it takes a little getting used to, but when you see the multi-tracks and the waveforms on Premiere for iPhone it just makes sense. It really is the timeline experience of Premiere on your phone.”

Canon, a camera brand which transformed itself from stills to video to cater for the changing needs of the prosumer market, also targeted creators with its latest Cinema EOS model.

Creators are pro kit buyers

“The creator market seems to be where everything's going,” said Philip Harpley, technical product specialist at Canon Europe introducing the new EOS C50. This is a video first market opening up the Pro end of the photo camera market to more video options.”

This camera can shoot 7K video and 32 megapixel stills but importantly it’s the first EOS to feature the full frame 3:2 open gate recording. This enables creators to capture vertical as well as horizontal shots at the same time, output both to different memory cards, primed for social media.

Visiting IBC for the first time was Justin Dawson from the All Things TechIE Podcast. “This is a techie dream to have cranes, cameras and movable devices all here.”

His number one pick of the show was Stream Deck Studio, a control surface for broadcast environments made by Elgato.

Video and podcast producer Laura Wilkes from Communicating for Impact was also looking for kit to buy. “I'm looking for lights that we can use in small spaces and also for a pop-up studio to expand our current kit. I've already been to Sony to check out the FX2 camera if you're thinking about upgrading your camera too.”

Asked how many creators he thought were present at IBC, Atomos’ Barber said, “Pre-Covid the industry was siloed. Broadcast here, prosumer there. Now those lines are blurred.” 

IBC2025: The media factory embraces GenAI to automate supply chain

Cable Satellite International

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AI is delivering positive benefits to processes in the backend of the media factory, according to the CTO of Warner Bros. Discovery, Avi Saxena.

In a Keynote to IBC2025 last week, Saxena said the company was using AI to improve performance and cost reduce the supply chain, notably in versioning, marketing and discovery. He and other execs at the show including ITV CTO Simon Farnsworth touted the efficiency savings and scalability of AI to reach consumers on multiple platforms.

The elephant in this room was the impact of GenAI on content creation, a debate that is left for another day.

“GenAI is changing the world at a pace I’ve never seen before,” said Saxena, who previously worked for Amazon Microsoft and several internet startups before joining Warner Bros in 2019.

“Whether it is employee productivity, operational productivity or consumer experiences, GenAI is shaping the future. We are spending a ton of time trying to keep up with that and work out how we use GenAI effectively in media. Across every aspect of the company and every aspect of the product, GenAI has been massively disruptive. We have embraced that, and we are working a lot in that space.” 

Metadata is the key.

“The amount of metadata that can be extracted is insane. It has jumped from a few hundred data points to millions and millions. The problem is to optimise ways to extract it all and then activate it in our products.”

WBD is investing in hundreds of innovations in AI throughout its business from content creation to consumption, he said.

“The most mature area for AI is in ‘languaging’ for generating content captions,” he said. “If we did 10 languages before, now we can do 20 languages without blowing up the cost or taking two years to do it.”

He pointed to semantic search as “the ground breaking development” happening now as more and more consumers use natural language via their remotes to find content.

AI is also being used to increase engagement by improving the relevancy of video clips which viewers see when browsing content. These ‘drop in moments’ have to be picture only, without giving away plot and be brand safe.

“We can’t put together an army of humans putting together these nano-moments,” Saxena said. “This tech is nascent but we have been using it for every episode of Friends.”

While manual checks are still applied, the acceptance rate of AI-driven drop-in moments at WBD is 40% “which is incredible given how diverse our shows are.”

Content discovery represented the biggest departure from legacy media, he said. “With streaming there are dozens of ways consumers find content. So we are using AI to tag and describe the content of scenes such as the narrative, theme, mood and objects.

AI can recognise the emotion of the characters whether they are in a rage or frustrated, he said. “The model recognises the characters by their names and describes the scene with a rich text summary. The same model can generate metadata to improve contextual advertising.

“We feed this data to advertising categories to help us monetise the content and use it to power search for curating and marketing.”

Saxena stressed the company’s “surgical” approach to use of AI. “AI is not being used as a general tool. We have very surgical programs based on product, personalisation and recommendation. This verticalisation helps us go pretty deep with the technology.” 

The most sensitive use of AI remains for final pixel content creation and this was the area where Saxena and frankly every other executive at IBC was coy.

“That, for me, is the biggest dilemma,” he said. “Warner Bros. are a content company. We build around content creators. We have intellectual property rights. We have actors and we want to be very respectful of that. In this area, we're moving very cautiously so as not to alienate the bread and butter of this business. We still think GenAI is not going to replace talent.”  

ITV: AI is good for the industry

ITV has gone through a huge phase of experimentation and is running 250 applications of AI from finance and HR to analytics and production. This includes producing Generative AI adverts to reach the SME market in alliance with Comcast and Channel 4 in the UK.

“Historically we thought competed against the BBC or WBD but our competition is Google and Meta,” said Simon Farnsworth, CTO at the commercially funded broadcaster. “We have to generate more data, clean data. We are making huge investments in underlying data because the market opportunity is huge.”

Planet V is ITV’s ad sales platform and its best strategic investment, according to Farnsworth. “It’s a very large data platform about viewing consumer habits and a self-service portal for advertiser to target and book campaigns.

The important thing is ITV keeps all the money,” he said. “We hold and own all that data – that data can be really powerful.”

Lantern is ITV’s outcome measurement tool which ingests data from supermarket club cards among other places. “When people buy campaigns on ITV we can prove the effect on consumer behaviour – which is where Google has been so effective.”

For all the importance of ads to ITV’s business, Farnsworth stressed that its largest single spend is in content creation. “If we want to generate money though selling we’ve got to pile money into content.”

This now includes using GenAI for ‘Creative augmentation’ as illustrated with unscripted reality show Love Island franchised in 27 different territories.

“We had a team of 40 people creating shortform content for producers to look at and select suitable before filming. AI is now used to produce all of that content. The amount of candidates we screen has gone up from 300 to 1000 – and we’ve seen 13% uplift in viewing. That is a direct correlation.”

It has been using GenAi to pre-visualise the filming of decades old soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale to reduce production time and effort.

“We’re using AI as previz – not for end content. The scene will still be shot by a camera and crew. AI allows us to ideate quicker.”

As part of ITV’s PSB remit it must caption content for 23 regional news stations. That used to need 140 people and now it’s entirely automated with AI.

“Only about 25% of the news that we gathered previously went to air. We are now able to put all that content out with subtitles. We’ve never been able to do before. It’s niche viewing but its deeply important to our audience.”

It is using GenAI to extract data from images and voice recognition to create text descriptions and video clips of content to populate sites like ITVX – and claimed a 7% uplift in viewing as a result.

“We haven’t saved money. We have poured money back into above the line marketing. It is a more efficient way for us to build brand value to drive more viewing.”

He reported that ITV marketing teams are outputting 1000% more using AI than previously; and that it is using AI to reformulate archive content held on one million digitized tapes for international sale.

“We expect to grow revenue streams from outside our traditional customer base by 300% within two years because of AI. It's a really exciting opportunity and accelerating really quickly, allowing us to be much more profitable.”

“This is good for the industry,” Farnsworth insisted. “GenAI will flood YouTube with average content. Our shows have to be better and more distinct and we have got to use AI to that.”

 

“The Creator Market is Huge!”: Atomos CEO on the Growth of the Creator Economy at IBC2025

RedShark News

Just the ticket for better TikTok vids? We catch up with Atomos CEO, Peter Barber, on the IBC2025 show floor.

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Video technology is democratising the business of media creation which sounds like a good thing for creators, but leaves tech vendors scrabbling for margin. Is it possible to retrofit broadcast gear for the creator market?

Atomos is far from the only vendor attempting this trick at IBC (see Blackbird, Blackmagic Design), but is one of the most overt in courting the TikTok generation.

“You want your dance video to look better than the next YouTuber’s dance video,” says Peter Barber, CEO. “The creator market is huge."

“What we're seeing is the evolution of the market. The phones are always getting better but there's also an evolution where people are using their phones and also wanting to bring the bigger cameras in. These are creators who once filmed everything on their phone but who want to increase their production value, get a better camera, a better lens, but they want to keep their tool set the same. They realise that if they want to look better than the other creator, who's also in the same space, they need to increase their production value. And they do that with more professional cameras.”

A Ninja on the iPhone

Last year the Australian vendor debuted the Ninja Phone, a 10-bit video co-processor for iPhone 15 (and tablets) that lets you record from professional HDMI cameras.

At IBC2005 this widget is paired with a Mavis Camera app and the heavyweight cloud system of AMPP from Grass Valley allowing users to live stream via Wi-Fi or 5G straight into the AMPP production environment, all from a mobile setup.

Mavis Camera provides the control over recording formats, frame rates, colour balance and focus, with monitoring tools. Atomos’ Ninja Phone provides the connection to mirrorless and DSLR cameras. Contribution to the cloud via AMPP allows additional live feeds to be switched, recorded, and distributed as part of the production.

Atomos thinks this appeal to creators of behind-the-scenes content, fan zone reactions, or corporate events, or anyone wanting to shed bulky gear or complex setups.

“This has allowed us to turn on more features so not only can it record ProRes to the latest iPhones you can use anything that's iOS 18 or newer as a monitor and a recorder and a streamer. It gives you the option to do like either h.264 or h.265, recording or streaming from there. This is a great way for creators to bring big cameras into their social media workflow.”

The larger more successful creators are also operating teams of people involved in content creation and in running more sophisticated postproduction.

Oh, what an ATOMOSphere

“That's also part of the reason why we built ATOMOSphere,” says Barber referring to the ATOMOSphere cloud ecosystem for media storage, backup, sharing, and review. At IBC this has new mobile UI improvements and integrated speech transcription, as well as some special offers to tempt new members.

“It’s an affordable, media-friendly, cloud-based platform that fits a creator workflow cost effectively. We've also integrated ATOMOSphere directly into the Ninja Phone as well.

“If you're a high-end production company and producing for advertising agencies or a TV show with Netflix you need something like a Framei.o with all of that level of distribution and approvals. But that's a very expensive platform, and rightly so. They’ve spent millions and millions of dollars to build that but not everybody needs it. We had a lot of feedback from customers saying, look, we love Framei.o and for certain jobs that make sense, but for other less complicated, less expensive projects we need something else.”

Studio PRO-2710

Atomos is also showing its new Studio PRO-2710 reference monitor, the technology for which it acquired from a company called eCinema.

“That's given us a legacy and the IP to build really high-end reference monitors for colour grading. Typically, these are very, very expensive reference monitors. What we're trying to deliver is a monitor that gives you similar performance to those big monitors, but at a much more studio friendly price.”

A unique aspect of the monitors is the lighting panel at the back. Barber explains, “Because the lighting of your room actually affects your perception of what you're seeing on the screen. By managing, balancing, and calibrating your room environment along with calibrating the screen environment actually guarantees the colour. This is something that the big post-production houses and Hollywood have known for forever, and they obviously have the infrastructure to build these dedicated suites, but if you're at a home studio, how do you do that? That's why we've introduced this technology to bring it to a much larger market.”

Shinobi 7 RX

An IBC show debut from Atomos is the Shinobi 7 RX, a new 7-inch 2200 nit HDR monitor-only device with camera control and HDMI and SDI inputs.

“Plus, it also has wireless monitoring. This now interfaces with our Atomos TX RX video transmitter and receiver pack. You could actually walk around with it as a director’s monitor, focus puller’s monitor on set or program or preview display for video switchers. You can have camera control on Sony and Canon and a whole heap of other cameras. All for 700 bucks ($700/ €699).

Asked how many creators he thought would be present at a stalwart trade show like IBC, Barber was optimistic.

“Pre-Covid the industry was siloed. Broadcast here, prosumer there. Now those lines are blurred. YouTube continues to be a platform for a huge amount of content but Netflix and Amazon haven’t slackened either. There’s a vast amount of content being made and if you want to beat the competition you need higher production value at source. That is our bread and butter.”

 

Sony Showcasing Growing Spatial Awareness & More at IBC

RedShark News

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Sony’s IBC exhibit was, as ever, packed with tech for all corners of the industry from enterprise level cloud media via Ci to virtual production and content verification with the PXW-Z300. RedShark was also intrigued by a small but busy demo tucked away at the back of the stand featuring a monitor for viewing pseudo-holographic content.

The Spatial Reality Display (ELF-SR2), first launched over a year ago and seemed at that time to targets industrial applications with a cost (over $4000) reflecting this. Plus, you’d need serious GPU power to process it.

However, on the Sony stand it was shown paired with a pair of VENICE Extension System Minis. This new accessory for the VENICE 2 was announced earlier this year and has a footprint the size of an average smartphone  

“We’ve already had users put our original VENICE Mini on helmets or the front of motorbikes for cool action videos, but the Extension Mini is about four times smaller so we thought it would be cool to put two together,” Sony’s Stuart Newton told RSN. “In fact, when we paired them side by side, the distance between the sensors [the interocular] is perfect for 3D stereoscopic capture.”

The monitor at the show was screening previously recorded 3D content but Newton said you can connect two Extension Minis and live stream 3D to the monitor. “This would be ideal for creating content for something like Apple Vision Pro. Primarily we expect people to use the Extension Mini in singles, but you can also put these cameras in an array and do full 360 with each Mini recording at 8K.

Now available in two sizes (27-inch and 15.6-inch) the 4K LCD Spatial Reality display is built with a micro-optical lens over the screen which divides the image between your left and right eyes, giving an auto-stereoscopic (3D) experience. A proprietary high-speed sensor follows your eye movement “down to the millisecond”, sensing pupil position which an algorithm then crunches to process content for each eye “without lag”.

“The spatial content market is starting to take shape,” Newton added. “I think we’ll see a lot of new spatial content from VR/AR devices coming out and a lot more 3D content for movies.

An all-seeing piece of kit

There was a European outing for the Ocellus camera tracking system, Sony’s first such product which released ahead of NAB this year.

It provides marker-free camera tracking through five image sensors and comprises a sensor unit, a processing box, and three lens encoders. The sensor unit is small and fits directly on top of the camera body.

“Traditional camera tracking works by tracking physical dots in a space to calibrate camera movement,” Stuart Newton explained. “This marker-less system uses sensors to create a point space that maps out the entire space indoors or outdoors.”

It does this using Sony's Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) technology.

“You could attach the module to small Venice Mini and move the camera out of sight so some of sensors are blocked off from seeing the full field of vision but since it's already mapped out the space it still knows where it is.   

“It's basically an all-seeing piece of kit.”

While it can be used with non-Sony cameras, it is optimised for a Sony chain because its hardware enables the throughput of metadata (including about focus, iris and zoom) from the camera while shooting to external devices via Ethernet.

If the lens does not support metadata acquisition through the camera, lens encoders can be added to the camera to obtain it. The metadata is necessary for virtual production and AR.

Newton said Sony is working on making the calibration easier to configure.

“The good thing about this is that it will work with the whole range of Sony cameras including studio cameras for sports or news or you could even do augmented reality outdoors as well.”

An adjacent demo showed how the system simplifies and automates match-moving by utilising camera trajectory data from Ocellus working with software from Sony’s Virtual Production Tool Set (the latest version 3 of which is slated to release this winter). New features are a viewing angle colour correction, ray tracing acceleration, and calibration for third-party cameras.

Recording evidence of authenticity

The new Sony PXW-Z300 was announced in March, as the world’s first camcorder to embed C2PA digital signatures for recording evidence of content authenticity.

At IBC, Sony was showing how it could help broadcasters to verify footage by displaying the digital signature information compliant with the C2PA standard.

The PXW-Z300 incorporates an AI-processing unit and an image processing engine for human subject recognition based on face, eye, skeletal structure, and posture information. It also features an auto-framing function that automatically adjusts composition to keep human subjects centred in the frame.

Live Streaming

The TX1 enables live streaming from Sony cameras. Co-developed by Sony and LiveU, it is due for release in 2026.

The LiveU TX1 supports resilient bonded transmission for faster data transfers using multiple network connections. It enables automatic file transfers simply by connecting the device to a camera via USB. In addition to USB connectivity, SDI support is also planned, enabling compatibility with a wide range of Sony camcorders.

 

Behind the scenes of Becoming Led Zeppelin with Director Bernard MacMahon and Sound Supervisor Nicholas Bergh

IBC

Becoming Led Zeppelin is the highest earning documentary of 2025 and IMAX’s highest-ever earning docu release. This is due at least in part to the efforts made to faithfully recreate the experience of first hearing the band.

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In yesterday’s IBC Conference session 'How Becoming Led Zeppelin was Created' Director Bernard MacMahon and Sound Supervisor Nicholas Bergh presented a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the techniques that made it possible. 

They used a vast archive of 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, 2in video, tape, disc and stills that was transferred and painstakingly restored – without using AI or any digital processing. 

“The moment you put anything through machines the machines are altering every single piece of that film, and the audience can tell it's been messed with,” MacMahon said. “What we believe is if there are scratches on that film, it's very laborious, but you go to the next frame or the previous frame and take just those pieces of grain and drop them over the scratch.” 

Nonetheless the footage from 1944 when founder and guitarist Jimmy Page was born has the same high quality as Led Zeppelin’s final concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1970. “Ninety-nine percent of what you're seeing on screen is exactly what was originally shot without anything done to it.” 

For the same reasons of authenticity, the filmmakers went through a similar but more complicated process with the film’s soundtrack. 

“We have amazing digital technology but if it's overused it can remove the audience's engagement with what they're seeing. If you EQ stuff or colour it or tinker with it too much, eventually the viewer subconsciously feels disengagement because they're not seeing the original thing,” said MacMahon. 

MacMahon and Bergh are passionate about preserving original audio and visual recording, telling the IBC audience they want to encourage the industry to make advances in transferring old sound just as there has been huge progress in restoring picture. 

“There is no modern equipment available to play back older sound correctly,” says MacMahon. “When you go to a cinema that's playing an original nitrate print of the 1930s the sound is amazing, but nothing exists to transfer that sound off the film and put it on a Blu-ray.” 

Bergh aims to change that. He is building amplifiers and other machines using original parts so cinema audiences can hear all the frequencies of an original recording. 

Despite the band granting full access to the original master tapes the filmmakers made the unusual choice to base the audio reproduction for the doc on the first cut of the vinyl recordings.  

“It helped to evoke the sound of that era,” MacMahon explained. “When you made an album in 1968-69 the record was finished on a quarter inch tape, and a cutting artist would do a huge amount of work goosing the audio so that it pops when played back. That was sound that got people so excited when they heard it on the radio.” 
 
They selected the best work from dozens of original vinyl copies. This includes a one of its kind lacquer disc that lead singer Robert Plant gave the filmmakers of a record he made with drummer Jon Bonham they made just before founding Zeppelin.  

“What you're hearing in the film is what you would have heard on the day the record came out, only we’re playing it on the best turntable on planet earth and with a bigger HiFi [IMAX theatres] than you would have ever had access to in 1969.” 

Berg suggested that we have all been listening to sound in the worst quality since the 1920s given the digitisation of sound and media from CDs to streaming.  

The birth of the band coincided with the explosion of stereo recording and the film’s audio makes the most of this. 

“By late 1968 when Zeppelin were making their first record, stereo had become much more sophisticated. We mixed in mono but spread across 5.1 so at the moment Zeppelin appear in the film, you hear the stereo recording explode. You can hear the drum kit, the symbols and then the guitars flying here and there.  

“We’re trying to give the viewer an experience of time travel, so you're back in that moment hearing what you would have heard if you were in the engineer's room when they were cutting it at Atlantic Records in ‘69. You're hearing that exact sound.”