International studios: a world of opportunity

Broadcast 

Global demand for production space is fuelling a boom in the sector both in the UK and abroad. Adrian Pennington looks at what the most in-demand overseas operations have to offer.

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GERMANY

Studio Babelsberg
Studio space 300,000 sq ft
Sound stages 20

Situated across a 39-acre lot, Studio Babelsberg is one of Europe’s largest production complexes. A staple of world feature films since 1912, it was recently home to series five of Showtime/21st Century Fox’s Homeland, plus Steven Spielberg film Bridge Of Spies (DreamWorks Studios) and Marvel Studios’ blockbuster Captain America: Civil War.

“We position ourselves as a production service provider and a one-stopshop for German and international film producers,” says Studio Babelsberg head of communications Eike Wolf.

Subsidiary Studio Babelsberg Motion Pictures delivers a wide range of production services. “The crews are internationally experienced and support producers with services ranging from location scouting to location and production management; crew and equipment support; setting up a co-production structure; securing subsidy and financing; and handling the accounting and payroll for the German portion of the production,” says Wolf.

The studio, a couple of metro stops from central Berlin, features Germany’s largest indoor water tank and permanent sets including a Boeing 737 aircraft gimbal. Set construction subsidiary Art Department Studio Babelsberg continues the studio’s grand tradition of film architecture, which stretches back to classics such as Metropolis and The Blue Angel. A partnership with Rotor Film Babelsberg can be tapped to provide sound mixing and colour grading.

Investment plans include a new backlot set, Neue Berliner Straße, featuring moveable classical façades, streets and pavements, “along with the combination of digital camera points for background visual effects, all of which will make the backlot more flexible for film-makers”, says Wolf.

The German Federal Film Fund (DFFF) offers an annual ¤50m (£35m) to stimulate production activities. International co-producers can apply for a rebate of up to 20% for their spend on the ground. In addition, several regional film funds provide efficient support to productions of any budget. Many German states also grant funds and additional soft money, depending on the regional spend.

BELGIUM

AED Studios
Studio Space 177,600 sq ft
Sound Stages 16

Located in Antwerp in Flemish-speaking Belgium, AED is the largest media complex in the Benelux countries and France. It boasts a 3,000 sq m water tank and several of its stages are equipped with ceiling rigging to speed up production.

Black box studios 2 and 3 are large enough to accommodate up to 1,500 people and are the home of live shows such as Belgium’s Got Talent (Fremantle Media) The Voice Van Vlaanderen (Endemol) and So You Think You Can Dance (VTM). Feature films that have shot there include The Fifth Estate and Grace Of Monaco.

“Many foreign production companies have positive experiences working with Belgian crews, which are predominantly bilingual,” says communications manager Filip Van Vlem. “Crew rates and conditions are negotiated per production and there are no unions. Other local services offer aerial shooting, underwater shooting, pyrotechnics and SFX.”

Through a recent investment of ¤8m (£5.2m), the studio changed 7,000 lights to LED technology, while a new main entrance and a larger parking lot will be ready by the end of the year. “In the near future, we will improve our infrastructure by creating extra workshop areas for costume, props and SFX departments,” says Van Vlem.

With the Belgian Tax Shelter, producers can fi nance 40-48% of their local eligible spend. To access the credit, a co-production with a Belgian production company must be established. AED Film Group, located on the studio lot, specialises in structuring foreign productions and uses the tax shelter, equity and sales deals to lower the cash risk.

IRELAND

Ardmore Studios
Studio Space 40,000 sq ft
Sound Stages 5

Between The Tudors, which shot there from 2006 to 2010, and the arrival of Penny Dreadful (below) in October 2013, Ireland’s most venerable studio was in danger of going out of business. Now its stages, plus 120,000 sq ft of ancillary facilities, are fully booked, with more capacity needed to soak up the extra demand.

“Practically everything we have here until Q1 2016 is taken up by Penny Dreadful,” says Ardmore chief executive Siún Ní Raghallaigh of Showtime’s horror drama, currently shooting its third season at the studio.

The Ardmore Film Factory opened in June as an extension to Ardmore’s primary location five minutes away. “We’ve converted warehouses into 30,000 sq ft of studio space and 11,000 sq ft of office space to accommodate overspill,” she says. There are plans to build a 20,000 sq ft stage on the main lot, which will require the studio to close temporarily, and it has pumped £1.4m into improving existing services such as workshops.

“There is a capacity issue,” says Ní Raghallaigh, who has been “vociferously” lobbying the Irish government to fund greater studio capacity in the country.

“Without infrastructure, you are not going to scale up the industry,” she argues. “That is both Ireland’s challenge and its opportunity. As with any European country, there are rules limiting the direct subsidy a government can make, but the Irish Film Board is very supportive of where we want to get to as an industry.”

A change in tax regime at the beginning of 2015 was a significant move in this regard. Incentives were swapped from an investor scheme to a tax credit worth 32% of eligible spend, putting Ireland on a par with the UK.

“The government is to be applauded for creating the right environment to attract productions,” says Ní Raghallaigh. “However, it is falling short by not addressing the need to incentivise and accelerate the creation of vital studio infrastructure to cater for these productions. Without this support, growth will be limited.”

Established in 1958, Ardmore is the only fullservice facility in Ireland, complementing its sound stages with the props stores, dressing rooms, hair and make-up rooms found on a typical studio lot. Tenants range from electrical companies and camera suppliers to sound facility Ardmore Sound.

“We have great crewing expertise on the doorstep plus castles, lakes, seaside, mountains, woods and period houses in striking distance. That makes us very attractive for productions,” says Ní Raghallaigh.

Plans are afoot for a new production hub in Limerick, backed by the local council, which agreed to buy a 350,000 sq ft former Dell factory for around £3.8m with a view to leasing it to Ardmore. The facility at Plassey Technological Park, near the University of Limerick, is twice the size of Ardmore’s Bray studio.

PINEWOOD INTERNATIONAL

Pinewood has capitalised on the strength of its brand with an international strategy that has extended its footprint globally.

“We don’t just want to put a flag in the ground for the sake of it,” says commercial director Nicholas Smith. “There has to be a justifiable business reason for going to a territory. If you want to go to Malaysia, for example, you could work with Pinewood or go with a standalone independent set of facilities in the middle of a relatively untried and untested country. For producers, Pinewood stands for quality and an established business that knows how to get movies made.”

He adds: “We’re not in a rush to establish elsewhere because there are some significant opportunities in places we already have.”

Pinewood Malaysia
Studio space 12,000 sq ft
Film stages 5

A joint venture with Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, the £84m Pinewood Iskandar Malaysia Studios opened in 2013. The 80-acre site is a small part of the multibillion-pound 2,000 sq km metropolis Iskandar, which the state is building over the next two decades to house 10 million people. The two HD studios have an audience capacity of 1,260 and The Weinstein Company’s Netflix series Marco Polo is shooting there.

The location boasts all the advantages of its connections to Singapore, which is just 10 minutes away across the straits, plus Malaysia’s lower-cost labour force, and is designed to attract Asian productions. These include Asia’s Got Talent, which is filmed separately for 10 countries, including Thailand and Indonesia.

“Producers would need to fly out key heads of department but that is often the case – even in Atlanta,” says Smith. “Lower crew levels are readily available on the ground and there are a lot of local training initiatives too.”

The Malaysian government offers a 30% Film In Malaysia incentive for qualifying production expenditure. This incentive is offered for domestic and foreign production, for production and post-production approved activities. The minimum TV series spend is US$120,000 (£78,000) per hour.

Pinewood Atlanta
Studio space 12,000 sq ft
Film stages 5

This site was “literally a wheatfield” before Pinewood descended in 2012. A 30% production tax incentive influenced the studio’s choice of Georgia over Louisiana and North Carolina. After placing Ant Man there, Marvel will use it to shoot part of Captain America: Civil War.

Pinewood Toronto
Sound stages 12

When the Ontario government trimmed the city’s production incentive from 25% to 21.5% earlier this year, it might have risked the US$700m (£450m) of production that Toronto hosted in 2014, with fears that productions might switch to Vancouver.

But Smith claims the attraction of shooting in Toronto remains “very strong”, while the Canadian dollar remains lower in value than the US currency. Recent studio pictures housed there include Sony Pictures’ Pixels and Legendary Pictures’ Pacific Rim.

Of the dozen stages, the 45,900 sq ft Mega Stage is North America’s largest. Studio 54 is a 32,450 sq ft multi-purpose space that can be used for workshops and as an effects stage. Nine acres of backlots feature an unobstructed view of Toronto’s city skyline.

Pinewood Dominican Republic

Built to service the Latin American market, the Caribbean facility boasts a 60,500 sq ft water tank – the world’s largest. Opened in June 2013, the studio was designed with input from Diving Services UK, which consulted on Skyfall and also runs Pinewood Shepperton’s underwater stage.

The Horizon water facility comes with tip tanks, wave machines, water tank tractor, camera rostrums, SFX rostrums, blue screen, metallic walkways, and movable stairs.

The Dominican Republic offers a 25% tax credit with a minimum spend of US$500m (£325m).

CHINA

Wanda Qingdao Studios
Sound stages 30

Pinewood was paid to consult on the design and build of the studio and film city under construction in the Qingdao seaport in China. There are no plans to brand it Pinewood China. “Part of the attraction [for venture partners] is to get that seal of approval associated with the Pinewood name and to help market the facility as fit for the global market,” says Smith. Chinese real estate giant Dalian Wanda is developing the multibillion-dollar complex spread across 494 acres and due to open in 2017. Planned to be the world’s largest film and TV studio, it will house 30 production stages and an underwater stage, plus China’s largest exterior water tank. Wanda and the Qingdao municipal government have stated that they will collaborate on a film and TV fund, and offer tax rebates.

ABU DHABI

TwoFour54
Studio space 32,000 sq ft
Sound stages 6

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens recently filmed scenes in Abu Dhabi but the desert locations of the emirate are far from its only attraction.

State-backed media group Twofour54, based in the UAE capital, works with the Abu Dhabi Film Commission to lure productions to the area with a 30% rebate. It also serves as a tax-free zone that strives to nurture entertainment content creation in the region, and offers a campus bristling with studio and postproduction facilities.

“Our main focus is to encourage TV productions to hub out of Abu Dhabi,” says Paul Baker, executive director of film and TV services. “A unique factor is that our 30% rebate isn’t just for drama but for all TV, from entertainment to commercials.”

After Top Gear and CBS drama Bold And Beautiful shot episodes there, Iftah Ya Sim Sim, the Arabic version of Sesame Street, and Sony PlayStation reality show GT Academy are basing production at the studio.

“The broadcast market in the UAE is very mature,” says Baker. “We shot 300 hours of Arabic drama here last year. Twofour54’s freelancer scheme, which has 500 registered people, allows incoming producers access to a fast-growing pool of skilled TV and film talent.”

To access the rebate, productions are required to employ UAE nationals as interns. “

Given our proximity and direct access to Bollywood, we are able to use their very experienced and cost-effective crews,” says Baker. “This was the case for Star Wars VII. We brought in a Bollywood construction team from Mumbai to build the sets.

“We believe these diverse international crew relationships, along with a TV-friendly environment, will help Abu Dhabi attract more drama and entertainment producers.”

Playout facilities have been managed by Ericsson, owner of Red Bee Media, since February.

“This deal gives producers the confidence that their information can be moved around by one of the most respected global connectivity companies,” says Baker.

There are plans to increase the capacity of its existing 11 studios.

“Major LE shows such as Arab Idol have tended to shoot in Lebanon, but we’re now starting to engage in more detailed conversations about those shows coming to us. Ultimately, what we’re trying to achieve is to increase the quality and quantity of Arabic content so that these stories reach beyond the region and the diaspora to the wider market.”

The success of Danish drama The Killing and South Korean cultural exports like K-Pop are held up as a model.

“We are also looking for opportunities to work with producers in developing hit international shows,” says Baker. “We have diverse locations here, from desert islands to futuristic cityscapes, and the support of the government in opening these up to production.”

HUNGARY

Korda studios
Studio space 161,170 sq ft
Sound stages 6

When Ridley Scott was scouting for a place to build Mars for 20th Century Fox movie The Martian, he landed in Hungary and occupied the world’s third-largest sound stage for six months. The 64,310 sq ft space at Korda, located a short drive from Budapest, is part of a complex that boasts 10 hectares of backlot, standing sets representing New York, the Renaissance and Medieval times, a water tank, a private forest, rivers and lakes. Netflix’s Marco Polo season two and Carnival Pictures’ The Last Kingdom took advantage of the tax discount of 25% of eligible Hungarian spend. NBC Universal’s Emerald City is a current tenant.

“Foreign feature productions will typically bring in their own services for visual and special effects and post, mainly to overcome the language barrier of our local crew,” says managing director György Rajnai. But local services are also in demand. Key providers include camera kit and lighting hire firms Visionteam and Sparks, grading and dailies specialist Color Front and post house Fox Focus.

A Gleam In The Actor's Eyes: Pixar Supervising Technical Director, Rick Sayre on HDR

IBC Executive p30

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Attending computer graphic show Siggraph in 1985, Rick Sayre first came across a small outfit called Pixar. It was showing the Pixar Image Computer, a machine born at LucasFilm that had the computational power to manipulate digital images with high resolution. Impressively it was able to handle 12-bit colour values, over and above the 8-bit depth which has been common for much of content production ever since. Moreover, these 12-bit colour components could represent values greater than 1.0.

“I was encouraged in the very early days of Pixar that the people there had total respect for the imaging process,” says Sayre, who joined the start-up in 1987 and has been involved in many of their short and feature projects from Toy Story onwards.

“For most of the past thirty years in CGI and VFX it was only possible to display a limited range of light values for images,” says Sayre. “By convention we picked 1.0 for the brightest value we could make, and accepted that 0.0 wasn’t really black. Now, with the new high dynamic range displays, we can begin to talk about images as a photographer would - in terms of contrast, mid greys and tonal structure. Not only VFX elements and light probes, but finally the images the audience will see can move beyond that 0 to 1 range.”

Sayre was involved in Pixar's pioneering work in creating an HDR finish for Inside Out and was Digital Imaging Consultant on the Dolby Vision HDR for Disney's Tomorrowland.

Unlike the current migration to 4K and Ultra HD, the addition of HDR does not incur a huge knock-on cost in data handling. “Improving the pixel has a much lower incremental cost than making more of them,” he observes. “More pixels cost more to render but better pixels require more care.”

HDR manifests itself clearly in the brightest areas of a frame such as metallic reflections or light sources. Sayre says that on Tomorrowland, the technique “revealed a gleam in the eyes of the actors which it has not been possible to show theatrically before.

"We have yet to fully explore what it means to not only capture in HDR but to light for HDR,” he suggests. “A DP will know instinctively what an audience is going to see and what dynamic range is appropriate. Today, you might gel a window on location interiors to avoid it looking blown out. With HDR capture you don't necessarily have to do that since you can delay the decision until post. So now you can show the audience what is outside that window. The question is whether you should, in terms of the story. The DP needs to be involved in that post production process. We need to beware of gimmicks.”

In addition, HDR between scenes will need consideration. “Moving from a night time interior straight to a daylight exterior may require a few frames of adjustment, depending on how we wish the audience to experience that change. Making HDR practical for editorial is another important step.”

Sayre's inspiration outside of the film industry come from photography and the natural world. “We are hard-wired to appreciate the beauty of the forms we see around us and as revealed in our understanding of physics.”

He views the advent of virtual reality as a fresh approach to a style of storytelling that harks back to the ancient Greek theatre-in-the-round.

“Many of the storytelling dilemmas we are struggling with right now were present thousands of years ago with ideas of audience interaction and breaking the fourth wall,” he suggests.

The veteran employee has seen the company grow into the world's leading CG animation house under the auspices of Disney which acquired Pixar from majority stakeholder Steve Jobs in 2006.

“When I started here, you could fit the entire company in one room, and everyone knew everyone,” says Sayre. “Pixar was small, intense, free-wheeling and idealistic.”

And his favourite Pixar film? “That's easy, The Incredibles.”

Hitting OTT Out Of The Park: Joe Inzerillo, CTO, Major League Baseball

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The hottest player in TV right now is the technology wing of Major League Baseball. Arguably it has been the hottest player for over a decade, pioneering live streaming of video content below the radar and accumulating a wealth of expertise that has seen it courted by HBO, Sony and ESPN.

“We've been doing OTT before the term even existed,” says Joe Inzerillo, CTO, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) – known as BAM. “We feel like even Netflix got a boost because we were doing OTT before they were.”

Inzerillo joined MLBAM in 2003, three years after the unit was set up to create websites for the 30 MLB teams and to consolidate MLB’s digital rights. He had started his career as a cameraman with Chicago White Sox before moving on to direct video operations for the league. At MLBAM he set about creating MLB.tv, a streaming service so successful it has become the poster child of how to do video on the internet, worldwide.

“The hallmark of what we've done is scale and the dimensionality of that scale,” says Inzerillo. “We had to deliver over a million plus streams concurrently and routinely. When we started doing this the technology simply wasn't around. We had to build our own, in-house, and figure out compression, geofencing, and multi-application delivery at scale.”

In addition to streaming over 2500 baseball games a year it handles the back-end duties for World Wrestling Entertainment’s streaming channel and Turner Sports’ (college basketball) March Madness. It powers Sony PlayStation Vue and delivers subscription OTT for golf's PGA Tour.

Capping that, last month MLBAM signed a ground-breaking $600 million six year deal with
National Hockey League (NHL) in which MLBAM takes control of NHL digital and broadcast rights, including NHL.com. NHL took a 10% stake in BAM as prelude to a forthcoming spin-off which will see the separate company valued somewhere between $3-5 billion.

The tech unit's skills are in such demand that HBO turned to BAM to launch its subscription OTT service HBO Now with Game of Thrones season 5 in April.

“The cable market has such huge penetration in the US I'd say that it has held back the market for OTT,” says Inzerillo. “So you can't underestimate the upheaval HBO's gutsy decision meant to the deal flow in the global market. It says OTT is 100 percent mainstream. No question.”

The company has just signed its thousandth employee having grown ten times its size in 2003. “I'd be surprised if you don't see us expand into Europe,” he adds. “We hope to get an anchor tenant very soon.”

With a burgeoning sports portfolio there are some suggestions that an independent BAM could bundle these into a digital only service to rival ESPN. Others see in its deal with HBO the potential to become a content service provider on par with Amazon and Netflix. Either way, could BAM turn competitor to its current partners?

“We are already in a situation where the whole TV ecosystem is 'frenemy' – folks partner and compete with each other,” says Inzerillo. “All those decisions are in the hands of our CEO. My personal belief is that I'll be involved in some form in all of it still [post spin-off]. I've been very involved with the OTT expansion of our business and I expect it to expand at an increased with an infusion of cash.”

Taking Broadcast to 4G and Beyond: Matt Stagg, EE

IBC Executive
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In 2012 mobile operator EE launched the UK's first 4G network and has used its experience to understand how a high capacity data network influences user behaviour. A key learning is that video consumption on mobile is even more significant than expected, and set to grow beyond initial expectations. While Cisco predicts that 72% of mobile traffic will be video by 2020, “we are looking at 75% by 2019,” says Matt Stagg, EE's Principal Strategist. “When we saw this huge uptake in video we realised that what we'd built was in fact a media distribution network.”

EE is now pioneering LTE (or 4G) Broadcast, the main benefit of which is the ability to simultaneously distribute live content to an almost unlimited amount of users without running into capacity issues of each user watching individual content.

“The biggest fundamental shift we will see in the next decade for mobile distribution of TV is LTE Broadcast,” says Stagg. “EE’s vision for LTE Broadcast is that it will be better than TV.”

Stagg led the team that delivered the UK’s first engineering proof of concept at the 2014 Commonwealth Games (partnered with the BBC, Qualcomm and others), and followed that up with a trial at this year's FA Cup Final at Wembley to prove how it could combine the efficiency of broadcast with the functionality of unicast. “It's the next iteration of red button,” says Stagg.

EE plans a limited live rollout for LTE Broadcast toward the end of 2016. “We're not saying it's a commercial launch but we will start to put capacity on the network for certain events where it provides benefits.”

One benefit is to alleviate spikes in congestion around live sports events, not just for users wanting to access the same live content but for other network users whose normal browsing might be affected.

However, talk of the technology pushing aside DTT as the main distribution network for live and linear TV is, for now, premature.

“We are actively steering away from that and saying let's focus on where we need this technology now. In the future, who knows?”

The Mobile Video Alliance (MVA), which Stagg co-chairs, is in accord. “We are not discussing [LTE Broadcast] as a DTT replacement but as a way of improving performance and efficiencies of delivering live linear TV, predominantly, and on top of that we have all the other services [like mass software updates].”

Stagg co-founded the MVA (which now resides within the Digital TV Group) in 2013. “Personally, it is one of the best things that has happened. I was given quite a free reign. No one really saw how mobile video needed to be treated differently and what an impact it would have, but this has now become one of most active working groups in the DTG. It's done a huge amount for driving forward UK mobile TV and it's seen as a model, globally, for how you bring mobile operators, content delivery networks, broadcasters and contentproviders together to work on delivering a superior customer experience for everyone.”
As EE is still in the process of being acquired by BT for £12.5bn, Stagg's lips are sealed but he restates EE's broader strategy as being about 'connected everything' “exploring uses for mobile connectivity in the home, at work and in the car.”

Stagg, who has clocked 25 years’ experience in telecoms and was recently voted in the top 50 most influential people in New TV, is also a mentor for the 5GIC project at Surrey University where the awesome potential of a mobile technology without bandwidth limits is taking shape.

“5G may yield a perception of limitless bandwidth because you will always have enough for your purpose,” he says. “This could be the connected car, remote surgery or holographic projection. 5G is not just a new air interface and associated technology. It is best understood as an ecosystem which a lot of industries, not just mobile operators, are exploring to change the way we think about being connected.”

Vice News: Millennial News Network

IBC Executive 

“The new battleground for news is authenticity,” declares Kevin Sutciffe, Head of News Programming Europe. “We're not shying away from the difficulties of reporting and we're prepared to show the harsher realities of events in a way that many regulated terrestrial broadcasters cannot.”

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The battleground is also over viewers, in particular the Millennial generation, which the online upstart believes have been excluded from mainstream TV news agendas.

“We launched Vice News 18 months ago to turn the commonly held misconception - that 18-35 year olds are not interested in news and current affairs - on its head,” he says. “Vice is a response to something that worked well but has now become stuck and is not serving a part of an audience which is mobile, online and wanting a fresh approach.”

Sutcliffe, who has previously described BBC journalism as “beige”, doesn't come across as confrontational to the TV news establishment. He is after all a serial (Bafta and Emmy) award winning documentary maker and former Deputy Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4 and Senior Producer at the BBC's Panorama programme. 

“TV reporting hasn't changed in 20-30 years and rolling news is a very tired format,” he says. “It is journalism fitted around the demands of the system. Our approach is to be honest. We recognise the world is very difficult to define and report so we have different lengths of film and immersive first person journalism which tries to tell the story as we find it and not package it down into 3 minutes bites.”

With reportage about the coup in Mali, the Ukraine conflict and, most notoriously, a documentary which embedded a team with Islamic State, Vice News has become the fastest growing such channel on YouTube, gaining 1.45 million subscribers, 350 million video views and high engagement on Facebook.

“News doesn't break in the newsroom,” says Sutcliffe. “It breaks on Twitter. Our films are made by journalists the same age as our audience and they are all switched onto social media to engage more deeply with stories.”

'Old' media investors have lined up to grab a slice of this hot property. WPP, Fox and Disney/Hearst-owned network A+E Networks have taken stakes in the group which began as a punk magazine in Montreal in 1994, valuing it over $2.5 billion and fuelling speculation of an IPO.

Characterised by Vice founder Shane Smith as “the CNN of the street”, its most recent deal saw Vice extend a deal with HBO to produce a daily news programme and have its own branded channel on the HBO Now streaming service.

“If we're going to make a scheduled TV news show how are we going to not make it like everyone else?” questions Sutcliffe. “We're spending a lot of time thinking and planning that now to try and capture the tone of what we do online.

“The notion of whether news should be emotional is worth exploring,” he suggests. “Our audience is intelligent. They know where to look for stories. They resist the patronising view of some broadcasters where stories are told in the round and everyone has a say. Our approach is to challenge the older models and say that there isn't one way of reporting a story accurately.”

Emotional Engagement Drives Onscreen Narratives: Gawain Morrison ‪CEO Sensum

IBC Executive 

Unsound was the world's first bio-responsive horror film, a 2011 short in which scenes, music and sound effects could be altered based on the biometric readings of the audience.

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“We thought we'd cracked a new form of entertainment,” says co-producer Gawain Morrison. “We pitched all sorts of ideas at Hollywood studios and the TV industry. No-one was interested.”

Now the time is right. “A lot has changed since then and companies are much more open to it,” he says. “There's an explosion in business and consumer consciousness about emotions ranging from mainstream content (Pixar's Inside Out to Channel 4's Humans about robot AI) to behavioural economics and emotional response techniques for audience measurement.”

In 2013 Belfast-based Morrison co-founded Sensum to develop and market a software platform which consolidates and provides context to emotional data triggered by content on any screen gathered from a variety of off-the-shelf biosensors including EEG headsets, smart watches, health and fitness trackers, eye-scanning heat maps and heart rate monitors – anything that triggers emotion.

Sensum has secured $1m in funding to develop the sweet spot for understanding emotional response data.

“There's been a whole shift in mobile and digital which has been about extending the life of a piece of content across multiple platforms,” he says. “Success means a deeper engagement with audiences. The next layer is to look at biometrics and emotions and to generate new revenues and new creative opportunities.”

You can't help but be engaged by someone who lists on their LinkedIn profile a period of 'Lounging and Loitering' for three years in South East Asia.

These opportunities include “new kinds of entertainment beyond just staring at a screen,” he says.

“Storytelling is all about emotional relationships. We have to give people a reason to live in the worlds of virtual reality or photorealistic computer games. You can understand that better by using biometric feedback and sentiment analysis. You can try out multiple cuts, with different timing, audio, and scene selection, to determine what is most engaging for your target audiences.”

How near are we to the vision of Unbound in which individual emotional responses are fed back into the story or game in realtime to alter scenes on the fly?

“It's a question of budget,” says Morrison. “Creating multiple story trees in live action drama, especially at 4K, is too cost-prohibitive at this stage. With gaming and animation though, you have all the assets of a 3D world and realtime engines which could drive realtime shifts in narrative and interaction.”

Traditional media companies, he thinks, have been “terrified” of change and of the power that the science of emotion can have in engaging people.

Nonetheless, Sky, the BBC and Virgin Media are among broadcasters tapping technologies like Sensum for fresh insights into consumer responses to programming and advertising.

Morrison is the first to admit that eye-tracking sensors and skin temperature or pulse monitors are invasive of privacy unless pitched as aiding personalisation.

“If you can show people that you can weed out the nonsense in their programmes of an evening they understand it and are open to it. This technology is a slow burning fuse but it is being embraced.”

Coax still going strong

TV Technology Europe

“Cabling, widgets and glue” to route AV signals have never been more important says the industry’s leading specialist in cabling and interconnection products Canford. http://issuu.com/newbayeurope/docs/tvtech_sep_web/28

Celebrating its fortieth birthday in 2016, Canford has certainly seen change throughout its existence – the difference now being the speed of change. Its broadcast customers range from equipment end-users, studio technicians, studio system integrators and OB truck builders.

“In essence the routing of signals around a building or on location boils down to the loss of performance in the equipment at the receiving end,” says founder and chief designer Iain Elliott.

Attenuation is the power loss caused by a coax cable. The longer the coax, the greater the loss, but the loss is also frequency dependent, broadly rising with frequency (or waveform degradation).

Canford began in the analogue domain and encountered the first digital explosion with the AES digital audio specification for 110 ohms. On introduction in 1985 it caused some concern about how far a signal could travel without debilitating attenuation, an issue long since alleviated.

“Exactly the same concerns occurred around SDI and now the hot topic is how far a SDI signal will go over 6G coax,” observes Elliott.

Until very recently there was no standard definition for 6G of what signal loss was acceptable to receiving kit. That meant that different vendors used different tests to measure their equipment's performance and the industry lacked a direct comparison between them.

Now that SMPTE ST-2081 has been published these assumptions can be laid to rest. Accurate “what’s the maximum run length” figures can now be calculated for each design of coax cable, although manufacturers may or may not include safety margins which makes direct comparisons less straightforward.

“When 6G equipment first emerged I did some calculations based on the SMPTE 3G standard and basically found that you can't go much more than 50 metres without having to use very large copper cable. That makes it very expensive and difficult to handle and terminate.”

With the increasing pace of the move from specialist broadcast cables and connectors to universal standard Category cables (Cat6 and Cat6A) and fibre, the product ranges Canford carries to support this technology are changing fast. But these changes always have knock-on effects. Finding an RJ45 connector large enough to fit onto Cat6A is not trivial, but exactly the sort of problem solving that is behind much of the firm's product sourcing.

While the bulk of cable is installed, deployable Category cables are now required to support location production. “Category cables were not designed to be flexible,” says Canford. “They don't lie flat on the ground because of the necessity to fix the geometry of the paired wires in relationship to one another.”

Canford were the first to introduce a truly deployable Cat5E cable that laid obligingly flat on the ground like a mic cable. “That cable proved extremely successful, but inevitably some users then requested a deployable Cat6, so we did it,” he adds. “But the principal method of attaining successful transmission of higher data rates is the accurate retention of the cable geometry, which is a direct conflict with achieving flexibility. A deployable Cat6A looks very challenging to produce economically. But we’ve already started the trial development work.”

Japanese group Senko also have DIY fibre termination kits suitable for location work, “another evolutionary product.”

Canford sales of Cat6A are predicted to be significantly higher next year, based on a notable hike in interest now, but this does not signify a collapse in the market for coax.

“Coax is still there because there's a broader market beyond broadcast in industrial, signage and education that wants BNC or Micro-BNC connectors and SDI coax. IP is coming, but for the vast majority of people there is a long life in SDI and coax. It's interesting to note that the classic BBC PSF1/3M coax cable has still refused to die, even though it's now a pretty inefficient design.”

For the majority of co-axial connectors, it is critical to have a connector that is specific to the cable to be used. Most connector manufacturers use a cable group coding system, but they are all different, as might be expected. Since a substantial number of Canford’s original range of co-axial cables were BBC designs, it is logical therefore to use the BBC’s own classification, extended to cover newer designs from Canford’s own range.

When ordering connectors, it is essential to check that the correct crimp die is being used when making crimp terminations. Because there are small detail variations in similar connectors from each manufacturer, different crimp dies may be needed. A similar looking connector from another manufacturer, on the same size cable, does not guarantee that the crimp die regularly used will still work.

While Elliott highlights product from Draka (manufacturers of the Canford SDV series cables) and Belden as the dominant quality brands “you should not find any difference in performance between them.”

He explains, “It's understood [among manufacturers] that you don't design a cable that needs a new connector but instead stick to a standard family of sizes (of which 0.6/2.8 and 1.0/4.8 are the two most common).”

“The laws of physics command that there is only so much you can achieve with current cable technology,” says Elliott. “You could gain an advantage by having a slightly larger centre wire but when manufacturers need to get higher precision in BNC performance they tighten the tolerances and so constrain the centre wire closer to the primary specification.”

One technique that has improved cable performance is the use of gas injection for producing the physical foam dielectric of coaxial cables. The ideal dielectric would consist of a vacuum, but practically the need to insulate and accurately space both the inner and outer conductors demands a dielectric material with tough physical and electrical characteristics. Traditionally that was made with a chemical mix injected into the cable but newer methods made of nitrogen gas deliver a more consistent performance. This is particularly beneficial where a coaxial cable is exposed to crushing, squashing and several bending manoeuvres during installation. The gas injected dielectric also ensures a better life span and stable attenuation values.

“However, it requires a very, very expensive gas injector in the manufacturing process. For the highest level of performance you have to get a very consistent formation in the dielectric. Beyond that, there's not much more you can do.”

Another rule of cable design is compromise. “Depending on what is required of the cable, the solution may have different characteristics,” says Elliott. “The vast bulk of cable is for fixed installation, but if you want to make cable more flexible for deployable operation you have to compromise. You trade some performance for greater flexibility.”

The seemingly hasty arrival of IP networking could see portions of the industry leap like lemmings into investment but broadcasters could also choose to upgrade in SDI for which the roadmap includes a 24G standard capable of 4K at 120 frames a second. Meanwhile, the IT industry is upping bandwidth at such velocity that already technologies of 25GbE, 40GbE and even 100GbE are emerging with the cost reducing every day. Imagine Communications, which is outfitting Disney/ABC with IP, has 'proof of concepts' in its labs with 40GbE and even 100GbE backbones.

“IP networking offers a lot of different possibilities to the discrete video channels of Coax but much of that is down to the capital kit that an operator decides they need for type of work they are going to do,” he says.

Canford’s range has always been a mix of in-house designed and manufactured products, alongside more specialist third-party product lines. Even with 400+ different mains distribution units, the company still hasn't met all the facility combinations that system designers require.

Some are ultra-basic products where sophistication isn’t applicable, at the other end of the scale, it now has a family of IP-addressable mains distribution units that will message when something isn’t quite right with one of the connected pieces of kit, and which can be fully controlled from an iPhone.

Adds Elliott: “IP may well become universal – or it may remain specialised. Whichever way it goes is down to commercial drivers and black box vendors.”