LIVE TV
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS
which then makes all of your audience feel like they are part of the event.” He sees a model developing where 5G and broadcast
combine to provide a range of experiences and information services as part of the build up as well as part of the game. Will the rights holders go for it? “I think the clever ones will make partnerships,” he says. “What needs to happen is to start working together to create white label products that sit in that environment.” How it is funded and who has ownership of the data will
be interesting questions to iron out over the coming year. Another area of rapidly developing interest is Low Earth
Orbit and Medium Earth Orbit satellite (LEO and MEO respectively). SpaceX’s Starlink service went live last month, others such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper will literally get off the ground soon, and has somewhere shy of 2000 of a projected 12,000 satellites in orbit providing download speeds of around 50Mbps, upload of 15Mbps, and latency around 50ms. It’s not broadcast performance yet, and there are other limitations such as geolocking that will need to be surmounted, but performance will scale as new constellations are put into orbit. SES’s forthcoming O3b mPower service next year, meanwhile promises gigabit connectivity from MEO at a latency still useful enough for live work. “Those constellations will provide broadband into remote
areas, so as soon as we can guarantee 1Gb they will be an interesting way to go,” says Shield. “You’re not going to replace what we do at the Ryder Cup, but I could imagine using it for golf; you’d still have to create a WiFi mesh around the course but you could have an uplink bringing back 10 cameras or so.”
NEXT GEN FORMATS Over in next gen format territory, the rollout of HDR is perhaps going slower than many people once predicted. That is probably down to a couple of factors; first confusion at the consumer end, and second the fact that it is not easy to do. “It’s probably one of the more complicated things we’ve
actually done in the last few years,” says McCue at Sky which has set up a complete end-to-end HDR workflow for its EPL and EFL coverage, deriving SDR outputs from it. “Signal management and maintaining colour control throughout the whole of the signal chain is very difficult and it takes us quite an uplift of training as there are lots of things in the chain that can catch you out. A mistake you make in one part of the chain will manifest itself eventually as a massive colour shift. And things like end to end round tripping of HDR content, where it’s been mapped up to HDR and then been mapped down again and then come up again, then you can start to see colour shifting going on.” BT, meanwhile, is looking towards a possible 8K future.
“We will do more 8K next year and we will do that full remote,” says Hindhaugh . “I think 8K and HDR are really important. We’ll look at High Frame Rate over the next period too and assess the value of 8K and 4K in HFR. That’s driven by the consumer. When you buy new sets you want
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televisual.com Winter 2021
the benefit from them and anything that makes that picture clearer is good.” One subject worth mentioning here as part of any
discussion of picture quality is the virtual set. The quality of these has ramped up enormously in recent years, partly as a result of hitching onto the accelerated development of industry-wide photorealistic realtime graphics engines such as Unreal and Unity rather than staying as siloed, proprietary systems. As part of its new Ealing Broadcast Centre, Timeline TV
has recently unveiled a flexible 2000 sq. ft virtual reality studio built in collaboration with MOOV. “We’ve created a modular white label set, essentially,” explains David Harnett, Head of Operations. “People generally shy away from spending three months building a virtual set unless it is something like the Olympics or a really high profile show. Productions can use ours though and we can make it feel like their own environment with their own geometries, their own branding elements, logos, and whatever they might want without having to build the whole thing from the ground up.”
SUSTAINABILITY: THE NEXT DRIVER With some of the other hot topics across the wider industry such as AI not currently gaining much traction in live production beyond an acknowledgement of its usefulness in clipping, sustainability as a technology driver is possibly the biggest thing coming down the pipe for next year. Sky has been carbon neutral for all its own UK sports
OBs since the start of the year, and produced its first net zero football match in September, reducing its omissions by 70% and offsetting the remainder. “We did some rudimentary maths on the cost of a
traditional gallery in terms of carbon footprint versus the cost of a cloud gallery for our COP 26 coverage,” says McCue. “What we worked out was if we used one of our traditional galleries to do the COP 26 output that would have cost us just under four tonnes of carbon over 12 days, taking into account that we don’t switch galleries off. To run the same gallery in the cloud, given the fact we’re switching it off, was 300kg.” Currently, there is a degree of opaqueness regarding
the carbon output of cloud components, but a forthcoming albert report being spun out of an IBC Accelerator looking at sustainability in live production is going to have access to data from Microsoft and AWS amongst others, so those gaps will hopefully start being filled in soon. And when that happens, we can have better visibility into the impact that remote and cloud in particular are having on live production’s overall footprint. It has to be said the anecdotal evidence is already
impressive though. “Looking at our work on SailGP we’d typically once have sent 50-60 technical people to deliver a world tour event of that scale,” says Timeline’s Harnett. “Now we just send two people to do the connectivity and bring back those feeds.”
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