BTS: A House of Dynamite

IBC

How filmmaker Barry Ackroyd takes audiences inside the bunker and gives them no control over the final countdown to nuclear Armageddon.

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A shaky camera and use of crash zooms are often highly distracting but in the right hands can immerse the audience into the story. That’s the case with A House of Dynamite, the latest movie shot by Barry Ackroyd BSC, a pioneer of docu-drama whose work with Ken Loach, Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow has inspired legions of filmmakers. However, as he tells IBC365, you can’t just mimic the aesthetic, you have to earn it.

“The nature of this kind of shooting is to give you a sense of being there,” says the twice Oscar nominated DOP (The Hurt Locker, Captain Phillips). “It should be frustrating because you’d like to intervene and say something to change the course of action but you can't of course. You can only watch and the camera is your eye.”

Netflix’s thriller A House of Dynamite is a thought exercise illustrating the strict protocols and inexorable logic triggered by a warning of nuclear attack. On the page it must have read like a group of people sitting and talking in a room filled with monitors, yet Ackroyd’s use of camera injects dynamism to proceedings.

“This film is a series of brief moves towards what happens in 18 minutes of real time,” he says. “Hopefully, you feel like you're in the room with them. Even though they’re not going anywhere you're listening intently to find out what the next move is.”

This is his third film with Bigelow following The Hurt Locker (2008) and Detroit (2017). While the director initially sought out the British DP following his work with Paul Greengrass on United 93 he credits her with challenging him to adapt his single-cam style to using multiple 16mm Aaton cameras on the tense drama about bomb disposal teams in Iraq (for which he won a Bafta).

Ackroyd explains that his approach to any film is to find its particular rhythm and texture. “The Hurt Locker had quiet moments of silence and other moments where we ran and chased with camera over rough terrain and down streets because that was what was happening in the story. Detroit had another different rhythm. Getting hold of that rhythm is the key to it. People push zooms in and out of subjects like a toy because they want some dynamism, but if the dynamism isn't there to catch, it won’t work.”

“[A House of Dynamite] is lots of people sitting in rooms making decisions - or not making them - and the important part was to capture their inner feelings. I then applied the technique that I would use on films whether for Paul Greengrass or Ken Loach which is to form a rhythm using the zoom and the observational documentary nature of it all to make it believable.”

A House of Dynamite is divided into three sections that replay the doomsday countdown from different perspectives. Ackroyd says he and Bigelow didn’t conceptualise the approach to each scenario differently.

“No, that would have been like pre-empting the storyline,” he says. “If you get too far down that route it’s like you’ve already drawn storyboards, which are perfectly fine to do for a stunt or a particularly complex scene, but trying to pre-empt a film like this I would find really disturbing. No matter what anyone draws or conceives upfront it will be different on the day. You have to react to the situation otherwise you will get a series of very contrived shots. You will know where the edit comes, how long the shot should be and where the move should be and where its focus is and the audience will feel this too.

“Maybe it's just my inadequacy but I can't do that. I don't feel that tells me the story. Although the films may be very beautiful I don't think beauty is the aim of the filmmaking process.”

Although the film has the polished sheen and A-list cast of a blockbuster Ackroyd says Bigelow adopts an indie-style where space is left for spontaneity when the camera rolls.

“They call it ‘show and tell’. It’s about shooting the situation for real,” he says. “Until we have the actors performing the words in the space that we've left completely open to them - where they have freedom to move - that’s where we capture the film.”

He continues, “Kathryn doesn't really establish camera moves or even moves for the actors. She puts the actors in the place that would be natural for the characters and largely leaves them to create their own choreography and movement.”

STRATCOM, the US strategic command responsible for nuclear operations, is an example. “Here, Tracy Letts (playing senior military officer General Brody), took the decision that he would get up and walk through the room, telling people to sit down.  This was great because that got him out of the chair. He understood that from an actor's point of view and it also aided the rhythm of the scene. Whether he had discussed that with Katherine or just did it on spur of the moment, I don’t know, but he knew that when he moved the cameras would capture him.”

Ackroyd has not made a film in which he hasn’t operated camera. Here he worked alongside two other hand-picked operators Katherine Castro and Gregor Tavenner, always covering with a foreground, mid-ground and background before diving into the subject of the scene.

“The idea of A cam, B cam and C cam isn’t really my cup of tea,” he says. “Everyone - the A, B and C of it - is making the same film. No one's going off to make a tricky Dolly shot or choosing to shoot in a different way. We're all tied together. That’s part of the method.”

Exteriors were shot in Washington, Iceland (for Alaska) and Kenya for the finale. 
Production designer Jeremy Hindle supervised the build of the main sets on stages in New Jersey.

“The rooms were huge and it was obvious where to put the camera,” Ackroyd explains. “The limitations were the geography of the room, the immovability of it. It was built to be realistic. It wasn't built to have elements that we could break away to make room for a track.  The point was to be covering the story and that means that every camera operator gets a piece of it.”

He elaborates, “I believe in covering all the actors in a scene and not necessarily just the ones delivering lines. That proves valuable in the edit when [editor] Kirk Baxter gets hold of it and brings the footage together. Sometimes the camera does the edit by anticipating and getting to the right place at the right time. That’s always a satisfying feeling. When the camera travels in motion blur and then lands on something and the shot comes into sharpness is all part of the drama where the skills of focus pullers and first AC's make for a great team.”

Ackroyd’s filmmaking is rooted in the dozens of documentaries he shot all over the world for the likes of Dispatches in the 1980s. He moved to drama enjoying a lengthy creative partnership with Ken Loach on films including Riff Raff, Carla’s Song, and 2006 Palme d’Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Throughout he has tended to shoot 16mm with zooms which, translated into digital for A House of Dynamite, meant ARRI Alexa 35 and his favoured 24-290 Angénieux lens.

“Using the zoom is an art,” he says. “It’s like playing jazz. It’s muscle memory for me. When I go to the camera, I always put my eye to the eyepiece, not to a monitor, unless it's impossible to get to the eyepiece. It's not necessarily on my shoulder, but next to my body and my hand is free to zoom so that you can do natural zooms. There are electronic zooms which work when you press a button but by the time your brain is deciding it should be moving and you’ve pushed the button, it's already too late. If your fingers are there and instinctively following your brain, your eye, then the camera and the zoom becomes part of the content. Using the camera becomes an extension of yourself.”

Ackroyd also draws attention to the work of the film’s composer Volker Bertelmann. His score combines sweeping moments of orchestral strings with tiny moments of silence to reflect the macro event of nuclear Armageddon and the reminders of its cost such as a scene of kids playing basketball.

“I've been listening much more intently to the sounds,” says Ackroyd. “I used to think that cinematography was the key but music can be very visual, driving and rhythmic as is it here and work closely with the cinematography.”

During research Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim spoke with a former chief of staff at the Pentagon who revealed that nuclear attack scenarios are almost never roleplayed by the President’s office (that’s any President not just the current administration) because they are too busy with a thousand and one other foreign policy or domestic terrorism threats. In contrast, STRATCOM’s leadership practice drills 400 times a year.

That the military are totally dialled into the decision-making process yet the president, who ultimately has to make the call within minutes is not, is the terrifying paradox at the core of the film. Are we complacent to the annihilation of humanity that nuclear proliferation entails?

Ackroyd says, “Politics always fascinates me. It’s one reason I make films and I hope this film prompts those ideas to be explored.”

 

Misfits come of age - What it feels like for a girl

British Cinematographer

Selecting tools and techniques to reflect the energy or intimacy of a scene were essential for Si Bell BSC, Kate Reid BSC and Neus Ollé BSC AEC when lensing the screen adaptation of the witty and wild memoir of a teen discovering their identity. 

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What It Feels Like for a Girl follows Byron, a teenager from Nottingham in a coming-of-age drama that explores escape, self-discovery and self-destruction. Based on the memoirs of the same name by author, presenter and activist Paris Lees, and adapted by Lees herself for BBC Three, the Hera Pictures production is variously raw, heartbreaking and hilarious. 

The eight-part series opens with young Byron – a fictionalised version of Paris’s younger self, played by Ellis Howard – living in a dysfunctional family, and beginning to explore their sexuality. Though only 15, Byron is soon catapulted into a world of prostitution and drugs. A trip to the heart of Nottingham’s wild nightlife proves transformative for Byron as they encounter a gang of queer misfits who will soon become a second family and call themselves the ‘Fallen Divas’. 

The glam look of the show is immediately striking. In colour scheme as well as its hallucinatory drugs, sex and abuse storyline it recalls Michaela Coel’s I Will Destroy You (2020) so it comes as no surprise that this was a key design reference. Another was HBO teen drama Euphoria. 

Look design was a collaboration between key heads including lead director Brian Welsh (Black Mirror) with Si Bell BSC (A Very British Scandal, Peaky Blinders) working with production designer Gem Randall and set dec Miri Katz, costume designer Nirage Mirage and gaffer Gary Chasity. 

“Everyone agreed that we didn’t want the usual kitchen sink council estate look but for a multi-coloured pastel and fluorescent scheme that nonetheless wasn’t too glossy,” says Bell. 

In early 2024, having finished BBC drama Miss Austen, the DP wasn’t sure if he wanted to dive straight into another show his agent had suggested for him. 

After watching “cool teaser videos” Hera had produced to get funding and also reading Lees’ book, he was convinced. “It just seemed so good as a project. When I met with Brian in Bristol we clicked on how to tell the story.” 

For what is a relatively low-budget production (compared to US drama), the filmmakers had the luxury of eight weeks prep which Bell believes is key to how well the story works on screen. 

“We had time to find and select locations, planning certain set pieces and sorting builds,” he says. The latter included the build of a toilet cubical fitted with removeable ceiling for top-down shots and the flat for Byron’s father Steve (Michael Socha) which was redressed for scenes set in his mother’s flat. Another flat for Liam’s character which we see in scenes of an after party in the first couple of episodes was another set build. All were on stages at Urban Myth Studios in Newport with locations in and around South Wales and Bristol (including of a squat party location in episode five) doubling for Nottingham.  

A second unit shot signature streets in Nottingham “and some big wides to sell the geography of the place”. Scenes were also staged in nearby Newstead Abbey and Hucknall, notably of a statue of Lord Byron seen in episode one. 

Reflecting experiences 

Most work went into finding and lighting the various nightclubs visited by Byron and the Divas. These were mainly shot in the Circuit and District clubs in Cardiff. Lees herself would input her lived experience of how different clubs felt to her around the millennium. 

“It was important to find the right spaces and fill them with extras and plan the lighting to make them each feel different,” Bell says. “One would be much more grimy, green hot and sweaty with strobe light and a more edgy techno vibe, others are very pink with soft neon lighting, less jarring. We wanted each club to have an identity which we achieve with light and colour. Even when we revisit a club for later scenes we needed the experience to reflect the character’s experience.” 

They worked from the club’s existing LED lights, changing the colours to fittings to capture in camera rather than using gels. They added a few lights to the floor to light faces and the production desk op often worked with the lighting desk op of the club itself.  

“It’s tricky to recreate a pink blue violet/indigo colour which can look super red if you’re not careful but I think we got the balance right,” Bell says. 

The movement of beams of light helped make the club look busy. “A big thing for us was to make the club feel like a club and not fall into the classic TV drama trap of being unable to fill the screen with energy because you lack sufficient extras. We tried not to flat light so everything was back lit to sell the illusion of more depth in the space. If we had all the lights facing forward from the camera it would expose the fact we didn’t have many extras. You might see less but you feel more energy and shape.” 

He commends 1st AD Joe Lea for her work in these scenes. “While we were concentrating on getting the shot with the actors she got all the extras amped up and made it feel like a party even if it was a wet Tuesday morning.” 

The grade by colourist Michelle Cort from Outpost based in Pinewood took colour to another level.  

“I didn’t want it to be too clean or the image too pretty,” says Bell who shot with grain baked in to the ARRI Alexa 35 (G833 Custom Super Nostalgic Arri Texture). “We tested different strengths of grain and decided on a medium option which we enhanced a touch in the grade.  Michelle made a LUT based on a film emulation that we tweaked with DIT Lewis Williams (of Twindraig) on set. 

Cinematic quality 

Bell’s choice of Hawk V-Lite anamorphic lenses added the right amount of distortion and further took the edge off the image, giving cinematic quality. He says, “I’ve always wanted to shoot them and never had the opportunity. We tested them and Brian loved it.”  

The camera package was hired from Movietech (now part of Sunbelt Rentals). “Since we were shooting a lot of handheld I loved the small form factor of the camera also we could mount it on a Ronin and use as a remote head, on a crane and also have the grips carry it with me operating the head using DJI Master Wheels.” 

He also appreciated the Alexa 35’s latitude which gave them more freedom to shoot on a tight schedule. “I wasn’t worried about clipping highlights or having to ND a window. With this camera you can get away with a lot more.” 

The single camera features a lot of handheld but there were no rules as to which scenes were handheld or not, Bell reports. “When we intuitively felt the scene needed an energy or intimacy we went handheld.” 

At times, and particularly when showing Byron’s point of view, the camera seems to float as if slightly high on drink/drugs/euphoria or dreaming.  

“What I try to do is get in the flow of the scene and into a space where I’m not thinking about it too much,” Bell says. “I like to balance the camera perfectly on my shoulder so I almost don’t have to hold it and just move with the actors, wherever the emotion goes, trying to emphasise certain beats.” 

He was aided by regular partners grip Paul Kemp and focus puller Tom Finch. “If everyone gets into that space of reacting to performance and feeling it in the moment you can get these magical moments. I think we did that.” 

Different notes 

Kate Reid BSC (Silo, Great Expectations) was keen to work with director Ng Choon Ping, having seen his feature debut Femme. They shot episode four and six, with the latter set in France offering a contrast between the more hectic scenes of the rest of the series. 

“Episode four is quite a fast-moving story, a lot of which takes place at night, so we wanted to give the French story a different note,” she explains. “It should feel like a pause in the story and a different direction for Byron and his relationship with his mother.” 

To that end, Reid swapped the Hawks for K35 sphericals to better capture a sense of stillness and allow for more space in the frame. 

“We’re no longer in the confined, darker spaces of suburbia and inner city and instead outdoors where we wanted to feel that Byron had more freedom. To support that our colour palette is softer.” 

When she read the script it had said ‘Byron goes to Greece’. The episode was shot in south Wales, albeit with decent weather, and the original story location switched to Normandy. Scenes around a swimming pool were shot in Portishead. “I think these are my favourites scenes in episode six because it’s a moment of self-reflection and stillness for Byron. We put the Alexa 35 in underwater housing which I operated in the pool while standing on the bottom.” 

Most of Reid’s block was shot single camera accompanied by B cam operators Claire Pie and Tanya Marar ACO for episode four. The rest of the camera/grip/lighting team were as per Bell’s block.  

“Ping was very keen that when we see Byron come out in public as a girl in episode four we should film it in an intimate way discovering things as Byron sees them. She is very aware that everyone is looking at her and it’s different to how she has behaved in or experience that club before. I occasionally used some K35s for those scenes to have close focus on what the actor was doing rather than being restricted which you can something be with anamorphic [when shots have to be within a certain minimum focus].” 

Freedom to explore 

Spanish DP Neus Ollé (Deadwater Fell, La Hija de un Ladrón) BSC AEC photographed the final two episodes for director Marie Kristiansen. Episode seven is almost entirely set in a prison and represented a departure in both look and set. 

“This actually gave us quite a freedom to create as we wanted,” she explains. “For Byron, being in jail is a shock and that’s what we aimed to reflect. Our aim was to enhance the feeling of how scared and isolated he must feel.” 

The location was a combination of Gloucester Prison (a former prison) for corridors, yard, exterior and Raglan Barracks in Newport for classroom, kitchen, toilets, visitor room, and office. A set built for the interior cell and section corridor (matching the one in Gloucester). 

“We raised the corridor 3-4ft from the ground to be able to accommodate the scene where the camera transitions from cell to cell, showing all the characters. We wanted to create the feeling of one cell on top of another, therefore the camera had to be able to move across the floor.” 

They also accentuated a cold feeling with an almost monotone of blues. “Marie wanted to play with a mix of reality and hyper-reality,” Ollé says.  

While Byron is in a male prison and has to act to hide his identity in order to survive, in the finale by contrast he is dressed as a girl and fully accepts who she wants to be. “We keep the colour aesthetic from previous episodes and make it even brighter, with a more upbeat poppy style.” 

 

You can touch this: Haptics becoming central to the virtual live experience

SVG Europe

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The video industry in general and sports in particular is going multi-modal. The picture and the audio alone is no longer enough. The industry has pushed resolution, dynamic range and audio fidelity to the point where enhancements are no longer monetisable. Attention is turning to new technologies which promise greater immersion in the game.

“2D video is good. Everyone knows that, but if we want to add value to the experience we might want to bring additional media and we also want to bring interactivity,” says Gaelle Martin-Cocher, Senior director, Media Systems, InterDigital. “The passive experience is good but younger generations demand more.”

InterDigital, the US headquartered research lab, develops the technologies that underpin many of today’s video compression and wireless communications standards. A key focus now is how the sensations of touch, force, motion and temperature can enrich immersive experiences.

“The goal is to enable interoperable transmission and rendering of tactile sensations across devices and platforms, complementing visual and auditory media,” says Philippe Guillotel, Senior Director, at InterDigital and a leader of the group in MPEG that is standardising representations of haptic data.

SVG Europe were given a tour of the company’s European HQ in Rennes, France during which its experts served a number of demos. One potential use of haptic signals is to leverage data from pressure sensors in the balls used during the FIFA World Cup 2026 to send vibrations to mobile devices each time someone kicks it or when a goal is scored.

“It’s a very interesting use case and the data would be straightforward to collect,” Guillotel  says. “I hope they will use it.”

Another scenario is for Formula One. Guillotel explains, “There are already sensors detecting motion, acceleration, deceleration in the cars and you can use this information to enhance the feeling taking a chicane or a overtaking. In basketball, when someone barges into you, you could receive that feedback.
 
“The easiest way to do it would be to have a library of effects ready to go and to have someone push a button for the appropriate effect when an event like a foul or a goal happens during the live broadcast.”

It would also be possible to automate this process using computer vision. Sensory experiences could potentially be conjured from anywhere in the stadium or on the pitch such as inside a rugby scrum or next to a high diver 10 metres above the pool.

Haptics standards

In October 2021, MPEG officially recognised haptics as a core media type, placing it on equal footing with audio and video. Finally published in January 2025 as ISO/IEC 23090-31, the new MPEG-I Haptics Coding standard unifies the encoding of vibrotactile and kinesthetic data, enabling interoperable, high-fidelity tactile feedback across XR, gaming, and broadcast.

This paves the way for haptics to be encoded, streamed, and rendered within the same ecosystem that powers today’s media experiences — from mobile devices to cinema and XR headsets.

“We have developed standards to describe the haptic information and distribute it using traditional broadcast or streaming formats including Dash, MP4 file format and CMAF. Establishing a consistent approach to the delivery of haptics is important to the technology’s adoption across immersive entertainment.”

Any device implementing the standard interface - gloves, vests, gamepads, or robotics actuators - can decode or adapt tactile data using the metadata-driven mapping layer.

The architecture supports very low bit-rate (about 8 kbps) synthetic effects meaning that a haptic track is a very light weight addition to the payload. MPEG is now extending the framework to cover interactive haptics, avatars and object-based touch interactions, forming the next phase of the Haptics standard for advanced XR applications.  

A key question is whether sports fans want this.

Guillotel says that feedback from tests has been positive but that it’s difficult to judge when the technology is so new. “I'm convinced that it will be something people will use but it’s too early to know. The issues is the device. One of the reasons we are concentrating on delivering haptics to smartphones, game controllers and especially to the headset is that most people have these and are comfortable with them. We need devices to be inexpensive to be adopted by the market.”

Further demos on show at InterDigital included real time delivery of volumetric video combined with haptics. The video would be captured from a multi-cam array surrounding the athlete and presented against a CG environment such as a sports stadia. Viewable in 2D displays or VR headsets, the application is considered useful for training by coaches and athletes able to playback, pause and interact with the 3D video.

Making presence felt

Haptics are part of a wider concept emerging in media which aims to immerse viewers in the sensation of being present.

Valérie Allié, Senior Director for Media Services, InterDigital says, “Imagine the year is 2032 and you are preparing to watch your country’s athletes compete at the Brisbane Olympics. Maybe you personalise your perspective to replay a winning goal or use AR overlays to cross the finish line with your favourite athletes. This potential to deliver high-quality, immersive  content, whether through avatar interactions  that will enrich the in-stadium experiences, or live 3D immersive content, and the ability to  sense this experience thanks to haptic feedbacks, all depends on advanced compression capabilities and new media formats.”

In this future it’s not only cameras that will capture content, but Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) which will enable any device to act as a ‘radar’ to gather surrounding information about the environment. This will enable application providers to build detailed and accurate digital twins or realtime replicas of an environment. 

“Using sensing data gathered from devices  around the pitch, the coach's bench, or any  other area in this arena, we can create dynamic digital replicas of stadiums full of players, of spectators, and other activities,” says Allié.

“ISAC will enable motion detection and tracking of people and objects. We will have all this sensing data that will be integrated with high video quality and ambisonic audio that will enrich spatial computing  and deliver even more exciting XR experiences.”

AI will help to optimise network resources to deliver hyper-personalised content. This could include immersive player tracking which overlays with the live game feed to provide detailed stats of a player like speed, stamina and positioning.  

Commercial 6G network launches are being primed for 2030, according to mobile industry standards body ETSI. That means the Brisbane Games could be the first major event to enjoy the benefits of the next-generation network theoretically delivering between up to 100 times faster speeds than 5G with data rates as high as one terabit per second and latency measured in microseconds. At this point the ability to merge detailed digital twins its physical counterpart becomes viable.

Energy aware streaming

However, more streaming to more devices comes at an environmental cost. InterDigital research found that streaming the Paris Olympics consumed about 1.25 terawatt hours of electricity which roughly equates to enough electricity  to power 400,000 European homes for a year.

Its solution is Pixel Value Reduction (PVR), an algorithm deployed on the content at source (such as CDN) to manage pixel brightness in order to lower energy consumption of any display without impacting the visual quality. It’s claimed to yield up to 15% energy savings in display power consumption and that viewers cannot perceive the small reductions in brightness. Indeed, had PVR tech been applied to all televisions streaming the 2024 Olympics globally, it could have potentially saved enough energy to power 12,000 European homes for one year.

PVR is part of the Green MPEG standard specification (of which InterDigital is a co-author) planned for the end of 2025.

“An AI-driven resource  management can increase the energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint  of large sporting events like the Olympics,” says Allié.

New video codec under way

InterDigital is also competing for its technologies to be included in a new video codec which this month was officially launched by ISO/ITU as a successor to MPEG standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC). The new codec, H.267, is intended to be more efficient in terms of bandwidth than VVC without increasing the complexity on the decoder side. That’s something that chip vendors want to avoid.

There is currently a call for proposals out to the industry. These will be evaluated in January 2027 following which there will be a standardisation stage leading to finalising in late 2029.

Already in tests, InterDigital claims to have demonstrated performance gains averaging 25% over VVC with some tests showing gains of double that.

e target for H.267 is to deliver improved compression efficiency, reduced encoding complexity  and enhanced functionalities such as scalability and resilience to packet loss.

“It’s a really big challenge and a great opportunity to develop new ideas, patents, and algorithms,” says Fabrice Le Léannec, Senior Principal Scientist, InterDigital. “In particular, we are exploring how AI can be used in synergy with traditional video compression methodologies.”

 

Paralysing piracy: Industry grapples with growing, industrial-scale theft

IBC

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Although the broadcast industry has been rife with theft since the early days of cable TV, it now faces piracy at an industrial scale and speed. At IBC2025, a panel of security experts warned that illegal streaming is accelerating in scale, sophistication, and impact.

“Piracy is an existential threat to sports’ economic model,” said Mark Lichtenhein, CEO of the Sports Rights Owners Coalition (SROC), at IBC2025.

With 80% of online piracy happening through illegal streaming services, content is under relentless attack. Unlicensed online video consumption is estimated to cost the media sector approximately $75bn a year globally, and is expected to hit $125bn by 2028.    

Spilling the beans

While live sports piracy tends to dominate headlines, it is not the most pirated category of TV content. According to research by Muso, the illegal consumption of films and episodic TV shows – notably Japanese anime – drove over 87% of visits to pirate sites in 2024.

While the value of both live sports and premium drama decays as soon as it is released, on-demand content has a longer time to be exploited, from script stage through production.

“We track lots of pirate services that have a fully stocked video on demand (VOD) library of the latest content, often unreleased and already available for users to stream,” reports Robin Boldon, Head of Product at an anti-piracy solutions provider Friend MTS. “That sits alongside a professional electronic program guide with tens of thousands of live channels from all over the world, all available in one service, for one monthly fee.”

In April 2025, European broadcasters called on the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to adopt a treaty that would protect member transmissions internationally regardless of where the pirates were located or where they rebroadcast.  

In a joint statement, they said the piracy of broadcast signals had become a global issue. “The internet facilitates unauthorised use and distribution of broadcasters’ signals, causing substantial financial harm to broadcasting organisations. This threatens the commercial sustainability of live and premium content, which is central to broadcasters’ programming.”

However, it is a mistake to think that pirates are only hijacking streams or attacking content delivery networks (CDNs). Sometimes the initial leak happens by accident as a result of a gap in security protocols at a redistribution partner, a supplier of VFX or versioning, or even within the production company itself.

Securing the supply chain

This is why research body MovieLabs is advocating for zero trust, a concept that operates a ‘never trust, always verify’ model. However, it is finding it to be a massive change management task to get everyone involved in a production to switch away from years of thinking about security as physically securing a computer or building, to one in which digital IDs are the only way to access media held on a network.

Theft is exacerbated by failing digital rights management systems (DRMs) that haven’t been updated since their introduction 20 years ago. Earlier in 2025, a report from Enders Analysis called out the weaknesses of Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine DRMs that the industry has long relied on as guardrails to keep consumers within the scope of their payTV subscription. The authors said that due to a lack of maintenance by the big tech companies, these "are now compromised across various security levels".

“When you've got a core technology that's not necessarily the biggest revenue driver, then it [may not get] good or regular updates,” says Boldon. “They don't really provide a barrier to a pirate who's determined to get access to that content. Equally, even with a solid foundation, if it's not implemented properly or with the best practice it should be, then you go out the gate with those vulnerabilities in place.”

Friend MTS has pioneered server (or domain) blocking to filter out access to pirated services, down to the internet service provider (ISP) level. “On average, access to nearly 10,000 video servers per live event is blocked, so what makes server blocking unique is not only its focus on video delivery servers – versus just front-end pirate services – but rather its ability to run for the duration of events defined in an order, priming it to tackle live video content, including sports,” Boldon explains.

CDN leeching is the latest form of piracy to threaten operators’ revenues and is perhaps one of the most serious ones yet. Alain Durand, Senior Director at media security specialist Synamedia explains: “Criminals know how to exploit and distribute encrypted keys to their subscribers, and they’re sending links directly to the CDN paid by the service provider to stream the content. Since they don't distribute the content themselves, they make much more money because they don't have any distribution costs to restream the content.”

Overall, these security experts advise media organisations to wrap their entire company culture in zero trust and implement all manner of defence mechanisms from forensic watermarking to issuing takedown notices.

The power of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest weapon in security experts’ armoury. Friend MTS collects 27,000 hours of video every day and millions of data signals related to piracy. According to the company, these can’t be processed with anything other than AI. 

“We use AI in a number of ways. For instance, we use it to help identify consumer behaviour patterns,” explains Boldon. “Are there telltale signs we could use to forecast where and when piracy will occur? We can then offer that guidance to the customer so that the next time, because there will be a next time, they're better equipped to handle any breach.”

AI can also be used to identify the unauthorised training of AI models on victims’ intellectual property. “We are actively involved in R&D to help customers identify where their content has been used or abused in that fashion and can advise on what they can do about it.”

The high stakes of live sports

Live sports have always been a target of hackers. However, the rise in the value of sports rights has made these events the most high-profile cases. Every year, the industry loses an estimated $28bn to piracy, fuelled by 230 billion views of pirated streams worldwide, 

“This is more than lost revenue; it’s an erosion of exclusivity – the very asset that makes sports rights so valuable,” says Durand.

For live sports, leaks must be detected and disrupted within minutes. Watermarking combined with real-time takedown capabilities isn’t a luxury anymore – it’s a business imperative.

Rights owners echo the urgency. Lichtenhein criticised the lack of clarity in current laws, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires “expeditious” takedowns but fails to define timeframes. “Expeditious for a football match must mean minutes, not Monday morning,” Lichtenhein argued, calling for a legal framework that recognises the unique value of live events.

Moving forwards

The industry has moved on in its awareness of the issue and willingness to confront it head-on.

Boldon says, “A couple of years ago, the issue was still largely considered one for the rights holders to deal with. Now, there’s a much more collaborative recognition that it's [the industry’s] collective problem. If there’s a specific regional problem with theft, there is an understanding that sharing that intelligence and getting the global rights holder on board can have a positive impact.”

However, just when the industry may be coming to grips with at least stabilising the amount of pirated content, the advance of new technologies could render every current encrypted digital system vulnerable to instant attack.

Quantum computing is on the march. For many experts, it is a matter of when, not if, a sufficiently capable quantum system is built to pose a problem that is immense enough to make Y2K look like child’s play for every single company’s IT department.

 

BTS Train Dreams

IBC

Editor Parker Laramie explains how frontier drama Train Dreams walks the line between naturalism and magical realism.

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The harsh wilderness and untamed forests of the Pacific Northwest envelopes and shapes the lives of men working to build the American railroad that will ultimately transform the country in melancholic Netflix feature Train Dreams.

Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainer, a stoic logger turned railroad worker, whose tough life on the frontier is tracked from 1917 in rural Idaho on to Washington at the dawn of the space age.

Co-written by Clint Bentley with Greg Kwedar it is edited by Parker Laramie, the creative team behind the Oscar nominated prison drama Sing Sing.

“We wanted Train Dreams to feel like a fable but still a salt of the earth American story,” Laramie tells IBC365. “This mix of naturalism and elevated magical realism was the line that we were walking the whole time.”

Laramie had previously edited Jockey for Bentley and Kwedar, a film about an ageing horse rider which established a form of poetic realism now extended for Train Dreams.

“We felt like we developed a language with Jockey and that was the template we started from,” Laramie explains. “For the most part, we saw Train Dreams as an expansion of a lot of the things we’d been doing in Jockey in terms of mixing a naturalistic tone with a more elevated or elegiac pitch.”

“There are differences. In Jockey we would go into the subjective headspace of the main character while with Trains Dreams we’re telling the story with a little less of a first person subjective experience. The story is nonetheless told from the point of view of the narrator. I think you're still in Robert Granier's head but not in quite the same way.”

The character that Edgerton plays is a man of few words but big feelings. His performance has to say a lot without actually saying much. We understand most of what he is thinking from a voiceover, narrated by Will Patton, though he was a late addition. Throughout the whole offline edit until almost final picture delivery, Laramie himself was the narrator.

“Clint is a director who loves trial and error,” says Laramie. “Clint and I, but mostly Clint, were constantly rewriting the narration, using it to figure out when and where we’d use it to move the story forward. It was a conscious decision from Joel and Clint that Robert Granier would have little agency over his life.

“That presented a problem because the classic way of telling a story is that the main character needs to sort of thrust themselves into the second act. Very specifically we were given a performance that was not that. Clint and Joel were true to the script but main my main notes to them were whether we could just inject a little bit of motivation to get us from A to B?

“Clint was very militant about it and Joel was right there with him. So by the time we got into the edit it was like ‘okay how do we get inside his head?’ The narration is vital for that as well as the footage.”

Virtually the entire film was shot on location using the available light and weather conditions. DP Adolpho Veloso ABC, AIP, who also shot Jockey, shot with Alexa 35, often framing the characters a little below centre, or with corner framing, to get either a sense of their scale amid the space and the sky or to feel hemmed in by their environment. Night scenes were often lit by candle or camp fire and lensed with Zeiss Super Speeds. For day time scene he switched to Kowa Cine Prominar Sphericals.

“The environment becomes its own character,” as Laramie puts it. “Some of the compositions that Adolpho did in this film are some of the most beautiful I've ever seen. It can be hard to connect with characters who lived in a different age to you, so we were trying to find a way of immersing the audience in his feelings.”

Shot long before the L.A fires of January this year, there are two major fire scenes in the film, one of which they shot practically in a burnt forest, with the lighting team constructing lights to mimic the glow and movement of the fire. A second dream-like sequence was shot on a volume stage with slow shutter speeds influenced by the work of director Wong Kar-wai.

The obvious reference for Train Dreams is the work of Terrence Malick, and Laramie doesn’t deny his influence. “On Jockey I remember cutting a scene and Clint's wife, said it felt ‘too Malicky.’ She was right, it was too obvious. But he is clearly an influence, particularly for me The New World, but as soon as we started to get too close to it we began to back off as much as we could. It’s unavoidable but we didn't want to have the film feel like it was a love letter. Clint has his own language that he likes to use that I think pushes beyond Malick.”

Bentley sent the crew half a dozen films to watch in prep, none of which were a Malick. They included two from Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky (Mirror and Stalker) and French new wave classic Jules et Jim which held clues as to how the narrator functions.

“Something I initially wanted to do was only have the narrator in very specific sections, almost like how the narrator operates in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. That film has very specific narrator sequences, shot in a completely different style. That wasn't the right language for our film. We knew that the narrator was going to step in at key points and carry us with just a line or two. There were a lot of times right up until the mix where we were pulling out or adding lines.

“Our conversations in the edit were extensive on the narration. Everything revolves around it and it was always a question of ‘do we really need narration here?’”

Laramie says they tested a few actors for the narrator and found them taking the tone in a different direction, away from their vision. Patton had previously narrated the audio book of the novella on which Train Dreams is based so instinctively grasped what was required. “The moment he started recording it was clear he understood it and brought sort of a levity to the role. We wanted to embrace what Will was bringing to the table.”

The filmmaker is adept at cutting documentaries too. André Is An Idiot, a doc about irreverent cancer sufferer André Ricciardi, which Laramie made with director Tony Benna took home two awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

“I prefer to use Adobe Premiere on docs because I really like the speech-to-text workflow and the text-based editing workflow,” he says. “That's huge because they tend to be much more interview based or dialogue oriented on doc. I’m basically the co-writer [of the film] so being able to work with text and have the video moving along with it is indispensable.

“I sometimes look back and wonder how I used to do it. We’d have an assistant doing a lot of the work but now I can have the assistant doing much more interesting work like digging for better footage or working with music.”

He adds that he prefers to use Premiere on the scripted materials because he finds it easier to edit and mix audio than on other platforms. “Especially on Clint’s projects. Clint's style is so meditative and so being able to take a piece of music and stretch it out and slow it down helps to carry all these long meditative moments. It’s a key part of our edit process.”

Laramie would like to alternate between factual and fiction work for the rest of his career. “I think that blending of fiction and documentary, the tension between the spontaneous and the structured is really interesting to me on a formal level.”

 

AI helps InterDigital reach beyond VVC in race to develop next-gen codec

Streaming Media

Candidates for H.267 already significantly outperform VVC as the hunt for a new video compression standard gets underway

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The starting gun has been fired on development of a new video codec beyond VVC with gains of at least 20% up to 50% claimed by R&D lab InterDigital.

The target for H.267 is to deliver improved compression efficiency, reduced encoding complexity  and enhanced functionalities such as scalability and resilience to packet loss.

“It's a real big challenge and a great opportunity to develop new ideas, patents, and algorithms,” said Fabrice Le Léannec, Senior Principal Scientist, InterDigital. “In particular, we are exploring how AI can be used in synergy with traditional video compression methodologies.”

Headquartered in Wilmington, DE and holder of more than 33000 worldwide patents and applications across wireless, Wi-Fi, 5G/6G and video, InterDigital is one of the world’s largest pure R&D and licensing companies.

StreamingMedia was given a tour of its video lab in Rennes, France, InterDigital where scientists said they were exploring combinations of AI and traditional compression methodologies to compete for patents that could be locked into H.267 when the standard is published in 2029.

There has been reluctance among some companies including Amazon to formally kickstart a new video compression project which could mean rip and replace of encoders in their existing ecosystem. In addition, many Big Tech and streamers are committed to working with rival codec AV1 from AOMedia.

“People were cautious,” says Le Léannec. “That’s why ITU and ISO convened a workshop to ascertain market demand. The key question was were we able to compress video with a significantly better efficiency than VVC?”

At that workshop the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) which reports to ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG issued a call for evidence. Samsung and Amazon were among attendees.

“The goal was to show the state of the art of video compression where anybody can come with crazy ideas,” says Lionel Oisel, Head of Video Labs and General Manager, InterDigital France.

Nokia, Ericsson, Fraunhofer HHI and InterDigital responded to the call and presented their results at a JVET meeting in Geneva earlier this month.

“That was very important because there was a clear expression of interest in the need for a new video codec,” says Le Léannec. “Further increasing compression efficiency, because reducing the bit rate is always good but with an encoder which is easily configurable and where the complexity on the encoder side is at least maintained to a reasonable level.

“Fraunhofer HHI demonstrated success. They had optimised a lot of their software, removed some constraints of VVC and added a few tools and were able to achieve a 20% bit reduction gain running at the same encoding speed of VCC.”

InterDigital made dual responses. One, called Enhanced Compression Model (ECM), was based on conventional codec schemes and the other was a hybrid of VVC overlaid with AI tools termed Neural Network Video Coding (NMVC).

The former was made principally in partnership with Qualcomm which was actively involved in ECM development and the latter was made in tandem with Huawei.

InterDigital had begun work on ECM in 2021, a year after VVC was finalized. Designed purely for research and without taking account of encoder complexity, by the end of 2024 ECM had reached version 18 and was demonstrating a coding gain of 28% over VVC.

In purely visual tests the company claims it can achieve 50% gains for some sequences.

“Overall more than two thirds of the sequences were gaining 30%,” says Le Léannec. “The evidence shows that you can outperform VVC with an encoder that has reasonable complexity. NMVC consists of VVC plus two to three ML/AI tools which could increase efficiency further.”

When new codecs are developed there is traditionally a trade-off between reduction in bitrate and increased encoder complexity. If saving bitrate was the only goal then you could keep introducing more complex tools and algorithms, however this makes the encoder much more complex to implement. Reducing or at very least maintaining complexity levels was a key ask by the market.

At the October CfE meeting it was agreed that there was concrete evidence that with existing tools a new encoding method could significantly improve on VVC without increasing complexity. JVET gave the go-ahead for a call for proposals.

Competing participants in this next stage, including InterDigital, will now work until January 2027 before presenting results back to ISO/ITU for assessment. Finalisation of the new standard is expected by end of 2029.

“We only used publicly available technologies and publicly disclosed algorithms to answer the CfE but we have internal technologies that were not disclosed and which already in our lab tests do better than the CfE response that we submitted,” Le Léannec explains. 

“Now, we switch to hidden mode and we develop tools and technologies internally.  Many other companies will do this too over the next 18 months. Our research is focused on keeping the complexity low. We cannot make the complexity explode.”

Key research aspects include optimising the trade-off between bitrate and visual fidelity, developing fast encoding methods suitable for constrained devices, and advancing performance in emerging use cases like HDR, 8K, gaming, and user-generated content.

The standardisation phase will start after January 2027 and will be a collaborative effort led by JVET.

“Everybody works on their own or with some additional companies trying to bring the best potential solution that will be evaluated in January 2027 but the one that will win won’t become the standard,” says Oisel. “Instead it will likely be used as a baseline for further development from 2027 to 2029.”

He adds, “This standardisation period will determine which tools are adopted (therefore licensable). To do that you have to prove that it delivers huge gain and also that you don't have high complexity. The issue with AI tools is that they put the complexity on the decoder side which is something that chip makers like Broadcom will fight against because they don’t want to add complexity to their hardware. If you come with a tool with huge gain but also huge complexity then this won’t be selected.”

VVC state of adoption

VVC itself has been slow to rollout so news of a potentially superior codec launching in less than four years may stagnate adoption completely.

“Everybody's waiting for a trigger,” says Oisel. “The trigger could come from the content provider but to deploy that they need hardware, they need encoding solutions, and also decoding solutions on the devices.

“There are a large number of TVs that potentially can decode VVC, whether enabled or not, and a couple of mobile phone manufacturers have developed VVC decoders. There are encoder solutions too but not necessarily fully optimal yet so this means that you don't reach the full bitrate gain of VVC. On the content provider side VVC is adopted as standard for next generation TV in Brazil. Content providers who wants to stream TV3.0 in Brazil will have to implement VVC. Encoder manufacturers will have to comply with the requirements of their customer (TV Globo) and TV manufacturers will also need to be TV3.0 compliant.”

ATSC3.0 which is rolled out to more than 75% of US markets references VVC as a codec; as does DVB in Europe but people are still waiting for a trigger.

“It could come from Brazil but the main market right now for VCC is China. Tencent is using VVC quite a lot where one use case for VVC is to better manage a huge number of UGC social videos. VVC could be a very good target for them to reduce the file size because compared to HEVC you have a reduction between 45%- 50%. Usually it is the US that leads the way but in this case it could be China that leads o, which is pretty unusual.”

The reference codecs for mobile via the 3GPP are AVC [H.264] and HEVC [H.265] and the battle to go to the next generation has not yet started. The competition is likely between AV1 (AOMedia) and VVC (MPEG).

“AOM are to release AV2 by end of this year and it also seems to be hugely complex on the decoder side,” says Oisel. “Will they be able to simplify it? Usually, MPEG are in advance compared to AOM. AV2 is using a lot of tools that were developed for VVC. So there are two parallel tracks, but the underlying technology between MPEG and AOM standards are, to date, not much different.”