The world's most influential media, entertainment & technology show
11 - 15 September 2020
RAI Amsterdam
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The trio has teamed up to create an end-to-end video experience platform which will enable Android TV providers to make linear-on-demand (LoD) a reality for viewers.
3 Screen Solutions (3SS) together with Media Distillery and Xroad Media have announced a next-generation personalised TV experience using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with advanced data harvesting and processing.
3SS managing director Kai-Christian Borchers said: “In today’s highly competitive marketplace, service providers need to differentiate from their rivals. Also, they need to increase stickiness of their service.
“Better personalisation and simplified, more successful content discovery are the answers to the need for increased viewer enjoyment and loyalty.”
At IBC2016, 3SS introduced LoD as a concept and predicted it as the future of TV when it launched 3READY Front End and UI/UX solution.
The joint solution provides a detailed depth of user profiling while delivering granular understanding of what comprises a item of video content.
In a statement the companies announced: “With this new platform, the TV service can really understand what the viewer spends time watching – and the key is rich metadata.”
They claim that truly personalised TV is only achieved by obtaining granular user profiles and accurate content metadata.
This new joint platform, multiple layers of high-quality metadata are made available in real time to help viewers find their desired content, thereby promoting viewer engagement.
The trio believe that creating seamless, personalised and measurable experiences, with content from all sources and ads that are relevant to the user, is the best-possible revenue generation and return on investment opportunity for the service provider.
Media Distillery chief executive Roland Sars said: “It’s time for TV service providers to deconstruct and re-sequence their content, to serve up right-size, on-topic personal experiences.
“From smarter search to snackable content and richer profiles, the players who differentiate through their content metadata, and enable individualised, intuitive viewing, will captivate and stay relevant for expectant audiences.”
At the beginning of 2017, virtual reality (VR) was on a forward trajectory for widespread adoption, however, as device sales fell short of expectations the evolution has continued but consumers and broadcasters have readdressed expectations.
A key issue for the industry is the “lack of a killer application for VR” as well as the slower than expected adoption from consumers, according to research from Futuresource.
The global VR market volume is predicted to reach 98.4 million sales by 2023, generating an installed base of 168 million units with a worldwide population penetration of 2%.
Growth is forecast across all regions and countries, with China leading the way.
The shift from tethered to standalone VR headsets represents a paradigm shift within the immersive ecosystem.
Technical paper authors from TNO in the Netherlands explained how VR retains industry interest, the market adoption remains slower than expected.
“The last few years have seen a major uptake of VR technology, enabling the creation of immersive video games and training applications, and also paving the way for new forms of video entertainment.
“One key challenge that many of those VR experiences face is the social barrier. That is the apparent discrepancy between the physical separation of wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) and the human need for sharing their experiences. This can also be seen by large investments into Social VR from key industry companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and HTC.”
To address this problem, TNO developed a VR framework that extends current video conferencing capabilities with new VR functionalities.
“With an increasing number of display devices supporting positional tracking and 3D interaction, the relevance of multi-camera capturing and 6DoF processing increases,” Chris Varekamp of Philip Group Innovation Research in the Netherlands wrote.
Producing live 6DoF video requires video capture with multiple cameras, real-time depth estimation, compression, streaming and playback. All of these components are under development and a ready-made solution is hard to find.
In Varekamp’s paper, he presented: “A quality evaluation approach that uses ray-traced images of artificial scenes to simulate the acquisition for a given camera capture configuration.”
Authors from NHK shared how viewing styles will be and what the technology and the research and development strategy that is required in the future of broadcasting.
Alongside VR, augmented reality (AR) is expected to be one of the key factors of future media in the living room and in order to develop AR/VR technologies for broadcasting, NHK has adopted two kinds of approaches, deductive and inductive.
“In the deductive approach, the future is drawn on the extension of R&D which we have been engaging in. It could also be said the one improving performance by taking advantage of our technical strength for sustaining innovation. Since this approach is aimed at realising AR/VR, we call it “For AR/VR”.
“On the other hand, in the inductive approach, at first, we expect potential needs in the present or the future from the trend of technology and society. Next, we consider what service image we should provide. After that, we set to work on R&D of necessary technology for the service.”
The DPP has released two new documents to extend the functionality of the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) with the development of an Auxiliary Image Sequence plug-in.
The two whitepapers Recommendation DPP 006: IMF Plug-in for Auxiliary Image Sequences and DPP Auxiliary Image Sequence have been produced to address the existing problem of managing sign language interpreted content in IMF as well as open up new possibilities for content localisation and addressable advertising.
The component-based nature of IMF already allows multiple versions of a programme to be created, managed and distributed more efficiently. However, SMPTE ST 2067-21:2016 IMF is limited to a single concurrent video track in any composition. This restricts certain use cases that could otherwise realise the benefit of IMF’s full capabilities.
Marquise Technology vice president business strategy and development Dan Tatut said: “As IMF adoption grows beyond the traditional studio workflows, it’s vital to consider content accessibility matters - a business need shared by many of our customers.
“The auxiliary image tracks expand the capabilities of the format into areas such as in-vision sign language. The simple design of the extension allows richer content, more advanced versioning, more automation and more accessibility for all audiences.”
The plug-in allows any organisation using IMF to dynamically layer image tracks for a wide number of different use cases, including sign-interpretation, localisation, branding and advertising.
The DPP confirmed it is not specific to its IMF Application specifications (SMPTE TSP2121), but agnostic to IMF applications.
ITV Signpost director Kenny Toal added: “It’s very important to ITV that we serve all our audiences with content that meets their needs.
“By working with the DPP on developing the Auxiliary Image Track, we will in future be able to bring the operational efficiencies of IMF versioning to the production and distribution of sign-interpreted content.”
The first phase is implemented by Recommendation DPP006. The second phase involves developing a more advanced mode, allowing users to resize and reposition the overlay within the IMF workflow and is expected to deliver in Summer 2020.
The DPP continues its support for the global adoption of IMF for Broadcast & Online. Next week, the winners of the DPP’s inaugural Virtual Hackathon will be announced. Competitors have been building new functionality for the IMF Media Management API, published by the DPP earlier this year.
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