#IBC2025
03
BRINGING THE ORIGINAL SOUND OF LED ZEP THUNDERING BACK TO LIFE BY ADRIAN PENNINGTON
Becoming Led Zeppelin is the highest earning documentary of 2025 and IMAX’s highest earning docu release ever, due at least in part to the efforts made to faithfully recreate the experience of fi rst hearing the band. In yesterday’s IBC Conference session ‘How Becoming Led Zeppelin was Created’, Director Bernard MacMahon and Sound Supervisor Nicholas Bergh presented a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the techniques that made it possible. They used a vast archive of 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, 2in video, tape, discs and stills, ranging from 1944, when band founder Jimmy Page was born, to a 1970 concert at the Royal Albert Hall. All were transferred and painstakingly restored without using AI or any digital processing. “The moment you put anything
through machines, the audience can tell it’s been messed with,” MacMahon said. Instead, fi xing scratches on fi lm required
(L-R): Moderator Scott Lane with Bergh and MacMahon
laborious frame-by-frame grain replacement. “Ninety-nine percent of what you’re seeing on screen is exactly what was originally shot.” For the same reasons of authenticity, the fi lmmakers went through a similar, but more complicated, process with the fi lm’s soundtrack. They chose to base it on the fi rst cut of the vinyl recordings to evoke the sound of the era. “When records were fi nished
on a quarter-inch tape, a cutting artist would goose the audio so that it pops when played back,” MacMahon said. “That was sound that got people so excited when they heard it on the radio.” The birth of the band coincided with the explosion of stereo recording and the fi lm’s audio makes the most of this. “By late 1968 when Zeppelin was making the fi rst record, stereo recording had become much more sophisticated. We
mixed in mono but spread across 5.1, so from the moment Zeppelin appear in the fi lm, you hear the stereo recording explode. You can hear the drum kit, the cymbals and then the guitars fl ying here and there. “We’re trying to give the viewer an experience of time travel; it’s what you would have heard if you were in the engineers’ room when they were cutting it at Atlantic Records. You’re hearing that exact sound.”
THE POWER OF PERSONALISATION IN LIVE SPORTS STREAMING BY MONICA HECK
At the ‘Streaming of Live Sport: Have we reached a tipping point?’ session on the IBC Content Everywhere Stage in Hall 4, Paul Erickson, Principal Analyst, Media & Entertainment at Omdia, noted that the industry today is in a mad race to acquire sports rights. “Live sports has proven over decades to be the most reliable high-engagement driver of subscriber acquisition and retention in the streaming video market,” he said. Customers streaming live sports have high expectations in terms of content quality and low tolerance for quality and latency issues. In the streaming world, platform loyalty is usually low as eyeballs follow the content. “In sports, loyalty to the content is huge, we see that in the engagement, in the
(L-R): Till Sudworth; Paul Boustead; Raimond Van Raamsdonk; and Paul Erickson
churn numbers, and there is a high chance to monetise this,” said Till Sudworth, Head of QoE Business Unit, NPAW. “The advantage of streaming versus broadcast is that we can add additional services and personalisation to it.” “I don’t think anyone has solved
the problem of personalising the fan engagement towards the actively watching viewer and what’s happening in the content at the time,” said Paul Boustead, Vice President of Product and Architecture at Dolby OptiView. “This is the key to building sticky fan engagement.”
Due to fragmentation, sports
remain scattered across streaming and linear channels, according to Raimond Van Raamsdonk, Director of Product Management at Gracenote. “A lot of consumers are frustrated, and it’s a great opportunity for platforms to solve this.”
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