MSG Sphere: Not only in Vegas

IBC

Immersive experience venues are changing the face of live events and the Madison Square Garden Sphere aims to top the lot by creating a new entertainment medium.

 

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MSG Entertainment owns iconic venues including New York’s Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall and The Chicago Theatre but with the MSG Sphere it aims to rewrite what it means to go to a live event. It has invented a whole new video format and production workflow for the world’s highest resolution and largest ever curved screen.

When it opens a year from now at The Venetian, Las Vegas, the $1.9 billion Sphere will not only be the largest spherical structure in the world but will claim the world’s highest resolution LED screen, sporting more than 170 million pixels and a resolution of 16K x 16K. That screen will be inside formed as a 160,000 square foot plane wrapping up and around the audience, while the exterior of the Sphere is clad entirely in another display, both of which are programmable.

There are plans to build more Spheres with one at Stratford in London announced, pending planning permission.

“Immersive has become a buzzword but I don’t think anyone has done it with to this scale or level of detail,” said Alex Luthwaite, VP Show Systems Technology, MSG Entertainment. “This will be the first large-scale venue to use multi-sensory storytelling for fully immersive experiences. The aim is to transport the audience to someplace else.”

The MSG Sphere will have 17,500 permanent seats and room for 2,500 retractable seats to bring capacity to 20,000. It’s intended to be multi-purpose, hosting everything from concerts to esports as well as experiential content enhanced with spatial audio and haptics. That means that all of the bells and whistles it has installed and the content creation technology it has developed will be put at the disposal of artists to make of what they will.

“An ambition of this scale and this ‘future forward’ raises different challenges but we have solved them all,” said Luthwaite, a Brit who has moved to LA to oversee the Sphere’s completion. “That really is the complexity and beauty of it. We’ve managed to overcome the challenge with tech solutions.

“That’s why we want to own end to end the entire process and have control of it. Because it is so bespoke we are trying to change how people perceive media development and people’s perception of going to a venue.”

MSG Sphere: 16K Screen and content

The fact that the screen is not your regular 16x9 or 4x3 video format presented the major hurdle when designing everything from content to managing colour fidelity when viewed from any angle.

“Flat, rectangular forms of traditional motion picture imaging are effectively the same at home on a 32” TV screen as they are on a 100’ movie screen, just bigger and hopefully sharper,” said Andrew Shulkind, SVP Capture & Innovation at MSG Entertainment. “In the Sphere, however, the scale differences are immense. You will never see the entire screen no matter where you sit.

“Even in IMAX you’re still aware of there being a screen in front of you. When the screen covers your entire periphery vision your brain does funny things.”

For example, producers have to be aware that removal of a horizon line in content shot in space or underwater could make people feel sick with the disorientation.

The scale of the canvas strains conventional filmmaking grammar. “The wide shape of the immersive media plane means that framing here is very different,” he said. “The close-up and the over the shoulder shot really don’t work in this format.

“One critical thing we’ve been exploring is the relation of the lens we use in the field to the field of view in the screen that audiences see. Field of view is more pertinent than focal length. We have been doing a lot of experimentation to see what works best to achieve specific psychological effects. In some cases, the best field of view for wide landscapes is a 165˚ lens, but some people and faces are better at 120˚. It is a completely new format, we are still playing with it.

“With a live music show in the Sphere, for example, we have to consider what happens to the performer on stage. How can we best feature a 5-6ft tall performer in a venue over 200ft tall, and how do we give the images meaning?”

The screen is higher resolution than any single camera can capture. MSG has built custom camera arrays and is applying techniques like tiling, uprezzing and stitching to deliver 16K resolution to the canvas.

Cameras including 8K capable REDs, Blackmagic’s URSA Mini Pro 12K are combined, after considerable R&D, into arrays for different shots.

Meanwhile, hyper-lapse (moving time-lapse) arrays required a custom built motion control rig to shoot repeatable frame accurate moves.

All of this kit is taken to location (a forest, a race track, a canyon) and mounted on technocranes or helicopters, strapped to an arm on a boat or on a Six Flags rollercoaster meaning a key design consideration is to keep it as lightweight as possible.

The exterior screen will have the capability of projecting imagery from a preset program or a live broadcast from an event going on inside the facility.

Underwater scenes for one video were shot using 15 prosumer cameras. “You can’t get too close to subjects,” said Shulkind. “Even small details in the water can make stitching challenging.

“The 180-degree field of view and resolution is so unforgiving the final image has to be seamless. There’s no tolerance for artefacts or faulty stitching.”

MSG Sphere: Into Space

Initially, Sphere attractions will be less CG and more grounded in what feels natural – epic landscapes, for example. It has signed with NASA to send camera equipment to and from the ISS on three separate launch missions. Astronauts will conduct onboard testing.

The intent is to use the microgravity conditions on the ISS and the harsh environment of space to develop a custom system capable of capturing the Earth “at a level of detail never before possible, and that can potentially be used deeper in space.”

Back on earth, boxing, basketball and esports could be held inside the Sphere. MSG owns the New York Knicks (NBA) and the New York Rangers (NHL), as well as esports organization Counter Logic Gaming.

“We are working out how take the concept of watching esports players and flipping it around and having the audience play,” said Luthwaite.

MSG Sphere: SDI-free network

The whole video network at Sphere is driven by ST 2110. There’s no DisplayPort and no SDI.

“The first reason is we’re streaming multi-layer 12-bit 60fps uncompressed media and the second reason is the sheer scale,” said Luthwaite. “We need to get a lot of bandwidth across a very large space. Plus, we want to incorporate live camera feeds from broadcast trucks to mix together on site, we wanted to stick with one standard.”

There is also the facility to incorporate live feeds picture in picture into the giant canvas.

“We wanted to be IP based and not run copper cables. There are so many channels of data going around. The more traditional video cables were not going to be able to transport it.”

MSG Sphere: 3D spatial audio

Developed in partnership with Berlin-based Holoplot, Sphere will house a custom spatial audio system – Sphere Immersive Sound – using 1,600 permanently installed speaker panels each composed of approx. 100 individual speakers, resulting in over 160,000 channels of audio.

These speaker panels sit behind the LED media plane, which is acoustically transparent for “concert grade” audio – a feat of audio engineering that has been extensively modelled and tested.

Sphere Immersive Sound is combining 3D audio-beamforming and wave field synthesis. The beamforming allows for precise shaping and steering of beams to create sound fields that optimally cover audience areas of any shape and size. Wave Field Synthesis enables sound localization “with lifelike distance” and directional perception of audio objects.

For example, an audience member could hear a whisper that sounds like someone is talking directly in their ear. Guests sitting in different sections can hear different sounds (eg: languages, instruments) – expanding the possibilities for customised audience experiences.

“A lot of the work we’re doing is creating a guide for what works and what to avoid for when artists and engineers programme this space,” said Stuart Elby, SVP Advanced Engineering at MSG Entertainment. “If someone came in with content mixed with Atmos we would be able to transcode that into Sphere but really it is the Sphere that has creative tools for audio engineers and artists to produce unique sound experiences.”

MSG Sphere: In-seat Haptics

The seats include haptic devices which allow artists to direct frequencies ranging from ultra-low rumbles to pitches of 500hz directly to individual seats, creating an additional layer of immersion beyond the audio and video.

A proprietary wind system has been devised to enhance the illusion of being in the natural world. It can be adjusted from an idle breeze “that you’d hardly notice” to gale force winds.

“We’ve quite a bit of IP around real wind effects designed to convey realism to the audience,” said Elby. The same system is used to disperse scent. “The typical length of screen content will be 45minutes to an hour, so we’re not trying to totally overload your senses like a theme park ride.”

MSG Sphere: LED screen design

If the interior is somewhat more of a traditional LED screen, the 580,000 sq ft exosphere presented new challenges, not least to be heat and UV resistant and to deliver uniform visuals across a convex surface. It’s composed of 1.4 million 80mm ‘pucks’ (or single pixel) that each contain 48 diodes.

The team faced similar challenges in terms of the pixel pitch except this time on a convex surface so that the pixels don’t appear wider at the equator than they at the poles.

Luthwaite said, “We made mega panels, trapezoid in shape, to triangulate the exterior surface, interlacing the pixels with a 225mm offset spacing. This increases your perceived resolution. The image resolve happens closer because of it.”

“Certain elements have been done on other projects but never to this scale or complexity and never all in one place. With such a large exterior, that it is even visible under flight paths, we want no single point of failure. We have to make sure there are redundant data paths all over the surface.”

Testing for content production and viewing has been taking place at MSG Sphere Studios in Burbank, which is a quarter-scale prototype of the Las Vegas Sphere.

Testing for brightness and image resolve on the outer screen involved building another small sale prototype and viewing it half a mile away.

MSG Sphere: F1 opening

The venue is timed to open just ahead of the Las Vegas Formula 1 GP which has a track that surrounds the Sphere. During the race F1 will take over the exosphere display for race-related content.

“There is a massive amount of connectivity and flexibility in the building because we want to be somewhat agnostic to the show,” said Luthwaite. “It is up to the creatives to come in and use any or all the tools at their disposal to create the best content.”

 

Oscars 2023: A look at the Best Editing Nominees

IBC

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Everything Everywhere All at Once    

In this absurdist comedy the audience wasn’t supposed to keep pace with every parallel universe and rabbit hole into which Michelle Yeoh’s time-hopping laundromat owner dives. The point was to be exhausted by its possibilities and that caught the zeitgeist to the tune of $103 million at the box-office. 

“The approach was to throw out the rules of traditional filmmaking and just whatever works then it works,” editor Paul Rogers tells IBC365 of collaborating with writers and co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. “[They] wanted to make a film, and then to break that film, and then we wanted it to rebuild itself.” 

Read more: https://www.ibc.org/features/behind-the-scenes-everything-everywhere-all-at-once/8535.article 

Rogers deploys split screens to subtly combine two takes in the same shot. He changes aspect ratio, adds blurry overlay effects, isn’t afraid to retain flashing lights that disorient the viewer. 

“I’ve always loved making music videos where the budgets are so low it gives you an insane freedom to experiment. You get to stretch and push and massage that footage and reshape it with any tricks you can whether that’s something as simple as sound design or colour or taking it into After Effects, changing out a background or a prop or an extra.” 

When Evelyn’s husband Waymond becomes Alpha Waymond in the Alpha universe of the film, Rogers devised “a scraping metal Terminator like sound” to coincide with when the character takes his glasses off. When a “reversed bell” sound rings, it’s another trigger to take the audience into another universe. 

Editorial took a year as they trimmed an early three-hour cut to find the sweet spot. “Once you’ve seen the movie, the opening seems pretty chilled,” he says. “But if you go back and watch it, it’s stress after stress after stress in the laundromat and then we kick it into second gear.” 

The Banshees of Inisherin  

A couple of Irishmen walk into a bar… sounds like the set up for a joke and for large parts of The Banshees of Inisherin the craic, as they say, in Ireland is as enjoyable as a good evening with friends in a pub. But this fairy tale is bittersweet with touching characters and violence at its heart. Editing duties were intended for writer-director Martin McDonagh’s regular collaborator Jon Gregory but when he passed with production already underway in September 2021, Mikkel E. G. Nielsen stepped into his shoes. 

“Everything happened very fast because it started out on a sad note,” the Dane, who won the Oscar for Sound of Metal (2020), tells Cinema Editor. “Jon’s work with Martin was an inspiration. It was strange, though, to enter a situation where you know it was supposed to be something else.” 

He adds, “It’s important to me that working on a film should feel like a family where you can feel safe in trying things out even if it turns out to be the wrong direction.”  

Those sentiments – of family ties and challenging oneself to create art – are two key themes of the film. “Banshees is a beautiful breakup story,” says Nielsen. “It’s very simple on the surface, very complex when you dig into it.” He constantly interrogated the footage, asking, himself ‘What happens if we make the scene a little sadder? Do we hold a little back? You don’t really know how much one scene affects the next or how sad or funny it should be unless you watch, tweak, review, discuss. How many pauses should there be? How long should a pause be?” 

Nielsen’s Danish heritage helped him relate to the story. “I can definitely appreciate the culture of close-knit friends and the sense of communities meeting in pubs. Even though everything has an emotional logic, you never know what is going to happen next. I loved that about Martin’s script. It takes so many turns you cannot predict it.” 

Top Gun: Maverick 

“Everyone knew this film would live or die on whether audiences feel the emotion of the characters in their F-18s,”  editor Eddie Hamilton told IBC365 about working with Tom Cruise and director Joseph Koskinski on the  highest grossing movie of 2022. “Everything was shot for real and built in the edit.” 

A mountainous 813 hours of material was shot for the film, most of which was collected on dozens of flying sorties featuring the actors in the co-pilot’s seat. Much of Hamilton’ task was spent with his team meticulously reviewing and annotating each take. 

“I’d spend entire mornings looking for the perfect shot of a jet turning left - or flying inverted through a narrow canyon,” Hamilton said. “Sometimes I’d add only a few seconds to my timeline each day. I felt the weight of expectation every day for the year it took to film and another year to finalise editorial.” 

From each 20-minute flight recording (x six onboard cameras) only a few seconds made the final cut. One technique Hamilton employed was to only select airborne shots with a moving horizon. “You start with tons of material and whittle it down and the very, very best footage rises to the top. We were incredibly disciplined about this.” 

None of the emotional impact of the film’s dogfights would have landed without understanding the character’s relationships. While more conventional this ground coverage was not without its challenges particularly in the opening bar scene.  

“There was a huge amount of exposition that required a delicate balancing act to make sure the audience connected subjectively with Maverick as he meets Penny (Jennifer Connelly) and the young pilots for the first time,” Hamilton says. “You need to convey each character’s unique personality and their hierarchy in the story very efficiently.  For example, you have to make sure Rooster gets a little more screen time and everything needs playing from Maverick’s point of view. “ 

Cruise and Hamilton combine again this summer for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. 

Read more: Top Gun: Maverick – behind the scenes | Industry Trends | IBC 

 

Tar 

Austrian filmmaker Monika Willi says her specialty is working on challenging films. And there are none more challenging than Todd Field’s exposition of woke culture in Tar. 

“I like to work on films that do something to you, that may cause pain, but pain and art trigger a lot of important emotions, thoughts and reactions in people,” she tells CinemaEditor.  

Willi is best known for serial collaborations with the austere and complicated films of Michael Haneke including on The Piano Teacher, Funny Games, The White Ribbon and Amour.  

Pent up emotion is the core of Tar as well. She cut the film, with Field, in a house in a “remote” part of Scotland during the winter of 2021-22, and perhaps some the atmospheric frostiness crept through to the picture. 

“We met in the morning, Todd would go for a walk, I would go for a run, then we would meet and talk about the film over coffee, then watch the whole film,” she says. They tracked the tension from scene to scene making microscopic changes—even down to individual syllables.   

Willi worked closely with composer Hildur Guonadottir on the score that Willi describes as “somewhere between tone and music—a sub-sonic sound.” The ambient sound design is interwoven into scenes which underline Tar’s mental state.   

Willi is also an experienced documentarian and made some of the Foley effects for the film. “I had a microphone with me [in Scotland], and we had all this nature around us.”   

Elvis  

Editors Jonathan Redmond and Matt Villa built on their previous collaboration with Baz Luhrmann, The Great Gatsby, in their attempt to encompass what it felt like to be Elvis. 

“Baz was very clear even the early phases of development and pre-production that he wanted it to feel contemporary,” Redmond told IndieWire. “In Gatsby, we often used hip-hop alongside of or in the place of jazz, so that the audience could decode just how radical and exciting jazz was in the 1920s. Baz wanted to do the same thing here.” 

For Villa, “We always intended to turn the biopic on its head whenever possible. “‘Biopic’ was a dirty word in Baz’s mind.” 

The script elongates certain sequences, making much of the 1968 televised concert that brought Elvis back from career oblivion (the film suggests) while barely mentioning his entire career as an actor. 

“We elongated that sequence because there was so much happening both from a world-historical point of view and in terms of Elvis’ development and his relationship with the Colonel,” Villa said.  

As ever, a lot of material was left on the cutting room floor as the editors whittled the film down from a four-hour first assembly. This included an early scene between Elvis and his first girlfriend to portions of the electrifying musical numbers.  

“Every song that you see in the film was shot in its entirety, and we edited them in their entirety,” Villa said. “There was a lot that came out there that I was sad to see go, and there were lovely scenes between Elvis and his first band.” 

15 Minutes with Wendy Aylsworth

interviewed and written for HPA

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Wendy Aylsworth has spent over 30 years in entertainment technology, bringing emerging technologies into production and distribution usage. A Lifetime Fellow, former president, and former VP of Engineering (Standards) at SMPTE, where she continues to provide technical consulting and strategic board guidance; Governor of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; and, of course, board member at HPA, Wendy has her finger on the pulse of the industry and shares her thoughts with us as we head into the New Year.

Virtual Reality has a future

What would you single out as an immediate and longer term trend in technology to look out for?

“Even though Virtual Reality, by which I mean accessing virtual worlds by way of a fully immersive headset, has yet to achieve anything like mass adoption, I believe its potential in both consumer and production spheres holds great promise.

Substantive technical improvements will occur over the coming years that will creep into both consumer and industry use. Headgear will not only get cheaper, but screen resolutions will vastly improve, weight and comfort will be addressed in lighter wearable form factors and we’re only at the foothills of where content experiences combined with sensory, haptic technology might take us.

The sea change sweeping production is that of volume stages where a director can play back any image desired on banks of LED screens and shoot live action in that environment. While it is early days with a lot of learning to do, this will be increasingly used by TV and movie shows to create content more rapidly and with more freedom than having to take cast and crew and kit out into live locations.

With the processing power of computers increasing at the rate they are, combined with rapid leaps in AI and machine learning, I see a point in time when all crew and the director and can wear VR headsets to view the performance of an actor with CGI mapped over it live. That’s not possible today – there’s still a delay between the data recorded of an actor wearing performance capture markers and having the visual effect of their CG character rendered in realtime. That means it’s tricky today for a director to get the performance they want when they can’t see it in realtime.

As long as there are people like James Cameron pushing this technology, it will change production possibilities radically. And as the headsets get better I think our children will be able to watch performances using these technologies.

I don’t see a world in which the director can direct an avatar, however. You can always wrap an actor’s performance in a different body and face, but we are long time away from having the ability to talk to an AI-avatar body and have it alter the performance based on vocal instruction alone.”

Don’t let DEI die

How would you rate the industry’s efforts in actioning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)?

“We have everybody’s attention at this moment but we have to continue to keep diversity, equity, and inclusion at the top of our minds. Many organizations are pushing progress and leaders at all levels are far, far more conscious of the issue than they were even five years ago. It remains vitally important that, as a society, we continue to keep DEI at the forefront of our minds. It is no difference to gender or age bias or conflict of interest. DEI needs to become ingrained in company and society culture. It should be second nature. There should be red flags automatically raised when lines are crossed or opportunities not fulfilled.

For its part, the HPA is working very hard on DEI from the board down and will continue to look at how we can further progress the cause in all our programming and our events.

There has been noticeable progress on screen too with major feature film hits such as The Woman King, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, directed by Ryan Coogler. For me personally, however, I still see the deficiencies when it comes to DEI in TV and movie programming as well as a clear a gap in the industry behind the scenes as well. We must all continue to do more.”

Women can be Kings

In another era, The Woman King, about a real–life army of women in Africa fighting back against oppression, if made at all, would have been a stirring action spectacular likely directed by a man. Yet Gina Prince-Bythewood made it her mission to populate heads of department with female craft talent. Does this signal change?

“The Woman King is a heartening tale which should be justly applauded. I fear, though, that this remains an outlier and we should be careful of generalizing from this success that the fight is won. I’ve been campaigning for my whole career to get more women into the industry, particularly into the hard science and engineering side with which I have particular affinity.

I don’t have a magic wand, nor do I think anybody else does. Yes, progress has been made but still no female DP has won the Academy Award for Best Cinematographer and women are outnumbered in roles from computer programmers to optical scientists. The video gaming industry, which is colliding with the film and TV industry at the intersection of Virtual Production, also has a heavily male-dominated skew.

So my message is don’t give up. We should continue to talk to girls and students about the exciting possibilities of the industry and to strengthen development of programs that educate everyone about the importance of gender diversity. Not because that is the equitable thing to do but because we will all tell better stories with a multitude of voices to conjure with.

As with DEI, the ultimate goal is for diversity in all its forms to be so ingrained it is no longer part of the conversation. Today, though, it very much still is.”

Let’s Get Into the Economics of Streaming and TV Conten

NAB

The streaming wars have drastically changed and so has the television landscape for 2023. The obituaries for the golden age of streaming TV is over as economic reality comes home to roost.

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“The grand experiment of creating something at any cost is over,” David Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), told Deadline late last year.

What’s less certain is what TV will look like once this new reset is complete — and whether the TV experience for consumers will simply look different or become dramatically less satisfying.

Some commentators believe the “golden age” of streaming — in which consumers have enjoyed a nearly endless flow of ad-free content at relatively low cost — is coming to an end.

That’s despite a record number of shows being released across streaming and broadcast TV last year. In 2022, more than 2,000 original shows were released more than double the 779 shows that aired a decade earlier, according to Variety. In August, the number of viewers of streaming services surpassed those of cable and broadcast TV for the first time ever.

“While 2022 brought new heights for the surge in both volume and prestige in television that is often called ‘Peak TV,’ it may also be remembered as the year the TV gold rush began to peter out,” suggests Mike Bebernes at Yahoo.

That peak TV has peaked is a theme taken up by a number of media posts in the past month. “The never-ending supply of new programming that helped define the streaming era — spawning shows at a breakneck pace but also overwhelming viewers with too many choices — appears to finally be slowing,” says John Koblin in the New York Times.

The figures don’t lie. The number of adult scripted series ordered by TV networks and streaming companies aimed for US audiences fell by 24 percent in the second half of this year, compared with the same period last year, according to Ampere Analysis. Compared with 2019, it is a 40 percent drop.

New economics of streaming TV

Streaming isn’t going away. Ampere also predicts global content spend will hit $243 billion this year - up 2 percent on 2022 and a long way up from the $128bn spent in 2013. However, cut backs are coming. After Netflix’s stock nose-dived last spring when it reported shock subscriber loss, Wall Street got cold feet.

As Stephanie Prange puts it at MediaPlayNews, “Now that Wall Street has realized that streaming will have to generate a profit as legacy distribution flags, financiers are putting pressure on companies to make it pay. When the distribution method was new, Wall Street hailed streamers for gathering subscribers and offering ever more expensive content to entice them. No longer.”

In recent months, as recounted by Kolbin, entertainment companies became increasingly anxious about a slowing economy, the cord-cutting movement and a troublesome advertising market. Since the summer, scores of executives have abruptly been dismissed, strict cost-cutting measures have been adopted and layoffs have taken hold throughout the industry.

You don’t want to dig through public filings for to see the hemorrhaging of money: A handy chart published by Vox has done it for you. It shows losses being made by Netflix competitors.

As Peter Kafka writes in Vox, the big picture to note is that there’s a ton of red ink, and there would be much, much more if we they went back further “because some of these services have been bleeding money for multiple years”; and if they could see the P&Ls of Apple and Amazon, “which are burning big piles of money on streaming but are so big that it doesn’t matter to them or their investors (for now).”

Amazon and Apple TV+, which make most of their money from e-commerce or selling hardware have actually increased the number of adult scripted series ordered this year.  According to Ampere Analysis quoted in the NYT, both companies, are “not as beholden to the same budget limitations as pure entertainment companies — they have deeper pockets and can weather this storm.”

Price hikes and consolidation

The others? Well, a period of consolidation seems to be on the cards. Warner Bros. Discovery is a case in point. It faces a debt of roughly $50 billion and is about to merge its main streaming services HBO Max and Discovery Plus, reportedly called Max. Other analysts predict more mergers as competing companies buy each other out.

“As a result, streaming may soon come to resemble the cable TV model that it disrupted just a few years ago,” notes Yahoo.

One result of this is a price hike for streaming.  WBD just raised the monthly cost of HBO Max for the first time since the streaming service was launched in 2020 (by $1 to $15.99 plus taxes a month for US subscribers, equivalent to a 7% increase).

At the same time, we may be getting less for our buck. “2022 was the year reality intruded,” concludes Eric Deggans at NPR. “Consumers learned [that]: Streaming services will not always offer a bottomless well of content. In the future, they likely will cost more, have a little less library content and cancel more shows more quickly. Welcome to the future,”

Content cutbacks

An article in Collider points out how mass TV cancellations will reshape streaming in 2023.

Among the cull; 1899, Minx, Love Life, Made For Love, Fate: The Wink Saga, Blockbuster, Night Sky, The Wilds, Shantaram, Rutherford Falls, Why Women Kill, and The First Lady all got the chop, many after just a single season.

The new economics of streaming TV means “there's been a general acknowledgement that the streaming model simply isn't delivering the same returns as the old model, in which a film or television show had many opportunities for additional rights sales and releases, says Paris Marx in Business Insider.

As a result, Marx says, streamers are retreating from any sort of creative risk in favor of “humdrum, lowest-common-denominator shows.”

According to Koblin at the NYT, a cutback was inevitable, particularly when many executives were ignoring profit margins and giving full series orders without so much as seeing a script.

“It’s part cost-cutting and stock price chaos, and part correction for the buying frenzy over the past five years where series were literally ordered over the phone without any proof of concept,” said Robert Greenblatt, a producer and former chairman of NBC Entertainment and WarnerMedia.

Sure you could watch the ad-supported tier of services like Netflix, but a recent study by Reelgood noted that Netflix’s ad-supported service features significantly less content — hundreds of fewer movies and TV shows. Some of the most popular movies on Netflix, including Sony’s Bullet Train, and TV shows like The Walking Dead and Brooklyn Nine-Nine are not available on the ad-supported service.

Cost-cutting pressure could also create less opportunity for ambitious projects that have wowed audiences in recent years to be made.

According to the NYT, some writers have found the market conditions so difficult that they are giving up on the idea of turning a project into a TV series — and looking to movies instead.

“In a stark reverse of what happened for 20-plus years, writers are now taking TV projects and converting them to features because they’ll be easier to get done,” Jay Carson, the creator of the Apple TV+ The Morning Show tells the paper. “The truth is, a lot of projects for the last 20 years that should have been features were stretched to be TV because that’s just what you did.”

In that regard, fewer projects tailored to appropriate length rather than padded out could benefit the discerning TV viewer.

“These companies pulling back — thinking longer and harder about each project — is actually good for the business,” said Greenblatt, the former television executive tells the NYT. “It will hopefully lead to less waste and more shows worth watching.”

Is TV itself bust?

There may be a more profound shifting of the sands underway.

The Hub portrays the endemic challenges facing the industry as being more generational in nature. Where older viewers (those over 35) watch lots of premium video on a big screen, their younger peers have a very different consumption pattern.

They’re much more likely to use other screens for entertainment, and to use those screens to play video games or watch “non-premium” video content like that on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok.

“The ‘streaming wars’ monopolize the spotlight when it comes to predicting the fortunes of media companies in the future,” said Jon Giegengack who works for the research agency to David Bloom at TVREV.  “But this obscures an even more important shift:  the next generation of TV consumers are just less engaged with traditional TV itself.  Gaming and social video are the focus of their entertainment lifestyles.  There’s no reason to assume they’ll grow out of these habits as they age.  Media organizations need to adapt to these changes in order to meet tomorrow’s viewers on the devices and platforms where they will spend most of their time.”

Entertainment companies can and are attempting to diversify to engage younger audiences Amazon, Apple, and Netflix have substantial videogame ventures but nobody has an alternative to TikTok.

“In the streaming future, we’ll all be paying more for less,” says Berbenes at Yahoo. “So I’ll be streaming as much as I can before the shine comes off this Golden Age.

Measurement up for grabs

The way TV is measured must also shake up to accommodate the move of eyeballs to streaming services. Problem is no-one can agree on how to compare ratings when streamers have been, and still remain, black boxes to the rest of media.

“Outside of the most popular handful of titles, precious little information about streaming series ever makes it beyond need-to-know circles within media companies,” says Rick Porter, in an analysis at The Hollywood Reporter. “Media conglomerates and ad buyers began to get more aggressive about finding alternative data streams to serve their needs.”

He cites the mushrooming of TV analytics in the past two years, among them iSpot, Comscore, VideoAmp, Parrot Analytics and Samba TV, all rushing to provide more and different data to media buyers and sellers.

“Very little of that makes it out for public consumption, but business is being and will be transacted using several different data currencies in the future, said the research and ad-sales execs who spoke to THR.

Where once there might have been total viewer breakdowns and a couple of demographic subsets — all supplied by Nielsen — to measure the health of a series, now there could be specialized sets of numbers for every aspect of the business.

Still, there are certain figures that research executives go to first. “I look at reach” — the number of people who check out at least a minute or two of a show “because that shows interest,” says Radha Subramanyam, CBS’ chief research and analytics officer. “And I look at time spent because ultimately, that’s engagement. And that determines whether a show is going to have a life.”

Someone focused on ad sales might still be looking at key demographic groups, whether adults 18-49 or 25-54. “We also want to know what’s happening on the many other screens that people have within reach,” Will Somers, EVP and head of research at Fox Entertainment, tells THR. “So [in addition to Nielsen ratings] we look at streaming metrics, which we also get on an overnight basis … and try to provide a holistic measure of total audience in real time for our stakeholders.”

The fact that nearly every big streaming service has or is about to have an ad-supported tier will likely increase transparency at least on the transactional side of the business. But Nielsen is, for now, still the primary provider of public ratings data — however incomplete it may be.

“Will that change?” poses Porter. “It likely will at some point. Everyone with a stake in the game, from ad buyers and network executives to members of the media and interested viewers, would like to have the best numbers at hand.”

Subramanyam added: “TV is under-measured and misunderstood. Our programs are among the most viewed in the world and form the backbone of linear and streaming platforms. We hope this becomes clearer as the measurement ecosystem evolves.”

Iñárritu, del Toro, and Cuarón: Life, Death and Everything Before and After

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An openness about death as a fact of life is a characteristic of Mexican culture and one that the country’s celebrated directors share in their movies.

Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón discussed death, metaphorical and literal, as a theme in their work during recent roundtable conversations which also touched on their friendship, filmmaking as biography and the politics of streaming.

“Sometimes it’s a literal death or the closeness to that death that in most cases is combined with the end of the journey of a character,” said Cuarón in an extensive Netflix hosted interview. Where do you think that comes from? he asked his compatriots.

“It comes from a very primal fear and consciousness that we all share,” Iñárritu responds. “No matter what race, nationality, or political belief, we all will die. Ever since I was a kid, I was always thinking, we all will be gone. For me, [it’s important] to have the opportunity to imagine your own death, and to imagine how you can make it not morbid but a little bit profound . . . that is, when we confront weakness or fragility, is when our biggest character [traits] or flaws come out.

Del Toro admits to thinking about dying since he was seven. “I’ve been a death groupie because I think it makes life make sense,” he said, adding that he values the “absolute inalienable right to be fucked up, to be imperfect… Imperfection is one of the most beautiful things. And that’s why I think those themes are very well represented in the [idea of the] monster, or in the fear of death.”

The directors are among the most lauded in current cinema. Between 2013 and 2018, Cuarón, del Toro and Iñárritu have taken home five of the six Best Director Oscars and two Best Picture trophies between them for a run of work that according to Deadline firmly established them in the pantheon of cinema history.

With Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant, The Shape of Water and Roma, they have delivered their unique visions of cinema with the world. To which you can add this Awards season, Iñárritu’s Bardo and Del Toro’s Pinocchio which are both directly and indirectly biographical.

For Iñárritu the death of his second son and near death of his third born were profound life-and-death situations. Bardo, he says, “is an allegory of my own life, a fictional way for me to liberate a lot of things — shame, pain, doubt, fear. That’s why movies exist for me. It’s a cathartic thing.”

Del Toro shares that Pinocchio stemmed from the same deeply emotional place, in his case about fatherhood and being a son. 

“To me, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever written is the final line, ‘What happens happens, and then we’re gone.’ It’s the essence of the one thing I’ve learned in 58 years — this little time we have for each other that is important. I lost my dad after The Shape of Water and my mom right before Pinocchio opened, and I was able to see them as people, as neither saints nor devils. When I came up with the idea of Pinocchio having a dialogue with Death, that was when the movie appeared for me. I thought, It’s about that.”

In thinking about Roma, Pinocchio and Bardo Del Toro notes that one of them is pure biography, one is a classic children’s fairy tale, and the other is obliquely a biography but they all are joined in similar ways.

“Different approaches, but ultimately the way we have deepened in our own biography within film is very similar,” he says, adding, “The first part of our career was how to handle the language of cinema. The latter part of our career is when the language of cinema and who we are start making contact.”

Cuarón, in the Deadline interview, describes this trio of movies as simply, “symbolic biographies.”

There’s a lot of mutual respect, shared history and friendship among the group who have been dubbed ‘the Three Amigos.’ Iñárritu says that he doesn’t have the same depth of relationship with other directors that he has with his Mexican peers.

“With others we] talk about technical things, stuff that is on the surface. But with these two, the benefit is they know very deeply who I am, and what my motivations are, and what triggers me. That deep knowledge of what needs to be said, and of how to say it in a way that is truthful and useful, is a complex mechanic. 

Del Toro adds, “We have a dialogue that is very real. It’s helpful to have these two guys to keep me in check, so that I don’t get high on my own supply. We remember, at the end of the day, that we grew up together.”

Iñárritu compares their trio to the triumvirate of Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese who grew up and made their careers together in the 1970s.

“We do make very different films, and we do come from different approaches, but I’m always in awe of what Guillermo and Alfonso can do that I never could,” he adds. “Like Pinocchio, for Guillermo: I wouldn’t even know where to start making a film like that. To see these incredible puppets and the technology he uses, and how he works with stop motion; there’s something about it I can’t even understand. And yet I admire it and I learn from that.”

Of course, love cinema they may, but each of these directors has now made films funded by Netflix. There is a tension between the epic and cinematic art that they all aspire to and the screening of their films to most audiences on TV screens or laptops.

“I love the experience of going to the cinema, and I go and see films in the theater as often as I can,” Cuarón defends, “but I’m by no means going to say it’s the only way to experience a film. There’s a lot of cinema I’m quite happy to watch on a platform.”

He says he is less concerned about the ways that people are watching cinema, than he is about a “dictatorship of ideas” that is driving production decisions in Hollywood.

“It’s about the movies that are being made to please that media,” he expands, in relation to streaming platforms. “If you watch a Fellini or a Godard movie on your computer, it’s still a great movie. It doesn’t change the power of the idea. But I think the ideas are being reduced to computer size in terms of ideology, and I think everybody is participating in that. The reduction of the idea is what we should discuss, not the possibilities of the medium.”

Del Toro agrees, saying that for him, “the size of the idea” is more important than the size of the screen. “Cinema—the marketing and financial side—has always tried to be constrained by rules. Right now, for example, you hear something like, “The algorithm says people need to be hooked in the first five minutes of the film,” but that was true in the ’70s and ’80s. That’s always been true. You need to have a strong opening sequence.”

He pushes the conversation wider than streaming versus cinema, espousing that cinema now is “post-Covid, post-Trump, post-truth cinema, and it’s very apocalyptic in a way. It’s always interesting generationally that when you think an artform is dying, what is really dying is the way you understand that artform.”

Iñárritu voiced concern about the impact of social media on young filmmakers, something that his generation did not have to face.

“It can be cruel, and it can be paralyzing. To have the courage to be disliked and to fail at this time is much more difficult than it was before.”

 

FAST Channels: Finding the Right Playout Solution/Strategy

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There are 30 FAST providers today ranging from Peacock to Xumo, and you can believe that number is going to grow in 2023. Free Ad-Supported TV is the hottest ticket in the Connected TV (CTV) universe with an overwhelming 92% of US households now reachable with CTV advertising. Additionally, 67% of consumers prefer some sort of ad-supported streaming content. In fact, the CTV ad spend is expected to reach $23.6 billion in the next year before reaching $32.5 billion in 2026.

Many of these users would also be cord-cutters, who prefer to stream content but want to retain the traditional linear TV-watching experience.

FAST would seem to offer a win-win situation for content owners, publishers, and end-users alike, but before you start building and monetizing a FAST channel, there are a few building blocks to get to grips with.

Perhaps the main issue to get right is ad insertion. Since ads are the primary source of revenue for FAST channels it stands to reason as the most common challenge associated with starting one up.

“You must ensure that the channel serves a variety of ads that resonate with viewers — too many irrelevant or repetitive ads will drive viewers away from your content,” states video services and platform developer Zype, which has published a handbook, “FAST Channels: The Complete Guide for 2023,” tuned to content owners embarking on a FAST strategy.

If you’re distributing the FAST channel on your own OTT platform then this should be no problem: you are in control, you can customize the ad experience and you can collect first-party data — though it’s likely you will need the assistance of a tech specialist to set up the infrastructure (hello, Zype).

When distributing on other FAST services and CTV devices from Samsung TV Plus to Roku sticks or Pluto TV, you won’t have full control over the ad inventory.

“In turn that increases the risk of degrading the user experience with the same low-quality ads played repeatedly. This can cause viewers to steer clear of your channel, and your ad revenue will likely drop.”

Also, third-party platforms will claim part of your ad revenue as a commission, which will take a further toll on your revenue.

Make sure you keep these in mind when you start monetizing your channel, Zype says.

It reserves its main advice, though, for selecting the right technology on which to build your FAST channel. For Zype, most of what needs to be accomplished can be taken care of by a sophisticated playout platform (including its own, of course) and shrewd software integrations.

For instance, you can use a playout tool’s programming timeline to design your linear channel. Playout solutions can offer drag-and-drop interfaces, similar to a video editing tool, that makes it easy to create a linear 24/7 channel and insert pre- and mid-roll ad breaks. To simplify and even automate creation of programming schedules, you can schedule or loop individual videos, playlists, and programming blocks.

Some playout solutions let you insert live events just as easily as VOD content. Other plus points include the ability to collect first-party data from end users to help you analyze the performance of different content assets. APIs allow you to integrate the platform with your central data hub to learn from real-time updates about users. That, in turn, can help you optimize your FAST channel with smarter programming decisions and drive more revenue.

“While a good playout solution will provide in-depth audience data and analytics on its own, you can take things up a notch by using integrated technology partners, like IRIS.tv,” says Zype, which has such an integration.

“With this, you get concrete data on individual scenes in a video and use that information to improve targeting and deliver a better ad experience to users.”

Playout software also helps you overcome one of the biggest challenges of FAST — ad insertion. Most playout software offers SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion) tools to connect an ad server and manage ad insertion. Most playout solutions also allow you to connect to a third-party SSAI, such as Google Ads Manager or Freewheel.

According to Zype (again, promoting its own stack), some advanced playout solutions include the ability to enable prefetch to place ad calls to the server in advance for ad breaks.

“That, in turn, ensures better personalization, fill rates, and render rates. It also improves your chances of ads not getting filtered out by ad blockers. That, in turn, leads to higher revenues while taking the ad experience for end-users up a notch.”

For more tips for strategizing a FAST launch, such as being sure to localize content, head to Zype’s guide.

TikTok and the Meme-ification of Social Marketing

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If you’re looking for clues for how TikTok is shaping global culture and politics you won’t find them in its own report, a glossily produced brochure enticing brands to work with creators and influence users of its platform.

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Much of what the shortform video giant says in its “What’s Next: 2023 Trend Report” could have been plucked from similar marketing messages produced over the years for YouTube. And maybe that’s the point. Move over Google, there’s a new place for investors to roost.

“Essentially, [TikTok] is a space where people can find new ideas on how to explore their passions and live their lives,” we learn. “And as people seek out ways to break the status quo, they’ll look to peers and role models who have the confidence to live life the way they want to.”

Sofia Hernandez, global head of business marketing for TikTok, is quoted, also saying not a lot: “2022 was the year people realized they didn’t have to live their lives as they always have done — with different points of view and ideas transcending cultures on TikTok. Next year we’re going to see more of this — as our communities get more confident and inspire positive change together.”

Against the backdrop of the increasing cost of living, apparently what people want is to have fun. They want humor, they want to feel happy and healthy. They want to feel part of a community and, above all, they want to be entertained.

It’s not rocket science, but TikTok says its platform is the best place for advertisers to reach audiences and that to do so they should work with creators.

Four out of five users say TikTok is very or extremely entertaining, per the report. “This means that when advertising messaging is delivered like an ad, but loved like entertainment, brands can see incredible business results,” TikTok explains. “For brands, the most effective messages on TikTok are uplifting, funny and personalized, or entertaining their audiences. Brands can build on this entertainment value by using editing techniques like syncing sounds to transitions or adding text overlays — which are effective at keeping viewers’ attention.”

The report differentiates content on TikTok from other platforms, where it is “personalized” based on broad identity categories or simple browsing histories. In fact, TikTok is 1.8 times more likely to introduce people to new topics they didn’t know they liked compared to traditional social platforms, per the report. We learn that content is curated on the platform based on what viewers find entertaining, so it captures their attention and trust.

“The trust is a result of who’s making the content. When a viewer sees a video from a creator they can relate to or from an expert they’re more likely to take the information to heart.”

Among people who took an “off-platform” action as a result of a TikTok video, 92% say they felt a positive emotion that ultimately resulted in an off-platform action. Meanwhile, 72% say they obtained reviews from creators they trust on TikTok, more than any other platform.

TikTok’s big prediction? In 2023, TikTok-first entertainment will inspire people to test out new products and new ways of thinking and behaving.

We are also led to believe that “people come to the platform to uncover truths and debunk myths, which builds credibility and trust between Creators and their viewers,” which may be news to those concerned about TikTok’s potential for political bias or cultural sway, though in truth these levels of mistrust have yet to reach Twitter and Facebook-style proportions.

Have longer video footage at your disposal? TikTok advises you to let artificial intelligence automatically cut video clips and save yourself time on editing, “so you can focus on the fun stuff.”

Joy, we also understand from the report, is a growing factor in people’s purchasing decisions worldwide, so it should be a key element of marketing strategies in 2023.

“Create TikTok content that helps people carve out joy for themselves, or even provides it through humor, relaxation and relatable points of view. Different creative approaches and tools can help you incorporate these elements into the videos you make for the platform.

In 2023, “messaging on TikTok — and beyond — should speak to this desire for levity and encourage people to make more room for themselves.”