TVBE December 2014 digital edition

www.tvbeurope.com

December 2014Business, insight and intelligence for the broadcast media industry

Focus on VFXSecond screen insightTapeless video: external recorders

Managing your AssetsMAM, archive and storage

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TVBEurope 3December 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

So here we are: the fi nal edition of 2014! I

struggle to put my fi nger on where the time

has disappeared to, but as I discussed with

some colleagues at a recent and unseasonably

festive soiree (a party): the swift passage of time

must mean we’re having fun. Either that, or we’re

mercilessly busy. (A rare mixture of the two, on a

personal level.)

It has been a year offering plenty in terms of

refl ection as we breach into the genesis of a new

annual chapter that bears the traditional promise

of progress, development, and growth. It has

been a year of consolidation; visible in the direct

aftermath of the mergers and acquisitions that

have persisted throughout the period, and equally

in the manner that entities have been recalibrating

their strategies to equip themselves for the new

digital age. And for every strategic seed sown,

there is hope of harvest.

There is much to look forward to in 2015, and

here at TVBEurope we’ve been busy recalibrating

our own strategy to ensure we’re doing all we can

to cover as much of this fascinating industry as

possible – an industry that endears itself to me on a

daily basis. To that end, our January issue will herald

the start of a brand new section in the magazine,

dedicated to providing regular insight from the

world of TV Everywhere, OTT and IPTV, multiscreen,

and the hyper-connected world. I’ve unashamedly

christened it ‘TVBEverywhere’, and I’m excited to

be able to introduce a dedicated home for what is

an important and absorbing area of our business.

This issue, we go in-depth on Media Asset

Management in conjunction with Tedial in

our supplement, while Philip Stevens unearths

the latest challenges and issues facing MAM

and archive and storage

companies in our two

Forums. We also feature the

mesmerising work of Milk

VFX and BUF Compagnie in

our VFX focus, while David

Fox returns to provide the lowdown on external

recorders. There’s a great wealth of quality content

in this issue that I hope you will enjoy.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank

everyone who has contributed to TVBEurope in

the last year: the quality and consistency of your

work has made my life much easier than it could

have been, and has ensured that quality remains

the key component of TVBEurope’s output. I don’t

have the room to name everyone individually, but

I will make a small exception for my immediate

editorial colleagues.

Firstly, I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to

Neal Romanek for his time as acting editor, and

more pertinently for graciously helping me to settle

into life at NewBay Media. Secondly, to my dear

colleagues Holly and Mel (alphabetical order),

without whom I’d get nothing done, and with

whom I have the pleasure of working on a daily

basis; each day a delight. They are the engine

room of what you see before you, and I can’t

highlight their importance, or thank them, enough.

Finally, a very special mention to my designer,

Dawn, who alongside her many skills, has the

patience of an angel.

Enough internal back-slapping. Congratulations

everybody on a strong year for the industry: here’s

to 2015. I’ll see you there. Merry Christmas to one

and all. James McKeown Executive Editor

There is much to look forward to in the coming year

WelcomeEDITORIALExecutive Editor - James [email protected] - Melanie [email protected] Writer - Holly [email protected] Media, 1st Floor, Suncourt House, 18-26 Essex Road, London N1 8LN, England +44 207 354 6002Contributors Mike Clark, Chris Forrester, David Fox, Mark Hill, Dick Hobbs, John Ive, George Jarrett, Heather McLean, Adrian Pennington, Philip Stevens, Reinhard E WagnerHead of Digital - Tim FrostHuman Resources & Offi ce Manager - Lianne DaveyHead of Design & Production - Adam ButlerEditorial Production Manager - Dawn Boultwood

Senior Production Executive - Alistair TaylorPublisher - Steve [email protected]+44 207 354 6000Sales Manager - Ben [email protected]+44 207 354 6000Sales Executive - Richard [email protected]+44 207 354 6000Managing Director - Mark BurtonUS Sales - Michael MitchellBroadcast Media International, PO Box 44, Greenlawn, New York, NY [email protected]+1 (631) 673 0072Japan and Korea Sales - Sho HariharaSales & Project, Yukari Media [email protected]+81 6 4790 2222 Fax: +81 6 4793 0800CirculationNewBay Media, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough, LE16 9EF, UK

Free [email protected] Tel +44 1580 883848

TVBEurope is published 12 times a year by NewBay Media, 1st Floor, Suncourt House, 18-26 Essex Road, London, N1 8LN, England

NewBay Media is a member of the Periodical Publishers Association

© NewBay Media 2014. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owners. TVBEurope is mailed to qualifi ed persons residing on the European continent. Subscription is free.

Allow 8 weeks for new subscriptions and change of address delivery. Send subscription inquiries to: Subscription Dept, NewBay Media, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough LE16 7BR, England. ISSN 1461-4197

Printing by Pensord Press, Tram Road, Pontllanfraith, Blackwood NP12 2YA

Here’s to 2015!

In this issue4 TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

The main thrust of our focus this issue centres on MAM, and the challenges that the rapidly developing digitalisation of the media industry is having on those tasked with the management and storage of fi les and content

A television renaissance 23 206-13 Opinion & Analysis

As many organisations are fi nding, there is money to be made in archive material. And that is good news. But just how do you store those assets – and retrieve them easily? Philip Stevens moderates

40 Archive and storage Forum

14-22 Workfl ow

New research from global analyst fi rm Ovum suggests that while mobile data services are on the rise in Africa, it is still playing catch-up to the rest of the world with high-speed broadband connectivity

46-50 Data CentreWorkfl ow

18Vive Liberté! Paris-based BUF Compagnie, which has worked on everything from City of Lost Children to Gravity is opening its award-winning VFX toolkit to the world. Neal Romanek reports

Milk VFX rose from the ashes of The Mill’s TV department, marked its fi rst birthday in June, and took home the Achievement in VFX award at the TVBAwards in October. Holly Ashford paid a visit, and spoke to CEO, Will Cohen

36External recorder manufacturers have been building on their expertise to reach into other areas of acquisition, most notably by developing their own cameras. David Fox reports

36-39 Feature: External recorders

MAM Supplement and Forum

Patrick Mitchell and colleagues at DLA Piper’s Global Media, Sport & Entertainment practice assess the latest trends, technology, commercial and regulatory issues related to second screen

Philip Stevens talks to Stryme about how it converted a regional studio to full HD operation and introduced a tapeless workfl ow for Austria’s ORF

www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

Opinion & Analysis6 TVBEurope

Broadcasters are fi ghting the threat of

advertising money being syphoned to

the web by converging online advertising

technology and techniques with mainstream TV

advertising. In doing so, they claim to have tapped

new revenue streams bolstering TV’s future.

“There has been considerable buzz about the

rise of digital video advertising, a widespread

perception that people no longer watch TV and

that advertisers will follow the eyeballs online

where targeting is apparently so much easier,” Jill

Hind, COO, Enders Analysis told IBC. “We believe

that TV will remain the dominant way to view

video for many years to come.”

Figures from GroupM show that TV revenue is

growing in real terms although the year on year

increases are slowing. TV spot ads will actually

rise fi ve per cent in 2015 in contrast to online

video advertisements which will rocket 50 per

cent in 2015, but from a signifi cantly smaller base.

Jamie West, director, Sky AdSmart and

commercial development, argues that the TV

advertising market needs to be shaken up. “We

can compete on a level footing with digital

media that claims to be the only market that

can offer addressability, targeting, reporting and

understanding return on investment.”

The QYOU launches 24/7 pay-TV serviceCommercial-free channel The QYOU has

launched what it claims to be the world’s fi rst

international 24/7 pay-TV service to bring a

selection of high-quality, short-form, internet

video content to TV screens. The QYOU is

Content Everywhere round up

Melanie Dayasena-Lowe rounds up the latest Content Everywhere news, including online advertising monies, and 24/7 pay-TV

available for all pay-TV platforms and supports

both on-demand and TVE applications.

The channel was founded and created

by industry veterans Scott Ehrlich (Fox News,

NBC Cable, Real, Divx), Curt Marvis (MTV,

CinemaNow, Lionsgate), Les Garland (MTV,

VH-1, The Box) and G. Scott Patterson (Lionsgate

Entertainment, NeuLion, Engagement Labs), all

of whom have extensive histories in both pay-TV

and digital content.

Programming for The QYOU is a curated mix

of high-quality ‘produced-for-web’ content from

around the world, presented and contextualised

by on-air presenters, known as Q-rators. These

Q-rators are internet stars in their own right,

bringing their audience and sensibility to ensure

the authenticity of the programming. Additionally,

the channel has been created to be quickly and

easily localised.

“Online creators are establishing a new art form

in much the same way music videos fuelled the

popularity and growth of MTV,” said The QYOU

CEO Scott Ehrlich. “The QYOU is committed to

doing the same for this engaging and entertaining

cultural phenomenon, while also generating

meaningful royalties for an entirely new generation

of web creative icons, fi lmmakers and talent.”

Broadcasters are fi ghting the threat of advertising money being syphoned to the web by converging online advertising technology and techniques with mainstream TV advertising

“There has been considerable buzz about the rise of digital video advertising, a

widespread perception that people no longer watch TV and that advertisers will follow the eyeballs online where targeting

is apparently so much easier” Jill Hind, Enders Analysis

Opinion & Analysis8 TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

News doesn’t stand still: by its nature it’s a

dynamic, shifting landscape of stories;

stories that can emerge instantly and

evolve slowly. The rise of web-based news, and

the increasing use of online video in the last two

decades, has changed the way that people

perceive news, placing speed-of-delivery and being

‘close to the action’ at the top of the list of priorities.

Prior to the emergence of cellular uplinking in

2008, acquisition technologies such as satellite,

fibre, and microwave, hadn’t been able to

develop the mobility and flexibility that was

beginning to be required. Of course, they all

still have their place, no one doubts that, but

the last six years has seen cellular uplinking

change the acquisition landscape, most

particularly in newsgathering and sport, but

also more widely than that. It is, as coined by

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, a truly

disruptive innovation. This describes a process

by which a product or service takes root initially

in simple applications at the bottom of a

market and then relentlessly moves up-market,

eventually displacing established competitors.

It allows – indeed encourages – people to

think differently. While cellular networks will

forever be fundamentally unstable, the market-

leading technology has now reached the point

where signal robustness and image quality

are a given. This is due to a variety of factors:

improved modems; superior encoding; and the

emergence of 4G/LTE networks. In addition,

something notable that we’ve seen in the past

18 months or so is the launch of cellular uplinking

smartphone apps. Broadcasters and media

companies have immediately recognised that

this is another game-changer as they can now

train a wider pool of staff – beyond reporters – to

use this simple technology, providing an army of

newsgatherers as and when required. Again, we

live in a world where dynamic content delivered

quickly is in demand.

Let’s take a quick look at a major 2014

deployment. Hundreds of LiveU units were used

by India’s broadcasters and online media to

boost their live reporting of the Indian General

Elections, said to be the world’s biggest. These

units increased the newsgathering capabilities

for many of India’s broadcasters such as ANI,

Network 18, and Times Now, among others.

Piyush Gupta, operations director and CTO,

broadcast, Network 18, said at the time, “We

needed to increase our coverage capabilities

during the elections. Supported by the local

Lamhas team (LiveU partner), we’ve been able

to transmit live coverage of the campaign

around the country with ad hoc interviews and

press conferences.” The new Prime Minister Mr

Narendra Modi then started his term with a very

busy, international schedule. Again, cellular

uplinking technology helped Indian media

outlets provide streaming solutions from foreign

locations to India on multiple platforms with some

reports using cellular uplinking smartphone apps.

As a sector, we are now in the next phase,

meaning that media companies can now select

exactly the form factor of the cellular uplinking

technology that they want to use. It’s now a

question of management platforms and cloud-

enabled applications. These powerful tools mean

that fleets of units can be centrally controlled

using geo-location capabilities alongside a host

of other management options. Footage can be

effortlessly introduced to a backend broadcast

environment creating a powerful content

network. But there’s more.

One of the key tenets of newsgathering is

sharing content with other outlets, in a variety

of commercial models. This, of course, is where

the cloud comes into its own. By using a

cloud-based network, connecting freelancers,

production houses and other service providers

with hundreds of broadcasters around the world,

new opportunities open up for content and

skillset sharing. An online news exchange platform

makes it easier and cheaper for customers

to offer or request newsgathering services for

breaking news and events anywhere, at any time.

Provided the platform is architected correctly,

once the connection is made between the

broadcaster and the service provider, content

can be transmitted and managed centrally.

Uplink devices will then be able to transmit to

any correctly specified server, essentially allowing

the broadcaster to use any service provider’s

unit as one of their own. Leveraging the massive

deployment of units and servers around the

world, this kind of platform enables broadcasters

to find correctly-equipped professionals in any

geographic location and create unique content

at a significantly reduced cost, and much faster,

than sending their own news crew or using

satellite or microwave equipment.

Cellular uplinking: the new frontierBy Ronen Artman, VP of marketing, LiveU


While there are concerted efforts

within the media industry to migrate

videotape archives to digital formats,

unfortunately there are far too many facilities

and individuals that still rely upon video tape

archives. Transferring valuable files to archive

and digital storage platforms offers businesses

a number of benefits, allowing organisations to

access files more efficiently, while also giving

them the flexibility to manage their assets and

extract the most value from them.

There are several reasons for this reluctance

to migrate to the digital landscape. The first is

the issue that production staff often relate to the

physical and tactile security of a physical asset;

in their minds, the cost of implementing tapeless

archives is a significant one to the business,

and is something that causes more hassle than

benefit. Looking after both your physical assets

and virtual archives is certainly a cost that can

impact a business, however, business leaders

need to think of the long-term benefits, rather

than the short-term cost.

Second is the continual evolution of file formats,

standards, and a general lack of specialist

knowledge. With file formats changing and

industry standards updating regularly, moving

files into digital format along with the cost of

maintaining the physical assets can create a

general reluctance to adopt this new process. In

an industry where margins are tight and content

needs to work hard to create value, businesses

are worried about external costs associated with

major transitions to new platforms.

Rapid turnaroundIncreasingly, broadcasters are now dependent

upon content preparation facilities houses to

archive their content and metadata, expecting

a rapid turnaround for repurposing existing

content. The benefits of a well-implemented

file-based system should enable rapid access to

archived assets in a cost effective manner with

a smaller storage footprint. File-based archiving

is less susceptible to the degradation witnessed

with video tape formats, and with the correct

tools, can be continuously migrated to ever

evolving file and storage formats.

Ever more frequently, facilities houses now

simply expand their ‘spinning disk’ archive. This

is potentially very expensive, and can be fraught

with technical challenges, as well as being

difficult to extend and maintain. Often, there is

an inherent distrust of spinning disk archives due

to possible mechanical failures and corruption,

perceived cost issues and importantly the

green issue; racks of spinning disks using

significant power with a corresponding

increase in cooling effort required.

Obvious alternatives to spinning disk archives

include Linear Tape Open (LTO) based archived

solutions: these offer the ability to create

automated multiple asset copies with the

capability to store media offsite for disaster

recovery purposes. While LTO archives are popular,

they are expensive to implement and may be

hindered by high licence and maintenance

costs. Facilities are increasingly turning to cloud-

based storage solutions. Although cloud-based

solutions offer easy access to ‘elastic’ storage, the

time taken to upload and restore high bandwidth

assets such as uncompressed 4K assets must be

taken into account.

The cost of high bandwidth internet connectivity

must also be accounted for, together with possible

ingress and egress storage costs. Deploying a

robust cloud-based asset management system in

conjunction with cloud-based storage platforms

may offer a viable alternative to buying a locally

archived system in the short to medium term.

Accurate and extensible archiving is

increasingly becoming part of any broadcaster’s

media operation. Broadcasters are continuously

looking to monetise assets for new emerging

markets and VoD platforms; therefore, having

quick access to assets together with accurate

metadata is becoming a necessity to compete

in the global media arena.

Media asset management The complexities of archiving and storage

Gary Finnerty, technical director at RR Media, delves into the complexities of archive and storage

Accurate and extensible archiving is increasingly becoming part of any broadcaster’s media operation

‘File-based archiving is less susceptible to the degradation witnessed with video tape formats, and with the correct tools,

can be continuously migrated to ever evolving file and storage formats’

Content and content consumption is

changing; digital users have more

sophisticated needs and higher

expectations, including portability across

numerous devices, personalisation, and

ease of use. As well as becoming available

in more digital formats, content is becoming

more socially interactive. Multiple interactive

touch points are becoming available to

broadcasters and others, creating opportunities

to collect data from a previously unknown

audience and to use that data to power

processes like programming and advertising.

Virtual disintegrationThe broadcasting industry is becoming an

‘industry of industries’, and a highly complex and

developing ecosystem has been created; the

entrance of non-traditional players into this market

has increased digital broadcasting growth. These

new players threaten traditional broadcasters

with their fi nancial strength and scale (eg, telcos

such as BT, and ‘super platforms’ such as Google

and Amazon). Additionally, rights owners (such as

NFL and NBA) are starting to deliver certain digital

online content directly to consumers, no longer

depending on the traditional sale of distribution

rights. Further, web-based content distributors such

as Netfl ix have the scale, data and content to

provide services on their own terms and rely on

others to provide the internet access on which it

operates. Netfl ix has built success through use of

archive and library content but also by entering

the commissioning and content creation space,

using analytics and data from its consumer base

to ‘produce’ programmes (eg, House of Cards).

Constantly evolving operating modelsTechnologies are migrating to IP and IT, core

processes are becoming more business-to-


Double visionPatrick Mitchell, legal director, Sam Churney, associate, and Benjamin Simon, trainee, of DLA Piper’s Global Media, Sport & Entertainment practice, assess the latest trends, technology, commercial and regulatory issues related to second screen Patrick Mitchell


Opinion & Analysis

consumer and data driven, and the number of

IP-enabled devices is increasing. Additionally,

business models are evolving with no clear-cut

golden rule on digital consumer monetisation.

Data is becoming the new content differentiator Media companies leverage big data from data

analytics to alter services and content to evolving

customer needs. Analytics and usage monitoring

can provide more of an insight into who is using

products and services and how they are being

used. Editorial teams are therefore able to adapt

content and commission programmes based on

knowledge of their audience and choose topics

based on real-time customer data insights. The

value of content is amplified by context.

‘Multi-X consumption’ is the new normVideo is travelling across screens and

there has been a noted shift in consumer

behaviour – the reality is that the TV viewer is

increasingly multitasking.

Social media has transformed TV viewingJohann Dudley, VP of product at Neilson, discussed

the impact of social media at a recent DLA Piper

webinar, where he explained that social media is an

important consumer phenomenon and is changing

how people watch TV. Indeed, according to the

2014 Nielsen Digital Consumer Report, 84 per cent of

US smartphone and tablet owners today watch TV

with a second screen in hand. These new consumer

viewing habits represent a powerful force, with such

viewers being capable of becoming valuable social

ambassadors for programmers and advertisers

as they amplify content and messaging through

their social spheres. Broadcasters, media agencies

and advertisers are leveraging this phenomenon

via on-air integrations and real-time audience

engagement to keep users of the second screen

watching the ‘primary’ screen in front of them;

social media, therefore, is being used to help drive

traditional TV ratings. Moreover, advertisers are

starting to use ‘#’ during the linear airing of their

ads to identify the social ad-effectiveness and

resonance of particular ad spots. Nielson has seen

an intersection growing between those tweeting

about TV and those tweeting about brands. Sixty-

four per cent of brand authors also tweet about TV,

with 78 per cent of those who tweet about brands

coming from that intersection. Broadcasters can

capitalise on and leverage this trend for monetising

opportunities with brands. Media agencies,

advertisers and broadcasters are therefore looking

at how much affinity a particular TV show has with a

particular brand and assessing sponsorship and/or

integration opportunities.

Regulatory and legal issues In the UK, there are three tiers to regulation for

content and advertising. In terms of editorial

content, a comprehensive and rigorous set of rules

exists for TV broadcasts, regulated by OFCOM (Tier

One). A lighter touch set of rules exists for video

on-demand and catch up services, regulated

by ATVOD (Tier Two). Finally, there is currently no

set of rules or a specific entity regulating content

on the ‘second screen’ (Tier Three). However, if

synchronisation methods between first and second

screens become more sophisticated, automatic,

or opaque, the potential for consumer harm

and regulator discomfort increases, particularly

if that is combined with attempts to circumvent

advertising or scheduling restrictions that apply on

the first screen, but not on the second. Indeed,

it would be wrong to assume that the second

screen is necessarily ‘secondary’ to the first screen.

If electronic programme guides and/or functional

control of the first screen develop around the

second screen, indeed if more content flows via

the second screen to the first screen, then the

three-tier hierarchy identified may be threatened.

There are a few key points that arise when

drafting second screen service provision

agreements between broadcasters and second

screen services/technology suppliers. Data

privacy, data ownership and data protection are

fundamental concerns, as is the ‘responsibility’ for

user generated content (there sometimes exists

an ambiguity between first and second screens

whereby in some instances, activities in second

screen may attract responsibility for the operator

of the first screen). Therefore, the agreements will

cover-off the share of responsibility for activities

carried out in social media. Warranty periods

and remedies for malfunctions are also key

points in such agreements.

Workfl ow14 TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

Austrian national broadcaster ORF

(Österreichischer Rundfunk) serves a

total of eight million people from its

studio centre in Vienna. In addition to the

national coverage, each of the country’s nine

federal states is provided with a mix of regional

topics, which are broadcast over ORF2 from

studios around Austria. In 2013, it was decided to

convert each of the regional centres to HD

and to introduce a tapeless workfl ow.

The conversion of the entire production gallery at

each of the ORF regional studios called for a multi-

channel solution. But because the playout varied

greatly in the different studios, a solution had to

be found that offered the required fl exibility during

the integration into existing infrastructures, while

simultaneously providing reliable performance.

The task of fulfi lling this upgrade was put

out to international tender – and won by local

broadcast solutions supplier, Stryme. During the

tendering presentation, particular emphasis was

placed on the company’s Genesix Videoserver.

“We were able to show that Genesix had

the fl exibility to integrate into the existing ORF

infrastructure and the client-server architecture

would achieve all that the broadcaster was

looking to achieve,” explains Goce Zdravkoski,

managing director of Stryme.

For the regional programming, both a playout,

as well as an ingest that creates a ‘clean and

ORF goes tapeless nationwide Philip Stevens talks to Stryme about

how it converted a regional studio to full HD operation and introduced a tapeless workfl ow for Austria’s ORF

The conversion of production galleries at each ORF regional studio required a multi-channel solution


Workflow

dirty’ recording of the broadcasts, was required.

The playout had to play not only two clips – fill and

key – on two SDI channels, but also provide a flat

TV screen in the studio that displays a preview of

upcoming clips. Likewise, the ingest requirements

were based on the necessity of a time-controlled

and automated SDI recording.

Zdravkoski explains further. “The playout

needed to support SD/XDCAM D10 and HD/

XDCAM HD422. Also, the same formats had

to be supported for the ingest. The broadcast

recordings from the ingest system needed to

be sent to a network drive – the ‘watchfolder’

– so that these could be imported into the ORF

archive after successful recording.”

“The playout needed to support SD/XDCAM D10 and HD/XDCAM HD422.

Also, the same formats had to be supported for the ingest . The broadcast

recordings from the ingest system needed to be sent to a network drive so that these

could be imported into the ORF archive after successful recording”

Goce Zdravkoski, managing director of Stryme

Workflow16 TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

At the outset, the use of the new XDCAM HD422

camera formats and Final Cut Pro editing

systems required a conversion of the entire

production gallery to HD.

“After a test phase at the regional facility

in Burgenland, the studio personnel said

they appreciated especially the user-friendly

interface, the easy handling and flexibility of

Genesix. What’s more, they recognised the

potential with regard to fast system integration

and reliable playout,” states Zdravkoski.

With the successful completion of the trial, the

full upgrade programme could begin.

The set-upZdravkoski reports that for the playout operation,

the clips are located in a MAM system supplied

by David Systems’ DigaSystem. “Part of our job

was to ensure 100 per cent integration of the

system during the collaboration.”

Initially, the clips required for the ORF

broadcast are transferred from the DigaSystem

and the TransferClient via CIFS/SMB to the

video server. The clips received by the video

server are automatically imported into the asset

management system via the network drive/

watchfolder. The compatibility of the file is

checked and the thumbnail is created. Using the

asset management system, it is then possible to

manage the clips – label copy, move, delete,

rename etc – on the playout system.

Zdravkoski continues, “The integration into the

CMS system makes it possible to access the ORF

internal content by means of a network share.

The interface facilitates dragging and dropping

of content into a watchfolder which Genesix

is then able to access. This allows the user to

populate the playlist in the asset management

tool or in the studio playout tool.”

The Genesix ABRoll tool is used for the playout.

All channels and their individual components

can be integrated into a large, dynamic playlist

using this application. “ABRoll was specifically

developed further in the scope of the project to

realise the requirement from ORF for a centrally

controlled playlist. The common playlist simplifies

The Genesix ABRoll tool is used for the playout at the upgraded ORF studios

One function of the Traffic Management system is the synchronisation of files with the backup server

“Part of our job was to ensure 100 per cent integration of the system

during the collaboration” Goce Zdravkoski


Workflow

handling and ensures an efficient use of the

multichannel playout solution.”

ABRoll permits existing playlists to be

stored, while readily preserving the structure

of clips when they are swapped between

rundowns. Templates, which are predefined by

placeholders, are a decided asset in terms of

time management.

Fill and keyBy grouping on the respective pages of the

interface within the GUI, it is possible to link

the channels with each other. For example,

if channels 1 and 2 are located in the same

group, then the actions – play and stop, for

example – are automatically executed on

both channels.

“Channels 1 and 2 start to play simultaneously

if the button is pressed or a ‘play’ action is

executed by means of a GPI contact. The

grouping can also be cancelled in this user

interface – for example, channel 1 is placed in

group A and channel 2 in group B. All channels

can be optimally used, quickly linked, and

securely released and the channels that have

been released can be immediately used for

playout again.”

IngestThe ingest module of the video server offers

ORF numerous recording options, which include

crash, scheduled batch and loop recording. The

4-In/4-Out version can record on four channels in

succession. In reality, ORF utilises two channels for

the constant loop recording, with the remaining

two channels for the time-controlled recording

of specific content.

A start point must be defined for the time-

controlled recording, the stopping point is

marked by the video server itself by means

of full-video detection. The detection

automatically switches the line off as soon as

the last signal has been received and thus

reliably stops the recording.

Redundancy on two levelsBoth video server channels can be operated

separately in emergencies. In ORF’s case,

an identical configuration of both devices

is implemented to ensure a 100 per cent

redundancy and failsafe performance. In

fact, the servers are synchronised both during

ingest, as well as playout and access the same

content. A simplification of the workflow results

from the necessity of the communication with

only one machine. The synchronisation with the

backup server is automatically taken over

by the Traffic Management system.

“The system ensures the clips and files are

synchronised between master and slave.

The library storage directory is mirrored on the

other server. If a file is added to the master, this

is copied to the slave. If this file is deleted on the

master or modified, then this procedure is also

carried out on the slave – offering a 100 per

cent redundancy.”

Zdravkoski concludes by explaining that

Genesix is now being used successfully in all

ORF regional studios. “Because of the project’s

programming and the specific adaptation to

the local conditions in each regional studio,

a complete integration into the existing

infrastructure was achieved and the security of

the continuous SD-HD conversion was ensured,”

he says. “The new redundancy concept, the

stability of the software, and the use of high-

quality hardware increases the operational

security for daily use. It was all completed

ahead of schedule.”

“Because of the project’s programming and the specific adaptation to the local conditions in each regional studio, a complete integration into the existing infrastructure was

achieved and the security of the continuous SD-HD conversion was ensured”Goce Zdravkoski

Paris-based BUF Compagnie was founded in 1984 by VFX

artist Pierre Buffi n

VFX Liberté! Each visual effects shot that passes through BUF’s workfl ow is overseen by a single artist

When BUF Compagnie was started

in 1984 by visual effects artist Pierre

Buffi n, it focused on leveraging and

developing the talents and skills of individual

artists, an ethos that has continued till the present

day. The company’s work has been perpetually

groundbreaking, whether through creating new

types of effects – the ‘bullet-time’ effect of The

Matrix fi lms had its genesis in BUF’s effects for a

Michel Gondry in 1996 – or in developing new

tools for its artists to use.

Unusually for VFX houses, each visual effects

shot that passes through BUF’s workfl ow, whether

for fi lms, TV, commercials or music videos, is

overseen by a single artist. Throughout the rest

of the industry, almost without exception, an

assembly line workfl ow is preferred, with modellers

modelling, animators animating, compositors

compositing. The effi ciencies created are exactly

those enjoyed in the mass manufacturing of any

factory product – whether it be an iPhone or a

toaster. Costs are kept down, artists need only be

specialised for certain tasks, and crew can be

brought on and off a project as needed.

BUF has stuck to the vision of using a kind of

‘mini-auteur’, working to perfect each shot

under his or her supervision. The BUF workfl ow

and software has developed in tandem with

this, and as a result, BUF’s range of visual effects

software has been designed to be entirely

useable by a single artist.

Pierre Buffi n saw an opportunity in the BUF

software suite to serve smaller companies and

projects, including those in developing markets,

who may not be able to afford the wide variety

of artists – and software licenses – required for big

budget effects projects.

A toolkit unleashedBUF’s visual effects tools cover all the necessities

of a visual effects studio – modelling, painting,

animation, compositing, and the workfl ow

management tools to bring them all together.

Starting at the beginning of 2014, it will be

offering its tools to the public, rolling them out

module by module.

SIGGRAPH has long been the premiere global

meeting place for computer graphics artists. The

convention has celebrated the power of graphics

software to leverage and expand the vision of

a single artist or designer. What better place

for BUF to introduce its single-user effects suite

than at SIGGRAPH Asia, held in Shenzen, China

at the beginning of this month (3-4 December).

The SIGGRAPH demonstration featured a full

presentation by BUF of its entire effects toolkit.

BUF’s CTO Julien Villemeur says that ‘B-View’ will

be the fi rst software to be made available in the

BUF toolkit. “B-view is a playback sequence tool.

The tool is for reviewing the work in a sequence of

images in a variety of different contexts – to view

in different colour spaces, for example, or view in

3D sterescopic space, or for annotating.”

BUF will publish a new website, which will

be the sole source of the downloads and

information about the software. B-View will

be available for free, and the company is still

discussing what the price point will be for the

rest of the software suite. The software will run

on Linux and Apple’s OSX.


Paris-based BUF Compagnie has always used proprietary workfl ow and software for its superlative VFX work. But now the company that has worked on everything from City of Lost Children to Gravity is opening its award-winning toolkit to the world. Neal Romanek reports

“Ours is a complete package, a complete pipeline. And the artists really like it”

Olivier Gilbert, BUF


Workflow

Villemeur recognises that moving from VFX

services to product development is a challenging

leap. “The first thing we need is to be able to

support a product in a global market,” he says.

“We need to learn and to gain experience in

that regard. We expect to learn a lot through this

first distribution of B-View. There is a lively interest

in BUF, and there is a lively interest in our software.

So we hope to create some anticipation for

the rest of the suite.”

BUF’s VFX supervisor, Olivier Gilbert, notes

that BUF’s long industry experience has been

invaluable in developing the software suite:

“We have been developing the software

for 30 years now. We have never bought

any commercial software, we have always

developed everything on our own, in-house. And

now we think that we have this fantastic asset

and we want to distribute it on the market.

“We think our software collection is valuable

for two reasons,” continues Gilbert. “First, we

have a proven track record, and second we

have a consistent collection of software. Most

products only offer special solutions for a studio.

So the studio spends a lot of time and money to

patch the different software together to make

them work as a whole. It’s a pain in the ass.

They don’t manage to make it really efficient

and seamless. Ours is a complete package, a

complete pipeline. And the artists really like it.”

Currently, BUF is dedicating its energies to

revamping some of the existing software to make it

more robust and easier to use by artists outside the

BUF ecosystem. Already, the response to a public

release of the BUF pipeline has been positive.

“I just came back from Taiwan for the premiere

of a movie we had worked on, Black and

White,” says Villemeur. “I told them about the

upcoming release of B-View, and I got a real

‘wow’ response. It’s really, really exciting and

encouraging for the next step.”

New developmentsBut the company’s 21st century transformation

doesn’t just stop at software development. BUF

has also been expanding beyond its traditional

role as effects provider to becoming a content

developer and producer too.

CEO Pierre Buffin started production company

Angel and Fine in 2007 to create projects that

could best leverage the company’s formidable

effects talents and to allow international projects

to take advantage of France’s tax rebate scheme.

Angel and Fine projects have included Thor, The

Grandmaster, Odd Thomas, the Oscar-nominated

short, Even Pigeons Go To Heaven and projects

with legendary French comic artist Moebius

and Stan Lee. Projects in development include

collaborations with the Jim Henson company.

“We try to come in at the beginning of

the projects,” says VFX supervisor Gilbert of

the company’s new direction. “We bring our

expertise. We bring our talents in design. And

we bring our money too. It’s really interesting.

It’s what Pierre wants to develop as well. We’ve

made a lot of beautiful things with our special

effects. Now he wants to be more involved in

the creative projects. It makes sense for us to

work with creatives. That’s what we’ve wanted

since the beginning.”

BUF’s visual effects tools cover all the necessities of a VFX studio


Last year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special

Cohen began his career in the early ‘90s like

many others in the industry, as a runner,

at Soho post fi rm The Mill. After moving

to several different companies Cohen worked in

live action commercial fi lm production, which he

soon “fell out of love with”, having “always had a

synergy with post production and visual effects”.

However, Cohen admits that in 2013, “the television

and fi lm business fell off a cliff and there wasn’t

a lot of work being done”. The volatile market

impacted The Mill, which shut the doors of its TV post

department. Rather than deter Cohen, he saw The

Mill’s closure as “the perfect opportunity” to realise

his “secret desire”. He explains, “when we work in

companies for other people, we always think we

could do things better ourselves – if only we had the

opportunity – to create utopia. But you kind of never

expect it to happen.”

Addicted to the high-endCohen founded his utopia with six others, and,

although he says none were entrepreneurs, they

had several years of experience between them,

and were “already a functioning team”. The

close-knit family-feel of this team exists today,

Cohen stresses: “Luckily we’re all still friends,

it all worked out, and the business did come

back. It helped that the visual effects

community were very supportive.” A number of

deals were still being done, up until the week Milk

opened its doors, and Cohen received words

of advice from “rival companies” including the

dangers of living on adrenaline: “Adrenaline is

highly addictive. Once you’ve put all these deals

together you actually have to roll your sleeves up

and get on with the work.” The priority now was

making sure all the jobs were done well, and not

getting “addicted to the high-end”. You don’t

get much higher-end than Universal Studios, Milk’s

fi rst client. “I will forever be in the dept of [senior

vice president of visual effects at Universal Pictures],

Jennifer Bell.” Mill Film had worked on fantasy

action feature 47 Ronin and following its closure,

Bell offered the new VFX house a package of shots.

The company also came to an agreement with the

BBC to work on the Doctor Who 50th anniversary

special, The Day of the Doctor, which later earned

the company a BAFTA Television Craft Award.

Cohen describes the win as “a fairytale end to year

one”, and a well-deserved one too, considering

the level of work achieved. The 80-minute

episode was simulcast and screened in cinemas

globally, and featured the villainous Half-Face

Man. Milk replaced one entire side of actor Peter

Ferdinando’s head in 87 of the 117 digital shots.

The company created the CG hollow cage-like

structure which makes up the missing half of Half-

Face Man’s head as well as a T-Rex in the opening

sequence, the Victorian London cityscape, and

helped drive the episode’s climax with wide fl y-

over views of the Thames.

Early on, Milk VFX also confi rmed global hit

Sherlock, as well as Jonathan Strange and

Mr Norrell, a seven-part series, adapted from

a 2004 novel, to be shown on the BBC next

year. Soon after came confi rmation of Natural

History Museum Alive 3D, presented by David

Attenborough and broadcast on New Years Day

2014. The production was to earn Milk its second

honour, the TVBAward for Achievement in VFX. The

company also won the contract to work on “the

fi rst high-profi le UK tax-break that got Americans

to come to the UK”: the immensely popular,

cult TV hit 24. The team created the drones that

chased Jack Bauer through London, CG water,

fi re, smoke and blood and numerous explosions.

Will Cohen, CEO, Milk VFX

A television renaissanceMilk VFX rose from the ashes of The Mill’s TV department, took on high-profi le projects from launch, and marked its fi rst birthday this June. The company had further reason to celebrate more recently, winning one of the fi rst TVBAwards. Will Cohen, CEO of the London-based visual effects company spoke to Holly Ashford about Milk’s journey


TV buzzSo how has the industry changed from Mill to

Milk? VFX in the UK was a “cottage industry” in

the ‘90s, says Cohen, crediting the huge Harry

Potter franchise with transforming it into a centre of

excellence to rival Los Angeles. “That helped stabilise

the industry more than anything else. All the main

companies knew they had work to do every year

or every other year, for a decade.” However, “there

was a global loss felt when Harry Potter ended, as

nothing came along to replace it.” It is fortunate,

then, that since Milk’s inception there has been

a renaissance in TV programming – big-budget,

cinematic, binge-worthy shows have been hitting

our screens, from fantasy epic Game of Thrones,

to fantastically addictive Breaking Bad. “There’s a

massive buzz about television,” asserts Cohen. “The

sophistication of storytelling is much more prevalent

today on television. We’re doing things in TV we

never thought we’d do two or three years ago.”

After “a great fi rst batch of work” and the

seemingly unstoppable rise of great TV content,

what is next in the pipeline for Milk? Cohen remains

tight-lipped about upcoming projects, as the

company is at the “exciting and nerve-wracking”

stage of closing forthcoming jobs. What he can

share is that the Christmas/New Year period will

act as a fantastic showcase for the company.

Milk has completed work on Get Santa, a festive

Brit comedy starring Jim Broadbent, the Doctor

Who Christmas Special, and the “powerful, epic”

Jonathan Strange. The company also worked

on fi lm Ex Machina by The Beach director Alex

Garland, set for UK cinema release in January.

Personal service and objectivesSeeing projects come to life and watching weeks

of work on the big (or small) screen is surely one

of the most rewarding things about the VFX

business? Cohen agrees: “It’s inspiring watching

something from a chat to a script, to a shoot, to

a drawing, to the edit, to fi nishing it.”

He also strips this idea down to its most basic

sentiment, saying that one of the draws of the

industry is the chance to “help to tell a good

story, whether it’s a TV show or a feature fi lm”.

Working with the newest software and tools and

producing visually-stunning effects is a highlight,

but Cohen says, “really, it’s all about the people.

Forget all the work: at the end of the day, what

you take home with you are the relationships,

the fun you’ve had and the conversations

you’ve had with people.”

The fi rm has 100 seats and is described as

“boutique” on its website. However, ‘boutique’ is

“really referring to a sense of personal service and

a culture,” says Cohen, “free of offi ce politics,

with six like-minded co-founders” at its helm and

with “very simple, very pure objectives.” These

objectives: to tell a good story, to “do something

innovative and creatively exciting”, and foster

a family-feel within the company, have resulted

in Milk overcoming the “doom and gloom” of

2013, with a raft of projects slated for 2015 as well

as “strategic [geographical] expansion”, which

Cohen is keeping tightly under wraps.

Members of the Milk team collect their TVBAward at the inaugural event in October

www.tvbeurope.com

December 2014TVBEurope Supplements

Media Asset Management

In association with

Perfect media management requires an

exceptionally well integrated IT architecture.

To maximise the capabilities of the modern

broadcast facility, it’s essential for MAM technology

providers to apply precision in IT technology to

broadcast and media. Back in 2004, the industry

began to label the forthcoming IT transition

‘tapeless’, but there was much more to it than that;

the realities of a cost-effective and scalable multi-

site enterprise media workfl ow were going to be far

more challenging than just having ‘less tape’.

Many suppliers proposed short-term proprietary

adaptions of their broadcast technology, which

in the long run didn’t go far enough. To really

succeed, it was important to think ahead of

that curve. The key was to design a Media

Process Manager (MPM), a common platform

that globally manages both automated media

workfl ows and application services integration.

However, the high throughput required by a

business-driven workfl ow also required solutions

that were more open and scalable. The

answer was the development of a Business

Process Modelling engine (BPM) specifi cally

tailored for broadcast and media operations.

This could provide a more effi cient ‘joined

up’ media process model, which enabled

integration throughout the business for archive,

production workfl ow and content preparation

for multiscreen. A cross-platform web-based user

interface and web-based API were also required

to provide every operator with media tools at

every desktop, in every department, at every

site; enabling stronger internal and external

working practices.

Continuous access to content Fast forward to 2014. The right media IT solutions

architecture now provides broadcasters with

full integration across their entire business

from acquisition and production through to

packaging and delivery, enabling increasingly

effi cient and cost-effective operations.

Traditional linear playout and viewing on-

demand evolved much quicker than many

expected into the concept of ‘content

everywhere’ via smart TVs, tablets, smartphones

and PCs. To keep up with the pace of this

consumer behaviour, broadcasters need to have

a number of key processes in place including

multi-site, multi-format, multi-platform delivery,

and, increasingly, media business reporting.

Today’s broadcasters require media tools

that provide continuous access to content

throughout their business. Removing the

unnecessary, and at times overwhelming

complexity caused by multiple workfl ow states,

wrappers and codecs enables easier discovery

of related media. By providing better tools, this

complexity is replaced by a logical view of the

content and workfl ow with direct access to

the different components for validation: forms

to easily select audio, and metadata enrichment

for packaging and delivery of content in the

correct format.

MAM Supplementii TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

Next generation MAMBusiness-driven media workfl ow

By Julian Fernández-Campón, head of solutions architecture at Tedial

“It’s important that MAM solutions deliver a media ecosystem that acts and reacts as required by the whole business and is not constrained by individual processes and

departments.”

in association with

TVBEurope iiiDecember 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

MAM Supplement

MAM media tools and an intuitive user interface

optimise operations, using low-res fi les to provide

content anywhere in the business with reduced

latency – no more waiting for the right version.

Today, users can have the tools they need to get

their job done at a higher quality; not a raft of

complex options they will never use.

Reporting and monitoringStepping back, reporting and monitoring is

an increasingly important challenge for any

media company because the volume of

media transactions and the number of delivery

partners have increased so dramatically. To

ensure the highest quality service delivery,

point-by-point manual checking is replaced

by real-time metadata and analysis. Simplifi ed

reporting and live dashboards identify and solve

problems, prioritise tasks and proactively detect

faults and bottlenecks. It’s important that MAM

solutions deliver a media ecosystem that acts

and reacts as required by the whole business

and is not constrained by individual processes

and departments. The use of this data is also

extending beyond the business.

The previous simplicity of linear push

broadcasting and the EPG is now replaced

by a much more complicated and interactive

relationship between subscribers and

broadcasters. Desktop media tools and the API

integrated with third-party business systems,

such as strategic planning, programming and

traffi c, are increasingly being used to provide

search tags and metadata to drive content

discovery and its recirculation by social media.

This reverse path of subscriber data from the CMS

is becoming the crucial battleground

for broadcasters seeking to innovate and

compete successfully in the turbulent

multiscreen transformation.

Scalability Scalability is the key issue. These days, most

customers want to avoid a ‘big bang‘ with

their projects and when launching new

services. Instead, they are seeking stable

yet rapid operational change and improvement

using a common platform to achieve increased

effi ciency. This type of change is usually gradual,

carefully prioritising the specifi c media processes

that will need adaption without disrupting

the existing production process.

To achieve this, the architecture needs to

be fl exible; for example, allowing business

performance to improve without each change

causing costly and complex re-investments in

storage and transcoding.

Media companies have to be considerably more

agile to adapt to the new and more complex

content distribution business models.

MAM processes and media workfl ow

must accelerate success and not hold back

the business.

Multi-site deploymentPractical multi-site deployment is another

area that is often overlooked. Very few of our

customers actually operate on a single site,

instead working with many partners throughout

their production and distribution workfl ow.

In practice, a central production hub ‘on

the ground’ often works with other sites to

enrich and package content by adding rich

metadata, international languages, subtitles,

and creating promos. Effi cient and traceable

content transfer and management is required.

Multi-site deployment capabilities have many

benefi ts such as content migration, and

business continuity with operational cost control

predictably and reduction. This led to the

launch of our Tedial Media Exchange Platform

at IBC this year. Broadcasters and global

media companies worldwide continue to rely

on media IT solutions to manage their entire

media workfl ow; better organise staff; access

content archives; and streamline third-party

technology integration. This allows them to

cost-effectively reach new audiences on every

screen. These solutions signifi cantly increase

creativity and effi ciency by combining multi-site

media management with business-driven media

workfl ows. Day to day, our own solutions enable

our clients to continuously expand and easily

re-confi gure their core media IT to improve

their overall media business performance.

They are adding multi-site working and

continuously tuning their media workfl ows

using open industry standard BPM tools.

Our customers are taking control to proactively

manage their increasing content enrichment

workload and the media throughput that is

required to drive their multi-platform packaging

for multiscreen distribution and success.

“MAM processes and media workfl ow must accelerate success and not hold back

the business.”

2014: a year in MAM2014 has been a highly successful year

for Tedial, with new international value

added integrator partnerships and third-

party integration and company expansion

all coordinated. The recently announced

integration of our archive solutions with Sony

Optical Disc Archive (ODA) provides the

industry with a vital missing link in archive

technology as part of the MAM workfl ow.

This technology provides reliable, long-term

archiving for the preservation of priceless

legacy content with a longer term, more

appropriate technology lifecycle than data

tape. We also unveiled additional third-party

editing workfl ow capabilities by adding Adobe

Premiere Pro CC to those already established

with Apple, Avid and Quantel. To dramatically

improve both editing throughput and multi-

site archive access using Adobe Premiere

Pro CC, Tedial’s Tarsys media workfl ow allows

high-res craft editing, compliance editing and

screening, promo production and non-linear

content packaging to be managed side-by-

side. This integration brings Adobe Premiere Pro

CC into the heart of Tedial’s Media IT solutions.

We have also continued to embrace

global industry trends with support for

media initiatives such as the UK Digital

Production Partnership DPP.

Our expansion in 2014 has seen the

company grow to 100 staff in Europe, Middle

East and the US. In Q1 we opened our new

offi ce in Dubai’s Media City, managed by

Razik Zaghlouli, regional sales manager MEA.

The offi ce complements Tedial’s existing

support services in the region. We also recently

expanded our North American operation

with the appointment of Ben Higley Shaver as

manager of pre-sales engineering and support.

Led by highly respected broadcast software

executive Jay Batista, Tedial’s North American

operation is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

With over 50 high-profi le reference sites

globally including some of the largest and

most complex MAM systems in the industry,

our customers use different confi gurations of

our core Tarsys, MPM, Ficus and AST software

modules in conjunction with their own

third-party encoding, storage, editing and

transcoding systems.

in association with

Based on Tedial’s previous partnership in

2011 with FORTA (Federation of Spanish

Regional Television Channels national

news exchange), where it provided multi-site

media management and content exchange for

Spain’s 12 regional broadcasters, the company

decided to look north.

Nordvision, a group of fi ve northern European

broadcasters that comprises DR (Denmark),

NRK (Norway), SVT (Sweden), YLE (Finland) and

RUV (Iceland), selected Tedial’s technology for

a major project that enables multi-tenant

co-operation for Nordvision’s Nordif-3 network.

The Nordvision partners co-operate to

strengthen public service broadcasting in the

Nordic region based on the principle:

“what we have, we share”.

The fi ve Nordic public service broadcasters now

operate a content exchange platform to share

media and metadata using their own local MAM

systems. Led by highly respected Norwegian

public service broadcaster NRK and managed

by Tedial’s technology delivery partner

Mediateket, the solution rapidly and securely

shares daily news items for 17 television channels,

with the broadcasters collectively generating

more than 4,000 long-form programmes every

year. HD and SD material contributed by any of

the broadcasters is searchable and selectable

via the cloud for rapid co-operation.

NRK co-ordinated requirements amongst the

group’s wide range of creative, operational

and technical stakeholders. Mediateket led the

multi-site workfl ow design, helping to specify the

appropriate operational practices, metadata

translation and preservation processes, to allow

the Nordvision members to work together more

effi ciently. Day to day, NRK hosts the services

and manages on-going support for the Nordif-3

platform in Oslo.

Sharing content using cloud connectivityForming the heart of the Nordif-3 project is

Tedial’s Media Exchange Platform (MEP), which

provides the broadcasters in the group with a

secure multi-MAM content exchange platform

to share media, metadata and attachments.

MEP enables fast and secure access over

IP and provides automated workfl ows that

present and package content, delivering to

the broadcaster’s MAM system in the format

required. This removes the unnecessary

complexity that is now a reality for many

organisations working at many desktops and

with multiple departments. MEP maximises

the re-use and minimises the re-working of

material, allowing large media assets to be

moved effi ciently, making use of centralised

management capability without the need for

extensive IT support.

MEP also provides Nordif-3 with unique global

monitoring of these exchange processes using

live dashboards and business reports that allow

the broadcasters to monitor the exchange of

shared media automatically.

Material contributed by the individual

broadcasters is searchable and selectable via

the cloud for subsequent delivery to the other

members in the group.

In operation, the media exchange processes

using Nordif-3 can be split into two categories:

‘acquisition’, and ‘select and deliver’.

Programmes are selected locally in each

broadcaster’s own MAM system and the essence

fi les, metadata (XML) and associated materials

are delivered to the Tedial Nordif-3 platform

in the broadcaster’s native format (SD: IMX30,

IMX50; HD: XDCam at 50Mbps; and DNX at 120).

On arrival, fi les sent to Nordif-3 are subject

to a simple integrity check and, if required,

associated materials and metadata are

attached to the new assets. The Nordif-3 system

then automatically generates a browse version

and key frames for each contribution. When a

broadcaster in the group wishes to select and

deliver content, they simply search, browse and

select assets using Tedial’s MAM web interface.

Upon selection, assets are transferred to the

receiving broadcaster using MEP.

The futureThe effective working relationship between

Tedial, Mediateket and Nordvision partners,

and particularly NRK, has resulted in a

smooth running project that has lived up to

expectations. Furthermore, Tedial, NRK and the

rest of the partners share the vision that using

Nordif-3 for easy media exchange continues

their long-term benefi cial relationship where

legacy issues in previous platforms can be

solved. The Nordic countries can cost effectively

share more programming and strengthen their

media partnerships.

Value added partners are crucial to help

develop new media services and platforms. As

well as Mediateket in Europe, Tedial has recently

announced partnerships with highly respected

systems integrators Magna Systems and

Engineering in APAC and Media Guru in India.

www.tedial.com

MAM Supplementiv TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

Multi-tenant media exchange using the cloud

For this supplement’s case study, we look at Tedial’s work with the Nordvision group of public service broadcasters; a major project to enable multi-tenant co-operation for Nordvision’s Nordif-3 network

The Nordvision group of broadcasters

in association with

MAM Supplementvi TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

The industry is in the throes of change, with the effects of digitisation reaching every corner of the marketplace. What

have been the most signifi cant changes you’ve seen from an MAM perspective? The industry has moved from a video-based

environment to a fi le-based environment;

and when we talk about fi les, we talk about

standard IT. From the beginning, we’ve been

an IT company with an IT heritage. When

it comes to broadcast, we’re applying IT

technology to the broadcast industry;

moving and delivering media fi les.

Broadcast is an IT-standard sector, and software

has become very important: it is, if you like, the

intelligence of the industry. The expertise and

knowledge is in software and in IT-standard

strategies that are applied in very specifi c

workfl ows. In this case, and especially for MAM

systems where it’s all about software, it’s very

important to apply all of the standards in the

digital asset management industry. It’s about

the mixture of the two worlds: very specifi c

expertise in video formats and supporting fi les

that are increasingly delivered in high resolution

(UHD, 4K, etc), whilst optimising for IT standards

like BPM workfl ows, so we don’t have to

reinvent the wheel – if in the IT world there

are people with expertise in optimising for this,

then why not apply that expertise and

technology in this industry.

Tedial HQ in Malaga, Spain

“We can now say that this is an IT industry. The future of the TV business

will be IP fi les and IT technology.”

Change management The management of digital media assets has arguably never been more important, with a greater volume of fi les having to be managed as the industry moves almost fully away from the days of analogue to a fi le-based present, and future. To discuss the recent changes in the MAM environment, TVBEurope sat down with Esther Mesas, chief sales and marketing offi cer at Tedial

in association with

TVBEurope viiDecember 2014 www.tvbeurope.com

MAM Supplement

Over the last ten years we have seen this

evolution play out to the degree that we can

now say that this is an IT industry. The future of the

TV business will be IP fi les and IT technology.

And that future scenario only increases the importance of MAM systems for all entities in this sectorIt does, because MAM isn’t only about managing

fi les and archiving them, it’s also an integrator.

MAM connects the delivery of fi les from ingest

to playout and it’s also the software that

automates all of the media workfl ows,

integrating the different components and

making them compatible.

It’s the core of a broadcaster’s business: the

companies organise their media through the

MAM software. Especially now with fi le delivery,

the non-linear playout is becoming more

important – if you need to deliver a signifi cant

amount of fi les, you need to automate that

process. However, some broadcast companies

still perform part of this job manually, so there is

still work to do.

Do you think that there was a resistance to change among the traditional broadcasters, perhaps a fear of digital progression? It has been a very niche market, and I think

companies worry that they will lose their niche

expertise, or that it will become less relevant in a

digital world. The content producers know that

it is a very specifi c world, but the technology

behind all of this will be a standard. I think that

linear broadcasting will only remain for live

events and the rest will be on demand.

What are the challenges and pressures of 4K and UHD on MAM systems? The challenges are about supporting the format,

being able to transcode, store and archive, but

it’s also about optimising the bandwidth of the

network so that you optimise every transfer of the

fi le. As the industry moves to greater production

of 4K and UHD, the MAM and storage aspects of

the industry need to support this.

Are you seeing more instances of companies requiring outsourced archiving and asset management facilities as the libraries they manage continue to grow? More often, you do see that customers don’t

want to store their content on their premises

as it requires more space, and brings with it an

infrastructure that needs to be maintained by

an IT team; it’s not their core business and, aside

from certain companies and public institutions

who require control for heritage purposes, it’s

not an investment that many companies want

to make. They need the security that their assets

are safe and are available when they need

them, but increasingly, companies are looking to

externalise this practice.

I think that the same will happen with software,

and I think that software as a service will become

a real alternative. Software is a challenge

because it’s not a physical product but a virtual

one; why invest in a product that needs to

evolve? As a service, you pay for what you are

consuming and are guaranteed the evolution

of updates that comes with all software, rather

than having to buy new iterations of products.

This allows companies to focus on their business,

free of distraction from having to manage IT

teams, and other

matters that fall

outside of their core

competencies.

Of your own core competencies, you point to the fact that you’re an IT company built specifi cally to assist broadcast and media companies with MAM and IT media challenges – how is that mix of expertise represented in the company? As an IT company

that specialises

in broadcast, 80

per cent of our

employees are IT

engineers and we

work with consultants

who specialise

in broadcast

workfl ows. It’s that

mixture of expertise

that allows us to build

broadcast solutions

– but with IT standard

technologies. One of our founders was from

the broadcast sector, the other an academic

at the University of Malaga (we still collaborate

with the University on R&D projects), so that

mix is an inherent part of the company. The

company was founded in 2001, with a dual

footprint in Europe and Latin America, but with

an international focus. We’re headquartered

in Malaga, Spain, and have offi ces in London,

Dubai, the US, Latin America and we also

operate in Asia Pacifi c. We’ve always been

involved in big projects and that has required our

focus to be global.

Finally, how has the mix of companies you service changed as media has become more pervasive in all business sectors? The majority of our demand comes from the

broadcast industry, but we also work in the

government and corporate sectors where some

of the larger entities have a signifi cant amount

of media that they need to manage – even if it’s

not their main business. In the digital age, media

has become a commodity for everyone.

“In the digital age, media has become a commodity for everyone.”

in association with

Davenport: A good MAM enables users to better

create, manage and distribute content. Operators

should be insulated from the complexities of media

manipulation and processing, confi dent that those

automated actions ‘just happen’ and ensuring

that all their interactions with media are about

applying human judgement and creativity to

business processes.

Dwyer: At Avid, we defi ne media asset

management through four essential capabilities.

First, the ability to fi nd assets across the entire

enterprise. Secondly, a powerful and open

integration capability permitting the system to

be connected across a diverse range of business

systems. Thirdly, the system should automate key

workfl ows and be easy to adapt to the changing

requirements of the business. Finally, a powerful

suite of reporting tools is essential to provide visibility,

control and enable optimisation over the workfl ows,

the underlying systems and processes. Our solution is

called Interplay MAM, part of the Avid Media Suite,

and one of the underlying systems that powers the

Avid MediaCentral Platform.

Dymond: MAM benefi ts vary according to the

business challenges that need to be addressed.

The primary benefi ts are the automation of

repetitive tasks and centralised management/

statusing of the assets within an organisation.

MAM is wonderfully generic enough to mean

everything and nothing. The key is in remaining

focussed on the challenge rather than distracted

by the solution. At Imagine Communications

we are focussed on specifi c-use cases such as

content ingest, preparation and delivery – with

all functions requiring a set of business rules to be

applied through our Nexio Motion solution.

Potuzak: A MAM system lets you know what

media assets you have and enables you to

fi nd them quickly. This is accomplished with the

extensive use of metadata added to the fi le when

it is ingested or imported into the facility. Each

company has certain, sometimes unique, business

models. A good MAM is a platform that allows

itself to be set up to support those business models

and all the related workfl ows. Such a MAM helps

the company to reduce the running cost by

automating the workfl ows to a maximum extent.

Don’t just sit on your assets

Content is king! But how effectively and effi ciently do studios and broadcasters handle this most important of resources? We have brought together a panel to discuss some relevant issues when it comes to Media Asset Management (MAM).

They are (in alphabetical order) Ximena Araneda, VP, video workfl ows, Vizrt; Ben Davenport, director of marketing, Dalet Digital Media Systems; Hans Douma, senior director of projects and operations, Primestream; Craig Dwyer, senior director, Avid Center of Excellence; Huw Dymond, product line manager, Media Asset Management, Imagine Communications; Jeff Herzog, product manager, EditShare fl ow asset management, Ark backup and archive; Phill Neighbour, COO, PlayBox Technology UK, a Masstech Group Technology Partner; Pavel Potuzak, managing director, Aveco; and Julian Wright, CEO, Blue Lucy Media.


MAM Forum

What are the major benefi ts that a user can

expect from a MAM?

Ben Davenport, Dalet

Craig Dwyer, Avid Center of Excellence

Philip Stevens moderates this month’s Forum, dealing with that vital aspect of any organisation’s armoury: its fi les and content

32 TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

Araneda: Today’s increase of incoming formats,

such as fi les from production houses, consumer-

like formats, and 4K can’t be a limiting factor

for the selection of a MAM system. Historically, it

was all about having one SD house format and

one HD house format in the MAM to simplify the

workfl ows and integrations to all connected

systems. Now we talk more about having

mezzanine fi les, storing original fi le formats and if

any transcode is needed, then it must be done in

a way that doesn’t interfere with the production

workfl ow, or increase the time to get content on

air. MAM systems must seamlessly incorporate

many more formats and make it easier for users

to combine several formats.

Davenport: Knowing what media ‘is’ and where

it came from, or structural and genealogical

media metadata is critical in automating media

processing. This is a key part of a MAM-driven

workfl ow, but it should be largely transparent

to users and the business. The importance of

format fl exibility is increasing exponentially

with new resolutions, frame rates and codecs,

and the uptake in crowd-sourced content

is driving the number and variety of devices

used for acquisition – strong media awareness

and understanding facilitates great media

asset management. Overall, the explosion in

acquisition formats makes the need for MAM

even more important, as it allows users to manage

transparently that additional complexity.

Dymond: First generation MAM solutions

were often very sensitive to the formats and

wrappers of content being registered. These

days, in a multi-wrapper, multi-codec, multi-

format, multi-resolution, multi-tenanted facility

the keys to managing effi ciently are some

common and fl exible toolsets. At Imagine

Communications, we make use of fi le-based

workfl ow in conjunction with scalable transcode

and processing capabilities of our Zenium

management platform. This allows for a

confi gurable movement and orchestration layer

alongside the underlying processing power of

the embedded Zenium technology to centralise

and pool processing resources. Removing

the complexity of discrete bespoke platform

integration – point product transcode/transwrap

functions, for example, is absolutely key to

having a well-balanced resource pool. Once this

is extended to private and public data centre

processing capacity, hiding the complexity from

operations is, again, core to gaining the required

transparency of operation. This is the only way

to scale up on VoD and OTT delivery outputs.

“The importance of format fl exibility is increasing exponentially with new resolutions, frame rates and codecs”

Ben Davenport, Dalet Digital Media Systems

What impact does the plethora of acquisition

formats have on the choice of a MAM solution?

MAM Forum


MAM Forum

Otherwise, operational cost models will be the

bottleneck, not technology.

Herzog: When evaluating an asset management

system for purchase, it is crucial to ensure that it

regularly adds support for the latest and greatest

cameras and recording systems. Scanning and

making proxies of incoming footage is a key step

in the asset management workfl ow, allowing

local or remote review and logging of footage,

so you should ensure that the asset management

vendor keeps new format support regularly on

their roadmap.

Neighbour: It requires an agile system with

integrated transcoding plus a comprehensive

workfl ow engine. Handling a multiplicity of

devices successfully requires an API specifi c to

each attached device. The fact that we can

transcode on the fl y enables us to ingest in any

format and playout to any device in multiple

formats, without user intervention.

Wright: Acquisition and content formats should

have no infl uence on MAM solution or selection.

The MAM should be completely agnostic as

to the assets it is managing, be that video – of

any format in any container – images, projects

or documents. In cases where metadata is

embedded within the asset, such as XMP or MXF,

it is important that the relevant plug-in exists

within the MAM to read and import this data.

Araneda: In years past this central storage was

located on site within a facility. Today, that

same capability can be expanded to the cloud,

enabling professionals located anywhere in the

world to access fi les and collaborate in realtime.

Indeed, cloud-based storage will be key to

keeping up with the ever-increasing demand

for more content. Viz One is today in virtual

production so technically our software works very

well in the cloud.

Douma: We see a lot of customers who don’t

want to open their network for any activity

from outside. They don’t want people remotely

accessing all the assets that are available on the

MAM, neither direct, nor via a ‘cloud’ solution.

So we like to think of installing ‘bridges’ between

the internal MAM and the outside world. Now

we can decide what content can be exposed,

and what should stay inside. By the way, ‘cloud’,

didn’t we call that FTP-Server a few years ago?

Dwyer: The cloud is one of a range of

technologies that the modern MAM needs

to leverage. Clients need to consider which

elements of their workfl ow can benefi t from the

fl exibility, mobility and elastic resourcing that

cloud services can deliver, and combine that

with their assessment of the associated benefi ts

and needs. At the moment, customers using the

Avid MediaCentral Platform are adopting the

private cloud model.

Neighbour: From a MAM perspective, public clouds

are potentially useful for long-term preservation

of digital content that you don’t expect to need

again, but cannot afford to lose. For content that

you are going to use or repurpose frequently, local

storage under tight local control is essential. Cloud

storage is currently much too expensive and access

times are too slow. Maybe these factors will improve,

but so, too, will the cost-effi ciency and capacity of

local storage devices. The MAM system still has to

manage fi les regardless of the archive location. We

are unique in that our system comes standard with

totally unlimited fi le management capacity.

Potuzak: ‘The cloud’ is just a marketing buzzword.

MAM simply must allow the users to safely and

securely manage the content at the required

workplaces, be it a desktop in a protected area,

or a smartphone anywhere in the world. MAM

systems did this before ‘the cloud’ phrase started

being marketed, and will do it after ‘the cloud’ is

replaced by another marketing term.

Wright: Not signifi cant frankly, and certainly

nothing like as much as once hyped. There have

been a few successful implementation projects,

but bandwidth and the large storage requirements

make the business case tenuous at best despite

the operational benefi ts. Hybrid solutions in which

the browse proxy content is globally available

from the cloud, but the master assets live fi rmly on

the ground with the content owner providing the

best of both approaches, namely accessibility and

security. I expect to see this type of cloud-on-the-

ground deployment grow signifi cantly.

Julian Wright, Blue Lucy Media

Hans Douma, Primestream

How signifi cant has ‘the cloud’ (public or

private) become for MAM purposes?

Jeff Herzog, EditShare

Ximena Araneda, Vizrt


MAM Forum

Douma: Oh yes, a few years ago, most of the

content would reach the system as ingested

baseband video. Now we have fi les, memory

cards, cartridges, optical disks. More and more

workfl ows have become tapeless. And the

increasing demand for IP-Stream capture will now

become important for anyone looking for a new

MAM-system for her/his facility.

Dwyer: With the rapid increase of IP technologies –

from acquisition, through production and distribution

– MAM becomes an even more important way

of working. Technically, there is an increasing

complexity to design, build and support IP-based

systems, and using a MAM solution can bring the

whole system together and unify the workfl ows.

Operationally, these systems can also allow for the

removal of repetitive, non-creative tasks.

Dymond: The fl exibility of

IP technology on COTS

IT platforms, in particular,

playout and distribution will

naturally extend the MAM

functions. The additional

automation required to

provision and manage

elastic scaling needs to be

fundamentally tied to an

orchestration engine that understands all aspects

of the broadcast ecosystem. Coupled with this

is the requirement to perform MAM functions

over a truly distributed architecture, including

traditional baseband, hybrid baseband/IP and

fully IP private/public data centre technologies.

As the broadcasting world evolves through all

stages of the IP transition, the MAM functionality

required must also evolve to allow for the engine

room to be pulled across multiple architectures

and geographies whilst consistently providing the

same operational interfaces to end users.

Herzog: We expect the increase in IP technology

for broadcasting only to cause more interest in, and

need for, automated fi le delivery. Flexible tools like

EditShare Flow Automation allow the creation of

complex custom fi le delivery workfl ows to get your

broadcast deliverables where they need to go, when

they need to go, with watch folders, automated

rule-based processing to control copy and

transcode activities, and delivery options like FTP.

Potuzak: Not in any revolutionary way. MAM

systems don’t concern themselves with the

transport mechanism, just the underlying media

and the control of the necessary equipment.

Araneda: In many cases the broadcast and

online production has happened disjointedly,

and the handoff between departments involves

cumbersome workfl ows. A MAM system can

Huw Dymond, Imagine Communications

Will the projected increase in IP technology for

broadcasting aff ect the use of MAMs?

The use of second screen activity continues to expand.

How does a MAM help the production of such second (or multi) screen content?

enable faster production workfl ows avoiding

moving media between the online systems and

the MAM, as well as providing a central repository

where video can be produced and prepared for

online publication, including video, graphics, stills

and metadata. With this, journalists and producers

can produce media for broadcast, web and

mobile using the same tools.

Davenport: According to Twitter’s director

of media, Danny Keens, ‘Twitter has become

the default second screen for TV.’ Effi ciently

supporting second screen is not only about

assisting and automating the creation of

additional versions of video content, but

managing associated textual and still image

content and using metadata to drive the

second screen experience. This means having

user-focused, task-orientated tools for searching

content and viewing the relationships between

the elements and essences of a rich asset and

quickly editing, assembling and publishing

for all mediums. The MAM is key to enabling

these second screen workfl ows to be highly

interoperable with the rest of the business.

Douma: As content will be instantly available

when handled by the MAM, different

departments can access this content and

individually build stories around it. These

packages can then be published for web,

mobile applications, VoD and more. Just look at

the advantages of this when ‘Breaking News’

pops up, and everybody needs the footage.

Using a MAM will ensure fast turnaround on every

platform available in the facility.

Dymond: There are three levels in the multiscreen

delivery chain – the business system to drive

fulfi lment requirements, the MAM or orchestration

engine to keep a repository and automate

processes, and the processing or delivery

subsystems. Only when all three are ‘glued’

together do the full benefi ts become realised.

The concept of automatic content creation

based on template-based delivery or work orders

alongside inventory and movement/processing

rules allows for greater levels of automatic

orchestration. Ultimately, the objective is to fully

automate multiscreen deliveries based on back

tracking from a delivery or due date.

Neighbour: Integrated transcoding is essential.

So, too, is a workfl ow engine that, based on a

metadata trigger, knows what format has to go to

what storage location. This needs to be a multistep

workfl ow in which each metadata change triggers

the MAM to create all the different versions and

deliver them where required.

Araneda: A MAM is designed to track the media

and manage it in the best possible way. Moving

media between different storage areas seamlessly

to the user and having the media as close to

the request point as possible are all important

to provide the access to the assets at the right

time. The concept of storage can be handled

differently depending on the MAM system, but it’s

important that MAM systems connect to different

archive systems and storages – including cloud.

Davenport: Archiving is a business function, which

relies on storage – which is a technical function.

It is the responsibility of the MAM to manage and

orchestrate these functions for the scope of content

that it is responsible for. So they are obviously

coupled, but not exclusive and this is becoming

more common with virtualised infrastructures. One

can imagine, for example, a storage infrastructure,

which is shared between a MAM – managing one

part of the storage – and other business operations.

Similarly, you can imagine a MAM in charge of

the archiving for Media Assets, but integrated with

another system in charge of archiving other objects,

such as contracts. So archiving and storage are

highly related to MAM, but should be thought of as

services, rather than pure functions of the MAM.

Dwyer: Sophisticated media lifecycle

management requires a wide range of systems

to be integrated within the overall environment.

In general, Avid media asset management

implementations are in environments where

there are legacy tools, infrastructure, databases,

systems and assets. Being able to unify all of

them into one logical environment is the primary

value of a MAM initiative, and the underlying

principle of the Avid MediaCentral Platform.

Neighbour: It is the most critical part. This is

where most MAM systems fall down – the ability

to fi nd the content and deliver. Most can fi nd

it – they just can’t get it. This is why middleware

came into being. Archiving and storage must be

fully integrated with the MAM system.

Potuzak: Storage for media – including LTO

and disk archives – are third-party products and

as customers have different tastes regarding

technology, the MAM shall be – as much as

possible – storage agnostic. Management of

storage is the crucial function of a MAM.


MAM Forum

Pavel Potuzak, Aveco

Phillip Neighbour, PlayBox Technology

Is archiving and storage a function of a MAM or should

it be a separate operation?

Recording is central to the broadcast

workflow, and external recorder

manufacturers have been building on their

expertise to reach into other areas of acquisition,

most notably by developing their own cameras.

Five years after it launched its Ki Pro recorders,

AJA has built on its recording expertise, particularly

with the 4K Ki Pro Quad, by adding a camera front

end to produce the new Cion, just as Blackmagic

did previously with its family of cameras, and

Codex has also done with its new Action Cam.

However, it is as an add-on, designed to

bring out the best in existing cameras,

improve workflow and provide secure

back-up copies, that is still the core of the

external recorder market.

For example, Codex has partnered with Arri

and Panasonic on their new high-end cameras.

It developed the recording and workflow system

for Arri’s Alexa 65 large format camera, creating

a high-performance, built-in recorder, as well

as on-set data management. Current Alexa XR

Capture Drives record at up to 24fps, and

a 512GB media card records about ten minutes

in the 65’s full open gate mode. Next-generation

Capture Drives developed by Codex will offer

2TB capacity, at 20Gbps data rates, to record

more than 45 minutes. Codex now also delivers

ProRes UHD workflows for Arri’s Alexa and

Amira, via Vault and the Codex CFast 2.0

dock for the Amira.

For Panasonic it developed a recorder for the

new VariCam 35 camera that will capture 12-bit

uncompressed 4K Raw at up to 120fps, and will

work with Arri LDS or Cooke/i technology for lens

data capture. Rapid transfer of digital camera

originals for post production and archiving is then

possible using Codex Vault.

The compact, 1kg €15,000 V-Raw recorder

connects directly to the back of the VariCam 35,

eliminating cabling for improved efficiency

and greater mobility.

“The recorder is about the practicalities and

the workflow. Its ability to do multiple formats

simultaneously is a big advantage, as it [allows the

camera to record] up to four at once,” said Rob

Tarrant, Panasonic’s European product manager.

Besides Raw, it can record 4K compressed using AVC

Ultra onto Express P2 cards, and 2K and 1K proxies

on to the same microP2 card. For a broadcast

workflow it will do uncompressed Ultra HD,

compressed UHD, HD and 960x540 proxies at once.

Feature36 TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com December 2014

Getting the best out of external recorders

David Fox explores the tapeless video and external recorders market

Direct connect: Tarrant with the VariCam 35 and Codex V-Raw recorder

Rigged and ready: Sony’s A7S full-frame DSLR with Atomos recorder


Feature

“Why so many? Obviously Raw is a vast amount

of data, but this gives you the ability to create

dailies in the camera, with the same metadata,

etc, so users can instantly start an offline edit.

There is also in-camera grading, saving further

time in post,” he added.

Codex has also added support in its Vault

workflow system for the Red Epic Dragon and

Vision Research Phantom Flex4k cameras,

while Panasonic has introduced its own 50/60p

AJ-PG50 AVC-Ultra recorder with 3G HD-SDI

and HDMI input, which offers dual-codec

recording to one P2 and two micro P2 card

slots. The AJ-PG50 also has full network

capabilities and can make backup copies

to USB 3.0 drives.

4:2:2 and Raw supportExternal recorders have a particular niche in the

world of DSLRs, where it is often the only way of

getting high quality results. Nikon’s new video-

focused D810 and D750 full-frame cameras offer

full 4:2:2 HD recording at up to 50/60fps via a

clean HDMI feed, while Sony’s A7S full-frame

DSLR, which has been lauded for its low-light

capabilities, also requires an external recorder

to record its 4K 4:2:2 output.

It’s not only DSLRs that benefit. Sony’s new

PXW-FS7 4K XDCAM camcorder can record up

to 180fps internally in HD, but up to 240fps to an

external recorder, which it also requires if you

want to record 4K as 12-bit linear Raw output

(it can do up to 4K/UHD XAVC Intra 4:2:2 10-bit

at 600Mbps internally). It needs the optional

XDCA-FS7 extension unit to output the Raw

video, recording to Sony’s own AXS-R5 recorder

via the HXR-IFR5 interface or the Convergent

Design Odyssey 7Q (the XDCA-FS7 also allows

ProRes recording internally).

Sony has also introduced its own XDCAM

portable recorder. The lightweight PMW-RX50

records to dual SxS cards and supports the XAVC

Intra 4:2:2 1080 50/60p and XAVC Long GoP

4:2:2 formats, as well as MPEG HD 4:2:2, 4:2:0,

MPEG IMX and DVCAM. However, it is designed

more as a deck replacement, with a built-in

3.5-inch screen for reviewing video, than an

on-camera device.

ProRes goes on OdysseyConvergent Design’s Odyssey7Q monitor/

recorder has now added 4K recording using

Apple’s ProRes 422 HQ, and will record 4K and

‘Atomos has also become “one of the first adopters of 12G-SDI,” which will be

necessary if 4K and Ultra HD are to be able to use just a single cable’


Feature38 TVBEurope

UHD video from the Sony F55, Panasonic GH4,

Phantom Flex4K and others, which can be

converted to ProRes. Because of the codec’s

efficiency, it will be able to record many hours of

4K to the dual SSDs.

The Odyssey7Q already supported 4K Raw

from Canon’s C500 and Sony’s FS700 (and adds

the new FS7). These are also being upgraded to

support ProRes to more than triple the recording

time of Raw.

The Odyssey7Q now also functions as a 4K

waveform and histogram (with RGB Parade).

Its Pixel Zoom function allows the 7.7-inch OLED

display to function as a virtual window for

accurate focus on an image equivalent to a

24-inch 4K monitor. It can act as a format

converter, transforming 4K input into multiple

1080p HD outputs for monitoring and transmission

around the set, and process a camera’s Log

signals while applying an appropriate look-up

table to its display and outputs.

The new $1,295 Odyssey7 monitor/recorder

is the 7Q’s little sister (for about $1,000 less). It

can capture HD in Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) up to

1080/30p, 1080/60i and 720/60p, with future free

updates promised to expand these frame rates

and add other formats. It has one SSD slot, and

both SDI and HDMI outputs.

Convergent Design has also developed a 4K/

multi-stream player/recorder encoder/decoder,

the Athena, which will support up to 4K 60p and

multiple-streams (even in 4K). It is claimed to be

the first system with the ability to record/play

four HD video streams along with 64 channels

of MADI audio, and would be useful as a live

event multi-camera recorder – multiple units can

be ganged together for large-scale events. The

half-rack 1RU system will have an LCD display for

status information and confidence monitoring, a

2.5-inch SSD slot and deck controls.

On deckLike the Athena, Cinedeck’s recorders are also

primarily deck replacements. Its new MX4K can

record two 4K or Ultra HD sources, and its MX can

handle a 4K YUV10 input from sources like a Sony

F55, while simultaneously creating edit-ready HD

Master and Proxy deliverables, plus streamable

H.264 files, while maintaining global file naming

and metadata. It also down-converts 4K camera

feeds in realtime for HD monitoring.

The 4K, HD Master and Proxy files are all

recorded to removable SSD drives, with edit-

ready deliverables simultaneously written to SAN

for immediate access, and can be encoded to

the full gamut of available codec and wrapper

profiles. Users can apply a variety of standard or

custom LUTs to the proxy, H.264, on-board display

and HD outputs.

There is also a new modular Cinedeck ZX

rack-mount line: the ZX20 provides two channels

of 2K, HD or SD, with optional 4K playback; the

ZX40 delivers four channels of 2K, HD or SD, and,

when fully-loaded with plug-in packages, is

equivalent to the 4K-capable Cinedeck MX; and

the ZX45 supports 4K and UHD at 50/60p and four

channels of 2K, HD or SD at 50/60p, including

Power packing partnership: Young with Shogun and add-on Power Station

Multi-faceted: The Athena is the latest in Convergent Design’s recorder line-up


Feature

visually lossless JPEG2000. Users can choose

codec and wrapper packages to support Avid,

Apple and Adobe workflows, and others. This

“means you build what you need, and only pay

for that functionality, while still having the option

to add a wide range of features and functions

should your workflow change,” said Charles

D’Autremont, founder and CEO of Cinedeck.

Shogun’s cutting edge Since first being shown at NAB, the new Atomos

Shogun has been refined further, and now “has

a new heat pipe system, to allow us to crank up

the frame rate to 4K 50/60p,” explained Jeromy

Young, CEO and founder of Atomos.

Atomos has also become “one of the first

adopters of 12G-SDI,” which will be necessary

if 4K and Ultra HD are to be able to use just a

single cable. Shogun also has 6G-SDI and 3G-SDI

input, as well as genlock in, HDMI 2.0 I/O, and

a Lemo connector (with included breakout

cable) for balanced analogue XLR audio input

and Phantom power, plus 12 channels of digital

audio. It is ideal for use with 4K DSLRs, such as the

Sony A7S and Panasonic GH4. Indeed, Atomos

has worked with camera manufacturers to add

SDI-like features (such as auto triggering and

timecode communication) to HDMI, so that

the Shogun can control Sony and Canon DSLRs

(and Canon EOS cameras) via HDMI.

It costs $1,995/€1,499/£1,220 and records 4K

ProRes, Raw or Avid DNxHD formats, as well as

high frame rate HD (up to 120fps), and has a

1920x1200 SuperAtom IPS 7-inch touchscreen for

monitoring and control.

Unlike the Samurai and Ninja Blade,

Shogun only has a single battery (as the

space for a second was occupied by the SDI

connectors and SSD array), so users wanting

continuous power will need to add the newly

launched Atomos Power Station, with its

hot-swappable batteries.

At the other end of the scale, Atomos has

introduced the world’s smallest 10-bit 4:2:2

ProRes recorder, the Ninja Star, a flash-based

device that is ideal for extreme applications,

such as on remote-control helicopters, or with

point-of-view cameras.

The €219/£179/$295 unit has no monitor,

but weighs only 240g with the included battery

and a low-cost Gen 1 CFast solid-state

memory card. It has HDMI input, and its flexible

mounting options should allow users to mount

it to just about any PoV set-up. It offers

frame accurate timecode (via HDMI) and

Start/Stop Trigger.

“You build what you need, and only pay for that functionality, while still

having the option to add a wide range of features and functions should your

workflow change” Charles D’Autremont,

Cinedeck

Fanichet: The market for 4K is developing

quickly, with consumers driving demand. This

means that a potential customer needs to ensure

the right package is purchased to handle 4K

content. During the 4K transition, HD and 4K

workfl ows will operate side-by-side in the same

facilities, but 4K-capable workfl ow components

need to be added today. Storage must be able

to stream multiple streams of high-volume 4K

content at the same time that SD-sized streams

of transcoded content are being transferred.

Storage must be designed to handle this mixed

workload effi ciently. NAS-based workfl ows that

worked under HD will struggle with 4K content,

without changing users’ existing processes.

Many shared storage solutions that advertise 4K

capabilities will require down-res editing.

Fernández-Campón: With regards the archive

solution – not only from the storage perspective

– the questions should focus on the customer’s

current and future business needs. For example,

does the archive solution provide effi cient content

management and tools to easily discover and

access content such as dedicated datamodels,

collections and fi lters and so on? How open is the


What’s the future for archives?In the second Forum of the month, Philip Stevens discusses with industry leaders the current state of archive and storage technology, and the next generation of archive solutions in the future

What questions should a potential customer ask of a

supplier to ensure the right package is purchased?

As many organisations are fi nding, there is money to be made in archive material. And that is good news. But just how do you store those assets – and retrieve them easily?

Our panel to ponder these issues comprises (in alphabetical order) Laurent Fanichet, product marketing manager, big data EMEA/APAC at Quantum; Julian Fernández-Campón, head of solutions architecture at Tedial; Benoit Fevrier, SVP, media division, EVS; Alan Hoggarth, managing director, Disk Archive Corporation; Jay Migliaccio, director, cloud platforms and services at Aspera, an IBM company; Lee Sheppard, director of product management, SGL

archive system? Does it easily and automatically

integrate with third-party systems? How flexible is

the archive solution? Can it be adapted to any

type of content that’s required for archive? How

scalable is the archive solution?

Fevrier: A potential customer should ask a

supplier what their vision is in terms of scalability

of the proposed solution. The job of a content

owner or a sport federation is not to manage

a huge IT infrastructure, but to produce and

preserve content assets. Being able to scale

their storage or their archive infrastructure,

without having to manage and maintain a big

installation in their facility, has become one of

the key questions. This is where new concepts

like storing assets ‘outside’ or in the cloud make

more sense because, in that case, the scalability

is theoretically unlimited.

Hoggarth: We put a lot of emphasis on ‘Total

Lifetime Cost of Ownership’. It’s not as easy as

it may seem to take into account the many

parameters that come into play, and the pace

of change in storage technology makes it

even more difficult. But it is possible to model

TCO for the various different solutions – and the


Feature


Feature42 TVBEurope

business impact is very revealing. So why are

we preoccupied with initial capital cost? Make

sure the solutions you consider are good for your

business in the long term, as well as the short

term. The great thing is that if you follow the TCO

model, the result will not only be better for your

business, but also it will certainly have a lower

carbon footprint and there will be less disks and

tapes in the recycling. We encourage customers

to question themselves, not just their suppliers –

why would I go for a tape-based archive? How

can we avoid being locked into closed systems,

proprietary technologies and single vendor

solutions for the one functional area of the

business which has to give the longest service life?

Question how the archive will take advantage of

every increase in disk capacity as it comes along

and every cost reduction without media migration

and replacement. And wouldn’t it be better if the

media could be purchased on a buy-as you-go

basis, from a local supplier, rather than from the

archive supplier, thus buying disks as an Opex,

rather than a Capex?

Sheppard: A customer’s content archive is

of course a fundamental business asset, and

therefore has to be managed with great care. The

archive is not only the point of last resort to protect

the asset, but also a vehicle to manage costs of

storing content while making it accessible quickly.

It is therefore essential to validate the organisation,

the proposed solution and the recommended

technology, against probable business workfl ows

and objectives. Consider carefully the various

ways in which content is to be managed and fi nd

a supplier who is knowledgeable about optimising

these workfl ows and handling any related risks.

Other considerations include how easy will it be

to access the content? Is the media managed

through an open, standard technology? How

future-proofed will the media be and what

happens when an upgrade is required?

Fanichet: Storing data in the cloud, either using

private or public cloud, is becoming a popular

choice, particularly for long-term archives.

Private cloud providers typically use an object

storage solution that offers self-managing, self-

healing technology automatically recreating

data on new media, should copies degrade.

They continue to work as long as you keep

adding new media to the storage pool. Public

clouds typically offer similar functionality. They

remove the responsibility for adding more media

to a third party. As long as the user pays their

monthly bill, data will be preserved forever.

Fernández-Campón: We’ve found that the

cloud provides us with a new business enabler

as it delocalises both the media and operations

from the customer’s facilities. With this in mind

the several scenarios should be considered.

For instance, the main operation should remain

in the customer’s site using the cloud as a

backup for disaster recovery. Consider multi-site

operations for large organisations that implement

a private cloud. Delocalise the execution of tasks

such as subtitling, content validation, access

services, and so on. Use the cloud for content

publishing and make the archive – or a part of

it – visible and accessible for content monetising

and non-linear platforms. Fully externalise

services in the cloud and have access to the

content and operations dashboards at the

service provider’s private cloud.

Fevrier: This is popping up more often in

discussions, but in terms of the customer’s vision

over an actual requirement. We all know that the

cloud, especially the one using public means, is

still at a conceptual stage and that there are big

gaps to address such as the security of content,

the quality of service and accessibility if the

network happens to be down. Many analysts

think the cloud will become a transparent

commodity in the future, we won’t even think of

the cloud as a concept and without it nothing

will be possible – a little bit like electricity today

compared to 250 years ago.

Hoggarth: Disk storage is already the de-facto

choice for the storage and becoming even more

attractive with massive capacity archive-specifi c

disks coming from the leading disk vendors. But

for media companies it is the ‘remote location’

aspect of the cloud, which causes the headaches.

At DAC we are pioneering hybrid solutions where

we keep one very affordable and very accessible

replica on the premises and a ‘copy of last resort’

in the cloud, which is only accessed for fault

How signifi cant has ‘the cloud’– public or private –

become for archive purposes?

“Many analysts think the cloud will become a transparent commodity in

the future” Benoit Fevrier, EVS

Alan Hoggarth, Disk Archive Corporation

Benoit Fevrier, EVS


Feature

recovery. This takes full advantage of the cloud’s

security, but eliminates the expensive routine

downloads in normal operations.

Migliaccio: The benefi ts of the cloud include

access to virtually unlimited storage infrastructure

without large upfront IT investments. Businesses

can easily scale up their compute and storage

resources to meet their growing needs, paying only

for the capacity they use. With the recent addition

by many cloud infrastructure providers of low-

cost storage options, the cloud has become very

appealing for long-term data archiving. However,

moving big data in and out of the cloud has been

a challenge. The conventional way of thinking for

organisations to move data to the cloud has been

to physically ship the data on disk, and then use

legacy transport tools such as FTP or HTTP when the

archive data needs to be accessed and restored.

But both of these methods are slow and insecure.

Physical disks can get damaged or lost in transport

and TCP-based transport methods signifi cantly

underutilise available bandwidth and achieve

transfer speeds that are unsuitable for large data

sizes and volumes, introducing unacceptable

delays in retrieving the data from the cloud archive.

Aspera high-speed transfer software eliminates the

transfer bottleneck so data can move quickly and

securely to and from cloud-based storage. The

initial ingest of data to the archive can be done at

line-speed, in a fraction of the time, and the data

is secure with both encryption over the wire and

optionally at rest. Solutions such as Aspera Sync also

enable manual or automatic high-speed replication

of data from primary on premises storage to the

cloud for disaster recovery and business continuity,

or simply to migrate aging data from expensive

high-speed disk to a lower cost long-term archive.

The combination of secure Aspera high-speed fi le

transfer and low cost cloud storage make the cloud

perfectly suitable for long term archiving of even the

most valuable digital assets.

Sheppard: The cloud defi nitely has a part to

play, though we are not near the point in which

it replaces tape and disk as the standard for

archiving storage. Archiving to a commercial

cloud is very cost-effective, however, the cost

to restore assets can be as much as 50 times

higher than the archiving cost. Required delivery

bandwidth also factors into the cost. This pricing

does, however, lend itself to using the cloud for

disaster recovery, in which the restoration costs

have to be weighed against the risk of disaster.

Lastly, there is still a strong sense in the industry

that vital content assets need to be managed

and accessible from within the organisation. Both

considerations are likely to change over time,

resulting in important new workfl ows arising.

Fanichet: Using a MAM system, 4K content can now

be catalogued and low-res proxies made available

for quick review. When the MAM is integrated with

a tiered storage and archive platform like Quantum

StorNext, high-resolution fi les can be retrieved with a

click of a mouse, even if they’re stored on second-

or third-tier storage. Object storage is a perfect fi t

for archiving 4K content. Ideal for petabyte-scale

digital content archive environments, object

storage offers a new nearline storage option that is

more durable than RAID through self-healing and

protection capabilities, and lower latency access

for predictably fast retrieval times at a price more

typical of long-term storage.

Fernández-Campón: Defi nitely, the archive

solution needs to be fully adaptable to enable

it to process any format regardless of bitrates.

However, choosing the right format to ensure

interoperability between other components

of the system for internal production, content

exchange as well as long term preservation of

the archived content is even more important.

Fevrier: In our experience, 4K is a major

requirement as customers plan for the future –

despite the limited need for it at the moment.

Like many other formats, 4K could have a

different meaning whether we’re talking about

the broadcast industry – more specifi cally UHDTV

– or the fi lm industry. It impacts compression,

colour space, frame rate, and obviously storage

space. This is where choosing the right fi le format

for archiving is key – it can make the adoption

of a new archive format easier to implement.

Apart from the obvious increase in fi le size, does

archiving 4K require any new thinking on the part of archive solution manufacturers?

“Archiving to a commercial cloud is very cost-effective - however, the cost to

restore assets can be as much as 50 times higher than the archiving cost”

Lee Sheppard, SGL

Jay Migliaccio, Aspera

Lee Sheppard, SGL


For example, those who have chosen JPEG2000

as a codec format won’t have any issues

managing 4K in their archive. Provided you have

anticipated the use of the right metadata model

you shouldn’t have problems. But it’s a different

story when it comes to discussing workfl ows from

archive to delivery.

Hoggarth: One less obvious outcome of the

cloud storage trend is the doubling in hard

disk capacity that has taken place in the

last two years. With 6TB disks at a cost effective

price for archiving, and even bigger disks a

matter of months away, 4K fi le sizes will not

present a capacity problem for cloud archives

or disk archives. In this respect, optical storage is

more likely to struggle since the individual

disk capacities are relatively small and transfer

rates fairly slow, but at around 150MB per

second, the time to restore long form broadcast

4K content from disk or tape storage is in line

with today’s expectations. Uncompressed

4K will present a challenge, but it will be in

the time to archive and restore rather than

the capacity.

Fevrier: Yes and no. We are close to achieving

different formats for archive and have some

already working, but each country and each

market will have different requirements.

For example, the US market will have a

different need to Europe and the fi lm industry’s

archive will go for something different to

broadcast. Each will need different colour

space, raster, and requirements in quality.

EVS is really involved in many initiatives to defi ne

a master fi le format for archive such as the

AS-07 specifi cation with AMWA or CST-RT021

for cinema archive. This is on its way at SMPTE

to become an IMF extension. For high

quality archive, MXF and JPEG2000

mathematically lossless compressions are

defi nitely the right ingredients.

Hoggarth: As an archive platform provider, the

fi le format doesn’t have any impact – the ALTO

platform is open and standards-based and

will store any fi le size and format, although the

system is optimised for typical large media fi les.

At the platform level, it is more about operating

systems and fi le systems, rather than formats

and wrappers. We welcome initiatives such as

DPP/AS-11, of course. The formats and wrappers

“Uncompressed 4K will present a challenge, but it will be in the time to

archive and restore rather than the capacity”

Alan Hoggarth, Disk Archive Corporation

Are we close to achieving a common fi le format for

archive purposes?


Feature

challenge belongs to the application partners

we rely on to deliver functionality in best-of-

breed solutions.

Sheppard: Yes. LTFS – Linear Tape File System – is

now consistently the best-selling storage tape

fi le system within the industry; and for compelling

reasons. The LTO Consortium suppliers – IBM,

HP, Quantum – along with many other archive

technology suppliers have adopted LTFS as

standard. The LTFS format self-describes the

organisation of the assets and metadata on each

tape, which means that a tape can be accessed

independently of any specifi c external database

or storage system. For instance, a stand-alone

LTFS tape drive could be attached to a desktop

computer and its contents accessed through

that computer’s fi le management system. This

offers tremendous security against complete

dependence on a particular supplier.

Fanichet: As of today, the use of tape still

prevails when it comes to archiving massive

volume of digital assets with the lowest TCO/

Cost per Terabyte. However, other technologies

have emerged like object storage. Even though

it’s been around for more than 20 years,

object storage is only now entering media

workfl ows as content owners grapple with

petabyte or greater content archives. Object

storage is best known as the technology

that powers the world’s largest public cloud

storage. Its increasing use has recently made

it affordable and practical for companies

with outsized storage needs. Because it

affordably combines disk-speed access with

long-term durability, more media companies

are turning to object storage for long-term

storage of digital assets.

Fernández-Campón: Multi-site, multi-tenant

effi cient content management for handling

different content for non-linear platforms. In

conclusion, the ability to adapt the archive

solution for effi cient content management,

distribution and cloud-based operations.

Sheppard: Increased integrated global

archiving. As the larger media companies

move to a global IP model, with content

being made delivered as required using cloud

and IP technologies, the archive is likely to

also move to a distributed model. This will

impact both operational media handling and

disaster recovery.

Laurent Fanichet, Quantum

Juliá n Ferná ndez-Campó n, Tedial

What should we look for in the next generation of

archive solutions?


As consumers continue to shift more of

their TV viewing online, it’s becoming

more and more important for marketers

to figure out the most effective way to adapt

delivery of ads to online content. On the one

hand, online ads give marketers more tools and

flexibility to engage consumers (eg, dynamic ads,

‘click to shop’ capabilities, enabling consumers

to choose the categories of ads they see). But

ads also need to create a satisfying experience

for viewers, because they now have ad-free

options to choose from if they want to.

Hub’s new study, ‘TV Advertising in an OTT

World,’ suggests that there are some clear best

practices when it comes to incorporating ads

into online programming.

Among those who reported seeing one to

four ads in their most recent online viewing

session, 34 per cent were “highly satisfied”

with the viewing experience, content aside

(i.e. rating of nine or ten out of ten).

Satisfaction was significantly lower – 23 per cent –

among those reporting five ads or more.

Dynamic ads and viewer control (e.g., the

option to choose the product categories of

ads you see) lead to greater sponsor recall. For

example, among those who said ads were based

on product categories chosen in advance,

38 per cent recalled ad sponsors during the

session, vs just 15 per cent overall. Dynamic

advertising creates greater value for advertisers

but is also more appealing to consumers.

Viewers who watched authenticated TV during

their most recent session reported seeing the

highest number of ads: 6.7 per session, versus

Online TV viewers prefer dynamic advertising

Data Centre

Dynamic ads and viewer control lead to greater sponsor recall, according to Hub’s new study, ‘TV Advertising in an OTT World’


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UK Sales

Ben EwlesSales Manager+44 (0) 207 354 [email protected]

Richard CarrSales Executive+44 (0) 207 354 [email protected]

US Sales

Michael J Mitchell+1 (631) 673 0072 [email protected]

For further information contact:

the average of five across platforms. And they

were least likely to recall which brands were

associated with the programme, via commercials,

programme sponsorship, or product placement

(19 per cent, vs 26 per cent across all platforms).

“Media buyers are steering more dollars from

linear to OTT, and sellers are trying to figure out

how to best monetise their digital properties,”

said Mike Haggerty, one of the study’s authors.

“This new data illustrates that it’s not enough

to just move your linear ad strategy to the

internet. There are specific tactics that not

only make ads in online TV more effective,

but also leave viewers more satisfied.

This is critical in an environment where so many

other options are available.”

“These findings show that even though

consumers prefer free, ad-supported content

over a subscription model, almost four in ten

say they are less likely to pay attention to ads

while watching online than ads on linear TV,”

said Peter Fondulas, a principal at Hub and

co-author of the study. “Online, distractions

are just a click away. So it’s even more

important to deliver ads in a way that

engages consumers. Our study shows that

dynamic advertising is the most compelling

way to accomplish that.”

Online viewers were asked to identify the greatest benefits, and biggest downsides, of watching TV online

Data Centre

“Media buyers are steering more dollars from linear to OTT, and sellers are trying to figure out how to best monetise their

digital properties” Mike Haggerty


Getting to know consumers’ intentions,

desires and ultimately actions during

and after exposure to advertising

has become ‘sine qua non’ in an almost fully

digitalised era. Consumers can watch TV content

whenever and wherever they want and are

no longer passive, but there is plenty more that

advertisers can do to better use the power of

the screen to target their audiences. According

to Discovery’s latest research report, The Future

of TV Advertising, conducted in ten countries in

Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and

Africa, the majority of viewers clearly indicated

that a TV brand they trust works as a quality

content assurance not only for programming,

but also for advertising. In fact as much as 70

per cent of consumers would go as far as to say

that TV quality would be compromised without

advertising. It’s all about creating the right affi nity

between viewers and the brands via smart

and effi cient ideas.

Another conclusion of this research that

impacts the whole media mix is the fact that

investing in multiple channel advertising reinforces

the TV advertising effectiveness. It’s about taking

consumers a step further on the way to fi nalising

the acquisition. This has been confi rmed by 50 per

cent of the viewers surveyed, who said they went

online to look up a product or a service, after

having been exposed to the TV ad.

The advertising industry heads towards

multi-phase campaigns depending on the

engagement a brand intends to generate among

consumers. The more information a brand has

about its consumers, the more targeted the

advertising can be. At the same time, consumers

become more demanding and would like to

See. Desire. Acquire. The future of TV advertising

Data Centre

TV quality is compromised without ads, Discovery Networks CEEMA

Ads drive viewers to look-up products or services, Discovery Networks CEEMA

Dorota Zurkowska-Bytner, VP of advertising sales development at Discovery Networks, discusses the company’s latest report on TV advertising


2015 will see TVBEurope attend and cover

more of the key events on the broadcast

media industry calendar. Following the

successful redesign of TVBEurope, we

have developed a more comprehensive

list of features for each issue over the

coming year, and will be launching a dedicated section covering the latest

developments in OTT, multiscreen, and

TV Everywhere: TVBEverywhere. Our Opinion and Analysis and Features sections will deliver the big stories

every month; Workflow will continue

our bedrock coverage of UHD, 4K, IT/IP infrastructures, and pre and post production insights; and our Business

section will provide a regualr analysis

of the marketplace, and all of the key

M&A activity. Our Audio for Broadcast coverage will now be present in every

issue and major sports/live broadcast events will be reported on throughout

the year.

For all advertising and sponsorship

opportunities, contact the sales team:

Europe

Ben Ewles: +44 (0) 20 7354 6000, [email protected], or

Richard Carr: +44 (0) 20 7354 6000, [email protected],

USA

Mike Mitchell +1 631 673 0072, [email protected]

EDITORIAL PLANNER 2015

Issue Date Exhibitions/ Events Coverage FeatureAudio for

BroadcastSports/Live broadcast

January

• BVE 2015 preview

• IBC Content Everywhere

preview

• Robotics forum

• Mobile TV

• Audio over IP • Pre-General Election

augmented reality coverage

February

• BVE 2015 show issue

• IBC Content

Everywhere report

• IP Networks

• Acquisition focus: camera lenses

March

• CABSAT focus

• NAB Preview

• System integrators forum

• NAB product preview

• Loudness

control

April• BVE 2015

• NAB 2015 show issue

• Beyond HD: 4K and UHD challenges

• Virtual sets forum

• UHD audio

May

• NAB review

• TVBE conference review

• Satellite TV focus

• Audio for broadcast special

• Sound mixers forum

• Sound

mixers forum

• 2015 UK election

June• Angacom focus

• TV Connect insights

• OTT multiscreen

• Acquisition focus: lighting for TV

• Audio & out-

side broadcast

• Summer of sport OB focus

July• Channel in a box forum

• Broadcast 2020: visions of the future

August

• IBC preview • Broadcast graphics forum

• IBC product preview

• Mics/ mon-

itors/ consoles

• Wimbledon 2015

September• IBC show issue • Quality control forum

• IBC show issue: product showcase

October• Audio for broadcast special

• IP technology forum

• Broadcast

audio feature

November• TVBAwards • Acquisition focus: all encompassing

• Transcoding forum

• Rugby World Cup 2015

December• Media Asset Management forum

• Archiving and storage roundtable

have the ability to skip through ads and only

view the advertising most relevant to them. In this

context, they are even willing to share personal

information, demonstrating the benefi ts of tailored

content to both viewers and brands.

There’s no doubt that people are consuming

more video content than ever before, but in a

period which has seen a surge in ownership of

connected devices, a rapid increase in time

spent online and a trend towards multiscreen

viewing across the region, there is even greater

opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers in

clever and creative ways.

Fundamentally, these trends will force brands

and content providers to develop far richer

relationships with viewers and it is time for

companies to go beyond the traditional ad

spot. The majority of viewers understand the

role of sponsorship: almost a third say they are

more likely to purchase a product if it sponsors

a programme, and product placement is

also regarded positively. By better linking

different media channels, there are now so

many opportunities to encourage viewers to

continue a brand conversation long after the

advertisement is over. The second screen is a

major driver of this behaviour through the ability

given to viewers to respond instantly and directly

to something they have seen on TV.

Looking ahead, we wonder whether the

tools advertisers might use – tailored advertising,

click-through-to-buy options, handing over

control to viewers of what adverts they

watch – can drive engagement even

further than is possible today.

Viewers want longer, less frequent ad breaks, Discovery Networks CEEMA

Data Centre


Data Centre

Mobile data connections and services

are growing strongly in Africa, but the

continent continues to lag behind most

of the rest of the world in terms of high-speed

broadband connectivity, according to new

research by global analyst fi rm Ovum.

The number of mobile subscriptions in Africa

continues to grow faster than in any other major

world region, with total mobile subscriptions

increasing by 9.8 per cent year-on-year to 808

million at the end of 2013, compared to the

global growth rate of 6.3 per cent. At the end

of 2014, Africa’s mobile subscriptions count had

risen to 851 million, and Ovum expects it to cross

the one billion mark in 2016 and reach 1.23 billion

by the end of 2019.

“With the rate of growth in mobile subscriptions

slowing – the number of mobile subscriptions in

Africa will increase by only fi ve per cent year-on-

year in 2019 – the more signifi cant development

within Africa’s mobile market is the growth in

mobile data connections and services,”

said Matthew Reed, practice leader for the

Middle East and Africa at Ovum.

“Despite the growth in mobile data

connectivity on the continent. Africa is ranked

second-to-last among world regions in terms of its

broadband development.”

According to Ovum’s Broadband Development

Index, a new research service that tracks the take-

up of high-speed fi xed and mobile broadband

services in 191 countries (see chart), Africa has

a Broadband Development Index score of 226

out of 1,000 for 2014, just ahead of Central and

Southern Asia (219 out of 1,000), but a long way

behind the leading regions, which are North

America (633) and Western Europe (433).

Mobile data services on the rise in Africa

New research from global analyst fi rm Ovum suggests that while mobile data services are on the rise in Africa, it is still playing catch-up to the rest of the world with its high-speed broadband connectivity

Mobile subscriptions in Africa at end of 2013

Projected mobile subscriptions in Africa by 2019

Mobile subscriptions in Africa at end of 2014

Projected mobile subscriptions in Africa by 2016

808 million

851 million

1 billion

1.23 billion

Africa is ranked second-to-last among world regions in terms of its broadband development

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TVBE December 2014 digital edition

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