Delivering the future

It is clear that the growing demand for content and platforms means that we need to make the best use of the bandwidth available if every member of the diversified audience is going to be satisfied. The fourth session of the SMPTE/EBU forum on emerging technologies looked at delivering the future.

Appropriately, the first speaker was Leonardo Chiariglione, widely regarded as the father of MPEG, and still a leading force in developments in delivery compression. He started his look forward by looking back, to see what were the expectations then and how they have come to pass.

20 years ago the thinking was that many technologies would be tried and the fittest would survive. In fact the Darwinian process did not take place: MPEG established a technology and everyone followed. Chiariglione suggested that the lesson we should take from that is that, in lean times, it is better to make inexpensive bets.

He went on to recall some less than successful developments of the era. The interactive CD seemed like a good idea, but failed utterly, as did the digital compact cassette. He argued that DAB was also not a success: the FM radio system was probably good enough, and fighting against it was a mistake.

On the other hand, MPEG-2 for digital television was a great example of a good technology for good use, efficient and effective even if there was room for improvement.

And although there were strong arguments against even including audio level 3 in the MPEG-1 standard because it was clearly too complicated to implement high compression for audio, today we cannot imagine a world without MP3 players. The business that took the MP3 and ran with it is now the biggest company in the world.

MPEG-4 succeeded for fixed and mobile internet; MPEG-7 failed as a metadata standard. The lessons learned may give us a guide to the future, Dr Chiariglione suggested.

Next was Albert Heuberger of the Fraunhofer Institute. He looked at the complex environment today, with a wide number of creative platforms and resolutions feeding an increasingly diverse set of platforms.

The first step is to move to a content agnostic production environment, including camera and sensor format metadata to inform downstream processing. The first stage is likely to be simple, light touch compression to enable content to be widely exchanged, along with object-based audio. Previews will be in the cloud. Enhancements like colour decision lists will be in the metadata. Virtual processing workspaces will allow multiple collaborative users, all working around a common mastering format, from which the deliverables will be created, adaptable to any consumer device.

This is where the next generation of compression will start, with high efficiency versions using the latest gains in processor power to reduce the bandwidth requirements while boosting quality. High efficiency codecs are as appropriate to audio as they are to video, not least because it means content can be delivered even over crowded mobile networks.

Dr Heuberger also talked about MPEG-Dash, the new standard for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. The goal of MPEG-Dash is to provide a common streaming solution which will always deliver the best possible quality whatever the capacity of the bearer, aiming to fill the gap created by competing proprietary formats.

Another interesting audio facility is the dialogue enhancement service, which allows each user to alter the balance between speech channels and effects, for instance to enhance or reduce the natural sounds of a sporting event against the commentary. It is all part of the future move towards more immersive viewing and listening experiences on all devices.

From Ericsson, Giles Wilson talked about his company’s consumer lab, which researches views on devices, services and future requirements, carrying out 80,000 interviews every year around the world, giving a good understanding of what people think. The most recent research suggests that consumers are no longer thinking about devices but the viewing experience.

The research discovered six roles for the tablet, for instance, around video consumption. These included a smarter remote and a tool for discovery as well as a viewing screen. Similarly, the smartphone has a range of applications, of which actually watching content is regarded as a last resort, only to be used when no other screen is available.

More than 40% of all consumers, according to Ericsson research, now use social media from the television sofa. This is no longer a young person’s phenomenon. For all, viewing behaviours are both triggering and triggered by social interaction online.

One other very interesting finding was that consistently consumers put quality – of content and of service delivery – at the top of their list of expectations. They will watch video on a smartphone, but only if they have to. OTT streamed video is acceptable only if that is the only access to the content. Consumers like big screen televisions, they want their content on it, and they want it to look good.

All of this leads to a continuing and growing demand for network capacity. By 2015, 90% of all network traffic will be video. So codec improvement is an absolute necessity. The next generation of codecs, HEVC, is already showing a 53% improvement over AVC.

Finally Mark Richer of ATSC took the stage. His presentation was called “a bright future for terrestrial broadcasting”, and he put forward the case that conventional broadcasting is still relevant, not least because it is infinitely scalable: it does not matter at all how many people are tuned it, it delivers the same quality of service.

ATSC 2.0 as a delivery platform has just been ratified, with full backwards compatibility with existing transmission system, and will be rolled out in the coming months and years. But in parallel ATSC 3.0 is being developed, which will be a complete clean sheet start.

On top of that, ATSC is a leading player in FoBTV, the future of broadcast television, a plan to develop a new digital terrestrial format that will be universally accepted worldwide. Last November – at 11:11:11 on 11/11/11 to be precise – FoBTV published a declaration that broadcasting is the most spectrum efficient delivery medium, and that broadcasters and technology bodies should come together to pursue improved standards globally.

Given this global commitment not only will the new standards be the most robust, they will benefit from mass production slashing costs. It also means that mobile and handheld devices which move freely around the world will work wherever they go. The next generation systems should focus on broadcasting to devices that are on the move.

FoBTV is not a new standards organisation: it aims to work with standards bodies to achieve its global goals. Its chair is Mark Richer of ATSC, with Phil Laven of DVB as deputy chair. Richer suggested that this is a defining moment for terrestrial broadcasting.

In response to a question, Giles Wilson suggested that the demand for new content delivery always has run ahead of the gains in coding efficiency, and he fears that this will always be the case. Leonardo Chiariglione, on the contrary, suggested that he could see no sign of compression running in to a brick wall in the near future.

Albert Heuberger thought that there will be new ways of identifying redundancy in the signal which can be exploited in the future to achieve new coding efficiencies. Researchers still have a wide field ahead of them, he said.

Commenting on the search for standardisation, Giles Wilson referred back to one of the students describing the internet as the Wild West. He certainly agreed with that as a characterisation, but pointed out that despite the apparent lawlessness it had managed its standards much better than broadcast.

An alternative viewpoint

The four panellists in the final session before lunch came from the International School in Geneva and provided an excellent and stimulating debate. The admirably lucid and thought-provoking 16 and 17 year olds did not have televisions in their rooms, relying on laptops or iPads for content consumption.

So what is the role of the television set? Does it have a social role, or no role at all? The living room television is seen as a way for families to get together, around sports and event television. It was not seen as in any way important in their lives. The iPhones are always with them, and status updates and social communication is always to hand.

They were then asked how they learned to develop trusted sources of knowledge. One quoted the recent viral Kony 2012 campaign, which she saw online first but then followed up with research to find out the background and learned that the organisation behind it was less than transparent.

Another suggested that by comparing a variety of sources online a more rounded view could be reached, with at least some of the bias eliminated. A third saw a virtue in the Wild West environment of the internet. Verifying information will become a huge part of information-gathering in future. Maybe the comments section following an article is as important in evaluating stories as the article itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protest was also quoted as an example, in that, it was suggested, it took days for the established news media to even acknowledge its existence. He was concerned about corporate influence on broadcast news, and tended to trust readit.com as a more reliable source. A more reliable and honest news service would be a wish for the future.

Moving from information to entertainment, how interesting is that to young people? Yes, it is a great source of entertainment and a way of relaxing – which followed up Ingrid’s comments earlier – but the choice can be overwhelming and they have a sense of having to ration themselves in their consumption. That could be because they are very driven students, though.

Looking to the future, what would be the one wish? Television to be more accessible through the internet, with easier and legal access to stream it wherever you are. A closer relationship between producers and audiences would be also be good.

Everyone is interconnected socially on a global scale, and this will affect the longer term future of media. Content might be more widely created and distributed without the intervention of large media enterprises. Media will also be more integrated into our lives, said one, citing the Google idea of augmented reality glasses. That will link in to more or less universal Wifi wherever you go, along with widespread cloud storage, allowing free access to data.

In response to a question about whether they will be owners of television sets in 10 years’ time, there was a genuine lack of understanding. When the question was rephrased to talk about quality, there was an acceptance that the television was essentially a social device and it was the big shared screen rather than the quality which was important.

Clouds on the horizon?

The second session of the SMPTE/EBU forum looked at technological developments, and in particular the influence of the cloud. First speaker was Karl Schubert of Grass Valley, who started by asserting that in 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices worldwide.

Moore’s Law is actually being exceeded, he suggested, with microprocessor costs halving every 1.2 years and memory density doubling every 1.5 years. Fibre optics are increasing in speed, and power consumption is falling. Today we are seeing off-the-shelf hardware becoming fast enough to allow non-linear production, repurposing content as it is created. So we have the ability to create integrated collaborative systems.

The question is not whether cloud computing will empower this, but when. The challenge is about security and rights management. But governments use cloud networks for classified material – the security issues can be addressed.

Transport bandwidths are increasing and costs are coming down, so the other challenge of cloud is addressed.

All these changes create a new business model, for a service oriented, resolution independent environment. Analogue to digital took 20 years; Schubert predicts that the move to IP will take 10 years. Be ready, he said: the transition will be fast. As Brigitta Nickelson said in the first session, the speed of change is way under-rated.

He was followed by Peter Ludé, president of SMPTE, who talked about the way that cinema technology moves into the television arena. In that context, 4k has become widely available in digital cinemas – about 10% of screens around the world – and now it is being offered to the home. More plausibly it will be a high quality production format.

He also talked about higher frame rates. Some prominent film-makers are working on 48fps productions and even faster rates are being considered. Similarly, there is a growing interest in high dynamic range imaging to offer up to 18 stops of latitude.

The result is that we have to move from a scale of megabytes per minute to gigabytes per minute. A 100 minute movie in 48fps 3D is close to 6TB in its raw form. Cameron is suggesting that Avatar 2 will be shot in 12 bit 4k 3D at 60 frames a second which is an order of magnitude bigger again.

New extensions in digital media are inevitable. They will drive exponential increase in data, which in turn will force the shift to IT-centric infrastructures, drawing on enterprise-class hardware which is the benefit of the IT industry’s R&D budget.

Leszek Izdebski of Cisco picked up on this theme, stating that clouds are here, not on the horizon. They are not just about cost savings, they are about enabling innovation. The market is already maturing, with platform as a service offerings drawing on infrastructure as a service companies. There are probably 30,000 plus web grade cloud hosting companies already, differentiated from enterprise providers which deliver service level agreements in exchange for higher fees.

As an example of technologies providing transformation he suggested that in future the conventional outside broadcast unit could be replaced by just a couple of Lytro light field cameras at a live sporting event. By using massive cloud processing the director could put virtual “cameras” anywhere in the stadium, in 3D if required, at any time.

From NHK in Japan Dr Yoshiaki Shishikui gave an update on Super Hi-Vision, its ultra HD system which has been under development for some years. With 16 times the resolution of HD it has 33 million pixels and 22.2 channel audio. So far it has operated at 60 frames a second but it is developing a 120Hz frame rate. Prototype CMOS sensors are now ready, and likely to be seen at IBC.

The next major demonstration will be coverage of some events from the London Olympics, to be seen on public screens not only in the UK but in Washington DC, Tokyo and Osaka. They will use projectors, developed in association with NHK. But Panasonic has a prototype 140” plasma display, first shown in March 2012.

While the elements of the production system are coming together, much of it has to be hand-crafted and development of productised versions will continue over the next five years. The current generation of full-resolution cameras, for example, weigh 65kg, which has to be reduced for practical, everyday use.

The aim remains to broadcast Super Hi-Vision from 2020. Looking still further out, in 15 years time Dr Shishikui predicts that the whole production chain will be as usable as HD is today. That includes processing and storage in the cloud. It will deliver the massive storage and high speed processing required, but it will also provide resilience and persistency against disasters, which is an important consideration given the events of last year in Japan.

Vision of the future?

The opening session of the SMPTE/EBU forum was a panel discussion to develop a vision of the future. Chaired by Ruurd Bierman of Dutch public broadcaster Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, the panel was Brigitta Nickelsen of Radio Bremen, Gilles Marchand of SRG and Ingrid Deltenre, director-general of the EBU.

Birgitta Nickelson set out five theses which might guide our visionary thinking:

- anyone who claims to understand the future is either a multimillionaire or a charlatan

- we do not over-rate the rapidity of innovations, we under-rate it

- public service broadcasting will continue to exist, but only if it develops from programme production to multimedia content production

- necessary change is not dependent on technical facilities but on the ability of change management

- we as the decision-making group risk underestimate the impact of innovations because we are out of touch with the next generation.

Ingrid Deltenre reminded the audience – perhaps a little controversially – that the purpose of television is to overcome boredom. In a comfortable society you want to spend the evening being entertained. That has to be set against the power of television for change, she suggested, citing as an example the events of the Arab Spring last year.

From there she looked at the effects of a fragmented audience, using multiple devices over various delivery networks. Consumers do not care about the delivery platform: they just want to get to the content they want. The result is that audiences are watching more television than ever before – even if some of it is not from conventional television channels.

Live sports and big entertainment will always be watched live. If you have more live content then you will keep more viewers on your channel. That has to be balanced with the cost of live content, particularly newsgathering which is a very expensive process. News is not readily susceptible to pay TV, Deltenre suggested: as newspapers have found there is always an alternative free source of content.

Gilles Marchand felt that, five years out, PSB would still be independent and stand for quality, although it will develop using new technologies through interactivity. Linear programming will still be important, but content will be more thematically organised and bi-media in nature.

In 10 years, less money will mean PSBs will have to make more distinct, focused content. 15 years will see only thematic media models, with screens everywhere. Deltenre saw a risk in PSBs only addressing content that could not be commercially justified.

The discussion was then opened out to the floor, and an interesting debate sprung up about the challenges of accessing content across multiple platforms. One delegate suggested that smart TVs are dauntingly complex for the majority of users. There are always geeks in the home who will find ways of interacting with technology, but without mass acceptance it will be difficult.

The counter-argument was put forward that user interface design is continually developing, and techniques like voice recognition and gesture recognition will drive change in the next few years. And another delegate reminded the forum that the audience is increasingly comfortable with technology – the people who have grown up with the digital revolution are not kids any more.

But Marchand warned that the interface has to be television-like: it should be lean back not lean forward, and delegates raised the question of multiple user interfaces, one suggesting that this was a ripe area for standardisation.

Finally a US broadcaster suggested the 500lb gorilla in the room is rights management. “I hate putting in passwords, and being blocked from content because I am not in the right place,” he said. Rights issues are really complex and have to be simplified in a uniform world, but they spring from conflicting business models. The result is a disrupted home environment. Technologically it can be solved, but rights issues could ultimately drive up costs to unacceptable levels.

Concluding the session, Ingrid Deltenre felt that television will continue to be an important social focus in the family room, not least because screens are getting bigger. Alongside the social experience is the individual experience from the iPad on the lap. And, as she said earlier, the future is all about being less bored.

Emerging Media Technologies

Delegates from 20 countries are sipping their coffees, ready to start deliberating on the future of our industry and how developing technologies will drive it. A dense programme, produced by SMPTE and EBU, has brought together the leaders of the media business to consider the challenges facing us all.
It is a tough ask to cover this rich and complex topic in just two days. Listening to the debate and commenting live on the SMPTE blog is leading international writer and commentator Dick Hobbs. Read the highlights of the conference here, as they happen.

TSC: From Cinemaplex to Googleplex?

Will we see a day when the cinema audience is asked to turn their phones on rather than off? That was the controversial blue sky topic at a session devoted to enhancing cinema with second screen applications.

With cinemas already being kitted out with extensive IT systems and the ability for consumers to connect with the web via personal devices, the prospects for revenue on second screens in and around cinemas are being explored.

“The ability to buy products that you have seen on screen directly from your smartphone is a logical extension of product placement,” said Peter Wilson, director, High Definition and Digital Cinema Ltd.

“If studios and advertisers could run a database which is timecode-linked to the movie, then consumer iPhones could be their shopping phone.”

Similarly, users in the vicinity of a cinema could download trailers to preview before a film before going to buy a ticket. There are, said Wilson, a myriad of ways in which studios, exhibitors, advertisers or vendors local to the cinema could connect with audiences.

“E-commerce is an opportunity for studios and exhibitors but it does mean an IT headache to devise a system that can handle the transactions and data securely,” said Wilson.

Though in-cinema apps could be made to mute the personal device, inhibit internal cameras and mics or dim backlights on phones, the fear is that all of this activity will detract from the content itself.

“I don’t want cinema to be destroyed by people using second screens because having one point of interest in a darkened room is why people go to the cinema today,” said Mark Schubin, technology consultant, SchubinCafe.com.

Nonetheless in a poll of the delegates attending the session the majority believed that not only would second screen activity be introduced before and after cinema screenings, but that apps for movie goers who are actually watching a film would also debut within a decade.

Outside of the cinema, second screen apps are already being used to enrich the consumer experience or drive revenue.

Location based cinema, which uses GPS coordinates of film scenes for consumers to replay on their devices when at the location, is already possible.

Future second screen apps being developed by Deluxe includes the delivery of audio streams (commentary track or different languages) in sync with content to second devices so that individuals with different preferences could watch the same film.

“We are also investigating voice activated menus, augmented reality, pre-release alerts to additional content and in-feature commerce where props or clothes can be pre-encoded for purchase via second devices,” said Sapth Sholingapuram, VP at Deluxe. “User generated commentaries or text could also be uploaded to Facebook for others to stream when they watch the same content back.”

The key to second screen apps is knowing what piece of content is being displayed at any point in time. There are various technologies to achieve this but the most robust is audio synchronization by way of watermarking or fingerprinting.

Watermarking utilizes hidden information embedded in the audio file that is not audible to the listener and does not effect the quality of the original track. Fingerprinting is a means of tagging segments of audio content. Both techniques enable a second screen app to detect or record a piece of audio within seconds of it being played and identify the content and timecode.

In the cinema second screen sync is easier. The content can’t be DVR’ed, there is only one timecode to manage and everyone remains in their own seat.

F65 Short "Eldorado" Premieres At The TSC

Eldorado—a new 8-minutes short film from Curtis Clark, ASC, which was lensed with Sony’s F65 camera, was presented Sunday at the NAB’s Technology Summit on Cinema, co-produced with SMPTE.

Clark (The Draughtsman’s Contract) also wrote and directed The Arrival, the short that previewed the capabilities of the F65, before its release, a year ago. At the time, the TSC (then called the Digital Cinema Summit) was among the first public screenings of the anticipated short.

Eldorado includes a range including day, night, indoor, outdoor and was lensed in Las Vegas and at Red Rock. It was produced using the Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES), the developing architecture aimed at preserving the quality of the captured image through a variety of workflows in production, postproduction, and restoration. The development of ACES was led by AMPAS’ Science and Technology Council and was outlined on Saturday at the TSC.

The screening of Eldorado concluded a Sunday session on “4K and beyond,” during which Sony CTO Hugo Gaggioni offered an overview of the F65 and its workflow. He said of the ability to perceive 4K compared with today’s more commonly used formats, “as panels get larger, you can see the [4K] effect.”

Yoshiaki Shishikui, head of advanced TV systems research division, NHK Research, discussed plans to shoot portions of the London Olympics using its UHDTV 8K production system, while testing a delivery method. This is a joint project between NHK, Olympic Broadcast Services (OBS) and BBC.

Reported Craig Todd, CTO, Dolby Laboratories: “Many of the necessary standards for UHDTV are in development. We may have an agreed specification in a couple weeks time.”

Jim Houston, principal of Starwatcher, moderated the discussion.