New with every view: Eno and the generative algorithm shaking up movie-making

IBC

Artist Brendan Dawes talks to IBC365 about his new documentary Eno and the invention of a generative ‘Brain’ that produces a unique version every time it’s watched.

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Eno, the new documentary about fabled musician Brian Eno, is suitably avant-garde because no audience will see the same version of the film twice – thanks to AI. It is unlikely to be the last feature film to be presented in this fashion with major streaming platforms and directors keen on using the patented underlying software, according to its co-creator the British artist Brendan Dawes.

“We've had discussions with big film studios and big name directors as well as documentary makers to imagine doing things in a different way,” he says. “An advertising company was also interested in making thousands of versions of a normal commercial.”

Discussions include those with fiction filmmakers. “We’ve definitely thought about it. Christopher Nolan’s films play with the idea of timelines. Take Memento, which is told backwards. Perhaps if he had had our software then Memento would be different, every time it was screened.”

Netflix is among those reportedly expressing interest when the film premiered at Sundance. It had after all pioneered branching narratives with drama like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. However, the cost of dynamically generating high resolution files for streaming over the internet would be astronomical at present.

“We're talking with various platforms, Netflix included,” Dawes confirms. “We could certainly just do a director's cut of Eno but that would kill our creative ambition for the film. Our dream is that when you stream it, it generates a unique version. It’s an ongoing conversation with all these platforms and hopefully this year it will be available on one of them. We're trying to find the perfect solution.”

Dawes created the software, which is called Brain One (an anagram of the film’s subject), with US director and visual artist Gary Hustwit. Together they have formed Anamorph, a software and film company, exploring ways to bring generative technology into the process of making and experiencing movies.

He stresses that Brain One is a generative system and not a generative AI tool like Midjourney or Sora. The system, or algorithm, was not trained on anyone else’s data, IP or other films. It was however trained on archive material of Eno and new footage shot by Hustwit and taught to recombine the video files along with 5.1 audio tracks into new sequences composited together using generative AI links in realtime.

Recent screenings of Eno have also been presented with a piece of hardware that looks like a DJ’s mixing deck.

“We realised that we wanted something a bit more theatrical on stage rather than just a laptop,” says Dawes. “So we approached Swedish consumer electronics designers Teenage Engineering to make a physical version of Brain One. At screenings now people want to take pictures of it. It’s almost like it has groupies. That’s because Teenage Engineering has a lot of fans but they are also just fascinated by the physical manifestation of this software.”

That’s apt because Dawes own journey as a visual artist began as a student of sound engineering in Manchester at the start of the rave scene.

“I wasn't a musician but I could program and sequence and sample and scratch with vinyl. Like Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades this form of music was about combining things in different ways. What I'm doing now is basically the same. I'm using data but reforming it to create something new.”

His fascination with computers began from the moment he plugged in a Sinclair ZX81 in the early 1980s. “The power of type words into it and making it do something was incredible. I never studied computer science but code just made sense to me. What I really loved is that by changing just one element you completely change the artwork. You can make infinite variations. It is reactive in real time, not fixed. There’s nothing more contemporary in contemporary art than digital art. It is the art of now.”

Growing up in Southport meant every minute of the weekend was spent in the video game arcades around town. Dawes channelled this memory into the artwork Arcade Machine Dreams (2021).

“Using actual footage from games like Defender, Tempest and Galaga, I created a generative system which transposes time, movement and pixels to create flowing, abstract data sculptures – a retrospective totem for each of these games which meant so much to me.”

His real-time generative work You, Me, and the Machine (2022) morphs its appearance in relation to a viewer’s proximity. Passengers BCN (2023) responds to official passenger data from Barcelona airport and gives sculptural form to the relationship between digital and physical.

His works titled Cinema Redux create a visual fingerprint of a single movie composed of dozens of frames and part of the MoMA permanent collection. Films including Metropolis

Vertigo, Taxi Driver, Deliverance, Gone With The Wind and Jaws have been subjects, the first of which was created in 2004 from DVD footage.

“I was wondering how I could present film in a different way than as a static image? I sampled the film every second then I built that up for 60 seconds per row for the entire film.

“It was basically data visualisation without abstracting the data. You're using the data as the film frame, and just presenting it, without changing the colours or anything. But when people saw it they said things like ‘I can see the rhythm of the film.’ I've got to be honest, it's one of the simplest things I've ever made.”

He adds, “This sort of reappropriation and remixing is obviously a very common thread throughout the whole of digital arts.”

Gen-AI is an extension of his work. Using Anamorph, he says, you could make over 52 quintillion variations of Eno.

“I was terrible at maths at school, and I never understood why we were learning it but as I got older I understood the beauty that's within mathematics. I'm fascinated by the ability to use maths to make art,” he says. “It’s through working with these machines — these code based collaborators — that I can put into the world my thoughts and ideas exploring our relationship and interactions with the analogue and digital.”

He is agnostic about whether AI on its own could create a piece of art but says we should be open to the probability.

“Who said humans are the best at creating art? If we take that as a given we’re limiting our imagination. For example, in Eno scenes are sometimes cut together in ways we never would have thought of yet somehow it works.”

Brain One has in fact been put together not just with math but with the expertise of storytellers. Elements in Eno including the beginning and end are structured to remain the same regardless of the rest being mashed-up.

“We had great editors on this film but they would never have done it perhaps because we have all these biases of how things are supposed to work in a narrative.

“AI is a tool that can help us think differently,” he insists. “Personally, I'm not interested in trying to create work that looks like something that has gone before. I don't care about AI generated photorealism. If I want that, I can look out the window.  To me, it’s far more interesting to make the familiar feel strange.”

He thinks that some core filmmaking skills might become simplified by using prompts to generate outcomes but believes that human taste, judgement and curation remain essential to our understanding of whether an AI assisted artwork succeeds or fails.

“Machines can't replicate consciousness. There is no genome of consciousness. It’s a total mystery. And because we don't know how it works, we can't feed that into a computer to make it understand. I hold on to that. I hold onto the hope that human consciousness remains something that can't be figured out.”

To end with a philosophical question: In future why would someone go outside and take a photograph of a tree when they can just prompt an AI to generate a photoreal a tree?

“I think it's too easy,” is Dawes’ response. “Machines are trying to make us more efficient and more logical. I want to be more illogical and more inefficient. I want to waste time. I want to appreciate the power of silence.

“Taking a picture of a tree is a powerful human experience and much more rewarding than just typing in a prompt into. The two experiences are totally different and they can co-exist. I'm a big fan of digital technology. I think we need to embrace it. So I don't think I’m being a Luddite when I say I fear for people who never look up from their screens and never experience the beauty of the world.”

Harvesting energy for the urban future

IEC-tech

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By 2050, more than 970 cities will experience average summer temperatures of 35 °C (95 °F). Cities already consume about 78% of the world’s energy, and account for more than 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the United Nations. Yet cities are also playing a vital role in developing, implementing and overseeing clean energy transition policies, as highlighted in the report Building Sustainable Cities, published by consultancy firm PWC.

Excess heat is increasingly viewed as the world's largest untapped energy source, according to many experts. Energy harvesting is part of the solution required for urban sustainability and climate resilience. According to this renewable energy specialist, “By tapping into the abundant energy sources present in cities, from pedestrian footfall to vehicular motion, we can transform urban landscapes into vibrant hubs of renewable energy production.”

Energy harvesting is the process of capturing energy from a system's environment and converting it into usable electric power. The global energy harvesting systems market is projected to grow at 10,3% a year between now and 2031 when it will reach USD 1 billion with smart buildings and infrastructure expected to register the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in that period.

Here are some of the innovative technologies and collaborative efforts governments and municipal authorities can harness for a more resilient urban future.

Walking on sunshine

Across the European Union’s 27 member states, there are around 60 billion square metres of available roof space and a similar amount of currently unused surfaces on buildings. This is considered prime real estate for energy harvesting. While photovoltaic panels are the main means of energy capture from roofs, a variety of other materials and methods are being investigated to harvest the near-infrared (NIR) solar radiation from façades.

The EU funded ENVISION project based in the Netherlands is developing four technologies, including solar heat collectors based on NIR absorbing coloured coatings. The energy collected is used for heat pumps. This technology has been trialled at a school gym hall in the Netherlands.

Smart ventilated glass could also be used to absorb NIR solar radiation with the energy stored or used directly to heat inside the building. Trials using a combination of technologies have taken place in Eindhoven and Helmond (Netherlands), in Austria at the factory of a major glass manufacturer and at the University of Genoa (Italy).

Streets and pavements to harness electricity

The kinetic energy from roads and pavement surfaces in urban areas can also be converted into electricity. According to a UK-based specialist, kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) technology is particularly effective in environments with heavy traffic, such as intersections and parking lots, where vehicles frequently decelerate and accelerate. 

Beneath the surface of pavements on London's Bird Street and Dupont Circle, Washington DC, for example, lie a network of sensors and generators that capture the pressure and movement caused by walking. As individuals traverse these pavements, their footsteps cause slight deflections, activating the piezoelectric materials that produce electricity to power nearby street lighting. 

These energy harvesting technologies require international standards to be used safely and efficiently and that’s where the work of the IEC comes in. The IEC 62830-1 series, prepared by the IEC technical committee which develops standards for semiconductor devices, includes methods for evaluating the performance of vibration-based piezoelectric energy harvesting devices.

Standards for piezoelectric technology are developed by IEC TC 49, which addresses piezoelectric, dielectric and electrostatic devices. This includes IEC TS 61994-5, which gives the terms and definitions for sensors, intended for manufacturing piezoelectric elements, cells, modules and the systems.

Photovoltaic modules are also being developed for pavements, roads and other parts of urban infrastructure. Having tested their design in Shanghai and 255 other Chinese cities, researchers in Hong Kong found that electricity potential could range from 0,70 kWh/W to 1,83 kWh/W. A Spanish startup has developed panels for locations such as hotel terraces, office buildings, sports centres, bike paths and will be ready for installation later this year.

IEC TC 82 develops standards for photovoltaic energy systems and is working on a publication which measures the flexural strength of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells.

Wastewater heat recovery

Billions of litres of heated water end up in the sewers every day of which the heat content is completely wasted. When this heated water is discharged from dwellings all year round, its temperature is in the range of 25 to 30 °C and by the time it reaches wastewater treatment plants, it’s normally between 12 to 10 °C.

The same research also found that the average temperature of sewage wastewater remains relatively steady throughout the year. That means heat pumps continue to operate efficiently even on cold days when heat demand is highest – providing a constant source of renewable energy.

An increasing number of municipalities are harnessing this form of excess heat to help decarbonize their energy use. A neighbourhood of Vancouver, Canada, is one of them.

Here, heat is captured from sewage at around 20 °C before it reaches the local treatment plant. Heat pumps concentrate that heat to produce hot water which can be as high as 80 °C.

According to the project’s manager, the heat recovery system operates at efficiencies of over 300%, meaning that for every unit of electricity used to run the heat pump, it returns three units of thermal energy.

An 8,3 km thermal grid distributes the recovered heat back to the district's 6 210 apartments. In each building, heat exchangers transfer heat from the water system into the buildings' heat system and domestic hot water pipes.

The IEC prepares standards for heat pumps, including thermoelectric devices. IEC 60335‑2‑40 specifies safety requirements for electrical heat pumps.

Other wastewater heat recovery projects are underway around the world, including in Norway and in Denmark where the potential in excess heat from wastewater treatment plants is calculated to heat 20% of all households in a country of 5,9 million. A similar system in Beijing also produces biogas from digested sludge – which is in turn used to fuel public transport networks.

All these intelligent ways of harvesting power could very well become the norm in our future smart cities, as they attempt to reduce heat and become more sustainable. More than ever, international standards are required to pave the way forward.

Live from the Supercup: Softseed demos world first live 360 10K stream

Streaming Media 

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German football league executives are buzzed about the prospect of immersive experiences and took a step closer to that goal with a claimed world-first demo of a system delivering a whopping 10K resolution VR live stream of the Supercup hosted at Leverkusen’s BayArena, last Saturday (17 August).

“This is not just the premiere in terms of football, this is a world premiere,” said Stefan Kiwit of DFL production and technology partner Softseed ahead of the match. “Of course, we have tested it, but we haven’t done this live before.”

Softseed is a Berlin-based startup formed early 2023 by executives with an academic and media background. It markets three products, the most important of which is called Plaiground which streams live 360 video to next-generation head-mounted displays using what Kiwit claims is a groundbreaking technology.

“Every tech company says that it is groundbreaking but this really is because it offers immersive reality life experiences,” he said.

The company has put together an end-to-end system from capture to display that “guarantees” low latency (claimed under 35 seconds glass to glass) with a consistent quality of 10K in 3D at 90Hz and a colour depth of 10bit.

Its main value lies in software able to process all of this at 1TB of data per minute.

This patented solution is based on a novel 3DIR codec which execs said was an adaptation of the MV-HEVC codec, a multiview extension of HEVC, developed by Fraunhofer ISS and for which Softseed is a test partner.

The demo at the Supercup was experienced on the Apple Vision Pro “the only display currently able to reproduce a 10K resolution”, but Kiwit expects all major head-mounted displays to come to market with similar panels.

“Our system is agnostic to the end display and works with any operating system,” he said.

The live feed is also in stereo. This would seem from SVG Europe’s inspection to be processed by software rather than captured natively as 3D. One of the developer’s trio of products, Loki (pronounced ‘looky’) is claimed to convert 2D video data into native 3D in real time. Further, Loki is capable of fusing two separate 180° 3D video streams into a seamless 360° 3D image in 8K or 10K resolution. It also uses AI-powered compute to compose, encrypt and adapt the data to the user’s individual playback device.

The camera system itself is still under evaluation with three different versions used in the BayArena. These were a Insta360 8K camera, a 12K 360 camera from Chinese firm KanDao and eight cameras from an unspecified Chinese manufacturer configured in a 360-array.

Quizzed on this, Softseed said the feed from this camera array was ingested raw at 80K (8 x 10K sensors) before processing.

“The production of the base signal can’t be achieved with any normal camera,” Kiwit said. “We tried to work with existing cameras but no camera in the world was able to supply what we need. So we tried to work on software solutions for existing hardware. We’ve pushed some hardware providers to change the things we need to do because otherwise you can’t get a resolution over 6K.”

He continued: “We are under 35 seconds latency which is superfast even compared to broadcast which is 45-second latency and especially when you consider we are processing 1TB of data per minute. That’s why this technology is really groundbreaking because it’s really difficult to handle this amount of data.”

The streams are static but the viewer can move their head around 360-degrees. Just as impressively, the Supercup POC demoed three of the 360-camera positions (including one on a crane above and behind a goal and one at a corner). Any number of positions could, in theory, be switched live by the user.

“You could imagine a position in the dugout putting you next to [Leverkusen manager] Xabi Alonso,” said Kiwit.

Softseed was also in charge of the bespoke production of the live stream during the game.

Private tests have been made using the system on tennis with the camera positioned on the umpire’s chair and with LIV Golf. Live concerts are another area of keen interest, with Adele apparently agreeing to host a demo at her run of concerts at the open-air arena Munich Messe this month where the 360-cams will be both back stage and front of house.

Kiwit was enthusiastic about the prospects for sports, fashion or music promoters to licence the tech.

Immersive data from Immersiv.io

Softseed wasn’t the only immersive reality developer showcasing its development at the Supercup. French firm Immersiv.io has worked with the DFL to show how Bundesliga matches could be viewed live (in 2D, taken from the host feed) in MR headsets such as Apple Vision Pro with users able to interact with a 3D model of the action running in parallel.

It could be possible, for instance, to pause and rewind action, or click on individual players for stats and most compellingly walk around the virtual 3D model which unfolds while the live action is playing like a Subbuteo set come to life.

At last year’s Supercup at the Leipzig Red Bull Arena Immersiv.io was involved in a trial of 5G networks to enable fans at the stadium to try out the features of a new in-stadium app developed jointly with DFL and Vodafone.

Live from the Supercup: DFL signals intent to become best league in the world on and off the pitch

Sports Video Group

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After proclaiming how exciting the Bundesliga product was on the pitch – including that it averages more goals per game (3.1) than any league in Europe – DFL executives were delighted but not perhaps surprised when last weekend’s German Supercup lived up to the occasion. The regular German soccer season opener, played this time between last year’s unbeaten champions Bayer 04 Leverkusen and runners up VfB Stuttgart, produced a four-goal thriller including a red card, an 88th-minute equaliser and a win on penalties for Leverkusen in front of an exhilarated crowd at the BayArena on 17 August.

The Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL) knows that its sporting product is good, but in order to grow it needs to sell the league to fans and by extension distribute media rights around the world, which is where tech innovation plays a centre role.

“Right now we have a very compelling and positive attitude towards German professional football and the Bundesliga in particular. For me, this is not just a feeling or an opinion but an observation that I can back up with facts,” said Steffen Merkel, DFL CEO.  “It is very important that we remain an organisation that recognises new technology, that remains curious, and always puts ourselves into the shoes of the fan to rekindle their fascination for the Bundesliga every day.”

Although he didn’t quite spell it out, Merkel and the DFL have a long-term ambition to usurp the English Premier League as the most successful league in Europe.  A recent report by Deloitte put the Bundesliga second, leapfrogging La Liga and behind the EFL in the elite of European leagues based on revenue.

In figures released in March, the DFL posted a record total revenue of €5.24 billion for the 2022-23 season (across Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2), 9% higher than the previous mark from 2018-19.

The core of the product continues to be “spectacular football and about excitement and about goals”, he said, noting that over the past five years the Bundesliga “has been consistently the league which scored the most goals and with the fewest goalless games.”

Coupled with this is stadium atmosphere. The DFL has sold more than 22 million tickets for the Bundasliga 1 and Bundasliga 2 combined. “That’s an all-time record and takes us even above pre-pandemic levels,” Merkel said.

The average attendance of games last year across both leagues was 29,000 per game, which is on par with Spain’s La Liga and Italy’s Serie A “always with sustainable and stable ticket prices that continue to be a strong characteristic also of German professional football”, he said.

“Every weekend, 400,000 people come to the stadiums, but domestically more than 15 million viewers are following our games over the weekend.”

He said that Bundesliga annual revenue had grown, on average, 7% a year over the past few years, making it the second fastest growing league after the English Premier League. “In sum, the Bundesliga is on the rise but to be very clear that’s not the point where we want to end. This is only the start of our key ambition to grow and even speed up the momentum of growth. We have ambitious goals as an organisation,” he added.

Of the €5.24 billion total revenue in 2022-23 media brought in €1.52 billion or 34% of the total, which is why the DFL is pursuing “an internationalisation offensive” to market the TV product overseas.

Bundesliga International chief marketing officer Peer Naubert has led more than 1,000 international activations this past year, which he said was considerably more than any other European league. “We are not the Premier League, we are the challenger,” he said, “and this is why we need to be more aggressive and more innovative to grow our business.”

The position of its domestic TV rights is muddied just now with DAZN, one of the incumbent holders, taking DFL into arbitration in a dispute over allocation of the next set of rights beginning 2025-26. DAZN believes it has lost out to Sky Deutschland and claims the bidding process was unfair.

“Did we want arbitration? Of course not, but it is also a sign of the popularity of the Bundesliga that broadcasters are fighting very hard to get the packages,” Merkel said.

Another option, in common with reports circulating about the EPL, is to take control of the rights inhouse and go direct to fans with a Netflix-style service.  With the production capacity already run by inhouse division Sportcast it’s clearly possible, but Merkel said the time was not right.

“The technical ingredients which we have for producing broadcast pictures at the DFL are probably better than at any of our colleagues but this is not just a production-related decision, in the first place it is a commercial decision. That’s more difficult to analyse. We want to optimise our media rights sales because it accounts for a significant proportion of the revenues on our books,” he added.

He pointed to the importance of digital platforms and AI to reach and engage younger generations and overseas fans.

“So many fans of the Bundesliga domestically and especially internationally have their first touch points with us in the digital and social media space. Having a presence there is so crucial. Our goal in our target markets is that you cannot avoid the Bundesliga. So, if fans choose in the end not to follow a club or not to engage with the league, fair enough, but at least we can present them with the choice. Of course, media consumption in the live space is still the focus and the key, but consumption has become more scattered and more localised that’s why we see technology innovation as the future of broadcast at the Bundesliga.”

Telestream: “What’s Going to Happen if the AI Gets an Answer Wrong?”

Streaming Media

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AI enhancements and a Cloud platform build out are the twin developments majored by Telestream heading into IBC. This includes the unveiling of a comprehensive Cloud platform which will eventually house all of its products and a focus on AI to streamline user operations.

Giving details to the press ahead of the event next month, Simon Clarke, Telestream CTO talked through the company’s general perspectives on AI and ML noting the capabilities and promises of AI are riding high on a wave of hype.

“There’s an inflation of capabilities,” noted Clarke. “Our view at Telestream is that AI functions should be an enabler for everyone that uses our products. One of the ways we're going to get that collectively is through a really ethical approach to how we look at AI.”

Clarke insists that humans are always going to be involved working with Telestream products for the reason that AI can make errors.

“What's going to happen if the AI gets an answer wrong?” he posed. “What is the jeopardy and the consequences of that decision? That's hugely important as we define products at Telestream. The other very important pillar for us and in the industry at large is how to ensure content provenance. Where did content come from that the viewer is seeing as it makes its way through the media supply chain.”

This, he said, is going to be an intense area of focus for the company over the next year or two. Telestream wants to create tools to help content creators track where their media comes from right across the supply chain.

Clarke also spoke of respecting intellectual property. “We process huge amounts of the world's media and we handle that in a very ethical way,” he explained. “We don't use that data to train models. We're very respectful of where the content is coming from.”

When it comes to integrating AI in product, Telestream begun the journey a year ago, equipping its captioning tool Stanza with the ability to automatically produce captions from media. It has now expanded this capability to include unique machine learning capabilities where Stanza can take a automatically generate speech to text and create captions in multiple different languages.

Crucially, from a content protection point of view, this processing is run locally with no data sent to the cloud. Clarke said its models produced “very, very high quality results” but left room for fine tuning by the user.

The company’s QC product Qualify is able to check files at scale running in the cloud using a ML model to detect the languages found in the audio track.

“This is hugely important for classification of content that moves through a media supply chain pipeline,” Clarke said. “It can automate content filtering, for example for profanity checking.”

It is also adding AI tools to Vantage to make it easier for newcomers and experts alike to work with it. This is based on feedback from clients telling the company that Vantage was “really hard to learn for folks who are new to it,” according to product manager Blake Parrish, and even those who are skilled found it “very difficult to build complex workloads.”

“Even though they know what they're doing, it takes them hours if not days to get what they need done,” Parrish said of the old version of Vantage. “It is really complicated so we're going to combat that by building in AI features to make this application more approachable.”

The next generation of Vantage being demoed at IBC2024 will have a number of AI tools to ease workflow design.

“Rather than manually building a workflow with a keyboard and mouse, they can go to a panel and type into the application what they'd like you to build and it'll go off and create the workflow for them,” Clarke explained. “If it matches what the customer is expecting, they click ‘Accept’ and they move on. It’s a hugely powerful feature.”

Typically, a Vantage customer would have hundreds of supply chain workflows doing various business critical functions. So for them to really understand what some of those workflows do at a glance can be fairly challenging. Another AI tool will enable an automatic summarization of each workflow and description of what it does to help users.

Enter Telestream Cloud platform

Parrish is the VP of product management at Telestream responsible for the firm’s Cloud portfolio. As a prelude to announcements, he outlined the challenges that its clients say they are trying to solve.   One of them is tapping the advantage of the Cloud’s scalability and flexibility in the cloud, which is clearly important for remote production scenarios and for cost control.

“I'm sure we've all heard the horror stories about folks migrating their content and their services to the Cloud and the moment when they received their first invoice, which was much higher than they expected,” said Parrish. “The beauty of Cloud is that it lets you pay for exactly what you use and not pay for things that are sitting there but only if your solutions are Cloud native.”

He pointed to global collaboration as “a huge trend” since more teams are performing remotely today than four years ago. The key here he said was the ability to access content and to collaborate in real time.

“I wouldn't say it’s rapid but the industry is transitioning out of the period where it makes sense to be buying a bunch of hardware which quickly becomes out of date,” Parrish said. “Things are evolving from where you needed a very large capital expenditure to get started.”

When it comes to content accessibility then most enterprise customers will have content stored across multiple locations, different Cloud regions and different Cloud providers mixed with on-prem.

“People need to access that content from anywhere at any time. The integration of services helps with this. Integrations need to be executed on and then maintained and that can be really expensive. and time consuming. It’s also very complex. Even keeping up to date with changes in codecs and formats can but very difficult and expensive to do.”

Telestream’s response to these core issues is the Telestream Cloud platform. Yes, Telestream offers cloud services today, but company execs are now painting Cloud as the future of the company.

“What we are doing is embarking on a journey to rewrite all of the services that are part of the Telestream portfolio,” Parrish said. “We are rewriting them to be Cloud native so that they are improved on their original versions.”

The Cloud platform is designed to streamline the process from “ingest, enhance and deliver” said Barrish by close integration of its products. Up to eight will be ported across in the next couple of years with four talked about today as being the first to be made available.

“There will be comprehensive first party integrations between every product that we're putting on this new platform,” he underlined.

The platform is said to be agnostic for deployment on any of the major public cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and it will be integrated with all leading MAM systems.

Parrish said, “It's going to provide end-to-down workflow management. It will be very scalable and secure. What's important is that we are going to be spinning up workers when they're needed, in a SaaS environment and a multi-tenant Cloud platform which will result in reduced costs for our clients.”

He added, “Eventually we're going to take that even further and actually allow for our Cloud interface and our Cloud API layer to become the single command and control point for all instances of the platform that clients may wish to deploy. They will be able to orchestrate jobs running on-prem from our Cloud instance.”

Of products rewritten for cloud native application on the Telestream Cloud then first out of the bag is its flagship processing tool Vantage.

“We are rewriting the entire interface in a way that's never been done before,” he said. “The workflow designer, which allows you to build out and eventually execute these workflows, is going to be accessible in a SaaS multi-tenant environment for the first time.”

Telestream’s Live Capture service is also now a cloud native app. It is described as “one of the most important pieces of many production workloads,” by Parrish, “because if this fails you aren't actually capturing the content as being filmed or recorded or delivered to you. It's essential but this is a robust and sturdy application.”

Deployment on the TS Cloud platform will enable users to scale up or down individual channels on demand.

“There's not a solution with similar performance to Live Capture available,” he claimed. “We're going to be delivering the ability to really granulate control over exactly how many compute resources are being allocated to the production of your content.”

Additionally, for Live Capture, Telestream is adding the ability control encoders from the Cloud and the ability to integrate some of the probing technology in its IQ product line directly into the Live Capture interface to check the health of the streams being received.

Also announced as being written cloud natively is GLIM, a tool which allows users to view hi-res media remotely in a web-browser, without generating a proxy file.

Titan OS strengthens hand as emerging European TVOS player

StreamTV Insider

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Titan OS, European developer of a smart TV operating system and advertising solution, has expanded its free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) content offer in partnership with Banijay Rights, the global distribution arm of content company Banijay Entertainment.

The deal will see single-series IP FAST channels for Banijay properties including Deal or No Deal, Fear Factor, The Biggest Loser, Hardcore Pawn, MythBusters, Pointless, and Mr Bean join the lineup available to owners of a TV set running the Titan OS.

It’s the latest step as Titan OS aims to strengthen its hand as an emerging player in the burgeoning TV OS battle.  A newcomer to the TVOS scene, Titan OS hit the ground running at the beginning of the year with a deal to supply its operating system to TP Vision, which began rolling out the OS on Philips and AOC-branded  TVs in Europe and Latin America.

The Barcelona-based company also launched with a partnership with UK and Nordic consumer electronics retailer Currys, which involves a retail media collaboration and will see the Titan OS rolled out on Currys own brand JVC TVs.

Its FAST channel lineup at launch included Euronews, Bloomberg TV, Red Bull TV, CHILI, FUNKE Digital, Blue Ant Media, Insight TV, and Love TV Channels. It has since signed with French pay-TV giant CANAL+ Group to have apps including Canal+, Skylink, Direct One, Focus Sat, TV Vlaanderen, and Télésat pre-installed on the Titan OS home screen across 10 European countries (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania). 

Last month it tied with A+E Networks EMEA to launch five FAST channels in the UK and Ireland including Inside Crime, Mystery TV and History Hunters.

By presenting FAST and broadcast channels together, the company intends to improve the viewer search experience, explained Lucas Llop, the firm’s VP Advertising. “The easier content discovery is, the more effective monetization options there are for content providers and manufacturers, and the better cut-through opportunities there are for advertisers,” he stated.

As for the new Banijay Rights deal, Titan said it not only marks an expansion of the content offering but reinforces the popularity of single IP channels and its programming strategy to keep viewers engaged.

“As the FAST market grows, streamlining our channel line-up will be key,” said Judith Diaz, content partnerships director at Titan OS, in the announcement. “As more premium content is released, channels dedicated to a single format or show will allow viewers to lean back and enjoy their favourite content for as long as they like. This will create a more engaging experience for viewers and drive greater profitability for content owners”.

Founded by CEO Jacinto Roca and COO Tim Edwards – both former executives of FAST platform Rakuten TV where Roca was CEO - Titan OS is targeting the 40% of the global TV market that lacks its own operating system (GFK Data 2022, quoted by the company in its launch release).

As TVREV analyst Alan Wolk has pointed out, this may mean little in the US where less of the market is up for grabs, as several players have already claimed share including tech giants like Amazon and Google, home electronics majors Samsung and LG, and sizable presences for Roku and Vizio.

“But that battle for control of the TV operating system is indeed heating up elsewhere and billions of dollars are at stake,” wrote Wolk. “There won’t be a single victor… Rather, there will be gradations of market share, with each half a percentage point being worth millions.”

With the field dominated by Google and major electronics and smart TV OEMs like Samsung, Titan OS is an independent operating system where its rivals include ZEASN and Xperi’s TiVo.

In Wolk’s analysis, these so-called indies “have been growing in appeal as they offer many unique advantages, especially to local TV manufacturers who are looking for options that don’t involve casting their lot with global behemoths.”

He pointed out the importance of Titan’s European base, which also counts offices in Amsterdam, and expertise in the local European market as an advantage.

“There are 27 local markets and 27 different languages in Europe, and just as many local rules and regulations,” wrote Wolk. “Having people on the ground who know the ins and outs of these markets makes it easier for advertisers to execute on a pan-European strategy and for Titan to take on bigger players.”

Titan OS also entered the Latin American market via the contract to supply operating systems for Philips and AOC TVs and hopes to license its tech to other OEMs that do not have their own OS.

Smart TV makers have more recently sought to leverage their TV OS interfaces and increasing influence as the TV viewing entry point to create new advertising revenue streams that go beyond device hardware sales. That includes through embedded FAST services and home screen integrations, among others. And Titan OS is promising OEMs a way to get in on the action.

“The main difference between us and global OS players is that we will share the business with the TV brand,” Roca told DTVE. “This gives them the chance to generate their own revenue stream over and beyond their hardware margin. Our other main difference is that we are European-focused.”

CTV ad marketplace

The company debuted its connected TV marketplace, Titan Ads, during the Cannes Advertising Festival in June touting exclusive first party data from more than 4 million monthly active users and the ability to extend campaigns to over 30 million streaming households across Europe.

“The Titan Ads team have demonstrated a strong understanding of the local CTV market, combined with an advanced technology and data stack to help drive incremental revenue for our FAST business,” testified Gareth Vaughan Jones, head of Advertising Sales at Virgin Media in the UK where Titan Ads is a sales partner.

A partnership with OneTrust, announced in February, placed user privacy at the core of its personalized content recommendations and targeted advertising. OneTrust's CMP (custom-built consent management platform) helps Titan OS safeguard user privacy and enable compliance with privacy regulations and industry frameworks, notably GDPR across Europe.

“How users watch TV is changing. TV viewership is fragmenting into many different streaming applications, making it more difficult for advertisers to reach them. The homepage of the connected TV is the one place that all users have to pass through, meaning our homepage ad format provides maximum reach for advertisers,” said Edwards in the Titan Ads release.

Building on the retail data partnerships, Titan Ads is said to help advertisers drive direct action with shoppable ad formats that allow users to purchase products shown on the screen by scanning a QR code on their mobile device.

“Combining our first-part retail data with Titan’s CTV formats helps to deliver more relevant advertising experiences as part of our Currys Connected Media network. It’s an exciting, innovative opportunity to engage consumers,” said Andy Barratt, head of Retail Media at Currys, in the release.

It has also struck deals with sales houses in European territories such as Germany (Goldbach), UK (Media16), Spain (EXTE), France (Stamp), the Nordics, Belgium, the Netherlands (ShowHeroes), Italy and other international markets (RTL AdAlliance) to extend its reach.

In Wolk’s view, “The fact that a TV OS not tied to an OEM has an ad offering at all may seem surprising, but the ability to collect and use data is a feature of all independent TV operating systems—they collect the data. In a privacy compliant manner, via the OEMs that deploy them.

“That reach extension is key to the success of all of the Indies. By striking deals with a range of streaming TV providers, they are able to offer a more robust product that lets advertisers hit hard-to-reach consumers across multiple outlets.”

ACE Cinema Editor: Slow Horses

Cinema Editor 

Tinker, Tailor, Editor, Spy: Sam Williams makes a successful show even better

article here p23

 Mixing espionage intrigue with whip-smart humour Apple TV+ Slow Horses has burned through three seasons since 2022 with two more in the works. Adapted from author Mick Herron’s award-winning novels by See-Saw Films and screenwriter Will Smith, the drama revolves around a group of British spy misfits under the notional command of washed-up MI5 chief Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) who somehow manages to get mixed up in plots that endanger state security. Also starring are Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke and Jonathan Pryce.

Critically acclaimed from the start with multiple Bafta nominations including for Katie Weiland’s editing of the pilot ‘Failure's Contagious’, Season 3 landed a Bafta win for Sam Williams editing of episode 1 ‘Strange Games’ (also ACE Eddie nominated) and a nomination for Zsófia Tálas’ editing of episode 6, ‘Footprints’.

“We're a little bit shocked to be getting all these plaudits for season three because normally that doesn't happen on a repeat show,” says Williams (Luther, His Dark Materials) who joined for Season 3. “When you come into edit a season of any show you are standing on the shoulders of giants because they've already done a lot of the work.”

One of the production’s hallmarks is that one director is handed responsibility for the whole six episode run. In this case it was Saul Metzstein (Brassic) whose paths had crossed with Williams on Dr Who but they’d never directly worked together. With Metzstein’s regular editor committed to another project, Williams got the invite.

Season 3 opens with an extended sequence shot on location in Istanbul with Williams also in attendance. He explains, “They didn’t want to have the expense of having to come back for reshoots so they sent me out there with a mobile edit suite to begin cutting it together. The problem was that I then fell in love with every piece of the shoot because I'd been so closely involved in it.”

The first cut for this sequence ran about 15 minutes when they ideally needed it around five.

“We were always aware that we might have to compromise the sequence because editorially we needed to do two things,” Williams explains. “We needed to establish that our two lead characters (Sean and Alison played by Sope Dirisu and Katherine Waterston) are in love with each other. We also need to ensure that we re-introduce Jackson Lamb and the rest of the series regulars as soon as we can.

“The whole motivation for the Season 3 story rests on whether you believe Sean and Alison are in love and the emotional impact you feel at the end of the sequence when she dies.

That’s down to the quality of the direction and acting but just the meeting and falling in love part of the story was originally about five minutes long. In the end we trimmed that down to around 40 seconds.”

To do that Williams says he had to become more objective. “No-one cares if we were up until four in the morning to shoot and cut a scene in Istanbul. I had to make hard decisions, trim the scene to its essentials, while retaining the action and emotion.”

The ten scenes following this opening were the trickiest to finesse and to order, he says.

“The task was to introduce all our characters without stretching out 20-30 minutes and suddenly finding half of our time has gone by and we’ve barely started on plot.”

The frenetic action which closes the opening scene in Istanbul gives way to Lamb in a doctor’s waiting room.

“There's a slow tracking shot across a doctors waiting room and we just see a pair of feet and hear someone break wind.  You don't quite know it's him, but if you've seen the show before then you know. The tracking shot ends on Lamb’s face where he is ruminating on death.

The editing here is just very simple. It says ‘now we're just going to take things very slow’ and shows that we’re back in a world where life feels weary.”

Nothing works out the way you want it to. That sort of feeling is imbued in a lot of those opening scenes, so naturally, you're not going to start cutting all over the place.”
A follow up scene with River (Lowden) and Standish (Reeves) packing files of boxes at Slough House continues the theme.

“Packing files is about the most tedious job you can imagine but there’s something else going on that isn’t immediately apparent which is that the whole story is really about files. If the camera team are favoring shots of boxes in this scene, that’s the reason why.”.
Season two hadn’t been released by the time they started editing but Williams and Tálas were able to watch rough cuts and get up to speed.
“Music is always a big thing to get sorted before you start any show since it’s a large part of the look and feel and pacing,” he says. “Obviously here we already had a whole box of tricks to instantly call on whereas the editing team on season 1 were still figuring it out.

“That said, we do as much if not more work on the sound as on picture. Executives who have invested in a project or are about to buy into it like to see as finished a product as possible so the closer you can polish it with temp FX and music the more likely they are to buy it. The process also helps you as an editor since a little bit of sound adds so much to the drama.”

For example, Slough House, the operational hub of Lamb’s division in a less affluent part of London, is intentionally depicted as a dull environment. To help convey that Williams layers in sounds of road works, police sirens and traffic.

“It’s supposed to be in a rubbish part of town so by adding some atmos you can do a lot of the storytelling.”

He continues, “It also helps your editing if you've fallen in love with the characters. With two series under the belt, there’s a whole history to rely on. You can note certain little looks or things that they do that are short hand for their character. You know instantly that when you see something in Gary’s performance that that is a very ‘Lamb’ way to do things.”

One short scene in episode 1 shows Lamb ordering a greasy kebab from a high street take-away. He asks the shop owner to put as much spicy sauce on the sandwich as possible so he can’t taste the meat. It’s a typically rude and witty remark that tells you all need to know about Lamb’s character. Williams thinks Oldman may have ad-libbed it.

“Did you notice the design team having fun in that scene? It’s subliminal but there’s a wide shot where Jackson goes into the kebab shop and you see a poster on the wall that just says, ‘Lamb is Great.’”

Williams edited episodes one, three and five with Tálas cutting the other three. “We critiqued each other's work and watched all the episodes together with Saul.”

Another signature of the show’s style is intercutting storylines, much of which is scripted but still requires tightening in the edit.
“Many scenes are written a lot longer because the writer won’t be quite sure if it’s going to work on screen. My job is to ensure it’s to the point. I've always found that having a lot of material in a scene really helps the actor with their performance. Even though I’ve taken some of it out, their performance is really strong emotionally because they've worked through the original script.”

He says one of the joys of Slow Horses for an editor is to show off different styles. “We go from the energy of a chase in Istanbul or the suspense of the siege at the file storage facility in episode 6 to simple ones such as Lamb when he's at the doctors.

“It was without doubt the best show I’ve worked on in a long time. So much fun. Everyone was lovely. And then to be getting all these accolades at the end just makes me realize how lucky am I to have worked on it.”