IET Central London Evening Lecture, Savoy Place, 12-Oct-2016

A joint event between the IET and RTS, The Royal Television Society

The aim of this panel discussion was to provide a review of, and feedback from, the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) held in Amsterdam in September.

Being completely ignorant of the RTS and IBC, I was fearing some drear recap of conference proceedings. Luckily it was the opposite, and I found myself being informed, entertained and energised.

I found the enthusiasm of all the speakers infectious. I really wished that I'd been at the conference and exhibition itself. 

For me, the format was novel and effective: We had a knowledgeable and easy-speaking anchor man in Nigel Walley (of Decipher Media Group). After setting the scene, Nigel called up each of the four panel members in turn to tell us what they had experienced and learnt at IBC, each with a quick debrief. At the end, Nigel led all four in a combined Q & A session. It was a good measure of the interest kindled and thoughts provoked that it was difficult to bring it to a halt (finally incentivized by the drink & nibbles reception awaiting upstairs in The Riverside Room).

Here are some of the things I picked up (I admit that I couldn't keep up with all of the whizzy stuff):

Tom Marshall (Producer of IBC's "What Caught My Eye" and Creative Director of captive north):

• Using the cloud for delivery of screenings on-line. Better than sending out DVD's and allows for analytics and ratings. Do we trust the Cloud enough, though? The presence of Amazon with their market leading Web Services (AWS) provided some clout to persuade doubters.

• Also using AWS for a non-linear editing suite (4 Scene), which has a secure codec and offers low bandwidth.

• The Live IP Project - Proving that it is possible to live broadcast over IP (Internet Protocol), offering flexibility and agility. The need for open standards to enable interoperability.

• Providing AI tools and services to monetise and find new revenue streams, such as: analysing audience reach, predicting & preventing failures & outages to monetise and find new revenue streams.

• Dynamically changing content that is more interactive and non-linear, such as a personalised cooking show, adjusting quantities for the number of people being cooked for.

Stephanie Scheller (Head of Business Development, APPINESS):

• Why is ad-blocking now so common?

• Consumers want personalisation and customisation without giving away too much data. It can be too creepy when the provider seems to know too much about our private lives.

• Consumers expect content at anytime, anyplace.

• How to drive them to your content and channel? Answer = metadata = $. Has been termed "A love note to the future"! Metadata is not dull, it is exciting and fun. Using second screens, can link products to the shows in real time e.g. food show ingredients can be listed then ordered and delivered to your home.

Graham Turner (Chairman, IET Multimedia Communications Network):

• Their audio interviews with a number of people are on the IET MMC community.

• Content protection is important against piracy (averages 200 days before detection); pirate set top boxes are widely available to get IP TV.

• Object oriented audio: single points of recorded audio which can then each be mixed in different personalised ways.

• Virtual Reality: There was a good demo of its use on an aeroplane (a captive audience), but it has more to do to be more than niche.

Craig Buckland (Business Development Lead, Media, Gaming and Technology at Vodafone):

• Of the top 20 Internet companies: 11 are in USA; 9 in Asia; None in Europe!

• Brands are creating content, such as Lego

• Brands and advertisers are finding ways to side-step ad blocking

• The concept of platforms and channels is changing as they become less distinct

• We now have the 'Fast consumer' wanting fast content

• Mobiles: most users prefer non linear content than to use broadcasters apps (eg ITV on line)

Q & A:

• High resolution excites people, maybe more than 3D or VR

• VR is the new gimmick for this year; was drones last year.

• Has the quality of content been diluted? There's so much content now, and so much advertising and product placement. On the other hand, perhaps there is just a lot of high quality content (big budget) that needs rationing (as in the old days)?

• Will TV die, as  YouTube is more fun?

Take away points:

• Cloud/IP

• Data is getting much more important

• Content security and privacy needs to be 2-way, to protect the consumer as well as the provider.

• Remember that someone has to pay for all this content (if it not the consumer) - the cost is mostly borne by the advertisers.

Many thanks go to Marianthe Evangelidis (IET London Central Events Committee Member) and to Terriy Marsh (RTS) for organising this event, and to the Volunteers / staff of both organisations and Savoy Place for their support.

Also to Naomi Climer (immediate past president of IET and Chair of the IBC Council) for presenting the RTS Coffey award for Young Technologist of the year to Christos Danakis.

Links:

http://www.ibc.org/ibc2016-conference-programme

https://communities.theiet.org/communities/home/60