Life: online mindfulness

One of the things I've been increasingly puzzling about recently is the disconnect between our online lives and our real ones; the personas if you like that we present to people in the real world and the ones that we forge for ourselves online.

There's a tradition of this, of course. Back in the early days of the internet, it was possible to have an enormous amount of fun in the Usenet groups you frequented by pretending to be a 16 year old schoolgirl from Helsinki. Certainly fun when troll-baiting. But with the rise of social media and its interconnecting webs of likes and dislikes, follows and retweets, our online personalities are designed to be much more faithful extensions of ourselves. The problem is, we don't treat them that way.

Maybe it's because our online relationships are mediated via the keyboard, and even with the rich complexities of language - and the less subtle interventions of emoticons - we are always a step removed. But it seems that this is particularly the case when it comes to mindfulness. A quick quip, a sarcastic comment...it is all too easy for us to participate in conversations that we perhaps wouldn't chose to in real life. I've lost count of the times I've been within a button press of tweeting something or commenting on something on Facebook and then pulled back and run through the usual quick Buddhist mantra: is it kind? Is it necessary?

Often it's not, and at least online there is a delete button (depending on how Facebook is running its privacy policy that week). But, again in Buddhist parlance, right thinking and right speech should also lead to right typing and our online relationships - ephemeral sometimes though they may be - are poorer when this isn't so.

Work: The History of VFX Part Two - The Model Men

This next part of my History of VFX for Red Shark takes us from A Matter of Life & Death, and the problems that the VFX technicians of the day had with the introduction of colour, all the way up to 1977 and a certain couple of films that not only caught the public imagination but also showcased exactly how far you could push optical effects technology.

Read it here: The History of VFX Part Two: The Model Men

Work: Vegas musings - cloudy, with a chance of hype...

[Final part of this year's NAB preview for Harris]

Every year in the broadcast industry has its buzzwords, but few have been as persistent, potentially transformative and also frustratingly nebulous as the cloud. It doesn't make sense for every sector of the industry, and indeed is facing a certain amount of resistance from within it, but 2013 is the year where it finally looks to be becoming relevant in a real world context.

Cloud-based services have always promised to cut costs via the holy triumvirate of increased scalability, flexibility and collaboration, and increasingly there are areas within the broadcast industry where it makes sense. Given the definition of cloud computing as services that are delivered over a network - typically over the internet and typically via a browser - there are even areas of the industry where it is already firmly established, with news production at the vanguard.

Web-based, distributed production, editing, archive mining and the like has already enabled field-based teams and bureaux to collaborate across continents and time-zones, and this trend is only going to continue as cloud-services become culturally embedded in news organisations. Their sport colleagues are already ahead of the game, mining remote archives when on location - especially at the big events with established broadcast centres such as the major tennis championships - to create quick-turnaround packages based on topical events within a competition.

It's not hard to see this being replicated in other areas of the industry - promos and graphics departments would possibly equally benefit from cloud-based workflows - but it is post which has seen the main mushrooming of services to date to the extent that you could even set up a facility with no specific geographical location if you wanted to. Editing, VFX, compositing, client approvals, rendering, production notes and planning, even invoicing and expense tracking...all this can be achieved to a greater or lesser degree in the here and now with cloud-based services.

Currently, there are a few instances where there is currently only one service or manufacturer fulfilling these various niches, and so NAB will probably see a significant expansion of both the players in the market and also that market itself expand into other areas, with live and near live in particular fecund target areas for the cloud and all it brings with it.

Those providing cloud-based services reason that the the winds of technological progress are behind them and that the ascendancy of the cloud is almost assured. There is perhaps a certain amount of hubris to this, especially given broadcasters' intransigence in particular on some very valid issues such as reliability and security. That said though, the only real technological missteps in the industry recently have occurred largely as a result of either consumer indifference (stereo 3D) or misapplication within an overall trend. Add in the general progress to more reliable and faster communications technologies (4G networks being a prime example) and it's difficult not to see the cloud as part of the general convergence between the broadcast industry and IT. And that is not going to ease up at any time soon.

Work: Vegas musings - more connections more of the time

[Part two of my NAB preview for Harris...]

There is an underlying dichotomy in the broadcast industry at the moment as it chases two screens at two very different ends of the scale. On the one hand, you have the 50in + displays associated with Ultra HD, on the other the sub 10in screens of the tablet and mobile market. Happily though, while one - Ultra HD - requires serious infrastructure investment, the other is as much about a change of production culture than anything.

That's not to say it's without it's challenges though. Indeed, responding to the changes in the newly consumer-driven connected world might be more problematic for broadcasters than any mere format progression. After all, in all the transitions from SD to HD - and historically from monochrome to colour, digital widescreen, NICAM stereo etc etc - the way people watch television didn't change. With the new connected world, everything's up in the air.

The latest figures from the UK's TV Licensing Authority in its 2013 TeleScope report are rather instructive. Some things have changed massively - for example, the UK leads the world in PVR ownership, with 47% of households owning one and watching 20% of their television time-shifted as a result. Also, around one third of Internet users in the UK have used one of the main broadcasters' catch-up services and a fairly astonishing 40% of all tweets during peak-time hours are about TV programmes (we shall draw a hasty veil over the fact that the most tweeted programme is The Jeremy Kyle Show).

Interestingly though, for all the online efforts, it is debatable whether that convergent device, the Smart TV, is really getting anywhere. While sales are growing, only 5% of UK households possess one, and 35% of those have never connected it to the Internet.

Tablet penetration, however, has reached 11% and it is this, along with increasing use of smartphones, that is looking increasingly disruptive. As an example, Dave Price, Head of the market (and world-leading) BBC iPlayer, said in January: "BBC iPlayer had a record-breaking festive period, with performance driven by new mobiles and tablets unwrapped on Christmas Day, and it looks like these devices have yet to be put down. There were 272m requests for TV and radio programmes in iPlayer throughout January, with TV requests from mobiles and tablets rocketing - and up 32% in just one month."

These are impressive figures. But broadcasters know that if they want to truly engage with the audience via new conduits such as the second screen, they have to do more with it than simply offer video on it. While it may require less actual capital investment than a move to Ultra HD, it does require some investment in interactivity research and the development of a truly transmedia approach that reaches back to the beginning of the commissioning process.

Talk to people involved in this sector of the industry, and once you get past the snake oil salesmen, you'll find people very conversant with the Gartner Hype Cycle. This charts the introduction of new technology via distinct phases, with the first three being Technology Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, and the wonderfully named Trough of Disillusionment. The feeling is that with the second screen we are now on the Slope of Enlightenment and heading towards the Plateau of Productivity, or, in other words, there is now the chance to properly monetise all this effort.

For those chasing the smaller screen end of the market, that will probably be most welcome.

Work: the History of VFX

Have been commissioned by Red Shark to write a six part series on the history of VFX. This is the link to Part One, which tracks the developments in the industry from the birth of cinema in 1895 to one of its greatest masterpieces in 1941.

The History of VFX - Part One: From Mary Queen of Scots to Citizen Kane

Work: Vegas musings - here come the Ultras

[I was asked by Harris to contribute a couple of articles to their blog regarding general industry trends in the run up to this year's NAB. This was the first piece...]

Undoubtably one of the big themes of this years NAB will be the rise of everything to do with 4k/Ultra HD. Long considered to be just over the horizon, the past 12 months have seen several significant events occur that has given the format the impetus it needs to really breakthrough to mainstream production… and broadcast not long after that.

Indeed, so far 2013 has seen several significant 4k stories emerging each week; everything from the BBC Natural History Unit starting to film in the format, to major sales to hire companies, to Japanese plans for commencing 4k broadcasts during next year's World Cup in Brazil. Momentum it seems is unstoppable, and NAB is probably going to be a fecund area for the format.

This far out, companies are keeping their efforts under wraps, but persistent rumour suggests that the price of 4k cameras is going to drop significantly across the board at the same time as the range of models is ramped up to cover multiple pricepoints. Partly this is due to the relative lack of interest in stereo 3D models, with the manufacturers desperate to make new sales. Back during IBC, no less a person than James Cameron said he thought 3D and 4k were locked in a struggle for resources, and at the moment that's a battle which looks like having only one winner.

This is especially true given the impetus that the adoption of HEVC, the next generation codec that is set to supersede MPEG-4/H.264, is giving to 4k broadcast. It was always assumed that 4k would become a production format in the next few years, but what is surprising is the speed with which the industry is heading towards 4k to the home. And with HEVC (which is at the Final Draft International Standard stage) already suggesting that it might be possible to squeeze 4k transmissions into ‘very nearly’ current satellite bandwidths, a bevy of production tests underway, and rumours already swirling around some high-profile pay-TV broadcasters looking to introduce a service perhaps even sooner than the Japanese one, that speed is only accelerating too.

Again, much of this is due to the lack of penetration of stereo 3D. Nature might abhor a vacuum, but the broadcast industry abhors a gap in the market even more and the industry is proving to be very quick at changing horses. The CE manufacturers have sets out in the marketplace, albeit at eye-watering prices, and expect to see many glue products in particular featuring HEVC-capable chipsets at NAB as the manufacturers look to establish a 4k production chain in a hurry.

Work: Une affaire très française

Just a link to a piece I wrote on the post-War development of French TV technology for Red Shark that a) I rather enjoyed researching and writing and b) is a lot more interesting than it sounds...honest

http://www.redsharknews.com/business/item/471-france-had-a-national-hd-tv-system-in-1949