Sprinkle of gold dust: Behind the scenes at ITV Sport’s UEFA Euro virtual studio

SVG Europe

“When you don’t notice that it’s not real and the viewer has a really good experience, then we’ve done our job right,” says Paul McNamara, senior director and executive producer for major events at ITV Sport. “The trick is to make the set as real as possible and use the tech and the space appropriately.”

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/sprinkle-of-gold-dust-behind-the-scenes-at-itv-sports-uefa-euro-virtual-studio/

McNamara is responsible for ITV Sport’s UEFA Euro 2020 output, of which the centrepiece is a virtual studio from which the broadcaster presents match coverage, except those it is airing live from Wembley such as England’s group stage clash with Scotland and the Czech Republic.

McNamara, a Bafta and RTS winner, is no stranger to virtual sets nor augmented reality (AR), which reached its last zenith during the 2018 World Cup from Russia where the undoubted star was the dramatic ‘cathedral’ studio in Red Square.

“When you go to Moscow and you have a studio position right in Red Square you want to see as much as possible,” he says, “but when we got there we could only see half of St Basil’s.

“When I wondered if there was a way we could see it all, our team managed to find a way (using camera tracking,) to enable what was a small studio space with restricted height to look like a much larger dome and to see the full height of the Cathedral.

“That was a real achievement and got a lot of publicity and proved that within a small space we could create a unique look.”

Euros goes through changes

Next up was UEFA Euro 2020, the concept for which went through a few iterations. For a start, the tournament was based in 12 cities (11 in eventuality) which presented an initial conundrum for a presentation that would normally be built around the sights, sounds and cultural flavour of one country.

“The original plan was to base our studio in London since Wembley had the most games including the semis and final,” McNamara says. “We planned the build in central London with a great view down the Thames.”

Then COVID struck, which has becoming a familiar punctuation point for these stories. “We didn’t know what state the country or indeed any country would be in, so when the tournament was cancelled for a year we opted to take studio space in order to be flexible with any outcome.”

That space, in Maidstone Studios’ 6,000 square foot Studio 2, 45 minutes outside London, is a regular host to ITV programmes (shortly to include ITV4’s Tour de France live programming made by Vsquared).

Arena Television has supplied and installed a purpose-built gallery from cameras, edit suites and recording equipment all supported by the IP core of Arena’s OBY truck parked outside the studio.

“Within the year of prep we mapped three to four different types of look and [those] three to four different projects evolved into what we have now,” he says. “Originally we wanted to be in every country. If a game is in Rome, let’s make the set ‘Rome’ but the pandemic prevented travel. We couldn’t get our team to the cities to film images that I thought would be good enough. I didn’t want to use stock shots. A lot of virtual studios look great on a wide angle but on the singles, stock shots can look pretty average.”

They then tried to simulate cityscapes virtually by animating them in the Unreal games engine, but these too were not up to scratch. “It looked like a video game and not really what I wanted for the background of shots,” McNamara says.

So, they reverted back to London. It still held the largest number of matches and McNamara’s thought was why hide the fact that ITV Sport was too in town.

Filming backdrops

He tasked freelance cameraman Rob Whitworth to capture a variety of panoramic shots of the capital in 8K to be used as set backdrops. Whitworth specialises in time-lapse photography (he terms it flow motion,) of cities including Singapore, Istanbul, Shanghai and Pyongyang.

Whitworth shot in London over different days, at different times, to reflect the times and weather conditions at which matches would take place.

McNamara explains: “He shot when it was hot so we have shots of sunshine across London, at golden hour when the sun is going down and at night for the highlights shows where we needed a darker studio aesthetic.”

Designer, Paul Sudlow, created the physical stage (just as he had done for Russia 2016,) at Maidstone. This was Lidar scanned, translated into a digital 3D model and imported into the Unreal Engine. In Unreal, virtual stage developers, White Light, used a disguise server to stitch (merge) the world of the physical set with a virtual world designed in Unreal by freelance creative director, Kevin Cooney.

“The aim is to move between the real and the unreal worlds,” says McNamara. “It meant we could use the cityscapes we’d designed in Unreal by displaying them on the virtual video walls.”

Marrying the real and the virtual

Lighting directors Chris Hollier and Andy Cottey have full control over both real and unreal environments. “Kevin gave us virtual surfaces that we could light in the Unreal world to match lighting in the studio and conversely, when we create a sky in Unreal, we can have that seem to reflect on the floor of the studio.”

Still concerned with ensuring that the virtual backgrounds to the singles shot of presenter Mark Pougatch and pundits including Gary Neville would stand up to scrutiny, McNamara shot singles in the studio against a background and shared those with Whitworth.

“We took a lot of time on the singles of each guest. Rob was able to use those as reference when he filmed and White Light then stitched those into the model so that the singles are perfect as well.

He says: “It’s a massive project unifying the real and the unreal. The goal is not able to see where the joins are.”

In many ways it is more like a light entertainment show than a sports programme, he says. “Vision mixing takes time to select a shot. When we go from camera one to cam two we need the background to change in sync.

“We mitigate this by spending a lot of time in prep. For a show beginning at 4pm we’d begin blocking moves at midday. It takes time, it’s quite technical and very different from what we do on a weekly basis.

“For example, when the jib operator zooms into the video wall or an AR graphic of Gareth Bale, he only sees the full comp on a small monitor. In reality he is seeing nothing apart from the physical set, which consists of the rostrum and the physical screen behind the presenters.”

“Ultimately, it’s very much the sum of its parts. If the jib doesn’t get to the right point, if White Light don’t open the screen at the right time, if VT don’t run the city profiles – then it won’t work. To get it right everyone has to be very focussed on what they are doing.”

All the AR graphics are selected from within Unreal. Graphics include player profiles, group table, country banners and hero banners and floor maps.

“We can do anything we want to do. We can show the studio in a 360 and use a vistacam [the 180º 4K stadium feed from UEFA] to take viewer into the stadium. The possibilities are endless. The trick is not to over use it.

“We want to make viewers feel comfortable with where they are. My guide is to use AR at the right point, not about showing how clever we are. We will be in homes for a month, so we want to sprinkle our presentation with gold dust.”

How Component shortages are threatening broadcast kit supplies

IBC

 

Broadcast kit vendors need customers to adapt their buying cycle as semi-conductor shortages bite. 

 https://www.ibc.org/trends/how-component-shortages-are-threatening-broadcast-kit-supplies/7674.article

The disruption caused by COVID-19 to the global supply chain is now affecting the manufacture and shipping of broadcast kit. The impact is widespread and worsening. All 130 companies responding to an IABM survey reported experiencing some level of problems in obtaining components, with 40% of those calling the situation “severe”. 

“It’s a perfect storm,” says Lorenzo Zanni, Head of Knowledge at IABM, “The industry is still trying to wrap its head around the implications.” 

Lead times have gone from a typical 12-16 weeks to 52 weeks. Manufacturers are investing in component inventory to ensure their customers continue to receive product but this is a short-term fix. 

“Even viewing over a full year there are predicated gaps in our supply and we have to work aggressively with the supply chain to close those gaps before they get to us,” says Bill Pulcine VP, Supply Chain Management at Ross Video. “It is imperative that customers understand today’s realities. If they want to ensure their project runs on time they need to get give us longer lead times as well.” 

Vendors always build to a forecast and if sales greatly exceed that forecast then the same issue would occur but the global shortage of semi-conductors has exacerbated this. 

That’s a message that the IABM and its members including Imagine Communications and Grass Valley are keen to communicate. 

“Collectively, vendors need a dialogue with their customers in terms of lead time,” Neil Maycock, CMO and General Manager Playout for Grass Valley says. “The buying cycle needs to adapt.” 

He explains, “We’re seeing a major impact in component delivery. We normally give our suppliers a schedule based on a forecast every few months which we typically adjust based on demand. Now, now we’re being asked to commit to a 12-month period which we can’t change.” 

These are binding contracts which are stressing the ‘just in time’ nature of modern manufacture. 

“It might be that ‘just in time’ production is not ideal for these times,” Zanni says. “We need to give more weight to the resilience of the supply chain to better respond to events in future.” 

Most broadcast customers are understanding of the issue but face their own pressures to meet deadlines. 

“There have always been tensions between project schedules and purchase orders,” says Pulcine. “A manufacturer typically won’t earmark production until they get an order from the customer, while the customer may not sign that order until they receive a guaranteed delivery date. That tension is exacerbated significantly in the current climate.” 

Source of the problem 

The pandemic has disrupted global supply chains since February 2020, shutting factories and transport routes. At the same time demand for computing equipment such as PCs has shot up with the move to remote working and cloud computing. Shelter at home orders have also seen high demand for TVs putting further pressure on core chipsets.  5G network deployments and rising interest in electric cars have resulted in spiked demand for integrated circuits. Cryptocurrencies are adding to demand for storage devices used in mining. 

Factor in geopolitical factors like US government sanctions on Huawei and ZTE (blocking access to chips built with US technology and in turn prompting Chinese firms to stockpile chips), and accidents — like the Suez canal grounding, a fire that knocked out a Japanese plant in March and a winter freeze that offlined chip makers Samsung and NXP in Texas - and you have a recipe for disaster. 

“If COVID-19 has shown us anything, it’s that supply chains are volatile and interconnected,” says Zanni. “It not just related to supply from Asia Pacific. This is an international problem.” 

Much of the focus is on the lack of semi-conductors but the IABM survey highlights batteries, motherboards, resistors, capacitors and amplifiers are also in short supply.  

Even cloud service providers rely on data centres to power services, so while a broadcaster’s move to cloud offloads the immediate burden of sourcing parts the bottleneck is just pushed elsewhere. 

Ramifications for development 

The norm for ordering parts for a new product is four months. That’s because if a manufacturer wants to launch a new product it takes that long to build up to volume production. With the lead period pushed to a year, few companies are able to accurately predict the market for their product so far out.  

“The flow of information from suppliers has also slowed to a crawl,” Pulcine says. “Typically, when we place an order it would be confirmed — not just acknowledged — with a date and price in two days. Now we see orders sitting in limbo with no real commitment on delivery for as long as a month.” 

There are workarounds to satisfy demand. One is to loan the customer an older version of a product until the newer one is available. Another is to substitute the missing part for an equivalent one perhaps sourced from another company. Some paperwork and data review may be needed to qualify the part for use so this can realistically only be done for simple components.   

A more severe part substitution would require building and testing a prototype. In the most extreme cases necessitating a complete re-layout of a circuit board the redesign effort is considerable. It could take 6-8 months to rework the product using a different FPGA – an effort that also takes resources away from R&D on the next of generation of product. That’s not a route vendors can afford to go down. 

 

Vendor response 

When COVID-19 began Ross Video took an aggressive stance on securing components. Starting with parts that originated in China, it secured inventory to ensure its product supply to customers would remain unaffected. As the virus spread overseas the company cast a wider net to include all commercial parts.  

“This gave us some safety but was still a significant investment,” says Pulcine. “When lead times went out to a year we expanded that bucket again to help navigate the problem – another significant investment. 

“So far, we are continuing to ship at normal volumes but there are select items where our lead time has been seriously affected. That has expanded our lead times on limited product offerings from two weeks to two months.” 

Fabless companies, those that don’t manufacture the silicon wafers, or chips, used in its products, are generally held not to have as much control over the situation as those who own their own fabs. Imagine Communications, though, subcontracts the manufacture of its product and says because of this the impact on it has not been severe. 

 “Our partner manufacturers have good relationships with all the semi-conductor companies and were able to get ahead of most of those shortages by planning ahead and forecasting further out,” says Chris Sjerven, VP of Manufacture and Supply Chain, Imagine Communications. “We’re asking our customers for that extended visibility also.” 

Imagine’s forecasts have also gone from six months to a year and it is stocking inventory. “Our policy is always to have a safety lead time built into our system so that shocks like this don’t shut us down. 

“In many cases customers with new installs, like setting up a sports arena, come to us already with lead times over a year plus so the just in time nature of manufacture is not impacted.  It is the drop-in orders which are harder to accommodate.” 

Price inflation horizon 

The IABM reports no increase to end users in terms of price of broadcast tech but says suppliers may soon have no choice. 

“Shortages mean the price of raw component goes up with demand and that impacts the bottom line. Suppliers then have either to absorb the cost, extend lead times or raise prices.” 

Reports suggest that some component makers are marking up product by 5-10 per cent. When thousands of parts go into making broadcast machines (Ross Video buys around 8000 parts for its portfolio) that can add up. 

“Electronics is a deflationary industry - generally you are reducing cost over time,” says Pulcine. “So far, we’ve been able to offset those increases. It means our cost reduction has flattened out but there’s been no need to pass any of that on.” 

“We’ve seen price inflation in all most all components not just semi-conductors but we aren’t passing that onto customer in the near term,” says Sjerven. “We are monitoring the situation and if it continues beyond a year we’ll see.” 

Inflation is already happening to the retail of consumer electronics.  

Some high-end televisions already cost 30 percent more than they did last summer according to market researcher NPD.  

“Anything that has a screen built into it is going to be affected by these price increases,” Paul Gagnon, senior research director for consumer devices at Omdia told Wired. 

Lenovo, Dell and Asus have flagged that a shortage of components would mean price hikes further upstream. Last month Sony told analysts that the PlayStation 5 would remain in short supply through 2022 due to the crunch. Console rivals Microsoft and Nintendo have also warned that component shortages could affect production.  

Apple confirmed that chip shortages will see it delay rollout of new ‌iPad‌ and Mac products and lose $3 to $4 billion in revenue in Q3 2021 as a result.  

To mitigate the effects of the shortages, 40 percent of broadcast kit vendors are finding alternative suppliers and spreading orders across several. Thirty one percent are advance ordering large stocks and/or paying more, 19 percent are managing customer expectations and 10 percent are just waiting for things to improve. 

Frenzied grey market 

Interconnected is one way to describe supply chain complexity. Another is “very tangled, even byzantine,” says Pulcine. 

Most of the large chip manufacturers only sell direct to the very largest CE giants (like Samsung), and rarely to companies the size of those selling kit into the niche broadcast industry. Instead, chip fabricators sell to distributors which is where most IABM member source parts. There is also a thriving grey market of brokers or independent distributors used sparingly by vendors. 

“The grey market is in a frenzy,” says Pulcine. “There are some good distributors but it’s also home to some shady suppliers who don’t necessarily have good quality processors and where counterfeit goods can get into market. We tend to avoid it as much as possible.” 

Imagine are also wary. “We use brokers on occasion and will use them more and more as this stress on the supply chain continues,” says Sjerven. “They can be very valuable but you always have to be careful of counterfeits. Anything we source goes through all the safety and quality checks to make sure it’s a good quality component.” 

As an alternative, the IABM has launched an online marketplace for members to pool and access parts. The BaM Stock Exchange, enables companies to list their excess stock on the IABM website using internationally accepted parts codes and descriptions.   

“Since many components are common across broadcast and media tech suppliers, it makes compelling sense to use the industry’s independent, international organization as an ‘Exchange’,” says Peter White, IABM CEO who credits Grass Valley CEO Tim Shoulders with the inspiration. “As a relatively niche industry compared with, for example, the automotive industry giants, we don’t have equal ‘clout’ with component suppliers. However, most companies do hold their own stocks of components – some of which they no longer use.” 

In the longer term 

Ramping up production or relocating fabrication plants closer to home is one long term solution. US semiconductor firms have been lobbying the US government for years to subsidise domestic chip manufacture having seen its share of capacity erode from 37% in 1990 to 12% today.  

In May, electronics manufacturing association IPC urged the US government to address “a fundamental mistake” they say had characterised US tech policy for decades: the idea that the United States can be a technology leader by designing electronic products that cannot be domestically manufactured.     

It argued that state should increase its support of semiconductor manufacturing but also of the entire electronics ecosystem for the country to remain globally competitive. 

The Biden administration has since pledged $50 billion pledge to boost semiconductor production but it’s only a start, according to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.  

“We would say it helps... it's not enough for the vision I am suggesting,” Gelsinger said. “It's something that is so important to every aspect of humanity, everything is becoming more digital and all that manufacturing for that is being done elsewhere. We’ve seen the supply disruptions through COVID. We need to stop the decline and start the rise." 

For its part, Intel announced in March plans to invest $20bn to build two new factories in the US and Taiwanese chip maker TSMC announced a $100bn spend on facilities in China and Arizona – mainly for automotive. 

As broadcast equipment is in the process of transitioning over to software then products should be less affected by hardware shortages – but not entirely.  

Software runs on PCs, on storage, and servers and on servers in data centres all of which rely ultimately on limited supplies of raw silicon. 

 

QoE the focus as playout move to cloud

InBroadcast

Multiplatform has moved from nice-to-have to must-have. And if OTT isn’t at least on your radar, you’re not in the game.

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https://inbroadcast.com/magazines/qoe-the-focus-as-playout-move-to-cloud

Effectively monitoring a steadily increasing number of channels at a centralised operations center is critical to the success of OTT services. OTT platforms must process and deliver multiple video formats to different display devices, different screen sizes and resolutions, at different bit rates, increasing the quantity and complexity of monitoring. 

As the number of channels for OTT delivery continues to grow, monitoring these channels in a highly automated way has become paramount to ensuring a good Quality of Experience for the viewer. To deliver QoE that’s as good as linear TV broadcasts, the entire system - from ingest to multi-bitrate encoding to delivery to CDN - must be monitored continuously. 

“Until recently, the only option to handle these performance requirements was for the multiviewer to be based on dedicated, broadcast specific hardware,” says Peter Wharton, TAG Video Systems’ Director of Corporate Strategy. “Now, software based multi-viewing of compressed and uncompressed signals is a reality.”

TAG’s platform offers both the probing and multiviewing function within the same solution which provides simplified workflows for operators. Wharton explains that the software’s “robust and open API structure” allows deep integration with third party network management systems and broadcast control systems. In turn, this offer easy configured and provides operators with the critical information needed to operate and manage the facility. 

The software-defined solution provides a complete probing and monitoring application tool for all the transmission layers starting from the ST 2110/ST 2022-6 uncompressed; MPEG-TS compressed; and OTT streams all the way down to the encoded video content and its quality.

A recent enhancement is the ability for users to manually set a recording of an OTT channel, record all metadata elements of additional OTT formats, and set 32 channels to be recorded simultaneously- a significant increase in capacity.

“OTT monitoring and error event recording has quickly become a priority issue with our customers and so we’ve enhanced the platform’s capabilities and capacity to help provide information easily for an effective post-mortem analysis,” explains Pinky Maron, VP Professional Services.

Some will argue that throwing everything into the cloud is the solution. Undoubtedly, cloud-based models are becoming a more common feature of the production landscape. However, this doesn’t always make sense - either financially or operationally. 

Few broadcasters can make a complete jump to cloud in one hit. According to Pebble most customers still have functional and valuable playout facilities. “We need to be there for them to keep those systems up to date and operating smoothly,” says to Alison Pavitt, Director of Sales and Marketing. “So much is changing for our customers that Pebble’s role of being a trusted partner and solutions expert is coming very much to the fore.”

Recent introductions by the company have allowed customers to not only increase their channel counts, but also to transition to newer technologies. Pavitt explains, “In installations where split sites are used, we deliver systems that allow both cloud and on-premises channels to be controlled from one interface via our Remote Control and Monitoring application. 

“Pebble Integrated Channel devices and Pebble Automation Solutions are already available on-premises, virtualized in private data centers, or in the cloud. We find the big need is to offer our customers solution flexibility so they can move forward at their own rate without worsening an already stressful change process.”

Grass Valley has perhaps the biggest install base of playout automation in the world and has taken that deep understanding to introduce a ‘true cloud’ architecture supporting playout.

“Public cloud is great at being elastic and offering services on a pay-as-you-go basis, but cloud is hardly what broadcasters think of first when planning how to do playout,” says Neil Maycock, General Manager - Playout. “Playout is a part of the workflow that always needs to be on tap.” 

GV AMPP Playout, the latest application suite for the Agile Media Processing Platform, is GV’s solution. It delivers an elastic playout solution that increases business agility by enabling users to deploy channels, where and when they need them without requiring any additional infrastructure. Built on a microservices architecture, it gives customers “infinite scalability with the ability to provision any number of channels quickly and easily with very low latency.” 

Eurosport is among the first to deploy it. The SaaS platform allows Eurosport to efficiently deliver every minute of its event coverage across all platforms: linear television, online, streaming, and social media. Many of these were previously disparate legacy systems, but now the broadcaster can leverage content much more effectively and across the entire organization, from whichever location its teams operate. 

“Using cloud playout, Eurosport can deliver audio, graphics, scoring and every other variable in localised versions for the duration of a specific event - a strategy that would be absurd in the linear world,” Maycock says.

Most broadcasters are launching OTT channels on Free Ad Supported TV (FAST) platforms or on their direct-to-consumer apps. There is some form of OTT offering in every broadcaster’s channel bouquet today. As a result, one of the challenges that broadcasters are facing, while making their buying decisions, is the duplication of their broadcast workflows for traditional cable distribution and OTT. 

“Those planning to reinvest or upgrade their playout systems, in addition to looking at cloud-based platforms, should be able to adopt cloud platforms that unify broadcast workflows,” says Srinivasan KA, co-founder, Amagi. “One should be able to run pay TV and OTT distribution from a common platform.”

He adds, “The flexibility and scalability of the cloud allows for more experimentation and trial and error in all aspects of the broadcast, including branding and visual style. I think broadcasters will look at systems which deliver such feature-rich live production that can match their on-prem output, but on cloud.”

At a time when OTT wasn’t very evolved, Amagi had invested much of its cloud playout capabilities to deliver broadcast-grade quality for traditional broadcasters looking to migrate workflows to cloud via Amagi CLOUDPORT. KA says the versatility of its cloud solution and its architecture design today allows broadcasters to unify workflows and create live linear channels that can then be distributed to not just pay-TV, but to FAST platforms and DTC apps. 

Amagi has also strengthened its Dynamic Ad Insertion solution with advanced analytics for OTT ad monetization.
Amagi ANALYTICS offers viewing metrics such sessions, average viewing time and content load time. The platform also highlights advertising metrics such as ad breaks, ad requests, responses and ad drops. 

When it comes to live production, Amagi LIVE, “enables the operator to control break durations and slots, insert graphics in the live feed, extend live playout, switch between input sources and so on with live controls on the platform.”

2021 looks set to be the year in which remote working becomes an integral part of many broadcasters’ lifestyle, even if only as a standby option. This in turn is likely to accelerate demand for systems capable of operating under full web/IP-control and in the IP domain.

Secure web/IP remote control allows PlayBox Neo customers to manage broadcast TV channel presentation and playout from whatever location they chose. This allows secure remote-site system operation regardless of distance, plus the ability for channel managers to work from home if necessary. Programmes are delivered to the server as a video data files, each packaged with audio channels in one or more languages plus relevant metadata such as open or closed subtitles.

“Broadcasters are looking for the greatest possible freedom to attach third-party hardware and software rather than be constrained to specific brands,” explains PlayBox Neo CEO Pavlin Rahnev. “We are seeing greater than ever use of the Media Object Server protocol. MOS reduces the need for device-specific drivers and so gives broadcasters the ability to source from multiple vendors. It is fully supported by ProductionAirBox Neo-20, which provides content playout for news, live shows, studio screens, video walls and live broadcasts.”

Content localisation is another increasing trend, including digital programme insertion and audience-specific advertisement targeting. Its AdBox Neo can be integrated into clients’ traffic systems to enable traffic and billing to provide “the complete one-box solution” that includes automation, video server and switching. 

No media company wants to deal with technically complex processes if streamlined solutions are available that allow them to focus on their core creative competency of producing, distributing and monetizing content. 

As a pure SaaS playout and streaming solution Techtriq’s q.air meets these requirements. According to Techtriq’s CEO Jürgen Schmiezek, q.air does so by providing an adjustable number of required channels, uptime-hours, data volumes, stream sources and destinations, that also include social media platforms. 

“The q.air business model is simple,” he says. “Clients choose between two tailored packages and the calculation is based on the number of needed streaming or playout channels. This allows them to scale up and down quickly and flexibly to meet individual and changing requirements.”

The platform offers the latest cloud-powered tools out-of-the-box for video formats up to UHD, broadcast-compliant streams, progressive IP-based protocols (e.g., SRT, adaptive streaming, etc.) as well as features like asset and stream transcoding, ad triggering for dynamic ad insertion, Dolby and loudness control.

Versio is Imagine Communications’ microservices-based media workflow ecosystem, offering everything required for complete channel creation - from ingest and media asset management to playout, master control, and graphics.

As a fully software-based ecosystem, Versio can be deployed on-premise, in the public cloud, or in a hybrid environment. The technology enables operators generate content for broadcast, OTT, linear, nonlinear, mobile, or any other platform from a single playout ecosystem. As part of Versio, Imagine offers a Master Control Surface (MCS) modular playout suite. This provides a touchscreen-based master control surface designed for either fully manual operation or combined with automation. It enables full control of switching, graphics and automation. 

Managing migration

InBroadcast

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http://europe.nxtbook.com/nxteu/lesommet/inbroadcast_202106/index.php?startid=58

https://inbroadcast.com/magazines/managing-migration

Vendors offer solutions oriented to on-premise, cloud and hybrid working environments but media organizations must judge the right time to move  

From a technical and business perspective, customers are currently at a design crossroads concerning library and archive storage management solutions. The dilemma boils down to on-premise, cloud or hybrid solutions. There is no right answer, since investment and timing is dependent on the existing infrastructure and business requirement of the organisation. 

VSN’s Global Sales Director, Roberto Pascual, lays the ground work. On the one hand, he says, an on-premise system generally requires an investment in the equipment and technical solutions that guarantee maximum control, maximum availability and access. This demands greater dependence in terms of manual supervision and maintenance by the client.  

A cloud model avoids this initial investment in exchange for shifting to a periodic operating cost structure. Cloud is generally held to provide greater flexibility to scale, grow or decrease its use according to workload and without impact on human resources.  

Nonetheless, says Pascual, this is subject to reduced availability and access to content, since it's hosted on third-party equipment. “That is why hybrid solutions allow for the creation of solutions that, if well-constructed, take advantage of both models to create a single solution.  

He says, “It’s important to bear in mind that the success of a hybrid solution will not depend solely on the selected technical resources, but rather on adequate prior consulting work to detect the specific needs of the project and deploy the most suitable solution.  

“The goal is for clients to have all the available options at their disposal and to be able to move from one environment to another once the solutions have been deployed and working,” Pascual explains. “In this sense, VSNExplorer and VSNCrea are focused on offering the flexibility that current workflows require to support our customer’s business success.” 

Telestream also points to the challenges of managing video in a hybrid environment and suggests that users want application agnostic storage. Users of media processing applications do not care or want to know where the content lives on storage, the firm says. Abstracting the storage layer from the application layer allows users to choose best of breed storage technologies for different departments and requirements. Another challenge is validating video quality after transfer. As content moves from camera card, to local disk, to cloud, to archive, video file quality must be preserved. 

Telestream’s DIVA Solutions now includes Kumulate (formerly part of Masstech which Telestream acquired).  DIVA stores media in what Telestream call “content-aware objects” and handles the storage of those objects through policies.    

“Policy-based asset movement allows for easy automation of media movement between storage tiers including disk, tape, cloud, and removable media on shelves,” explains Geoff Tognetti, CTO, Telestream Content Management Unit. “Telestream will leverage the strengths of DIVA and Kumulate to provide the market with the most advanced content management solution."  

DIVA can sync content across multiple data storage centers, on-prem or from any cloud provider and offers “unlimited” storage when integrated with media platforms from the likes of Avid, Grass Valley or Pebble. 

From Tedial’s perspective the main challenges are: The selection of technology and the management of new media formats like UHD and component-based media (IMF, cameras and so on) 

“The first challenge relates to the selection of robust technology that is cost-effective and future-proof and simultaneously offers the reliability required for preservation in a long-term archive,” says CTO Julian Fernandez-Campon. “If broadcasters are storing on-prem they need to implement security mechanisms to guarantee that content won’t be lost, such as having double copies and definition of a policy to migrate from one storage technology (i.e LTO) to another.” 

When archiving in the cloud all these problems disappear, he says, as redundancy is guaranteed and the underlying hardware is transparent. “AWS provides almost 100 percent durability of objects over a given year for the whole storage portfolio. The downside of this might be cost and the vendor lock-in.” 

For the second challenge, Fernandez-Campon  says storage systems don’t provide an efficient way to group and describe all the elements that belong to specific content. “This means some logical structure is required that groups them and can store in the most efficient way, depending on the underlying technology.” 

Tedial’s Content Management solution aSTORM addresses both issues by providing a media abstraction layer where all content is defined by a unique ID that’s archived in a storage group.  

“The underlying technology is transparent and the applications on the top request to archive a piece of content,” he explains. “aSTORM then selects the correct storage technology (on-Prem, cloud) depending on the defined policy. Most importantly, if migration is required because of technology obsolescence or because the price of the storage service in the cloud has been increased, it will be done automatically without disrupting the service.” 

aSTORM also offers a set of microservices that cover storage, technical metadata and media files. These provide the abstraction layer required to describe the technical metadata of the content at the component level and the information of each track (language, video/audio class, etc.), “offering a unified management of all these elements.” 

Of course, media files vary greatly in size and complexity, in line with better quality and resolution.  GB Labs points to an often-ignored issue which is that each frame in an image sequence movie is seen as an individual file and therefore requires an archive file to be created for every frame (up to 30 frames per second).  

“This has the potential for millions of archive container files to be created and can turn a theoretical 6-hour complete tape write to 30 hours or more,” asserts Chief Business Officer (Asia) and Co-Founder Ben Pearce. “While backup is two or more copies of your data, archive is a single asset moved from online or nearline storage into a more energy-efficient and cost-effective resting place. However, since it may be required again, the time it takes to get the asset back and the provision of a suitable storage for working with that asset again (archive storage is not suitable for editing in place) must be considered.” 

In terms of cloud storage, the cost of egressing files back onto suitable storage must also be considered. GB Labs has an LTO archiving platform ideal for archiving large amounts of data that uses the GB Labs technology ‘Hyperwrite’ to efficiently archive a full tape’s capacity of millions of files close to the native speed of the tape. Its new ‘Unify Hub’ solution links Cloud storage and on-premise storage and utilizes intelligent caching to massively reduce repeat file egress charges. 

Facilities using LTO tape to store project files run into several challenges “which often result in workflow compromises,” argues Tim Klein, President & CEO, ATTO Technology. “Aside from running daily backups of project files and assets, many studios transfer files and assets from outside the studio via LTO tape. It’s not uncommon for the files and assets for a single project to span multiple tapes and that number increases as the project develops.” 

Tape drives housed in server rooms create challenges where post production artists need to make frequent trips into server rooms, interrupting their creative process. Constantly invading the server room also raises security concerns as well as disrupts the regulated room environment. 

Klein explains that as simple redesign of the storage infrastructure using an ATTO XstreamCORE intelligent Bridge eliminates these workflow and security problems while retaining network availability. XstreamCORE, he says, enables LTO tape drives to be relocated outside the server room and into the studios near the workstations using the existing Ethernet network while the drives remain available to the rest of the facility. 

XenData is mining a similar theme. The pandemic has of course put even greater emphasis on supporting distributed working which includes making archived media files available across multiple facilities and to remote workers.  Xendata understands that organizations with multi-petabyte quantities of media files have historically benefited greatly from the much lower cost of on-prem LTO tape archives. But the cloud makes it much easier to share files. Consequently, hybrid approaches that combines on-prem LTO and cloud are now becoming attractive. 

 “XenData Multi-Site Sync is a cloud service that provides highly scalable file sharing across multiple sites and remote users, ensuring that everyone uses the same media file-folder structure,” explains Philip Storey, XenData CEO. “It boosts the productivity of distributed teams by enabling them to seamlessly synchronize files across all locations.” 

The latest version of XenData Multi-Site Sync was released in April and includes optimizations for conventional Adobe Premiere Pro Shared Projects. Storey says this means that editors do not have to switch to Team Projects when working remotely.  

“The XenData service instantly propagates project and project lock files to all users, no matter whether they are connected to the network or are working remotely.” 

All organisations face the challenge of protecting data at scale but for M&E organisations, the data they are protecting is their “crown jewel” in the words of Maziar Tamadon, Product & Solution Marketing, Scality. 

“Storing and managing digital media assets, whether during the production process or afterwards, is critical to smooth workflow and maximising asset revenue,” he says. “Security and reliability are therefore of paramount importance, and must be balanced with availability and performance to ensure that data is always and rapidly available when, where and in the format in which it’s needed.” 

 Software-defined Scality RING scalable storage enables enterprises and cloud service providers to run petabyte-scale, data-rich services such as web applications, video on demand, active archives, compliance archives, and private storage clouds. Acting as a single, distributed system, the RING scales linearly across thousands of servers, multiple sites, and an unlimited number of objects.  

Scality says data is protected with policy-based replication, erasure coding and geodistribution, “achieving up to 14x9s of durability and 100% availability” adding that RING provides high performance across a variety of workloads at up to 90% lower TCO than legacy storage. 

Trust is also the theme at Rohde & Schwarz. “We now accept the storage, transfer and security of digital content but for some, the same fears remain – ‘where’s my content, is it backed-up, is it safe,’” observes Marketing Director Ciaran Doran. 

The firm’s SpycerNode solutions come into play here. Doran explains a recent project demanded a scalable networked system with ultra-high-speed access or ultra-capacity modes connected to remote backup. Users don’t notice whether their content is located in London or New York, Doran says. 

Another project required a “bare metal, single-setup with small/medium capacity with the ability to decide whether speed or capacity is the priority, together with easy add-on expansion of flash or disk”. This sort of solution with up to 22GB/s access speed is often critical in high-end post. 

Doran also points to a networked storage across two sites 10 miles apart. More than 300 clients were registered to a graphics network “with consistently high-user demand for engaging graphics to be available to all users at all times while using several software creation tools.” The storage network is kept in perfect synchronisation with HQ via a third-party ISP 100Gig connection and SLA with <1ms latency between sites. 

“A top-class storage solution should act like a top-class restaurant waiter,” he says. “You shouldn’t even notice it. The content should be available and appear exactly when needed without having to think about it. However, the waiter serving your meal is unlikely to deliver at 22Gb/s or with a latency to the kitchen of less than 1ms!” 

Quantum’s Marketing Director Skip Levens is seeing a huge surge in demand for content creation. Instead of developing a television episode a week, or working on a single feature at a time, content creators need to deliver entire seasons and juggle multiple ongoing projects in different stages of production simultaneously.  

“If teams want to keep up with the pace of production but also thrive, they need the agility to adapt their production and content workflows,” he says. “The sheer scale and complexity of these demands has required many customers to rethink how their production workflows ingest, create, and in particular, archive and retrieve content to optimise performance, capacity, and economics.  

“Many customers find they need a mix of on-premise shared storage with cloud or tape, with a safety copy on tape or cold cloud. They rely on their content management application and file sharing and collaboration platform to work seamlessly with that platform to ensure content is exactly where it’s needed.” 

Quantum’s solution is the StorNext 7 shared file system platform. Levens say StorNext lets customers fine tune their mix of performance and capacity, from high-performance shared storage collaboration to Petabytes of object storage or cloud.  

 

Tech Pros Want a Hybrid Workplace (and Agree They’ll Risk Burnout Otherwise)

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Tech workers prefer flexible at the office and at home scenarios and are increasing risk of burnout if employers don’t grant it, finds a new report.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/tech-pros-want-a-hybrid-workplace-and-agree-theyll-risk-burnout/

The 2021 Technologist Sentiment Report, released by Dice, shows the complexities organizations face in creating attractive work environments for in-demand technologists.

Results from the survey of 2021 were compared to sentiment surveys from last year.

The desire to work remotely five days per week in Q2 2021 (29%) has significantly declined from the fourth quarter of 2020 (41%), showing a preference for a hybrid work model in lieu of being fully remote, the report reveals.

Currently, tech professionals are most enticed by the cost-savings of remote work (70% in Q2 2021 vs. 61% in Q4 2020) and more flexibility/schedule control (67% vs. 65%).

However, 24% of respondents feel their work-life balance is worse than pre-pandemic due to increased demands, workforce shortages and no set boundaries between home and work. Roughly three-quarters feel their work-life balance is better (33%) or the same (43%) as it was before COVID-19.

“Because there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to punctuate the workday, no reason to stop. The demands keep coming and I keep working,” Dice quotes one anonymous participant as saying.

Burnout seems to have hit those aged 18-34 hardest. Older technologists may not have young children to manage in addition to their workload, Dice speculates, and they’re less likely to need the in-person mentoring and collaboration that technologists between the ages of 18 and 34 desire so fervently.

It’s also apparent that relationships have deteriorated between technologists and their colleagues and managers. Fifty-one percent said that remote work made it harder to develop and maintain working relationships with colleagues (up from 40% in Q2 2020), and 34% claimed they were having difficulty maintaining an effective relationship with their manager (up from 22% in Q2 2020).

What could the solution look like? Dice suggests that “companies’ traditional reluctance to embrace remote work seems to be disappearing — but many technologists, especially those in the 18-34 demographic, may still hunger for certain benefits that only in-office work can provide.”

Giving this group the ability to create their own schedules can help them achieve a “successful” work-life balance based on their own definition, which in turn reduces the likelihood of reaching burnout.

All this suggests that companies are taking a slow-and-careful approach to bringing their workforces back into the office, which makes sense: no organization wants to go through the arduous and expensive process of shutting down workplaces again.

 

Why TV Advertising Works So Well in Conjunction with Social Video

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As the past year made very clear, linear is not the only place for audiences to watch content, with streaming and social video continuing to grow. But a new report reveals just how crucial social video is for media companies alongside linear audiences.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/why-tv-advertising-works-so-well-in-conjunction-with-social-video/

The choice isn’t one or the other. The challenge is how to use TV and social video in concert with one another (along with other mediums as well) to drive marketing success.

The Global Video Measurement Alliance report, “Discovering Audiences On Social Video: How brands can leverage new reach in the changing media landscape,” showcases how social video in the US attracts younger demographics, engages viewers at a high rate, is rapidly growing in comparison to linear TV and is an important complement to linear TV.

In the report, Howard Shimmel, president of Janus Strategy & Insights, writes on the current threats facing traditional linear TV in media negotiations, and says advertisers should move dollars to social video to expand and complement linear media strategies.

As widely reported, the decline in linear TV viewing across all demographics except adults 65 and older has been dramatic. Especially for teens and adults 18-34, who are watching less than half the linear TV than they were in 2010.

“The challenges that advertisers and agencies are facing with linear TV supply are very present now,” Shimmel says. “Advertisers that continue to rely on network and cable will face the perpetual challenge of CPM increases due to diminished supply.”

In the past, a show the caliber of The Mandalorian would have run on ABC in primetime, and been monetized through ABC retransmission fees and advertising sales.

Now Disney recognizes that The Mandalorian is worth more in corporate value driving subscription and retention to the Disney+ service.

“We are just at the beginning stages of premium content moving to ad-free DTC services and, with that movement, social video offers advertisers opportunities to reach consumers in a highly engaged environment like they used to find on linear.”

Traditional linear TV companies have made national scale a major part of what’s offered to advertisers. For these companies, the report found that, social video offers 75% of the reach that linear provides, and for Disney, nearly the same reach.

What’s more, social video provides a direct complement to linear TV. More than half of social video consumption comes from persons 18-34, compared to less than 10% for linear TV. On the other hand, while more than 60% of linear TV’s audience is 50 or older, that demographic is less than 15% of social video’s audience.

Shimmel argues that social video can alleviate the disparity between demographics in TV. If advertisers, brands, and media companies want to reach younger audiences, they only need to look at social video, where 53% of social video consumption comes from the 18-34 demographic.

Traditional media companies like Disney, ViacomCBS, and Comcast with a lot of content that directly appeals to younger audiences showed linear and social at a dead heat in terms of reach.

“Essentially, this data shows it’s a missed opportunity if media companies don’t run cross-platform campaigns to leverage potentially lucrative social video reach at scale,” suggests John Cassillo at Tubefilter.

While there are differences between the way that linear TV and social video are measured, this report puts them side by side to provide perspective on the reach and demos of each medium.

In particular, it uses data from Nielsen and Tubular Labs (a GVMA member and co-sponsor of the report) to compare traditional linear TV with social video.

“Metrics like Tubular Audience Ratings can function as an effective currency to show exactly who’s watching and where, providing a level of audience intelligence that allows for better ad targeting and content customization,” the report concludes.

 

How Do Local TV Stations Shift Audiences to Streaming?

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Local news stations have to work out how to get the next generation of viewers hooked on their streaming content. Fail in that and say goodbye to business.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/how-do-local-tv-stations-shift-audiences-to-streaming/

Broadcast networks are attempting to find the formula by launching streaming services. They include Stirr from Sinclair Broadcast Group, CBSN Local from ViacomCBS and Gray Television’s Local News Live.

Another experiment, VUit, aggregates local programming from over 200 stations (including Hearst Corp. and Gray TV) across the nation.

“We created this sort of local-to-national syndication,” Jack Perry, founder and CEO of Syncbak, the company that owns VUit, tells Bloomberg. “Our focus is on helping our local broadcasters pump more content into the streaming ecosystem.”

The Bloomberg article goes into more detail about VUit’s business model and prospects. Launched last autumn, VUit is an ad-supported streaming platform available on Android and iOS devices, Roku, AppleTV and Amazon Fire TV.

In the past, cost was an obstacle for smaller stations trying to reach a streaming audience, Perry said. His company built VUit with the smallest designated TV market area in the U.S. in mind — specifically Glendive, Montana.

“One of the things that has slowed OTT adoption for small companies is that it’s so darn expensive,” Perry said. “I figured let’s just make it free. That’s the winning formula.”

In addition to providing access to its news programs, participating local stations are encouraged to produce a minimum of 12 live events each year exclusively for VUit. The station and VUit split the resulting ad revenue.

This could mean anything from high school graduations to live coverage of the 2021 Iditarod from Alaska (shared on VUit by NBC affiliate KTUU-TV).

“We tell our broadcasters, go put a webcam up on the Soo Locks [Linchpin of the Great Lakes] and watch the boats go through,” said Perry. “If people want to watch that, great.”

Gray’s streamer Local News Live is formatted around a news anchor and a curated mix of feeds from across Gray’s stations. “It’s a VJ kind of approach,” Pat LaPlatney, president and co-CEO of Gray Television, said. “Here’s an interesting story out of Boise. Here’s the sun setting in Honolulu, or Alaska or whatever.”

This all seems a bit hit and hope with audience figures hard to come by. According to analyst Colin Dixon, of NScreenMedia, quoted in the article, the difficulty is trying to get younger viewers to turn off social media long enough to get hooked on a new and unfamiliar app.

“When you do polls, you have to ask a lot of people before you start finding anyone saying that they are trying them,” he says. “So how many people are actually using these services? My gut says not many.”

Despite all the hype over hyperlocal digital news, nobody has yet figured out how to hook new viewers onboard.