ibc2015 executive summary

01 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Cover.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:55

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IBC template.indd 1 22/09/2015 16:39

At even a casual glance, the broadcast and media industry is being assailed from all sides.

There is huge interest in what lies beyond high definition, whether that is even more resolution – 4K or higher – extended dynamic range or high frame rates. At the same time consumers are expecting to be able to view content of their choosing wherever they are, on a growing number of different devices.

Competition for channels increases, with every major broadcaster looking to expand its offering. How can revenues be maintained? Programmatic advertising? Dynamic advertising insertion? New business models?

Productions are being stretched creatively too, with augmented reality,

vast numbers of cameras and ever more ambitious locations.

IBC is the one international forum where all these issues are tabled and debated. From the technical papers in the conference – where the best of cutting edge thinking is unveiled – to networking on the show floor, it is all about sharing knowledge.

Now firmly established in the calendar, the IBC Leaders’ Summit is an important part of the debate. Behind closed doors, top executives from around the world talk about these issues and more: the real factors which are driving the industry forward – or perhaps acting as a brake on growth.

These guests come from established broadcast and media businesses.

They also come from the newcomers to our industry who are bringing fresh technologies, fresh capabilities and most importantly fresh ideas. Just as the industry is changing, so IBC has to refresh itself to carry on delivering the most important forum for our industry.

In the pages of this publication you will read the views of some of those taking part in the IBC Leaders’ Summit or presenting keynote addresses in our conference. I hope you find it stimulating and thought-provoking.

On behalf of the whole IBC team, I wish you well through the coming year of change. I look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam for IBC2016.

Michael CrimpCEO, IBC

Sharing wisdom

theibcdaily Executive Summary 03

David ButoracOSN Page 4 Maaz Sheikh STARZ Play Arabia Page 5 Dr Riyadh Najm Media Expert Page 6 Kevin Sutcliffe Vice News Page 8 Delia Bushell BT TV and BT Sport Page 9 Niall Duffy Sony Page 10 Ulf Ewaldsson Ericsson Page 13 Joan Gillman Time Warner Cable Media Page 14 Dominic Glynn Pixar Animation Studios Page 15 Mark Hilton Grass Valley Page 16 Markus Gross Disney Research Page 17 John Honeycutt Discovery Communications Page 18 Christian Kurz Viacom International Media Networks Page 19 Jonathan Lewis Channel 4 Page 20 Rhys Noelke RTL Group Page 21 Phillip Luff Scripps Networks International Page 22 David Pendleton Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Page 23 Muki Kulhan BBC Page 24 Roger J. Lynch Sling TV Page 25 Leaders Summit Pages 26,27 Matt Stagg EE & Mobile Video Alliance Page 28 Fran Unsworth BBC World Service Page 29 Lord Michael DobbsHouse of Cards 0 Rick Sayre Pixar Page 31 Gary Woolf All3Media International Page 32 Brian Bonnick, P.Eng. IMAX Corporation Page 34 Scot Barbour Sony Pictures Entertainment Page 34 Dean Bullock Dolby Page 36 Andrew FerroneRoku Page 38 David Hancock IHS Technology Page 39 Stijn HenderickxBarco Page 40 John Hurst CineCert Page 41 Joseph Inzerillo Major League Baseball Advanced Media Page 42 Pete Ludé RealD Page 43 Steve MacPhersonFramestore Page 44 Gawain Morrison Sensum Page 45 Thomas Riedl Google Page 46 Sylvain ThevenotNetgem TV PVX Page 47 Simon Segars ARM Page 48 Ian Shepherd Odeon & UCI Cinemas Group Page 49 Tom Toumazis MBEYahoo Page 50 Eric Achtmann V-Nova Page 51 Richard Friedel Fox Networks Engineering & Operations Page 52 Erwin Jansen Wunderman and Y&R Group, Benelux Page 53 JB Perrette Discovery Networks International Page 54 Matthew Postgate BBC Page 55 Laurence Miall-d’AoutTVbeat Page 56 Jonathan Allan Channel 4 Page 57 Jeroen Schulte Industrial Light & Magic Page 58

EDITORIAL Editorial Director: Fergal Ringrose Editor: Michael Burns Reporters: Kate Bulkley, Chris Forrester, David Davies, Carolyn Giardina, Dick Hobbs, George Jarrett, Adrian Pennington, Neal Romanek, Will Strauss, Catherine Wright Photography: James Cumpsty ART & PRODUCTION Design: Adam Butler Production Manager: Alistair Taylor SALES Sales Manager: Ben Ewles Tel: +44 (0)20 7 354 6000, Email: [email protected] Richard Carr Tel: +44 (0)20 7 354 6000, Email: [email protected] US Sales Michael Mitchell Tel: +1 (631) 673 3199 Email: [email protected] IBC Chief Executive Officer: Michael Crimp Managing Director: Mark Burton

Published on behalf of the IBC Partnership by Intent Media Ltd, Suncourt House, 18-26 Essex Road, London N1 8LN © The International Broadcasting Convention 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without the express prior written consent of the publisher.

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Inside

03 Executive IBC2015_v1 - mike Crimp.indd 1 23/09/2015 12:21

“The concept of broadcast doing battle with digital media is long gone,” declares David Butorac. “I don’t see challenges with OTT, I see only opportunities.”

We should take note of what this highly experienced TV executive has to say. His 30-year career has spanned positions as head of operations and station manager at BSkyB, Group COO at Malaysian broadcaster Astro, and president at News Corporation’s Star TV in Hong Kong. Prior to joining pay TV operator OSN in October 2010, he was managing director of WIN Corporation, Australia’s largest regional cross-media company.

“As broadcasters we need to ensure the delivery of content to consumers and that hasn’t changed,” he says. “What has changed is that this is now driven by consumer demand, rather than them being dictated to as to how and when they watch.”

Butorac has overseen a rise in viewing to OSN’s linear TV channels at the same time as launching OTT platforms, OSN Plus HD for online viewing and OSN Play, a TV anywhere product.

“Let’s be clear, mainstream TV broadcast is nowhere near dead,” he says. “TV is thriving and particularly so with massive investment going into creating spectacular content. The key is ensuring the broadcaster is able to adapt to deliver that. Ultimately, we deliver meaningful content to consumers and the technical means to distribute it is just an enabler. We are delivery systems for content.”

Until after the first Gulf War

there was very little international content broadcast in the region. Couple that with an extremely tech-savvy young demographic and it means a voracious appetite for content and information on devices. “There is a huge opportunity for content over mobile,” says Butorac, but points out there is also a widespread culture of ‘free’ which breeds piracy, and which has until recently been rampant in the region.

“Piracy is a problem the whole industry faces,” he states. “We are tackling it fairly successfully with a consortium of stakeholders. On satellite, for example, we’ve seen a reduction of 47 TV channels taken off air that were causing concern. There are also significant levels of overspill piracy, where legitimate operations were illegally selling in this region. We have to clamp down on all of these and make the case that this is hurting not just our business, but having an economic impact on the region. Piracy is a fight we will never finish.”

The region’s overwhelming reliance on satellite to deliver free to air and pay TV makes the launch of Ultra HD potentially more costly than for cable or broadband service providers, but OSN has a launch planned for 2016.

“We are engaged in conversation with lead contractors for the creation of the platform and with content providers, but we

need to have content available to drive the market,” he says.

While most of MENA’s premium content is imported, there are world class production facilities such as Dubai’s Studio City and Abu Dhabi’s TwoFour54. What is needed now, says Butorac, is to create a large pool of skilled human resource.

“People don’t go to Pinewood for the high-tech facilities so much as for the craft skills of local talent,” he says. “That’s what we all need to focus on in MENA, in order to originate Arabic or English language content here that can be sold worldwide.”

New battlegrounds for content and consumer demandDavid ButoracCEO, OSNRegion: United Arab Emirates

Interviewed by: Adrian Pennington

“Ultimately, we deliver meaningful content to consumers, and the technical means to distribute it is just an enabler. We are delivery systems for content”

04 Executive Summary theibcdaily

04 Executive IBC2015_v1 - David Butorac.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:54

The spread of multi-screen video on connected devices is increasing, feels Dubai-based Maaz Sheikh, president, STARZ Play Arabia, who spoke at the ‘Is OTT Simply Broadcast Re-booted?’ session.

Sheikh feels the convenience of on-demand content on the consumer’s device of choice has opened up business models for the entire value chain that previously did not exist. “There is a market for the creation of short-form and mid-form content, specifically designed for mobile and tablet,” he says. “This has created new opportunities for content creators and producers.”

From Sprint to Ernst & Young, and on through various US and Arabian-based tech corporations, Sheikh is now heading up the first STARZ-branded service to be localised outside of the USA. This is a specifically-tailored platform, completely different from the US offering, remarks Sheikh, with handpicked content to cater to the audience demographics of Middle East and North Africa.

The interface and overall service supports multiple languages including English and Arabic. All content is subtitled in Arabic, and sometimes multiple dubbed language tracks are available. There is support for mobile, integration with major telecom and IPTV operators in the region, and optimisation for local CDNs.

From October onwards STARZ Play Arabia’s customers will have the ability to temporarily download content from the platform for watching later, offline. “Temporary downloads have added to the convenience and choice for the consumer, and created a product that can be monetised by both content creators and OTT service providers,” Sheikh explains.

He adds, “We were able to secure content deals for movies in the pay window and also

show first run series from majors like CBS, Showtime, and Sony.”

Yet it has not been all smooth sailing. “We faced several challenges as we built the business,” explains Sheikh. “The concept of SVOD and OTT is still evolving [here]; education and customer awareness are needed in the MENA region. Customers need to feel comfortable that the service will run smoothly on their internet connections. The consumer demographics in the region are also very diverse; the service offering needs to cater to the varying interests and diverse ethnic population. And finally, online methods of payments are still evolving, as is consumer willingness to trust in e-commerce.”

As to how OTT services are evolving and competing, Sheikh comments, “While both Netflix and Amazon Prime Services are powerful brands, the need to localise and tailor the service for each market is a critical part of the overall success factor. Other start ups and established brands will be able to compete with Netflix if they are able to lock in compelling programming rights – movies, series, and kids’ content – and localise the service with content relevant to the market.”

Yet OTT presents several challenges to the broadcast industry, adds Sheikh. He points to multi-channel cable and DTH package ARPUs, which are under tremendous pressure. “Service providers have started to unbundle channels and offer lower ARPU packages to avoid losing subscribers to SVOD service providers,” he says. “Free-to-air channels are also challenged as advertising dollars are moving to digital platforms and likes of YouTube, while the consumption of content and advertising on mobile platforms is an added threat to the broadcast industry.”

Thinking locally, delivering on-demand

Maaz Sheikh President, STARZ Play ArabiaRegion: United Arab Emirates

Interviewed by: Heather McLean

“There is a market for the creation of short-form and mid-form content, specifi cally designed for mobile and tablet”


05 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Maaz Sheikh.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:54

Dr Riyadh Najm has an illustrious track record of promoting and managing broadcasting, not least in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where he was until recently president of the General Commission for Audiovisual Media.

He holds strong views on the future direction for broadcasters, not least a desire to see DTT introduced on a more widespread basis. Dr Najm praises the investment made in production facilities in Dubai, Cairo, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. “But there needs to be more focus,” he says. “Right now almost all of the investment is going into satellite, and in my view we need more investment in DTT. As well as a physical infrastructure we also need better quality programing. It is high time that governments in the region looked at this. Unfortunately we cannot even communicate with our own local citizens, and this is not good.”

Dr Najm said the Kingdom’s mandate is to establish DTT services that comprised both public and private channels. “Now we need a decision from those who make the budgets to allocate the investment. There’s another strong benefit in that it

would help solve the problems of TV rights, especially to sporting events. Currently most of the key soccer rights, for example, are not available unless people subscribe to expensive pay-TV services. Unfortunately the rights are increasingly in the hands of one provider. For one single provider to control and monopolise all these sports rights is dangerous.

“The upcoming IBC Content Everywhere MENA event in Dubai is also important for the region for a number of reasons. First we need more investment in delivering broadband right across the region. Far too many rural regions have very slow connection speeds, and these must be improved.

“Creativity – or the lack of it – is also not helped by the absence of a reliable audience measurement system. People who want to invest in new productions are often not at all sure if their material is going to be seen or carried by the right channels. I am chairman of the Saudi Media Measurement Company, and if the Kingdom supports this initiative then this could make a significant difference on a number of different levels.”

Backing DTT, and more creativity, in MENADr Riyadh NajmMedia ExpertRegion: Saudi Arabia

Interviewed by: Chris Forrester

“Right now almost all of the investment is going into satellite, and in my view we need more investment in DTT”


06 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Riyadh Najm.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:53

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“The new battleground for news is authenticity,” declares Kevin Sutcliffe. “We’re not shying away from the difficulties of reporting and we’re prepared to show the harsher realities of events in a way that many regulated terrestrial broadcasters cannot.”

The battleground is also over viewers, in particular the Millennial generation, which he believes has been excluded from mainstream TV news agendas.

“We launched Vice News 18 months ago to turn the commonly held misconception – that 18-35 year olds are not interested in news and current affairs – on its head,” he says. “Vice is a response to something that worked well, but has now become stuck, and is not

serving a part of an audience which is mobile, online and wanting a fresh approach.”

Sutcliffe, who has previously described BBC journalism as “beige”, doesn’t come across as confrontational to the TV news establishment. He is after all a serial (BAFTA and Emmy) award winning documentary maker, former Deputy Head Of News And Current Affairs at Channel 4, and Senior Producer at the BBC’s Panorama programme.

“TV reporting hasn’t changed in 20-30 years and rolling news is a very tired format,” he says. “It is journalism fitted around the demands of the system. Our approach is to be honest. We recognise the world is very difficult to define and report, so we have different lengths of

film and immersive first-person journalism – which tries to tell the story as we find it and not package it down into three-minute bites.”

With reportage about the coup in Mali, the Ukraine conflict and, most notoriously, a documentary which embedded a team with Islamic State, Vice News has become the fastest growing such channel on YouTube, gaining 1.45 million subscribers, 350 million video views and high engagement on Facebook.

“News doesn’t break in the newsroom,” says Sutcliffe. “It breaks on Twitter. Our films are made by journalists the same age as our audience, and they are all switched onto social media to engage more deeply with stories.”

‘Old’ media investors have lined up to grab a slice of this hot property. WPP, Fox and Disney/Hearst-owned network A+E Networks have taken stakes in the group which began as a punk magazine in Montreal in 1994, valuing it over $2.5

billion and fuelling speculation of an IPO.

Characterised by Vice founder Shane Smith, as “the CNN of the street”, its most recent scoop saw Vice extend a deal with HBO to produce a daily news programme, and have its own branded channel on the HBO Now streaming service.

“If we’re going to make a scheduled TV news show how are we going to not make it like everyone else?” questions Sutcliffe. “We’re spending a lot of time thinking and planning that now to try and capture the tone of what we do online.

“The notion of whether news should be emotional is worth exploring,” he suggests. “Our audience is intelligent. They know where to look for stories. They resist the patronising view of some broadcasters where stories are told in the round and everyone has a say. Our approach is to challenge the older models and say that there isn’t one way of reporting a story accurately.”

Content Innovation

08 Executive Summary theibcdai

Millennial news networkKevin SutcliffeHead of News Programming EU, Vice NewsRegion: UK


“Our approach is to challenge the older models and say that there isn’t one way of reporting a story accurately”

08 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Kevin Sutcliffe.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:53

The launch of BT Sport Ultra HD shook the market up in the way it was intended to, according to one of its chief architects.

“We’ve now raised the bar on innovation for broadcast in Europe,” says Delia Bushell, Managing Director, BT TV and BT Sport. “From our on-air talent to the design of our augmented reality studio set to viewer selection of multiple camera angles, and the interaction by sports fans with our BT Sport app, we are raising the bar for sports – and entertainment.”

When Bushell boarded the UK telco to lead its multibillion-pound investment in television and sport in April 2014, she said she wanted to join a market disruptor.

“We absolutely still are,” she states. “We are trying to make premium sport accessible to fans again. We’re taking a category that’s been gated behind pay-TV fees and making it free or available for £5 (€7)

a month. In doing so we have opened sport up to 2 million more people who couldn’t afford access before.”

BT poached exclusive live 2015-2018 UEFA Champions League rights from ITV and Sky for £897m (€1.2bn) and is paying £6.5m (€9m) every time it airs an English Premier League game. Overall, the telco-turned-broadcaster says its BT Sport TV channels are now in more than 5.2 million homes, with the customer base growing.

In late August, it debuted a UK version of US cable network AMC, home to Breaking Bad, Mad Men and new series Fear of the Walking Dead.

“AMC is the first step in enhancing our range of entertainment packages,” she says. “It makes a lot of sense

to broaden into drama and entertainment which is more appealing to females.”

Talk of BT commissioning original drama is premature, but perhaps not for long. “We’ve had a range of content producers approaching us since the AMC deal and we see a wide range of opportunities there,” is Bushell’s cryptic response.

A BSkyB high-flyer for more than a decade, Bushell ironically spearheaded the company’s attack on the telecoms market as director of broadband and voice. Her last position was as chief commercial officer at Sky Italia.

“Very clearly all market growth is now sitting in pay-TV lite,” she says. “Those on full fat pay-TV are questioning what they are paying for per month when they can get a fantastic combination of services for significantly less. Those on free to air are looking at upgrading and just want a small step of £5-10 a month.

The market is converging on pay-TV lite, of which OTT is one element, and BT is in a great position to tap that trend.”

BT’s launch of a ‘Showcase’ channel on free to air platform Freeview gives the operator a more flexible content model, she explains. “It means we can work with pay-TV [ like Netflix which is partnered with BT ] and FTA broadcasters like ITV to offer a very broad range of programming.”

Outside of her keynote, Bushell took time at IBC to visit the exhibition. “I’m particularly interested in possible iterations of 4K like HDR, in next-generation TV platform user interfaces

and in cloud-based production services,” she says.

“It was very important [to be first to launch Ultra HD],” she says. “We brought together BT Sport and BT TV into one combined vision, which is a huge innovation leap across Europe. BT TV unlocks fibre IPTV and 4K is a strong way to do that. 4K live is the toughest end of the spectrum and it was a hugely challenging undertaking. It’s a tribute to everyone involved that we are on this exciting journey.”

Keynote

Raising the bar for sportsand entertainment

“We are trying to make premium sport accessible to fans again”


Delia BushellManaging Director, BT TV and BT Sport Region: UK


09 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Delia Bushell.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:52

Niall Duffy, Sony Europe’s head of workflow and IT solutions, spoke in the IBC2015 session ‘Cloud Processing – Apps That Make Sense’, and then took the chair for ‘The IP Infrastructure Revolution’. His kick-off point for the former was, “it is not the cloud apps that are the really interesting focus.” Instead, Duffy points to the back end infrastructure, and to more cloud services being used by small organisations.

“Larger broadcasters are going to focus more on developing what they would call hybrid cloud infrastructure, converting their standard IT infrastructure into either private cloud or a mixture of private and public,” he says. “The interesting point is the extent to which they are going to share some of that with the wider ecosystem.”

Duffy feels that efficient management of infrastructure will enable any app to be deployed.

“We are going to see the emergence of cloud-native apps,” he adds. “The really interesting change is when people start designing apps in the way companies like Google do – apps to run on a cloud where they can see and monitor other cloud services as resources.”

So far apps are effectively ‘crucial point solutions’ like encoding, transcoding and editing, and many apps seem like those from an in-house data centre.

“They are not yet core to anyone’s workflow, and are not really part of a connected cloud workflow,” he says.

Duffy adds that once we get past the public-versus-private focus we are going to get a lot more sophisticated cloud-based apps.

“A lot of the impact is going to be under the hood. A Sony partner company in China has

deployed a news production system on an internal private cloud for Shenzhen Media Group, and to users there is almost no difference to what they deployed beforehand in terms of tools.

“However there are more options, one being the much better ability to connect with interstitial media,” he adds. “The backend is completely different and virtual desktops are quite revolutionary from a broadcaster perspective. They can spin up these systems pretty much anywhere and at any time.

“In terms of the really clever stuff, we are looking at three years beyond when people refresh their infrastructure using cloud, before we really start experimenting properly with originating cloud-based workflows,” he adds.

Looking back on his IP session, Duffy recalls, “If something is hot at IBC, it is probably two years away. The key thing I wanted to get across is that we still think of IP in the same way as we thought of other technologies. We are no longer technology-driven, we are business driven.”

The exceptions would be broadcasters gearing up to deploying 4K services and facing the compelling technical reasoning of following the IP route, and new OB truck commissions.

“For everyone else it is going to be the business imperative. Nobody is going to rip out an API infrastructure because something new has come along,” says Duffy. “Acceleration however will be much faster than SD-HD and HD-UHD, because there are a lot more financial benefits associated with IP. It liberates people from a lot of hard-wired, fixed workflows, and they will recognise it gives them much more ability to control and optimise the infrastructure.”

Business Operations


Broadcasting needs to have its head in the cloud

Niall DuffyHead of Workflow and IT Solutions for Europe, SonyRegion: UK

Interviewed by: George Jarrett

“If something is hot at IBC, it is probably two years away”

10 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Niall Duffy.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:52

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Ulf Ewaldsson, as well as his high-profile day-job, is also chairman of Ericsson’s Research Board, which gives him a special insight as to what is likely to happen over the next few years. Indeed, he sees further dramatic changes taking place in broadcasting: “As we approach 2020, established rights holders, producers, content owners, broadcasters and all forms of MVPD TV service providers will be competing and jostling for position with a raft of new entrants, investors and aggregators. In other words the media value chain is being dismantled and reset into a dynamic media ecosystem. The opportunities are enormous.”

One new development is especially exciting. “One of the most important pieces of research under development is 5G,” says Ewaldsson, who was one of the key speakers in the IBC Roadmap Session: ‘Our CTOs Look Forward 12 Months’. “5G is the next step in the evolution of mobile broadband and will be a key component in the future Networked Society. Its arrival will be a watershed moment for the entire TV industry, delivering the flexibility and high reliability needed to deliver video to billions of users across the globe, and supporting the 15 billion video-enabled, connected devices by that time.”

Ewaldsson forecasts that the trend towards the infamous Martini moment (‘any time, any place, anywhere’) is already

with us. “As we move towards 2020, video will be everywhere, ranging from the connected car and wearable technologies, to tablets, smartphones, laptop computers and the living room TV. Ubiquitous mobility, broadband and the cloud will transform the industry but we need to build networks that can capitalise on these new opportunities. They need to be smarter and go far beyond today’s capabilities. The industry also needs to build agile platforms that can respond to new services and a whole range of new players across an ever-growing market.

“The Networked Society is our vision of the future, a world in which virtually everyone on the planet is connected and will have access to mobile broadband internet. It will change all the business rules; it’s an irreversible entity and will open up a whole range of exciting and potentially ground-breaking opportunities across every industry, and of course, also in the media industry.

“The Networked Society is creating the next era of television; one we call the internet era of TV. In this future TV landscape, the vast majority of the world’s population will have access to a screen that can send and receive video. By 2020, there will be almost 8 billion mobile broadband subscriptions, of which 3.7 billion will be on 4G networks, an increase from 0.5 billion in 2014.”

Strategic Insights

Enormous opportunities ahead for broadcastingUlf EwaldssonSenior Vice President and Group CTO, EricssonRegion: Sweden


“As we move towards 2020, video will be everywhere, ranging from the connected car and wearable technologies to tablets, smartphones, laptop computers and the living room TV”


13 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Ulf Ewaldsson.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:51

The inevitable move by advertisers and brands from traditional TV advertising to digital alternatives is starting to pick up pace, but these new opportunities cannot come quick enough for Time Warner Cable Media’s Joan Gillman.

The outspoken, long-time cable TV and internet industry exec has audiences, programme makers and marketers all in her sights, as one of the US’s biggest cable providers launches a more dynamic digital strategy.

Time Warner Cable Media has developed better targeted advertising products to help drive greater revenues to tap

into the growing hunger for on-demand and streamed video viewing.

This appetite is growing fast: major US network CBS predicts that by 2020 digital viewership will be 50 percent live TV and 50 percent non-linear. “Time-shifted viewing and the consumer use of streaming and VoD is on the rise because more people are mobile and they are watching less live TV and more on-demand TV,” says Gillman. “We are in a growth mode.”

Gillman believes VoD is a marketeer’s dream because consumers who are watching VoD have made a conscious

choice to do so. “Whether it’s binge viewing or catch up VoD, it’s a better environment for brands than a lot of the user generated content and even premium content in other, less secure environments,” says Gillman. “TV has always been the best medium for brand building, and VoD is really supercharged TV. The consumer is making a more concerted decision, and the decision and the context are very powerful.”

Time Warner Cable’s cross-platform ad product, ‘Ads Everywhere’, debuted in 2014, and this past May the company announced that the combined TV and digital product now allows brands to use geo-targeting, device targeting and addressability. “We are getting great feedback from the marketers,” says Gillman. “Some of our clients realise that if they activate this channel with us it increases their digital traffic for their websites and for their search.”

Gillman believes that as viewing has fragmented among different devices – TVs, phones and tablets – that the margin for measurement error has increased and that the gold standard of the US TV measurement world – Nielsen – has not kept up.

“In a world where marketers are asking for greater accountability you need to have more census based-measurement, and Nielsen is not moving in that direction. They are trying to retrofit multi-screen and on demand measurement into their primary model and that is going to restrict the revenue opportunities.”

For Gillman, the proof of effectiveness will largely come from better measurement and from paying attention to how

on-demand and streamed content is protected in the digital world. Add that to the scarcity of premium video content to advertise against and you have a recipe for greater revenues.

“Marketers are smarter now because they can see a lot more information about the audience,”

says Gillman. “It’s a huge opportunity for everybody to tap into better measurement and better distribution options. But I am cautious when I hear people say there is a big pot of gold, because I’m watching the digital display industry [online] getting shut down through fraud.”

Gillman’s answer is simple: “We really need to solve some of these basic issues – measurement and content security – before people go running into the deep end.”

Strategic Insights


Joan GillmanExecutive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Time Warner Cable MediaRegion: USA

Interviewed by: Kate Bulkley

“The consumer is making a more concerted decision, and the decision and the context are very powerful”

Taking soundings for

VoD

14 Executive IBC2015_v2 - Joan Gillman.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:51

“The HDR revolution has really shaken a lot of folk in the industry to be aware of the fidelity of their image,” says Dominic Glynn, Pixar’s senior scientist. “It’s a wake up call for those skating a fine line of efficiencies and short cuts to better protect their imagery throughout the pipeline if they want to leverage HDR into distribution.”

From its inception nearly 30 years ago, Pixar has continually redefined the upper limits of image quality. Since joining the company in 2006, Glynn has been the custodian of that ethos, involved with films including Cars, Ratatouille, Wall•E, Up, Brave and Toy Story 3.

“My main role is to ensure that the ‘bits’ are used to their optimal capacity as image data flows down from the texturing/paint, shading, lighting departments all the way to the finish,” he says.

Glynn graduated from the University of South Australia with a Master of Engineering in 1999, and within four years was working with Disney as a Lead Software Engineer. Here he first applied a new colour engineering and mathematics concept to the animated film, The Wild. Via this work and some high profile research and publications, he came to the attention of Pixar.

Initially his concentration

was on colour science. “You can make a big difference to an animated film by tweaking the colour mathematics,” he explains. “I am the closest to the finishing end, implementing the technical details of laser film transfer, colour correction and digital cinema.”

Latterly, he has been at the forefront of research into high dynamic range, working with standards bodies and developers like Dolby to bring HDR to the screen. He led Pixar’s endeavours in guiding the HDR finish for the theatrical release of Inside Out in Dolby Vision, the world’s first feature exhibited in HDR and Rec.2020 wide gamut colour.

“We are unique in already leveraging a very high fidelity product internally,” he says. “We use a very high precision 16-bit floating point format. We may not be limited by optical acquisition, but we still have to protect our virtual worlds in the same way as live action, if we

want to leverage high dynamic range through to exhibition.”

The Disney-owned animation studio has yet to officially announce that all of its releases will be given a HDR treatment but Glynn says the company is more than ready.

“We need to be aware of a strong desire in the home entertainment market, in particular, for HDR,” he says. “Certainly the last five or six Pixar movies have been mastered to such incredibly high fidelity that we can take advantage of HDR. As we track back further into the Pixar catalogue it becomes more difficult [to remaster for HDR], since the technology on those first films was not nearly as sophisticated as it is today to make the most of the nuances HDR offers.”

The technique is not just one of finishing, he says. It impacts animation at many stages from concept art and editorial through shading, lighting and VFX.

“It’s a high impact return for creatives,” he asserts. “HDR approaches a range of stimulus that is more naturalistic. It affords a visceral yet subconscious feel for an audience who are no longer distracted by the limits of the projection system. You don’t need to read a white paper to understand that HDR enables higher quality filmmaking.”

For all the vibrancy of Inside Out, Glynn’s favourite scene in the film depicts the Memory Dump, a place he describes as “very ambitious, visually very dark, calm and sombre and quiet. A place of fading memories. It’s an emotional scene that doesn’t need to be flashy and loud.”

IBC Big Screen Experience

Dominic GlynnSenior Scientist, Pixar Animation StudiosRegion: USA

Interviewed by: Adrian Penningon

“You don’t need to read a white paper to understand that HDR enables higher quality filmmaking”


The Inside Out of HDR

15 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Dominic Glynn.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:50

Mark Hilton, head of Grass Valley’s Infrastructure business unit, was a key contributor to the IBC landmark session ‘The IP Infrastructure Revolution’.

This revolution was really kick-started in 2013 by the Joint Task Force on Networked Media and its look at replacing SDI. One concern then was that proprietary systems might emerge and the desire was for an interoperable replacement offering flexibility in workflows, remote production, and cost savings – IP plus software defined networking (SDN).

Commenting on this, Hilton says, “By working together as an industry we can develop agile IP solutions which leverage the best offered from the IT market, such as COTS switching for applications which

do not require vertically accurate switching in the core, as well as SDN.”

He also hoped to park a number of key messages in people’s minds in the contexts of technical, commercial and operational issues.

On the ‘just married’ sign that many people wrap around IP and UHDTV, Hilton says, “IP and UHD are highly correlated trends but not essential partners. It is possible to create either a 12G SDI infrastructure or use lightweight compression to leverage an existing SDI infrastructure. Both of these strategies are short sighted on delivering only 12G UHD. The promise of IP is format agnosticism, so whether we are using 10 bit 4K, or 12 bit HDR 4k, 4k with 120 fps or 8K, all of these can be supported in a scalable, distributed architecture.”

Another specific issue was how remote production can benefit from IP.

“Grass Valley is enabling an evolution to IP rather than a

revolution,” Hilton cautions. “There will be a long transition period, and vendors must support such a migration without forcing the market to disruptively rip out current architectures.

“Elements of the evolution include edge devices such as cameras, servers, production switchers, playout servers, and multi-viewers. They must be able to migrate from SDI to IP in a step-wise manner,” he continues. “True SDN must be leveraged along with current SDI control systems to support a hybrid architecture including both SDI and IP routing infrastructures.”

However what sort of irritating hybrid period are typical facilities facing while SDI dies away?

“It will take some time for

this evolution to occur but it will probably happen faster than previous transitions,” says Hilton. “Users should only purchase products capable of supporting both IP and SDI. We will see islands of IP emerge first in areas of lower risk such as monitoring, editing, and ingest. Grass Valley has brought to market a full glass-to-glass IP capable portfolio following this approach.”

Standards around everything new with IP are urgent, illustrated to great extent by Sony’s widely supported adjustments to SMPTE 2022 for IP live projects. So how does Hilton regard this initiative?

“As a market we absolutely need to work together to develop standards which all vendors can adopt. Developing sideline proprietary projects, for which only a few are invited to join the club, is counter to the spirit of interoperability and collaboration needed at a time of such a large technology shift.”

Business Operations


Fulfi lling the promise of IP

Mark HiltonVP, Infrastructure Products, Grass ValleyRegion: Canada


“There will be a long transition period to IP, and vendors must support such a migration without forcing the market to disruptively rip out current architectures”

16 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Mark Hilton.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:50

Academy Award-winner Markus Gross, one of the world’s top computer scientists, took on the challenging new frontier of ‘Pervasive Disruption’ at IBC, from the angle of how it impacts content creation and distribution.

As VP of Disney Research, and director of Disney Research Zurich, he explains, “We understand ourselves to be the key resource of the entire Walt Disney Company. We push the forefront of technological innovation in all fields that matter to our entertainment businesses.

“We define disruptions broadly as significant changes or developments within our industry often driven by new technological advances. Such disruptions can happen as a result of global trends, but they can also come from through big ideas and innovations,” he adds. “Some of the commonly understood disruptions

include the change of content consumption patterns, the diversification of content creation, the way stories are being told across different media platforms, and our ability to deliver scalable, premium personalised experiences or content.

“Most media content will be delivered by digital distribution platforms and consumed at any time and any place by a generation of users who are innately mobile,” he continues. “Digital platforms enable distribution companies to better understand audiences, which is key to optimising the quality of a personalised experience.”

Gross also spoke about perfecting new creative software options for Disney animation and FX.

“For animation, we collaborate closely with our studio partners. This includes better physically-

based lighting and shading as well as simulation technologies for the physics of motion,” he reveals. “For live action FX we have been focusing on surpassing the ‘uncanny valley’

for human faces, with a new generation of capture methods for facial features, such as geometry, eyes, eyelids, and hair.

“We are also exploring realtime, high quality rendering technologies to create interactive content of cinematic looks and feel. Over the past years, we have further developed a significant portfolio of technologies for stereoscopic 3D, light field processing, high

frame rate processing, and high dynamic range imaging,” he adds. “Combined, these methods enable us to create immersive 360 VR experiences at the highest quality levels.”

The Disney research agenda is broad, and novel production and post production technologies constitute only one part of its output. Other topics include machine learning, 3D printing and digital fabrication, robotics, language processing, AI, and behavioural economics.

“We relentlessly innovate, pushing the boundaries of creativity to make great stories and immersive experiences. Our technologies have been

utilised in feature films such as Maleficent, Cinderella, Tangled, Frozen, and Big Hero 6,” says Gross.

Asked what he had wanted to leave in the minds of his IBC session audience, Gross says, “I don’t want to speculate about the impact of the aforementioned disruptions within the industry, but it is commonly understood that the ability to analyse what customers want will be a key factor to long term success. As such, all technologies in the wider space of analytics are important to us.

“At Disney Research, we continue to hire some of the best researchers across various scientific fields worldwide,” he adds. “We are building upon the spirit and firm belief of our founder, that technology is a key to leveraging the creative process.”

New Disruptors

Leveraging the creative process with technology and research

Markus GrossVP of Disney Research, and Director of Disney Research Zurich Region: Switzerland


“For live action FX we have been focusing on surpassing the uncanny valley for human faces, with a new generation of capture methods”


17 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Markus Gross.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:49

When Thomas Edwards, the vice president for engineering and operations at Fox Networks, predicted earlier this year that there would be no broadcast kit inside a broadcast facility by 2020, some people gasped. Not Discovery’s John Honeycutt.

“I need that to happen before 2020,” he says knowingly. “I have no desire to buy more blinking lights.”

Honeycutt, who was a speaker in the IBC Conference

session ‘Our CTOs Look Forward 12 Months’, sees IP underpinning almost everything in the near future and even feels that, as an industry, “we have not moved quickly enough.”

“We have too much specialised kit and too much nuance in workflows to suit certain needs and wants,” he says. “If we are going to move to a software-defined future we all have to embrace that transition, because it will take all

us working together to help the slower areas to get there too.”

There is a concern also that some suppliers and developers may be dragging their heels. “If vendors don’t move quick enough, they are going to become ex-vendors. We are not going to sit and wait for people to move forward. If they cannot, we are going to find another way to do it.That is the beauty of software. You can get there in more ways than one.”

The move to IP-based broadcasting is not the only subject on Honeycutt’s current ‘to do’ list. As the man who leads Discovery Communications’ consolidated IT, media technology, production and operations functions globally, he has his eyes set on many things, from remote production to making the most

of the ‘big opportunity’ of OTT. 4K broadcast is a given too, he admits, but not quite yet.

The last big step change, from SD to HD, “had a much clearer view of success,” he argues, pointing out that it coincided with the change from 4:3 to 16:9, and to 5.1 sound. “Because the improvements were so good and so compelling, you knew it had to get there.”

Although his company is producing 100 hours in 4K this year, when it comes to transmitting it, “there are still a lot of questions to be answered.”

“It is about having a recipe of improvement – with resolution, HDR and a better frame rate,” he says. “Unfortunately they are all developing at different speeds. From a standards perspective, specifically in HDR, there is a debate on which HDR will we

use. It’s chicken and egg.”Honeycutt is also keen to

embrace the cloud. “I don’t see many material areas where the cloud is not relevant,” he asserts. “In the core Discovery business we deal with 600 production suppliers around the world. We don’t want those assets delivered to our physical environment. We want them to be in the cloud and then get them when we need them.”

This subject also prompts a wider discussion about security, as company profiles rise.

“Publicity raises exposure and increases the possibility of people wanting to open a window and try to see what is going on inside your company, from an information security perspective,” says Honeycutt. “Security has to be in every conversation about the future.”

Strategic Insights


Covering all the basesJohn HoneycuttChief Technology Officer, Discovery CommunicationsRegion: USA

Interviewed by: Will Strauss

“I have no desire to buy more blinking lights”

18 Executive IBC2015_v2 - John Honeycutt.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:49

Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN)’s research study, TV RE[DEFINED], explores how people are watching television in today’s changing viewing environment, and the answer is, “on their own terms”.

The research shows that the biggest irritation encountered by viewers is not being able to access content, for example not being available in their country, followed by difficulty in locating the content.

Christian Kurz is responsible for providing VIMN’s businesses and operations with strategic consumer-based research. He also maintains a consistent and strongly aligned research organisation across the company, which guides and informs international business decisions across all brands of the VIMN portfolio, such as MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, on all platforms. He was ideally picked then for the IBC Conference session, ‘Know Your Consumer: The Better You Know Them, The Better Your Business’.

Commenting on the VIMN study, Kurz says, “Ultimately what we found is that viewership came down to one simple equation; greater access to great content increases engagement. The viewer must perceive that they are gaining access to great content in order for it to positively impact their viewing. If this middle part of the equation is missing, then increased engagement is not achieved.”

While linear TV’s role is still dominant and the only source, currently, that satisfies both passive and active viewing needs, Kurz feels that

additional viewing options are increasing in terms of usage. He notes that viewers today are simply expecting content to be available to them on their preferred platform and distribution channel at a time they choose, adding, “To live up to that expectation, the broadcast industry as a whole has been adapting and will need to continue to do so. Broadcasters and [traditional] operators can leverage the very strong bond they have with the audience and push into new areas; there is a lot of potential for innovation starting from that point.”

“Viewers are thinking differently about TV, and as their expectations change, TV providers and content creators should redefine their relationship with viewers in a number of ways, from innovating around the management of content libraries, to creative exploitation of the full range of secondary sources.”

“We need to listen to the consumer first,” he adds. “They want great content delivered through engaging platform experiences, and as an industry we need to continue to innovate in this area while continuing to deliver great content.”

There’s also another business aspect to viewer

research. Viacom launched Viacom Vantage in the US over a year ago, a data-driven ad product that enables advertisers to reach their custom targets at the programme level across the Viacom portfolio.

Kurz notes however that there are issues in the use of customer data. “I think one of the most important questions in this area, that is not currently being discussed widely, is that of data ownership and research ethics. As an industry we need to be more transparent with consumers about what data we are collecting and what we do with it.”

Leaders’ Summit

Evolving with the viewerChristian KurzSVP of Research, Insights and Reporting, Viacom International Media NetworksRegion: USA

Interviewed by: Heather McLean

“Broadcasters and operators can leverage the very strong bond they have with the audience and push into new areas”


19 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Christian Kurz.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:48

Jonathan Lewis works on the front line of one of digital TV’s hottest subjects – trading programmatically. He spoke on the IBC panel session ‘Advertising Meets Big Data’, and drew a lot of interest in the gathering of all Channel 4’s digital assets under All 4, with a strong focus on VoD from live stream, catch-up, archive and box-set perspectives.

“We are seeing the digital and linear businesses starting to converge,” says Lewis. “There is less of a difference or importance now as to where people are watching content and on what platform. If we can offer addressability in audiences and access to data wherever they are watching, then it really doesn’t matter.”

Channel 4 started targeting demographic audiences 18 months ago and can now identify certain groups of users, who retrieve benefits and usability via All 4, while advertisers eye segmentation and targeting values. Everything hangs off Channel 4’s proprietary data management platform, and the over 30 data analysts it employs.

“Research proved that allowing advertisers to target audiences on a demographic basis, as opposed to bucketing audiences by the specific

genre of shows they watch on demand, was much more effective,” says Lewis. “So being able to target 16-34 ABC 1 adults on 4OD (as All 4 used to be known) for a brand like Audi, was a much more effective way of getting access to that audience.”

Other plus factors came in delivering a return on investment, purchasing considerations, and raising advertising and brand awareness.

“We are coming up to about 50% of our direct sold business on All 4 being targetable, addressable audience advertising,” says Lewis. “What we are doing with the data we are collecting on the people who watch our content is ahead of the market globally.”

Lewis has heard this from the ad-serving company Freewheel and agency groups, but he sees a bigger picture.

“There always comes a point when you want your competitors to offer the same services, because you are able to scale the business in a much bigger way and get more brands on board,” he explains. “If brands can buy audiences just on Channel 4 that is great for Channel 4, but not great for the overall VoD market, which ultimately we want to grow.”

One of Channel 4’s big assets is the panel of 8,000 registered users gathered under Core 4.

“We ask them to engage regularly via online surveys, which informs us about their likes and dislikes, what their interests are, plus lifestyle statements,” says Lewis. “We track that survey data with their viewing behaviour on All 4, and from there we have created half a dozen interest segments which we are starting to offer to agencies and clients.”

Setting up Europe’s first premium programmatic buying platform saw Channel 4 working with Freewheel and its FourFronts initiative.

“It enables agency traders to buy premium VoD inventory on an automated basis, using a demand side platform (DSP),” says Lewis. “For the first time, we are passing through our data in that platform, so agencies can target Channel 4’s first-party data segments. We are also looking at how we can offer access to data across multiple platforms and devices.”

Lewis does not believe terrestrial TV ad revenues will drop, or that the 30-second spot will die away, but the VoD market is in rude health. “We expect our revenues to better 20% growth year-on-year,” he says. “A lot of that is driven by the initiatives we are bringing to the market, like the ability to buy addressable audiences. The ability to buy programmatically has been a massive pull to that sector.”

Business Operations


Jonathan LewisHead of Digital and Partnership Innovation, Channel 4 Region: UK


“What we are doing with the data we are collecting on the people who watch our content is ahead of the market globally”

The wisdom of crowds

20 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Jonathan Lewis.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:48

Rhys Noelke is responsible for driving strategy at RTL Group, one of the biggest entertainment networks in Europe. Before joining the group’s headquarters in Luxembourg in 2007, he was part of the team who built RTL’s VoD platform, RTL Now.

How is RTL adapting to online demands?We have been ramping up our efforts to build reach and monetisation in the online world. The good thing is that we are already seeing results: RTL Group is now Europe’s leading media company in online video, with seven billion views per

month. Reach is important, but it’s not everything. We

also need to attract the best content

and talent.

Our subsidiary FremantleMedia is already producing hundreds of hours of original web content in dedicated studios around the world. At BroadbandTV, for instance, we have signed several YouTube stars like RCL Beauty 101. Monetising the content remains a challenge. Today online advertising sales can happen in a split second and we want to be part of this growth market. That’s why we acquired SpotXchange, a leader in realtime programmatic advertising sales.

In which ways are you moving away from the classic advertising model?While you have the typical 12 minute ad break on traditional TV, in the future there will possibly be more targeted and higher valued advertising on your PC or tablet. Some viewers will prefer to subscribe to a content package that

only reflects their tastes. We are also becoming

less dependent on pure advertising sales. In 2014 non-advertising revenue already accounted for 44 % of our total earnings.

How do you handle rights in a non-linear environment?As a commercial broadcaster we need to balance our business by monetising views either through advertising or subscription-based

offers. Content must fund itself. That’s why

we want to offer our video services across all screens

in different ways, either on open or managed platforms. Watching your favourite TV show seven days after broadcast for free on RTL Now or 6play, or being part of a subscription service enabling the viewer to watch soaps or US dramas before they air on TV, are two examples of how we manage rights and exploitation windows.

What has your past experience in VoD taught you about what the customer wants?I was part of the launch team at RTL Now, around eight or nine years ago. Most of the technical issues we had in those days no longer exist. The pace of change has increased. New offers are emerging every week and sometimes you need to cut through the noise and ask yourself: would I use this myself? My view is that on-demand has its limits. I think online linear/playlist channels will become bigger, because it’s great to lean back and be entertained. That’s what we did with half a dozen 6play channels in France, for instance.

How can big broadcasting groups compete with the likes of YouTube? For the past two or three years we’ve been specifically looking at generating short-form video offers and have heavily invested in online video. A key change is that the young are looking for fresh content and want to watch it wherever and whenever they want. Our multi-platform networks StyleHaul and BroadbandTV are addressing those needs. But that doesn’t mean that linear or scheduled programming is dead. Not only are live TV sports and entertainment events drawing mass audiences, live streaming events are also growing, and even on-demand services like Netflix are creating weekly programme schedules to attract new audiences.

Keynote


Bigger is bestRhys NoelkeSenior Vice President, Strategy, RTL GroupRegion: Benelux

Interviewed by: Catherine Wright

“On-demand has its limits… online linear/playlist channels will become bigger, because it’s great to lean back and be entertained”

21 Executive IBC2015_v2 - Rhys Noelke.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:47

A long, continent-hopping career in TV, with many years at Discovery, has taught Phillip Luff that there are more similarities across borders than differences.

“Businesses are operated slightly differently in different places, or it might take a different time frame for things to happen,” he says. “But it made me realise that consumers around the world pretty much want the same thing. They want quality entertainment, they want to watch things when they want

to watch them, on devices that give them flexibility. And they will always seek out great characters and storytelling, no matter where it is.”

Just a few months into his new post at Scripps Networks Interactive, Luff is applying his experience of partnering with the consumer in the fullest way possible.

“One of my focuses at Scripps is to get even more insight into consumer behaviour and desires on a global level. I think the

cross-border trend is growing, for example -- if I travel, I want to watch my content wherever I am.

“But there are also certain local requirements that have to be considered. Some cultures are interested in certain types of content or a certain angle. With the Food Network for example, we’re very conscious of seasonality. You might be doing a summer campaign in the UK, but it’s the middle of winter in Africa. It’s those kinds of simple things you have to become aware of.”

With YouTube now saturated with pop-up ‘lifestyle’ content, from one-man cooking shows to fashion commentary, how will Scripps up its game for the 21st century lifestyle audience?

“For one, our key target

audiences are adults aged 25 to 54. They are not the millennial audience. Our audience is very much focused on consuming linear content that’s good quality, engaging and inspiring, and they’re less likely to be shifting to only watching content on-

demand on an iPad. I think we’re safe for a while, and that gives us room to experiment.”

While OTT threatens to unleash a content ‘wild west’, Luff believes brands like Scripps have an increasingly important role to play as forces for stability in the future.

“What are the roles of lifestyle brands like ours – the Food

Network, Travel Channel, Fine Living? Will they be a flag for consumers to help them find content in that non-linear world?

“My view is, based on the research, that consumers are still very much reliant on brands to frame their expectations. A

brand is really about a promise. What do you expect to get from us? Is it interesting, exciting, but also a safe environment to watch on the sofa with my family on the big screen? What can I expect? Even with the growing importance of OTT and the consolidation of the industry, I think brands will continue to play a very important role.”

Keynote


Finding a global lifestyle

Phillip LuffMD UK & EMEA, Scripps Networks InternationalRegion: UK

Interviewed by: Neal Romanek

“Consumers are still very much reliant on brands to frame their expectations”

22 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Phillip Luff.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:46

David Pendleton has been ABC’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer since 2004. He is also chairman of MediaHub Australia, an ABC and WIN Television Australia joint venture that provides multi-client digital playout and distribution via IPTV, mobile and other handheld devices to Australian metropolitan and regional markets. He was thus a key choice to explore cutting edge topics at IBC, on panels such as ‘Is OTT Simply Broadcast Re-booted?’

Is OTT the future of broadcasting?In the short term it’ll continue to be an adjunct to linear broadcast TV. Over time there is no doubt, however, that OTT will be the dominant platform. Particularly as the internet and broadband becomes more ubiquitous. As internet speeds increase and connectivity becomes cheaper and easier via 4G and the emerging 5G standards supplemented by increased WiFi penetration, OTT will surely become the medium of choice for the audience and for the networks and content owners seeking to monetise their IP.

Is OTT expanding the market or just re-training it?A little bit of both. In addition to duplicating existing linear scheduled broadcasts online, going OTT to mobile devices, in particular, offers a range of new options for both the audience and the broadcasters. It also allows those companies not in the position of owning a broadcast transmitter, cable or DTH platform to

start broadcasting to a mass market. That is, OTT technology provides the opportunity of being a broadcaster to those who own the content and can directly connect with the audience to monetise that content in new and innovative ways bypassing the old broadcast and cable models.

Almost every member of a household now has a personal device. That means more eyes on the same available content and wanting to engage with the content as well. To a large extent we are being constrained by the market.

How are OTT services evolving in the shadow of Netflix and Amazon Prime, and what does it take for a broadcaster to compete?There is a range of business models for OTT operators, whether they are traditional broadcasters and content owners or new OTT aggregators like Netflix. The ABC has followed a similar model to the BBC. The ABC’s content, for which it has acquired the online rights, is shown free-to-air on our iView platform which, until the introduction of Netflix earlier in 2015, was Australia’s largest OTT platform.

ABC iView charges no subscription fees and has no support advertising. It is merely an extension of our broadcast services but in an online, on-demand way. I don’t think the audience will settle on just one OTT provider or abandon the old broadcast model entirely. They’ll more than likely graze among different platforms and different devices: some paid, some free,

some advertising or sponsor supported. I think there’s room for those who have compelling content across all of the OTT, cable, broadcast and DTH platforms.

With Telstra now bringing the Roku box to market, we are also witnessing the next phase of OTT: a single solution that aggregates all subscription OTT services - and potentially offers a bundle deal. Broadcasters have to compete via content differentiation and ruthless operational efficiency. Most have catch-up services and OTT offerings. These cost money, but they don’t necessarily bring commensurate value. Great content brings people to a platform regardless of who operates it.

Strategic insights

Going up and over, down underDavid PendletonChief Operating Officer, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)Region: Australia

Interviewed by: Will Strauss

“Great content brings people to a platform regardless of who operates it”


23 Executive IBC2015_v2 - David Pendleton.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:46

“Making digital interact with broadcast is really my principal objective, and it feels as if a lot of the different strands have come finally together with my work on The Voice UK,” says Muki Kulhan of her role as Executive Digital Producer on BBC One’s flagship Saturday night vocal talent show.

Many of these ‘strands’ – including new, immersive viewing platforms and the trend towards increased interactivity and audience engagement – were aired during the IBC 2015 ‘Rising Stars’ session to which she contributed, ‘The Future of

Broadcasting: Hot Topics and Game Changers’. For the projects in which Kulhan has been involved, though, many of tomorrow’s technologies have been in the mix for some time now.

Her awareness of the potential for enhanced interaction between media producer and consumer has been honed through a distinguished career in both the music and broadcasting industries. An extended stint at MTV International – which culminated in her role as the broadcaster’s first-ever Director of Digital

Media, Talent and Music – has been well-documented, while clients engaged through her own digital strategy and production operation, Muki-International, have included Skype, O2 Mobile, Endemol/Shine, Universal Music and Sony Music.

In particular, Kulhan feels that the recent journey taken by the music business shows how much can be achieved in terms of adopting multiple platforms successfully.

“As devices become ever more sophisticated, people are used to accessing anything at any time on the go, and the music industry has grasped that. Just look at Universal Music, which recently hired Jay Frank to serve in a role dedicated to improving streaming services.”

Fortuitously for Kulhan, her arrival on the team of The Voice UK – in time for series four last year – coincided with a desire

by the BBC and production company Wall to Wall to raise the level of audience engagement with the show.

“They had launched a dedicated YouTube channel so we upgraded our presence there and also on Instagram, as well as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. We also revamped the app to be a truly gamified, interactive hub complete with quizzes, ratings, videos and news. Essentially, we went in the direction of having more video, visuals and written content out there for viewing on all devices – as opposed to continuing with a more traditional ‘sidekick’ show.”

Kulhan’s enthusiasm to explore the potential of new technologies, such as smart watches and VR to bring fresh dimensions to the viewing experience, inevitably raises questions about the long-term

validity of traditional linear broadcasting. But unlike some of her peers, she feels confident that it will continue to fulfil a vital function.

“There will always be big events that people will gather around the TV to watch in realtime, including major sporting events or Royal Weddings. And now, the transition from linear to on-demand on platforms like BBC iPlayer gives us an even more reasons to watch entertainment, so I don’t think that element of the viewing experience will go away for a while,” she says. “Instead, I think that the BBC and other broadcasters are thinking actively about how to work with traditional platforms, while still seeming to be futuristic and remaining one step ahead of the game. And my impression is that many of them are achieving that balance.”

Rising Stars


Muki KulhanExecutive Digital Producer, The Voice UK, BBCRegion: UK

Interviewed by: David Davies

Embracing new technologies

“As devices become ever more sophisticated, people are used to accessing anything at any time on the go”

24 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Muki Kulhan.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:45

Sling TV is a new kind of OTT TV service, perhaps best described as pay-TV ‘lite’, and which requires no cables, no complicated set-up, no long-term contract and additionally can be taken anywhere the user has a device. In barely six months (it launched in February 2015) it had signed up a reported 250,000 users.

Sling TV’s CEO is Roger Lynch, who delivered Saturday’s IBC Conference Keynote, ‘Over

the Top Comes Of Age’. His keynote dealt with the realities of creating streaming services to satisfy the demand for multiple-device, on-demand TV, and how the appetite by consumers for online-delivered video is growing.

“We see Netflix and Hulu as being more complementary to what we are doing,” he says. “We differentiate ourselves from them by providing to our users the most recent programming,

live sports and shows. As far as pay-TV is concerned, we win by being very simple. For pay-TV the process can be cumbersome in that there are calls to a call centre, [with customers] spending time talking through all the packages. Then there is a credit check, then a two-year contract, then you have to schedule an installer, who then will spend three or four hours running wires everywhere.”

“At the end of this process you have a service,” he adds.

“With us there’s a phone call, an account is created and you’re done! You could be watching immediately on a seven-day free trial. The content travels with the users wherever they go, and they can cancel at any time.

Access is on all of their devices, there’s no hardware to buy. Our price point, at just $20 a month is also quite a bit different.”

Lynch explains that traditional pay-TV subscriber acquisition costs (SAC) are in the $800-$900 range. “We don’t work that way. Our SAC is a tiny fraction of that $800. We don’t need multiple year contracts, nor those high-gross margins to be successful. And our potential market is growing. Just look at the broadband-only homes in the US, which now number 12-14 million, and that’s growing all the time. Even people re-erecting aerials, that’s a growing market, and cord-cutters are also growing. These are the markets we are going after.”

Keynote

Growing the streaming market one device at a timeRoger J. Lynch CEO, Sling TV Region: USA


“We don’t need multiple year contracts, nor those high-gross margins to be successful”


25 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Roger Lynch.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:44

IBC LEADERS’ SUMMIT 26 Executive Summary theibcdaily

Maaz SheikhPresidentSTARZ Play Arabia

Daniel TooleMedia & Entertainment Industry Leader, Europe,IBM Global Business Services Europe

Alex GrossmanVice President Media and EntertainmentQuantum

Michelle MunsonCEO & Co-founderAspera, an IBM company

Laurence Miall-d’AoutCEOTVbeat

Alice MasciaVice President StrategySky Deutschland

26,27 Executive IBC2015_v1 - IBC Leaders Summit.indd 2 23/09/2015 11:44

IBC LEADERS’ SUMMIT theibcdaily Executive Summary 27

Christian KurzSVP, Research & InsightsViacom International Media Networks

Fran UnsworthDirectorBBC World Service

David ButoracCEOOSN

Matthew PostgateCTOBBC

Phillip LuffMD UK & EMEAScripps Network Internationa

Andrew NeilIBC Leaders’ SummitAnchor

26,27 Executive IBC2015_v1 - IBC Leaders Summit.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:44

In 2012 mobile operator EE launched the UK’s first 4G network. It has since used its experience to understand how a high capacity data network influences user behaviour. A key result is that video consumption on mobile is even more significant than expected, and set to grow beyond initial expectations. While Cisco predicts that 72% of mobile traffic will be video by 2020, “we are looking at 75% by 2019,” says Matt Stagg, EE’s Principal

Strategist. “When we saw this huge uptake in video we realised that what we’d built was in fact a media distribution network.

“The biggest fundamental shift we will see in the next decade for mobile distribution of TV is LTE Broadcast. EE’s vision for LTE Broadcast is that it will be better than TV.”

Stagg led the team that delivered the UK’s first LTE (4G) engineering proof of concept at the 2014 Commonwealth Games (partnered with the BBC,

Qualcomm and others), and followed that up with a trial at the FA Cup Final at Wembley to prove how it could combine the efficiency of broadcast with the functionality of unicast. “It’s the next iteration of red button,” Stagg says.

EE plans a limited live rollout for LTE Broadcast toward the end of 2016. “We’re not saying it’s a commercial launch, but we will start to put capacity on the network for certain events where it provides benefits.”

One benefit is to alleviate spikes in congestion around live sports events, not just for users wanting to access the same live content, but for other network users whose normal browsing might be affected.

However, talk of the technology pushing aside DTT

as the main distribution network for live and linear TV is, for now, premature.

“We are actively steering away from that and saying let’s focus on where we need this technology now. In the future, who knows?”

The Mobile Video Alliance (MVA), which Stagg co-chairs, is in accord. “We are not discussing [LTE Broadcast] as a DTT replacement but as a way of improving performance and efficiencies of delivering live linear TV. On top of that we have all the other services, like mass software updates.”

Stagg co-founded the MVA in 2013: “It’s done a huge amount for driving forward UK mobile TV and it’s seen as a model, globally, for how you bring mobile operators, content

delivery networks, broadcasters and content providers together to work on delivering a superior customer experience for everyone.”

Stagg is also a mentor for the 5GIC project at Surrey University where the awesome potential of a mobile technology without bandwidth limits is taking shape.

“5G may yield a perception of limitless bandwidth because you will always have enough for your purpose,” he says. “This could be the connected car, remote surgery or holographic projection. 5G is not just a new air interface and associated technology. It is best understood as an ecosystem which a lot of industries, not just mobile operators, are exploring to change the way we think about being connected.”

Strategic Insights


Taking broadcast to 4G and beyondMatt StaggPrincipal Strategist, EE & Mobile Video Alliance Region: UK


“We are not discussing LTE Broadcast as a DTT replacement but as a way of improving performance and efficiencies of delivering live linear TV”

28 Executive IBC2015_v2 - Matt Stagg.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:41

A year into her appointment as first woman director of the BBC World Service, Fran Unsworth is leading one of the world’s most respected news sources into the digital age. After a long career at the BBC, Unsworth’s keynote conference panel, ‘The Future Is Now – Broadcasting in an Age of Challenge’, is her first appearance on the IBC stage. Her topic is not an unusual one: the changing nature of audience consumption habits – but when it comes to the BBC World Service, those consumption habits are global in scale and tremendously diverse.

“For us it’s a question of predicting what the next technology is that people are going to be using and what we can do for audiences on those technologies,” says Unsworth, “as well as servicing our traditional audiences who are still there in significant numbers.”

And the technologies audiences use to access the BBC World Service are wide-ranging. In an age of multiple mobile devices, there is no “one size fits all” solution, but that issue is further compounded when some of your audience may not even possess mobile devices.

In Africa, for example, where the growth of phones has been considerable over the past five years, connectivity may be slow or intermittent, or non-existent, and the packages required to watch video are not always affordable by most people.

“What we take for granted in Western countries is that we don’t have that rotating circle in front of our eyes – the international symbol of bad

connectivity – as frequently as they do in the developing world,” Unsworth points out. “A lot of our audiences are rural and not affluent, and whilst we’re not totally back in the days with everyone gathered around a radio set, not everybody has a mobile phone, and certainly not everybody has a smartphone.

“The global growth of smartphones is going to change everything, but it’s changing things at different speeds and for different socio-economic groups. And it depends on the various economies of the world what they’ll be able to do on those phones.”

Exactly how to pinpoint the technological curve and how audiences are using technology in each region is one of the World Service’s biggest challenges. And that technology includes not just hardware but the software running on it, including the shifting tides of social media platforms.

Is there a danger that organisations like the World Service can over-focus on chasing technological trends and begin to lose sight of their original purpose? Surely one of the things the world has come to expect from the BBC World Service is its stability.

“I think the stability that the BBC World Service embodies is in our editorial,” says Unsworth. “People say around the world: ‘I saw it on the BBC website, so I believe it’s true’. That’s where the stability of the BBC brand

comes in, not by saying we’ll only carry on appearing on short wave radio -- because that is the fastest route to having no audience at all.

“What we’re offering audiences is trustworthy news and information with a global perspective” – and through whatever means necessary, Unsworth is going to get it to them.

Keynote

Serving the world “Whilst we’re not totally back in the days with everyone gathered around a radio set, not everybody has a mobile phone, and certainly not everybody has a smartphone”


Fran UnsworthDirector, BBC World ServiceRegion: UK

Interviewed by: Neal Romanek

29 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Fran Unsworth.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:40

“It might not have reached maturity yet, but we are looking at the emergence of a global entertainment culture. It’s fantastic that English, Chinese and American viewers, for example, can find things they enjoy in common. That is going to have all sorts of knock-on significances in the years to come that go way beyond the usual political dialogue.”

Of course, observing the interaction between political and public cultures has pretty much been a life’s work for Lord (Michael) Dobbs. In parallel with roles as special advisor, speechwriter and, latterly, Deputy Chairman of the

Conservative Party during the ‘80s and ‘90s, Dobbs began to cultivate a career as an author of political thrillers. The 1989 publication of the first novel in the House of Cards trilogy initiated what would ultimately prove to be a hugely successful media franchise, entailing the production of a BBC TV mini-series and, more recently, a US-based adaptation where each new series has been released in its entirety on a single day through Netflix.

Two years on from the launch of Season 1 of the ‘new’ House of Cards – which was initiated by independent content producer Media Rights Capital – it seems

fairly obvious that the show did much to crystallise the then-nascent streaming services market.

“The change has crept up on us gently over some time, but the key to the whole [streaming movement] has been to completely change the fundamentals of broadcasting,” says Dobbs. “Not just the technology itself, although that plays an important role, but the actual point of the technology – which is to give the customer total control. You don’t have to go back very far to find a system in which the broadcasting world was very tightly controlled by the commissioners and schedulers. You got what they thought you wanted when they said you got it – and then you had to wait another week for the next batch.”

The gradual progression away from this “paternalistic” approach towards consumption at the viewer’s own preferred

pace is also bringing benefits for TV drama as an art-form, believes Dobbs. “Creatively there can be more continuity, as there is much less need for artificial climaxing. We’re in a period of transition, of course, but for the viewer it’s becoming

more like reading a great novel – you put it down when you want to.”

In his Keynote Conversation at IBC, Dobbs reflected both generally on the new realities of TV drama production as well as the specific creative relationships – with Netflix, Media Rights Capital, principal actor Kevin Spacey and executive producer David Fincher – that brought about the latest version of House

of Cards, which he describes as “one of the happiest professional experiences of my life”.

With Season 4 set to premiere early next year, the revival clearly has plenty of distance left to run. But it’s hardly Dobbs’ only project – as he readily admits,

he has “plenty on the plate” at the moment, including a proposed Westminster-set show, in collaboration with the creator and principal writer of Danish series Borgen.

“I think it’s fairly well-known that I have been working for a while on a major political project with Adam Price, and I am hopeful that in the near-future we will be able to share it with millions of others,” says Dobbs.

Keynote

Writing new rules for entertainmentLord Michael DobbsCreator and Executive Producer of House of CardsRegion: UK


“We’re in a period of transition, of course, but for the viewer it’s becoming more like reading a great novel – you put it down when you want”


30 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Lord Michael Dobbs.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:40

Attending the computer graphics show SIGGRAPH in 1985, Rick Sayre first came across the Pixar Image Computer. Born at Lucasfilm, the machine had the computational power to manipulate digital images with high resolution. Impressively it was able to handle 12-bit colour values, over and above the 8-bit depth which has been common for much of content production ever since. Moreover, these 12-bit colour components could represent values greater than 1.0.

“I was encouraged in the very early days of Pixar that the people there had total respect for the imaging process,” says

Sayre, who joined when it was a start-up in 1987 and has been involved in many short and feature projects from Toy Story onwards.

“For most of the past thirty years in CGI and VFX it was only possible to display a limited range of light values for images,” says Sayre. “By convention we picked 1.0 for the brightest value we could make, and accepted that 0.0 wasn’t really black. Now, with the new high dynamic range displays, we can begin to talk about images as a photographer would -- in terms of contrast, mid greys and tonal structure. Not only VFX elements and light probes, but finally the

images the audience will see can move beyond that 0 to 1 range.”

Sayre was involved in Pixar’s pioneering work in creating an HDR finish for Inside Out and was Digital Imaging Consultant on the Dolby Vision HDR for Disney’s Tomorrowland.

Unlike the current migration to 4K and Ultra HD, the addition of HDR does not incur a huge

knock-on cost in data handling. “Improving the pixel has a much lower incremental cost than making more of them,” he observes. “More pixels cost more to render, but better pixels require more care.”

HDR manifests itself clearly in the brightest areas of a frame such as metallic reflections or

light sources. Sayre says that on Tomorrowland, the technique “revealed a gleam in the eyes of the actors” which it has not been possible to show theatrically before.

“We have yet to fully explore what it means to not only capture in HDR but to light for HDR,” he suggests. “A DP will know instinctively what

an audience is going to see and what dynamic range is appropriate. Today, you might gel a window on location interiors to avoid it looking blown out. With HDR capture you don’t necessarily have to do that since you can delay the decision until post. So now you can show the audience what is outside

that window. The question is whether you should, in terms of the story. The DP needs to be involved in that post production process. We need to beware of gimmicks.”

In addition, HDR between scenes will need consideration. “Moving from a night time interior straight to a daylight exterior may require a few frames of adjustment, depending on how we wish the audience to experience that change. Making HDR practical for editorial is another important step.”

As for virtual reality, Sayre views it as a fresh approach to a style of storytelling that harks back to the ancient Greek theatre-in-the-round.

“Many of the storytelling dilemmas we are struggling with right now were present thousands of years ago with ideas of audience interaction and breaking the fourth wall,” he suggests.


Rick SayreSupervising Technical Director, Pixar Region: USA


“With the new high dynamic range displays, we can begin to talk about images as a photographer would – in terms of contrast, mid greys and tonal structure”


Adding a gleamto the eye of actors

31 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Rick Sayre.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:39

Gary Woolf is responsible for implementing new and innovative commercial strategies at All3Media International, the distribution arm of the content creator, at a time when business models are rapidly changing. “We expect our revenue from digital media to expand in coming years as more and more digital platforms are launched, whether by traditional broadcasters or by new and upcoming VoD services”, he predicts.

Alongside this global shift from traditional broadcast to digital, one of the areas which is fast expanding is programmatic advertising and trading, as more and more broadcasters adopt new ways of leveraging data from their VoD and digital services.

“From a B2B point of view, the progress of programmatic trading is something we track,” states Woolf. “One of the advantages we see is that it can help VoD services start, and grow quickly. On the flip side, if ad sales are anything like content sales, it’s a people business and we have to be careful not to lose the innovation and collaboration that comes from a highly skilled sales team. One of the challenges for broadcasters is to ensure their in-house teams are experts in handling cross media sales.”

Acquired by a joint venture between Discovery Communications and Liberty Global in May 2014, All3Media is also quite firmly established on the global map: the company started up its LA branch in 2012, in a move to expand in the US, as well as better meet the demands of existing clients in

that key strategic market. Prior to that, it acquired one of Holland’s largest production companies, idtv in 2003, and Germany’s MME Moviement in 2007.

“The production business has become much more global yet there is more demand for high quality, locally originated and created content,” comments Woolf. And indeed, one of the company’s strengths is that it can claim to be both a global and a local player.

Back in the All3Media fold after a short spell at Zodiak Rights, Woolf reports to Steve Macallister, with whom he worked previously at BBC Worldwide and Zodiak. “It is a little early to make any big announcements about our strategy, but what I can say is that we will clearly be looking at diversifying our business into new areas and build new partnerships, including in the digital world, while maintaining and growing our existing relationships. The line between traditional broadcasters and digital companies is blurring anyway, as broadcasters diversify to become digital players as well.”

In his opinion, All3Media has a strong card to play, as viewing habits shift not only from one device to another but also in the way people watch programmes. “It’s fascinating to see that more and more long-form programmes are being viewed on the internet, for instance, which is great news for us. People are also making their own appointments to view, which keeps them engaged in high quality long form content.”

Strategic Insights


Betting on long formGary WoolfEVP Business Development, Digital and Insight, All3Media InternationalRegion: UK


“The production business has become much more global yet there is more demand for high quality, locally originated and created content”

32 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Gary Woolf.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:36

IMAX has recently launched its next-generation laser-based digital projection and sound system. IMAX CTO and Executive Vice President Brian Bonnick spearheaded the R&D project, the largest in IMAX’s history, and so was excellently placed to share his thoughts on the potential of HDR and laser projection, as well as the future of film, at IBC2015.

On HDR:“It’s something we’ve been doing for quite some time. I think it’s going to help move [cinema] forward; filmmakers like contrast. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to change the world.

“I think it has, perhaps, a bigger impact on the home marketplace, where you have much greater control over home TVs and you can get substantially higher brightness levels. Now obviously with the home TV, you don’t have the field of view and the rest of the experience of cinema, so I separate the two. I look at HDR in cinema as being very good, but also opening doors to being really good in the home marketplace. I think HDR in the home marketplace will have substantially better value than that of 4K TVs.”

On laser-illuminated projection:“Getting more brightness in 3D. That’s been the prime pusher for the implementation of lasers [by others].

“In our particular case, we needed more brightness because we needed to find a solution to replace our film-based projectors, so we had a very specific reason in mind. Film projectors are going to be going away. In very large venues, xenon [lamps] can’t get you enough brightness. [Also, laser] provided us with a suite of opportunities if we did a complete redesign, such as substantially higher interframe contrast and sharpness – sharpness was a really big one for us. So there were multiple things we were

looking for with laser, including that extended colour gamut.

“In effect the laser system we have developed is not a commercial solution; it’s intended for the largest of screens that have the great big 1:4:3 aspect ratios. We are presently considering what we will do in the commercial marketplace.

“Unless you are looking at the largest screen, I would question if you really need laser. I think there are certain applications that have value, but I don’t think it’s necessarily across the board. Xenon’s certainly not dead and it’s certainly not bad.”

On the future of fi lm:“In our particular case we have sealed up access to film for a few

years; I think a lot will be based on market demand. Filmmakers like Chris Nolan absolutely love film. Chris has played a very active role in trying to preserve the supply of film.”

“I could see [film’s life continuing] more than five years. Ten or 15 years? I don’t know. But in our world when you have to design new products that take years to develop, it’s close enough that you have to worry about it.

“And of course you have the cost of film. A 3D large format movie in film can run to $60,000 per print. A DCP of the equivalent movie can run to a couple hundred dollars. As long as we can get access to film, we are going to support [it]. There are still people who love film. There’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer.”


HDR, lasers andthe lifespan of fi lm

“I think HDR in the home marketplace will have substantially better value than that of 4K TVs”


Brian Bonnick, P.Eng.Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, IMAX Corporation Region: USA

Interviewed by: Carolyn Giardina

33 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Brian Bonnick.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:36

Scot Barbour, VP of Production Technology at Sony Pictures Entertainment, had a fun time delivering the Rising Stars Masterclass ‘The Heart of Hell – Craft Skills’. He had a dual focus: “For me, it was about staying in touch with emerging artists, and how they each employ and enjoy technology. For them, I hope it was an experience that simplifies things by establishing some of the common fundamentals in our work that we can all relate to,” he says.

“It was about the hope that that experience also inspires them to pursue and persevere, by knowing that we all ultimately started from the same place, and have the potential to reach the same goals,” he adds. “Everything cannot be divided into two camps anymore. For the first time in our history, it’s now often the audience that dictates what they want to see in

content rather than the creator. YouTube is a great example of that, whereby viewers themselves can make or break a channel.”

This is more than a bit different to the traditional cable TV model. “With YouTube, we’re also directly in touch with our viewers, and in the cable model we’re not,” says Barbour.

“Working at a studio has that similar dynamic when compared to independent work, so for me, with a job in production technology, I like to keep an eye on both sides of the coin.”

His session title had the odd handle of ‘The Heart of Hell’. Where did that originate?

“There was a lot of duality in that title,” explains Barbour.

“On the one hand it’s about having a ‘heart of hell’, or more commonly referred to as a ‘thick skin’. Each of them are a metaphor for the level of tenacity and commitment it takes to make content creation dreams come true. On the other hand, it’s also a reference to the great challenges we face in production, and the harsh

realities of the often-idealised world we live in.”

“I once read a great rule about writing screenplays in one of Robert McKee’s books. It stated: ‘If the scene is about what the scene is about, you’re in deep shit’. In reality, the scene is always about what the scene is about when you first conceive of it, so you’re ultimately always

in ‘the heart of hell’. It’s learning how to continually keep working your way out of that that matters most.”

The fact that people can get the full Avid or Adobe editing toolsets for $50 a month leads to the question, will cheap technology kill mentoring, and worsen the learning opportunities for new talent?

“That’s a big question right now, stemming from the inevitable result of technological advancement,” agrees Barbour. “For the content creation industry, nothing really changes

as far as the availability of talent; what changes is the filtering process in our finding that talent, and the visibility opportunities that talent has in reaching us. It’s ultimately a win-win in that regard. At the same time we need to consider what the definition of talent really is, because that word is being redefined by the audience nowadays unlike any time ever before. We’re also witnessing the point at which artist and audience are merging in social media and VR. It’s an exciting time.”

Rising Stars


Lessons from the heart of hell

Scot BarbourVice President of Production Technology, Sony Pictures Entertainment Region: USA


“For the first time in our history, it’s now often the audience that dictates what they want to see in content rather than the creator”

34 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Scot Barbour.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:35

Dean Bullock, Director of Technology Strategy for the Dolby Cinema Group, and Co-Chair of SMPTE TT-21DC, was a key contributor to the IBC2015 session on ‘Immersive cinema: Sound’.

In fact, taking immersive audio to the home is not a difficult challenge, because Dolby Atmos is already supported by current Blu-ray players using existing Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus technology, coupled with a wide range of Atmos-enabled AV Receivers. “We introduced object-based audio to the production process

three years ago and more than 300 Dolby Atmos films have enabled a completely new listening experience for consumers,” says Bullock. “More than 35 Blu-rays have been released for consumers to enjoy Dolby Atmos in their homes.”

IBC Big Screen audiences saw the movies Fantastic Four and Inside Out screened in Dolby Atmos. Dolby AC-4 was also a huge buzz subject. “We have been working with the industry to develop a format to address the future needs of next-generation video and audio entertainment,” says Bullock.

“We’ve seen tremendous momentum among the worldwide broadcast community focusing on the enablement of new audio experiences – including immersive and personalised.”

What shape and size is the requisite bit stream for taking immersive audio to consumers? “The bit stream rates are somewhat higher than traditional 5.1 channel based mixes, but are still deliverable on a standard Blu-Ray,” answers Bullock. “We believe what matters most to the industry is a proven solution that provides a one-stop, end-to-end system that solves real-world challenges with the appropriate bandwidth efficiencies.”

The mission of SMPTE TC-21DC is key to his wider role in the industry. “It documents and maintains standards related to the distribution and reproduction of content for movie theatres equipped for digital cinema

playback. This includes standards for compression, encryption, marking, packaging, play out, projection and

related topics,” says Bullock. “During IBC, I wanted attendees interested in digital cinema to understand that the industry is making a move to SMPTE standard delivery formats,” he continues. “21DC has sent new standards to publication that provide for delivery, transfer and synchronisation of auxiliary data such as immersive audio.”

“The group has been busy writing and revising standards to help the industry switch from ‘interop’ digital cinema delivery formats to full SMPTE standard delivery,” he adds. “This includes publishing a rich set of metadata that describes the contents of a DCP, and updates to standards that clarify packaging and add rich metadata to main audio tracks.

Currently, we are working on revisions for subtitles, and new standards for the exchange of facility information.”

What does Bullock see as Dolby’s new lines of attack? “Dolby is currently working with broadcasters to test next-gen audio solutions that provide unparalleled fan engagement for a wide range of sports, by allowing a customisable listening experience that is more personal and immersive,” he adds. “As 4K and HDR become the norm in the living room, we are working with all points in the ecosystem to deliver Dolby Vision content. We are also fully engaged in activities to

ensure next-generation audio keeps pace with the work

the industry does, to enable future visual

experiences in 4K and beyond.”

Moving to an immersive audio standardDean BullockDirector, Technology Strategy, Cinema, DolbyRegion: USA


“We’ve seen tremendous momentum among the worldwide broadcast community focusing on the enablement of new audio experiences – including immersive and personalised”



36 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Dean Bullock.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:35

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“Streaming is booming,” declares Roku VP of Pay TV, Andrew Ferrone, and what’s more he has the statistics to prove it. In 2014, Roku streamed some three billion hours of video content – a dramatic uplift from the 1.7bn recorded for the previous year – whilst on average each user is streaming 60 hours per month via the Roku platform.

Impressive results, no doubt, but underpinned by a philosophy that actually seems relatively straightforward. “We want to provide a platform to our partners throughout the ecosystem to allow them to

reach consumers on devices the way they want, when they want,” he declares.

Whilst the traditional pay TV bundle isn’t going away anytime soon, there is no denying the growing profile of on-demand à la carte services. Accordingly, the emergence of this new model was a primary theme of the IBC conference session, ‘Breaking the Bundle: The End of TV As We Know It?’, to which Ferrone contributed.

The arrival of offers such as HBO’s new streaming service, HBO Now – which launched with Apple in the spring and has recently been rolled out to

Google Cast and Chromecast – point to the current sense of transition. It might also be suggested that they underline the fundamental wisdom of the streaming strategy pursued by Roku itself, which now has more than ten million streaming players in the US market.

Ultimately, though, services will rise or fall on the quality of the content and the usability of the platform in question. “In Roku’s case we are able to provide a very open ecosystem that allows content providers to work with and then distribute over the Roku platform – as well as customer tools that allow users to find that content through a best-in-class search experience,” he says.

Effective search is certainly critical since “there really has never been more choice than there is now. What it comes down to is that the market is driven by consumer behaviour

and desire; they want to access great content as easily as possible.”

As to whether we are witnessing – to cite the IBC session sub-title – ‘the end of TV as we know it’, Ferrone

has an interesting take on current developments. “For sure we are seeing a shift towards on-demand viewing and consumption via other devices, but we believe that the TV continues to be the primary viewing platform. Long-form content viewing patterns, in particular, are really developing at the expense of the PC as streaming platforms become more prominent.”

Whilst the pace of change is undoubtedly quickening, it’s also evident that the “evolution of the user experience, and of the

business too” has a long way to go yet. For streaming service providers, continued success will only be possible through constant vigilance when it comes to market requirements.

“It is vital to carry on providing

new tools for content providers to achieve monetisation once they have engaged with an audience,” says Ferrone. “For us, that means billing services for one-click sign-up, such as with Hulu and CBS All Access, and providing advertising services to support ourcontent partners. To which end, we’ve recently undertaken integration with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings. So yes, it’s very much a situation of ongoing development of the way we serve our partners and consumers.”

Business Operations


Long-form holds the key to streaming success

Andrew FerroneVP of Pay TV, RokuRegion: USA

Interviewed by: David Davies “There really has never been more choice than there is now”

38 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Andrew Ferrone.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:34

At the end of June 2015, 91.7% of the world’s screens were converted to digital cinema, according to David Hancock of IHS Technology. Hancock, who played a key role in the ‘EDCF Global Update’ session, was able to summarise his forecasts for the sector.

What are the remaining challenges in the transition?“Some of the remaining screens are proving challenging to digitise, mainly for financial reasons. The near-full conversion of cinemas doesn’t mean that the digitisation of the film

industry is finished. In particular, the electronic distribution of films to cinemas is relatively underdeveloped and there is still much work to be done here.

“However, now that cinemas are running a digital backbone of projection and operations, this acts as a platform for other technologies to be sold into cinemas, many aimed at improving and enhancing the experience that customers have in cinemas. The multiplicity of new technologies can cause a complex distribution environment, and can also lead to redundant equipment, as

technologies are launched and don’t fade.”

What does the industry need to do next?“These new technologies have to have a compelling business case behind them, either in generating revenue or saving money. There is a risk with all this new technology that the film world ends up with expensive redundant equipment, and/or a complicated distribution infrastructure of file formats and projection systems. Ultimately, this could bring the sector to a standstill, unwilling to invest in new equipment and unable to advance the creative palette for filmmakers. The industry needs to keep talking to each other, where possible ironing out technology conflict and aiming for agreed paths ahead.”

What is your forecast on laser projection?“The very high cost of current high-end laser solutions is due to the nascent nature of the technology as concerns cinemas. The cost will come down and the technology will evolve from the first generation of today. The interest for exhibitors comes in the light output, upping the brightness for 3D to match that of 2D (14Fl for 3D viewing), but probably more importantly the extended lifetime of a laser light source is such that it brings the total cost of ownership down as exhibitors do not need to buy lamps. Assuming the costs do come down to an affordable level, laser illumination does seem to offer a credible business case for buying projection equipment in a future where VPFs no longer exist and exhibitors need to

budget for IT and technology themselves.”

What’s your view of HDR?“HDR offers higher scope for creativity, but will come at a price. Films can be made for HDR but the projection quality will only be matched by cinemas that are set up for HDR. Of which there are currently very few. However, this technology is now in the market, and there has already been some take-up of the Dolby Cinema offer; the feeling is that the benefits of HDR in terms of image do offer a justifiable reason to invest in the necessary technology.”


Emerging D-Cinema

David Hancock Director, Head of Film and Cinema, IHS Technology Region: UK


“HDR offers higher scope for creativity, but will come at a price”


Making the business case for new cinema technology

39 Executive IBC2015_v1 - David Hancock.indd 1 28/09/2015 14:01

The cinema business will be fully converted from lamp projection to laser-illuminated projection by 2020, predicts Stijn Henderickx, Barco’s Vice President of Cinema.

“For new installations and renovations, it could be 2017 or 2018,” he adds. “We expect the high-end of the market for large installations to move [quickly] to laser given the much higher brightness and higher image quality you can achieve, compared with xenon lamps. You’ll see both old equipment being replaced by laser projectors, and also existing and new equipment being retrofitted in the coming five years.”

But what about the cost of a transition, with laser-based projectors significantly more

expensive that xenon-based ones -- and particularly at a time when many movie theatre owners are still paying off their current digital cinema projectors, including those that involved virtual print fee (VPF) deals to subsidise this expense?

Henderickx acknowledges this current state, but expects the economic model to change. He relates that Barco’s current laser projectors are aimed at the high end, but next year it will release laser-phosphor-based models targeted at the mid-range. “These new projectors will be available at acquisition costs that are in the same ballpark as xenon, and the cost of ownership will be lower,” he says. “Additionally, theatre owners will be able to retrofit

[existing digital projectors]. You can take the lamp house out of the projector and put a laser module inside. The cost of the lamps, over a period of some years, is actually higher than the cost of that module. So savings will be realised on lamps and related maintenance.”

In addition to laser projection, Henderickx anticipates much innovation ahead, with the cinema in 2020 including advances in sound, immersive screens, in-theatre gaming and more alternative content, including concerts and sports.

He also believes these will be needed as the cinema business faces some challenges. “TV at home is getting better and better; it’s become more of a home theatre, so the cinema has to reinvent itself,” he says. “I expect cinemas to significantly invest in bringing more showmanship back to the theatre and creating a fantastic experience.”

He believes that begins with more digital experiences in the lobby (an element of the ‘Cinema

Barco’ model), as well as luxury chairs and more upscale food and drink, in addition to cinema technology advancements.

Among these technologies is Barco Escape, a new three-screen model designed to create a more immersive Cinerama-like experience. The system is starting to roll out with select movies -- for instance 20 minutes of Fox’s upcoming Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials will be available in select configured theatres -- in addition to a Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga concert performance. Henderickx adds that Barco is also looking to offer this format for pre-show advertising, as well as sport. In defining these models, the executive sees a need to understand what today’s young people want.

“The next generation has a different view,” he says. “I hope that is realised soon, because I don’t see all exhibitors realising that what was good 10-15 years ago isn’t good for this generation. We need to make [cinema] different from the

television experience and learn how to get teenagers to the movies more [frequently] than today. If that doesn’t happen, and they are not in the habit of going to the movies, you’ll see a long-term decline in the movies.”

As part of the changing business, there’s also been some debate about the possibility of shrinking theatrical release windows before the home entertainment release. “I question if that will happen,” Henderickx admits. “Why would the studios do that? They would be kind of biting the hand that is providing money to them. I think it could backfire. There’s still huge money to be made at the box office.”



Laser projection transition to be complete by 2020Stijn HenderickxVice President of Cinema, BarcoRegion: Belgium


“TV at home is getting better and better; it’s become more of a home theatre, so the cinema has to reinvent itself”

40 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Stijn Henderickx.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:32

Now that substantial work on the digital cinema rollout has passed, this community is looking at ways to streamline operations and create efficiencies in today’s operations -- a hot topic at IBC and its EDCF Global Update, where John Hurst, co-founder and CTO of digital cinema technology development firm CineCert was a key speaker.

“Cinema content is protected so that for every screen a movie plays on, a key must be made that is unique to that player, which allows the player to unlock the content,” says

Hurst. “The service provider needs to have information about that player to make the Key Delivery Message [KDM], and that is typically sent by email or sometimes courier.”

Now, he notes that the community is working to advance this process with new standards, including updating the Facility List Message that provides validation for KDMs, as well as a Facility List Message Exchange. In addition, there are new workflows that take advantage of connected technology.

Hurst explains, “There was

talk of using internet connectivity in the early days of digital cinema, but with all the other issues that had to be addressed, that was considered ‘nice to have’ but not essential. Now it’s starting to look essential.”

Having a digital platform in place, of course, also enables new opportunities for the cinema. “We can use the same content delivery and security platform to introduce new features incrementally over time,” Hurst says. “We have new sound formats, ‘shaky’ seats, proprietary add-ons, high frame rates – and high dynamic range is now in prototype form. All of these advancements are relatively straightforward to move around the global distribution system because they all rely on this fundamental infrastructure.”

The digital cinema set-up

relies on delivery of a Digital Cinema Package but there are still many cinemas in various regions that use formats such as DVDs for playback. These are generally referred to as E-Cinema.

“It’s difficult to make an argument for quality when getting information into areas is really important and you don’t want the information to be blocked because of economic barriers,” says Hurst. “We continue to promote the DCP as the highest quality way to move images around interoperably. At the same time, I understand that for economic reasons there will always be places where the DCP is ‘too much technology’ and will get in the way of the more important goal of communication. That said, as computing technology continues to increase in density and

performance for price, the DCP will become more accessible.”

Looking further out, Hurst relates that CineCert’s priority over the next five years is adapting its software and services to virtualised computing environments. “Our customers are showing increasing awareness of the cost benefits,” he says.

“There’s also been increasing conversations about emissive displays for cinema applications,” he added. “I think it’s still a little bit early to be talking about reaching the same quality that we expect today in terms of pixel pitch. But in terms of colourimetry, dynamic range and contrast ratio, they are getting closer and closer. I think it’s a short matter of time before we could conceivably have an emissive display for cinema. I would say less than five years.”


John HurstCo-founder and CTO, CineCert Region: USA



Future projections on D-Cinema

“It’s a short matter of time before we could conceivably have an emissive display for cinema”

41 Executive IBC2015_v2 - John Hurst.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:31

The hottest player in TV right now is the technology wing of Major League Baseball. Arguably it has been the hottest player for over a decade, pioneering live streaming of video content below the radar and accumulating a wealth of expertise that has seen it courted by HBO, Sony and ESPN.

“We’ve been doing OTT before the term even existed,” says Joe Inzerillo, CTO, MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) – known as BAM. “We feel like even Netflix got a boost because we were doing OTT before they were.”

Inzerillo joined MLBAM in 2003, three years after the unit was set up to create websites for the 30 MLB teams and to consolidate MLB’s digital rights. He had started his career as a cameraman with Chicago White Sox, before moving on to direct video operations for the league. At MLBAM he set about creating MLB.tv, a streaming service so successful it has become the poster child of how to do video on the internet, worldwide.

“The hallmark of what we’ve done is scale, and the dimensionality of that scale,” says Inzerillo. “We had to deliver over a million plus streams

concurrently and routinely. When we started doing this, the technology simply wasn’t around. We had to build our own, in-house, and figure out compression, geo-fencing and multi-application delivery at scale.”

In addition to streaming over 2,500 baseball games a year, MLBAM handles the back-end duties for World Wrestling Entertainment’s streaming channel and Turner Sports’ (college basketball) March Madness. It powers Sony PlayStation Vue and delivers subscription OTT for golf’s PGA Tour.

Capping that, MLBAM recently signed a ground-breaking $600 million six-year deal with National Hockey League (NHL) in which MLBAM takes control of NHL digital and broadcast rights, including NHL.com. NHL took a 10% stake in BAM as prelude to a forthcoming spin-off, which

will see the separate company valued somewhere between $3-5 billion.

The tech unit’s skills are in such demand that HBO turned to BAM to launch its subscription OTT service, HBO Now, with Season 5 of Game of Thrones in April.

“The cable market has such huge penetration in the US, I’d

say that it has held back the market for OTT,” says Inzerillo. “So you can’t underestimate the upheaval HBO’s gutsy decision meant to the deal flow in the global market. It says OTT is 100% mainstream. No question.”

The company has just signed its thousandth employee, having grown 10 times the size it was in 2003. “I’d be surprised if you don’t see us expand into

Europe,” he adds. “We hope to get an anchor tenant very soon.”

With a burgeoning sports portfolio, there are some suggestions that an independent BAM could bundle these into a digital only service to rival ESPN. Others see in its deal with HBO the potential to become a content service provider on par with Amazon and Netflix. Either way, could BAM turn competitor to its current partners?

“We are already in a situation where the whole TV ecosystem is ‘frenemy’ – folks partner and compete with each other,” says Inzerillo. “All those decisions are in the hands of our CEO. My personal belief is that I’ll be involved in some form in all of it still [post spin-off]. I’ve been very involved with the OTT expansion of our business and I expect it to expand at an increased rate with an infusion of cash. It’s an exciting time to be here for sure.”

Strategic Insights


Hitting OTT out of the park

Joseph InzerilloChief Technology Officer, Major League Baseball Advanced Media Region: USA


“OTT is 100% mainstream. No question”

42 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Joseph Inzerillo.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:30

A top commentator in the areas of cinema and consumer technologies and laser displays, RealD SVP Pete Ludé chaired one session and spoke twice at the IBC2015 Conference. He fronted ‘Immersive Cinema: Picture’, and was a panellist on ‘Immersive Cinema: Sound’, but chose to comment first on ‘HDR: From Zero To Infinity’.

“There is a good deal of confusion about exactly what is meant by HDR – largely because the term is being used by different proponents to mean different things,” says Ludé. “It is critical that the industry quickly settles on a common vocabulary to describe the benefits of HDR imaging, so that we can manage expectations for cinema audiences and consumer electronics customers.”

There is substantial work going on toward defining the HDR ecosystem and specific standards. “This is good, since HDR televisions are already on the market, and higher dynamic range movie theatres are open for business,” Ludé says.

“One of the less-understood aspects of these new display technologies is how much the performance is dependent on viewing environment,” he adds.

“In a projection system, such as found in a digital cinema theatre, we now need to worry more about port glass, lens veiling glare, exit lights, screen geometry and room reflectivity; they restrict achievable black levels.”

It’s important to look at this environment as a system contrast ratio. Everyone can agree on the benefits of darker ‘inky’ blacks and brighter spectral highlights.

“It’s very difficult to greatly increase brightness in projection display technology,” says Ludé. “You need to start with a light source capable of achieving the desired luminance for the very brightest pixel. For some emissive displays [like OLED TV], it is more practical to have much brighter highlights on a few pixels, but even here, most experts are talking about distinguishing between diffuse white and spectral highlights.”

Immersive cinema is a dense vendor battle, especially in imaging terms. How did Ludé shape this session?

“When we started 10 years ago, we mimicked all the familiar technical attributes from film, because we were comfortable with them,” he says. “Now,

engineers and filmmakers have realised that any of these can be rather easily changed in the world of digital, and the result is often referred to as ‘immersive’ cinema’.

“To some, this means increasing the frame rate to 60 or 120 fps to remove the familiar temporal defects of 24 fps images,” he adds. “To others, immersive might mean borrowing from new virtual reality techniques. Still others will focus on increasing the dynamic range, broadening the colour gamut or improving the stereoscopic rendering of reality.”

Turning to the standardisation battleground of immersive cinema sound, Ludé says, “Object-based sound has been embraced by exhibitors and filmmakers, but the studios would like to master one release print (DCP) which can be faithfully reproduced on any of the [competing] systems.”

For the past year, industry bodies have been working together to define the required immersive metadata, under the SMPTE Immersive Cinema Sound Working Group, which Ludé chairs.

“Further work in defining the transport bit stream and renderer behaviour is under way,” he says. “This standards process is critical to continued deployments, but is not quick or easy, since we must make sure that all opinions are considered, and the best solutions implemented.”



How to improve the rendering of realityPete LudéSenior Vice President, RealDRegion: USA


“It is critical that the industry quickly settles on a common vocabulary to describe the benefits of HDR imaging”

43 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Pete Lude.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:30

Framestore’s Steve MacPherson added a giant film facility house perspective to the session, ‘Cloud Processing: Applications That Make Sense’. He came to the IBC Conference on the back of a SIGGRAPH celebration from Google, described there as a ‘trailblazing customer focused on graphics rendering’.

“The problem of the cloud for us is one of rendering and peak provisioning,” explains the Framestore CTO. “It goes back through our complete history, hitting a barrier where our resources are at 100% when we are trying to do 120%. Previously we worked with competitors and were able to share rendering to get us through any peaks.”

Framestore has used AWS, Google and web services for delivery. It produced an analysis of the cloud industry and settled on Google, in part for its good engineering. Moving quickly to spin up a couple of thousand cores, it took the edge off a growing computational load.

“We partnered with SohoNet for the VPN tunnel into the Google data centre in Belgium, and we built our OS image on one of Google’s virtual machines,” explains MacPherson. “That’s the Google Compute Engine, which we put into our Render Q manager and started rendering, spinning up processors.”

The questions switched to efficiencies, and which jobs to send through the tunnel. “We found that jobs with a low I/O but high compute ran much more efficiently, and we ended up putting most of those jobs out there,” says MacPherson. “There were security concerns, and we had to be careful not to

send anything from our secure clients.”

The Render Q software makes the distinction of what is sent to the cloud, using certain resource tags, and dispatches work across the VPN. Framestore is looking at using caches to aid some of the re-read portions of data.

“When we push a job out there with a texture image, and we know it is going to be read by successive frames, we do not want the next frame to come back through the VPN to our servers. We want it to hit something local,” MacPherson says.

“That testing has produced positive results and we think we can expand the type of work we send to the cloud. Right now if we run out of the classic job that fits on Google we start losing efficiency,” he added. “We render millions of hours, so a small

percentage of that could be a big customer.”

He is hoping to identify additional classes of work to send to Google, and is happy with a latency of nine milliseconds. 12 milliseconds would equate to a efficiency hit.

“We are now looking at using storage out in the cloud, and have to tackle the local storage/data locality problem in order to increase the efficiency of our renders. In turn that will expand the range of work we put to the cloud. Next we will be looking at archiving,” MacPherson adds.

“It is having an influence on CAPEX for sure. It means we can build enough to be 80% efficient in-house, and overflow what we need. For me it’s just a way of doing business, of getting more film work through the door. All the scepticism around cloud comes from people who try and make it some

kind of crazy life changing thing. It simply changes the way we approach work,” he adds.

Business Operations


Trailblazing VFX on the VPNSteve MacPhersonChief Technology Officer, FramestoreRegion: UK


“All the scepticism around cloud comes from people who try and make it some kind of crazy life-changing thing”

44 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Steve Macpherson.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:29

Unsound was the world’s first bio-responsive horror film, a 2011 short in which scenes, music and sound effects could be altered based on the biometric readings of the audience.

“We thought we’d cracked a new form of entertainment,” says co-producer Gawain Morrison. “We pitched all sorts of ideas at Hollywood studios and the TV industry. No-one was interested.”

Now the time is right. “A lot has changed since then and companies are much more open to it,” he says. “There’s an explosion in business and

consumer consciousness about emotions ranging from mainstream content (Pixar’s Inside Out and AI in Channel 4’s Humans) to behavioural economics and emotional response techniques for audience measurement.”

You can’t help but be engaged by someone who lists on their LinkedIn profile a period of ‘lounging and loitering’ for three years in South East Asia.

In 2013, Belfast-based Morrison co-founded Sensum to develop and market a software platform which consolidates and provides context to emotional data. This

can be triggered by content on any screen, gathered from a variety of off-the-shelf biosensors including EEG headsets, smart watches, health and fitness trackers, eye-scanning heat maps and heart rate monitors – anything that triggers emotion.

Sensum has secured $1m in funding to develop the sweet spot for understanding emotional response data.

“There’s been a whole shift in mobile and digital which has been about extending the life of a piece of content across multiple platforms,” he says. “Success means a deeper

engagement with audiences. The next layer is to look at biometrics and emotions and to generate new revenues and new creative opportunities.”

These opportunities include “new kinds of entertainment beyond just staring at a screen,” he explains.

“Storytelling is all about emotional relationships. We have to give people a reason to live in the worlds of virtual reality or photorealistic computer games. You can understand that better by using biometric feedback and sentiment analysis. You can try out multiple cuts, with different timing, audio, and scene

selection, to determine what is most engaging for your target audiences.”

How near are we to the vision of Unbound in which individual emotional responses are fed back into the story or game in realtime to alter scenes on the fly?

“It’s a question of budget,” says Morrison. “Creating multiple story trees in live action drama, especially at 4K, is too cost-prohibitive at this stage. With gaming and animation though, you have all the assets of a 3D world and real time engines which could drive real time shifts in narrative and interaction.”

Traditional media companies, he thinks, have been “terrified” of change and of the power that the science of emotion can have in engaging people.

Nonetheless, Sky, the BBC and Virgin Media are among broadcasters tapping technologies like Sensum for fresh insights into consumer responses to programming and advertising.

Morrison is the first to admit that eye-tracking sensors and skin temperature or pulse monitors are invasive of privacy unless pitched as aiding personalisation.

“If you can show people that you can weed out the nonsense in their programmes of an evening they understand it and are open to it. This technology is a slow burning fuse, but it is being embraced.”

Strategic Insights


Emotional engagement driving onscreen narratives

Gawain MorrisonCEO & Co-Founder, SensumRegion: UK


“With gaming and animation, you have all the assets of a 3D world and real time engines which could drive shifts in narrative and interaction”

45 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Gawain Morrisson.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:29

You gave the keynote: ‘Broadcasting in an Age of Challenge’; what is your message to broadcasters?Our message is: keep doing what you’re doing and let’s innovate together on top of it.

With all the talk about OTT we quickly forget that switching on your TV and channel-surfing through compelling broadcast channels is a user engagement model that has been successful

for a long time, and is still popular

today. It’s a great way to relax and serendipitously discover great new content. So we’re convinced that model isn’t going to go away any time soon. Yet side by side with linear broadcasting is on-demand, which is getting more and more popular and offering access to even more content.

With our Android TV platform, we give consumers the best of both worlds -- an innovative linear TV experience and access to all the OTT apps through Google Play Store.

The key is to make things not only easy for the user, but also for content owners, broadcasters and games publishers so they can build experiences that scale across device makers on our platform.

Does standardisation make all devices the same?We actually think the opposite. We want to free the resources for each of the device manufacturers to focus on the features that make them stand out. The Smart TV space of today is widely fragmented – much like smartphones before iOS and Android. By making this experience more

consistent, we’re making it easier for developers to create a flourishing ecosystem of apps and content.

What are the characteristics of great content recommendation?

It’s very hard to build a one-size-fits-all recommendation service that works in all geographies and across all devices and for all business models. There are so many variables in a multi-user household from watching linear TV to Netflix or OTT. So our approach is to provide a recommendation platform that lets each individual service decide what to recommend, and then display the recommendations across linear and OTT in a compelling fashion.

Where does YouTube fit into the picture?Users have stopped distinguishing what is content for the big screen versus what is content for a laptop. People just want to consume great

content on whatever device is most convenient. However, this doesn’t mean that apps like YouTube should have a one-size-fits-all approach, they should optimise their user experience based on the form factor. YouTube is a great example of that. YouTube on Android TV is the best YouTube experience on a big screen, while the YouTube app for Android phones is optimised for a smaller screen with touch interactions.

Should Google be seen as competitor or collaborator with pay-TV in the smart home?We don’t want to be the gatekeeper. With Android TV, we’ve built a platform where it’s very easy to integrate a variety of services very quickly, and this equally applies to home automation. Android enables innovation and is designed to integrate various standards in the home automation space quickly and easily.

Keynote


One size does not fit all

“Users have stopped distinguishing what is content for the big screen versus what is content for a laptop”

Thomas RiedlHead of Global Android TV Partnerships, GoogleRegion: USA


46 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Thomas Riedl.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:28

Sylvain Thevenot has spent most of his career in the telecoms industry, but he has a keen understanding of the added value brought by television. “One of the reasons I left TalkTalk to join EE in 2010 was because the company’s strategy included television alongside telecoms.”

He spearheaded the launch of EETV, on Netgem set-top boxes in October 2014. This ‘Telco TV’ service is, he insists, fundamentally different from a pay-TV one. “Unlike pay-TV, the emphasis is not on offering premium TV channels but on providing viewers with a great multiscreen experience and enabling them to watch what they want, without paying an additional subscription fee for it.”

A bit of a gamble at the time, that approach led to the launch of a Freeview channel service without any exclusive content. However, it paid out as EETV is now among the market leaders in the UK.

Thevenot now heads French company Netgem’s UK arm, Netgem TV PVX, which he started up in January of this year. “My job is to sign up new partnerships but also to drive innovation to stay ahead of the game, as more and more companies vie for the UK quad-play market,” he explains.

One of these companies is Sky; its much awaited 4K set-top, SkyQ, will have very similar features to Netgem’s EETV box, according to Thévenot. “It is expected to enable viewers to share content across multiple devices and to record four different programmes at once, which is what our Telco TV box

already offers.”He also wants to change

Netgem’s image. “I would like our potential customers to understand that we are far more than a set-top box maker. Our core competency is not hardware but software,” he states.

The company made a number of customer-related announcements during IBC, including Cloud-TV capabilities for Post Telecoms in Luxembourg, 4K for Swiss-based Netplus, as well as new features on the EETV box designed to enhance multiple device viewing inside the home. But, as Thevenot admits, content still can’t be streamed onto a smartphone or tablet as soon as you walk outside the front door. “The technology is there but the main Hollywood studios and the big broadcasting groups are unwilling to let go of the rights,” he explains.

After speaking at IBC about ‘the relentless rise of mobile’, Thevenot thinks that non-linear viewing represents a great opportunity for the TV industry. This is, as long as content owners embrace, rather than try to fight change by refusing to share their programmes more widely, and across multiple devices.

“Consumer habits have shifted. People spend an increasing amount of time viewing programmes and videos on their tablets and their smartphones. Content owners have to adapt because otherwise the public will flock to Netflix and YouTube. Viewers don’t care where the content comes from as long as they get it.”

This is no empty threat: Netflix is already available on Netgem boxes in Finland and Mexico, and the US on-demand service is rumoured to be in discussions with EE in the UK regarding a future launch.

Strategic Insights

Embracing change

Sylvain ThevenotManaging Director, Netgem TV PVXRegion: UK


“Viewers don’t care where the content comes from as long as they get it”


Executive IBC2015_v1 - lvain evenot.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:27

IBC International Honour for Excellence


A lot has happened in 25 years of computing. In 1990, UK manufacturer Acorn was working with Apple on RISC – reduced instruction set computing – a new idea to make processors smaller and more powerful by tailoring them to the job in hand.

A new company was formed: ARM. Today its embedded processing can be found in virtually all of our smartphones and tablets, and a lot of other devices we rely on, too.

“In the lifetime of ARM we have seen microprocessors go

from a box under your desk to something so small you can hardly see it, and so low power you can use them anywhere,” according to Simon Segars, now CEO of ARM.

“Embedded processing means you can put computers in everything from light bulbs to DVD players,” he adds. “Most important, embedded graphics processing brings media to life on a screen you can carry around with you.”

There is no doubt that the rise of mobile has transformed the media and entertainment

industry, and ARM’s technologies have been a leading driver. For this reason, the company received the IBC International Honour for Excellence this year.

“Evolving technology brings new revenue streams, diversity in consumption and seamless viewing experiences,” Segars says. “But getting there requires effort, as the technology must be delivered in the most cost, capacity and energy-efficient way so companies remain as sustainable as they are innovative.”

While ARM processing in mobile devices may be the headline news, the company’s technology also appears in many other parts of the media landscape. For example, because most disk drives also include embedded RISC processing, video servers are

also dependent on the company.Segars sees the importance

of securing the path from the server all the way to the display device. “DRM has been a huge issue for content providers,” he says. “If you invest in making content, you want to get paid for it, and that is quite right.

“So each device needs to be trusted, and [the route from] server to screen needs to be protected,” Segars adds. “The standards have to be in place, of course, but it has to be seamless to the consumer.”

The statistics are staggering. The ARM business model is to licence its designs to chip manufacturers, who build special purpose designs for everything from phones to toaster ovens. Today ARM has over 400 chip-building clients, and in 2014 saw its technology in 12 billion devices; this is equivalent to

everyone on the planet buying two ARM-powered devices.

What of the future? “Screens are getting bigger, resolutions are getting higher,” Segars observes. “User-generated content is getting more engaging, using cameras like the GoPro – which happens to have an ARM processor.

“For networks, bandwidth is up and latency is down,” he adds. “We are trying to make all this and more happen by improving the performance of our CPU and GPU. The next level of innovation might be the connected car. If the car can drive itself, why not catch up on the news or last night’s television on the commute to work?

“All this and more is bound to benefit content creators. And for IBC to recognise us amongst this community is an incredible honour for us.”

Simon SegarsCEO, ARMRegion: Global

Interviewed by: Dick Hobbs

Reduced instruction, increased innovation

“The next level of innovation might be the connected car… if the car can drive itself, why not catch up on the news or last night’s television on the commute to work?”

48 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Simon Segars.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:26

“Let’s fill those seats,” Ian Shepherd, chief commercial officer of Odeon and UCI Cinemas Group, urges the cinema business. “Let’s use social media engagement, let’s use dialogue with customers, to make sure we drive more people to visit the cinema, more often.”

“We need to realise, first and foremost, that the cinema is a hospitality business,” he continues. “You are going to go to the cinema more often if you have a great time when you go.

“Even the best cinemas in

the Western world – if they are doing really, really well – are selling 25% of their seats,” he explains. “Try to run an airline or hotel business like that. [We need to] focus on using the techniques that the hospitality industry has developed, to drive occupancy up.”

A key piece of this strategy, he believes, is using data, insight and analytics. And that’s where Odeon and UCI Cinemas – whose largest markets include the UK, Italy and Spain – is focussing its attention. “We

now have a cloud-based, very modern data structure; we upgraded the analytics engine and the tools that send the messages to customers,” Shepherd explains. “We can be responsive to the visit you made to the cinema and the retail products that you brought, but we can also [use] data around what things you looked at on the web site, the trailers you watched. We have Wi-Fi in all of our cinemas now, so we can begin to connect when you arrive.

“What we are doing with the data is making sure the communication we send to guests is more timely, relevant and attractive. We’re also very active in social media. So you begin to build a conversation with your customers and get them excited about what’s coming up. We’re sharing video with them, teasers and trailers.

We are starting to find that formula really works for us.”

In fact, for the first half of 2015, Odeon and UCI Cinemas reported that while the cinema market in which it operates grew 7.3% in the half, Odeon/UCI paid attendance increased by 13.8%.

Looking ahead to what the movie theatre of 2020 might look like, Shepherd emphasises belief in the potential of Premium Large Format cinema (PLF). “Our strategy involves and includes investment in PLF,” he says. “We’re a big partner with IMAX and also have our own ISENSE PLF format brand around Europe. We have also done a lot of work historically in partnership with Dolby. We have explored a lot of premium and emerging technologies and we like what we see.”

Summing up, Shepherd concludes: “The audio and

visuals for the next generation are important, I don’t want to underemphasise them. But actually building a really vibrant hospitality business is going to be the core. The investment we are putting into technology sits alongside investments we are putting into training, incentives and recruitment, to make sure everyone who walks in the door has a fantastic time.”


How to fill cinemasIan ShepherdChief Commercial Officer, Odeon & UCI Cinemas GroupRegion: UK


“The audio and visuals for the next generation are important, but actually building a really vibrant hospitality business is going to be the core”


49 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Ian Shepherd.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:26

After over 30 years of working in blue-chip companies spanning the publishing, TV, film and advertising worlds before settling recently at Yahoo Europe, Tom Toumazis expects the digital future to be built principally around a series of partnerships between traditional media and the digital tech players.

Far from a zero sum game, he sees the current ‘collision course’ between traditional media and 21st century digital tech as an opportunity for both to leverage their strengths and connections and build something better.

“Video is where the money is and data is becoming an increasingly important component,” explains Toumazis, who joined Yahoo a year ago as head of partnerships for EMEA. “Tech companies can cope with large volumes of streaming, consumers are spending increasingly more time on mobile and the app ecosystem has won. So bringing tech and media together is a very exciting place to be.”

Toumazis is thus happy to reveal that The X-Factor creator Simon Cowell will launch his new format, The Ultimate DJ, exclusively on Yahoo in early 2016.

“It will be a live, ad-funded format and we will use Tumblr (which Yahoo owns) for the voting by viewers,” says Toumazis. “We are connecting a TV format with digital and social interaction.”

Another example of how Yahoo sees the new cooperative world will take place in late October, when Yahoo will be the exclusive

global broadcaster of an NFL American football game between the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars, taking place in London. For the first time, this will be OTT, live, free, global, ad-supported, and not available on TV outside of local TV markets in the US and the UK. NFL fans will have to tune in to Yahoo for the game.

“That’s a big step for us,” says Toumazis, explaining that it furthers Yahoo’s mission to become a top destination for premium content and live events, and for the NFL to tap into a global audience.

As former chief commercial officer at Endemol, and prior to that as former MD of Disney/ABC/ ESPN’s programme and channel distribution across Europe, Toumazis believes that among the biggest problems the TV business faces right now is accessing accurate data.

“Advertising has become more results-based and always-on and accountable as a medium, yet the gold standard of TV audience measurement in the UK (BARB) is still using panel data, a system that has been the same in practice since it was set up in

1981,” he says. “The problem is it’s no longer fit for today’s industry. Today it’s all about individual viewing, device and location data, and not a panel of 5,100 representing the entire country. The industry talks about boosting the panel [with data from laptops and tablets] but it’s an old-fashioned mechanism. It’s a chink in TV’s armour.

“Yahoo has grown up with data, and as we migrate into video we are taking the knowledge of data results and ROI advertising into that world,” says Toumazis who is also Chairman of TVBeat, a UK-based TV analytics business. “As the media and tech industries collide, there is a big opportunity for a data business like Yahoo to take advantage.”

Keynote

Lessons learned from growing up with data Tom Toumazis MBEHead of Partnerships, EMEA, YahooRegion: UK


“TV audience measurement in the UK is still using panel data, the same as when it was set up in 1981 - the problem is it’s no longer fit for today’s industry”


50 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Tom Toumazis.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:26

V-Nova, and its award-winning Perseus video compression technology, has been described as something of a stealth weapon against the world’s longer-established compression players. It certainly managed to stay under the radar for some years as it developed its technology – and in the process won impressive support from some powerful clients.

Eric Achtmann, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at V-Nova, says the fresh

thinking is long overdue. “The established industry is failing. We have a host of problems that have yet to be solved. Let’s examine these. Currently we are not able to put full 4K over an HD telecom infrastructure. It just doesn’t work. We want 4K transmission now, and indeed some are also looking at 8K in order to handle the Tokyo Olympic Games. Yet we cannot today deliver 4K to millions of installed users. We currently cannot even deliver HD to

‘smart’ mobile devices over cellular networks. There’s about one third of the planet which cannot receive video at all.”

V-Nova, and its Indian client TataSky, is looking at helping solve those problems. “There’s a huge portion of the nation that simply cannot get video at all,” says Achtmann. “They seem to max out at about 500 kb/s. For all practical purposes the actual bandwidth is actually lower than this. So, first up they want us to deliver SD video, and we have demonstrated this. We have also shown that we can handle SD over 3G networks to lower-cost devices, even down to 125 kb/s. For clients this is the ‘eureka’ moment when they realise we can give them video.”

Achtmann and his team are working with the likes of

Sky Italia on 4K contribution, including handling multiple streams of live 4K video at soccer games. Their technology was used for the multi-camera 4K video capture of the Papal canonisation in Rome in April 2014 – and won praise for the image quality (in 4K, 3D and HD) from Vatican TV.

They are also in deep discussions with the airline industry, solving problems of In Flight Entertainment (IFE) and the terabyte of data required for a typical flight. “The pace of change and innovation in terms

of IFE and seat ergonomics, and the seat-back video, is changing so very fast that the airlines can barely keep up,” Achtmann explains. “Add to this the fact that the screen on our phone is probably better than the one in the seat-back, and that doesn’t help the airline’s reputation, especially if it has a problem. The passenger is already saying that they’d prefer to use the device they’ve carried on with its Retina screen, and so on. The passenger often would prefer this, and the airline could save a ton of weight, and fuel.”

Advances in Technology

Looking for a compression paradigm shiftEric AchtmannCo-Founder and Executive Chairman, V-Nova Region: UK


“We currently cannot even deliver HD to ‘smart’ mobile devices over cellular networks. There’s about one third of the planet which cannot receive video at all”


51 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Eric Achtmann.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:25

“The industry is clearly in the early stages of a massive sea-change. For broadcasters, the pressing need now is to build new systems and infrastructures which can react to that evolving environment,” says Richard Friedel, who is ideally-placed to track these changes as head of the News Corporation division responsible for engineering, operations and technology, with responsibilities across Fox’s national and regional television businesses.

With prior stints at Capital Cities/ABC and NBC News, among others, Friedel has illustrious experience of linear broadcasting. As part of the ‘Media Factory of the Future’ panel at IBC 2015, he sought to address some of the challenges now facing those

traditional models, as well as the possible benefits editorially and organisationally of adopting new techniques, including IP and cloud-based operation.

Whilst clearly aware of what other broadcasters are doing – in particular, he is an admirer of the BBC’s iPlayer service and the UK public broadcaster’s concerted efforts “to engage the public in a different way” – it is also evident that Friedel sees Fox itself playing an integral role in this long-term transition.

“Here at Fox we are thinking very carefully about the development of new systems that can respond more quickly and with greater agility,” he says. “So yes, we are in the process of re-architecting and want to accelerate putting IP systems in place, with [greater utilisation of]

analytics, and so on.”The broadcaster is currently

two years into a five-year plan to define its technological future – but it certainly isn’t undertaking the journey on its own. Implementing the most appropriate systems has led it to forge a number of collaborative

projects, including with Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS) on cloud-based operations.

Friedel also sees the advent of IP-based workflows as being beneficial to other forthcoming technologies, such as 4K. “One of the great things about

IP is that it is format-agnostic. IP-based systems don’t care whether it’s SD, 4K, or so on,” he says, although it’s clear he feels that mass 4K adoption is some way off yet.

Like all other major broadcasters, Fox must necessarily face a future that

entails substantial change across systems and structures. But whatever the roadmap for individual techniques and technologies, it is apparent that a comprehensive understanding of an audience whose expectations have changed profoundly over the last decade

must be at the base of any transition.

Consumers do have different expectations now, confirms Friedel. “They are used to the internet. They have constant access to devices that simply did not exist 10-20 years ago. And of course [these] are driving viewer fragmentation for traditional broadcasting.”

The fact that new technologies are now emerging at such a rate of knots means that attendance at the broadcast industry’s flagship events is critical. “Along with NAB, IBC is an important part of the annual calendar, and for us [as a US-based broadcaster] it is a great opportunity to interact with European companies, some of whom may not attend the US events too often.”

Business Operations


Architects of future engagement

Richard FriedelExecutive Vice-President & General Manager,Fox Networks Engineering & OperationsRegion: USA


“We are thinking very carefully about the development of new systems that can respond more quickly and with greater agility”

52 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Richard Friedel.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:24

Antwerp-based communications agency These Days is part of the Wunderman creative house, and following its merger with Young & Rubicam, it is also part of the giant WPP operation.

“It sounds complicated, but for the Benelux we are in the happy position of being top dog, if you like, but we also have a regional role with our Wunderman hats on! I think officially I have 18 business cards, but I can’t draw 18 paycheques,” jokes Erwin Jansen, joint CEO at These Days, and a keynote speaker at the recent IBC Conference.

Jansen has created some fascinating campaigns for Belgian IPTV business Telenet, in particular for the Game of Thrones series. In August, his work with SBS and Liberty-backed Telenet bore fruit with a new, non-intrusive method of making ad-breaks more palatable for viewers which has been dubbed ‘breakvertising’.

The concept kicks in as soon as the viewer presses the pause button on the remote control, perhaps to put a kettle on, or visit the bathroom. Then a frozen image pops up on the screen which can be light-hearted or more hard-hitting. The product goes ‘live’ later this year.

At IBC, Jansen told the audience he firmly believed that broadcasters need more marketing help at a number of levels.

“There is much more that can be done on content marketing,” he says now. “We need greater innovation even in areas that one might think were well

represented, for example sports marketing. But we also need to be much more active in terms of social media, about which some broadcasters are still afraid.

“It is the same with app developers, and even game developers,” he adds. “We should be looking very closely at how those games developers promote their upcoming releases. Broadcasters are, of course, very creative and it is good to start building upon those strengths. Our work with Game of Thrones was interesting, and successful, but Facebook also told us it could take it much

further. Facebook wanted money, naturally, but I am sure it could have achieved a lot for the campaign by bringing it in front of so many extra eyeballs and extra traffic for the show.

“So when asked about the future, in particular for TV, I have to say there are a lot of contradictions around. It might be true that viewers no longer care, and there’s massive fragmentation in terms of offerings and viewer loyalty. This is no doubt a very disruptive time for the industry, which is why the message has to be stronger.”

Keynote

‘Breakvertising’ in the BeneluxErwin JansenEMEA SVP of Business Development & Marketing and CEO, Wunderman and Y&R Group, Benelux Region: Belgium



“We need to be much more active in social media, of which some broadcasters are still afraid”

53 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Erwin Jansen.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:23

Discovery Networks is a behemoth broadcaster. Already recognised around the planet for its pay-TV factual programming, it is now moving aggressively into free-to-air broadcasting and sport. In June it outbid the EBU (and the likes of the BBC), and via Eurosport secured for €1.3 billion most of the European TV rights to the Summer and Winter Olympics through from 2018 to 2024.

JB (Jean-Briac) Perrette is Discovery International’s president and has his eyes firmly fixed on driving revenues and profits onward and upward, despite the pressures from the enormous consumer and technological changes in the business. During his IBC Keynote, he admitted that Discovery doesn’t – unfortunately – have all the answers to these challenges.

“We have grown this 30-year company from a single channel, single country pay-TV programmer, to an

average of 10 channels in some 220 territories around the world,” he says. “We’ve moved into multi-genre, including fiction, kids and now sports, and at the same time also moved from pay-TV exclusive to pay-TV plus FTA. Now [that we’re] including OTT shows that the evolution continues. And we are ready for more.”

He stresses that Discovery, whether factual or now in sports, is in essence all about story-telling. “From Day 1 our absolute prime focus has been to find great characters and to tell good stories, especially in factual, in the most authentic way possible. We have evolved to tell those stories in broader-based entertainment platforms, such as SBS Nordic and broader still into sports, which is arguably the most dramatic non-fiction content that exists. When you look at that sort of evolution, it is not quite as

dramatic or as radical a shift as you might think. We want to stay rooted in the way we started: great stories, great characters, and stories that we can tell on a global basis.”

Perrette is also happy with 4K. “We have always reflected

what our viewers and fans want, which is the ‘bleeding edge’ of technology. We were the first in pay-TV, the first in HD, even the first in 3D, although we don’t talk so much about that today! That evolution is part of us.

“Now we all know that some of these experiments didn’t quite turn out the way we expected, but this is part of that experience. And some things don’t end up being mass market. We are going to be doing more and more in 4K. We think it is important for us, the brand, and the company and the archive.”

Keynote


An ever-evolving storyJB PerrettePresident, Discovery Networks InternationalRegion: USA


“From Day 1, our absolute prime focus has been to find great characters and to tell good stories”

54 Executive IBC2015_v1 - JB Perrette.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:18

A decade from now the BBC won’t be a broadcaster. It will be a data-caster and the transition is already under way. “The economics of broadcast are changing quite radically and we need to free up cash to invest in becoming a ‘digital first’ organisation,” says BBC CTO Matthew Postgate.

Promoted from controller at BBC R&D a year ago, Postgate’s early focus has been on driving efficiencies. Savings are being made through a number of outsourcing programmes, and by rolling out commodity IT kit across the BBC estate. Doing so is shaving £45m a year from BBC Engineering budgets, contributing to the £1.1 billion a year of savings enterprise-wide since 2007.

“We are transforming our core connectivity and network reach of all our bureaux worldwide,” Postgate says. “It’s a big technical change but is the foundation for the next 10-20 years, as we think about becoming an internet-oriented organisation.”

His next focus is on flexibility. There will be a new framework for software development and testing aimed at delivering new products and services, and a massive ICT programme, which Postgate says will have a huge effect on the corporation’s culture. It recently combined digital and broadcast engineering teams into a single group.

“Where we have new video systems we can deploy the skills of teams that have worked on iPlayer, and when we invest in consumer facing areas we can

help achieve the resilience of service we enjoy on BBC One,” he explains. “If we’re to define what an internet broadcaster is over the next decade we need to bring those skill sets together.”

What does a ‘digital first’ vision mean? “It’s about what it feels like to work in a data driven organisation which competes with Netflix or Amazon in content,” he says. “It’s about swapping out the network to be more IP-centred. It’s about how we change the IT that people touch and use every day. All the time we are driving down cost and giving editorial more options.”

This is already happening, including using IP to deliver more live feeds into the BBC than ever before, and using iPads to edit on location.

“Digital first is also about distribution. Moving BBC Three online is the beginning of that transition,” he says. “And digital first impacts storytelling.”

It’s clear that this aspect excites Postgate the most. At BBC R&D he was involved in early tests of object-based broadcasting, the concept of deconstructing video and audio into component parts, mixing them in real time and reconstituting them in a way that makes best use of the consumer’s device and their context.

“I think the idea is profound and little understood,” he says. “It’s about moving the whole industry away from thinking of video and audio as hermetically sealed and toward an idea where we are no longer broadcasters, but data-

casters creating information and delivering a computer graphic model of reality. That opens up all sorts of creative questions around veracity and flexibility.

“It is feeding our R&D around immersion, including investigations using Oculus VR, and around mobile where video is pervasive. Once you move to object-based broadcasting in a world of the internet of things, there are fundamental questions about what role a media organisation plays.”

Strategic Insights

The journey towardsobject-based broadcasting Matthew PostgateChief Technology Officer, BBCRegion: UK


“It’s about moving the whole industry away from thinking of video and audio as hermetically sealed, and toward an idea where we are no longer broadcasters but data-casters”


55 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Matthew Postgate.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:17

As the head of TVbeat, a three year-old London-based TV start-up which aims to collect and analyse data from digital, cable, satellite and OTT apps in one single platform, Laurence Miall d’Aout is well aware that the key to business development in an increasing non-linear world is measuring and knowing your audience.

The paradox is that social media tools such as Twitter or Facebook reveal a huge amount of information about the viewing public, but that no one can yet claim to measure both linear and non linear audiences on one single device. BARB’s project Dovetail which aims to combine both in the UK is still only at beta test stage; the Coalition for

Innovative Measurement in the USA is attempting to develop a cross-platform tool with the backing of CBS, Fox, NBC and ad agencies Publicis and Carat, but it has yet to hit the market.

“We are not in the business of providing a currency measurement, but we can supply complementary tools to analyse viewing patterns and behaviour,” explains Laurence Miall-d’Aout. “We know which data to process, and perhaps more importantly, how to read it and make it meaningful.”

Since its launch, the company has sold its products to an increasing number of broadcasters across Eastern Europe and the Baltic States,

such as Telekom Austria’s subsidiary Vipnet in Croatia, or Russian OTT broadcaster Nemo TV. But TVbeat is also expanding into Western Europe.

“We are in advanced discussions with a broadcaster in the UK and we hope to sign up after IBC,” she reveals. “Quite a few smaller pay-TV channels are interested in what we can offer, because their audience is too small to have much of an impact on traditional panel based data.”

Miall-d’Aout says TVbeat can give an insight into multiple device content streaming as well as delayed TV viewing. “We can keep track of delayed viewing after a week and even up to a month,” she explains.

“According to our data, 25% of the audience we monitor watch television on their smartphones or tablets, even if it is for shorter periods of time.”

TVbeat’s business model works on two levels : it provides broadcasters with an algorithm which aggregates non-linear and linear data, but the company also resells its readings and findings to other clients, whether broadcasters or, increasingly, advertising agencies.

Laurence Miall-d’Aout’s background in television (she spent 10 years with Sweden’s MTG, launching pay-TV channels in Russia and in the Baltics) have given her a great insight into the weaknesses of

traditional broadcasters. “I am not hugely optimistic because so many big groups are failing to adapt to shifting viewing habits. They are dinosaurs, and if they don’t wake up, their business will end up in the same spot as the publishing industry did a few years ago.”

The lack of vision at the heart of the traditional broadcasting world is one of the reasons she joined TVbeat three years ago. “I was fed up with being asked to devise strategies for channel launches without having any proper realtime measuring tools. It is amazing to think that in the day of the internet and the mobile phone, so many broadcasters simply don’t know their audience.”

Leaders’ Summit


Offering a wake up call to broadcastersLaurence Miall-d’AoutCEO, TVbeat Region: UK


“Many big groups are failing to adapt to shifting viewing habits. They are dinosaurs, and if they don’t wake up, their business will end up in the same spot as the publishing industry did a few years ago”

56 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Laurence Miall-d’Aout.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:15

With some 12 million registered users to its All4 VoD platform, the UK’s Channel 4 is in the vanguard of commercial broadcasters growing VoD viewing as well as gaining income from it.

The growth of on-demand content viewing at Channel 4 has been impressive and its VoD advertising impacts are on track to grow 20% this year. All this is good, but for the next stage of VoD growth an essential element needs to be established that convinces the advertising community even further. For the

media buyers and planners and the brands they represent, it’s all about the numbers, and leading the way to providing just that kind of detail is Channel 4.

Jonathan Allan, the channel’s director of sales, is using data to both to fly the flag for VoD investment and also – and equally crucially – to fill in the gaps where the numbers are not yet available. “VoD viewing is great because tracking is 98% accurate and there are no BOTS [fraudulent machine-generated viewing] on the platform. We have first party data on 12

million of our users and the viewing experience is robust.”

The good news for Allan is that while linear TV impacts were up 6% this year at Channel 4, the VoD impacts rose by 20% for the second year in a row. Channel 4 gets higher cost per thousands (CPMs) from a VoD audience than it does for its TV ads because they are better targeted and there is also scarcity in VoD inventory. Depending on the audience delivered, the VoD premium can be between 25% and 100% higher than for a linear TV spot, although there is still a note of caution, because VoD makes up just 5% of total viewing.

However, VoD viewing is growing, partly because Channel 4 removed its long-form content from YouTube (largely over commercial terms) and because Channel 4’s commercial strategy

has been to put its programming on all devices and platforms that make commercial sense.

“The next phase of VoD growth will be from something other than this last growth spurt from technology like the proliferation of tablets or the bigger phablets,” says Allan.

Considered an industry maverick, Allan rose to be the MD of OMD before decamping to Channel 4. So he is well versed in how media agencies think. He expects part of the shift in non-linear viewing to include increasingly more VoD advertising, which doesn’t mean simply running the same TV ad on VoD platforms.

While the bulk of C4’s VoD advertising is an extension of a brand’s TV campaign, about 20% is interactive, which includes options like links to the advertiser’s website, direct

buying opportunities and social sharing directly from the advert. “We can have more fun with the dot com, Android and Apple iOS platforms,” says Allan. “But only about 15% of our VoD revenue is from this kind of advertising.”

Channel 4 is looking to ramp that up as well as growing its VoD overall. To that end the broadcaster is launching a “triple point measuring” product in January 2016 that will combine UK panel data from BARB with its own All4 registered viewers’ data, as well as modeled platform audience data from shared device platforms such as YouView, Roku and Samsung Smart TVs.

“It’s a propensity model approach that will act as a proxy for audiences on platforms where we as Channel 4 don’t have direct registration or access to that kind of data.”

Strategic Insights

on-demand

Jonathan AllanDirector of Sales, Channel 4 Region: UK


“The next phase of VoD growth will be from something other than this last growth spurt from technology like the proliferation of tablets or the bigger phablets”


Maverick

57 Executive IBC2015_v2 - Jonathan Allan.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:14

A master of digital intermediate and finishing workflows, ILM’s Jeroen Schulte has placed an emphasis on best of class colour science for digital cameras and image processing solutions that apply to dailies, visual effects and post.

“When we got word that Disney wanted to do a HDR theatrical version for Tomorrowland and have it be the first HDR movie ever released, we started looking at what that

would mean for us and it proved to be fairly straightforward on the VFX side,” says Schulte.

ILM created OpenEXR and shared it with the VFX industry several years ago. “It supports the data types and values that are ideal for a HDR finishing environment,” Schulte explains. “As OpenEXR is the file format at the core of the various workflows at ILM, the bulk of the work in preparing the VFX media for a HDR finish was already

done and could fit right in.”He describes HDR as

“opening up a window into a world we put so much time, effort and love into. It was very clear to us that HDR was a perfect complement for the look of the world [director Brad Bird] wanted to create for Tomorrowland.”

At Lucasfilm since 2009, Schulte’s various roles have included digital artist, image pipeline lead and sabre software engineer. He’s worked on the VFX for biggest blockbusters around including Hugo, Elysium, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Pacific Rim and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

ILM is busy on not one but two Star Wars films, which are

being shot at Pinewood in the UK, but Schulte is keeping mum on whether Episode VII: The Force Awakens will have an HDR sheen.

Now residing in San Francisco, Schulte is a Dutch native and a MultiMedia Design graduate at the Graphic School of Art in Amsterdam.

He helped set up an international network of boutique facilities in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa for Amsterdam’s commercials finishing shop Condor Digital. So what does he make of coming back to his home city?

“It’s great seeing IBC embrace something as new as HDR and it fascinating to see the European and Asian take on its value. It’s also always good to see old

friends of course, Amsterdam is a great city and a great place to come together and learn.

“I get to work on a lot of different and amazing content and to work with hugely creative people at the peak of their game,” he adds. “Being able to get involved on the technology and imagery side so early in the process to help drive that final image is hugely rewarding. That’s the thing that gets me up in the morning.”



Adding the HDR finish Jeroen SchulteImage Pipeline Lead, Industrial Light & Magic Region: USA


“HDR is opening up a window into a world we put so much time, effort and love into”

58 Executive IBC2015_v1 - Jeroen Schulte.indd 1 23/09/2015 11:10

ibc2015 executive summary

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