TNT Sport’s coverage of The Ashes

IBC

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England’s cricket team head down under with a sporting chance of returning with a little urn. This Ashes series which begins 21 November in Perth is the most anticipated in years, on this side of the world at least. It is also the third consecutive away Ashes series broadcast by TNT Sport, which did so as BT Sport in 2017/18 and 2021/22, and one where the payTV broadcaster is promoting its presence for every ball bowled.

“TNT Sport is entering our third season now and we’ve started to really understand how to broadcast premium sport to an audience that loves that sport,” says Scott Young, executive vice president at WBD Sports Europe. “That's the lens that we're now going to put over the top of something as important as the Ashes.”

TNT Sport were reportedly the only bidder for the UK rights from Cricket Australia this time around with Sky concentrating its Christmas coverage on the World Darts Championship. However, England’s dismal performance over the last two Ashes tours when the series was over as a competition after a couple of tests probably contributed to lacklustre interest.

TNT is hoping the contest will be sustained into the fourth test in Melbourne which begins on Boxing Day. “We would love for our cricket fan base for this to go right down to the wire in Sydney because that would give you a full slate of five Tests to enjoy what is some of the best sporting competition around. We don't want for this to be a whitewash. Many years ago, five-nil was a great story for Australians but it's not much of a competition. We would love to go down to the wire.”

The time zone is a challenge since the first ball of the first test will be delivered at 02:20 AM for viewers in the UK and Ireland.

“From the moment you start watching early in the morning we want that bright Australian sunlight to come directly into your living room,” says Young. “We want you to feel like you are there and that we are not in the studio.

“The unique experience for us this year is going to be the second test in Brisbane which is  a Day-Night game. Having an event that starts a bit later in the Australian day but is still live further into the UK daytime will be brilliant. I think that's going to expose the second Test to a wider audience  and I'm really looking forward to seeing what impact it has.”

Cricket Australia appointed Fox Sports as the host broadcaster with TNT Sport taking the world feed with presentation fronted by Becky Ives with former players Alastair Cook, Graeme Swann and Steven Finn.

“We made a decision very early on that we wanted to be on site. We looked at the balance between presentation in a studio, which would have been at Stockley Park, where we do all our football production as well as our cycling and tennis production, and on-site. Stockley Park is a proven technical facility for us to do any kind of sport and being on-site is the more challenging way to do it but absolute right for this particular event.”

NEP is Fox Sports’ technical supplier and will also supply TNT Sport with dedicated production facilities at each of the five venues. Presentation cameras and mics are sent into PCRs at Stockley Park where the directing, producing and the studio control room teams will be. NEP Connect is managing transfer of signals back to London from each of the grounds via fully redundant dual path fibre. This has the effect of reducing the amount of kit required on-site whilst giving TNT Sports the look and feel of being at the ground.

“When the audience wake up, they know they're going to be on the boundary rope, amongst the action and amongst the story. We didn't want to be detached from the Ashes. We need to be in the heart of the story.”

“The quirky part of cricket is that you never know how it will end. It could be a fast Test with a result in three days or it could go right down to the final ball on the fifth day. It's really important to have our teams on site to tell the story as it unfolds. This story began in 1882 and it never fails to deliver.”

Commentary is led by Alastair Eykyn and Rob Hatch. Both are more familiar to coverage of rugby union and cycling and they will also be based in the UK, a decision that the Daily Mail described as a “dumbed-down insult to long-suffering England fans.”

“The beauty of commentary is individuals can be anywhere, connected not just be audio but with picture so everyone can see each other as they're commentating together,” defends Young.  “We've reimagined, what was BT Sport, now TNT Sports, as being a very fan first sports broadcaster with relatable experts ripping up the playbook and being a little bit maverick in our tone and style. I think our approach on commentary is making a bit of noise at the moment but I think it's making noise the right way.”

Social media video, also produced in London, will also be distinctive. Hosted by Ives, it will feature her experience of traveling Australia from November to January.

“There is an audience here in the UK that may never get to go to Australia. So how do we not only cover the Ashes but also what's it like to be in some of these cities in between each of the Tests? What is it like walking into the MCG on Boxing Day. Having done that, I can tell you it's quite an extraordinary experience, so we want to bring a lot of that feel of the Ashes particularly our social media coverage.”

The biggest on screen innovation will be the use of Timeline Markers. Familiar to Premiere League viewers on Discovery+, the markers signal key moments to enable viewers to go back and catch-up before moving back to the live action.

To complement the live action, TNT Sports will broadcast highlights throughout the daytime on its linear channels and discovery+. In addition, TNT Sports will produce The Edge – a review programme presented from its studios in London - airing in an evening prime-time slot on TNT Sports after the completion of each Test.

As an Australian, Young admits to being naturally conflicted. “I grew up on cricket and in particular on England's tour of Australia which, as a cricket fan, was always one of the best moments of summer. I don’t think you'll ever see a sporting audience in Australia complacent about the Ashes.

Given that I run a UK sports business, it’s slightly challenging to be as fully bipartisan as I normally am across all of the sport. When it comes to the Ashes, I would like to see England do well because that's great for our audience and our platform here in the UK. As an Australian, the ultimate result might be slightly different. Let’s say we've had some lively conversations here.”

Broadcasters on a high cyber alert

IEC E-Tech

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Cyber attacks on broadcasters are evolving and so are the standards which offer cyber protection.

A BBC reporter was recently offered a life-changing sum of money for his part in sharing digital access keys to the Corporation. It proved one of the more blatant examples of phishing, a technique that usually involves tricking an employee into revealing sensitive data. The aim in this case was to extort money by stealing information and/or leaving virus software that would scramble the IT system and leave part or all of the organization offline.

It's the latest in a tsunami of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure hitting all industries. In a recent update, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) highlighted a sharp rise in cyber activity linked to advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. According to its latest data, APT-related attacks have increased by more than 200% – a clear signal that the external threat landscape is intensifying.

Cyber attacks on news organizations - mostly politically motivated

News organizations are a particular target. One study reported that in the 10 months to March 2025, over 97 billion malicious requests had been sent to just 315 news outlets. The cyber security firm behind the report said that it had blocked an average of 325,2 million cyber threats every day in that period – a 241% increase from the previous year.

It further noted a rise in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting investigative outlets operating in regions under government pressure, including Russia and Belarus. Swedish broadcaster SVT may have been subject to one such attack. In June this year, the broadcaster, government websites and other institutions were subject to a DDoS attack on the country’s digital infrastructure. While this appeared to be state-sponsored with a view to causing maximum disruption, an attack in September on a US newspaper publisher and broadcaster, allegedly by Russian hackers, was an attempt to solicit a ransom. Irish broadcaster RTÉ investigated a potential ransomware attack in July following an alert from the country’s national cyber security centre.

“Most attacks appear to be politically motivated rather than financially driven,” says Alain Durand, Senior Director at a security specialist that counts Sky as an investor. “It’s essential for broadcasters to maintain a strong and well-balanced cyber security posture — not only to help systems withstand a certain level of attack, but also to ensure rapid recovery in the rare event that a black screen or disruption cannot be avoided.”

Policing piracy on an industrial scale

Other attacks on broadcasters are typically motivated by profit. In 2023, the final episode of HBO’s fantasy series House of the Dragon was uploaded to pirate websites after the servers of a satellite distribution company were hacked. Earlier this year, two Indian blockbusters, Sikander and Coolie were leaked online in separate incidents. In the case of the former, the damage cost the producers 91 crore (over USD 10 million) in lost box office revenue.

With the cost of films and TV dramas rising – House of the Dragon episodes cost USD 20 million each – any loss of paying customers impacts not just the immediate producer, but undermines the economics of the media and entertainment business. Unlicensed content consumption is estimated to cost the global media sector USD 75 billion a year, rising at an annual growth rate of 11% to hit a staggering USD 125 billion by 2028. “Combating piracy is a formidable challenge, providing a direct threat to profitability for broadcasters and streamers,” say analysts in a report published in May.

IT systems and human error are the soft underbelly

It might seem as if the problem is recent, but criminality has plagued the broadcast and film industries for decades. It is the industrial scale of the challenge which has soared, with the transition over the past decade to using standard IT systems to create programming and the internet to distribute it.

The move to IT equipment and internet-based production and distribution workflows has been driven by the need for greater cost efficiency and flexibility. The dedicated hardware used to edit, store and mix programming has been largely replaced by less expensive software applications running on off-the-shelf computers and, increasingly, on servers housed in data centres.

Robin Boldon, Head of Product at a security solutions provider whose clients include BBC Studios, explains: “I wouldn't necessarily say it was more secure [before internet-based systems], just different, in that [if you were a criminal] you had to know how specific broadcast engineering systems worked. Operations weren't necessarily connected to the public internet and were typically closed platforms, which could only be accessed via proprietary gateways. Physical security was a greater consideration, particularly at the facilities that receive and distribute signals.”

Meanwhile, broadcast content is increasingly delivered to viewers over the internet rather than beamed into homes using satellite, terrestrial transmitters or transported over cable networks. In the US, streaming overtook traditional TV delivery forms this year. “With internet protocol (IP)-based delivery to internet devices, the attack surface for the cyber criminal is far greater, and the tools available to access them are more commonly available,” Boldon adds.

The latest wave of attacks, known as CDN leeching, is when pirates not only steal the content but use the service provider’s own resources to distribute it. Durand explains: “Criminals know how to exploit and distribute encrypted keys to subscribers and they are sending links directly to the content delivery network paid for 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 cost to restream the content.”

Multi-layered defence is recommended

As a result, organizations are being compelled to reassess their cyber resilience strategies. This includes not only strengthening their security posture, but also preparing for potential operational disruptions that could arise from future incidents. Security experts advise media organizations to adopt a multi-layered shield.

“It's not one shot,” says Boldon. “The whole ecosystem needs layering with multiple tools to deal with particular problems. Risk reviews now span a broader scope – incorporating cyber insurance to offset financial exposure, tighter supply chain oversight, enhanced identity protection, ongoing security awareness training and continuous improvements in detection, response and recovery capabilities. A critical part of this effort involves collaborating with key suppliers to improve shared security practices. In today’s interconnected business environment, a single point of failure can have far-reaching consequences.”

Meanwhile, cyber criminal tactics continue to evolve. Advances in AI-powered tools – such as deepfake voice and image technology – are making phishing and impersonation attacks more convincing and harder to detect. “This growing sophistication means human error remains a significant vulnerability,” Boldon says. “While prevention is paramount, organizations must also prepare for the worst. Containment and recovery capabilities are increasingly recognized as essential components of a layered defence strategy. Recovery can take weeks – or even months – disrupting operations and eroding stakeholder trust.”

Hollywood Studios, including Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal, are attempting to standardize their production and distribution processes in the cloud where security will be guaranteed by the principles of zero trust. This concept, which is a common approach to securing IT systems, assumes that the security of the infrastructure is always in a state of breach. The Studios’ solution is to set up permissions to access assets and applications online, based on everyone involved having a unique digital identification.

Yet, substituting decades of ingrained thinking in locking down a physical location to one based on securing data on a network is proving a challenge. “Productions are naturally very risk-averse,” says Richard Berger, CEO at the research lab tasked by the Studios to lead the cloud migration project. “Most security today is an add-on after the workflow has been designed. There’s a perception that security by design will get in the way of the creative process, but that’s not the case.”

Where standards reinforce defence

The international standard for information security management and certification is ISO/IEC 27001. It provides a common international language across all business sectors and applies to all levels of information security management. According to Dr Edward Humphreys, Chair of the working group responsible for the management, development and maintenance of ISO/IEC 27001, “The power of the standard is to build confidence, assurance, resilience and trust that cyber risks are being managed effectively.”

International standards such as ISO/IEC 27001 and IEC 62443, together with conformity assessment, are important tools for a successful and holistic cyber security programme. Such an approach increases the confidence of stakeholders by demonstrating not only the use of security measures based on best practices, but also that an organization has implemented the measures efficiently and effectively.  The industrial cyber security programme of IECEE, the IEC System of Conformity Assessment Schemes for Electrotechnical Equipment and Components, tests and certifies cyber security in the industrial automation sector. IECEE includes a programme that provides certification to standards within the IEC 62443 series.

Looking ahead, we are likely to see increased investment in business continuity frameworks based on standards like ISO 22301, which provides a structured approach to restoring critical functions after a disruption. These frameworks not only enhance operational resilience, but also build confidence among customers, partners and regulators.

The bottom line is clear: the cyber threat landscape is escalating, and organizations that fail to plan and invest accordingly may jeopardize both their operational viability and their ability to serve customers effectively. Cyber resilience is no longer optional – it’s a business imperative.

 

How to avoid Q-Day?

IEC E-Tech

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According to the 2024 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, there are an estimated 600 million cyber attacks every day around the world, and things could be about to get significantly worse. Rapidly developing quantum computing technology is poised to render most current methods of encryption redundant.

At the same time, emerging post-quantum cryptography (PQC) promises a new defence that would lock, in theory, not just critical national assets but all digital systems from quantum hacks. The race is on to build worldwide resilience before what most pundits call Q day – the collapse of digital security.

Cryptography’s role in our digital societies

Business and infrastructure are under constant attack from both cyber criminals and nation-state actors. Multinational car manufacturers, European airports, Japanese weather forecasters and Australian pension funds are among those to have been hacked this year with potentially disastrous financial and, in the case of airports, fatal consequences.

“Cryptography has become the lynchpin of our digital society,” says Robert Oates, associate director at a UK-based cyber security specialist. “It provides three key services: keeping data confidential; guaranteeing [the website] you are connected to is the one you think it is; and preventing messages from being tampered with. The internet would not be the place it is today if you could no longer trust who you were speaking to or you couldn't guarantee security of payment details when we transact online. Cryptography is fundamental to the way our society works.”

Algorithmic systems like RSA, a form of asymmetric encryption, named after its creators Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), employed in various digital signature schemes, are foundational to securing modern digital infrastructure from military communications to medical records, financial information and private emails, yet these are the systems most vulnerable to being broken by quantum computing.

RSA and ECC are based on classical mathematics, where a digit (or bit) is either 0 or 1. Since a bit (or qubit) in quantum computing can be in multiple states (or superpositions) at the same time, in theory, it could crack conventional encryption in a fraction of time. “A sufficiently capable quantum computer would be able to sift through a vast number of potential solutions to these problems very quickly, thereby defeating current encryption,” warned the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) last year.

Crucially, RSA and ECC are also asymmetric systems where one key is public and used to encrypt the data and another key is private and used for decryption. “It was always assumed that it would take millions of years to calculate the private key from the public key,” Oates explains. “The crux of the threat with quantum is that it can calculate the private key in hours. That's a real problem because you put your public key out there, and suddenly anyone can read messages intended for you. Quantum can do it in a few hours, not because it's faster, but because it works in a fundamentally different way to classic computers.” That a cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) capable of cracking conventional cryptography has yet to be built does not undermine the certainty that, at some point, it will be.

There are differences of opinion as to when this might happen but government agencies are taking no chances. The US federal agency NIST suggests such capability could exist within a decade, “threatening the security and privacy of individuals, organizations and entire nations”. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has tasked organizations with having a plan for being quantum safe by 2028, to migrate high priority systems by 2031, and a deadline of 2035 to upgrade all security with resilience to the threat from “future large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers”. The EU has detailed a similar time line.

Julian Van Velzen, Head of the Quantum Lab at a French multinational IT company, says, “RSA could be broken by quantum almost overnight, were a suitable computer to be developed. It's just a matter of time. The risk of a CRQC being ready by 2035 is maybe 50/50 but you need to prepare now.” The scale of the upgrade is the biggest issue. “All cryptography has to be replaced,” Van Velzen says. “It’s in hardware. It's in software. It's in operating systems, databases and VPNs. It's like Y2K [the millennium bug], but, since 2000, the internet has exploded in complexity and therefore exploded in cryptography. The challenge is huge.”

The risk is real today. Encrypted data is believed to be intercepted by criminals with a view to storing it for potential decryption with quantum computing in the future. So called “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks pose a problem for everybody, says Daryl Flack, Partner at one of the IT security companies supporting the UK government on the first phase of national PQC migration. “Any malicious actor who's listening in now could capture all of this traffic. It may be encrypted for now, but once you get a quantum relevant computer, you can effectively reverse engineer the math.”

Post-quantum cryptography

Perhaps surprisingly, the solution to the quantum threat is to rewire every existing cryptographic system with new algorithms based on classical mathematics. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has been worked on by mathematicians for nearly a decade. NIST led the charge by running a competition to find new algorithms resistant to quantum computing, whittling a shortlist of 69 down to three sets, which it published in 2024.

“We know that quantum computers can do very specific computations very well, but there are plenty of things that they are not good at,” says Van Velzen. “PQC is designed in such a way that even quantum compute won't be able to break it. Maybe one day we'll devise a new quantum algorithm that will break PQC, but the design process has been such that it's believed to be resilient against quantum computers.”

One set of PQC algorithms published by NIST is based on numerical lattices, another on hash functions. Oates explains, “We're swapping out the problems at the heart of cryptography with algorithms that we have confidence are difficult to break for both quantum and classical computers. We are fairly confident – because you can't really prove this – that quantum computers will struggle to solve these [lattice and hash-based] problems.”

Yet, one of the shortlisted NIST algorithms was broken at a fairly late stage in the process, prompting calls to build in cryptographic agility. “We may need to think about designing systems where cryptography is easier to switch out of so we don’t go through this pain again,” Oates advises. “That raises a whole set of other challenges because we've seen that, in the past, when people have tried to do that, they've accidentally made things vulnerable. Hackers have gone in and essentially forced them into using a weak cryptography algorithm.” He adds, “The general consensus is that we've enjoyed a long period of stability with RSA and elliptic curves, where they were pretty much untouchable, but now we might enter a period where every few years we have to try something else.”

Quantum key distribution shows potential

A further line of defence could come with the development of quantum key distribution (QKD). This method of encryption relies solely on quantum technologies and on the development of suitably powerful and affordable quantum computers.

QKD encodes messages using the properties of light particles. As outlined by the IEC, the only way for hackers to unlock the key is to measure the particles, but the very act of measuring changes the behaviour of the particles, causing errors that trigger security alerts.

“QKD is very good at ensuring that you have encrypted data between two points, but it's not very good at solving the problem of being confident that who you're talking to is the person you're talking to,” explains Oats. “Government agencies believe QKD is not ready for mainstream use, but it is being viewed as another potential layer of security. For example, you might end up with a post-quantum crypto certificate that proves your identity and you communicate using QKD exchange keys.”

“But there's a big economic barrier to QKD. You would need dedicated quantum infrastructure although advances are being made in using fibre optics or even over-the-air QKD. The big barrier is distance. There are serious limits on how long a QKD connection can be without it degenerating.”

Van Velzen agrees with this assessment, “It's our view that within the timeline laid down, QKD is not a solution. It may provide additional security and benefits further down the road, but in the next five to ten years, it's not going to make a significant contribution to getting us quantum safe. The complete solution relies on PQC.”

Standards indispensable to underpin security

The global market for quantum computing is expected to hit USD 50 billion by the end of the decade, potentially rising to USD 1,3 trillion by 2035. That huge leap is predicated on breakthroughs in the technology which will see quantum computing systems scale up. “The main areas of risk are for organizations which opted to manage their own cryptography,” says Flack. “If you're buying a service off a SaaS [software-as-a-service] provider or a big technology provider, then a lot of the necessary upgrades will happen in the background. But if you've got your own crypto which runs on your own hardware security modules, then all of that tech is going to need to be upgraded, and how you communicate with devices will need to change. That’s where setting new technical standards for devices and protocols is all important.”

The IEC and ISO have already published a couple of standards, ISO/IEC 23837-1 and ISO/IEC 23837-2, related to the security of QKD systems. ISO/IEC 23837-1 specifies a general framework for the security evaluation of QKD modules. It includes a baseline set of common security functional requirements for both the conventional network components and the quantum optical components of QKD systems The international standard also outlines the entire implementation of QKD protocols and analyzes potential security problems that QKD modules might face in their operational environment.

ISO/IEC 23837-2 focuses on the test and evaluation methods for the security evaluation of QKD systems. It describes the evaluation activities necessary to test the security functional requirements of QKD protocols, quantum optical components and conventional network components. These standards are the work of the joint IEC and ISO technical committee JTC 1/SC 27. It is responsible for developing international management and technical standards for information security and privacy protection and related topics. 

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) recently launched a new Technical Committee on Quantum Technologies to develop specifications that address the implications of quantum on global communications networks. A key area of activity is “establishing methodologies to assess hardware vulnerabilities and side-channel attack risks”.

The IEC has been tracking the power of quantum cryptography for years, noting that if the technology falls into the wrong hands, it “could break encryption and wreak havoc on critical infrastructures”. That’s why the joint IEC and ISO technical committee for quantum technologies, ISO/IEC JTC 3, was formed. According to international expert Michael Egan, who is a member of JTC 3, the task force will help prepare for a quantum future by “harnessing the collaborative power that exists in international standards to enable trade and technology adoption”.

JTC 3 has established formal liaisons with relevant regional and international organizations, including the European Commission, the IEEE and ITU-T. Working groups have been set up to examine quantum’s impact on sensors and the supply chain and to benchmark quantum computers. The foundational standard, ISO/IEC 4879, defines the terms and vocabulary commonly used in quantum computing with work ongoing in several other standards to support the technology and expertise required to build quantum systems.

 

 

Extreme athleticism meets engineering excellence

interview and words for RED Digital Cinema

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Earlier this year, Red Bull athlete Sean MacCormac became the first person to surf the cables of San Francisco’s world-famous Bay Bridge—having skydived onto them from 5,000 feet. For this unprecedented “skysurfing” feat, MacCormac trained intensively, spent months planning, and oversaw the creation of a custom-designed, high-tech skyboard developed in collaboration with Prada’s technical sportswear collection Linea Rossa and the Luna Rossa team.

A fictional “behind-the-scenes” video captures part of this meticulous preparation - a stunning skydive over the Italian island of Sardinia.

Directed by Lorenzo Canci and filmed by local cinematographer Pietro Medda, the three-minute promo was remarkably shot in just two days using three RED KOMODOs.

“KOMODO is like shooting with the simplicity of an iPhone but the quality of a professional cine camera,” Medda says. “I tried to capture this like an observer who follows the process as close as possible without interfering with the action.”

The film blends fashion with sports and tells a story of MacCormac’s test jump from take-off to landing using the new carbon fiber board.

The first day of shooting was the skydive for which Medda flew in a couple of flights to capture B-Roll and then operated A-cam from the ground during the stunt itself.

“For the B-roll on flights we did before the stunt I needed a heavy handheld rig to give me a good heavy feel, without micro-shaking while the plane was vibrating a lot. I then used this rig as A-camera from the ground using a long lens.”

Tracking MacCormac’s freefall was skydive filming specialist Craig O'Brien who had a KOMODO attached to his helmet. A third KOMODO was operated on a tripod from the ground to capture the parachute landing by an AC.

The second day was in more controlled conditions on the ground and featured technician Mauro Zamichele crafting the special board. “We were a really small crew, and we had limited time to capture everything that Lorenzo wanted in order to tell the story,” Medda explains. “At the same time I wanted to give him all the freedom of a larger shoot and of course to keep all of the quality. For these reasons KOMODO was the perfect choice. With a bigger system it would never be possible for us to do something like this.”

The nearest main camera kit hire companies are in Milan and Rome, however, Medda is one of the few people (let alone cinematographers) on the island to own a KOMODO.

“I had fallen in love with previous generations of RED,” Medda says. “I knew we wanted something small and easy to handle, but with a lot of options. Only when I decided to shoot with KOMODO did we discover that Craig also owns one. That just sealed the deal.”

Zooms were the logical choice for the docu-style shoot with Medda selecting Angenieux EZ-2 15-40 and EZ-1 30-90 PL Mount with built in NDs. O’Brien’s helmet-mounted KOMODO carried a Canon RF zoom.

Versions from the same primary footage needed to be published in 16x9 for YouTube and also 9x16 for social media.

“Lorenzo and I also aesthetically like a shot that is less symmetrical, a little unbalanced, where maybe there is more air around the subject than usual. Adopting a more open and free approach to framing allowed us not only to be creative without being forced into standard composition but also to play with our needs (vertical and horizontal delivery). Blending both necessity and desire worked well for us.”

Since Medda shot open gate RAW the 6K recording allowed as much information as possible for cropping a vertical version, although delivery was only required at 1080p.

“The RED LQ compression was a smart choice for this. I also wanted to shoot LQ because we were doing post-production remotely, sharing sets of three camera files online. It worked out extremely well.”

He monitored rec.709 with high contrast through a RED look LUT with false colors “because I wanted to see less than the camera was seeing. I find it easier while shooting with natural light at a faster pace. For example, when we were shooting in the airplane we had a limited amount of fuel and time. It was a real run and gun shoot and having a heavier LUT allowed myself and Lorenzo to see very easily where and when our light quality and position was working, even with bright sun flashing on our monitors. That’s because we were turning a lot while in flight, so the sunlight was constantly changing from our perspective. Giving the pilot fast directions was crucial.”

He mostly lit the interiors on the ground with practical lights to keep the scene moody and contrast ratios dramatic. “I took care not to clip useful information especially in the shadows so we could eventually push them up and down in post if needed,” he says.

“To give as much time as I could to the acting and to the overall production, I imagined some windows and cuttings that I then drew onto our color preview. Our colorist Leonardo Masoero (a freelance artist who is part of the Not Bad Collective) could follow them as a reference for our final grade.”

Medda says he found KOMODO’s integrated exposure comp and color tools are “a safe zone” to solve small problems like ND shifts or to play around with the look without having to prepare dozens of LUTs beforehand.

“One of the crucial features for me in this shoot, besides design, color science and reliability, was the global shutter. That allowed us to follow the whole stunt from the ground without wobbling and so giving some more headroom to stabilize.

“I know my KOMODO really well. It’s become second nature to me, and I never feel limited by form factor. To give my director some more freedom with a small crew I need an easy and versatile modular camera system. Using a bigger camera system for this job would have required more budget, a bigger camera crew and/or more technical time.

Thank you to Pietro Medda for sharing behind the scenes.

 

Touch the future: Immersive video will soon make its presence felt

IBC

As XR devices become more accessible and 6G wireless systems emerge, we’ll move from simply watching video to stepping inside it.

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Imagine a world that fuses the digital, physical, and human to create revolutionary immersive experiences. Ericsson calls it The Internet of Senses. Nokia describes “a new world of sixth-sense applications”, and European tech body ETSI talks of the ubiquitous communications network acting as a ‘radar’ to sense and comprehend the physical world. 

The dawn of 6G

Video codec and mobile standards developer InterDigital thinks that the world is on the verge of stepping inside video. It forecasts that, with the arrival of 6G, we will experience the coming together of machines, ambient data, intelligent knowledge systems, and new computation capabilities. 

According to Nokia: “One striking aspect of that will be the blending of the physical and human world, thanks to the widespread proliferation of sensors and AI/ML combined with digital twin models and real-time synchronous updates.”

6G is expected to launch commercially by 2030, with an initial release planned for 2028. Included in the 2028 release is Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), a technology that is considered to have huge potential. ISAC allows the network to become a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects. It would collect data on the range, velocity, position, orientation, size, shape, image, and materials of objects and devices, essentially expanding the functionality beyond just communication. 

There are 32 potential use cases for ISAC listed in the technical report from the mobile specification group 3GPP. Among them is the ability to build digital representations of the physical world, a so-called digital twin. For example, a digital twin could incorporate a player’s physical environment into an extended reality game. 

“ISAC will enable motion detection and tracking of people and objects,” says Valérie Allié, Senior Director for Media Services at InterDigital. “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.” Analysts Futuresource predict that 6G deployment will coincide with the maturity of XR hardware and software ecosystems, which is expected to take place between 2028 and 2032. Ericsson also expects that by 2030, most of us will be using XR devices for all our communication, similar to today’s smartphone.

“As we get closer to 2030 and the release of the first 6G standards, XR entertainment is going to become an expectation. We will see everything from interactive digital sports venues to real-time augmented city guides and digital twins,” says Lionel Oisel, Head of InterDigital’s Video Lab, which is based in Rennes, France. “But the success of these experiences will hinge entirely on the quality of experience – where ultra-low latency, responsive interactivity, and consistent media synchronisation are all essential to unlocking XR’s full potential.” 

Universal haptics 

The research lab also believes that haptics will play a bigger part in how we virtually experience sports, films, and TV. In contrast to visual or auditory interfaces, haptic technology is said to enhance realism by stimulating the sensation of touching, grasping, or manipulating virtual objects – making digital landscapes feel more tangible. 

In January 2025, the first MPEG-I Haptics Coding standard was published, paving the way for haptics to be encoded, streamed, and rendered to mobile displays, headphones, and XR headsets.

With a standardised format, haptics can now be streamed alongside audio and video in the same bitstream. It can be authored once and played anywhere across networks, devices, and platforms. In short, according to developer SenseGlove: “haptics is finally ready for prime time.” 

The idea is to be able to encode the haptic signal just once and still enable playback on any device, rather than continue having to create a different process for each unique platform from Microsoft, Sony, Apple, or cinema’s D-Box system. 

There is a clear use case in gaming. For example, when you play Battlefield 6, you will experience over 170 curated effects designed specifically for the game, provided you have the right haptics gear, like a seat pad. As developer Razer Sensa HD Haptics describes it: “You’re no longer just reacting to the fight on the screen, your body becomes part of it.” 

“You've seen haptics in gaming before, but wouldn't it be cool if somebody could make a movie with haptics that you experience through your TV or on your chair?” posited Liren Chen, CEO of InterDigital.  

Philippe Guillotel, Senior Director at InterDigital and a leader of the group in MPEG that is standardising representations of haptic data, says he is trying to convince streamers like Netflix that physical feedback will bring a new experience and added value to their content. 

“Since everything is offline [on-demand], it would be easy to create content with haptics. The issue 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. We need devices to be inexpensive to be adopted by the market.” 

“There is a creative aspect to haptics and we are engineers,” he says. “So, we need artists. We need to educate people in creative schools that haptics is a new modality. [Creatives] can learn how to do it, and they have to understand how people perceive it. Then, we will have a much better content experience.”  

Earlier this year, Apple released a trailer for F1: The Movie, which synced action on-screen with the iPhone’s Taptic Engine: “making you feel the roar of Formula 1 engines.” Subtle moments, like a seatbelt snapping or a ping pong ball bouncing, trigger delicate taps, while high-speed crashes jolt your hands.   

New video codec underway 

InterDigital is also competing for its technologies to be included in a new video codec, which is currently being developed by ISO/ITU as a successor to the 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.   

There is currently a call for proposals out to the industry. These will be evaluated in January 2027. Following this, there will be a standardisation stage and a final standard release scheduled for 2029. 

Already in the testing stage, InterDigital claims to have demonstrated performance gains averaging 25% over VVC with its technologies. Some tests show gains of double that.  

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 Edouard Francois, Senior Director 2D Codecs Lead at InterDigital. “In particular, we are exploring how AI can be used in synergy with traditional video compression methodologies.” 

Other groups likely to respond include Nokia, Ericsson, Fraunhofer HHI, and MediaTek. Oisel explains: “This standardisation period will determine which tools are adopted (therefore licensable). To do that, you have to prove that it delivers huge gains 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.”  

 

Behind the scenes: Frankenstein

IBC

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Cinematographer Dan Laustsen tells IBC365 why he and Guillermo del Toro turned the classic nightmare, Frankenstein, into a love story of ice and warmth between father and son.

Having spent decades contemplating his vision, Guillermo del Toro had a fully conceived approach to his magisterial screen version of Frankenstein, which would test the capabilities of every single aspect of film craft. There would be giant sets, huge props, and a complex wardrobe.

Set against the backdrop of the Crimean War, but otherwise largely faithful to Mary Shelley’s gothic fable, this is the tale of scientist Victor Frankenstein (played by Actor Oscar Isaac) who reanimates a new creature (played by Actor Jacob Elordi) from the body parts of dead soldiers – only to realise that his control has limits.

Creature design 

In the film, Frankenstein selects mutilated bodies for his experiment and puts the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. The makeup needed to reflect that, but also have a certain beauty to it.

Creature Makeup Designer and Prosthetics Master Mike Hill previously helped transform Actor Doug Jones into the Amphibian Man in 2017’s The Shape of Water, and conjured the carnival sideshow performers in 2021’s Nightmare Alley. 

“We agreed that we didn’t want all these garish wounds and stitching,” Hill says. “Victor Frankenstein is not a butcher. He’s trying to make the perfect man, so he wouldn’t make this thing look like a car accident. This was a sympathetic being. I didn’t want to make [the creature] too good-looking because at the end of the day, he is a revived corpse, but it was very smart of Guillermo to say that these body parts came from soldiers, all moderately healthy and strong young men.”

Hill’s design was convincing enough that DoP Dan Laustsen could shoot Elordi’s monster as he would any other character. “The creature feels like a normal person,” Lausten says. “It was a character and didn’t require any special treatment.”  

The new creature takes the form of a soldier resurrected from a mass grave who needs to feel like a baby, and then like a philosopher, and then like a man.

Crafting a classic

“I wanted it to feel like an old movie that was made in the heyday of Hollywood,” the director explains in a ‘making of’ featurette. “Luscious and beautiful and operatic.”

He shared this vision with Laustsen, working with del Toro on their fifth film together after winning Academy Award-nominations for The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley.

“We talked about making a classic movie, but it also had to look modern. To do so, we were shooting wide angle with the camera moving a lot, and having big vistas, strong close-ups, single source lighting, and a very strong colour palette,” the Danish DoP explains to IBC365.

Unpicking those key decisions, Laustsen says his first instinct was to shoot with a large-format (LF) Alexa 65 camera to produce an image close to the classic 70mm print.

“We shot Nightmare Alley half with Alexa 65 and half with Alexa LF, but I felt Frankenstein needed to be shot with Alexa 65 all the way,” he says. “I had to check with my Steadicam Operator James Frater if that was possible because the Alexa 65 camera is a monster. It's a really heavy camera. I didn't want to shoot part of the picture with the Alexa Mini LF, but to shoot 65 throughout.”

Frater was okay with the choice, so Laustsen proceeded to deploy LF Leitz Thalia lenses, which were more wide-angle than on his previous del Toro productions.

“I think one of the reasons it looks so classical is that we shot most of the movie on the 24mm, the widest lens Leitz makes for the Thalia range. Again, using classic film language, we often start on a big wide shot, so we see more or less everything in the set and end on a big close-up of one of the actors.”

To further this classic feel, diffusion filters were inserted inside the camera to create a specific type of romantic image. “The Leica lenses are really nice because they're sharp from edge to edge. If we want to have a flare, we can produce one; there are no surprises. The flip side is that the image is very sharp. That's okay for the sets, but it's not good for the skin tones. So, we shot with a Black Pro-mist 1/ 4 and 1/8 filter inside the camera. We can have deep blacks but still a kind of flare in the highlights. It’s organic and beautiful.”

A language of colour

Light and colour are always vital elements in a del Toro film. Here, del Toro conceived of Frankenstein’s childhood in black and white and red. His mother and his home are red, and since the character loses both as a child, the colour haunts him. For the rest of the movie, he’s the only character who wears red – red gloves, red scarf.

Before anybody joins him on a project, Guillermo’s already got strong ideas about sets, the costume and the colour palette for different scenes,” Laustsen says. “That's a really good idea because it acts as a guide for every head of department [HoD]. We’re starting from the same position. Everything is planned together and blended together. There’s a very close relationship between HoDs and it’s based on this colour palette.”

For scenes depicting Victor with his creature, Laustsen and del Toro brought together “two sides of the colour wheel”, moving from steel-blue cyan to deep, warm amber tones offset with heavy layers of shadow.

“We are playing a lot with the contrast between amber and the steel blue. When the creature and Frankenstein are together, the creature is lit with steel blue and his father is lit by tungsten. It’s totally unrealistic, but it evokes a feeling of coldness contrasted with warmth. This horror story is about love.” 

Light up the room

“We are not afraid of the darkness. We are not afraid of single-source lighting. When you're shooting locations like dining rooms, we need to have a lot of negative fill inside the room.”

To illuminate the lavish sets created by Production Designer Tamara Deverell, Laustsen placed powerful 24kw tungsten lamps outside. Laustsen adds: “To keep the same mood and colour palette consistent across all those sets, you have to be able to control the light from outside. By lighting from behind the windows, we can control the sunlight through the atmosphere and keep the blacks pretty deep.”

This decision allowed the actors to move around with ease and created pathways for the sizable camera on dollies, cranes, and Steadicam. Additionally, coloured gels in front of the lights created the desired hue.

“We didn’t make a LUT [look-up table]. My mindset was ‘I'm shooting it as if it were shot on film, so if I want to change the colour, I'm going to change that on the lights. I'm not changing the colour in the camera.’ I shot more or less the whole movie at 4200 Kelvin, a colour temperature at which the candles look good and the daylight combines well with the steel blue.”

Set the stage

Frankenstein’s family home, depicted in the first half of the movie, is a composite of stately residences shot on location at: Gosford House in East Lothian; Burghley House in Lincolnshire; Dunecht House in Aberdeenshire; and Wilton House in Wiltshire.

“We used a lot of atmospheres like mist, steam, and smoke, and the windows acted as a gobo to control the shape of the emitted light and its shadow. This adds a dimensionality to the image that I hope will feel particularly immersive.”

The elaborate staircase at Wilton serves as a focal point for the fictional Frankenstein estate and links del Toro’s production to one of legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s most revered projects, Barry Lyndon. That period production famously shot scenes on film lit by real fires and candlelight.

“Guillermo and I talked about going with candlelight, and we did a lot of tests there. Every cinematographer in the world wants to shoot something like Barry Lyndon, but we wanted to have a bit more control over the light. When you have candles everywhere, you cannot control the contrast, so we decided to use fewer practicals in favour of single-source lighting. I shot the whole movie at the same T-stop [exposure, in this case, a T-4] inside and out.”

Playing with fire

The team did, however, use real fire torches as the key light for night scenes set on the exploration vessel ‘Horisont’, which is icebound in the Arctic. Instead of creating the ship in VFX, del Toro insisted on a scale build at outdoor stages in Toronto and mounted on a mechanical gimbal so it would look as if it were being rocked physically by the creature. 

“We had big discussions about using flaming torches because, of course, they can be very dangerous, and we’d need to use LED torches, but Guillermo and I were keen to shoot as authentically as possible. When you have a real torch, the light will constantly flicker. It looks organic because it is, and the effect is much more dramatic.” 

The gigantic conflagration that destroys Frankenstein’s laboratory was also achieved in-camera by blending photography of the set in Toronto, Canada, with a miniature 20:1 scale set shot in London on a RED camera.   

“The key was to shoot high speed between 72 and 125 frames, which is why we shot that scene with a RED camera. It has a large sensor, so I can still use the same Thalia lenses we shot the whole movie on.” 

A father-son interpretation

Frankenstein has endured as a tale partly because it allows for different readings. The story could demonise the creature as the embodiment of everything that is inhuman, or condemn Frankenstein as the true monster for daring to be a god. Del Toro’s version reveals the humanity in both characters through their father-son relationship.

“The first time Victor sees the Creator for real, when he opens the blinds and lets sunshine come in, we shoot it a little bit like a love story. There's warm light for the first time that the father and son are together.” 

Similar warm light is used in an early scene when we see Frankenstein senior trying to teach his young son about science. 

“One of the scenes I like very much is the first time the creature sits with his father in the lab, and his father is tenderly shaving him. It’s a simple scene with the sunrise reflecting in a broken mirror. You feel the chemistry between the two actors, and you can also see that Daddy doesn't understand anything about kids.” 

This arrangement is mirrored in the film’s final scene when the pair reconcile, and sunrise streams in through the window. 

 

Comcast moves for ITV to create a UK-focused streaming giant

Streaming Media

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UK commercial broadcaster ITV has confirmed it's in early stage talks about a possible sale of its broadcasting business to Comcast which already owns pay-TV broadcaster Sky in the UK

The division includes ITV’s terrestrial TV channels and its streaming platform ITVX. The deal would value the business at £1.6 billion (U$2.1bn).

Sky News – itself part of any potential merger with ITV’s News operations - said “the approach centres on the potential creation of a UK-focused streaming giant.”

Sir Peter Bazalgette, former chair of ITV until September 2022 and a shareholder, told BBC Radio 4, “There's going to be an inevitable consolidation of domestic broadcasters all across Europe. There are four or five domestic broadcasts across Europe who can't all have a long-term future against the streaming giants. There is going to be a consolidation, and ITV are going to lead it in the UK.”

ITV’s largest single shareholder, Liberty Global, which jointly owns Virgin Media O2 with Spanish telecoms operator Telefónica, halved its 10 per cent stake in ITV last month.

The proposed deal does not include ITV Studios, the content arm behind drama such as Mr Bates and the Post Office and reality format Love Island.

Bazalgette said ITV’s share price doesn't reflect the value of ITV Studios and “probably discounts all of their commercial revenue from their channels and ITVX. This is one way to release some value.”

ITV and Sky along with Channel 4 are planning to pool resources into a new advertising marketplace in collaboration with Comcast in 2026. This will be based on Universal Ads, Comcast’s advertising platform, which has been “designed to make television as easy to buy as social media” and includes video generation from Streamr.AI at its core.

Alongside the AI video generator, the marketplace will also reportedly allow easy access to on-demand and streaming inventory from the three sales houses through a single campaign powered by Comcast’s FreeWheels technology.

ITV’s share price is down around 75 per cent what it was a decade ago. In other words, quality of performance hasn’t translated to commercial value. In a supremely competitive field, the world is moving away from linear TV which is where ITV still generates a lot of revenue.

“Free-to-air channels across the world are not seen as having a great amount of value,” said Bazalgette. “In fact, they throw off a massive amount of cash and still sell a lot of advertising, so they're undervalued by the marketplace and this is one way of trying to correct that.”

If ITV were to join with Sky in the UK they would hold about 70% of the TV ad marketplace, a near monopoly which would not pass normally pass the regulator. However, given the parlous stage of public service broadcast and the government’s desire to keep it running, Comcast may sense the sentiment has changed.

Bazelgette called UK competition rules “completely out of date” adding that the real market is video advertising where Google and Meta are prime competitors. Google and Meta have nine times the combined advertising revenue of Sky and ITV, so the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) needs to redefine what the advertising market is. Once they've done that I think they’ll probably say that this deal was fine.”

Media analyst Ian Whittaker, also speaking to BBC Radio, said the move was “essentially a massive dare to the UK government.”

He said, “Comcast’s pitch that the UK needs to be seen to be open to business and that a merger is the only long-term survival option given the changing structural environment.”

ITV shares rose as much as 19 per cent in morning trading on the news.

The other main UK commercial broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 (styled as 5) face similar pressures to consolidate. Five is owned by Paramount Skydance which under new ownership has begun cost-cutting in the US. Channel Four’s future has been a topic of debate for some time with repeat speculation of a merger between its digital services and BBC iPlayer.

“Channel 4’s future over 10-15 years is very uncertain, and at the very least it is going to need to find ways of collaborating with other broadcasters like sharing streaming services, or selling advertising together because its long term future is not healthy. But it is a very valuable brand so we've got to have a great deal more flexibility in the television market to preserve the value of the domestic broadcasters and the public good of the programs they make.”

He argued the UK media industry should have had a strategy for the survival of public service broadcasters in place a decade ago. “Instead, we're very late to it. [We] should credit ITV with probably triggering that reappraisal. In a way the market and the companies have done what governments haven't done.”

On Thursday, ITV warned the uncertainty surrounding the UK government’s financial plans, to be announced in a budget on 21 November, were hurting ad revenue. As a result it would “temporarily” cut £35m from its budgets.

The company also said it expected advertising revenues to fall by 9% in the key fourth-quarter advertising period in the run-up to Christmas.

In June, Comcast sold pay-TV group Sky Deutschland in Germany to RTL for an initial price  of EUR150 million ($176m) with the final sum determined by RTL’s share price. The US company paid Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. U$40 billion in 2018 for the Sky operations in Italy, Germany and the UK.

ITV launched ITVX three years ago. By end of 2024 it had recorded 6 billion streams and claimed to have “outpaced all other major streaming platforms in terms of growth in viewer hours - with a 35% growth in viewer hours, ahead of iPlayer, Netflix, Disney+, Channel 4 and Amazon Prime.

Year end 2025 figures are due in a month.