As the sun sets on the 50th anniversary of IBC 2017, we thought we’d take a quick look at some of the things that caught our eye. Live streaming was certainly high on the agenda. Broadcasters and corporates are now looking seriously at the use of live streaming to either expand the use of their content and reach new audiences/demographics; or to promote their brands. In fact, we wrote on a blog on this very subject last month. The use of live video streaming to Facebook was highlighted on the LiveU stand 3.B62. They demonstrated “At home remote production” via a studio on the stand, which was hosted by five-time Emmy Award-winning Michael Artsis from BeTerrific, with a centralised studio control room instead of an onsite production truck or studio. Click here to watch some footage.
If you checked out the Future Zone you would have seen some cool augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR). We particularly enjoyed the holographic shark footage – check out our twitter feed. However, as reported in TVB Europe, panellists at IBC’s ‘Leaving the Hype behind’ session agreed that VR, AR and MR still have some way to go. Ed Tang, founder and CTO at Avegant, and the business behind the Glyph headset and technology, said that as exciting as the industry is today, in reality it is at the same stage of development as the very early Motorola ‘brick’ mobile phones. “But we are moving very rapidly forward,” he said. If you’re a bit confused about the difference between AR, VR and MR have a look at this blog on Foundry’s website.
The Future Zone also played host to 8K content courtesy of NHK. The Japanese public broadcaster showed its 8K UHD OLED sheet-type display, which can be installed in the living-room. The panels have a refresh rate of 120hz, essential to ease motion blur at high resolutions. UHD and HDR – which shows a greater range of brightness levels, blacks in a picture become darker and highlights much brighter – are a cool development but there are still questions being raised regarding speed of adoption. IBC 365 included a feature recently by the EBU’s Dr. Hans Hoffmann that looks at this subject in more detail.
It’s clear that the industry is still in a state of transition, but the question remains: to where? More than once, the refrain “the viewer must come first” echoed round the increasingly complex IBC halls. While viewers have rested a lot of control as to when and where to watch, the principal of quality content attracting eyeballs hasn’t gone away. But there’s no doubt that when it comes to how to produce, process and – most particularly – distribute that content, there are changes all around.
