Games engines are transforming virtual sets and then TV

SVG Europe

http://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/games-engines-are-transforming-virtual-sets-and-then-tv/

Is the writing on the wall for the traditional virtual set renderer? Traditional virtual set vendors seem to think so. Here’s the view of Gideon Ferber, director, product management and business development, Ross Video Virtual Solution: “Virtual studios reached their peak about ten years ago, but we now see a decline in the market because they are just not good enough.”

And here’s ChryonHego’s managing director of virtual solutions, Oliver Cohen: “Game engines represent the future industry standard.”

The introduction of games engines into broadcast will begin but not end with virtual sets. New entertainment formats mixing physical and virtual objects and characters and people in real time are being developed. Some call this concept interactive mixed reality.

Reality Check Systems (RCS) president Andrew Heimbold says the entrance of game engines into the virtual set space “is one of the most exciting developments I have seen”.

“There is a difference in visual quality; we have to acknowledge that,” agrees Gerhard Lang, chief engineering officer, Vizrt. “While games engines are ahead at this time there are also advances in broadcast engines which will bring the capabilities of the two technologies closer together.”

All eyes will be on Epic Games at NAB. The developer of Unreal Engine – one of the prime games technologies – is hosting its first ever broadcast trade show press conference. SVG Europe expects a flurry of integrations along the lines of NewTek’s partnership with Epic announced late last year.

Vizrt, for example, “has always had a very open system which has made it possible for users to choose an alternate renderer as a plug-in inside Viz,” says Lang. “We will continue that.”

Broadcast and games convergence

Virtual sets were first introduced by Ultimatte in the mid-1990s, based around its chroma-keying technology and were advanced by companies like Vizrt and Orad using powerful renderers based on character generators.

Competitor systems by Brainstorm, Ross Video and others continued to grow the market. Indeed, virtual sets have become a fixture at many broadcasters, primarily for use in children’s, sports and news programming as a cost-effective use of studio space. In recent years, such systems has been augmented with robotic tracking systems and the ability to overlay augmented reality (AR) graphics and 3D models.

The convergence of linear video production and gaming engines has been taking place over the past several years in an organic fashion. In a quest for more and more realistic rendering, producers are turning to gaming engines to provide state-of-the-art real-time 3D rendering of virtual environments.

“The main driver is to get a much more realistic looking image,” says Ferber. “Viewers can tell when a virtual set is being used. For many broadcasters that is the look and that’s fine, but the major element we set out to solve in adopting a games engine was to create a level of realism unrivalled by any character generator on the market. As much as some vendors can get nice results they will never be up to the level of a games engine which can push realism from day one. That’s something CGs were never meant to do.”

On the other hand, games engines were never designed to work in broadcast. Games engines from Epic Games (Unreal) or Unity are designed to render graphics (polygon counts, textures, specular lighting) as fast as possible and do not natively fit with broadcast signals which must correspond with the slower frame rates of SMPTE timecode.

“Gaming engines have gone beyond what has been possible with traditional virtual rendering engines,” argues Brian Olson, VP of product management for NewTek. “Things like global illumination, real-time reflections, and real-time shadows are difficult to do with most traditional virtual set products.”

Re-coding Unreal

Ross Video partnered with Oslo-based The Future Group to rewrite the Unreal code to comply with genlock. This software is being sold as Frontier, a new graphics engine. It is also packaging other components around this to create a turnkey tool-set for a new Mixed Reality production system which mixes virtual and physical objects, characters or people in real-time.

Other components of the Ross solution include a tracking system with which broadcast cameras and robotics communicate with Frontier and drive the software’s virtual cameras. Ross’ UX is the control platform used to drive the whole system.

“Games platforms give you all the editing tools to create your game but no interface to drive production, run events or trigger animations,” says Ferber. “UX brings the games engine into the Ross workflow. Using it we can control multiple engines and cameras and control tracking and data feeds from a single interface.”

The first example of its use is Lost in Time, a game show produced by FremantleMedia and TFG. Ross is also marketing Frontier to broadcasters.

“We think game engine-driven virtual production systems will be adopted as straight replacements for virtual sets – initially,” says Ferber. “This is the broadcaster’s comfort zone.”

However, it’s hoped that exposure to the technology will lead to more innovative presentations.

“What has not been possible with virtual sets is replication of outdoor scenes,” says Ferber. “With traditional CGs this is almost impossible since they do not reflect light sources [in a naturalistic manner]. Games engines open up endless stylistic and creative opportunities.”

Photoreal environments

Currently, the traditional virtual set technologies are more broadcast-compliant than games engines. “However, when it comes to rendering performance, game engines are a real step ahead – largely due to their connection to the video gaming world,” says Cohen. “In general, games engines scale better in terms of rendering performance and features, simply because the developer community behind Epic Unreal or Unity is much bigger than the support any single vendor could provide.”

RCS’ Heimbold agrees: “Game engines have many more capabilities in terms of photorealism; however, there can be limitations in their integration with broadcast workflows. On the other hand, there are established broadcast CG vendors with extremely refined workflow solutions that do not produce the photorealistic look you can achieve with a modern game engine. Both sides are converging to solve their respective challenges.”

Underpinning this growth is GPU technology from companies like NVIDIA that continue to increase performance for both sides.

“The question remains as to who will provide the most robust solution that not only looks great but also integrates seamlessly into modern facilities,” says Heimbold.

Cohen says ChyronHego is “looking at this topic very closely” while recognising that the transition to games engines in broadcast will take some time.

“Broadcast compliancy is a key issue for broadcasters. That’s why we see more applications for game engines in cinema and entertainment programmes for now.”

“It’s never been easier to create 3D graphics using standard modelling tools, and powerful 3D virtual set and game engines are yielding incredibly realistic results,” he insists. “For on-camera tracking technology, systems have become very reliable and offer the ability to track studio cameras in any positions simply by adding small optical sensors to the top of the cameras.”

Broadcast compliancy

He points to ChyronHego solutions like Filmbox for importing a complete 3D project for 3ds Max or Maya including lights, geometries, shaders, textures and animations. “Once the project is passed into the virtual set engine, the results are very photo-realistic thanks to major improvements in hardware and software,” says Cohen.

“Virtual graphics will start blooming for all sorts of content in the next few years,” he believes. “We will also see a transition from HD-SDI to IP video that will help game engines proliferate. Game engines will continue to become more and more broadcast compliant, and at some point we envision that virtual sets and virtual graphics will run as a cloud service – allowing multiple studio productions without all of the hassles of in-house hardware.”

Vizrt’s Lang doesn’t think photoreal graphics will drive demand. “We’ve been in this business a very long time and we see fashions come and go in waves. Virtual sets have always been a revenue generator for us. We are also seeing a lot of demand for Augmented Reality outdoors and in blending physical with virtual sets seamlessly so the audience really does not notice the difference.”

Game engines have certain sets of functions which they bring to the equation such as Artificial Intelligence and the ability to use realtime motion capture data, he adds.

As depth cameras advance and GPUs accelerate the processing of 3D maps interfaced with animation software, the green screen could be removed entirely. Vrtual content could then be created outside a studio.

“The technology will improve such that the look of a rendered scene and a real background will be indistinguishable,” says Lang. “Ultimately, the use of a virtual set or AR assets means the content has to be meaningful and be achieved in a way that could not with a real set otherwise the solution loses its effectiveness.”

A new generation of robots are changing what we mean by bipedal

RedShark News

Handle, a two-wheeled, four-legged hybrid robot, has a performance that really has to be seen to be believed. 
http://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/4416-a-new-generation-of-robots-are-changing-what-we-mean-by-bipedal

The Three Laws of Robotics state that 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’
These are pretty solid tenants but their writer, Isaac Asimov, didn’t mention ‘must not take the job of a human unless it pays taxes’.
Robots are part of a wave of technology – along with virtual reality and artificial intelligence – leaping out of science fiction into practical reality and causing some wild speculation about their impact.
There is a hotel staffed by robots in Japan and, in the same country, a robot bank teller. Bank of America Merill Lynch has forecast huge numbers of jobs being taken over by robots: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, both blue-collar and white-collar jobs.
There’s also the idea, at the back of Asimov’s mind when he wrote the three laws during the Second World War — and in many science fiction dystopias since — that humanoid robots in particular are simply sinister.
What, then, to make then of Handle, a two-wheeled, four-legged hybrid robot.
In the video, posted on Wired among many other places online, Handle is recorded travelling on snow, leaping heights of near 50 inches onto a table, taking corners like an expertly-piloted Segway and even moving unimpeded down a flight of steps.
It can do all this at top speeds of 9mph on wheels that let it stand up vertically and with arms that can carry 100lb weights.
According to designers Boston Dynamics, Handle “uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge.
It uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the firms’ quadruped and biped robots (including BigDog, a quadruped robot designed for the US military; the Cheetah which at 29mph is the fastest legged robot in the world; and RiSE, a robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences).
Handle, though, has only about 10 actuated joints, so is significantly less complex.
“Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere,” says the robot firm. “By combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.”
Boston Dynamics’ CEO has termed the prototype “a nightmare-inducing robot”. He was apparently cracking a joke at a presentation event but his words have been taken literally in some quarters to suggest the rise of the Terminator.
It doesn’t help that Alphabet – Google’s parent which bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 – seems not to like the direction of its subsidiaries’ research either.
“There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” Google director of communications for Google X, Courtney Hohne, wrote in a private email that was later copied onto a Google forum and obtained by Bloomberg. It concerned an earlier Boston Dynamics project but Google’s concern is telling. “We don’t want to trigger a whole separate media cycle about where BD really is at Google,” Hohne added.
There is a generally held view that robots and AI systems are only as smart and benevolent as the data you use to teach them. 
It’s why a group of luminaries including Space X entrepreneur Elon Musk, and Facebook’s AI chief Yann LeCun were among 2,000 signatories to a set of guidelines published last month and recalling Asimov’s laws, The 23 Asimolar AI Principles.
The guidelines dug into the ethics of AI and even included a principle aimed at diverting the Terminator like “arms race in lethal autonomous weapons."
Others were more prosaic. Principle 12 on personal privacy, states, "People should have the right to access, manage and control the data they generate, given AI systems' power to analyze and utilize that data.”
Whether commercial organizations will take heed of this as they compete for business is moot. Just don’t mention Skynet.

All the quality of ARRI Alexa in reach of any budget

VMI

The ARRI Alexa, for many the gold standard of digital acquisition, has always been tantalisingly out of range of cinematographers working with tighter budgets – until now...

http://vmi.tv/news/article/231

By reducing the rental fee of all its  ARRI Alexa and Alexa Plus models* to £250/day and £300/day, the Alexa Classic is now actually cheaper to hire than that of the ARRI Amira, VMI is opening up fresh opportunities in workflow and creative imaging for producers and directors of photography.

“All too often when people have either an indie production in development or are shooting a pilot or a low budget show they find that the Alexa is frustratingly out of their reach,” says Barry Bassett, Managing Director, VMI. “For the first time they can broaden their creative options with a genuinely affordable means of working with the whole ARRI Alexa family.”

Since introduction in 2011, the ARRI Alexa has been preferred by cinematographers to create a glittering cast of high end TV drama like Game of Thrones to high profile features like Skyfall to Birdman.

The subsequent debut by ARRI of the Amira and the Alexa Mini brought the same impressive dynamic range and image qualities of the S-35mm ALEV III sensor to bare on new types of filmmaking.

The ARRI Amira is favoured for its hand held and extended shoulder-mounted operation and the Alexa Mini carries a 4:3 sensor to offer the capability of using 2x squeeze anamorphic lenses and is ideal for gimbal and drone work or when greater portability is required.

Each model can record in 1080p, 2K or (up-res'ed) UHD to render natural, organic colours and skin tones with incredible texture and beauty.

The reduction in cost of hire at VMI is considerable. An Alexa can now be hired from £250 per day with the Alexa Plus at £300 per day. It is a saving that also makes the cost of pairing the Alexa with a set of Master Primes a genuine alternative to selecting lower grade or mid-level cameras.

“The Alexas are stalwarts of the cinematographic community with good reason,” says Bassett. “They offer outstanding imaging and practical functionality in a robust package that makes them an unbeatable choice for all manner of productions.”

Timeline’s All-IP 4K Scanner With TR-03 “Is Most Advanced On The Market”

BroadcastBridge

A new all-IP 4K outside broadcast vehicle from Timeline is claimed to the most advanced in the world by incorporating among other things the first instance of IP protocol TR-03 in a truck.

The new scanner, UHD2, complements Timeline’s existing 16 camera quad-SDI 4K truck but goes leaps and bounds beyond it in terms of technology.
https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/7981/timelines-all-ip-4k-scanner-with-tr-03-is-most-advanced-on-the-market
This is a 32 camera triple expander entirely kitted out with IP in what Timeline Managing Director Daniel McDonnell calls a “brand new concept” in OB workflow.
It operates 4K UHD uncompressed over 12GigE and a massive 100Gig Ethernet switch from Arista.
“You need a lot of bandwidth to route uncompressed 4K signals so you need a data centre switch. Each port can handle 100Gig – there is no SDI video matrix.”
The IP backbone is sourced from SAM (SAM also provided the bulk of kit including Sirius router for Timeline’s UHD1). This includes multiviewers, Kahuna switchers – of which there are two – and a SAM video to IP convertor converts. The only signal that does not originate as IP are out of the cameras – these are Sony 4300s.
Also on board is space for 12 x IP-enabled EVS 4K XT3 servers and a Calrec 56-fader Apollo console.
The truck is the first anywhere to implement TR-03, the protocol favoured by lobbying group AIMS and devised by Video Services Forum among others which is winding its way through the standardisation process.
It’s a step up from straight SMPTE 2022-6 because it enables the separation of audio and video for greater production flexibility. It also means Timeline can do away with huge chunks of hardware for embedding, de-embedding and audio processing.
“When the video comes into the IP world the first thing that happens is it get split into two IP streams one for video and one for audio – then each are treated totally
separately. It means editorial can select, for example, different audio streams for the referee’s mic for example,” says Mcdonnell.
Timeline is working closely with SAM on developing a unique combination of dual vision mixers and multiviewers. This enables the creation of a 4K SDR and 4K HDR as well as down converted HD outputs - simultaneously.
“We take the output from the cameras and between them the switchers work together in synch but process a different output,” says Mcdonnell. “The main aim of the development with SAM is to ensure the SDR picture is not interfered with in any way.”
A pair of Grade One Sony monitors are available to view the HDR and SDR mixes.
While Timeline runs three other OB trucks, including a recently released 4K RF vehicle for smaller OB jobs, this multi-million pound investment is a serious step up for the company.
Its main contract is with BT Sport. McDonnell says UHD2 has not been built with any specific client in mind.
“It will be without doubt the most advanced 4K truck on the market,” he says. The truck is due on the road in May. “It gives us many advantages. One of them is that if you have a truck with a traditional large video matrix then you are immediately limiting your options. In order to expand you would have to add another matrix and when you are doing 4K you will very quickly reach your limits.
What our truck allows you to do is quickly plug in 5, or 10, or more EVS machines at a venue. Perhaps these are sited in a temporary portacabin but you wouldn’t be having to call in another 2 or 3 large OB trucks. You can do the event with one. Our switch is big enough to add hundreds of video IOs for a big show as required. In addition, since UHD2 is stripped of a lot of the bulky hardware of a conventional OB vehicle there is room for 2 or 3 production galleries for enhanced editorial.”

5G to pave way for UHD and VR to mobile

Sport Business Group

http://www.sportbusiness.com/sportbusiness-international/mobile-world-congress-2017-5g-pave-way-ultra-hd-and-vr-sport-mobile

The 2017 GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) took place in Barcelona last week. MWC is the world's biggest mobile industry conference, and the place to look for sports executives wondering what's coming down the track in mobile and connected technology.

5G to power ultra-HD video and VR applications

Video delivered to mobile devices in super-high resolution, with no buffering or delay, and immersive virtual reality (VR) environments were centre-stage at MWC last week. To carry this next generation of mobile video services, the mobile industry is looking to the next generation of mobile networks: 5G.

“5G and VR are both technologies with enormous potential,” says Howard Watson, CEO of BT technology, service and operations. “Drawing on the high bandwidths and low latencies of 5G will allow us to go beyond the already compelling VR experiences that are possible over 4G, and cater for more interactive future VR content which will place people right at the heart of the action.”
Broadly, 5G will mean speeds up to 10 times faster than today’s 4G networks - fast enough, for example, that an episode of the TV show Game of Thrones could be downloaded in fewer than 4 seconds.
BT used MWC to demonstrate a replayed VR broadcast of the Tottenham Hotspur vs CSKA Moscow Uefa Europa League clash last December. This was filmed by UK pay-television operator BT Sport on the Nokia Ozo VR camera and transmitted via the Finnish firm’s 5G tech. Viewers with VR goggles were able to 'sit' in a virtual VIP box anywhere in Wembley Stadium.
Telcos around the world are trialing 5G but a universal standard and solid business cases are not expected before 2020.
South Korea's SK Telecom, for example, will launch trial services this year with a target date of 2019 for commercial services. It plans to showcase its service at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
Analyst Ovum predicts that more than 50 operators will be offering 5G in 30 countries by the end of 2021, with the majority of an estimated 25m subscriptions concentrated in the US, China, Japan and South Korea.
Before then, there will be significant upgrades to existing mobile networks to satisfy the incredible demand for video viewing on-the-go. Mobile data traffic is set to grow 15x by the end of 2017, with video the main culprit. For major events such as next year’s Fifa World Cup in Russia, where demand for live video on mobile is likely to be at an all-time high, the latest compression techniques are being explored.
5G doesn’t stop at VR or 4K video - it can potentially permit live streams of sport in 8K – 16 times HD resolution – something only possible hitherto over satellite and dedicated academic and research internet networks.
There is even talk of holographic broadcasting – where VR headsets would be unnecessary and viewers could potentially walk around a 3D projected representation of the sports action.
JB Perrette, president and CEO of broadcaster Discovery International, told MWC that content has to be re-imagined for the always-on, multiple-screen world in which the same viewer might want to watch Michael Phelps win a gold medal, find out his age, see who he is dating, and then tweet about it all a few seconds later.
Simply streaming live broadcasts “will not be enough” to gain fans or retain subscribers. Storytelling needs to be layered, personalised and reduced for consumption in bite-size chunks.
Discovery is planning for the 2018 Winter Olympics, exploring VR coverage and supplying data from wearable biometric sensors. These sensors could supply data on athlete heart rates and glucose levels, for example, targeted to different audiences – from high-level obsessive fans to the more casual sports enthusiasts.

Voice control and AI will form content gateways
If 5G is to provide the technical glue binding networks and devices, then the future consumer interface looks likely to be a combination of voice and facial recognition powered by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence (AI).
We can already talk to digital assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Assistant via our phones, sound systems and TVs. This technology is set to become ubiquitous and a whole lot smarter as AI hoovers up more and more data about our preferences and habits.
Google at MWC announced the launch of a home speaker/listener device this summer, following in the footsteps of Amazon's Echo and Dot, and said it would install its voice AI on all Android phones.
The sophistication of digital assistants will evolve quickly from simple commands to something akin to conversations as natural language processing and understanding of accents is combined with user specific data.
What does this mean for sport? For one thing it is clear that content discovery and advertising is set to become voice-driven, so gaining an understanding of the hooks – the SEO if you like – needed by the main AI engines to drive relevant content to consumers could become crucial.
Secondly, if they weren’t already powerful enough, the companies behind the major four virtual assistants could develop an even stronger lock on the end-user as they battle it out to become the market-leading AI in 'smart' homes, vehicles, and all connected devices.

This time it's personal

Broadcast

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/this-time-its-personal/5115278.article

Broadcasters and content owners are learning from the likes of Amazon and Netflix by overhauling their platforms to better engage viewers with content suggestions based on data and algorithm.

BBC iPlayer is widely credited with kick-starting the online video habit in the UK, but a decade after launch, it is set for a major revamp to keep pace with over-the-top (OTT) competitors Amazon Prime and Netflix, which have made greater strides in using data to personalise the experience of using their platforms.
“The first generation of catch-up services were based around the assumption that viewers knew what was on a particular broad caster’s channels, and an assumption that the broadcaster could communicate this to you through traditional channel advertising.
“The need to provide insight into what you wanted to watch was considered minimal,” says Thomas Williams (below), chief executive of Ostmodern, which designed and built the BBC Store platform.

The seismic shift in user behaviour towards going straight to digital means aiding discovery is now a much higher priority for OTT platforms. Göran Appelquist, chief technology officer of delivery-over-IP systems provider Edgeware, says that making content easily available on-demand is one of the big draws of OTT.
“Letting users find exactly what they want, whenever they want it has become crucial to content owners since it’s the best way of engaging audiences and, most importantly, keeping them using your service,” he says.
Personalisation is often associated with recommendations, for which Netflix first cracked the code. By some estimates, more than 50% of viewing on the platform is based on recommendations.
“They’re so good at it that they don’t even bother to show users their entire catalogue,” says Iddo Shai (below), director of product at opensource video platform Kaltura.
“But personalisation goes much deeper than that. For example, Netfix and iTunes users see a personalised homepage and personalised push notifications about new content based on shows watched in the past.”

Targeted marketing has also made great strides and will soon work in unison with recommendations, predicts Shai.
The tracking of users will begin long before they sign up to an OTT service (using cookies that track users’ browsing history on all devices, as well as credit card purchases) and will continue even if they decide to cancel their subscription.
“In between, personalisation will help to keep them using the service for as long as possible and to increase their spend,” says Shai.
Social media chatter can also be used to determine the context of a person’s discussions around trending TV or films.
Many of Kaltura’s customers encourage users to sign in with their Facebook account. The system then shows the user a dynamic activity feed, which includes real-time updates on what their friends watched and liked.
The key to all of this is data aggregation: the more, the better.
Gathering profiles can be done anonymously by relying on cookies, but results will be better with user registration. Here, the video player constantly communicates to the host platform what the user is doing.
Every action, or click stream, is noted and aggregated. For example: the user is browsing; adding a movie to their favourites list; playing a video or choosing a different one.
“This behaviour can be analysed to find patterns and improve the discovery experience for individual viewers, but also of the service as a whole,” says Shai.
In some cases, additional components like a data management system will offer the OTT operator third-party data that can be purchased from companies like eXelate (now Nielsen), Bluekai (now Oracle) and Lotame.
These companies aggregate information about users from the likes of websites and credit card companies and index it into segments that are relevant to marketers.
Content providers and product owners often have to balance user behaviour against a need to push and promote valuable content that defines their brand.
“Personalisation has historically surfaced all content equally without accounting for the commercial, brand or editorial value of the content,” says Williams.
“By augmenting personalisation with content owner needs, it is possible to imagine a product where users get heavily targeted content that satisfies both themselves and the business need.”
Not only will the usefulness of data vary in quality and interpretation, but “sharing data is only as good as the commercial agreements the parties are bound by”, says Alex Drosin, North America president of multiscreen video technology provider Massive.

“Everyone is eager to optimise data to increase subscription levels but the reality is that this is limited to how much they can gather.”
Netflix and Amazon hold another advantage over broadcasters whose online service isn’t their primary product or output: their own delivery network.
“This means they can analyse everything that’s delivered to each user,” says Appelquist.
“Whereas, a supplementary online service with fewer users is more likely to be renting space on a third-party delivery network to deliver its content, so doesn’t have access to those numbers.”
Edgeware suggests broadcasters build their own content delivery network. It illustrates a business case to show that implementing one becomes worthwhile when an average 250,000 users watch content on a service for a minimum of an hour a day.
BBC iPlayer has almost 8 million users watching for an average of 30 minutes a day – or just shy of 4 million who watch for an hour.
“The BBC has the amount of requests for content that would justify building its own network,” says Appelquist.

“It will have complete access to the analytics of its users, letting it compete with the likes of Netflix.”
Recommendation engines are built using machine-learning algorithms, which process raw actions forwarded by the client application on a user’s device and are based on past behaviour.
The next stage is to use cognitive computing to examine the same click stream, but to divine user intent ahead of the next action – ideally leading to serving more relevant content and ads.
ContentWise chief technology officer Pancrazio Auteri calls this research “in-session predictions” or “intent-based recommendation”.
ContentWise is also helping clients, including Sky, experiment with voice-based discovery via digital assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
“Users don’t like to have a single choice imposed, nor to have to scroll or browse too much choice, so with voice commands, we return a small number of options,” says Auteri.
Typical commands are requests about a specific team, channel, celebrity or news topic. AT&T-owned DirecTV has integrated voice control from Alexa but this does not necessarily mean an Amazon takeover.
“They are using Alexa just as the interface while retaining the existing logic of content recommendations based on their library from the ContentWise platform,” says Auteri.
As virtual assistants are fine-tuned through analysis of natural language, accents and conversations, operators will turn to voice as the de facto interface between human and service.
Pietro Berkes, principal data scientist at digital security and media solutions firm Kudelski Group, says that virtual assistants will understand viewers’ preferences and respond to vocal commands, enabling content discovery from multiple sources.
He says: “As traditional media becomes increasingly connected, AI will enable content providers to interact with end users. AI assistants will help consumers select personalised camera angles for sport events and they will deliver automatic summaries of the latest news and missed TV shows.”
Some think personalisation is about context, predictable desires and suggestion as much as it is about algorithms.
“We are all wired differently and even if you can afford to build the world’s most amazing personalisation engine, you can still get it seriously wrong – for example, by serving ads that are not relevant,” says Joe Foster, chief executive of multiscreen VoD platform provider Easel TV.
Personalising the experience could be as simple as the consumer promoting menus, changing available skins and other settings to tailor the experience themselves, he suggests.
“It doesn’t have to be all about algorithms.”

Technology providers

Easel TV

• Customers: Virgin Media; 4OD

Suggested TV, Easel’s cloud-based software- as-a-service, boasts a range of tools for user management, content management and promotional activity.
“Our background and experience in digital television has enabled us to build a ‘televisual experience’ and evolve it to provide an optimised user experience for each individual screen,” says chief executive Joe Foster.
The Suggested TV platform can distribute a mixture of Subscription (SVoD) and Transactional (TVoD) video on demand content separately, or within the same service.
Electronic Sell Through (EST) is currently being developed into the platform.

Kaltura

• Customers: HBO; TMZ

Kaltura’s unified back-end for video, business rules and household management is unique in providing a “full picture” about the user journey, according to director of product Iddo Shai.
“For example, we usually authenticate each user at the beginning of the video session,” he explains.
“Then the app offers them the option to continue watching a show from where they left off [even if it was watched on a different device]. If the user is looking for something new, we can show recommendations.
“If the user samples three movies before settling on one, we can track it.”

Ostmodern

• Customers: ITV; BFI

Ostmodern’s Skylark product comprises an enterprise-level CMS, an API, which organises content, and a suite of connectors that integrate with internal and third-party systems.
It handles scheduling, ingest and data, providing editorial teams with the ability to curate recommendations while offering a considerable degree of personalisation.
“Editors can be informed of trends and behaviours within Skylark to understand what content they should be pushing and where,” says chief executive Thomas Williams.
“While this often requires manual creation, a CMS should understand user behaviours to help editors make more informed decisions.”
Recommendations presented to the user can be augmented with editorial weighting of content to ensure that valuable content gets the correct exposure.
“Editors can still curate and build views of products with content groups they require, but add personalisation on top of these views to enable the surfacing of the most relevant content in this group.”

Massive

• Customers: Channel 5; Sony Pictures

Typical approaches to user interface design are “rigid”, says North America president Alex Drosin, lacking the flexibility to change if, for example, the commercial goal changes.
“The app should be able to update special offers, discounts or different price points in real time and without going offline,” he says. Massive’s Axis technology allows broadcasters to do just that.
The cloud-based platform enables the delivery of video apps across devices, with a common user interface.
“You can tweak or completely update the look and feel of apps, by the minute, and without requiring users to install updates,” says Drosin.

Contentwise

• Customers: Telefonica; Sky

ContentWise provides software building blocks for marketing and editorial teams to configure according to business goals or editorial style.
A typical home page for an OTT service might include six themed carousels.
Clients can tailor each of these for different users based on user-defined preferences and analysis of consumption habits. Someone who likes sport or animation, for example, will be shown relevant content.
“We can populate the screen based on general content themes and have this change dynamically based on device, location or time of day – which might suggest another user – or around a breaking news topic.
“You can even create a neighbourhood- based context,” says chief technology officer Pancrazio Auteri.

Edgeware

• Customers: PCCW (China); KPN

Edgeware offers broadcasters and content owners a mechanism for distributing TV over their own content delivery network (CDN) instead of hiring capacity on a third-party CDN.
It has three layers: content control, network services and delivery. The former two are run in the cloud and the latter on Edgeware servers, which enables caching, repackaging, pause and play functions, ad insertion and encryption.
“With the right infrastructure, broadcasters can also take advantage of user analytics to fi ne-tune services,” says chief technology officer Göran Appelquist.
“This means they can monitor things like band width consumption, bitrate per session and session quality. It also lets them monitor IP network changes – if a user goes from wi-fi to 4G, for example – to gauge on what device and where their content is being watched.”

TV App Agency

• Customers: Blockbuster; Wuakitv

“Offering the capability of content tagged as ‘already watched’, even on a different platform, is key to being able to optimise the user experience,” says TV App Agency co-founder and director Bruno Pereira.
Its TVA 360 analytics product does this by aggregating personal data to create groups for targeting.
“We can then target users more efficiently. We use that data to create dynamic playlists in the TVA aggregator, based on device, region and so on,” he explains.
“The OTT personalisation challenge is how to float between devices that offer one-to-one personalisation, such as mobiles and smart TVs.”

The State of Mobile Video 2017

StreamingMedia Europe

Mobile video traffic keeps rising at a rapid rate, leaving operators struggling to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, the U.K. is falling behind on broadband connectivity.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-State-of-Mobile-Video-2017-116710.aspx

When the president and CEO of cable giant Libery Global declares mobile to be “strategically critical,” as Mike Fries did in November, then you know the pendulum has tipped decisively. Many would argue that the writing had been on the wall for years.
The seventh edition of Ericsson ConsumerLab's annual 'TV & Media' report underscored the enormous and rapid shift in TV and video viewing behavior toward mobility. According to the report, mobile video traffic is forecast to grow by around 50 percent annually through 2022 to account for nearly 75 percent of all mobile data traffic.
People are watching more content than ever before, but the proportion of viewing on fixed screens and viewing on mobile and portable screens is moving toward an equal split.
Ericsson said that the ratio between viewing on fixed screens (such as TVs and desktops) and mobile screens closed to 60:40 this year—compared with almost 70:30 in 2010.
The average viewing time on mobile devices has grown by more than 200 hours a year since 2012, driving overall TV and video viewing up by an additional 1.5 hours a week. The surge in mobile viewing is offset by a decline in fixed screen viewing of 2.5 hours a week, though the overall appetite for TV and video is not waning.
The weekly share of time spent watching TV and video on mobile devices grew by 85 percent from 2010 to 2016, while on fixed screens it has gone down by 14 percent over the same period.
“What is really happening is there is an addition because mobile viewing is done on top of everything else,” notes Anders Erlandsson, senior advisor, consumer insights, Ericsson ConsumerLab. “So people are doing more viewing than they have ever done before.”
Mobile data traffic continues to grow, driven both by increased smartphone subscriptions and a continued increase in average data volume per subscription, fueled primarily by more viewing of video content. In Q3 2016, data traffic grew around 10 percent quarter on quarter and 50 percent year on year. Social networking is the second biggest data traffic type after video; it’s forecast to grow by 39 percent annually over the coming 6 years.
The report forecast that in 2022, there will be 8.9 billion mobile subscriptions, of which 90 percent will be for mobile broadband. At this point in time, there will be 6.1 billion unique subscribers.
Cisco backed these trends up in its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI). It suggests that three-fourths of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2020. Mobile video will increase by a factor of 11 between 2015 and 2020, accounting for 75 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period.
The Middle East and Africa will have the strongest mobile data traffic growth of any region, with a 71 percent compound annual growth rate. This region will be followed by Asia Pacific at 54 percent and Central and Eastern Europe at 52 percent.
Mobile networks carried fewer than 10 gigabytes per month in 2000, and less than 1 petabyte per month in 2005. By contrast, within the next 5 years, monthly global mobile data traffic will be 30.6 exabytes by 2020 (one exabyte is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes, and 1,000 petabytes). The number of mobile-connected devices per capita will reach 1.5 by 2020.
This clear and unstoppable shift in consumer behavior isn’t lost on pay TV broadcasters, which have been launching SVOD over-the-top (OTT) bundles left, right, and center.
That said, Google warned that mobile’s disruptive impact was being underestimated by broadcasters. Speaking at IBC, Benjamin Faes, managing director of partner business solutions at Google, says, “Mobile is the biggest revolution broadcasters have faced—it is happening now, and we still do not see a huge, pressing desire to take advantage of this revolution among the broadcast industry.”
Perhaps the stat that concerned Fries most of all is that a third of Millennials aged 16–24 find portable screens more important for video consumption than their home TVs, according to Ericsson.
Liberty, the owner of Virgin Media in the U.K., is pursuing a quad-play bundle in every market and wants to more than double its mobile base from 15 percent to 40 percent of its 17 million broadband subscribers by 2022.
Liberty needs to compete with Sky which, perhaps more significantly than its launch into 4K this year, made video playback on mobile possible for the first time. A Sky Q app allows subscribers to watch on-demand and live streamed content regardless of the device in or out of the home. Features include a pause and playback of content on different devices.
Virgin Media addressed this by unveiling its own branded “TellyTablet,” intended to allow portable TV around the home. A revamped app permits recordings and live TV to be paused and continued room to room on a new V6 set-top box or on a mobile device.
Not to be outdone, BT is launching a new BT TV app (due summer 2017) with options to manage recordings and stream live and on-demand programs. YouView, the hybrid DTT and broadband TV service of which BT is a shareholder with the BBC and broadband provider TalkTalk, also has multiroom viewing under development after re-engineering its infrastructure to run over Amazon Web Services (AWS).

LTE Conflict and Competition

In November, Virgin Media launched its first 4G/ LTE tariffs, the last major U.K. network to offer high-speed mobile internet plans.
However, all major operators faced criticism from members of Parliament who believe rural areas of the country continue to exist in a mobile broadband blackspot.
EE lit up its 4G network in 2012 and has pledged to deliver 4G to 95 percent of the U.K. landmass by 2020; Vodafone and O2 launched LTE a year later (the latter claims to have achieved 93 percent outdoor coverage). Despite this, many services, such as 300Mbps speeds, are in the most profitable urban areas.
The Broadband Infrastructure Group (BIG) wants mobile users in rural areas to be able to roam across different mobile networks depending on which has the best signal, but industry body Mobile UK opposed the plan, claiming it is not only technically difficult to accomplish in a localized way, but is a significant disincentive to competitive network investment.
The BIG is also unconvinced the four major operators will meet a legally binding target to extend 2G coverage to 90 percent of the U.K.’s landmass by 2017. The latest estimates suggest that 28 percent of all rural areas in the U.K. remain without coverage.
Operator O2 ended the year with its future uncertain after European Commission competition officials in May decreed that Hutchison (owner of the Three network) could not proceed with a £10.3 billion takeover.
The reason given by Brussels was that the merger would reduce choice and ultimately be unable to compete effectively with BT-owned EE and Vodafone as the U.K. market becomes increasingly converged.
Hutchison had hoped to create the biggest mobile operator in the market, able to compete better with BT and Vodafone.
The move leaves Telefónica, O2’s Spanish owner, looking at floating a minority stake in the network, which has 10 million 4G customers.
In an attempt to halt BT/EE’s increasing dominance in the local market, regulator Ofcom blocked the company from bidding for more spectrum in the 2.3GHz band, which could be used to boost existing 4G capability.
BT currently holds 45 percent of the U.K.’s usable mobile spectrum, while Vodafone has 28 percent, compared with 15 percent for O2 and 12 percent for Three. At the same time, Ofcom granted BT permission to bid for a chunk of the 3.4GHz band—considered critical for the rollout of 5G services across Europe—when it comes up for auction in 2017.
Three has called for BT/EE to be completely stopped from bidding for the sale of the spectrum. The watchdog, however, says the spectrum for 5G was not “immediately useable” and that it is “important that operators are given an opportunity to acquire this spectrum so they are able to consider early development of 5G services,” according to a report in London business daily City A.M. Ofcom has set reserve prices of £1 million for a 5MHz block in the 3.4GHz band.

U.K. Plays Broadband Catch-Up

Acutely aware of the importance of connectivity for the digital economy post-Brexit, in November the government pledged to spend more than £1 billion over the next 5 years to deliver broadband speeds up to 1Gbps to 2 million more homes and businesses.
Britain already has one of the most comprehensive digital networks among developed world economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), but it also ranks as one of the most expensive for consumers and businesses to use.
At the same time, Britain is falling behind on the rollout of full fiber, and only 2 percent of premises have access to it. By contrast, Turkey already has double the U.K.’s coverage, while Latvia boasts 20 percent. More businesses are connected in Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany than the U.K., according to OECD figures.
“We’re already on the back foot,” comments Ewan Taylor-Gibson, broadband expert at uSwitch.com. “The U.K. has fallen far behind most EU countries, where ultrafast-capable fiber-to-the-home services are common, and, meanwhile, the take-up of existing fiber services is still fairly low.
“Superfast fiber broadband is available to 90 percent of the U.K., yet 20 of the U.K.’s 42 biggest cities are registering actual average speeds of below 24Mbps. And 3 in 10 broadband users register actual speeds of less than 5Mbps, while just 10 percent log speeds of above 50Mbps.”
Full fiber-to-the-property (FTTP) is already offered by some independent providers such as Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, and B4RN, but to a few thousand customers. In October, BT completed a European first trial of an FTTP technology that it claimed can deliver 40Gbps and 10Gbps connections on the same fiber cable. Virgin Media is also bringing these speeds to 2 million homes.
BT has pledged £6 billion to connect 12 million homes to at least 300Mbps by 2020 mostly using “G.fast”—a technology that speeds up copper cables, rather than using FTTP.
The U.K. government is also offering local authorities the chance to bid for a slice of a £740 million fund to trial 5G networks, linking them to the fiber-optic rollout to provide greater wireless capacity.
Speaking in October at the Broadband World Forum, Matt Hancock, minister of state for digital and culture, said the U.K. had (alongside the U.S.) led the world when it came to the installation of a fixed and mobile network, but he admitted the U.K.’s rollout of 3G and 4G “should have happened sooner.”
“By 2020, the volume of global internet traffic is expected to be 95 times its volume in 2005. In the U.K., fixed internet traffic is set to double every 2 years,” said Hancock at the Broadband World Forum. “We need the digital infrastructure that can support this; providing ubiquitous coverage so no one is left out, and with sufficient capacity to ensure data can flow at the volume, speed and reliability required to meet the demands of modern life.”

5G Gains Momentum

4G traffic exceeded 3G traffic for the first time in 2015 (according to Cisco) and continued its upward trajectory in 2016, when 4G represented more than half of total mobile traffic.
By 2020, 4G will account for 40.5 percent of connections, but 72 percent of total traffic. By then, a 4G connection will generate 3.3 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connection. We can expect three-fourths of the world’s mobile data traffic to be video by 2020 too.
LTE networks can’t cope. “At a certain point, the existing 4G LTE technology will not be sustainable to cope with the massive growth in video data,” says Volker Held, head of innovation marketing at Nokia. “We need a new structure. This is the kernel of the 5G business case. Using it means we won’t need to talk about bandwidth constraints for the foreseeable future.”
5G will raise the bar by providing data rates of tens of megabits per second for tens of thousands of people. In addition to handling high bandwidth applications, the Internet of Things, and billions of video-enabled devices, it will—according to Ericsson—“drive seamless, borderless coverage, allowing media companies to go beyond the geographical restrictions of fiber and become true global players.”
While the broad parameters are agreed upon, standards aren’t expected before 2020. That won’t stop operators from launching “prestandard” 5G networks. Indeed, Ericsson forecasts that there will be 550 million 5G subscriptions by 2022.
Last year, South Korea claimed it would lead the world in 5G, making it a destination for business investment and digital businesses. In September, China asked telecom providers to bid to install 5G networks in major cities after a yearlong trial.
Europe’s governments formed the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the hope it will reinforce the European industry’s ability to compete on the global stage. Launched by the European Commission, the PPP has assorted manufacturers, telcos, service providers, small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), and researchers on board.
Separately, telcos including BT, Nokia, Hutchison, Telefónica, Orange, Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom signed a manifesto pledging to launch a 5G network in every country within the EU by 2020.
There are so many claims being made for 5G—from live 4K virtual reality to coordinating self-driving cars— they can’t all be true from Day 1.
“5G is an aspiration,” says George Robertson, chief technologist at U.K. digital TV promoter DTG in an interview with Streaming Media in August, “Probably what will happen is that LTE will dovetail into 5G. There won’t be an overnight switch on.”
“The rollout of 2G, 3G, and 4G took 10–15 years, which is the time frame for 5G,” adds Peter Siebert, executive director of European digital TV consortium DVB.
Partly this is because 5G is complex to deliver. Most research is concentrating on Massive MIMO (multiple input, multiple output), a technology that uses antennas located at both the transmitter and receiver and incorporated into wireless standards including 802.11ac (Wi-Fi), HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE. Massive MIMO scales up to hundreds or even thousands of antennas and terminals and boosts efficiency by focusing the signal into a more precise set of layers. Vodafone UK claimed the first in Europe in the 2.6GHz TDD band.
The PPP calculates that “very dense deployments” of antennas will be necessary if the billions of wireless devices are to be linked worldwide. The DVB’s Siebert suggests this means a base station every 150 meters, plus the investment in backhauling on top putting the question of the business case firmly on the agenda.
This article was published in the Spring 2017 European edition of Streaming Media magazine.