The making of sub drama Vigil in depth

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BBC murder mystery Vigil, set aboard a nuclear submarine, was the broadcaster’s biggest domestic ratings hit of 2021.  Now available via BBC and ITV streamer Britbox among other outlets, it’s time to dive deep into how the show was made.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/sounding-the-depths-of-bbc-peacock-submarine-drama-vigil/

The indie behind the 6-part drama has pedigree. World Productions, part of ITV Studios, produces hugely popular police thriller series Line of Duty and also made the political thriller Bodyguard which was the highest rated BBC drama in three years until Vigil broke that record reaching 13.4 million earlier this year.

The show is set in Scotland (where the UK’s nuclear sub fleet is based) and the premise is that a land-based detective is tasked to investigate the death of one of the crew of the HMS Vigil while the sub is at sea. Things get murkier from there on.

Given the nature of the subject matter, the Royal Navy did not offer much in the way of cooperation. Nuclear subs are shrouded in secrecy.

“I don’t think that they were interested in engaging with us,” notes Matt Gray BSC who was hired by the director of the pilot James Strong. “[Nuclear submarines] are just short of one and a half football pitches long, eight double decker buses deep, generate their own airflow, and have unlimited power. They are designed to be invisible. We also had to piece together the world of the Navy base which was a combination of visual effects and the clever use of locations.” 

The Hunt for Red October was natural touchpoint for designing the visual grammar of the show, along with sci-fi like Alien for creating a claustrophobic environment deep underwater.

“It’s completely artificial… and what it does to your senses and mind,” Gray says. We tried to create a sense of depth. You are on different decks and the way that piece of engineering is created you have your nuclear tubes and reactor, and the human element fits in around those components.”  

Creator Tom Edge had done a lot of research but a large part of the show’s credibility stems from the production design of the sub. Edge and PD Tom Swayer talked to former submariners and scoured the internet for similar vessels. The space had to be big enough to contain the story action and flexible enough to work in and yet retain all the claustrophobia of a real submarine. For the interior of the HMS Vigil, LED Astera tubes were linked back to an iPad through WiFi. 

“We did some testing in the submarine set, but some adjustments had to be made so that the Steadicam was able to take full advantage,” Gray tells Definition “We wanted the camera to be constantly moving and flowing through the environment – never letting it get too static, not to distract from the pace of the story.”

A lot of the tension in the series comes from the twin tracks of story – one on the sub and the other following another detective investigating on land.

Gray gave each a different but linked colour scheme, explaining to BritCine; “We were working with more manmade industrial colours inside of the sub like acidic yellows, greens and reds. There were different states so when the sub was on different levels of power that was denoted by the way the lighting would adjust. When on land, we tried to have natural interpretations of the same colours.”  

He shot with a pair of ARRI Alexa LF cameras in 4K HDR, delivered as a 2:1 aspect ratio and graded in ACES. The lenses were a combination of Zeiss Master anamorphic primes, Kowa anamorphic 75mm, and Tokina Vista spherical. 

Goodbye Kansas Studios delivered 180 VFX shots for series including a detailed 150 metre model of the Trident submarine – again having to create a convincing model through extensive research.

VFX supervisor Jim Parsons explained in a release, “We even went so far as talking to a former Navy officer… obviously without breaking any official secrets! The next challenge was to submerge HMS Vigil into the ‘digital North Sea’, developing each shot to make the submarine look like more than a long object in a dark ocean. We created a thickness to the water that allowed pools of light through it, creating a sinister and ominous mood, with every shot of the submarine adding to the atmosphere of the show’s mystery.”

Some important scenes feature a fishing trawler that, due to the complexity of the sequences, called for it to be shot in many different locations including in a bay and in a stationary dock.

“A lot of our work involved removing external scenery, creating the illusion that it was nowhere near land,” Parson explained. “Some underwater scenes with actors were also filmed at the Pinewood Studios water tank, which involved having to remove the external scenery in the edit and create VFX surroundings of a lake in the Scottish Highlands.”

Director Strong described the opening 20 minutes of the series as the most audacious, complex and exciting he has ever shot.

“We had to film the sinking of a boat in the middle of the North Sea and then helicopter our hero onto a moving submarine 200 miles off the Scottish coast,” he explained to the BBC. “It took months and months of planning, breaking it down shot by shot and deciding how to do each frame, utilizing all the different cinematic tools, kit and techniques available. It was a monumental effort from all the departments involved and I’m truly thrilled with the end results.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Web3 and the Battle For the Soul of the Internet

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Web3 is one of the buzzwords of the year, but what does it mean and how does it relate to the metaverse? There is some tech behind the jargon, but mostly Web3 and the metaverse are part of a philosophical tussle for the soul of the next internet revolution, namely a chance to reset the early promise of an information superhighway in which we all share control, or a future in which more of our data and money is ceded to a handful of Big Tech companies.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/web3-and-the-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-internet/

First a handy recap of terms.

The World Wide Web inaugurated as Web 1.0 was the era of static webpages. Images were discouraged — they took up too much bandwidth — and video was out of the question.

Web 2.0 is our more dynamic, editable, user-driven version of the internet with which we have been living since the mid-2000s. Platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter emerged to bring order to the Internet by making it easy to connect and transact online. Images and video no longer reduced sites to a crawl, and we started sharing them in huge numbers. Critics say that over time those companies amassed too much power.

Web3 is about grabbing some of the power back.

“At its core is the idea of decentralization,” writes David Nield at Gizmodo. “Rather than Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta hoarding everything, the internet will supposedly become more democratized.”

Key to this decentralization is blockchain technology, which creates publicly visible and verifiable ledgers of record that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. The blockchain already underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as a number of fledging technologies, and it’s tightly interwoven into the future vision of everything that Web3 promises.

“In some ways, Web3 is a mix of the two eras that came before it,” Nield says. “The advanced, dynamic, app-like tech of the modern web, combined with the decentralized, user-driven philosophy that was around at the start of the internet, before billion- and trillion-dollar corporations owned everything. Web3 shifts the power dynamic from the giant tech entities back to the users — or at least that’s the theory.”

In its current form, Web3 rewards users with tokens, which will eventually be used in a variety of ways, including as currency or as votes to influence the future of technology. In this brave new world, the value generated by the web will be shared out between many more users and more companies and more services, with much-improved interoperability.

To critics — and there are many — Web3 is the emperor’s new clothes, a marketing slogan thinly disguising vaporware.

“Web3 is bullshit,” blogged London-based software engineer Stephen Diehl. “At its core, Web3 is a vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony.”

Ron Miller, who notes in TechCrunch that he was writing about the potentially disruptive nature of blockchain four years ago, quotes academic and author Kevin Werbach: “Web3 is, to some extent, a meme or marketing brand around a variety of blockchain and cryptocurrency activity, which was already happening. Like the enterprise blockchain wave of a few years ago, Web3 is being hyped as much farther along in adoption than it truly is. Lots of people are trading crypto and buying NFTs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are adopting distributed alternatives to major tech platforms.”

On the other hand, there has been a genuine rise in blockchain activity. The New York Times reports that venture capitalists have invested more than $27 billion in crypto and related projects this year, more than the previous 10 years combined. It says the biggest investors and industry players are also lobbying in Washington “to influence rules that would favor their futuristic view of tokenomics, which can already be seen in some burgeoning communities where Web3 is not some abstract concept but a feature of daily life.”

Hilary Carter, VP of research at the Linux Foundation, tells TechCrunch, “we’re seeing the maturity of the blockchain ecosystem, so much so that nation-states are building ‘central bank digital currency,’ which is probably the use case that will demand the most throughput.”

Deloitte’s Blockchain Survey reported that nearly 80% of respondents to its blockchain survey believe that digital assets would be important or somewhat important to their industries within the next two years.

“There is also a persistent belief that the speeding of digital transformation amid the pandemic is driving a corresponding shift to more widespread acceptance of digital currencies,” says Miller.

If Web3 and specifically the blockchain underpins the apps and services running on a future internet then that also means the AR/VR interface into a three-dimensional metaverse.

The hope — and it looks increasingly naïve — is that Web3 will cut the middlemen out of the picture putting control and monetization directly in the hands of users and creators.

“Enthusiasts hope Web3 will mean that sharing photos, communicating with friends and buying things online will no longer by synonymous with Big Tech companies but be done through a multitude of small competing services on the blockchain,” describes Bobby Allyn at NPR. “For instance, every time you post a message, you earn a token for your contribution, giving you both ownership stake in the platform and one day a way to cash in.”

In an attempt to differentiate itself from Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, Twitter says it is studying ways to incorporate Web3 concepts into its social network.

“It means that all the value that’s created can be shared amongst more people, rather than just the owners, investors and employees,” Esther Crawford, a senior project manager at Twitter, told NPR.

She’s on the side of Web3 being a force for the good of all.

“For a long time, Web3 has been very theoretical,” she said. “But now there is a surge of momentum to build.”

It’s fair to say the sceptics outnumber Web3’s proponents.

“Experts say, in the best case scenario for Web3 enthusiasts, the technology will operate alongside Web 2.0, not fully supplant it,” Allyn says. “In other words, blockchain-based social networks, transactions and businesses can and will grow and thrive in the coming years. Yet knocking out Facebook, Twitter or Google completely is not likely on the horizon, according to technology scholars.”

That’s because Big Tech is already making moves to fold Web3 into their services and subvert, if you like, the utopian goal of decentralized democratic internet ownership to their own cause.

“Facebook will always be incentivized to enrich Facebook,” Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, a blockchain-based project for storing data online, tells NPR. “And that’s not

James Grimmelmann, a Cornell University professor, says the whole premise of Web3 is contradictory. If part of the impetus is to resist giving up personal data to Big Tech companies, then the blockchain is not the solution, since that will make even more data public.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he says to NPR. “The vision says the problem with the internet is too many centralized intermediaries. Instead of having lots of different applications and sites, we’ll put it all on blockchains, which puts it all in one place.”

It’s not as if blockchains don’t solve some difficult problems in new ways, he adds, “they’re probably going to end up in the toolkit that the next internet is built out of, but that doesn’t mean the internet is going to be built around them.”

In 2022 the hype cycle around metaverse and Web3 will go into overdrive but there will also be hard hitting pushback until there is some concrete example of what it means for the longer term.

 

“Voir” and the Video Essay as an Art Form

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/voir-and-the-video-essay-as-art-form/

Netflix series Voir, executive produced by David Fincher and director David Prior explores how the grammar of filmmaking impacts a film or TV show’s meaning.

Three of the six episodes are made by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou whose own YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting, which almost served as a proof of concept for Voir.

One key difference: Obtaining the licences to show content on YouTube was “very constricting” whereas with the combined clout of Fincher and Netflix it meant almost too much freedom of choice.

“It was mildly terrifying,” Zhou told IndieWire.

More than access to money for media libraries and rights lawyers, however, what Ramos and Zhou had to contend with was the ability to scale how they presented their ideas, expanding from narration over picture to mix in other modes of filmmaking.

“Videos are a weird hybrid that have elements of narrative and elements of documentary,” Zhou explained Zhou. “So [there are] elements of this show that tilt towards narrative… or documentary, in our case. We went out and shot interviews, which we would have done in a doc format, or things like motion graphics, like actually building an animated character.”

‘Film vs. Television’ narrated by Ramos, examines the differences between the small screen and the big screen, especially the difference between how these two mediums are shot. Cable and streaming have mostly changed everything, where television can now be cinematic and film can be easily watched on the small screen.

Zhou and Ramos’ ‘The Ethics of Revenge,’ serves as a meditation on why violence off-screen can be more haunting than violence on screen. 

‘The Duality of Appeal,’ takes us through character design by looking at how the human eye processes shapes - what is pleasing and balanced? Ramos and Zhou try to deconstruct why it is we default to the same familiar face for females in animation. 

“The thing I’m most proud of learning [was] the process of adapting what was effectively a two-person workflow to like 40 to 50 people,” Zhou said. “It’s one of the weird things that they don’t really teach you in school. They’ll teach you protocols for how to do certain things on set, but they don’t necessarily teach you how to you take something that involves just two people talking and make it 40 people without causing chaos.”

Other episodes include ‘But I Don't Like Him’ which dives into Lawrence of Arabia and the value of films that center on complex or even dark characters. This episode suggest this is especially true of the films of the 1970s and directors like Martin Scorsese.

‘Profane and Profound’ is Walter Chaw's personal examination of the Walter Hill film 48 Hours and how it connected with him growing up in the mostly white Colorado. He explores Hill's daring approach in giving the Eddie Murphy character so much agency at a time when that really wasn't done quite to the same degree -- a life-changing revelation to Chaw.

6G Mobile Network Begins to Take Shape with 7G Already in the Wings

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While 5G is still very much a work in progress, industry thoughts are already turning towards the next generation of mobile connectivity: 6G.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/6g-mobile-network-begins-to-take-shape-with-7g-already-in-the-wings/

Historically, there’s been a 10-year gap between one generational leap in mobile technology and another, and if specifications for 6G are locked down as early as next year that means a target date of 2030 for commercial rollout.

While discussions about the successor to 5G are serious and growing in number, the substance of a 6G network remains vague.

The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance is taking a very high-level view of the status of 6G. This group includes T-Mobile, BT, NTT Docomo, Orange, KPN, China Mobile, Telefonica, Vodafone, and Canada’s Bell (but not AT&T or Verizon).

NGMN’s framework for building a 6G network sets out “the imperative to satisfy three fundamental needs facing the society at large, and the telecoms industry specifically,” namely: the need to address societal objectives at large, notably the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals; the need to satisfy customer requirements by offering new services and capabilities, supported by evolving technologies in a cost-effective manner; and the need to make the planning, deployment, operations, management, and performance of the mobile operator’s networks increasingly more efficient.

As one can see, these needs are so broad they could apply to 5G, AI, VR, Blockchain, or virtually any emerging technology.

The sustainability goal is a key focus of the NGMN. “This includes energy efficiency and adoption of green technologies and green energy, towards carbon neutrality, for this decade and beyond, and should be a fundamental design consideration for 6G,” it states. This can only succeed with a holistic approach by the entire ecosystem, including global standards, ecosystem design, service footprint, metering and monitoring, and deployment strategies.

The NGMN goes on to say that it expects 6G “in its novelty and capabilities” to meet the three drivers it outlined, “and, in addition, break new frontiers with respect to environmental impact, societal benefits, users, scenarios, players, value creation and spectrum,” to drive new business models, “and potential new paradigms unknown today…. We also require features of 6G to be introduced in a way that enhances trustworthiness, security and resilience.”

One of its members, Japan’s NTT Docomo, has gone further in a paper outlining what to expect of 6G that 5G cannot.

This includes high-fidelity mobile holograms, any camera to any device anywhere, completely cable-free video production, and the possibility of replicating physical entities, including people, objects, systems, and places in a virtual world. If you’ve heard that before then you’ll be thinking “metaverse,” with 6G perhaps ushering in the processing power and speed to deliver real-time online interactivity.

6G connectivity is envisaged to deliver peak data rates of the order of terabits per-second together with sub-millisecond latency in the sub-terahertz and terahertz ranges.

These peak rates are unlikely to be delivered over wide areas but might be useful for some use cases in localized areas. As such, there is interest in the potential use of frequencies in the sub-terahertz and terahertz ranges to provide the bandwidth to deliver these peak data rates and to enable the intensive use of spectrum within localized areas.

This encompass spectrum between 90GHz and 300GHz, which is between millimeter-wave and infrared. For more information on that, visit the Brave Research Project, a collaborative research project investigating new PHY-Layer technologies to reach beyond-5G data rates and capacities.

According to consultants Analysys Mason, the characteristics of sub-terahertz/terahertz frequencies are very different from those of the bands used today for wide-area, contiguous coverage in mobile networks. Potential use of sub-terahertz frequencies in 6G therefore raises fundamental questions in terms of usage environments, use cases, network topologies, and devices, the consultant advises.

“It remains unknown how sub-terahertz frequencies might be deployed together with the spectrum and architecture used in today’s mobile networks. This will be the subject of further research, industry debate and standardization over the coming years.”

A key consideration for 6G lies in how the network architecture used in 4G and 5G mobile networks today might evolve to address future traffic volumes, while also catering for the new use cases that might emerge with 6G.

It will be challenging to integrate terahertz frequencies into existing mobile network architecture since terahertz communication only occurs over short ranges (of the order of 100 meters) and therefore communications will be limited to “line of sight,” explains Analysys Mason, pointing to how much this will cost.

“Such dense infrastructure, or even a move to user-centric, ‘no cell’ architecture, does not appear to be commercially viable for providing contiguous coverage given the level investment required, and hence would be limited to localized deployments.”

Other key infrastructure is needed as well. RedSharkNews lists these as antenna technologies, an evolution of duplex technology, an overhaul of network topology, spectrum sharing, the still nebulous promise of AI, split computing (i.e. utilizing computing resources in the edge and further into the cloud), and high-precision networks. These are all name-checked and backed by different organizations.

Low Earth Orbit satellites of the type being built by Amazon and SpaceX could also take advantage of 6G.

“Satellite is one of the key ways that 6G could be differentiated from 5G from the start,” says RedSharkNews. “That was always terrestrial network first, satellite considerations second. Flip that around, or at least balance it, and you could potentially accelerate the rollout and make it more uniform at the same time.”

Some observers point out that the timeframe for advancing a new generation mobile network has come from 15 years to eight years, hence the optimistic scenarios of a 2030 6G deadline.

“6G will emerge around 2030 to satisfy the expectations not met with 5G, as well as the new ones fusing AI inspired applications in every field of society with ubiquitous wireless connectivity,” states University of Oulu, a Finnish development program reporting to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Others are more skeptical and a long timeframe feels about right when you consider that operators have barely scratched the surface of making their money back on 5G.

But then why stop there? There is already chatter about 7G, including this prediction from Technology Trend:

“We will have actual mass-market adoption of 5G by 2025. We should expect 6G in the 2035 timeframe and 7G in the 2045 timeframe.”

 

 

 

Neal Stephenson: Who Cares About the Metaverse When We Have Real-World Problems?

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/neal-stephenson-who-cares-about-the-metaverse-when-we-have-real-world-problems/

He coined the term Metaverse in three decades ago but he’s not impressed by Mark Zuckerberg. Author Neal Stephenson is also far more concerned about climate change and wonders if billionaire big tech will ride to the rescue and at what cost?

In conversation with Kara Swisher of the NYT Stephenson discusses the perverse relationship between personal wealth and climate survival.

He is dismissive of Meta’s conception of the metaverse – just as VR pioneer Jaron Lanier had been in recently also in the pages of the NYT.

“The idea of holding virtual meetings where everyone’s represented by an avatar,” Stephenson says. “The idea of playing a board game with somebody virtually across the table from you who’s actually far away. That stuff is really old hat. And so it’s hard for me to make out what they claim to be doing that’s new, other than maybe implementing those old ideas on a larger scale for a broader audience.”

While Snow Crash, his 1992 novel was a satire on a virtual world owned by corporations he thinks the metaverse today is kind of neutral.

“I mean, it’s certainly part of this dystopian world, but in and of itself, it’s just an entertainment medium. It’s not inherently bad.”

What is bad – and a view he shares with Lanier – is the business  model behind social media today and tomorrow.

“Every time you input data to a social media site, you’re giving free I.P. to whoever runs that site. And that can mean clicking on a ‘like’ button or something like that. But even if you choose not to log on for a day and you don’t interact at all, that’s data in and of itself. And AR/VR devices are going to have much more sophisticated ways of extracting information from your usage habits. So they’re tracking your eyes to some extent, your pulse, all of that stuff.

“A better system is one that would look kind of the way manufacturing looked after labor unions entered the picture, where the people who have been contributing their free labor have some kind of collective bargaining power. And, as such, are part of the process, and helping to improve the product as opposed to just throwing their data over a blank wall.”

His latest book Termination Shock describes a world overrun by the effects of climate change and how geoengineering might pull us back from the brink of armageddon.

Geoengineering is a form of technological interventions in the climate to blunt the effects of having too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In theory that could include artificially generated volcanoes which would spew ash into the atmosphere to block the sun’s radiation and lead to a worldwide decline in temperatures. Stephenson imagines a billionaire building a special ‘sulfur gun’ in Texas to achieve the same effect.

“Geoengineering doesn’t get talked about very much because it’s quite controversial - So that’s kind of where I’m starting from. I’m saying, what if there was somebody who just didn’t care and kind of came at it with a classic kind of mentality of big oil, gas, mining, and what would be the geopolitical fallout from somebody doing that? Because if somebody were to intervene, it would affect different regions of the Earth’s surface in different ways. And some countries are going to do simulations. They’re going to ask themselves, how is this thing going to affect temperature in our country? How is it going to affect rainfall, and then as all nation-states do, they’re going to act in their own national interest.”

The billionaire he portrays is purposefully not modelled on Musk or Bezos. “Realistically, I doubt that it would be an individual billionaire just unilaterally taking action. But a decade or two down the road, I can easily see a country making a decision that they’re just going to do this because it’s going to make things better for that country.”

Even if someone were to geo-engineer the earth’s climate to materially make a positive difference, the author thinks this is a last resort.

“Geoengineering is just like the tourniquet that you put on the patient’s leg while you’re driving them to the emergency room. You don’t apply the tourniquet and then declare them healed. So they’re both important, but this business of trying to extract unbelievably huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and make it scalable and economically realistic, [needs to] have that degree of glamour that might start drawing some good brains into it.”

What may be changing with the whole climate debate is the possibility that the situation that already exists is so dangerous that the dangers of doing nothing may overbalance the hypothetical dangers of taking some kind of action.”

His belief is that the short-term consequences for the planet over the next 50-100 years will be disastrous, but that there’s a glimmer of longer term hope.

“I’m afraid that we may start seeing those or similar climate disasters happening. So that’s going to be bad, no question about it. What I choose to believe is that, eventually, we’ll somehow come up with the business plan or the set of incentives that will make it possible to realize your idea of the carbon capture trillionaire, or what have you. And that people will turn their creative energies and talent for building institutions and creating things into that all- important project. I hope that 100 years from now, the CO2 level in the atmosphere will be back.”

 

Making the Metaverse a Positive Environment for Digital Self-Actualization

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For business, the metaverse carries wide implications for an era of virtual commerce. While exciting, it also creates urgency to close the digital divide.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/making-the-metaverse-a-positive-environment-for-digital-self-actualization/

An article by Media.Monks’ Catherine Henry in Campaign US draws this argument out in relation to the video game industry.

Social games like Animal Crossing, Roblox and Fortnite allow people to connect virtually. The same skills and tools required to make games are used to build a broader category of virtual experiences, like extended reality and product configurators.

“It’s amazing to see games become more inclusive,” Henry writes in a separate article posted to LinkedIn. “An industry once dominated by competitive and violent first-person shooting games has given way to narratives and experiences focused less on killing and more on building This has allowed more people to explore their individual interests within the gaming world.”

This shift has also helped players form more authentic in-game identities. Henry points out that The Sims made marriage available to same-sex couples long before many US states. Now, The Sims has settings to customize gender outside the traditional binary.

“Simple yet effective features like these help people of all kinds see themselves in the games they play,” she says. “The pool of players is noticeably growing as more diverse groups join.”

Forty five percent of gamers in the US today are women (per Statistica), and LGBTQ+ gamers spend 8% more time gaming per month than others, according to a recent Nielsen report.

Yet, as Henry tells Bloomberg Law, “There won’t be true inclusivity until diverse teams can create digital experiences — not just consume them. Gaming remains exclusive to diverse developers. Activision Blizzard, the largest video game publisher in the US and Europe, is the latest to come under fire to come under fire for creating unwelcome environments for those who aren’t straight, white men.”

As the metaverse opens more opportunities for people to design, build and distribute virtual products or communities, businesses must solve the digital divide for creators and developers.

“Supporting digital talent goes beyond hiring. We need to help underserved creatives access the technology needed to hone digital skills, which often requires prohibitively expensive tools. I’m optimistic that the metaverse will enable a positive environment for digital self-actualization. But it’s only possible if we make that space inviting for everyone.

“Otherwise, we risk shutting out a significant cohort from the new world economy.”

 

2021 in review: Vendors and technology

IBC

In our second review of the past 12 months, we look back at supply chain issues, mergers and acquisitions, the rise of remote production and the dawn of the metaverse. 

https://www.ibc.org/features/2021-in-review-vendors-and-technology/8239.article

Bottlenecks in the global supply chain and a semi-conductor shortage continue to be a significant obstacle with the issues first raised by the IABM mid-year.

Chips for smartphones and new vehicles are among the most affected but broadcast industry vendors felt the knock-on to their ability to source GPU, CPU, motherboards and other components to fulfil orders for everything from servers to switchers.

In the case of consumer electronics, the move to remote working and the concurrent disruptions in global supply chains caused by COVID-19 produced an imbalance between demand and supply.

The IABM’s poll in April showed that this is a serious issue for most media technology suppliers, and it is a global problem. Anecdotal research highlighted that this is not a temporary situation but rather a structural shock that may have prolonged effects.

In response to the shortages, around 40% of the media tech vendors said that they were looking for alternative vendors or redesigning their products, and almost the same number of respondents said they were extending order lead times, ordering in advance or paying more.

Vendors including Ross Video and Grass Valley talking to IBC in June said they didn’t expect the issue – which can cause delays of months rather than weeks - to be resolved until at least mid-2022.

Fears of inflation have yet to materialise but there is a further fly in the ointment. There is a huge reliance (from companies including Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom, AMD, and NVIDIA) on chipmakers based in Taiwan. A simmering China-US trade war the risk of conflagration over Taiwan poses a geopolitical risk. Making components in higher wage economies like the US is likely to mean price rises.

Billion-dollar check-outs for SaaS-y companies

August saw the most jaw-dropping vendor news of the year when Adobe spent $1.275 billion on production management tools company Frame.io.

Respected analyst Devoncroft was left dumbfounded, admitting, “We do not have an explanation for the valuation level.” Especially when on the date of acquisition “it is unlikely profitability had been achieved.”

Eyebrows were also raised at the $1.97 billion valuation of video SaaS provider Kaltura in March. The New York-based company had to return to the market mid-year with a lower offer valuing the company at $1.4 billion yet it too has not made a profit. Kaltura’s net loss for the third quarter 2021 was $25.2 million compared to a net loss of $6.4 million for the same quarter of 2020.

How to explain this? Devoncroft observes that in Kaltura’s IPO filing it claimed an addressable market of $55 billion. This is larger than the best industry estimates for the entire broadcast tech industry, notes analyst Josh Steinhour.

Sure enough one of Kaltura’s strengths is the real-time video conference market which it estimates at $39 billion - though there was no source offered for this number.

There are merits to this approach, says Steinhour acidly. “It is quick, inexpensive, easily explained, and arrives at a flatteringly high figure. The downside is no third party should believe it and no management team should base decisions on it.”

Kaltura is not the first and will not be the last to take this approach. “Only slightly fewer than every public company in the media technology sector manages to find a means to ‘credibly’ suggest an exceptionally large and growing market,” Steinhour says.

However, these valuations chime with market optimism about future demand for cloud, as-a-service and software-based media tech.

Avid is a case in point. It has had a stella year, beating most market expectations (Q3 revenues increased 12.4% YoY) with cloud-enabled software subscriptions up by 35% year-over-year to approximately 389,000. Mid-year its stock rose to the highest it has been since 2005, valuing the company at $2bn.

“We see Avid being a predominately software, subscription, and SaaS company by 2025, if not sooner,” said Avid CEO Jeff Rosica to investors.

Steinhour’s reponse: “Stock prices are based on the future, though the future is only believed by way of a reference to past and present performance. It would appear Avid has managed to clear some invisible milestone among investors to refocus them on the future opportunity.”

Sport cements remote workflows

Sport began the year in a bubble, broadcasting live events without spectators and gradually returned to something like normality – but the new routines and the uncertainty of the future means much of this will stick.

“Remote is now standard for us,” BT Sport chief operating officer Jamie Hindhaugh told IBC365. “I think we’ll still rely on agile working and workspaces going forward. Travel is hard and even more so as the pandemic seems to retighten its grip so we need to bring back the live experience in all the ways we can. We still rely on vMix at operator homes for coverage of Premier League matches, for instance.”

BT Sport won the IBC Innovation Award for Content Everywhere for developing new technologies for the BT Sport App to recreate the matchday experience for live sports fans watching their favourite teams at home.

“The trend toward personalisation and experiences that give the audience more input into programming is a very exciting trend for us,” Hindhaugh said. “Covid has challenged us to think how we create personalised experiences that are not just about a two-dimensional sound and picture.”

The sporting centrepiece of the year, the Tokyo Olympics was a hybrid or fully remote affair for most broadcasters with Discovery and the BBC relying on virtual studios as backdrops to presentation. The innovations of host broadcaster OBS also showed how sports could evolve in terms of greater immersivity. This included rings of multiple 4K cameras at venues like BMX freestyle which, when stitched together, created a unique 360-view of the action.

Traditional OBs aren’t going to be scrapped anytime soon. NEP for instance is still investing in trucks with new CTO Pete Emminger telling an SVG Europe summit, “There will always be a place for trucks. Yes, a lot of workflow is moving to the cloud but being onsite has a lot of value.”

OB firms like NEP are pivoting to cloud-enabled production services but some aren’t so lucky. Arena TV suddenly ceased trading in November after launching a new decentralised production hub on the back of helping BBC Sport to deliver the remote production of the FA Cup Final.

Education needed for Virtual Production

To many people Virtual Production means The Mandalorian, the ILM and Disney posterchild for filming a VFX-driven episodic show inside of an LED volume. Yet this is just one style of one aspect of the tools and techniques governing the interaction of physical with digital worlds which spans the gamut of content creation from pre- to post.

Awareness of this knowledge gap is the first step in expanding VP into all types and budgets of production.

“We see virtual production as an approach to production that connects all parts of the production process (pre- through post), and requires an advanced culture of planning,” Andy Fowler, VP, Production Innovation, told IBC365.

VP stages are opening up across the world; one of the biggest outside LA is Dark Bay at Studio Babelsburg in Berlin which housed Netflix drama 1899.

However, many seasoned filmmakers aren’t accustomed to the idea of making every decision in terms of effects imagery before production occurs and may find the process counterintuitive.

“Over the last twenty years we’ve all got used to the idea of fixing things in post but Virtual Production upends this,” says Erik Weaver, Director of Virtual & Adaptive Production - Entertainment Technology Center @ USC who is co-curating a Supersession at the HPA Tech Retreat early in 2022 on just this topic.

“Successful virtual production requires a renewed focus on filmmaking disciplines otherwise there is a real risk of the whole project spiralling out of control.”

One of the virtues of a virtual production stage is the economies it can bring in terms of physical footprint yet remarkably the demand for conventional studio space remains insatiable.

A July report from real estate services agent JLL, which includes contributions from the British Film Commission, highlights that the demand for new studio capacity in the UK has never been greater, with up to 4.5 million sq ft of new development under consideration in order to meet it. This is more than double the current amount of permanent stage space in the country.

Welcome to the Metaverse – nothing to see here

The metaverse burst into the open in 2021 although the fight for the soul of the successor to the 2D internet has barely begun. Even ITV got in on the act with a version of its game show The Void, released inside popular video game Fortnite; another gaming activation to support I’m A Celebrity and an investment in a startup agency Metavision, which helps bring entertainment IP and brands into the metaverse. Arguably these could have been marketed just as an online or digital brand extension - it’s not yet clear what makes the Metaverse different to other platforms.

That will come, the theory has it, when there is the ability to buy and transport digital assets from one game to another, or one part of the internet to another. That ability in itself relies on standard technology stacks like Universal Scene Description which Nvidia is leaning heavily on and on blockchain for tracking of assets and money.

Absent that and the opportunities for filmmakers lies in content creation and in that sense nothing really changes. The creation of computer games, CG animations and the games-engine rendered backdrops of VP require the core skills of someone versed in how to photograph light. They are called cinematographers. How about telling the story in the best way that’s going to appeal to a target audience from the maze of potential sound and images available? You’ll need an editor for that. And a director and /or scriptwriter who has the creative storytelling vision in the first place.

One of the points about the metaverse is that it is a simulation of the real world. It is a digital copy.

As Dave Shapton succinctly put it, “Fundamentally, for metaverse experiences to seem real, they have to be based on real things. That means someone has to create the images, because they’re not going to be coming directly from someone’s mind - at least, not yet.”