Where We’re Headed Next With Social Media Marketing

NAB

Social media is now an integral and increasingly valued part of strategy, regardless of the company, but Sprout Social finds it’s still being under resourced.

article here

Its ninth annual trend forecast, “US Social Media Trends for 2022 & Beyond,” surveyed more than 1,000 US consumers and 500 US social marketers to understand how social media has transformed on both sides of the marketing equation.

Whereas marketing teams were still trying to convince senior leadership that social media was “business-critical,” now the value of social across functions is clearer than ever, the report finds.

But the new responsibilities of social teams come with new challenges. Creating the outcomes businesses have come to expect from social calls for more talent. More than half of marketers (52%) say that finding experienced talent is their number one challenge this year.

Eighty-eight percent of marketers say they expect to hire another team member over the next two years, and more than half (62%) anticipate hiring between two to six new positions.

LinkedIn reported that social media managers are the third most in-demand marketing position by posting volume in 2022, while social media coordinator roles have the third most year-over-year growth of all marketing titles.

“Social is no longer limited to marketing, with functions across the business weighing in on strategy. But as a more diverse set of stakeholders gets involved, core social teams will need to adapt,” Sprout Social says in the report. “Figuring out who owns what, and which proficiencies are needed across teams, has to be addressed as social strategies become more sophisticated.”

For example, since every platform has a different algorithm, brands may need to post more often to make sure their customers see the ideal number of posts. The length of a video post matters as well. In 2020, 50% of consumers thought short-form was the most engaging type of content, and that’s only growing. In 2022, that number has risen to 66%.

Social platforms may differ, but the one you can’t ignore is TikTok. Per the report, 38% of consumers plan on using TikTok, more than double the 17% who were planning on it in 2020.

There are nuances in audience demographics who are able to be reached on different social platforms that only specialist social media marketers may be in touch with.

For example, not all audiences respond to influencer marketing in the same way. Sprout Social finds that younger generations value collaborations with celebrities, influencers, or creators more than older generations and that polished, highly produced videos are not necessarily the best way to win likes.

“Today’s consumers seek authenticity, and a super polished or overly stylized piece of content isn’t it. A produced video is essentially your opinion — and consumers aren’t interested in your opinion. They want to hear what other people think of your brand and/or product,” Sprout Social warns.

That message extends to the type of creator partnerships deemed most effective. Consumers care about creators’ qualifications, so you need to choose wisely.

“Consumers are more marketing savvy than ever — they can tell when there’s a disconnect between a brand’s values and how they promote a product or service,” says Jayde Powell, a content creator and marketer quoted in the report. “This is no different for content creators. While many creators believe you need to have hundreds of thousands of followers to get brand partnerships, that’s not necessarily the case. Having an engaged community, consistent voice and content style is what attracts opportunities.”

There are implications for creators as well — 81% of consumers will unfollow creators if they post sponsored content more than a few times a week.

And yet, while all of this points to the need to grow the social media team and budget within an organization, two-thirds (66%) of marketers report having to encourage leadership to create company positions on the big issues.

Sue Serna, founder and CEO of social media consulting agency Serna Social, comments: “Many leaders think social media managers are ‘the people who post stuff on Facebook.’ But the best leaders take the time to learn about their social media operation — the strategy, the day-to-day ins and outs and the pain points.”

She adds, “Leaders who have invested this time position companies to act quickly and with precision when a crisis or major issue is brewing. When leaders lack that understanding, things go sideways — often making headlines for out-of-touch responses and missing the mark.”

 

If Social Media Makes You Feel Some Type of Way, Then It’s Working

NAB

Social media acts like a drug on our social behavior changing how we think about right and wrong and fermenting social division by design in order to boost the profits of a few tech giants, a new book argues.

article here

“It is a drug that 80-percent of Americans take a dozen times a day,” says author Max Fisher. “And if you work in the media or you’re a young person multiple that several dozen times. We are living in a world where the vast majority of the population is taking a mood altering drug multiple times a day.”

The investigative journalist has covered the impact of social media extensively for The New York Times. For his book, ‘The Chaos Machine’, he interviews researchers, psychologists, whistleblowers, and Silicon Valley executives to paint a coruscating picture of the current state of social media.

“The result is the single most complete understanding of how social media has rewired our brains, our culture and our politics that I have ever read,” says filmmaker Jon Favreau who interviewed Fisher for the Apple podcast series Offline.

From the creation of the Facebook newsfeed to Gamergate and the election of Donald Trump “he traces the origins of our current political shitshow to many of the internet most consequential moments.”

Fisher argues persuasively that it is not just social media algorithms that are the problem but the fundamental design of the platforms themselves.

Extremism isn’t just amplified but created by social media which Fisher concludes may be the most destructive force in society today.

In the book, he details how the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up. Here is a key excerpt:

"Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see the most outraged half of your feed. Next year, when 200 doubles to 400, you will see the most outraged quarter, the year after that the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes radically more moralizing, aggrandizing, and outraged, and so do you see, at the same time, less innately engaging forms of content.”

Podcaster Rich Roll also speaks with Fisher and covers the specific ways social media changes its users’ morality, and how algorithms can make users more prone to violence.

“This is an admittedly scary but crucial conversation about how social media’s reach and impact run far deeper than we have previously understood,” Roll says. “I’ve become increasingly convinced that the impact of social media and technology on our lives and the lives of our children is one of the great existential threats to social cohesion.”

Fisher writes that social media polarizes and radicalizes us because of the choices that algorithms make. But why is it that among the whole spectrum of things that the algorithm could show us, the things they choose to show us are the outrageous, polarizing ones?

“Because those are the things that are most engaging to us and speak to a sense of social compulsion, of a group identity that is under threat,” he explained to NPR's Ari Shapiro.

The enjoyment of moral outrage is one of the key sentiments Fisher sees being exploited by algorithms devised by Google (for YouTube) and Meta (for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), which “discovered they could monetize this impulse by having their algorithms promote hyperpartisanship,” writes The New York Times. “Divisiveness drives engagement, which in turn drives advertising revenues.”

Fisher goes into depth about the impact of social media sewing discord in Sri Lanka. He links posts amplifying the division of Sri Lankan society directly to violence that then took place on the streets. He claims that Sri Lankan officials begged Facebook to do something before violence broke out and these were routinely ignored.

“What amazing is that if you go and look back at internal conversations within YouTube they explicitly said, our goal should not be to surface the best information,” Fisher told NPR. “[YouTube’s] goal [it said] should be to surface content that will get people to spend more time on the platform. And they were saying this right at the start of what would turn out to be arguably the most consequential election in American history.”

Fisher says that no-one in Silicon Valley deliberately set out to write an algorithm to surface the most polarizing content but that now the system has taken hold, shareholders aren’t keen to change it since doing so would directly impact their profit.

“The thing is these people do not ultimately have the authority and the power within these companies. The people who have the authority in the power are - just like in any major corporation, are the profit drivers. And those are the people who get that traffic up so they can sell ads against it and continue to make billions and billions of dollars. And that is the thinking that prevails in which Sri Lanka. They don't even make that much money there.”

What can be done?

So how do we thwart the algorithmic overlords from abusing the infrastructure that is beginning to rule the world? Is there a way to change the model so companies are not so incentivized to feed people outrageous stuff that'll keep them glued to the platform for hours?

Whenever Fisher asked this of experts their solution was always some version of turning it off “not turning off the entire platform, not shuttering the website, but turning off the algorithm, turning off likes, the little counter at the bottom of the post that shows you how many people liked it or retweeted it,” Fisher told NPR. “That's something that even Jack Dorsey [the former head of Twitter’ floated as an idea because he came to see that as so harmful.

A version of social media without these engagement-maximizing features, could, Fisher thinks, potentially mitigate some of the harms.

“His answers may not make us much more hopeful that we can actually regulate social media but they may help us understand how we can all reclaim some agency back from these platforms and restore a little sanity to our lives,” says Favreau.

Fisher went further with in interview with ABC News Prime. “There a lot of people who work at the big social media companies whose job is to reduce misinformation, reduce extremism, reduce recruitment for far right terrorist groups, but they are fighting a losing and in many senses, unwinnable battle.

“Not because there's something about social media that means that misinformation and hate are going to always be on there but because these platforms are deliberately designed to ramp up engagement in the most ruthless possible ways these companies can come up with.

“You can't clean it up as long as the companies are doing that but it's also, at least in theory, relatively easy to fix because all the companies have to do is turn off these engagement-maximizing features, and a lot of this problem goes away. But they're not going to do that.

A lot of the people who talked with Fisher are apparently still true believers in the theoretical potential of a more neutral social media that does not have these engagement-maximizing features.

“They believe [that social media can be a] major force for good in the world. But the problem is just these engagement-maximizing features are just overpowering that good and creating a lot of harm in the world.”

The New York Times (arguably biased because it employs Fisher) called the account “authoritative and devastating” noting that Fisher repeatedly invokes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a supercomputer coldly kills astronauts.

“As a story about trying to fix a wayward technology as it hurtles out of control, it is beautifully apt,” reviewer and NY University philosophy and politics teacher Tamsin Shaw says.

She adds that the way the book connects the dots between Facebook’s gleaming (space-ship like) corporate HQ and the riots, radicalism and conspiracy “is utterly convincing and should obliterate any doubts about the significance of algorithmic intervention in human affairs.”

One of the tech industry’s biggest open secrets, Fisher writes, is that “no one quite knows how the algorithms that govern social media actually work.”

He quotes Mark Zuckerberg’s “astoundingly naïve view that “there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.”

But none of this absolves Meta or Google from blame. “WhatsApp and YouTube play in fomenting genocidal hate,” says the NY Times.

“There are of course facts on the ground that determine the algorithm’s effects, the local susceptibility to disinformation, the explosiveness

of the divisions. And this highlights an important point: Millions of people use social media without succumbing to conspiracy theories or allowing moral outrage to escalate into violence.”

Human judgment and morality, in other words, aren’t reducible to instinctual drives that can be manipulated. So, Shaw insists, we need to ask not just what makes some people susceptible to manipulation, but also what in the mind’s “wiring” protects others, even in lives saturated with social media.

“The answer will presumably include education, and will span the range from individual critical thinking skills to the overall quality of the information environment.”

The lesson of Fisher’s book, Shaw concludes, is that we need to make individual members of societies resistant to such efforts.

“We have the means to do so if the political will is strong enough, and if our political system hasn’t yet been wrecked by the chaos machine.”

Is This the New Standard for Social Media?

NAB

Last month, Meta changed its algorithms in what’s considered such a seismic shakeup that some commentators are calling it the end of social media.

article here

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on July 21 heralded a switch from feeds essentially curated by friends and followers to a “discovery engine [that] will recommend the content we think you’ll care most about.”

In short, your social media feed on Facebook is no longer defined by followers sending you content but by Facebook itself dictating what the content it thinks relevant to you.

And Facebook is late to the game. This recommendation-based model of content distribution is already in play at arch-rival TikTok, on YouTube, and already on Facebook sister-site Instagram.

“Recommendation media [is] the new standard for content distribution on the internet,” declares Michael Mignano, co-founder of the podcasting platform Anchor, and an astute observer of what this means to creators and the future of the social network.

In a post on Medium, Mignano outlines why he thinks Facebook has altered its approach to its recommendation algorithm. One reason is to scale back the massive cost in content moderation incurred by giant platforms like Facebook.

“If a bad actor wants to share problematic content on social media, the content can spread fast because of the guaranteed distribution to the person’s network of friends,” he says.

In turn, this generates massive costs for platforms, “in the form of gigantic moderation teams made of tens of thousands of people, severe damage to platforms’ brands, and openings for competition to find more efficient means for distributing content.

“No platform has been better at exploiting the weaknesses of social media than TikTok, the platform which popularized algorithmic content distribution and gave birth to what I call, recommendation media.”

What is Recommendation Media?

As defined by Mignano, “recommendation media” content isn’t distributed to networks of connected people as the primary means of distribution. Instead, the main mechanism for the distribution of content is through “opaque, platform-defined algorithms that favor maximum attention and engagement from consumers.”

The exact type of attention these recommendations seek is always defined by the platform and often tailored specifically to the user who is consuming content.

For example, if the platform determines that someone loves movies, that person will likely see a lot of movie-related content because that’s what captures that person’s attention best. This means platforms can also decide what consumers won’t see, such as problematic or polarizing content.

“It’s ultimately up to the platform to decide what type of content gets recommended, not the social graph of the person producing the content,” Mignano says. “In contrast to social media, recommendation media is not a competition based on popularity; instead, it is a competition based on the absolute best content.”

The Impact on Creators

While, in social media, people see content from their friends regardless of the quality of the content, in recommendation media content distribution is optimized for engagement. This, says Mignano, results in very little waste in a feed, and consumption patterns are highly efficient.

In social media, creators maintain programming power over what gets seen and when. But in recommendation media, the platform is always in control.

Since a platform is in control of what content gets served to who and when, there’s no expectation that a creator’s social network is guaranteed to see their content. Therefore, platforms can also choose what not to program, and there’s little creators can do or say to counteract this.

“In recommendation media, the algorithm is understood to be the final decision maker about what gains traction and what doesn’t. This gives platforms far more leverage to hide unwanted content and therefore reduce the need for massive moderation teams.

“It’s not that these teams are no longer needed; they’re simply not needed to the same scale as in social media because distribution for certain types of content can be eliminated from a platform without changing the underlying structure of content distribution.”

In social media, creators have the programming power. As a result, “social media is effectively a “competition based on popularity, not on quality of content”. It favors the creators with the biggest followings; the bigger the following, the bigger the potential for distribution and influence.

But in recommendation media, the best content for each consumer wins. This means that consumers are always being recommended and actively served content best suited for them, creating a superior consumption experience at all times.

As Mignano points out, influencers with huge social media followings might be expected to lose some of this power with recommendation media. Kylie Jenner, with more than 360 million followers on Insta, recently posted about her displeasure with Instagram prioritizing recommended videos over photos from friends.

Three Predictions About the Impact of Recommendation Media:

1. Explosive Growth

Since there’s no guaranteed distribution for content through friend graphs in recommendation media, creators are incentivized to seek engagement elsewhere when they’re not getting it from the platform where they created content. Where do they turn for that engagement? Other platforms. This is why you often see so much TikTok content being shared to platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, he says. Creators are sharing content to networks where they already have audiences.

“This has a second order effect of driving massive growth to the original platform. As an example, each time content from TikTok is shared on Twitter, a user who wants to consume that content clicks through to consume it on TikTok. This not only drives engagement on TikTok, but when the content consumer isn’t already a user of TikTok, it drives new user acquisition as well.”

Imagine this dynamic occurring tens of millions of times, each time someone shares content from a recommendation media platform, and it’s easy to see how this can result in sky-high growth potential.

2. SVODs Open to the Creator Economy

In order to be able to match the exact right content with the exact right person, a platform needs an ocean of content, including extremely niche content for every person on the planet.

“The only way to have that much content is to be an open creation platform where users of the platform are able to create on the platform,” says Mignano, who expects Netflix and similar platforms to let anyone create, not just the professional studios.

3. Synthetic Media at Scale

 If recommendation media is about platforms having more control over the consumer experience, it’s not hard to imagine that platforms will ultimately seek even more efficiency by making their own content.

But to do this at the scale of an open creation platform, such as TikTok or Instagram, platforms won’t be able to rely on humans. Mignano looks instead to advances in AI-generated or synthetic media. OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 showed just what is possible today in terms of automated creation of still images. It is just a hop, skip and a jump for technologies like it to generate animated or video content at scale.

“As the cost of AI content-creation solutions come down, I expect platforms to create more synthetic media over time to create even more perfect fit content for the right users at the right time.”

Mignano signs off with this thought. Is social media gone for good? Or does this create an opportunity for a challenger to take a contrarian approach and bring social media back from the dead?

 

How Are Creators Positioned to Handle Economic Change?

NAB

There’s a cold wind blowing, ushering in a slew of economic challenges that for months, even years, will impact pretty much everyone on the planet. The cost of living is rising and politicians all over the world seem unable to do anything meaningful about it.

article here

Yet, if you’re an online creator, then perhaps there’s a silver lining: You’ll weather the storm better than some.

That’s the contention of Roger Patterson, co-founder of marketing platform Later and co-founder of accelerator Launch Academy. He outlines why creators could come out ahead, even in a downturn, in a blog post for Entrepreneur.

Point 1: Small Is Beautiful, Agile and Lean

Plummeting stock values and rising interest rates can pummel global enterprises and wreak havoc on national economies, but smaller businesses are often better positioned to pivot as needed. Patterson argues that low overheads and lean operations make it easier to adapt to shifting economic circumstances.

There’s already a template for this during the pandemic. “Legions of entrepreneurs moved to a digital marketplace, the vast majority of whom were solopreneurs or running small teams,” Patterson notes.

In the process, he suggests, these entrepreneurs have laid a strong foundation to withstand future economic shocks.

“Surviving a recession used to require deep pockets and rock-solid business connections, but the economy has changed to favor small and nimble operations that can pivot as demands change. No one is better positioned to do that than creators who, by and large, have built their careers listening to the needs of their communities and providing value accordingly.”

Point 2: Creators Aren’t Part of the Global Supply Chain (Phew)

The pandemic screwed up the interconnected, just-in-time supply chain for hardware, causing massive delays in parts like semiconductors. The international oil cartel doubled down on this at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sending transport costs soaring. But if all a creator needs are an off-the-shelf webcam, a PC, and an internet connection then they should be good to go.

“One advantage creators have is the ability to monetize their ideas and knowledge in addition to, or instead of, physical goods,” Patterson writes. “For example, writers have built and monetized audiences through newsletter subscriptions and musicians earn money through sites like Patreon or partnerships with Spotify.”

While it’s true a decline in consumer purchasing could affect creators who depend on paying clients or community contributions, Patterson believes many will be able to offset losses by expanding their reach to more followers and implementing new monetization tools, like virtual tips and NFTs (remember them?).

“The trick for creators, regardless of macroeconomics, is to stay focused on building their own niche and nurturing the communities they’ve built.”

I guess so. Even in a downturn, as evidenced by the pandemic, we turn gratefully to streamed entertainment and digital services that we couldn’t go out to find.

Point 3: Creators Can Build a More Equitable Marketplace

This point seems weaker to me since it holds up Web3 collectivism as an economic savior. I’m cynical that such ideals won’t get eaten by Big Capital. But let’s hear Patterson out.

“Right now, only a small percentage of creators — roughly 12% — make more than $50,000 a year from their content. A large number of those creators do so by competing for the same contracts from a handful of global brands. A downturn that causes bigger companies to pull back on creator spending could actually result in the acceleration of the peer-to-peer economy.”

Patterson points to the use creators can make of Web3 tools to monetize directly from their community. “A peer-to-peer economy based on genuine shared goals and interests between creators and their audiences, could even the playing field and help the industry mature into something more authentic,” he argues.

Maybe. Most creators are freelance and work from home. They still have to eat and heat that home, paying for exorbitant gas and electricity costs. Belt-tightening by consumers will inevitably shrink the advertising and marketing budgets of brands across the board knocking on to the creator economy. Can they make enough margin to survive? Many will. Some will not.

Patterson is not ignorant of the challenge. He knows the creator economy won’t be entirely immune. “For one thing, creators may face increased competition if we see more people enter the space out of necessity.” But he’s optimistic that creators are in a position to not only navigate the changing economy but to potentially find themselves in a better place “if they stay nimble and tuned into their communities.”

 

One in Four People Are Content Creators. Here’s Why That’s Awesome (and How It’s Actionable).

NAB

The creator economy grew by more than 165 million people over the past two years to reach 303 million creators globally, Adobe finds in its latest “Future of Creativity” study, “Creators in the Creator Economy.”

article here

In fact, according to the report, almost a quarter of us (23%) are designated creators, contributing photography, videography, creative writing and more to online spaces like social media platforms and blogs.

While over a quarter of creators (26%) are motivated by money, the report found, nearly half (48%) of creators “are universally motivated by the same goal: freedom of expression.”

The study found that content creation can be a source of income, “but it takes time and commitment to be successful and while it remains a side hustle for most, many creators aspire to do more.”

Scott Belsky, chief product officer and EVP at Adobe Creative Cloud, explains, “The unprecedented growth of the creator economy provides a platform for everyone to be a creator. Individuals, soloprenuers, small business owners and content creators can now express themselves and explore creative and artistic pursuits in new ways.”

Adobe defines creators as professionals and non-professionals creating original content for their jobs or passions including designers, photographers, filmmakers, illustrators, hobbyists and more.

Influencers are defined here as a subset of creators with five thousand followers or more who leverage social media to impact their audience.

Per the report, Millennials represent 42% of the creator economy. By comparison, Gen Z represents 14%. Influencers make up only 14% of the global creator economy.

In the US alone, the creator economy grew by 34 million new creators (40%) since 2020. Brazil (+73 million new creators), South Korea (+11 million) and Spain (+10 million) also emerged as hot spots for creativity.

Nearly all (95%) of creators charted in the study take action to advance or support causes that are important to them.

“By using their creativity and influence to advance social causes, creators believe they can drive awareness (51%), give a voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one (49%) and make it easier to voice opinions on social causes (47%),” Adobe says.

The study further suggests that the more time creators spend creating and sharing content, the happier they feel. This, Adobe pointedly notes, “is the opposite of social media consumers, who studies have shown can experience negative effects from social media use.”

The “Future of Creativity” study surveyed 9,000 online creators in May 2022 throughout nine global markets (including US, France, Australia, Japan and South Korea). Edelman Data & Intelligence conducted the study and analyzed the data.

 

IBC Review, British Cine.

British Cinematographer

article here

A lot may have changed over the past three years but IBC’s status as Europe’s premier media and technology show remains intact, as the show’s autumn 2022 edition proves.

After a hiatus of three years, the European media and technology community was able to reconvene in beautiful Amsterdam for meetings, networking and exploration of industry trends. It may have been a smaller show at the RAI convention centre with 37,000 visitors – 20,000 less than pre-pandemic highs – but attendees were glad to be back in 3D, not Zoom. The sentiment seemed to be that you don’t know what you missed until it’s gone.

AI as a creative tool

In a keynote address, Walt Disney Studios explained how rapid progress in artificial intelligence is already disrupting many aspects of the traditional filmmaking process both for live action and animation.

“AI is truly profoundly transforming the way you produce movies,” said Markus Gross, the Studios’ chief scientist. “We want to use AI and deep learning to create animated characters that are truly art directable in real time.”

The technology could eventually enable directors to give verbal instructions to CG characters about how to walk or which way to move in much the same way text to image engines like DALL-E-2 operate today.

Another popular presentation focussed on the work done by Accenture Song for Netflix Stranger Things season four, specifically around the VFX work to bring the main antagonist, Vecna to life on-screen. This was all done manually with VFX Supervisor Juri Stanossek, highlighting the painstaking nature of each stage: “You are using all the experience you have to add realistic fire to a moving character because everything is different when the character is moving.”

Editing masterclass

A highlight of the IBC conference was an editing masterclass from Paul Machliss ACE, who walked the audience through his early career to his most recent collaboration with director Edgar Wright.

Born in Melbourne, Machliss first visited IBC in the late nineties working for a post-production company after which he stayed on in London, met budding director Wright and together they worked on comedy series Spaced leading to features Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Last Night in Soho.

“With every film Edgar tries to challenge what’s possible in cinema and in editorial too,” Machliss told IBC. “Everything we did with Baby Driver [in terms of synchronising action to music], we tried to take one step further on Last Night in Soho.” 

Machliss shared how his approach to editing had a major impact during the shooting of Baby Driver and resulted in the design of a portable edit system which allowed him complete freedom to locate himself anywhere on the film set.

Of his latest project, the DC Comics feature for Warner Bros The Flash, directed by Andy Muschietti starring Ezra Miller, he said: “We’re going to be utilising some very new technology in terms of getting multiple versions of the same actor on screen. It’s going to be worth the wait because it looks fantastic.”

Transitioning into the cloud

Many of the tech developments were about further transitioning facility workflows into the cloud. That could soon include the full DI if a new solution from AWS works as well as they believe. “We have achieved the ‘over-the-shoulder feel’ for uncompromised live reference grade monitoring in the cloud,” explained Katrina King, Content Production M&E, AWS.  

The solution, tested with FilmLight’s Baselight grading system, uses JPEG-XS to lightly compress pictures at 444 12-bit with a latency suitable for interactive working.

“It is visually lossless,” reported Peter Postma, MD, FilmLight. “You don’t see any artefacts and the creative decision making is seamless.”

AWS will release the application in November and wants other workflows requiring reference grade monitoring such as compositing to use it.

Studio-funded thinktank MovieLabs provided updates to its 2030 Vision for the industry to migrate all production workflows to the cloud. CTOs from Marvel Studios, Universal, Sony, Paramount and Warner. Bros were all present to affirm that the strategy is on track.

EVP, Global Production & Studio Technology at Paramount, Anthony Guarino, said Vision 2030 “has been a major influencing factor” on how the company is approaching production technology globally.

Adobe had a presence on over 100 IBC exhibition stands, many of them highlighting the ability to work with software in the cloud. For instance, there were numerous camera to cloud demos with companies including Atomos, Teradek and Mo-Sys. Frame.io, now integrated with Premiere Pro and After Effects and included with Creative Cloud membership, now enables file sharing and real-time review and approval.

Avid returned to Amsterdam with cloud-enabled solutions for remote working. It debuted NEXIS | EDGE, a software that provides editors with the same media access, workflow, and user experience they have come to depend on from Avid in facility environments. There was a technology preview of high-resolution Media Composer streams to Microsoft Teams, achieving what Avid called a “third monitor” experience intended to accelerate content review by creatives. 

RED Digital Camera demonstrated a means to capture 8K 16-bit Original Camera Files (OCF) direct to cloud for instant on-set or remote editorial collaboration. A live stream of 8K captured content is also seen as a breakthrough for virtual reality 180-degree experiences.

“It makes no sense to watch a flat image when you’re shooting immersive, so it is vital to come up with a way to feed the live camera to a headset,” said Lewis Smithingham, of global creative agency Media.Monks. “[With RED Connect] we are able to have a live monitor on set that is the same 8K resolution as the post files we deliver.”

He added, “The entire immersive experience from capture to delivery has changed so rapidly in the last six months, it is staggering.”

Evolution of video broadcast services with DVB Native IP

Cable Satellite International

The video transport stack has not evolved much since the 1990s – until this year. The DVB-Native IP, standardised last February is intended to converge satellite and terrestrial delivery based natively on IP - provided the industry can devise compelling use cases to adopt it.

article here

“The long term vision for DVB NIP is to use internet infrastructure to deliver broadcast content,” outlined Emily Dubs, DVB, Head of Technology at an IBC panel discussion. “It’s a long journey to unify TV platforms and there has previously been an issue of market hesitance. The published standard is now in a phase of test and implementation.”

The success of any standard depends on how wide it is deployed and in this case means being embedded by default in all STBs and devices in the market.

“If we’re not doing this it will be difficult to create the economies of scale to build a real market,” stressed Antonio Arcidiacono, the EBU’s director technology and innovation.

DVB-NIP is the result of one year of intense technical work by representatives of more than 13 DVB Member companies from across the media delivery value chain. The new system, designed to use DVB-S2X or DVB-T2 broadcast bearers, is entirely IP-based and no longer relies on the MPEG-2 Transport Stream that has been the basis for DVB broadcast systems up to now.

That Eutelsat and SES played a key role in developing the standard is a very good sign, Arcidiacono said.

The rationale behind DVB-NIP is to use the efficiency of broadcast networks for large-scale content distribution to modern IP devices, fully integrating broadcast technologies with those used in broadband networks. Operators can use the same broadcast signal to cover both professional applications (CDN caches, content distribution to tower sites, hotspots, etc.) and consumer applications (DTH to native-IP TV sets, broadcasting to IP devices via in-home gateway functionality).

Nonetheless broadcasters need a compelling reason to switch to DVB-NIP.

Arcidiacono said: “A public broadcaster like RAI or BBC is already paying for their own transmission in DVB received in the STB. You need to give them something more if you want to convince them to go in another direction because switching means they have to start again from box number One.”

You have to have applications that pave the way, he insisted.

“We have experimented with multicast and with push – to feed the edges of the network in such a way you can integrate with existing terrestrial infrastructure. If you do exactly what has been done before the market will react in defence. You need to invent new applications that will convince broadcasters to reach new audiences with new content and to compete with the major streamers.

Arcidiacono added, “Media companies and operators need to work hand in hand if we want to invent a new way.”

Speaking for STB maker EKT, its CEO Richard Smith said: “We have to be able to deploy this into existing DVB operators up to high end VSAT data operators who want to add video as an offering. For us, it’s all about flexibility to cope with all the new opportunities available through this technology.”

Those opportunities include finally reaching regions with low connectivity and emerging markets, although as the panellists pointed out this does not exclusively mean Africa or India but rural parts of Europe too.

Mohsen Haddad, co-founder of Easy Broadcast said Native IP was an opportunity to have the best of both broadband and broadcast.

“For us, native IP is about marrying the OTT experience on any device anytime with broadcast quality. For an OTT service provider, this is about footprint. They can reach more eyeballs, new markets.”

It seems that e-learning is an early adopter market for the technology. EKT reported it had
15 POCs with existing DTH providers and with educational projects.

“Our expectation is that these will happen shortly,” Smith said. “In some of the educational projects there is government money already set aside. So yes, it will happen.”