10 TVBEurope News & Analysis


www.tvbeurope.com June 2012


By 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices worldwide


Emerging into the future


In a time of huge technical and sociological shifts, it makes sense to spend time considering the future. Last month SMPTE and EBU combined to gather an influential group to make sense of emerging technologies. Dick Hobbs reports from the two day forum in Geneva


OVER TWOdays at the SMPTE Forum on Emerging Media Technologies in Geneva many questions were asked and thoughts provoked. By the end of the forum most delegates left with at least a better understanding of the issues, even if many of the answers are yet to be uncovered. One of the most thought


provoking presentations came in the first session, from Brigitta Nickelsen of Radio Bremen in Germany. She challenged the forum with what she called her five theses: l Anyone who claims to understand the future is either a multimillionaire or a charlatan lWe do not over-rate the rapidity of innovations, we under-rate it l Public service broadcasting will continue to exist, but only if it develops from programme production to multimedia content production l The question of whether necessary change will succeed is not dependent on technical facilities but on the ability of change management lWe as the decision-making group risk underestimating the impact of innovations because we are out of touch with the next generation The delegates — more than 100


top executives from over 20 countries — spent the rest of the two days digging deeper into these five issues. Karl Schubert, the Grass Valley


CTO, said that by 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices worldwide, and that date was a good estimate of the point when broadcast and internet video would truly intersect. He pointed out that Moore’s Law is being exceeded,


(L/R) Brigitta Nickelsen of Radio Bremen, Gilles Marchand of SRG and EBU Director General Ingrid Deltenre


viewing hours are going up, the share taken by the television screen will fall rapidly. That was underlined in a fun session in which four 16 and 17- year-olds gave their views of the media world. This was hardly a representative sample of today’s teenagers as they were drawn from the Geneva International School, which meant they were charming, engaging and lucid, but they were also well educated and from wealthy families. Not one had a television in their


with microprocessor prices halving every 1.2 years and memory density doubling every 1.5 years. So with off-the-shelf hardware


already fast enough for most media applications, we have the ability to create integrated collaborative systems. And with transport bandwidths increasing and costs falling, the question is not whether cloud computing will come to our industry, but when. Picking up that theme, Leszek


Izdebski of Cisco said that cloud services are here — he estimated that there are more than 30,000 web-grade cloud hosting companies already — and said that cloud is not just about saving costs but enabling innovation. As an example he suggested that in the future a live sporting event could be captured by a small number of Lytro-type light field cameras then, by using massive cloud processing, the director could put virtual cameras anywhere in the stadium, in 3D if required, moving them in realtime to match the action.


In a later session Dr Albert


Heuberger of the Fraunhofer Institute added that cloud processing could form part of a content agnostic production environment. Camera and sensor data, and object-based audio, could be coupled with metadata and processed downstream. Virtual processing workspaces would allow multiple collaborative users, working around a common mastering format to create the very many deliverables needed to satisfy any consumer device.


A shared experience The number of deliverables continues to escalate. According to Christophe Diot of Technicolor, a new movie today is delivered in more than 200 different versions. And according to Chuck Dages, Warner Bros. had 1.3 billion transactions for its products across all delivery formats in 2006: five years later that number had grown more than 50% to two billion.


On a wave of Emotion


and repair, and will fit into the IT environment.


The first is an audio loudness


app. It meters loudness to the now established standards, but it can also fix to whatever standard the user requires, in a way which is easy to make machine automatable. Alternatively, it presents the measurement in a user-friendly way, meaning an editor can be helped and encouraged to deliver a soundtrack


which has impact but remains within the loudness specifications. “We have a very clear set of rules on the sort of product we want to make,” MC stated. “If it is not something that can or should be automated then we do not want to be there. We want to tackle processes that are machine analysable and fixable — processes that are not rewarding to the user. “But we are sticking to our


As well as looking at the opportunities the technology opens up, the forum also considered where the revenue will come from to pay for it. Tom Morrod of IHS Screen Digest made the point that, up to now at least, total consumer leisure spending is still focussed on traditional content types. Actual spending on new media and online content is almost negligible: 1 or 2% only. More than half goes to pay TV, 10% on gaming, and substantial revenues still go to cinema and DVD. But advertising revenue is


following a very different path. Television remains the largest single advertising market, but the internet is now running it close and is likely to overtake television in the relatively near future. Morrod also made the point that consumers are spending on devices, and the typical household now uses tablets and smartphones as well as computers, televisions and DVD players. While total


room, relying on laptops or iPads for content consumption most of the time, except for occasional social viewing. The living room television is seen as a way for families to get together. Indeed, they seemed to struggle with the very idea of ‘television’, seeing the big screen in the living room as just that: the big screen around which people could congregate for a shared experience. That was a view clearly endorsed by Ingrid Deltenre, who had opened the forum with the view that consumers do not care about the delivery platform: they just want to get to the content they want. Audiences are watching more television than ever before, she agreed, even if some of it is not from conventional television channels. She also said, somewhat


controversially, that we should remember that for many the purpose of television — in whatever way we receive it — is to overcome boredom. In a comfortable society, she said, you want to spend the evening being entertained. By the end of the forum,


delegates were forced to acknowledge the truth in the first of Nickelsen’s theses, that it was impossible to predict the future with any degree of confidence. But they were united in believing that, while it may be delivered in different ways, and perhaps with a different business model, there is a strong future in what we currently call television.


continued from page 8


knitting. We have 35 years of video experience behind us when we use IT skills to solve media problems.” MC Patel still relishes the challenge of developing skills for the future of the industry. “Emotion Systems is developing the infrastructure to do media in the IT world. And we are looking to do this with fresh graduates and young people, to bring in new thinking.”


A fresh-faced MC Patel in 1978 with Peter Owen (Ed Note: yes that’s Peter Owen in a T-shirt), preparing for a Quantel presentation


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52