Gewecke Keynote: Professionals Can "Redesign" Entertainment

“Over the next 5-10 years we have an opportunity to redesign what entertainment experiences will be … This is a time for us to create new projects and services.”

That was the message of Thomas Gewecke, chief digital officer and executive vp for strategy and business development at Warner Bros. Entertainment, who delivered a keynote Tuesday at the SMPTE conference.

One way that Warners is responding to change in the foreseeable future is by making its content as accessible as possible. Noting that Warners has more than 250 distribution partners in more than 100 countries, Gewecke said, “It needs to be in as many places as possible so consumers have legitimate way to access it.”

Looking at additional ways to buy, Gewecke described the Cineplex Superticket program in Canada that now allows movie-goers to  pre-order a digital copy of a film that they are seeing, while they are at the theater. “It’s helping them make the purchase at a time when they are most aware of the movie,” he said.

On potential new opportunities, Gewecke pointed out, “it’s difficult to reproduce the serendipity of walking around looking at things [in a store]. ... We are at the very beginning of reproducing that experience in the digital space. There are many technologies that could drive that.”

During his address, he also expressed interest in the potential of creating “communities of interest,” using as an example the recent Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign (more than 91,000 contributing to the project, which raised $5.7 million to fund a movie based on the TV series).

The takeaway: “It was about quantifying the number of fans. They created a community and effectively [learned the level of interest] before making the movie.”

Concluded Gewecke: “We think it’s critical to continue to assume that content is being changed by technology. We need a sense of urgency and it’s important that we act to drive innovation.”

WHAT DOES HOLLYWOOD WANT FROM UHD-1 ?

The grouping of Hollywood studios, Movielabs, revealed their own wish-list for UHD on the afternoon of the first day symposium at SMPTE 2013.   It’s quite a stack – and its seems to go beyond the features available in UHD TVs in the shops now.   The engineers in the audience were delighted when they heard of the high quality aspirations of the movie studios.    A little later in afternoon, another speaker practically got a standing ovation when he said ‘let’s forget 8 bit/sample’ (and go for higher bit depths).   Maybe as a group of engineers, we are happiest when providing the highest image quality that technology permits – but is this a fault?

One of the points of ‘stress’ in the movie studios wish list is the suggestion that UHDTV movies shown on TV sets should use the same colorimetry that is used for making movies, termed the ‘XYZ’ system.   Having the same system for making movies and for showing them on TVs would have benefits, and the XYZ system is very flexible.   But for TV broadcasting the price maybe higher bit rates without actually any higher quality for events like sports.  Maybe tests made in the coming months will shed light on this?

4K/UHD TV - Will it be a Hit with Consumers?

“Aren’t we living in the most interesting time? I truly believe we are” said SMPTE president Wendy Aylsworth on Monday as she welcomed attendees to the Symposium on next generation formats that kicked off the annual SMPTE Technical Conference and Exhibition. “Advances in wireless technology allow consumers to get content anywhere, anytime …  Home technology is allowing HFR, HDR, UHD – and these can greatly increase the content quality.”

But do consumers want UHD TVs, which are currently priced anywhere from $700-$40,000?

This is the question that Insight Media president Chris Chinnock asked the first panel of the business track, and this question was addressed throughout the day.

“Nobody has been making money for a while, but I see some reason to be optimistic,” said Peter Keith, vp and senior research analyst Piper Jaffray. “When I see a product, I ask ‘is it bigger and does the picture look better?’ 4K checks both those boxes.’

But  there are many considerations in this discussion and while initiatives in areas such as satellite and OTT 4K services are in the works, a key challenge of course is getting 4K content to the home.

Steve Venuti of HDMI Licensing believes 4K upconversion features on new displays could help to jumpstart the market. Added Samsung marketing exec Dan Schinasi: “The reality is that most of what we watch will be upconverted for the foreseeable future.”

But on another panel, Bryan Burns, the former ESPN exec who is now president and CEO of Forward Direction Group, offered his view on the subject of upconversion, saying, “I hope we don't hear, ‘if there was only more content [4K would gain momentum].’ If there’s is chip that upconverts everything for you, it make it harder for producers to invest in creating the content.”

Speakers also addressed the need for clear terminology with which to communicate the new capabilities to consumers. The Consumer Electronics Association uses Ultra HD as the industry term for 4K, but ITU for instance has a 4K and 8K flavor. “CEA has come up with a definition for the U.S., but they don't follow it in Europe [and other international markets]. There’s still a way to go,” said Paul Gagnon, director of global TV research for NPD Display Search.

In conjunction with this program, a 4K/UHD demo room has been organized to showcase 4K/UHD in both professional and consumer markets. It will remain open through Oct. 23.

4K in Movies and TV—Where Does it Make Sense?

There are “no major barriers” to 4K production using currently available gear, asserted Larry Thorpe, senior fellow at Canon USA, who kicked off a Monday session exploring the potential of 4K for movies ad TV.

Steve Weinstein, CTO of Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, said the issue surrounding 4K at his company is that “our storage has been blow out.

“This makes a distributed workflow much harder to do,” he said. “You end up working on proxys. We are looking at cloud transcoding to move this around. …The toolsets seem to be handling 4K reasonably well.”

He added that Deluxe is seeing increased labor in visual effects, requiring more “personnel and time.”

Offering a broadcasters perspective, Fox Sports vp of field operations Jerry Steinberg said the network currently has no plans to deliver 4K. “We spent millions going to HD and never got an extra dime from advertisers,” he said. “It seems today [4K broadcasting] is a monumental task with not a lot of return.”

But answering the question “where does it make sense?,” Steinberg related that Fox has been using Sony F65 4K cameras for HD sport coverage, for instance to extract a portion of a shot for a replay. “We were able to tell the story with clarity. This Super Bowl, I would probably have six 4K cameras.”

SMPTE 2013 CONFERENCE DAY 1: ARE YOU NUTS FOR NITS?

 The first day of the SMPTE conference symposium split into two streams – one on UHDTV technology and the other on Business aspects. 

You blogger joined the technology stream, where two issues predominated mostly about the lower UHDTV quality level UHD-1 (otherwise 4k). 

The first was about what ‘brightness’ should be assumed for UHDTV displays.  Display brightness used to be measured in ‘candelas/sq metre’, but a new shorter term ‘nit’ (which by the way means ‘idiot’ in colloquial English) is coming into fashion.   There were two schools of thought.  One was that UHDTV should be more like the real brightness range we see in nature, with 10-20000 nits.  The other was that if we did that, when a TV show was set on the beach, viewers in their living rooms would need to wear sun-glasses.    This is linked to the ‘opto-electronic transfer characteristic’ we need in the UHDTV standard.   The debate will no doubt be continued in the ITU later in the year.  Let’s hope for compromise.

The second was about the number of images per second needed (frame rate).  Though UHDTV sets going on the market today accept a frame rate of up to 60 frames/second – the frame rate used for HDTV today – evidence was presented showing that there would be a really dramatic improvement in image quality or sports if the frame rate were increased to 100 or 120 frames/second.  This quality jump could even outshine the jump in quality due to the increased resolution going from HDTV to UHD-1.   However true this is, it looks like we may have to wait some years before receiver encoders can cope with higher rates than 60Hz.

The discussion showed that we may have some way to go before all the i’s are dotted for UHD-1.

SMPTE 2013 Symposium - Better Pixels but no 3DTV.

I'm not quite sure what 'better pixels' means (and what therefore 'worse pixels' might be) but it is the talking point at the SMPTE 2013 Symposium here in Los Angeles.  It seems to be a shorthand way of saying that having more resolution alone may not be enough to sell UHDTV, and that more goodies are needed such as higher dynamic range (giving the picture more sparkle) and higher frame rates (making the line-backers sharper when they run).  Looking at the programme, it seems it will be impossible not to emerge from the Symposium not an expert in UHDTV.  Some may see UHDTV as the great meeting place where movie production and TV production meet.....all will be revealed in the next few days.   By the way, I've sold my 3DTV glasses, because it doesn't look like they will be needed.   

ETIA: Enjoying content with an Internet second screen

Al Kovalick, Founder of Media Systems Consulting, kicked off this afternoon's session on "second screen" viewing of Internet content with an overview of the many possible meanings of second screen -- ranging from smartphone to smartwatch -- and the wide variety of possible uses.

Colin Dixon, Founder of nScreenMedia, led off the panel with the amazing stat that 278 million second screen TV apps had been downloaded in the US by the end of 2012 -- over three times as many as the total number of households in the US with TVs and broadband. An amazing 11% were the Shazam app, behind the overall leader of Netflix with 12%. Overall, apps related to the TV content drove the market. Apps for social TV check-in sites were way down and a very small part of the market -- usage was even worse.

Going beyond applications, Colin explained his vision of second screens moving from being a replacement TV and enhancing TV to really changing the TV experience itself, by making it a truly personal experience. His examples harkened back to yesterday's session on user-contributed content and interactive media experiences.

Mobovivo is augmenting 21 hours per week of TV, per CEO Doersken
Photo by David Cardinal

Trevor Doersken, CEO of Mobovivo, explained that second screens can represent an additional ad revenue opportunity for content providers, since they can be a powerful amplifier for the primary experience on the main screen. He and Mobovivo aim to harness this potential and turn what has been a threat for "big screen" content providers into an opportunity.

Echo is taking advantage of second screen opportunities by allowing companies to create second screen experiences with their toolkit, explained Khris Loux, CEO and co-Founder of Echo. A key element of the winning strategies in his mind is taking control of the user interaction -- use social networks like Twitter, but don't become so dependent on them so you need to revenue share.

Hardie Tankersley, Fox Broadcasting, gave some more examples of second screen experiences. In his experience the hardest part of getting people to use second screen experiences is explaining it to them. Creating the FoxNow app has given Fox a unified platform for augmented experiences across all of its shows. He identified the additional issue of the second screen taking away attention from the main screen, as well as the opportunity to syndicate second screen content into other second screen apps.

The panel agreed that there is room for some standardization of at least the format of second screen content, and perhaps even for a platform for presenting it, but also that the follow-on issues including monetization would create a substantial hurdle for those efforts. -- David Cardinal