tvbe july 2014 digital edition

www.tvbeurope.com

July 2014Europe’s Television Technology Business Magazine

4K Beyond HD Feature

Graphics ForumIT Broadcast

Workfl ow Preview

Mergers and Acquisitions in a Recovering Europe

EditorialTVBEurope 3July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

Contents4 Content EverywhereNews round upMelanie Dayasena-Lowe provides a round up of the latest news from the Content Everywhere world. 4

6 Register John Wilson Remembering John Wilson, the IBC Chairman, who passed away in June. We take a look back at his career. 6

12 – 21 WorkflowAvid Roundtable part twoNeal Romanek presents the final instalment of our report from BT Tower, where TVBEurope and Avid hosted the latest roundtable on collaborative workflows. 14

23 – 33 4K: Beyond HDBeyond HD Masters reportWe look back on the main takeaway themes and discussion points from the 2014 Beyond HD Masters conference at London’s BAFTA. IABM Chairman, John Ive, provides the foreword. 29

34 – 42 Feature Mergers and acquisitions in a recovering Europe Rachael Cairns of Goodbody Stockbrokers, assesses the landscape for broadcast entities amidst a recovering European market, while we look at some of the protagonists driving the recent M&A activity. 34

44 – 47 Graphics Forum Graphically illustrated Philip Stevens brings together a host of experts to discuss the varying challenges facing graphic system providers in this month’s forum. 44

48 – 50 Data CentreThe drivers of growth PwC’s Adam Edelshain details the findings from PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook that suggests advertising and electronic home video will drive growth in the EMEA Television market over the next five years. 48

ENCOURAGING INNOVATION is one thing, harnessing it is quite another (monetisation a whole different practice). We are not an industry shy of great minds — creators, thinkers, visionaries — and neither are we lacking of those who bring these visions to life — the builders, engineers and grafters. Like many industries, there exists a rich mix of heritage and modernity; the old hand of experience mixing with fresh-faced dynamism. The current challenge is to ensure that neither end of that spectrum becomes too detached from the other — that the future doesn’t expand too far away from the industry’s core and leave in its wake a hollow middle ground bereft of shared knowledge.

This is pertinent for the composition of the broadcast sector of the moment, with talk of digital transformation and hyper-connected-this-and-that. But it is also pertinent where it concerns innovation, and whether it is carried out for the sake of itself, and at the expense of the growth it was born to deliver.

Barriers to adoption These were some of the more prominent questions to busy my thoughts during the Beyond HD Masters conference in June, as discussion hovered around 4K, frame rate, aspect ratio, and on to 8K, 16K and wherever next

the UHD movement will lead us. But concerns prevail as to the effective application of technical advance if that advance is too far ahead of the consumer’s limits of affordability. Indeed, as Jack Wetherill’s Beyond HD Masters presentation informed us — you can see a selection of data from that presentation in this issue’s Data Centre on page 50 — shipments of TV sets in Western Europe have been on a uniformal decline since reaching a high of 51 million in 2010. Allied to that is the seeming indifference in consumer attitudes towards UHD sets — Futuresource’s Living with Digital consumer research finding that 42 per cent would be interested in buying a 4K set, with the remaining 58 per cent neither here nor there on the matter.

But, as discussion at Beyond HD Masters alluded to, the indifference of the ‘58 per cent’, if you will, isn’t just about cost. One of the barriers to widespread adoption at present is a lack of available and proposed content — there simply isn’t enough content for consumers to justify upgrading their TV equipment for an occasional experience. Once the supply sufficiently influences the demand, and we can confidently assume that it will, then we will start to see traction in the UHD movement, and that wonderfully rich culture of innovation can be allowed to thrive more effectively.

The delivery of experiences, not servicesOne quote that struck a chord this month arrived in a dispatch from PricewaterhouseCoopers, whose entertainment and media lead partner, Phil Stokes, expressed his views on how personal preference could, and perhaps should, drive a new breed of personalised content, consumable across all devices.

“Forget audience fragmentation. From a consumer’s angle, it’s about ubiquity — a consistent feel across multiple devices,” he said. “Building this relationship offers a global opportunity as the economy moves from the delivery of products and services to the delivery of outcomes and experiences.”

It is enticing language: the delivery of outcomes and experiences. If the broadcast sector is to appropriately keep pace with the digital evolution, then perhaps Stokes’ sentiments are correct. TV broadcast has always had engagement at its heart, and despite the furore around the amount and quality of pixels on ever expanding screens, content remains ‘king’. But as this content becomes ever more personalised to the consumer, perhaps we should be talking more of the delivery of experiences; the encapsulation of several component parts that engage the viewer to their own specifications, on their own terms.

You can read more from June’s Beyond HD Masters conference in our review on page 29, with a foreword from the IABM’s John Ive.

I sincerely hope you enjoy this issue of TVBEurope.

James McKeownExecutive Editor

Power to the pixel?

“We are not an industry shy of great minds — creators, thinkers, visionaries — and neither are we lacking those who bring these visions to life”

The quality, rather than abundance of pixels on a screen forms the blueprint of the Ultra-HD movement, but content will always be king. Recollections, both, from our Beyond HD Masters conference in June, but should we be moving towards a more experiential future based on user preference?

James McKeown

WE START our round up with BBC executive board member, Sir Howard Stringer, who has highlighted the need for the broadcaster to adopt a content-fi rst strategy for mobile and to appeal to social audiences. Stringer detailed his action points in the 2022: Towards 500 million report looking at how the BBC can expand its global audience reach, and states: “If the target weekly reach of 500 million is to be met, digital is going to be very important and a step change needs to be made to make the most of it.”

Stringer explained, “The combination of the growth in mobile broadband and the growth in the young, aspiring global middle class dictates that the BBC must focus on serving the needs of that audience in whichever market it is operating in.”

Stringer’s report states that by 2022, the BBC should be mobile-fi rst in every market outside the UK.

The report highlights that in the BBC’s target markets, there should also be investment in social newsgathering. BBC Turkish has led the way in this regard, and in 2013 had an average of 22 per cent of direct traffi c from social media as opposed to four per cent for bbc.com/news.

Stringer also urged the BBC to look for more partners for language service TV bulletins, a multi-genre channel in Africa and a new language service in Ethiopia.

In response to the report, Liliane Landor, acting director of BBC World Service Group, commented: “We welcome Sir Howard Stringer’s report; it is stimulating and ambitious, and asks refreshing, sometimes provocative, questions of the BBC.

“We will continue to harness social media as well as focus on digital-fi rst and mobile-fi rst

markets, and adapt our journalism accordingly. And we will continue to explore editorial partnerships as well as top-up commercial opportunities, as we have been tasked to do by the Trust.”

Twitter and Facebook face increasing social TV competition A new report from Futurescape suggests that Twitter and Facebook are having to confront the increasing competition for social TV advertising revenue and viewer engagement from rival social media and mobile messaging companies.

The Social TV (seventh edition) report reveals how social media rivals, such as news service BuzzFeed and Yahoo!’s multimedia blogging platform Tumblr, have set their sights on social TV promotion and ad revenue.

Broadcasters such as the BBC are working with leading mobile messaging apps, such as WeChat and Facebook’s WhatsApp, for viewer engagement. They are using the apps to distribute content, engage users and invite viewer contributions: comments, photos and video clips.

The messaging apps are experiencing fast growth and accumulating huge international user bases, making them potential venues for mass viewer engagement. WhatsApp has half a billion monthly active users with WeChat recording 396 million, compared with Twitter’s 255 million.

Producers are also turning to a wide range of social networks for interacting with fans, not just Twitter and Facebook. The Voice USA runs its social television engagement across multiple social networks and mobile apps, including Google+, Keek, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr and YouTube, plus Facebook’s Instagram and Twitter’s Vine.

The FIFA World Cup is set to be the major social TV event of the year; Twitter, Facebook, WeChat and Sony have all launched rival World Cup social TV services.

Twitter’s Amplify, which integrates video into tweets, is ideally suited for sports highlights. Twitter has deals with major broadcasters, such as ITV in the UK.

Meanwhile, Facebook is offering its video advertising product to broadcasters to show their video clips via the social network.

TV Everywhere promotes rise in overall TV viewingFinally, TV Everywhere is here, there, but not quite everywhere, according to a new report from Channel 5’s acquirers, Viacom. The TV Here, There (Not Quite) Everywhere report, explores consumers’ experiences around TV Everywhere (TVE) apps and sites, and reveals an increase in overall TV viewing among TV Everywhere users, as well as greater customer loyalty towards pay TV providers that offer TV Everywhere services.

Viacom defi ned the TV Everywhere experience as watching full-length TV programmes on sites and apps by ‘authenticating’, or using pay TV log-in information.

“While still nascent in terms of awareness and usage, TV Everywhere presents a huge opportunity for brands to grow and strengthen their relationships with fans,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president and

chief research offi cer, Viacom Media Networks.

The report found that TV Everywhere is supplemental to the TV viewing experience. Since they began using TV Everywhere apps and sites, 64 per cent report watching more TV overall. This fi nding is even stronger among Millennials, with 72 per cent watching more TV.

For those using TV Everywhere, the television is still the go-to source for TV shows and watching live. After live TV, TVE apps and sites are a strong alternative, rivalling VoD, DVR and other sites that don’t require authentication with a pay TV provider, such as subscription streaming services or other free sites.

Another major driver of TVE use is its fl exibility, which allows viewers to watch shows when, where and how they want.

Nearly one-third of users use TVE because they weren’t able to watch the show live. 28 per cent use TVE because they are away from home, 22 per cent because all TVs were in use, and the same percentage for the ability to move around the house.

TVE users also consider themselves early adopters, with one-fi fth reporting that they started using these services because they like to be the fi rst to try new things.

They are also much more likely to own and access TV shows on a range of different devices, including tablets, set-top-boxes and smart TVs.

www.tvbeurope.com July 20144 TVBEurope

Content EverywhereEDITORIALExecutive Editor James [email protected]

Acting Editor Neal [email protected]

Editor, Special Projects Melanie [email protected]

Staff WriterHolly [email protected]

Intent Media London, 1st Floor, Suncourt House, 18-26 Essex Road, London N1 8LN, England +44 207 354 6002

Contributors Mike Clark, David Davies, Chris Forrester, David Fox, Mark Hill, Dick Hobbs, John Ive, George Jarrett, Heather McLean, Adrian Pennington, Philip Stevens, Reinhard E Wagner

Digital Content Manager Tim Frost

Offi ce Manager Lianne Davey

Head of Design & Production Adam ButlerEditorial Production Manager Dawn BoultwoodSenior Production ExecutiveAlistair Taylor

PublisherSteve [email protected]+44 207 354 6000

Sales ManagerBen [email protected]+44 207 354 6000

Sales ExecutiveRichard [email protected]+44 207 354 6000

Managing Director Mark Burton

US SALESMichael MitchellBroadcast Media International, PO Box 44, Greenlawn, New York, NY [email protected]+1 (631) 673 0072

JAPAN AND KOREA SALESSho HariharaSales & Project, Yukari Media [email protected]+81 6 4790 2222 Fax: +81 6 4793 0800

CIRCULATIONIntent Media, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough LE16 9EF, UK

FREE [email protected] Tel +44 1580 883848

TVBEurope is published 12 times a year by Intent Media London, 1st Floor, Suncourt House, 18-26 Essex Road, London, N1 8LN, England

Intent Media is a member of the Periodical Publishers Association

© Intent Media 2014. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owners. TVB Europe is mailed to qualifi ed persons residing on the European continent. Subscription is free.

Allow 8 weeks for new subscriptions and change of address delivery. Send subscription inquiries to: Subscription Dept, Intent Media, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough LE16 7BR, England. ISSN 1461-4197

Printing by Pensord Press, Tram Road, Pontllanfraith, Blackwood NP12 2YA

Content Everywhere round up As the industry prepares for IBC2014 in September, Melanie Dayasena-Lowe rounds up the latest news from the world of digital content and its creation, delivery and consumption over IP networks

Howard Stringer

Blackmagic URSA is the world’s fi rst high end digital fi lm camera

designed to revolutionize workfl ow on set. Built to handle the

ergonomics of large fi lm crews as well as single person use, URSA

has everything built in, including a massive 10 inch fold out on set

monitor, large user upgradeable Super 35 global shutter 4K image

sensor, 12G-SDI and internal dual RAW and ProRes recorders.

Super 35 Size Sensor

URSA is a true professional digital fi lm camera with a

4K sensor, global shutter and an incredible 12 stops

of dynamic range. The wide dynamic range blows

away regular video cameras or even high end broadcast cameras,

so you get dramatically better images that look like true digital fi lm.

The extra large Super 35 size allows for creative shallow depth of fi eld

shooting plus RAW and ProRes means you get incredible quality!

Dual Recorders

Blackmagic URSA features dual recorders so you

never need to stop recording to change media.

That’s critical if you are shooting an historical event,

important interview or where you just cannot stop shooting! Simply

load an empty CFast card into the second recorder and when the

current card is full, the recording will continue onto the second card,

allowing you to change out the full card and keep shooting!

Introducing Blackmagic URSA, the world’s fi rst user upgradeable 4K digital fi lm camera!

User Upgradeable Sensor

Blackmagic URSA features a modular camera turret that can

be removed by unscrewing 4 simple bolts! The camera turret

includes the sensor, lens mount and lens control connections

and can be upgraded in the future when new types of sensors are developed.

This means your next camera will be a fraction of the cost of buying a whole

new camera! Choose professional PL mount, popular EF mount and more!

Built in On Set Monitoring!

Say goodbye to bulky on set monitors because

you get a massive fold out 10 inch screen built

into Blackmagic URSA, making it the world’s

biggest viewfi nder! The screen is super bright and features an ultra

wide viewing angle. URSA also includes two extra 5” touch screens on

both sides of the camera showing settings such as format, frame rate,

shutter angle plus scopes for checking levels, audio and focus!

Blackmagic URSA PLBlackmagic URSA EF€4589* €4975*

Easy to access standard broadcast connections, no custom cables

Built in audio meterswith level control

HD-SDI video out and 12V power for monitoring

Mounting points for V-Lock or Anton Bauer battery mounting plates

Compatible with quick release tripod base plates

XLR connectors with phantom power for professional external microphones

Adjust camera settings and monitoring tools with advanced touchscreen controls

Removable handle with multiple mounting points

Built in rail mounts for large lenses, matte boxes and more

Unique user upgradeable sensor and lens mount turret

Push button menu selection for focus, iris and more

www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl*SRP is Exclusive of VAT.


John Wilson

JOHN WILSON worked for EMI in the 1960s, before moving to Prowest as general manager. He later joined Link Electronics as a sales director, during which time he established a display division within the company. This later became Anna Valley, after Link was liquidated by owner Quantel. The UK-based kit rental company still exists as a subsidiary of Shooting Partners. More recently, his exceptional personal contribution to the supply side of the broadcast media and technology industry was recognised by the IABM, which awarded Wilson with an honorary membership.

Wilson joined the IBC Management Committee, and in 1991 took over from Peter Mothersole as chairman. The

changes over the following years, under John’s leadership, were instrumental in shaping the IBC as we know it today. At the time of Wilson’s joining, the IBC was based at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, though it soon became clear the venue could not accommodate the IBC’s rapid growth. After a year in which it spilled over into the Metropole Hotel and Conference Centre, as well as a pavilion on the beach, the decision was made to move to the Netherlands.

1992 marked IBC’s arrival at the RAI, Amsterdam, and from 1994 it was held annually. Under Wilson’s leadership, improvements were also being made at management level. The fi rst IBC came about through a group of manufacturers’ desire

to organise an exhibition, and from 1968 was managed by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). This later became the IET, following the merger between IEE and IIE in 2006.

With Wilson at the helm, IBC became an independent body, owned by six partner bodies: IABM, IEEE, IET, RTS, SCTE and SMPTE, with a full-time professional staff. These developments ensured that the event was still run by the industry for the industry, with a dedicated staff allowing the organisation to be more fl exible and responsive. Many people were involved in this transition, but its success was due in very large measure to Wilson’s skills, contacts and vision.

The structural changes in management overseen by Wilson have helped create the IBC team as it is today, continually looking at ways to develop the event to meet the rapidly changing needs of the industry, and always looking to extend its reach.

When he passed the mantle on as chairman, he was given the title president. He remained one of the busiest people on site during the annual IBC show, so keen were delegates to talk with him.

Through it all he remained softly spoken, polite and calm. David McGregor, founder of TSL and a veteran of every single IBC, said “John Wilson was always the perfect gentleman who in his own quiet way worked extremely hard for the benefi t of IBC and the

broadcast industry in general. His chairmanship transformed IBC into the well-drilled organisation it is today.”

The remarkable legacy he leaves behind is emphasised by the scale of IBC’s growth since adopting permanent annual residency in Amsterdam in 1994. 2013 saw total exhibiting companies surpass 1,500, with almost 53,000 attendees from more than 170 countries.

This year has also seen the introduction of a new ‘IBC Content Everywhere’ series of global events covering markets in Europe, the Middle East and

North Africa, and Latin America. The new annual events will be for professionals “engaged in the creation, management and delivery of entertainment and news content worldwide,” and will span areas such as rich media production, devices, apps, digital marketing, social media, content personalisation, big data, cloud services, second screens, and investment.

It is testament to Wilson’s vision that the business he helped to mature from its modest Brighton roots, is now taking fl ight to more international frontiers.

John Wilson

The long-standing IBC Chairman, John Wilson, has died at the age of 82. Holly Ashford refl ects on the career of a man regarded as the ‘architect’ of the modern day IBC

Register

IBC Content Everywhere Europe Launching at IBC2014, IBC Content Everywhere Europe will provide a forum for discussing the latest developments and the future of digital content in Europe’s Single Market.

IBC Content Everywhere MENAHeld at the Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai 18-20 November 2014, IBC Content Everywhere MENA will provide a forum for the vibrant media sector of the Middle East and North Africa to interact with technology companies and service providers dedicated to opening

up global opportunities for online content distribution.

IBC Content Everywhere LATAMIBC Content Everywhere LATAM will be held in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in 2015, with the country forecasted to be one of the highest profi le and most active broadcast markets in the near-term. Intelligence from comScore reports that Brazil is already the seventh largest internet audience in the world with 62.1 million unique visitors at the end of March 2013, while online video consumption in the country grew 18 per cent in 2012 — faster than the UK (11 per cent) and the global average of three per cent.

Wilson’s IBC vision takes fl ight

Every production needs a multipurpose tool. Make yours GV Director. Switcher, Server, Graphics Engine, and Multiviewer—many powerful tools in a single, streamlined package. Small, yet mighty. That's GV Director.

www.grassvalley.com/gv_director

GV DirectorProduce big. Pack small.


IN THIS issue you can read Part Two of our coverage of the TVBEurope workfl ows roundtable, held in partnership with Avid at London’s BT Tower. We have devoted two issues to the May workfl ow discussion, because the breadth of issues raised was so vast, a single issue hardly did justice to them.

TVBEurope has long recognised that the rise of fi le-based workfl ows would bring unexpected challenges. Our IT Broadcast Workfl ow conference, now in its sixth year, was born out of the need to provide a forum where broadcast industry professionals could share ideas about the constantly evolving landscape of fi le-based production.

This years’ IT Broadcast workfl ow conference, held at London’s BAFTA on 8 July, will look at a range of issues, from the latest in broadcast systems integration to challenges in asset management.

BBC Northern Ireland will present a case study on the transformations it has undergone since installing its software-based infrastructure in 2008 and the cost savings made as its workfl ows have evolved from SD SDI tape workfl ows to HD card-based migration to the world of IP. The session, sponsored by Cinegy, will feature Clive Jones, media technologies manager, BBC NI, and BBC NI’s head of technology and operations Mervyn Middleby.

Tape isn’t deadIT Broadcast Workfl ow 2014 will also feature a special panel on Loudness, sponsored by Emotion Systems. The panel will feature Craig Russill-Roy of Adstream to talk about

Loudness from the advertising perspective. Broadcasters around Europe are incorporating Loudness standards in their audio workfl ow, but international advertising is a murkier swamp. Russill-Roy will discuss the challenges advertisers face in distributing Loudness compliant content on a global scale. Ericsson’s strategic solutions architect, Simon Leppington, will also join the conversation to cast light on fi le-based preparation and playout for broadcasters.

MC Patel, CEO of Emotion Systems, has had plenty of experience in imposing order on the chaos of fi le-based workfl ows. Emotion Systems specialises in audio software, including eFF, its suite of audio tools for Loudness compliance.

“What fi le-based workfl ows allow is a more fl exible delivery method,” says Patel. “When we had a tape-based workfl ow we were generally relying on a single delivery point, broadcast transmission. File-based workfl ow allows you to deal more easily with different levels of video quality. A transmission for broadcast could be SD or HD, but transmission for mobile could be at a lower resolution, or — as Netfl ix is doing — at a much higher resolution like 4K. File-based workfl ow lends itself to being able to create these multiple masters and distribute them more easily. Whereas a tape-based workfl ow is generally specifi c to a resolution.”

Tape still isn’t dead, and isn’t likely to vanish anytime soon, says Patel. “We’re not really done with tape. There are a lot of operations that are based around tape, and there’s a huge amount of effi ciency that’s come about because of our familiarity with how we use tape. So we’re not done with it, but if you can imagine having to do 45 versions of tape, that’s a lot more expensive than 45 versions of fi le.”

TVBEurope’s IT Broadcast Workfl ow conference is back again. Neal Romanek looks at the big issues on the agenda

IT Broadcast Workfl ow to take on the fi le-based fl urry

MC Patel: “What fi le-based workfl ows allow

is a more fl exible delivery method”

“File-based workfl ow allows you to deal more easily with diff erent levels of video quality”

MC Patel, Emotion Systems

IT Broadcast Workfl ow Preview

B e c a u s e i t m a t t e r s ®.

Find out about our latest Convert products at www.aja.com

www.aja.com

HA5-Plus brings HDMI signals, including 480p/576p DSLR formats, into professional workflows with the highest quality possible. Video and up to eight channels of embedded audio are converted to 3G, HD, SD-SDI for use throughout the facility.

Hi5-Plus HA5-Plus

In-line Color TransformLUT-box

Take control of the color look applied to your monitors or recording with AJA’s LUT-box. Load 3D LUTs into LUT-box and apply them to the incoming video signal and output to HDMI and SDI monitors simultaneously. Never worry about incorrect color space monitoring again.

Convert with AJA

3G-SDI to HDMI Mini-Converter HDMI to 3G-SDI Mini-Converter

NOW WITH

MiniConfig SUPPORT

Hi5-Plus is capable of handling 3G, HD, SD-SDI inputs from interlaced, progressive or PsF sources and outputting Deep Color 30- and 36-bit video for driving HDMI monitoring solutions in professional workflows with optimal quality.


Shout it out loudThe question of Loudness metering is still confusing to some people. What is Loudness anyway? And why exactly are we moving from peak-based measurement to Loudness? And for that matter, what is peak-based measurement?

It’s important, says Patel, to understand why we needed to make the change in the fi rst place. “Using a Loudness-based delivery standard gives you a better potential for creative audio. By using the average audio level of a programme, it gives you the opportunity to balance the dynamic range and use the dynamic range of the spectrum, whereas the old peak-based measurement really didn’t relate to the range of audio we could use.

“The peak measurement was originally designed for certain limitations we had in our transmission standards. The reason we did peak-based measurement was so the sound didn’t interfere with the colour quality of the television signal in transmission. I’m old enough to remember that. But now we have digital transmission and a variety of ways of transmitting content. If you use the average level in a programme, as Loudness monitoring does, you can use the nice dynamic range that digital audio gives us, and it’s a better user experience.

“A good way to think of the shift is like the transition to decimalisation,” says Patel. “It made life easy for us, but people like me still think in feet and inches. It’s a signifi cant change for someone who has to do it for a living, but it’s not a change that’s diffi cult to overcome.”

Getting more for lessVisual effects companies were early adopters of fi le-based workfl ows, often leading the charge in the manipulation of large fi les across multiple

locations, and working collaboratively with them across multiple teams.Simon Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of visual effects software developer The Foundry will take part in a VFX discussion panel at the IT Broadcast Workfl ow conference. The Foundry was a pioneer in software

development for compositing and effects. Its compositor, NUKE, originally developed by Digital Domain, has become the company’s fl agship software and is used throughout the industry.

The Foundry and the companies it serves are only too familiar with fi le-based workfl ows and the notion that some parts of the industry are

still just letting go of a tape legacy is shocking.

“From the perspective of a company developing software for visual effects, I’m always astonished by the tape-based workfl ows still out there,” says The Foundry’s Robinson, “We don’t engineer software with tape in the back of our minds any more.”

With ubiquitous connectivity and huge processing power at everyone’s fi ngertips, how does Robinson see workfl ows changing in the next few years?

“It’s hard to know quite when it reaches the tipping point where the processing power becomes a game-changer, because the technical hurdles to move the required amount of data and workfl ow around

cloud infrastructure are still quite signifi cant. The start-ups we’ve seen around cloud-based rendering of CG, for example, aren’t as successful as we might have thought they would be.

“For a lot of our customers, big and small, it’s still not obvious that there is yet a better solution than just managing their own

hardware resources and software pipelines on site. Connectivity is a big thing already though. Once the medium is purely digital from capture to delivery, it matters a lot less where in the world the content creators are and where the customers are.”

But despite more robust workfl ow, better connectivity, remote production, and tremendous scalability, the

endless push for greater and greater effi ciency is still the key driver. “The big challenge is getting more for less,” says Robinson, “Maybe it always has been. Effi ciency gains over time mean that customers expect higher quality and faster turnaround for less money. The consumers of media are becoming more and more discerning about visual quality, because they are acclimatised to a feature-fi lm world where anything can be made real (real to today’s standards; I bet in ten years time we’ll be looking back and seeing the cracks). And because the cost of setting up a small team is relatively low, in hardware and software costs, there’s a lot of competition bubbling up, and it could be anywhere in the world.”

Tickets for IT Broadcast Workfl ow are available at the Broadcast Workfl ow website.www.broadcastworkfl ow.com.www.adstream.comwww.bbc.co.uk/northernirelandwww.broadcastworkfl ow.comhttp://emotion-systems.com/www.ericsson.comwww.thefoundry.co.uk

IT Broadcast Workfl ow will take

place on 8 July at London’s BAFTA

“From the perspective of a company developing software for visual eff ects, I’m always astonished by the tape-based workfl ows still out there. We don’t engineer software with tape in the back of our minds any more” Simon Robinson, The Foundry

IT Broadcast Workfl ow Preview

OPENED IN 1992 by Queen Elizabeth II, the site at Pencoed was initially created to manufacture Sony CRT TVs for the European marketplace. The two sites in South Wales produced one television every eight seconds and employed 5,000 people. Seven years later, the Centre began producing SD cameras, expanding into the HD market in 2006, and today, staff numbers around 400 people. However, recent Sony

announcements suggest the growth and optimism at the site is not shared by all Sony divisions. In February, after 17 years in the PC business, Sony announced its was getting out, selling its VAIO laptop computer brand to Japanese investment fund Japan Industrial Partners (JIP) and cutting jobs. Sony instead decided to focus on the manufacture of games consoles and smartphones, as well as its studios, and made clear that its TV division would be split into a separate subsidiary as

part of a restructuring programme. This was followed in May by Sony posting an £808 million quarterly loss, due to the sale of its VAIO business and a drop in value of its overseas disc manufacturing and battery business.

Sony’s best-kept secretYet, Sony’s other focus — high-end cameras — remains seemingly unscathed, evidenced by the continued output and dedication from its UK team. Rather than manufacturing in Asia, as many

tech companies choose to, the company’s Technology Centre is located in Pencoed, Wales; a rural town with a population of 11,000, perched on the Ewenny River. It is no surprise that Claus Pfeifer, Sony Europe’s strategic marketing manager, introduces the site as “Sony’s best-kept secret.”

The company’s focus on quality has managed to withstand cuts,

as Pfeifer explains. The company “is the market leader in live production, because the quality is there,” he said, of operations at the Wales site. “The customers are trusting in these products because we put a lot of effort into making and testing the best quality products.” The quality is maintained due to the human effort involved in the manufacture

Workfl ow www.tvbeurope.com July 201412 TVBEurope

66,000 units serviced per year, 13,609 shipped, 450 unique circuit boards produced, 54 diff erent products manufactured, two hours per camera build — just some of the stats from Sony’s Technology Centre, a 30,000sqm building in South Wales and Sony’s only facility outside Japan to produce HD cameras. Holly Ashford paid a visit

Sony’s Technology Centre Zooming in on camera construction

of cameras and peripherals, as well as the management of processes throughout the production line. At the site, circuit boards are created, camera parts manufactured, end products tested and, with a service centre on-location, it is “the only service in the world where a customer can bring a product back to the factory for service and repair,” explains Rob Wilson, general manager at the Technology Centre.

Personal and individualVisitors to the Sony Technology Centre may be surprised at the level of human involvement in the manufacturing process. “Camera build is very individual,” says Ian Morgan, senior manager, supply chain. “Low-volume, high-skilled work

is very personal and means ownership and effi ciency.” The build stations “are all about fl exibility, effi ciency and quality,” says Morgan, each manned by a single person. Typically, there are 400 parts to be assembled per camera and builders will receive the exact number of parts available per build, as well as instructions

on-screen to guide them through the process: as Morgan admits, “there are a lot of failsafes. Everything we do on-site is about protecting the next bit of a process.” This applies at the test station too, where each camera’s unique barcode is scanned, identifying who has tested it, and when. One operator can test six cameras at one station as well as automated testing taking place, at the end of which, the camera is weighed “so there’s no way a faulty product gets through.”

At the QC stages, there’s “more hands-on checking,” continues Morgan, with employees manually testing the

way a camera’s parts function. The human element in QC has its benefi ts, especially when it comes to testing circuit boards. There are up to 2,000 parts per board, with an estimated ten parts in every million having a defect. When checking for these defects, “with machines”, Morgan explains, “there is one problem — it is only a 2D check.” As such, it

is again the human intervention at this stage that helps ensure the quality of the products so keenly stressed by the company.

More than just camerasIn addition to cameras and peripherals, there are other, more unexpected products leaving the Pencoed site. The credit-card sized computer, Raspberry Pi; energy-effi cient LED street lighting destined for Canada; and the Cyden hair removal device, are also produced at the Welsh site, as part of Sony’s Collaborative Manufacturing Solutions.

The production of the fantastically popular Raspberry Pi relocated from China to Wales, where 22 operators now produce 60,000 units per week — more cost-effective than in Asia. The basic unit allows children to learn and explore computing easily and, having been developed by University of Cambridge students, is now a fully UK-designed and produced device.

At Pencoed, the management team stresses both the Centre’s UK ties, as well as those with Sony’s homeland, Japan. “Being close to your market is really where your advantage comes,” says Kevin Edwards, head of engineering. “The parts we use here aren’t necessarily the same as we use in our Japanese markets. The sheet metal, for example, is procured locally.” 38 per cent of the material used in Pencoed is European, which as well as supporting businesses closer to home, has the “extremely

important” advantage for Sony of reducing lead time for orders. In addition, the on-site Business Incubation Centre has offi ce space for start-up companies, and is intended to promote the country as a desirable place to work, and demonstrate collaboration with local educational institutions.

However, this does not mean that the company’s Asian roots have been forgotten. At the Technology Centre, Edwards mentions the Bridge Project, which involves Japanese employees visiting Wales, and vice-versa. “We’ve revitalised that communication with Japan,” he says, and the Pencoed Centre maintains “a very close collaboration with our Japanese design offi ce and our sister factory in Japan,” adds Wilson.

A snapshot of the factory fl oor exemplifi es this partnership, as photos of Sony president and CEO Kazuo Hirai hang on the walls, while metres away teams of local Welsh employees assemble Asian and European components into high-end products.

Looking forwardTechnology and rigorous testing at the Sony Technology Centre results in the output of high-end products and high standards of customer service. Yet, as Steve Dalton OBE, managing director at the Centre, summarises, “Our key asset is our people, and that’s what drives our business.”www.pro.sony.eu

Workfl owTVBEurope 13July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

Sony’s UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales

Camera builders receive the exact number of parts available per build, as well as on-screen instructions


IN MAY, TVBEurope hosted another of its executive roundtables. Held in association with Avid, the discussion focused on the challenges of workfl ows in an increasingly fl exible fi le-based world. In Part Two of our coverage, Neal Romanek reports on a discussion that encompassed the heartbreak of metadata and the search for a common language.

Participants in the roundtable discussion were 12 top-end representatives of the broadcast industry: (in alphabetical order) Steve Bennedik, head of technology at Sky News; Tom Cordiner, VP international sales at Avid; Jose de Freitas, CTO of Ireland’s TV3; Ian Draysey, manager, post production engineering at Discovery; Craig Dwyer, senior director Global

Center of Excellence at Avid; Steve Fish, RVP technology and operations at Turner Broadcasting System Europe; Alla Salehian CEO of TIMA accompanied by TIMA’s head of operations, Ammar Hijazi; Paul Stevenson, director of technology and technical operations at ITV News; Martyn Suker, head of production innovation at ITV Studios, and Mark Wilson-Dunn, VP sales and marketing at BT Media and Broadcast.

The panel was moderated by TVBEurope correspondent Philip Stevens, accompanied by TVBEurope executive editor James McKeown and acting editor, Neal Romanek.

The discussion was kicked off by Avid’s presentation of its Avid Everywhere concept of workfl ows, then the conversation quickly turned from the management of fi les to how to manage the management of fi les.

Good metadata, existing in a well-considered framework, is the key to a successful workfl ow, it was agreed. But how in the world do you get good metadata in the fi rst place? The problems cover a wide area, a lack of understanding about the importance of metadata, whose responsibility it is to enter it,

Neal Romanek reports on part two of our Avid workfl ow roundtable at BT Tower

Avid’s Tom Cordiner opened the roundtable with a discussion of the Avid Everywhere concept of collaborative workfl ows

in association with

Alla Salehian, CEO, TIMA

Clearing the metadata mess

and who controls its language and parameters.

ITV Studios’ head of production innovation, Martyn Suker, posed the question: “Why doesn’t metadata work at the moment? It’s great seeing the kinds of new workfl ows

Avid has shown us today, but how many production people get exposed to this? Almost nobody. So consequently they have no concept or understanding about what this is all about. More senior people do, but the grass roots level don’t. They continue to think in ways they’ve always thought – that is, in a linear fashion. So they’re not getting the benefi ts out of fi le-based working that they might otherwise get, because the tape has been replaced by a fi le, but they’re using workfl ows that are still based in a tape world.”

Suker added that in most organisations there was no longer the wealth of experience and the engineering community that the industry once had. In the face of change, without the support of an expert knowledgebase, production teams stick with what they know, even as what they know becomes less and less effective.

Metadata issuesSteve Bennedik, head of technology at Sky News, said that metadata was an issue for his organisation as well. “For us, the best benefi t would be if metadata was entered at the fi rst point of ingest, and then it fl owed seamlessly through into archive. But that’s quite diffi cult to pull off. It’s important. You’ve got to know the source. Can it be played out to Australia or to America? Can it go out to this new product that

you’re launching? It’s becoming increasingly important to get it right. And it’s taking up a lot of people’s time.”

“The problem is magnifi ed when you digitise and archive,” replied Mark Wilson-Dunn, VP sales and marketing at BT Media and Broadcast, “We did a big archive project with 30,000 hours of content that went back to silent movies. You were actually looking at metadata which was bad, good, indifferent, or didn’t exist and trying to get them to a common standard. Then when you’re trying to sell into an ecosystem to remonetise the content, are the people you’re selling into interpreting that metadata in the same standards and the same

formats? I think you’re absolutely right. One of our biggest learning lessons was metadata.”

It was recognised that the kind of metadata that you would employ in production might be quite different from the metadata that would be required for an archive, and that the real trick of metadata was fi nding a common set of standards that also had fl exibility to incorporate a variety of genres and media types.

Alla Salehian’s company TIMA provides outsourced news reporting and regularly

deals with a host of news organisations and freelancers around the world. He wondered how practical it would be to get many different users all on the same page when entering metadata – if you could get them to enter it at all. “If you’re

TVBEurope 15July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

in association with

ITV’s Martyn Suker: “It does take a long time to change, unless there is an immediate catalyst for it”

“When it starts

impacting your budget, that’s

when the change happens”

Alla Salehian, TIMA


going to have several hundred independent freelance producers or production houses how are you doing to get them to adhere to your standard of metadata? What are you going to do? Are you going to bring that content in to you fi rst? That is going to add another layer of work within your organisation, especially if you’ve got hundreds of hours of independently produced content.”

Sky News got around the problem by controlling data entry with standardised drop-down fi elds, but how to keep metadata coherent when content may come in from diverse producers in diverse locations, is an ongoing challenge. Keeping metadata consistent within a controlled environment like a broadcast studio is diffi cult enough, but a company whose specialty is repurposing and distributing globally produced, often independent, content can be problematic

Steve Fish explained that, as Turner Broadcasting has moved away from tape, the role of librarian has transformed more into a content curation role, and one where looking after and managing the data around content has become a major job. Fish remarked that at Turner, the cost of managing the assets versus the actual storage of them is now approaching 10 to one – organising the fi le structure, managing the metadata and

curating the content costs ten times as much as the storage of the material.

“Even simple metadata becomes a challenge when you upload an archive with a million assets in it, and have to make sure the metadata’s right, and the spelling, and have to answer questions like, is it ‘The Scooby Doo Show’ or ‘Scooby Doo Show, The’? When you have a million titles to deal with, these are not trivial problems.”

It was agreed that the next generation of systems will have to be extensible. Production is changing so rapidly, with a new technology trialled every few months, that workfl ows and the software that support them will need to be expandable and adaptable.The need for expandability was made clear by Fish: “We’re just going through a process with our workfl ow, and we’ve got about 400 different metadata points at the moment. There are

only about 100 that are really valuable, but over the past 25

years we’ve captured about 400. We’re migrating it

into a new database. But soon 4K is going to become an issue — or 6K or 8K or High Dynamic Range, or who knows what. Systems are going to have to extend. They

are going to have to be able to cope with changes,

without having to rewrite the whole system. That I think

is going to be the real trick with whatever the next generation of technology is.”

“The beauty of an old record report,” said Fish, illiciting laughs from the table, “was if there wasn’t a fi eld printed on it, you just scribbled it on there and anyone who picked it up knew what you meant.”

Forget your spreadsheet“We have started to address this”, said Suker about the new metadata methods at ITV, “We’ve put in a system where we capture the metadata right at the earliest stage that it’s generated. And I mean right at the earliest stage, with the conception of the idea, then we use that editorial specifi cation throughout the rest of the chain. And we’re mandating that. We’re saying ‘You will do it this way. Forget your spreadsheet, forget your Word document, forget your emails, it’s all going in one place.’ Some of that metadata that’s entered in the beginning will go into that DPP delivery format at the very end,

so we’re starting to tie those two ends of the chain together.”

There is some fl exibility in the ITV metadata scheme from programme to programme or genre to genre. Parameters specifi c to the content of an individual programme are left to the production staff, but the key core metadata set has been standardised.

Educating the journosThere was agreement that education of people coming into the industry was key, but just as much, industry veterans whose careers spanned many years of linear workfl ows, needed to be taught to think about workfl ows in new ways.

Avid’s Craig Dwyer said that he has talked to many customers about managing metadata and was impressed by the solutions developed by a public broadcasting company in Finland, which had carried out an enormous cross-system integration, joining up their systems and creating a new connected media ecosystem.

“They were having real issues with metadata in the archive, because the journalists who had all the information just weren’t that worried about entering it. But as they were modernising their system, they noticed the video on-demand side of the business was growing. All of the journalists wanted their stories on the new on-demand platform. They could see there, much more easily than they could in the regular broadcast, how the playlists were working and how they were ranked by Most

Popular. But the journalists couldn’t publish them on the VOD platform unless they entered all the metadata and the synopsis. Suddenly, overnight, the journalists were quite happy spending all their time adding the metadata to get their material on the VOD. And obviously the metadata for the VOD platform linked right back into the MAM system and into the archive. You’ve got to try to tune into the cultural change as well and fi nd ways to motivate the staff.”

“Yes,” agreed Paul Stevenson of ITV News, “You’ve got to incentivise people to do it. Otherwise there’s always the question: ‘Why are there all these bloody fi elds I’ve got to populate?’”

Stevenson went on to say note that well-designed technology, combined in workfl ows that make sense, become easier to use. “Sometimes people retrench to some simpler processes. They go back to something that’s a little bit manual, but it gets around a lot of the complexity. It’s a diffi cult thing to resist. When we instituted fi le transfer desktop to desktop at ITV news, it took off exponentially. Journalists realised they could retrieve a clip straight to their desktop without going through a long process. There was a bit of learning they had to do to make it work, but that was fi ne because they were incentifi ed. Journos are quite literate with the technology, if it suits them. And it suits them if it works. People will respond and adapt well, if the solution actually works.”

in association with

Turner’s Steve Fish: “When you have a million titles to deal with, these are not trivial problems.”

Mark Wilson-Dunn, BT Media and Broadcast

“Journos are quite

literate with the technology, if it

suits them. And it suits them if

it works” Paul Stevenson,

ITV

“More and more there is a language problem,” said Fish, “If you’ve got a 30 minute tape you know exactly how much you’ve got. If you’ve got a 64 gig card -what bit rate is it? What bit depth? The language you’re speaking has fundamentally changed. I think that’s one of our challenges. How do you describe the workfl ow? Once upon a time, you’d go down to the pub with your systems integrators, draw it on the back of a beer mat, and they would go away and pretty much know what you meant. There was a way of articulating to someone else exactly what you wanted the system to be. You can’t do that now. It ends up being an A1 size piece of paper – and then you implement it, and it’s still wrong.”

What will it take to evolve?TIMA’s Alla Salehian said that the only way there would be an improvement in procedures and workfl ows is if there was a fi nancial incentive, “When it starts impacting your budget, that’s when the change happens.”

Martyn Suker echoed the sentiment, noting that the industry often only evolves when it’s forced to. “It does take a long time to change, unless there is an immediate catalyst for it. What pushed us to being fi le-based more quickly than we might have wanted

in production was a natural disaster – the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Tape was suddenly in short supply, and that was the catalyst that forced people to move more to fi le-based than they would have otherwise done.”

The Mosaic platform was BT’s media management platform, developed in-house, then sold to Tata Communications in 2010. Mark Wilson-Dunn said that BT learned a great deal about working with new workfl ows from the Mosaic experience: “If you put in an automated workfl ow platform and then go into the offi ce and still do things the same way you did last Friday, you actually don’t do anything at all. You’ve wasted your money.

“You’ve got to go through a business process and review and reengineer the way you actually run the business. That’s where you get your effi ciencies. You don’t get your effi ciencies by comparing a hard drive on the back of a courier bike to a new connected workfl ow, because it just doesn’t make any sense. You’ve got to change.”

Part one of our Avid roundtable can be read in TVBEurope’s June issue.You can access our digital editions at TVBEurope.com. Exclusive video commentary on the roundtable can be found at: smarturl.it/workfl ows

TVBEurope 17July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

in association with

The roundtable took place at London’s BT Tower

MOBILE DEVICES are now as powerful as many computers were not long ago, but have far more advanced and efficient operating systems and lots of abilities that would previously have required additional hardware (such as GPS or inclinometers). This means they can be used for an increasing number of tasks on set, in post, or while planning a production.

From script and storyboard, to location scouting, production planning, intelligent clapperboards, camera control, prompters, logging, controlling

and matching lighting, and even live vision switching, there’s an app for that.

Usually, you’ll need an iPhone or iPad, because almost all of the apps are iOS only. Indeed, FWD:Labs, which has a list of Apps for Filmmakers, shows 186 professional apps for the iPhone, 34 for Android, and just four for Windows Mobile.

ScreenwritingIt all starts with the script, and writers no longer need to be tied to a computer, as there are several good screenwriting

apps, making it easier to update scripts on location or share them with others without needing printed copies.

Final Draft Writer, ($29.99/£20.99/€26.99) from the makers of the industry-standard screenwriting software, interacts well with the desktop version, and has many features to simplify writing or editing — it remembers character names and scene headings, for example, and puts revisions on differently coloured backgrounds. There is also a free Final Draft Reader, without the editing abilities.

Scripts Pro ($12.99/£8.99/ €11.99) is similar, and can import/export Final Draft 8, Celtx or formatted text files from desktop script writing software. It has iCloud support, so scripts automatically update across all your iOS devices and Macs.

There are also: Fade In Mobile (free or $4.99/£2.99/ €4.49 versions), which uses Dropbox to sync between devices and its Windows, Mac, Linux and Android versions; and Celtx Script ($4.99/£2.99/€4.49) for collaborative scriptwriting,

which is backed up with Celtx Shots (free) for creating storyboards and blocking scenes.

What’s the story?Storyboards (free limited version or Premium $14.99/£10.49/ €13.99) makes it simple to set up a storyboard using template graphics that can be rotated and changed (such as different hair colour, glasses and clothes) and built up in layers (which can be blurred to mimic focus). You can add backgrounds from photos, and it’s easy to add frames and arrows (to indicate action/camera movements). It comes with hundreds of characters and props, so you don’t need to be able to draw. It can also export the images for use in other programmes.

Cinemek Storyboard Composer ($14.99/£10.49/€13.99) for iPhone and iPod Touch and Storyboard Composer HD ($23.99/£20.99/ 26.99) for iPad (or any iOS device) allow users to take photos with a phone and add traditional storyboarding markups such as dolly, track, zoom and pan. Set a duration for each panel and play it back to show realtime pacing and framing, which can be exported as a QuickTime Movie (or PDF).

Scout’s honourPanascout ($9.99/£6.99/€8.99) is useful for planning productions and scouting locations. It can frame photos or video in custom aspect ratios, or 2.40 (Anamorphic), 1.85 (Super 35mm), 1.78 (16:9) or 1.33 (4:3) presets. Each shot includes such metadata as GPS, compass heading, date and time. It also has location sunrise/sunset information and users can make voice notes.

Something similar is Artemis (for iPhone) and Artemis HD (iPad) ($29.99/£20.99/€26.99), although this is not a Universal app, so if you want to use it both on your iPhone and iPad, you have to buy it twice.

Workflow www.tvbeurope.com July 201418 TVBEurope

Mobile production There’s an app for that

Phone it in: FiLMiC Pro can turn an iPhone into a 50Mbps HD camera

Many parts of the production process that require dedicated hardware or laptops can now be carried out on your phone. David Fox reports

By selecting a camera, aspect ratio and a group of lenses, it allows you to compose shots with the same field of view as the lenses you will shoot with. These images can be saved, with focal length, GPS, tilt angle, bearing and shot information, and then used in storyboards.

The developer also offers Toland ($39.99/£27.99/€35.99), essentially the Manual of the American Society of Cinematographers in an app (created with the ASC), with exposure, depth of field, field of view, shutter and speed information and shot logging.

It also offers the Helios Sun Position Calculator ($29.99/£20.99/€26.99), which shows where the sun will be when you shoot, including a map view. A less expensive alternative is Sun Seeker: 3D Augmented Reality Viewer ($6.99/£4.99/€5.99 — also on Android), with a useful on-screen overlay, so you can see where the sun will be in relation to your scene, as well as map view.

€26.99) Digital Viewfinder for Cinematography is another alternative to Panascout or Artemis, with information on more than 45 professional digital and film cameras, and lenses from Zeiss, Canon, Cooke, Hawk, Panavision and others.

The less expensive Cadrage Director’s Viewfinder ($10.99/ £7.49/€9.99 — also on Android) includes an extensive format database for film and still cameras (including medium and large-format — useful for the new Pentax 645Z, which does HD video). It also has a built-in calibration tool that allows the use of any wide-angle or telephoto adapters on your phone (or just to get an accurate calibration on an Android phone — where there are too many sensor/lens combinations for all models to be included). It supports spherical, anamorphic 1.3x and anamorphic 2x lenses, and users can create their own custom formats.

The developer also offers a free Focus Chart (iOS and Android), with a Siemens Star, that stops the phone from going to stand-by while you adjust back focus or test a lens.

Cine Meter ($4.99/£2.99/ €4.49), by Adam Wilt includes: a reflected light meter, using the camera in your iDevice; an RGB waveform monitor; and a false-colour picture — making it a useful tool to have

with you when you happen upon a possible location and want to check how you’ll shoot it.

On shotHollywood Camera Work’s Shot Designer (free or $19.99/£13.99/€17.99) allows you to quickly design and block camera coverage of a scene (as well as set and lighting design), with precise control for plotting (and animating) a classic top-down diagram, with shot lists and storyboards. Also on Android, Mac and PC, it can preview the focal length of

lenses using your device’s camera, and includes pre-loaded camera plots.

Rotolight Magic Eye ($6.99/£4.99/€5.99) gives wireless lighting control over the Rotolight Anova LED Floodlight, allowing users to match lighting between location and studio, remotely control brightness, colour temperature and systems settings over multiple lights, including multiple point fades over custom time and brightness ranges. It also has a ‘DMX style’ controller view (faders), and total project recall.

Slated for productionQRSlate (free) uses QR Barcodes to link metadata on the slate (scene, take, camera rolls, scene description, etc) to the video clip.

There is a Desktop Importer ($49.99) for the Mac that will automatically import and embed the metadata into the clips, for use with Avid, Final Cut Pro or Premiere. It can also find the slate clap and lay down markers. The metadata can be revised after a take, and markers can be added during the shoot itself to go with Script Supervisor notes — particularly useful for reality TV or documentary shoots.

MovieSlate ($24.99/£17.49/ €21.99) is an all-in-one digital slate, clapperboard and shot log (which can include voice notes and photos). Timecode can be synced with compatible cameras, sound recorders and LTC generators via the headphone

jack (optional in-app purchase), or over Wi-Fi

with Timecode Buddy or between multiple MovieSlates. Another option allows users to simultaneously log data and shot notes for up to 26 cameras, while another is especially designed for

the audio department.There is also a free

Timecode Buddy slate app, which allows Timecode

Buddy hardware to stream realtime SMPTE timecode to ten iOS devices at once, via Wi-Fi. 3D Slate ($14.99/£10.49/ €13.99) is optimised for Stereoscopic 3D productions, to keep track of specific 3D

WorkflowTVBEurope 19July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

MovieSlate allows users to simultaneously log data and shot notes for up to 26 cameras

In design: Hollywood Camera Work’s Shot Designer makes it easy to create camera plans

‘iPads are perfect for location prompters

because they are so light and the

batteries will last all

day’

camera data, such as Interocular Distance, Convergence Distance, Distance to Subject and other useful items like Camera Height and Camera Angle. In Slate mode, you only see the traditional items displayed — scene, take, memory card (roll), director, producer, project, and date, but once the camera is rolling, all the extra information is flashed up within a few seconds, so that each page is displayed for at least a few frames. The app will also generate a daily log, plus any notes you add. There is also a DSLR Slate ($9.99/ £6.99/€8.99) for anyone using DSLR cameras.

Action Log (free and Pro $32.99/£22.99/€29.49 versions) can be used with one (free) or up to 25 recording devices (Pro), and keeps track of all reel/card names and timecodes for each recording, and also functions as a slate. All clips in a project can be emailed as XML files (free) or to Avid ALE files/Final Cut Pro XML (Pro) for immediate ingest.

Very calculatingCamera users or DITs will like AJA DataCalc (free) by AJA Video Systems, which computes storage requirements for video and audio media. It works with the most popular formats and compression methods, including ProRes, DVCProHD, XDCAM, CineForm, Redcode, Avid DNxHD and uncompressed, up to 4K, and is simple to use. Media durations can be entered as days, hours, seconds, or frames.

Something similar is KataData ($4.99/£2.99/€4.49): an all-in-one storage and runtime calculator, which can handle multiple calculations from different cameras/codecs/frame rates at once, which covers a wide range of cameras, codecs and external recorders.

ARRI also has Alexa Data (free) for calculating storage requirements for any Alexa, whether Arriraw, uncompressed HD, ProRes or DNxHD, and any frame rate.

The widely-used pCAM Film+Digital Calculator ($29.99/£20.99/€26.99),

developed by a working Camera Assistant, started in 1998 for Palm devices, and won an Emmy for engineering in 2010.

It calculates: depth of field, hyperfocal, image circle, splits/aperture finder, field of view, angle of view, relative sizes (compares sensors), focal length (lens) matching, triangulation, exposure, running time to length, shooting to screen time, HMI flicker-free, colour correction needed (choosing colour correction filters), diopter, macro, time lapse, underwater distance, scene illumination (beam intensity), light coverage (width/distance), and mired shift (with suggested colour correction gels). There is also a conversion calculator; Siemens Star (focus chart); and reference material, such as technical charts, cine film stocks, cine lens manufacturers, and safe panning speeds.

Prompt serviceiPads are perfect for location prompters because they are so light and the batteries will last all day, which is why almost

every prompter manufacturer offers them for mobile use.

Version 3 of Teleprompt+ for iPad ($14.99/£10.49/€13.99) will soon be available. Teleprompt+ 3 is a full rebuild, including many requested features, such as: quick editing; integrated timer; individual settings per script — speed, starting countdown, font, cue points, video out, video and audio recording, which can happen automatically once prompting begins (useful for rehearsals); iCloud sync and Dropbox or Google Drive integration; Bluetooth foot pedal support using the AirTurn; wireless remote control from another iOS device or a Mac running Teleprompt+ 2 (sold separately), which can control several devices.

The widely-used ProPrompter ($9.99/£6.99/€8.99), has many of the same features, including remote control from another iOS device.

There is also ikan’s Elite Prompter ($9.99/£6.99/€8.99), which can import Final Draft and Adobe Story scripts, or text

files. It also supports multiple languages including Spanish, German and French. For remote control, there is an add-on $99 Elite Remote Bluetooth 9-button hand set.

Camera controlMany cameras, such as Sony’s F5 and F55, can now be controlled via an app, but few need this more than small, remote cameras such as the GoPro. Its app (free) gives full remote control via iOS or Android, and is easy to set up via Wi-Fi, frame shots (although there can be lag), and control functions like time lapse.

TriggerTrap Mobile (free) is an ingenious app and dongle ($29.99 including cable, which is camera specific) that connects your iOS or Android device and a stills camera to trigger a photo in some very useful modes, particularly for time lapse use.

The most notable setting is Distance-lapse mode, which triggers the camera every time you’ve covered a set distance (GPS), so that no

Workflow www.tvbeurope.com July 201420 TVBEurope

matter how many times you stop or speed up, it looks as if you are travelling at the same speed. There is also an Eased time lapse mode that adds acceleration/deceleration to any time lapse shots. It can also control long-exposure HDR time lapses, and be set to trigger via sound, vibration, magnetism, or face recognition.

iPhone videoIf you need to shoot video on your iPhone/iPad (remembering that the best camera is the one you have with you), FiLMiC Pro ($4.99/£2.99/€4.49) is useful as, besides a variety of time lapse modes, you can also record video at higher bitrates (50Mbps at 1080p) and various frame rates.

It also includes independent, manual control over white balance, focus and exposure on the iDevice’s HD camera, plus external audio monitoring, chroma key, and screen display options. There are also aspect ratio overlays (2.35:1, 4:3, 16:9), making it useful for planning shoots. It generally gets excellent reviews, but

it can be a bit fl aky for some users. An alternative to Filmic Pro is MoviePro ($4.99/£2.99/€4.49), which offers 2K resolution (2560x1920 — on iPhone 5s, iPad Mini Retina and iPad Air, at 30p, 25p, 24p, and down to 1fps), or 720p 120fps for the iPhone 5S, and multiple recording options including 50Mbps.

Audio options include uncompressed. It also offers video stabilisation (iPhone 4S or later), and video editing.

Remote viewingThere are numerous apps that allow you to view camera output on a tablet or smartphone. At NAB Teradek launched Serv, a camera-back or table-top wireless video transmitter for realtime monitoring on up to 10 smartphones and tablets at very low latency over 2.4/5GHz Wi-Fi. It has an HD-SDI input and supports streaming in both 720p and 480p. For multi-camera setups, Serv is compatible with the free TeraView monitoring application for iOS, allowing

users to view up to four live Serv or Cube streams at one time (although this is easier on a tablet than the smaller screen of a phone).

The latest versions of its TeraView or TeraCentral applications for iOS and Android now support colour grading using standard or custom 3D Lookup Tables. Users can synchronise any custom 3D LUT fi le from the DIT cart in realtime by connecting a smartphone or tablet to the same IP network, and running Teradek’s LUT sync utility. www.adamwilt.com/cinemeter/ www.andris.co.ukwww.bodelin.comwww.bombingbrain.com www.davideubank.com www.distantblue.atwww.fadeinpro.comwww.fi lmicpro.comwww.katabatic.tv/katadata/ www.lastshotapps.comwww.movie-slate.comwww.pseudostudios.comwww.qrslate.comwww.seeitwithus.comwww.timecodebuddy.com

Be prepared: Panavision’s Panascout is like a Leatherman for scouting locations

Workfl owTVBEurope 21July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

www.tvbeurope.com

July 2014TVBEurope Supplements

Commanding the PitchDirecting in 4K4K and UHD in

Post Productio nBeyond HD Masters Conference Review

4K: Beyond HD

MUCH HAS rightly been made of the technical achievements in transmitting both sporting and other events in 4K. The world’s first 4K live rugby match — a Saracens versus Gloucester game — was captured in Ultra High Definition (UHD) 60p and transmitted from London to Amsterdam during the IBC2013. The match was shot on three Sony F55 4K cameras fitted with Sony CA-4000 Fibre Transmission Camera Adaptors which carried the images to the 4K capable Telegenic OB truck. The output was transmitted over BT fibre and the IntelsatONE network, then uplinked to Intelsat’s 905 satellite using Newtec equipment. Delegates at IBC then flocked to the three venues within the exhibition centre to view the stunning pictures.

More recently, on 26 April, a German Bundesliga football match between Bayern Munich and SV Werder Bremen was covered in 4K by Sky Deutschland — the world’s first 2160p50 UHD live broadcast in HEVC. This was closely followed on 17 May by another 4K transmission, this time featuring the German Cup Final between Dortmund and FC Bayern Munich, played in Berlin. Both games were broadcast as a test over satellite. And, of course, coverage of some World Cup matches includes the UHD treatment.

But beyond the technical achievements, there are production considerations that are equally important. To some degree, programme directors had to rethink their coverage when the switch was made from

SD to HD. And of course, 3D has to be treated in a different way from 2D. So how did the directors of these ground-breaking 4K broadcasts go about their task?

The rugby challengeBT Sport’s Gordon Inglis was responsible for the Saracens/Gloucester rugby match coverage. “We used three 4K cameras with different limited range 4K Fujinion lenses on each. Because we only

used three heads, the main consideration regarding the placing of the cameras was locating them in a position to suit the event and to get as many different, appropriate, shots as I could from each.”

Inglis explains that covering a rugby match means that the rhythm of the cutting is more obvious than is required by a more random-play football match. “Each play in rugby has more of a repeated two stage process. The ball is either being

contested for in a fixed scrum or ruck, before getting passed along the line or booted up the park. I quickly detected I could happily cut into the low angle 22m line cameras with tighter lenses when play had the reduced velocity of a scrum or ruck, and then cut back to the gently panning main wide shot up on the grandstand gantry for all other elements of play.”

He goes on to say that despite the reduced number of cameras — as compared with

‘traditional’ coverage — the beauty of 4K detail means a shot can be held for far longer because there is more visible information for the viewer to enjoy in each framed shot. And with fewer cameras, vision mixing is a great deal easier.

With 4K generally associated with very big TV screens, but with viewers also inclined to watch on other devices such as tablets or mobiles, do those other screens make any difference to the way coverage is directed? “It is most suited to large screens, and my instinct is to produce programme images to suit that format,” said Inglis.

“The monitors in the scanner were 4K — they have to be. Unfortunately the most important monitors — the camera operators’ viewfinders — were not 4K. I believe they most certainly should be.”

So, having experienced his first 4K show, what does Inglis feel about the format? “I foresee times when 4K will outshine HD broadcasts of events, but am wary that not all television would be better off with this format. For instance, recent events like the Chelsea Flower Show and the Carl Froch v George Groves title boxing fight at Wembley would be super-enhanced by the clarity of 4K detail, but fast-moving sports like horse-racing might not.”

4K: Beyond HD www.tvbeurope.com July 201424 TVBEurope

Does working in Ultra High Definition affect the way directors view their task? Philip Stevens talks to those who have made 4K their palette

Commanding the pitch Directing sport in 4K

The camera positions selected for first German football match in April. Cameras 3 and 4 are shown in ‘conventional’ positions

Based on the experience of the April game, director Alberts relocated cameras 3 and 4 to these new positions to gain better 4K coverage

“Ultra High Definition is a beautiful format for live sport. It’s the beginning of the creation of a new language of sports production”

Bill Scanlon

4K: Beyond HDTVBEurope 25July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

Producer for that fi rst 4K Rugby coverage was Bill Scanlon. He says 4K images gave the viewer much more ‘onscreen real estate’ to entertain them. “What really excites me as a sports producer about 4K is being able to see all the grunts, expressions and emotions on the faces of the players – something you don’t get with HD picture quality.”

Covering footballJust as the rugby match was Inglis’ fi rst HD experience, so director Georg Alberts was in a similar position when he covered the two German football matches.

“I have been working as a director since 2000. It has been mostly sports — not only football, but also handball, basketball, hockey and athletics.”

He continues, “Six UHD cameras were used for the football matches, supported by four HD cameras utilising upconverted signals. When it comes to positioning the 4K cameras we found that to achieve the best result you have to avoid fast horizontal movements — otherwise you will see the motion blur. Therefore, it is important to place the cameras

on a high position or low behind the goals.”

As a result of analysing the fi rst match coverage, changes were made when it came to the Berlin fi nal. Alberts placed the main camera – number 1 — on a very high position to get the best overview of the whole pitch without pivoting the camera. “This enabled the TV viewer to enjoy the feeling of being in a most impressive stadium.”

The principle close up camera — number 2 — was positioned at one level below the main camera. Alberts says that this camera was not required to zoom in, but rather use static framing of two or three players.

“In addition, we had two cameras low behind goal left and right, so we could cover both sides of the pitch with the players running towards the camera. We found that slight tilt and zoom movements did not affect the 4K quality. The fi fth camera was high behind

goal right, while camera 6 was located high behind the corner on the left side.”

With those positions in mind, how did directing with a relatively small number of cameras compare with ‘traditional’ coverage?

“Directing with six cameras does mean that you are not able to resolve every match situation. Because the framing is always very open, it is diffi cult to show close ups of the players and then to cut back to a wide shot for the next match action. And for that reason we up-converted some cameras from the HD production — like the 16m high cameras for offside decisions, and the steadicam for walk in and celebrations after the match.”

Alberts reveals that his directing technique has changed to accommodate 4K. “As I mentioned earlier, you will get the best 4K results by using wide shots. But football is a dynamic and emotional

sport. So you have to fi nd a compromise between the requirements for 4K and a traditional football production.”

He reports that because 4K is still in its infancy, learning to cover events is still very much a hands-on experience. “Not only for me, but also for the cameramen — especially when they are used to the big lenses. You have to remind them very

often not to zoom in. It is a new experience for all of us to be so wide with our shots.”

TransformationIt is a new experience, says Scanlon, that is set to transform the world of live sports production. “UHD is a beautiful format for live sport. It’s progressive, 60fps, you don’t get motion blur and have incredible image detail. It’s the beginning of the creation of a new language of sports production.” www.fujifi lm.comwww.intelsat.comwww.newtec.euwww.pro.sony.comwww.sky.dewww.sport.bt.comwww.telegenic.co.uk

The possibilities available with Camera 3 located pitch-side for the Cup Final

“Ultra High Defi nition is a beautiful format for live sport. It’s the beginning of the creation of a new language of sports production” Bill Scanlon

The world’s fi rst 4K live rugby match — a Saracens versus Gloucester game — was captured in UHD 60p and transmitted from London to Amsterdam during the 2013 IBC

Director Alberts’ choice of lenses for the German Cup Final


The overall look of the series has a slightly moody cast, refl ecting the tense, internal political intrigues of the story

THE SECOND season of House of Cards, the political drama from Netfl ix, was released on 14 February 2014. For the fi rst time, 4K and Ultra HD were among the deliverables from post production and VFX company Encore, a Deluxe Entertainment Services company.

The series was shot using RED EPIC cameras at 5K resolution. Some scenes were shot using RED’s HDR extended dynamic range mode, which gives a much greater contrast range and broader colour gamut. The native camera raw fi les were delivered to Encore for the edit and grade, then scaled in 4K to match the highest resolution deliverable.

In charge of the grade was lead colourist Laura Jans-Fazio, who worked on a Baselight TWO system with the Blackboard control surface from FilmLight at Encore’s Los Angeles location. The Baselight TWO was networked to a Baselight ASSIST workstation to help prepare the project. With 13 episodes all at 4K, the sheer amount of data to be managed was huge. Careful workfl ow planning and realtime performance were critical to the success.

CollaborationCo-producer Peter Mavromates and post supervisor Hameed Shaukat worked directly with Jans-Fazio on the grade, with input from director David Fincher and DP Igor Martinovic. Viewing content shared via the PIX System digital collaboration tool, Fincher and Martinovic used calibrated Sony OLED monitors to see precisely what

Jans-Fazio was creating in the colour suite. Jans-Fazio would grade half an episode, send it to PIX for Fincher and Martinovic to review and then begin working on the rest of the episode.

“We were able to extract the feedback received and import it directly into Baselight,” explained Morgan Strauss, Encore SVP, operations. “Baselight could interpret the XML fi les from PIX and display the notes on screen at the relevant moment, really speeding up the fi nal grade for the colourist and ensuring that no notes were missed. It was essential to maximise this asynchronous collaborative process so we could fully realise the creative needs of the producers and DP.”

The overall look of the series has a slightly moody cast, refl ecting the tense, internal political intrigues of the story.

The grade avoids over-saturated colours, maintaining the palette throughout — which was Fincher’s vision for the show.

PowerThe processing power of Baselight meant that successful results could be achieved in 4K

in limited time. This means that virtually everything — even multi-layer effects — could be achieved in realtime, so the team

was never waiting for a shot to process. They could see the effects of changes instantly.

Baselight has a fl oating-point processing capability, which gives it huge control over the quality of the colour. It also allows it to dig deep into the extended range of HDR to pull details from the extreme ends of the picture and help them sit comfortably for standard viewing.

Examples on House of Cards were shots where, after the grade, a window behind the actors became burnt out. Jans-Fazio was able to use the HDR to get detail in the window and composite that

into the overall picture to achieve a natural result.

“We often used multiple shapes in a single shot, and being able to do that in one layer in Baselight was a real time-saver,” said Jans-Fazio. “We could also composite through VFX mattes, and do monitor replacements, in realtime.

“Dodging and burning was part and parcel of the way we graded this show,” she added. “I also like the fact that Baselight has four different keying options, including a proper 3D keyer which is unique to Baselight.”

DeliveryThe team output the fi nal graded versions of all 13 episodes in uncompressed 4K, which went to Netfl ix’s own compression engines. The series was also delivered in HD. Because of the realtime performance of Baselight, creating the deliverables was a streamlined process.

“Keeping 13 episodes of 5K media live throughout the post production process required us to be as effi cient as possible,” explained Strauss. “Baselight allowed multiple operators to work on the series simultaneously, even from different rooms; it was key to helping us stay on track.”

“Baselight has been developed to be really intuitive, with a rich toolset that gives me complete freedom in my grading,” Jans-Fazio concluded. “Suggestions and requests to FilmLight from colourists, assistants and engineers are more often than not generously implemented. The development and support team at FilmLight are awesome — they are so smart, they really get what we need.”

By Wolfgang Lempp, co-founder of FilmLightBaselight fi nishes a

4K House of CardsLaura Jans-Fazio,lead colourist, Encore

The overall look of the series has a slightly

moody cast, refl ecting the tense, internal

political intrigues of the story

“Baselight allowed multiple operators to work on the series simultaneously, even from diff erent rooms; it was key to helping us stay on track” Morgan Strauss

All p

hoto

s: N

atha

niel

Bel

l for

Net

fl ix

4K: Beyond HD TVBEurope 29July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

THE 2014 Beyond HD Masters conference provided vivid clarity regarding the introduction of resolutions beyond HD. A fascinating day that combined the complex interactions between production, distribution and consumer consumption of Ultra High Defi nition in both its 4K and 8K variants.

Conference speakers and panellists called upon their in-depth experience to highlight the opportunities available for an improved video experience. However, they also cautioned that further development is necessary to make a signifi cant impact at the consumer level before making a compelling case to transition from the already excellent HD quality.

Increasing screen sizesConsumer TV companies have launched high resolution products worldwide, together with extensive marketing budgets in order to boost maturing HD sales. Against this, several speakers emphasised that improved picture quality is not just about resolution with higher frame rates: extended colour space and high dynamic range all have their part to play.

During the content-packed day, case studies were presented of pilot programming shot in UHD-1 (4K), and under

controlled conditions the results can be stunning. However, one graphic example of the extreme contrast range of a football match combining bright sunlight and shadow, illustrated the potential benefi t of high dynamic range. Also with an assumption that screen sizes are increasing to 50-inches and larger, tolerance to motion judder and blurring reduces, hence the benefi t of higher frame rates.

Clearly the consumer TV manufacturers cannot wait for these developments to mature and incorporate them into the fi rst models. This, together with no fi nalised delivery specifi cations, leaves the possibility of the fi rst generation products being incompatible a few years hence.

Despite consumer promotion and marketing, take-up of higher resolution TV sets is expected to be slow according to Futuresource Consulting with the majority of products being produced and delivered into China’s domestic market.

Better pixels, not just more pixelsAndy Quested from the BBC joined the rally for all-round picture quality improvements, requesting: “Better pixels, not just more pixels,” and listed fi ve points: higher dynamic range, more colour, better audio, appropriate frame rates and

more resolution. His request for “appropriate frame rates” is interesting, indicating that different programme genres may benefi t from different frame rates. This theme for more fl exibility in formats and image parameters was echoed by others throughout the day. Having hardware rigidly constrain users to a predefi ned set of image parameters may not be acceptable in the future. Evolution will continue, and user requirements may vary, so a more fl exible infrastructure will be needed by broadcasters and media companies.

The need for fl exibility led to another important theme and question regarding infrastructure. Will current video and hardware-centric infrastructures support broadcasters’ needs in the future? Should we as an industry embrace more fully IT solutions based upon Internet Protocol and network architectures? It is quite clear these approaches cannot satisfy the needs of live production today, but modifying existing coaxial cable (HD-SDI) interconnects and routers may end up being no more than an expensive interim solution. The needs of the IT industry are such that 10GB and 40GB networks are rapidly becoming commodity solutions and a more fl exible, format-agnostic interconnection alternative to video over co-axial cable.

Trials and experienceWe found that programme trials and the consequent case studies are providing good experience at the operational and technical level. Several presenters suggested that shooting techniques will change, taking advantage of the higher resolution with wider shots. However, we were reminded that the same was said about HD, and that, in fact, very little has changed. It was made clear that, unlike 3D, UHD can be distributed natively or down-converted to provide stunning HD pictures. This will be an important factor when both formats are needed and removes the need for separate production crews. It may however constrain the shooting styles in order to preserve image compatibility.

Fortunately there is hope that UHD will not consume four times the bandwidth of HD, with the emergence of HEVC compression enabling transmission at bitrates with just a modest overhead compared to HD.

Content rulesAs always speakers stressed that “Content rules”, and it is clear that UHD production should

be considered if a programme is to retain its value for the years to come. Broadcasters however are underwhelmed by the prospect of UHD, because many do not have the available bandwidth, the potential for additional income, and therefore no budget for investment. This has left a newcomer, Netfl ix, to be the innovator and provide UHD content through its internet service. Other online service providers will follow. So with this development, internet-delivered video gains yet another small step in credibility.

In conclusion the day proved to be a fascinating glimpse at how far we have come since last year’s event but also presented the feeling that we have two to three years to go before many of the open questions will be answered with workable and economic solutions.

Beyond HD Masters 2014 brings key issues to the tableJohn Ive, IABM director of business development and technology, provides the foreword to our review of the 2014 Beyond HD Masters conference, which examined the challenges and the capabilities of the UHD movement. Conferenece Report by Melanie Dayasena-Lowe

John Ive, Chairman of the Beyond HD Masters

2014 conference

“We have two to three

years to go before many of the open questions will be

answered with workable

and economic solutions”

Having hardware rigidly constrain users to a predefi ned set of image parameters may not be acceptable in the future

THIS YEAR’S keynote Stephan Heimbecher, head of innovations and standards/products and operations, technology, Sky Deutschland, opened the conference by refl ecting on the lessons learned since last year’s Beyond HD Masters event. “A year ago we weren’t quite ready yet to do an Ultra HD [UHD] production live as we would do HD today. But we have advanced,” he explained. Heimbecher told the audience that UHD will require bigger screens to reach and wow the consumer and that bigger displays require different production grammar than for HD.

He went on to talk about Sky Deutschland’s live football trials earlier this year.

“Today, we have continued to focus on all the different aspects in the end-to-end chain. On 26 April in Munich, we were fi nally able to do a full 50p live end-to-end broadcast in UHD with a multi-camera production with HEVC live encoding.” On 17 May, Sky Deutschland completed a second full 50p live end-to-end test in Berlin.

Heimbecher stated: “50p will do for now but we will certainly be benefi ting from higher frame rates in the mid to long-term.

High Dynamic Range [HDR] might help.”

Talking about the demand and awareness of UHD, he believes consumers are anticipating UHD but they are not in a hurry at this point in time. “People are very well aware of UHD but they are also well aware of the lack of UHD content. People know there are sets out there but feel they are still too expensive. They would

like to see a full conversion to HD fi rst before they see anything else.”

One of the questions from the audience was about Sky Deutschland’s plan for 2015 in terms of 4K transmission. Heimbecher responded: “We’re working hard to start a service at some point in time. We think it needs more ingredients to come to a point where what you end up with

on the screen is something that people pass by and say ‘this is what I need and is so much better than what I have at home’. If we rush too fast to the market with something that is technically UHD, especially with the scepticism people already have, I think we have to be very careful.”

Why 4K?Jack Wetherill, senior market analyst at Futuresource Consulting, looked at what’s driving 4K. He highlighted that this time last year only four models of 4K TV sets were available in the UK. “The message was 4K will come. It’s going to be on very high-end TV sets and prices will remain quite high in the mid-term.” By March 2014 20 models were available in the UK and by the end of May 2014 there were 30-plus.

Awareness of 4K TV sets is encouraging. The Futuresource ‘Living with Digital’ consumer research found that 44 per cent of consumers in France, Germany and the UK are aware of 4K/UHD TVs. When asked if they would be interested in buying a 4K set with improved


Future resolution

Chairman John Ive introduces Beyond HD Masters 2014

TVBEurope’s Beyond HD Masters 2014 conference, held at London’s BAFTA in June, generated informative debates around the topic of 4K and prompted the question of whether it is an interim format. Conference report by Melanie Dayasena-Lowe

Q. Should we go beyond 4K?A: Ruth Sessions, director of operations, Atlantic Productions

“When working with 4K we were only looking at broadcast delivery in HD and 4K for the giant screen. Now we’re creating 4K TV masters. Not because anyone needs them yet but we’re future proofi ng. If we could afford to work in 8K that would be great.”

Q: Is a higher resolution bringing 3D closer?A: Duncan Humphreys, head of broadcast and content acquisition, Stream TV Networks

“8K, 12K, that’s all in the pipeline. I don’t think 3D is dead. It’s sleeping.

Live 3D conversion from a 4K source is going to be very exciting territory.”

A: Claus Pfeifer, strategic marketing manager, live production, Sony Europe

“4K is the format where I see practical production happening in the short-term. 8K is still a long time away.”

A: David Wood, chair, DVB CM – UHDTV and DM – 3DTV

“Even if it is six to eight years until 8K comes along, is it really worth changing our whole infrastructure to 4K now for something that’s only going to last six to eight years?”

What does the future hold?

The fi nal panel discussion of the day debate whether higher resolution is bringing 3D closer and ask if we should go beyond 4K?

picture quality over their HD set, 42 per cent were reasonably/very interested in doing so while 26 per cent were adverse to buying such a set.

Wetherill asked how 4K content is going to get to the home. “There’s a lot of talk about OTT and online services… will there be enough content out there and will the online providers be able to get their hands on it?”

According to Wetherill, 4K is a ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. “Streaming sources will be the key source of content while pay TV/packaged media gear up their propositions. Upscaling capabilities of TV sets themselves will be a stop gap measure for many years to come.”

The IP connectionClaus Pfeifer, strategic marketing manager, live production at Sony Europe, believes 4K and IP are interrelated. “We would like to have a system that is in the broadcasting centre and have the fl exibility to connect everything via IP, plus the possibility to connect to remote locations like regional stadiums/sites. That means a future-proofed IP-based system needs to be decentralised with one cable for all signals and routing of sources without glitches in video etc.”

Commenting on better pixels, he said: “We all want this, but I’m worried that it’s an ‘either-or’ discussion at the moment.”

Sounding off Later in the day, talk turned to the area of next generation audio. Dr Frank Melchior, head of audio research, BBC R&D, assessed the volume of innovations available from an audio standpoint. “We have a massive variety of devices but how we deliver audio to these devices today is more like the smallest common denominator (stereo or surround) rather than taking advantage of these devices and giving the audience a better experience.”

As a public broadcaster, he explained how the BBC wants to deliver a new digital live experience on a variety of devices. “We want to do it in an intelligent way so we want to create content that goes much beyond just a linear piece of broadcasting. So we want content that adapts to the environment.”

He feels that the next generation of audio will be responsive and/or immersive.

“I found it encouraging that the next generation system will probably be an object-based sound system,” he added.

Bert Van Daele, CTO, Auro Technologies, spoke about the company’s Auro 3D product, which is about immersive 3D sound.

“Immersive sound also increases the emotional connection to what happens on screen. That’s the same for TV productions.”

Van Daele said the ultimate goal in audio recording has always been the most natural, immersive listening experience.

He also compared object-based versus channel-based audio. Object-based allows for maximum fl exibility while channel-based allows for the best audio quality and maximum artistic control.

Rob France, senior product marketing manager, Dolby Europe, also discussed object-based audio and how far it can go. “It’s a key opportunity that as we look at the transition to 4K it will be really disappointing if we miss.” He highlighted that stereo has to be the forefront of our thinking.

France also stressed that we need to give consumers access to the content in a way that works best for them. “The only audio setting consumers understand today is volume.

“We have to think about bringing the next generation of immersive surround sound into the home” he remarked.


Q: What’s your take on delivery?A: Simon Parnall, director, new initiatives, service provider video software and solutions, Cisco.

“We’ve been doing some interesting work on how we think TV might evolve in the home. We’ve been looking at opportunities afforded by new display technology, particularly technology that is unobtrusive and immersive. We feel one of the opportunities of the next few years is to break out of this world where this box dominated the corner of the room.”

Q: The rate of change of standards is so quick, how can we apply them?A: Andy Quested, head of technology for HD and UHD, BBC

“We think about standards that will allow us to fi nish a programme. If you have a four-year natural history

programme, you could have a different TV standard from one to another so we do have to think about the longevity of a standard.”

Q: Should we bring 4K and 8K in parallel?SP: “We need to ask the question: what is the modality for television in the future? Young people are quite happy to use an iPad as their TV and the different ways of watching television need to work together.”

Q: How long has SD delivery got to go?AQ: “Standard defi nition will never go but will exist in IP terms based on bandwidth and requirements. Resolution is just another variable from mobile phones to 8K. I think the question is, how long will MPEG-2 last?”

A: Simon Gauntlett, technology director, DTG

“How do we migrate DTT platforms to something more effi cient? We want this fl exibility because we want to have different

content that has different requirements and is targeted at different devices. We need to think about what we’re delivering the content to and how best to make the design for those types of devices.”

IN A series of quick-fi re presentations, speakers from the BBC, ARRI and Dolby Laboratories discussed the area of enhanced Ultra HD.

The BBC’s Andy Quested, head of technology for high defi nition and ultra-high defi nition, said the public broadcaster does not believe UHD will take off just on the grounds of resolution. “We see it as a family of requirements. We believe just adding more pixels isn’t enough,” he added.

Milan Krsljanin, business development manager, ARRI, spoke about the company’s offering on show in the exhibition area at BAFTA on the day of the event.

“This year we wanted to do something to push the boundary.” Showing natural history material, Krsljanin explained that the images

are all documentary style, acquired with its new camera Amira. “The essence of the exercise was to show how important the dynamic range of the sensor is in capturing as much of the highlights and tone etc in order to achieve and fully utilise the device.”

Prinyar Boon, director of system architecture, Dolby Laboratories, told the audience that his company had been shooting HDR material using Alexa cameras for several years.

He explained that Dolby had carried out acceptance tests where users could turn the brightness up and down and decide where to set blacks etc. The fi ndings showed that viewers want 200 times more brightness and 4,000 times more contrast than current television standards.

Enhanced Ultra HD

What’s missing in the standards debate?

The panel addresses the rate of change of standards and how we can apply them

44 per cent of consumers in France, Germany and the UK are aware of 4K/UHD TVs — Futuresource ‘Living with Digital’ consumer research

“If we could aff ord to work in 8K that would be great”

Ruth Sessions, director of operations,

Atlantic Productions

Delegates learn more about Ultra HD, the standards debate, and next generation audio among other topics

What will it take for broadcasters to go 4K?In a panel discussion, the recurring theme touched upon was the availability of 4K content.

Mark Wilson-Dunn, VP sales and marketing at BT Media and Broadcast, said that until content in the right formats is widely available, it will halt adoption. “Content has to be there and content has to be good.”

Duncan Humphreys, head of broadcast and content acquisition at Stream TV Networks, said: “There’s a lot to be learned from the 3D experience for 4K. One of the problems with 3D was content. 4K content is there in a varied form and able to attract viewers. But there’s not going to be a compelling argument to start a channel.

“It’s going to have to fi nancially work. I’m not sure it will be an instant uptake. Will it be 4K or will there be a jump?” Humphreys asked.

The panel discussed whether it could be a 4K sports channel that gets up and running fi rst.

David Wood, chair, DVB CM — UHDTV and DM — 3DTV, said: “Sport is something you want to be present at. You want to be in that stadium. That’s why it’s a great marriage with UHDTV.”

Wilson-Dunn added: “It’s a great hook to get the technology out there and for people to buy into it. The danger if you go down the single channel route or the sports route is that you actually switch a lot of people off because it becomes another gimmick. It has got to be something that becomes mainstream and appeals to everybody.”

And will internet delivery to the consumer help broadcasters get their content out?

Wilson-Dunn remarked: “I’m a great believer in the linear TV experience. Broadband delivery over the internet is growing rapidly but it’s a choice. Internet delivery has probably got some way to go.”

Wilfried Dudink, product marketing manager, cloud services, EMEA, Level 3, noted that online services are becoming more popular. “The younger generation are increasingly watching OTT.”

On the topic of whether 4K becomes geographically niche, Wilson-Dunn discussed the situation in Japan. “They have the infrastructure to go 4K now. NHK is looking at skipping 4K and going straight to 8K. Culturally, in Japan, Korea and Singapore, it’s very well established as a genre.”

Production valuesRuth Sessions, director of operations, Atlantic Productions, shared her insight into David Attenborough’s Natural History Museum Alive project. It is Atlantic Productions’ fi fth 4K shot project and third mastered in 4K.

“It’s not all about TV. Who’s going to be watching 4K? For us it’s a multi-platform approach. Our stereo 3D projects have all been shot 4K, apart from one, and most will be giant screen projects,” she explained.

Sessions said the biggest lesson she had learnt from doing 4K for four years is that it is all about planning. “4K has brought us back to fi rst principles. It’s all about storytelling. We’ve got more to play with and more depth to play with 4K.”

Simon Parnall, director new initiatives, service provider video software and solutions, Cisco, took a look at how television might emerge in the home. “There’s a belief that television will migrate from being a box in the corner of the room and when it does you have a new opportunity.”

He also considered what degree of immersion is required for all types of content.

“TV will be unobtrusive. Why should television be one size fi ts all? Part of the grammar of TV needs to be the ability to change its immersion level for television to be able to have additional apps and elements around the picture. This is where TV can be enhanced and can be immersive or where television can be peripheral.”

Talking about his experiences with 4K, Richard Mills, CTO, ONSIGHT, feels 4K technology is mature. His company has been shooting for 4K archive, HD and 4K delivery since 2009-2010 and his clients wanted longevity of the archive by shooting in 4K.

Considerations include choosing a 4K camera, making sure the camera system is working for the production to deliver high quality content, plus having a reasonably good workfl ow. He also added that lenses and focus are absolutely critical.

“When it comes to post, is there enough storage and speed of storage?” he asked.


The TVBEurope team would like to extend our sincere thanks to all our Beyond HD Masters sponsors.

Gold Plus sponsorsSony

Ericsson

Gold sponsorsScreen Systems

Blackmagic DesignARRI

Toshiba

Silver sponsorOmniTek

A thank you to our sponsors

“8K, 12K that’s all in the pipeline. I don’t think 3D is dead. It’s sleeping. Live 3D conversion from a 4K source is going to be very exciting territory”

Duncan Humphreys, head of broadcast and content acquisition, Stream TV Networks

After a productive and informative day, delegates relax at the networking drinks

Visitors take a look around the exhibition area at Beyond HD Masters 2014, held at London’s BAFTA


Stephan Heimbecher, Sky Deutschland:

“People are very well aware of UHD but they are also well

aware of the lack of UHD content”

ALISON HUTCHINS, senior propositions manager at BT Media and Broadcast, discussed the company’s recent experiences with 4K. In June last year, BT was asked to broadcast complex UHD content encoded live, transmitted internationally and shown on large UHD displays to audiences at the IBC show in Amsterdam.

Along with partners Ericsson, Sony, Telegenic, Intelsat, Newtec, BT Media and Broadcast produced two demonstrations at the trade show. The first was a pre-recorded football match looped and played out from BT Tower for the duration of the show. Then on Sunday it switched to a Saracens versus Gloucester rugby match produced and transmitted live from the stadium in North West London to the IBC show for the duration of the match.

The demos showed that UHD looks great for sports content and Hutchins said the BT network handled the signals easily. The biggest challenges were in production such as understanding how to shoot the match with just three cameras and how the encoders deal with fast moving action at 60fps.

As one of the partner companies, Ericsson’s Fabio Murra, head of TV compression product marketing, discussed what consumers are looking for from 4K. “What consumers will be willing to pay for is a better TV experience than what we have today in HD services.”

He also reiterated the importance of immersion and a better sense of realism of being there. “Larger screens today are possible and will fill 60 per cent of our field of vision giving us a more immersive experience.”

Sports in 4K

AS EUROPE re-emerges from its economic doldrums, advertising revenues should at last see an upturn due to rising consumer confidence and disposable incomes. Of course, while the majority of television operators will benefit from this recovery given TV’s cyclical bias, the real winners will be: (i) those providing a superior schedule of programming, which can drive market share gains in their relevant geographies and; (ii) those that can retain financial discipline and maintain an efficient cost base to yield the benefits of the operational leverage available.

Getting the right content in place and having security on programming rights over the longer-term can be easier said than done and recent activity in new programming deals is evidence of this. In addition, there has been some noteworthy mergers and acquisition activity in the TV sector.

We believe that further consolidation is likely. Some of the recent deals in the media sector highlight the race to secure programming in an attempt by operators to best position themselves for the recovery in Europe. Outside of M&A deals, there has been some change of rights in some high profile, premium content.

Encouraging trends in advertising continues across EuropeThere is increased confidence in the recovering advertising markets in Europe, and while there is a boost this year as a result of the World Cup, outside of that, underlying trends still continue to point to an improving backdrop. Looking at the UK and Ireland markets, growth has returned to advertising and UTV has highlighted strong growth coming off its Irish TV and radio businesses as markets

that were particularly depressed during the downturn begin to benefit. For example, reported figures from the Broadcasting Authority in Ireland show TV advertising declined by 43 per cent between the peak in 2007 and the low of 2012, while GDP has decreased by nine per cent. If we apply the factor to the upside, as European economies recover, we will surely see a considerable portion of that lost revenue return, albeit some structural issues will also have an impact, such as the move to digital advertising.

Generally, the Western European advertising market as a whole is expected to grow in the region of two to three per cent in 2014. Within this, some countries are expected to deliver an outperformance, such as the UK, Ireland and Spain. Other peripheral countries look like they too will contribute to the growth for Europe, with Greece expected to accelerate growth

into 2014 and 2015, while more recently, Italy has returned to modest growth after a poor performance in 2013, when it was down more than ten per cent.

Of course, given the recovery and the cyclicality of TV, operators will want to increase their exposure either through increasing scale or by having the best content in place to win the more attractive advertising deals.

Recent programming deals highlight increased competition for premium content rightsIn the UK, rights for the Champions League have passed from Sky to BT as the latter tries to establish itself in the TV market. In Ireland, we have seen Sky make a move to secure market share by obtaining the rights to some of Ireland’s popular GAA match coverage. Also in Ireland, we have seen UTV (the number one TV

broadcaster in Northern Ireland by market share) announce its plans to launch UTV Ireland in the Republic in January 2015. One of the key drivers behind the launch was the group’s ability to secure exclusive rights to ITV Studios content in the Republic of Ireland from 2015. The incumbent holder of the rights, commercial broadcaster TV3, is now left in a difficult position as it must replace some of its key programming such as Coronation Street and Emmerdale (in addition to losing GAA rights to Sky as noted, although it has secured domestic rights to the 2015 Rugby World Cup).

Operators that have exercised financial discipline are best placed to benefit from market consolidationThe financial strength of a company will be critical to ensure security over content, whether that is having the capacity to outbid other leaders in the space for premium content, or having the ability to produce its own. Fortunately for the most part, the media sector as a whole is continuing to reduce debt levels on its balance sheets, particularly as

Feature www.tvbeurope.com July 201434 TVBEurope

Mergers and acquisitions in a recovering EuropeThis issue, we turn our attention to the M&A activity that has swept through the industry in 2014, bringing about a market consolidation that is set to continue, at least in short-term. Rachael Cairns, media analyst at Goodbody Stockbrokers, offers an assessment of the recovering European market, and which companies are best placed to engineer growth in the current climate

advertising markets recover.Given the diffi culties within the industry over the past number of years, operators — such as UTV and ITV, for example — have taken considerable costs out of their businesses, leaving them with a much more effi cient business model. This cost effi ciency has led to higher operational gearing available in their businesses. In the case of UTV, Goodbody estimates that this is up to 80 per cent of revenue converting to profi t within TV. Therefore, with the support of an improving environment, with all else being equal, cash generation should improve, helping to pay down debt further. As this deleveraging continues, the availability of credit improves; companies are likely to continue to scope out the large deals (where media ownership rules allow) that can provide synergies, such as the BSkyB, Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland proposal. On a smaller scale, companies may look to acquire some of the independent content producers, helping to secure

content for the longer-term and possibly add another stream of revenue if they can sell the programming rights overseas.

TV giants snap up the independentsOn the other hand, rather than running the risk associated with short-term contracts for content and pricing risks around renewals, operators can buy up independent production companies with time-proven formats and content. However, the risk now becomes the lifespan of this content and whether it proves to be a hit with audiences long enough to justify the investments made. Therefore, this may not always be the most attractive proposition for operators. Additionally, the prices commanded by premium content producers could signifi cantly impact the risk-return ratio. In May, we saw the acquisition of All3Media by Discovery Communications in a joint venture with Liberty Global (a £550 million deal, 8.5x EV/EBITDA) and we

also saw ITV acquire Leftfi eld, a US-based content producer for $360 million (plus an agreement for additional payments should the company meet certain targets), which represented 9.5x EV/EBITDA. These compare to an average transaction multiple of c.7-7.5x EV/EBITDA. Both of these deals highlight an increasing appetite for content ownership.

M&A activity within the operator space highlights confi dence in the European marketWithin the operators’ space, the most notable recent M&A activity has included Viacom’s acquisition of Channel 5 in the UK for £450 million.

Viacom is aiming to increase and enhance the programming content on the channel with the help of its resources, in a bid to increase its exposure to valuable audiences. Also, BSkyB’s recent proposal to acquire 21st Century Fox’s stakes in Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland in a reported c. £8 billion deal that would

allow synergy benefi ts whilst also increasing

exposure to a cyclical recovery, particularly in Italy.

Content is kingIn summary, holding rights to audience-grabbing content will be one of the major factors determining TV

operators’ ability to take full advantage

of the cyclical recovery in European advertising

markets. However, this could prove expensive if target

content, such as key sporting events, is bid to levels which already price-in aggressive growth assumptions to generate a return. Similarly, acquiring premium content producers, or indeed investing more into high quality proprietary content, can be uncertain given risks around audience retention. Companies with deleveraging balance sheets and high operational gearing are best placed to benefi t in the long-term.

FeatureTVBEurope 35July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

“Holding rights to

audience-grabbing content will be one of the major factors

determining TV operators’ ability to take full advantage

of the cyclical recovery in European

advertising markets”

ONE OF the significant announcements that emerged around NAB this year involved the acquisition of UK company AmberFin by Paris-based Dalet Digital Media Systems. Dalet is one of the best known providers of Media Asset Management (MAM) solutions, software and services for broadcasters and content providers, while AmberFin specialises in video ingest, complex media manipulation, transcoding and quality control (QC) solutions. It is estimated that the annual turnover of the combined operation will be more than $55 million.

The melding of different companies and operations has become quite commonplace over recent months — and there are always good reasons for the moves. But what specifically is the rationale behind this particular acquisition?

“Some of the recent merger activity has been driven by venture capital backers seeking greater efficiency in the company’s core operations and to reduce cost wherever this is possible,” states Raoul Cospen, Dalet’s director of marketing. “At Dalet, the motivations are very different. The one main goal? Combining the workflow expertise of Dalet on one side, and the media expertise of AmberFin on the other. AmberFin is well known for the quality of its products. Together, we are creating the best in class MAM/workflow/video platform for the high end broadcast and electronic media markets.”

He says that behind each good consolidation there must be a real industrial project with a match at the technology and product levels, and most importantly, staff that bring value and know-how.

Customer benefit“It’s important to understand what’s in the DNA of Dalet in order to explain the AmberFin

acquisition. The Dalet goal is not to become the biggest company in the world with thousands of employees sitting behind their desks. What we are trying to achieve is the development of a product line that brings real value and genuine benefits to our customers. This motivation is really about the long term customer relationship and solving complex business problems. In short, we will be

able to offer our customers a wider functional coverage

with truly global reach.”Cospen stresses his

next point. “I want to emphasise that we are continuing the AmberFin product line. There is no question — we will

maintain the support for, and development of, the iCR

product line.”Bruce Devlin, CTO at

Amberfin, and now chief media scientist at Dalet explains more. “This is a significant move. For AmberFin it is a great business enabler. Dalet is a much bigger company with more reach and more leverage than AmberFin. Simply put, this will help us find more customers who need what AmberFin has to offer. And yes, the Amberfin name survives. The brand is seen as valuable by everyone, and we intend to continue offering packaged, easy to install transcode, ingest and QC software under that name.”

Cospen adds, “Customers will have a wider choice of products, but also more technology and better quality. Let me give an example. AmberFin is spending a lot of R&D effort on video quality and, specifically, the AT3 toolbox, which is capable of making pictures look better. Whether a conversion requires de-interlacing or converting from US standards to European standards, there are unique algorithms that make the image quality better than any other products. But in the end, the objective of Dalet and AmberFin is the same — to provide solutions that allow customers to produce more, at better quality, with a lower cost of operations, and to seamlessly deliver more content to more devices. It is all about making customers’ operations faster and more profitable.”

Company benefitThat’s the overview, but how specifically will it help the two businesses? According to Cospen there are several sides to this. “First of all, at the technology level, we will integrate AmberFin components into Dalet Brio and Dalet Galaxy.

The other way around, AmberFin is currently integrating some Galaxy components. At the company level, it adds new talents in the organisation. Dalet is growing, and we welcome those new talents that we need for presales,

sales, project and support. Finally, we offer a wider choice of products to our customers. They will definitely benefit from it.”

Devlin picks up the point about customer benefit. “They will see more AmberFin products in Dalet workflows and more Dalet metadata in AmberFin workflows. Customers will always retain the power to choose. We believe that Dalet MAM plus AmberFin processing cannot be beaten. The customer can choose to use different transcoders in a Dalet MAM and they can choose to put AmberFin transcoders in their own MAM. They can also mix and match to their hearts content to get the best solution.”

He adds, “The opportunities for merging talent are awesome. Each company has had different


Dalet’s deal is a dream come trueMergers and acquisitions have been a highlight of the broadcast industry during the past 12 months. Philip Stevens talks to the two key players in one of the most recent deals

The acquisition of AmberFin by Dalet was announced at NAB this year

“This is a significant

move. For AmberFin, it is a great business

enabler” Bruce Devlin,

Amberfin

Bruce Devlin, CTO at Amberfin, chief media

scientist, Dalet

specialities over the years. We can see a great chance to use that talent and experience in a bigger range of products, solutions and services that will really excite customers.”

Merging: a good idea?Some of the recent merger activity has been driven by venture capital backers seeking greater effi ciency in a company’s core operations and to reduce cost wherever this is possible. And that’s a perfectly laudable aim. But as these consolidations seem to be a growing part of the broadcast industry, are they really a good thing?

“My belief is that they can be either good or bad depending on the drivers that led to the acquisition taking place,” maintains Cospen. “Are the motives the investment in the long-term or are the companies driven by more short-term fi nancial considerations? To really understand what is going on — and therefore what are the medium and long-term implications for the company and its ability to support the growth and development of their customers’ operations — you must look at each transaction closely.”

Devlin believes that, in general, consolidations are a good thing. “During these times of very rapid change within the industry, it is diffi cult for any one company to be master of every aspect of the end-to-end value chain and simultaneously innovate in every area. I think, over the next few years, we will see continued acquisitions and mergers as corporations attempt to broaden their technology portfolios to be masters of the new media value chain that is developing.”

Integrating technologiesOne of the ‘buzz’ words — or perhaps ‘buzz’ phrases — around at the moment is ‘seamless integration’. And according to Cospen, such integration makes good business sense — in fact, it is key. “At Dalet, we have more than 100 existing integrations with traffi c systems, automation systems, NLEs, graphics engines, transcoders and so on. It is important to mention that we will keep all our products open and, where possible, based on open standards. For example, if you want to integrate your Dalet MAM system with another transcoder, we will support it. If you want to integrate your AmberFin transcoder into another MAM, we will support it. We believe in the power of open standards and customer choice.”

“But this goes even beyond transcoding. Dalet is committed to FIMS, and to standards in general. Integration is a critical component of our solution.”

Devlin agrees, “‘Seamless Integration’ happens when people think similarly and products mesh easily. Dalet and

AmberFin have been working together for years before the acquisition, and we have similar ideas about stable APIs and good design. From our customers’ perspective, our already seamless integrations should be even more seamless in the future.”

Watch this spaceWith the acquisition now a given — and the two operations merged — what can we expect to see in the way of new products or services over the next six to 12 months?

Devlin says that both Dalet and AmberFin will be making new product announcements in the run-up to IBC. “You will see some exciting developments around our image processing and partners, as well as further developments in the scalable farm technology that we have already deployed around the world.”

Cospen adds, “Plus, we are creating a new division that focuses on off-the-shelf products that will be distributed through channels. To hear more, you’ll have to wait until IBC!”

Cospen concludes, “You know, combining the best of AmberFin’s media technology and the best of Dalet’s metadata technology is a dream come true.” www.amberfi n.com


Raoul Cospen, Dalet’s director of marketing

It is estimated that the annual turnover of the combined operation will be more than $55 million

“It is all about making

customers’ operations faster

and more profi table”

Raoul Cospen,Dalet

NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN

for more informationvisit www.tvb-awards.com

For more information please contact:

[email protected]

For European sponsorshipopportunities contact:

[email protected]@intentmedia.co.uk

[email protected]@intentmedia.co.uk

+44 (0)20 7354 6000

For US sponsorship opportunities contact:

[email protected]+1 631 673 0072

Book tickets

NOWwww.tvb-awards.com

ERICSSON HAS 110,000 employees. It has customers in 180 nations. It manages over a billion mobile subscribers. It has scaled these mighty peaks with a steady stream of acquisitions that progressed from Tandberg and Mobeon, to Optimi, Telcordia, Bel Air Networks, Technicolor Broadcast Services, Concept Wave, the IPTV platform Microsoft Mediaroom, and TV anywhere specialist Azuki Systems. Then came the long closure game for Red Bee Media, which coincided with dozens of mergers and acquisitions in the media market. Was this part of an industry-wide readjustment for the media battles ahead?

“There are always multiple reasons but if you look at our customer base it is also consolidating very fast,” said Frost. “If it was NAB and you were looking US centric you had Comcast/Time Warner, you had DirecTV/AT&T (announced but not closed) and you had Vodaphone with its cash spree (Kabel Deutschland).

“Our own media customers are consolidating, and they are doing so for two key reasons. One is for the delivery technology to the home. All of those powerful players need an IP strategy to the home for the future of connected TV and two-way delivery of content,” he added. “Powerful satellite-based platforms really need IP strategies as much as anyone else, and obviously cable is looking at IP. So reason one is about having the right delivery capabilities to the home.”

The other reason is just pure scale, and it involves new entrants. “These start-ups, like the Netflix’s of this world, come into this market with exclusive content. We all know the classic model of bidding for exclusive content, so the price of quality content is only going to go up as more players bring in new money,” said Frost.

“The scale you have in revenues drives the scale of the investment you can bring, both in technology, but more

importantly in content. The more exclusive content you have the more subscribers you drive, so it is a virtual circle and it is quite a hard one to crack as a new entrant,” he added. “It is a big price ticket to come in as a new entrant. That is why we are seeing so much industry consolidation, and I think that is part of the reason you are

seeing vendors in this space also make strategic acquisitions to build out their portfolios in strategic ways.”

Red Bee was a huge deal because it takes Ericsson closer to the content services end of the business. “Yes it is huge,” agrees Frost. “Ericsson is pretty well known in TV given the equity transfer of brand from Tandberg TV, but yet it could still be stronger. It is strong in its core market of Pay TV particularly. Red Bee, along with the Technicolor part acquisition, has really spread that recognition for Ericsson far more towards the content creation side of the market.

“We have yet to see how that plays out. If you look at the Mediaroom acquisition there is a lot of design experience from a UI/user experience point of view – labs that are looking at the next generation of discovery mechanisms for content and how you interact with content,” he added. “You have also got our consumer lab TV studies that we do, so I think we see the whole thing adding to the melting pot.”

Continuing to delight the consumerThis led to Ericsson’s plan to publish six Game Changer white papers by the end of this year, the first being ‘Forever Evolving Experience’.


The game changerSimon Frost joined Ericsson in 2007, when Tandberg TV was acquired. He is now the head of marketing for Ericsson’s TV business sector. George Jarrett talked to Frost about the wave of consolidations announced around NAB, IP strategies, consumer perceptions, the impact of new market entrants, and Red Bee – a corporate marriage made in heaven

Simon Frost “Powerful satellite-based platforms really need IP strategies, and cable is looking at IP” Simon Frost

“The key piece for this was our analysis of the fact that consumer expectations will continually evolve,” explained Frost. “Our message to the market is to most people in the media value chain but it is sharpest for pay TV operators. That’s the point where you are trying to justify the amount of money you are charging a subscriber for a package service, but it is equally relevant for a broadcaster that’s trying to drive viewership and wants advertising revenues.”

The primary message concerns the consumer’s perception of the value of any content delivery. “It is continuing to shift. We started to see some cord cutting and shaping in the US based on key heavily bundled packages of services – linear channels,” said Frost. “The consumer is just going to keep evolving. You are going to have to keep re-assessing your business model because frustration could cause challenges to the revenue you will earn in the future. That is the key piece we are trying to get across, and part of it is about continuing to delight the consumer with the ultimate in content.

“In a way, we see it as two aspects from the experience. The discovery of content is an opportunity and a frustration element to consumers today in a more connected world. I can do this on iPlayer on my connected TV but I cannot do that on my Skybox. There is an opportunity to make this much better, so

I think discovery is one key aspect,” he added. “What was the interaction with content itself will evolve with social media networks, with being persistently connected with mobile. The creative side of the TV business can start to explore the programming format itself, of how to leverage technology for making content more immersive for a consumer.”

There is a huge desire to create great ‘fi lmic’ content, so much so that budget-wise, top drama is running at £1 million an hour. Series like Happy Valley and True Detective have

set new standards, but will budgets hold?

“There is a strong potential that we will see the cost of content going up because more people keep appearing. It is the way into the market if you are a new entrant. Just look at BT Sport, for example: you drive exclusivity on rights for some of it, and if you look at the Netfl ix example, you commission your own content. Entry is either buying the rights to something or commissioning something you think will be compelling,” said

Frost. “The quality of content will go up in the premium areas. That is the most compelling stuff and that’s the thing people would be prepared to pay for, change their lifestyle for.”

The reclamation of spectrumWhat casts the bad shadows on the market? One issue we never hear the end of is ‘spectrum grabbing’.

“I do not know whether we would say spectrum is an issue. Spectrum is a valuable bit of real estate that most governments are looking to leverage for the common good,” said Frost. “But what we are

mainly seeing is the discussion between the reclamation of spectrum that has been typically used for terrestrial broadcasting for mobile broadband. The EU approach is about harmonising bits of spectrum for that, and if you look more long-term, is broadcasting – and I mean the technology of broadcasting in the UHF spectrum – the single most important way of reaching consumers? To a broadcaster it is important, and it will be important for a long time, but even if you look at

the UK example we now have connected TV platforms.

“We have got YouView, and globally in many other countries you have HbbTV for platforms. There are now linear channels appearing on the internet, to an internet delivered platform, so linear broadcasting does not have to be through the UHF spectrum. And we are seeing consumers shifting ever more to wanting on demand access to content,” he added.

Red Bee puts Ericsson closer to traditional broadcasters. It can put in elements like portfolio, business scale and

insight from being a world leader in managed services for Telcos. What picture does Frost see here?

“We are effectively one of the world’s largest mobile operators for our customers, so we have a lot of best practices expertise with how to do managed services. So a lot of the logic for getting in there (Red Bee) was that we could bring a lot of ethics for best practice into broadcast,” he said.

“Broadcast itself is quite fragmented; each broadcaster

does things in different ways and there are many broadcasters doing their own thing. In a world where those challenges are only going to increase, trying to address connected devices and play services and smart TVs is ever more technologically challenging for a broadcaster. We have a lot of insights across how each technology is going — mobile networks, devices — and a lot of expertise around the challenges broadcasters will face,” he added. “All of them have an aspiration to be on all of these new devices, delivering over the internet, and meeting the challenges of producing great quality experiences for consumers. They also want to leverage their business internationally as much as possible. They have scale challenges and technology challenges that we have a lot of insight into.”

Mobile traffi c growth to jump tenfoldWill the internet stand everything heaped on it? Will the mobile companies carry so much video content that they quickly exhaust the spectrum they grab from broadcasters?

“I don’t think we will exhaust anything. Spectrum is a slightly separate discussion. Mobile traffi c growth is going to jump ten times between now and 2019. There is going to be a quadrupling of the amount of people on the internet through mobile – going from two billion to eight billion mobile broadband subscribers globally,” Frost explained.

“The fi xed internet is pretty much capped, just teetering around one billion, but with the massive growth in mobile will the internet sustain the demand for video consumption as it is? No it will not. But what is already happening but needs to cement itself a little more is what the industry is actually doing: the people who want to distribute quality experiences on the internet need to assist the engineering of that network to guarantee their ambitions,” he added. “The content industry has happily become part of this network society and the connected world. Groups that were representing the content owners and broadcasters are coming together with the people that made an effort to understand the ecosystems and understand the devices, because that’s what they need in the future.”


THE BURGEONING trend in mergers and acquisition activity continued as forecast in June, as global broadcast technology provider BroadStream Solutions acquired OASYS, the automated playout software technology specialist, for an undisclosed fee. The deal will see the consolidation of all operations under a global holding company, enabling BroadStream Solutions to expand its global reach to markets in which OASYS is currently active. The deal is also seen as a vehicle to enhance the position of OASYS products in the US.

Mark Errington, BroadStream Solutions’ CEO, explained, “The acquisition is great news for both OASYS and BroadStream customers who now have access to a wider range of products. The broadcast industry is undergoing a transformation, spurred by consolidation in the market sector, changes in customer consumption habits, spreading of advertising revenues, changing broadcaster

budgets and rapidly updating technology. Now BroadStream and OASYS have joined forces, we are well placed to ensure that our customers gain maximum ROI, with better long-term fl exibility of products, that can be reconfi gured as channel requirements and workfl ows change.”

The owners of both companies, Mark Errington and Herbert Brenninkmeijer (OASYS) will remain as senior leaders within the business, with Errington assuming the role of CEO at BroadStream Solutions and Brenninkmeijer remaining chairman of the board. BroadStream is also making a series of additional appointments to support business growth and reinforce its ongoing strength and innovation in customer service.

In terms of integration, the team at OASYS will be consumed into the new entity, with the company’s products being brought into the wider portfolio to become the basis of all playout innovation in the future.

BroadStream Solutions deal adds to M&A activity

“We will see more quality content at the high end as more money comes into the industry and more people commission exclusive content to drive exclusivity for them” Simon Frost

Mark Errington, CEO, BroadStream Solutions

“IMAGINE COMMUNICATIONS is laser-focused on leading the industry to a future defi ned by IP, software, the cloud and TV Everywhere, with an architecture vision for delivering and monetising multiscreen content,” said Charlie Vogt, CEO of Imagine Communications, on announcing the deal to acquire Digital Rapids in April.

It is an acquisition that demonstrates Imagine’s commitment to the enhancement of its TV Everywhere portfolio, and its wider campaign to pioneer change in the industry. As Digital Rapids CEO, Brick Eksten put it, “Imagine Communications is strategically positioned to transform the media and entertainment industry through innovations in IP, software-defi ned workfl ows and virtualisation.”

If the industry isn’t exactly ‘laser-focused’ on a future defi ned by digital parameters, then it is at least accepting of the necessity to engage with the technologies, solutions and platforms that will form the basis of the future industry. The mergers and acquisitions activity we have seen this year is a refl ection of this, with more investments in multiscreen and ‘next gen’ entities only likely to increase.

Indeed, the $7.2 million investment by 3TS Capital Partners in OTT and multiscreen solutions provider, Visual Unity, provides the most recent example, and while at the other end of the value spectrum, is no less signifi cant for the companies

involved. This is particularly the case for Visual Unity, for whom the $7.2 million investment will signifi cantly enhance the growth of its vuMedia™ product. CEO, Tomas Petru, told TVBEurope about the signifi cance of the deal itself, and its timing in the growth of the company.

“The investment is defi nitely a cornerstone for the growth of the company, and comes at an ideal time,” he explained. “Digital mobility has changed all aspects of communication, education and entertainment, and visual communication (including both video and audio) is key part of that. Even though there are companies that have raised larger amounts of money than us, we feel the competition is weak — not just because they don’t have as robust a product, but also because they don’t have entertainment and TV technology experience, which

is key. So, this investment puts us in the best possible position and gives us the power to create an even bigger group of

happy, profi table customers.”

That investment will be used primarily to bolster the growth of an already robust vuMedia™ platform that is based on

“200 man-years” of code, and to

allow the company more valuable time

with its customers. “The aim of this investment

is to give us more face time with our customers,” Petru continued. “This will allow us to present vuMedia as the solution that meets their needs in the developing world of individualised media

communication. It will also allow us to expand our customer service so that we are even more accessible to support our customers.”

As an investing partner, 3TS Capital Partners brings plenty to the table in terms of pedigree for technical investments. The growth capital technology fund’s investment in Visual Unity comes from its Cisco, ENRD, EIF and OTP backed growth capital fund that specialises in fast growing technology companies, and will see 3TS acquire a minority stake in the company. Petru explained the involvement of 3TS in the concept and delivery of the company’s strategy going forward.

“Our goal was to get a partner, not just funds, and

we have achieved that with 3TS, which has a track record of bringing CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) companies to a global scale (LogMeIn). Even during due diligence, which was performed by PwC, we were able to identify and apply improvements to the management processes. Investors empower a company through a strong board. We wanted a partner and we got a partner, and these integrated skills are multiplying the power of the company.”

The partnership will help the company to scale for the future, but in terms of fulfi lling Visual Unity’s growth strategy going forward, is the company actively looking for more investors, or will 3TS’ investment satisfy the fi nancial and strategic requirements for the mid-to-long-term?

“The fact that we have a great product, great customers, a strong sales pipeline and market opportunities means that the investment has a very strong business strategy connected to it,” Petru concluded. “This should quickly allow us to get close to $500 million in revenue. The benefi t of being a real and ready company adds a multiple to every dollar invested. However, because our industry is so fast moving — and because we are really customer-centric — we plan to scale our customer support and coverage based on pipeline rather than waiting for bottlenecks to show up during deployments. This means we will probably have some working capital needs. We are ready for that with the existing investor, and we also have a number of other opportunities for bank or other ‘standard’ fi nancing.”

It’s an interesting deal that again highlights the investments being made to capitalise on the growth in OTT and video streaming services.


Investments inspire unity in visual delivery Deals at both ends of the value spectrum continue to intrigue, as companies look for ways to improve their business off erings and position in the market. Imagine Communications’ acquisition of Digital Rapids was one of the talking points of this year’s NAB conference, while more recently, 3TS Capital Partners has invested $7.2 million in multiscreen solutions provider, Visual Unity. James McKeown reports

Tomas Petru

“Digital mobility has

changed all aspects of communication,

education and entertainment, and

visual communication (including both video and audio) is key part

of that”Tomas Petru,

vuMedia

DESIGN & INNOVATIONA W A R D S – 2 0 1 4

Now offering NINE new categories for innovative product design

Post production

Audio

StorageTest, quality

control & monitoring

Acquisition & production

Content & communication infrastructure

Storage

Playout & delivery systemsSystem

automation & control

Services

Apply now at www.theiabm.org/designawards

R e co g n i z i n g i n n ov a t i o n i n t h e b r o a d ca s t i n d u s t r y

Application deadline: Friday 25 July 2014

E N T R I E S N O W O P E N

Benovici: If you compare the real estate on the screen allocated to graphics to, say, five years ago, it’s clear that graphics have become ever more important in TV productions, to the point that one may ask if the classical definition of ‘secondary event’ is still applicable for graphics. Couple that with the increased focus on cost reduction and efficiency, and the result is that many more graphics need to be on screen with complex logic and workflow — but in an efficient and cost effective manner. This is the main challenge we are facing.

Churruca: Broadcast design is no longer linked to dedicated islands and hero systems, as it has evolved to become integrated into collaborative workflow environments. Formerly, operators were using high-end systems for the whole process, but today it is possible to split projects into smaller actions managed by different designers using compatible systems with different feature sets. So, from a manufacturer’s point of view, the challenge is not only to provide the best toolset and user ergonomics possible, but also to create a product range that is able to cope with different requirements, from inexpensive template editing

to the completion of the most complex projects.

Forster: With ever-increasing demand for video content, the market for graphics products is amazingly buoyant. Graphics are being used to not only uniquely identify and brand channels, but also to drive new interactive experiences. The challenge for product developers is to look at future-use cases for our products and identify the areas in the market where we can maximise the return on investment for our customers.

Fraser: Portability. As hardware becomes more powerful, graphic

products and platforms have had a hard time differentiating and competing in different price ranges. As the ability to achieve the most demanding on-air graphics is available to commodity hardware and graphics cards and with Thunderbolt’s current bandwidths, the shift in interest for companies like wTVision is towards portability.

Gilbert: Giving customers sophisticated and audience-capturing branding and graphics, whilst simultaneously offering flexible workflows that automate the production and transmission of graphics to drive down costs.

Delivering multiple versions of graphics across multiple platforms, second screen and multiple resolutions. Many of the alternative delivery platforms have no monetisation and no budget.

Kjellin: Combining good and solid technology with efficient user interfaces and workflows is always a challenge. An even greater and more specific challenge is to decide what the product should and should not do. Today, there is already enough computing and rendering power. The challenge is to decide where one product should end

and another should pick up, as well as to have enough self-awareness as an organisation to understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie. In the context of being a creator of graphics products, it materialises as having a clear view on what you should do as a company and when you should partner with someone else, or simply refer to someone else — even if that someone is a competitor.

Lempers: Our biggest challenge is to make sure the workflow remains simple. More and more broadcasters who want to bring graphics on-air have less time and fewer engineers — so they want to work with all-round multimedia people. This means an easy workflow with maximum result and flexibility.

Olson: From my perspective there is still a huge push from the market for more features and functionality. Realtime graphics are used in an amazing number of vertical markets that all have their own unique needs. From a competitive standpoint, time-to-market is the Holy Grail. You need to get there first, or if you don’t, you’d better figure out how to get the work done fast, so you can stay competitive.

Stadler: Creating a system that’s flexible enough to use throughout the production chain is a challenge right now. From creation to distribution, we need a system that easily allows individuals to create, edit and then distribute content to a variety of different platforms. Graphics aren’t just being used for an over-the-air stream any more, they must be usable and visible on the internet and through mobile devices. This means the graphics need to work not only for the designers, but also for the producers and journalists who have to change the content on a day-to-day basis.

Stevens: There are challenges, but these are as much opportunities, particularly as changes in hardware profile are giving creators of creative products, like us, new ways to show how applications such as Adobe After Effects can take advantage of raw processing. At the same time, leveraging the cloud is a fantastic opportunity for the future. It’s an exciting time as this new method in computing proliferates, and we are exploring many ways to utilise it.


Graphically illustratedForum

Graphics

This issue, Philip Stevens explores the varying challenges facing graphic system providers with (in alphabetical order) Ofir Benovici , VP marketing, Orad Hi Tec Systems; Miguel Churruca, marketing director at Brainstorm; Darren Forster, Grass Valley director of product management (master control, branding and subtitling); Alex Fraser, CTO at wTVision; James Gilbert, CEO, Pixel Power; Luke Harrison, product manager, RT Software; Sören Kjellin, CTO, ChyronHego; Reinout Lempers CCO VidiGo; Brian Olson, director of graphics marketing product management, Ross Video; Stephan Würmlin Stadler, EVP sports, Vizrt; Niels Stevens, business development manager, Video at Adobe

What are the current challenges facing creators of graphics products?

Ofir Benovici, Orad Miguel Churruca, Brainstorm

Benovici: There are few ways 4K can be utilised in the broadcast world, the main usage of such technology is now for video walls in the studio. Our PowerWall solution is set to deliver up to 16K — yes, 16K — outputs from a single box that can be mapped over one or multiple video walls in the studio space. Such a high resolution image offers a pixilation free environment. Another area in which Orad is active is Channel in a Box. At NAB we presented the world’s fi rst 4K Channel in a Box solution, offering both 4K video and 4K graphics all rendered by the same box.

Churruca: Brainstorm software, starting with the eStudio 3D render engine, is capable of creating graphics in 4K, and beyond, in realtime. 4K means higher hardware requirements, and because of this we are working with companies to make sure that computers, GPU and IO hardware can work in conjunction with our software to ensure the required realtime performance.

Olson: 4K is frustrating. Just when you overcome the technological hurdles to get an adequate amount of headroom in graphics performance in one standard, the TV manufacturers come up with another one that cuts your performance down by a factor of four. That said, 4K presents new challenges that keep things interesting. It will potentially open up new markets and opportunities, as well. Looking through the lens of business, you can’t get too mad about that.

Stadler: The challenges with 4K are reminiscent of the issues faced when switching from SD to HD. Vizrt graphics are not actually rendered until the very moment they are put on air, so this makes it very easy for us to build graphics in any resolution. As we’re not rendering anything out of the clips, everything is kept as metadata. Because of this we can deliver a 4K graphics package that’s essentially the same size and storage as an HD graphics package. The only issue then lies with the capabilities of

the render engine. Currently, we’re utilising the NVIDIA Quadro K6000 card which allows us to not only render 4K graphics live on air, but also take HD graphics packages and develop them for 4K as well. However, as resolutions increase so will the pressure on rendering power.

Benovici: Very much so. We are offering our own social TV solution called Social Media Hub. It offers a tool to aggregate, moderate and eventually take to air content generated by social media. At the same time, it offers the unique capability of publishing content from the fi rst screen to the second screen. Content that was on display in the fi rst screen is pushed as a clip to the second screen for additional usage.

Fraser: Yes. On-air graphics and user interaction mechanisms need to go together much more than they do in the present day. The two track approach where activity in the second screen does not make it back to the broadcast is merely a starting point. The natural feedback mechanism for this feedback loop is through TV graphics. We will see more and

more creative formats popping up in entertainment, news, politics and sports and when something works, I expect quick market adoption from other competing players.

Harrison: The idea of ‘design once, broadcast everywhere’, is a nice thought, but not always achievable with identical assets. Sure, if the broadcaster wants exactly the same output on mobile as on TV, it’s easy to downscale. But this does not always suit smaller screens. What’s interesting in second screen is the integration of viewer feedback — how does or can the viewer interact with the broadcast? RT has worked with a number of broadcasters to provide interactive feedback into a programme via second screen using web technology.

Kjellin: Absolutely. Second screen experiences are yet another output stream where content and artistic creation efforts need to be repurposed. For ChyronHego in particular, having a quite signifi cant leg in the gathering of realtime sports data, we clearly see and experience the need for relevant and effi cient methods of repurposing and parallelising both artistic and editorial creation for multiple media.

Lempers: It does. We have developed a plug-and-play application interface — Social Media Hub — for second screens/interaction with users. And our technology is OEM’ed by many who develop for second screen.

Stevens: Our Media Core and Adobe Media Encoder teams strive to stay fully up-to-date with all ingest and delivery codecs. We can quickly and

easily empower broadcasters to deliver encode content for second screen, and ultimately stream it with the Media Server family. Outside of conventional broadcast, our Digital Marketing organisation is at the forefront of a revolution in content monetisation, optimisation, analytics and dynamic intelligent ad insertion.

Churruca: Of course, integration of the graphics solutions in either video or IT environments is a must for any solution. But also, when a graphics project

is prepared in a collaborative environment, it could be shared by different vendors’ equipment, as designers would like to use the best-suited toolset for each process. Therefore, the ability to integrate within complex working environments — sharing information, data, images — is a common request on the graphics arena, and providers are often required to improve their inter-compatibility in terms of formats and workfl ows.

Forster: All broadcasters have been through some form of cost-cutting exercise in recent years, and this has led to a reduction in resources available to assist integration efforts. Grass Valley’s iTX integrated playout platform provides an effi cient playout operation with no compromises in quality, fl exibility or control. It includes full branding graphics within the same playout server. No additional interfaces to external devices are required.

Fraser: The fragmented nature of our market creates a very real and justifi able concern when designing and implementing workfl ows for a channel or programme. More than guaranteeing that a certain product works to specs, solution architects and designers have to worry about products working together reliably and worry

July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com TVBEurope 45

ForumGraphics

What will the growth of 4K (or higher) mean to you?

“With ever-increasing demand for video content, the market for graphics products is amazingly buoyant” Darren Forster, Grass Valley

Darren Forster, Grass Valley Alex Fraser, wTVision James Gilbert, Pixel Power

Does the growth of second screens aff ect your work for broadcast applications? Following

a similar thought, seamless integration is a ‘buzz phrase’ at the moment. What does it mean for providers of graphics solutions?


Forum

Graphics

free. ‘Seamless Integration’ is the anxiety ‘buzz-pill’ to ease those worries. By testing and supporting workflows between common products and solutions, graphics makers assume some of that responsibility and this becomes a valuable selling point for their product. As a provider of products that control a multitude of broadcast systems, this is an everyday concern for wTVision.

Gilbert: For genuine solution providers it means a lot of work to understand and deliver the detailed implementation of a ‘seamless’ integration. This work has to be paid for and the lack of interoperability standards for graphics means it is not reusable across different vendors’ equipment. For some vendors it is merely a ‘buzz phrase’ or an empty promise. Worst case scenario is that the customer discovers it is an empty promise after purchasing the equipment. Customers often perform insufficient due diligence on the integration and workflow side, instead being seduced purely by the visual appeal of the demonstration graphics.

Harrison: Seamless integration is a nebulous concept. There has always been a requirement for integration in one form or another. News is the most obvious example. Graphic vendors now need to consider MAM, ingest, edit, playout etc as well. Conventional dedicated software is limiting and hard to adapt. As web technology develops and the web/app performance gap closes, the ability to provide an integrated solution becomes easier. The biggest challenge — as ever — is standardisation. For as long as vendors insist on implementing their own formats, the job remains difficult.

Stadler: Seamless integration means more than just taking on graphics — it’s about looking at the complete package being delivered to the broadcasters. For example, live sporting broadcasts involve a multitude of content, including pre-packaged stories, graphics and videos. For a seamless integration, broadcasters need a system that can access the video content, merge graphics and then easily convert and send out a single video stream in SDI format. All this while also being able to instantly repurpose and re-size it for multiplatform distribution. It’s a huge task!

Benovici: Orad started as a virtual studio company some 20 years ago. Remove the green screen and replace it with physical set, keep the camera tracking and the 3D graphics rendering and you have your augmented reality solution, sounds simple, right? Well, it isn’t, but it’s been our DNA for the last 20 years which is why augmented reality is an inhered part of our solution for many years. Artistically, you need to figure out how the virtual elements will blend with the real physical elements to achieve an on screen look that will look natural and not artificial to the viewer at home. To achieve such results we developed some unique features such as material shaders, depth of field shaders, and others that enhance the photo realism of the augmented reality object. We also perfected the camera tracking element

so that the augmented reality object will remain fixed to its position regardless of the camera movement, thus creating the illusion that it is actually part of the studio. Workflow wise the entire creation and on air process is identical to the creation of regular graphic templates. That means that there is no need to create a

specific graphic template just because it is an augmented reality element. Such elements could be, for example, generated by journalists via the NRCS system.

Fraser: We have been involved with augmented reality shows since 2006, especially for large election coverage projects. This type of graphics creates beautiful integration between real sets and graphics that transform them into ‘props’ and ‘live furniture’ that sticks to the set as real objects would. Graphics have to be designed so that they remain legible from multiple angles and with ‘zoom’ robustness in mind — where a director and camera operator become part of the choreographed solution to convey information to the audience. It is a skill that must be developed and evolved with directors, operators, talent and

designers at the same table to produce good results.

Gilbert: The obvious route is to select the graphics provided by the virtual studio vendor, but the danger here is that the graphics are compromised for other applications. It may be better to separate the graphics that interact with the virtual studio from the other

graphics (information overlays, branding) so that the best of breed can be chosen outside the studio environment.

Harrison: To be honest, it doesn’t. From a pure graphics point of view, the use of AR is no different from regular graphics, except your virtual camera is hooked up to a tracking system. What does change is the control and asset side. You need to have an integrated approach to control as well as asset management. ‘On the day’ graphics need to augment any static element to your AR or VR set. So you need a flexible approach to control and a means to get new assets into the system.

Kjellin: Huge. The converging of video and graphics is more than just a trend. It is a concept with great editorial potential and is likely to change video presentation both within

broadcast and outside of it — forcing our industry to think quite differently across all steps of graphics design work, from creation to authoring and playout.

Olson: What most people don’t realise is that although graphics devices are used to render virtual sets and augmented reality, the skillset

needed to create quality content is not usually the same as a broadcast designer. For example, to create a realistic looking virtual set, you need to understand set design, which incorporates a bunch of different disciplines. You need to understand architecture, construction, lighting, camera blocking, etc. There are only a handful of people worldwide who do this well right now. It’s going to be an area of huge growth for people wanting to go into that field.

Stevens: The model of compositing is not that different — there is just higher demand which is a good thing. To blend the virtual with reality and create photo-realistic imagery is the foundation of visual effects. The key is planning. How will the shot work in the end? What cost and time will it take to produce high quality output?

What is the impact of the increasing use of ‘augmented reality studios’— a mixture of virtual and live — on the production of graphics?

“4K is frustrating. Just when you overcome the technological hurdles to get an adequate amount of headroom in graphics performance in one standard, the TV manufacturers come up with another one that cuts your performance down by a factor of four” Brian Olson, Ross Video

Sören Kjellin, ChyronHego Brian Olson, Ross Video Niels Stevens, Adobe Systems

Is the right talent available? These aren’t new problems, but the demand for mixing virtual and reality increases the requirement for careful planning and management.

Churruca: Apart from the advances in computer hardware for realtime applications, the arrival of 4K and second screens, I believe augmented reality is likely to become a common technology for broadcast graphics. We see how it is now popular in mobile applications, and it would seem television will follow that trend. The tools, skills and experience are already available, and what was reduced to a certain kind of show — elections coverage, for instance — is likely to be much more used in other applications that require data driven graphics such as news, sports and weather, to name a few. So realtime 3D graphics solutions such as Aston 3D have much to say.

Forster: For me, the innovation is coming from the integration of social media into the viewing experience. With so much of broadcasters’ revenue coming from live events such as sports, content producers are looking to create similar pseudo-live events using social

media. Getting the end-user experience right is the key to making social media jump into the mainstream.

Gilbert: Not so much a ‘big bang’ innovation, but a progressive one — the graphics are becoming targeted at an ever smaller audience. Historically graphics were specifi c to a channel or brand. In the future they will be specifi c to a region, a local area within a region, or even to an individual, particularly for IP delivered streams.

Harrison: If we look at the ‘pure’ graphics render process then fi xed function pipelines have already evolved into fully shader based pipelines allowing more sophisticated graphics. But the rasterisation process has not really changed. True real time ray tracing is one of the big innovations to come in the future. This will provide much more realistic looking graphics — especially in the fi eld of AR and VR. Perhaps a unifi ed, open, extensive and scalable asset exchange format — including 3D graphic assets — would be truly innovative.

Kjellin: It’s hard to predict one single innovation, but, if I

were to pick one trend, it would probably be something labelled ‘contextual awareness’. What I mean by contextual awareness is that rendering will be reacting to the dramatically increasing amount of data being collected around everything, rather than being controlled by distinct instructions and settings. An

example that most of us can relate to occurs in ice hockey where, if a goal is scored, it is common to run an animation reading ‘GOAL.’ This metadata triggers something quite unrelated — the playout of an animation. The same logic could be applied in news where specifi c graphics could be triggered by a certain zoom/focus setting on the main camera rather than a distinct button click. Contextual awareness could also apply to a second screen app that knows

what video content is currently being displayed to automatically allow user interaction with this particular content.

Lempers: For us it will be ease of use and using standard web technologies. Broadcast graphics has always been a mystery and a ‘closed workfl ow’ driven by engineers, but this

mystery means a high price. Be open and let the business be driven by creatives.

Olson: I think graphics will continue to play a larger and larger part in video production. Many of the functions that previously required separate dedicated devices are being incorporated into the graphics system. The all-in-one aspect of this trend is very cost-effective, and it actually improves the quality and consistency of the production. I think we’ll see

more and more of this merging of functionality to the point where the graphics system will be ‘the’ device that is doing your show. Of course, I’m biased.

Stadler: We’re going to see virtual graphics becoming a larger part of every graphics production. This includes the virtual studio behind

the presenters, the immersive graphics in front of them and the presenter’s ability to control these graphic in various ways. www.adobe.comwww.brainstorm.eswww.chyronhego.comwww.grassvalley.comwww.orad.tvwww.pixelpower.comwww.rossvideo.comwww.rtsw.co.ukwww.vidigo.tvwww.vizrt.comwww.wtvision.com

July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com TVBEurope 47

Graphics

Forum

In your view, what is the next biggest innovation when it comes to graphics production and technology?

“Broadcast graphics has always been a mystery and a ‘closed workfl ow’ driven by engineers, but this mystery means a high price. Be open and let the business be driven by creatives” Reinout Lempers, VidiGo

Luke Harrison, RT Software Reinout Lempers, VidiGo Stephan Würmlin Stadler, Vizrt

ONLINE TV advertising is expected to more than treble over the next five years, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.3 per cent to reach €1.6 billion by 2018. Over the same period, multi-channel broadcast advertising revenue is expected to grow at a CAGR

of over ten per cent, taking it from €6.7 billion in 2013 to €10.9 billion by 2018.

Meanwhile, even more impressive growth rates are being witnessed in the electronic home video market. Total OTT/Streaming revenue grew by 46.6 per cent last year and is expected to continue to grow at

a similarly impressive rate over the next five years. This growth is being spearheaded by Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD), which is expected to overtake Transactional Video On Demand (TVOD) this year and reach €2.3 billion by 2018. However, TVOD is growing very quickly as well, with annual

growth of more than 30 per cent expected over the next five years. The strength of the OTT/Streaming market in EMEA is underlined by the fact that revenues from the OTT/Streaming electronic home video market will overtake Through-TV-Subscription revenues in 2017, a market which itself is

expected to see double digit annual growth between now and 2018.

PwC’s E&M Outlook, which makes five-year projections for both advertising and consumer spending, has highlighted that the television market will grow at 3.4 per cent per year over the next five years. This will be a boost to the industry, which has seen significantly slower growth in 2012 and 2013. In fact, total TV advertising revenue fell in 2012 and grew only 0.4 per cent in 2013. Similar patterns were witnessed in the home video market, with revenues falling in 2012 and only growing at 0.6 per cent in 2013.

So what is driving this expected upturn in the EMEA TV market?

There is no doubt that some of this growth can be attributed to the global economic recovery which has seen investor and consumer confidence return, to some extent. However, there are several other factors that are also key to this growth.

Growth of internet accessThe first is the continued rapid growth of internet access even in the relatively mature markets of Western Europe. Globally, internet access is expected to generate more consumer spend than any other media product or service in the next five years. And this consumer spend will extend to the television market, driving revenue growth in online television, OTT/streaming and electronic home video.

In some markets, analysts have expressed concern that an increase in internet access revenue will divert spend away from consumer products. However, the growth of internet access itself is being driven by an increase in the size of its customer base. Fixed broadband penetration in EMEA will grow from 53.6 per cent to 61.6 per cent, while mobile internet growth will see penetration rise from 32.1 per cent to 58.3 per cent.

Accompanying growth in internet penetration is the strong increase in device ownership. Tablet ownership in EMEA will rise from 88 million in 2013 to 346 million by 2018, while smartphone ownership

Data Centre www.tvbeurope.com July 201448 TVBEurope

The drivers of growthAdam Edelshain, senior manager in PwC’s entertainment and media team, details the findings from PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook that suggests advertising and electronic home video will drive growth in the EMEA Television market over the next five years

will more than double in the same period from 442 million in 2013 to 956 million devices by 2018. The increase in the number of consumers accessing and consuming digital products across an ever growing number of devices provides the television market with the perfect platform to grow its Online TV, OTT/Streaming and electronic home video offerings, while also driving growth in the digital TV advertising market.

Shift in consumption habits towards ‘24/7 access’ and micro-transactionsAlongside the growth in internet access penetration and devices, there has also been a notable shift in consumption habits towards ‘24/7 access’ and micro-transactions. Consumers expect to be able to access high quality and (where relevant) tailored content whenever it suits them. This shift has been refl ected by many businesses that have seen the need to adapt and develop consumer-centric business models. They have noted that the key to monetising the digital consumer is to adopt fl exible business models that offer more choice and better experiences. This has been epitomised by the rapid growth seen in ‘on demand’ services such as the electronic home video over-the-top (OTT)/streaming sector, and, in particular, the rise of streaming video company Netfl ix. Investors’ confi dence in OTT streaming services was underlined by the surging price in shares for Netfl ix in 2013. Its shares rose by almost 300 per cent in value during the year.

Key digital markets gaining critical massAnother aspect of growth in the EMEA broadcasting market is the fact that key digital markets are gaining critical mass. Fast growth rates in digital advertising, online TV and electronic home video were easy to overlook in the past because the revenues they generated were still very small. However, this is no longer the case in some key markets. A major tipping point was reached in 2013 in the home video market. After falling in 2011 and 2012, the market

experienced growth overall as declines in physical home video revenues were being replaced by electronic home video revenues. Electronic home video represented 9.6 per cent of the EMEA home video market in 2009, but this more than doubled to 22.8 per cent in 2013 and is expected to reach almost 50 per cent by 2018.

EMEA broadcasting marketFinally, it is important to note that growth of the EMEA broadcasting market is not evenly spread between Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the

Middle East and Africa, or even within these segments.

Globally, key drivers for growth in entertainment and media are those countries where the internet access and device penetration have the opportunity to grow the fastest and this is consistent within EMEA.

In the TV advertising markets, Middle East and African countries are expected to grow at an average CAGR of 12.1 per cent, compared to three per cent in Western Europe, and seven per cent in Central and Eastern Europe. The picture

is similar for TV subscriptions and licence fees, while in home video, Central and Eastern Europe is expected to grow even faster than the Middle East and Africa, driven by the growth of the Russian home video market, which is expected to grow at over 20 per cent annually over the next fi ve years.

The big three players in the EMEA market, Germany, France and the UK, will all see much less spectacular growth rates. In TV subscriptions and licence fees, the three countries are expected to grow at a CAGR of between 1.4 per cent and 2.5 per

cent over the next fi ve years. In the home video market, France will grow at an impressive nine per cent CAGR from 2013 to 2018, overtaking Germany in 2017 to become the second largest home video market in EMEA. It will generate total spend of 2.3 billion by 2018, behind only the UK which will grow at 3.7 per cent annually to reach 3.6 billion by 2018.

In TV advertising spend, the UK will see the fastest CAGR of the three countries over the next fi ve years, with 3.5 per cent annual growth expected. Here, though, the dominance of the ‘big three’ will be blown apart as France and Germany are overtaken by Russia in 2014 and 2018 respectively, a result of Russia’s large population, rapid growth of internet access penetration and the fact that TV is the only platform with truly national reach.

Yet, while there appears to be a positive growth story for the broadcasting market in EMEA, not every country is expected to benefi t. Spain’s TV advertising and TV subscriptions revenue are both expected to decline over the next fi ve years. And other countries, including Ireland, Belgium, Finland and Holland could see declines in their home video markets.

TV as a platform will also lose advertising market share in EMEA over next fi ve years. Total TV advertising spend will be overtaken by internet advertising spend as the largest EMEA advertising market segment in 2015.

The industry is still to make much progress on the issue of TV audience measurement. While digital audiences are easier to identify and track, the growth of multi-channel and terrestrial TV in EMEA highlights the importance of knowing who and how big the audiences are in order to monetise them effectively.

Yet, it will be some comfort to all of those working in the industry that such issues are being addressed against a broad backdrop of growth over the next fi ve years. broadcasting market in EMEA, not every country is expected to benefi t.” broadcasting market in EMEA, not every country is expected to benefi t.”

Data CentreTVBEurope 49July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

“While there appears to be a positive growth story for the broadcasting market in EMEA, not every country is expected to benefi t”

Data Centre www.tvbeurope.com July 201450 TVBEurope

4K market outlook

The levels of interest around 4K TVs remain neutral, with 42% of respondents registering some level of interest while the remaining 58% are either indifferent, or have no current interest

The uptake in 4K TV ownership will be slower than the upatke of HD TVs in Europe. Over the fi rst fi ve years of availability, HD TVs saw uptake of 32% with 4K at just 4.7%

Again, we see an example of innovation pushing ahead of the curve as there is a signifi cant disparity between homes with HD TV sets and those receiving HD signals

The number of homes in Europe with access to fast broadband is set to increase signifi cantly by 2018, meaning that broadband is likely to be main delivery platform for 4K

There has been a uniformal decline in the number of TV sets being shipped in Western Europe. After reaching a high of 51 million in 2010, that fi gure decreased to 35.7 million by 2013

The widespread uptake of 4K will require a number of related factors to come together, not least the affordability of TV sets and availability of 4K content

This issue, we take a look at research from Futuresource which assesses the current market and future outlook for 4K TV, encompassing consumer awareness and demand for 4K TV sets, how broadband is poised to become the main delivery platform, and a how ownership of 4K versus HD sets will develop in the short-term

IIn 2014, there are more platforms and wider distributions than ever.The IBC Daily creates business opportunities that can be converted into solid revenues. We have proven that The IBC Daily isa business opportunity for those IBC exhibitors who work with ourteam to achieve the strongest possible impact at the event.

� Preview issue� 5 Live shows� Digital Editions� Executive Summary

� 22 IBC e-daily newsletters� Exhibition Catalogue� Exhibition Map

Exhibition Catalogue and Exhibitor MapThere were 15,000 Exhibition Catalogues printed and distributed at IBC2013 in addition toover 20,000 exhibition maps. Not only is the IBC catalogue an essential guide to allexhibitors, and more, at the show, but it is also the ONLY directory for the electronic mediaand entertainment industry with full details of over 1,400 companies in our industry.

To confirm yourposition in any ofthe 2014 editions,contact the sales

team now!

Drive visitorsto your stand

For more information contact:[email protected]; +44 (0)207 354 6000

[email protected]; +44 (0)207 354 6000

[email protected]; +44 (0)207 354 6000

[email protected]; +1 631 673 0072

� The IBC Daily is successful, respected and well read precisely because we work hard to deliver. We find that more and more IBC exhibitors want to work with us because they respect our approach and understand it is based on integrity, accuracy and commitment to business success.

� We employ the best international editorial team in the business to work with exhibitors in each hall of the RAI.

tvbe july 2014 digital edition

Documents

hd masters presentation

hd masters conference

hdbeyond hd masters

broadcast entities

broadcast sector

recovering european

register john wilson

latest roundtable