In its newly released report, Veritone’s Uplift Study found COVID-19 showed no negative impact thus far on advertising performance, as average campaign lift saw an average of 6.5% increase for both Q1 and Q2 of 2020.

Over the years, technology has been a major force in evolving our world. As each major technological advancement happens (e.g., cars, elevators, movies, TV, the Internet, the smart phone, etc.), we see society change to adopt technology. Whether this is increasing mobility, building up instead of out, or increased transmission of information, humans quickly adopt new technologies and use them to their advantage.

Many media companies have a lot of different media content (video along with photos) that very often ‘’lie on the shelves collecting dust’’. Mostly because it requires a lot of time, money, and staff to have control over thousands of assets. Using modern MAM and CDN technologies you can not only get control over your valuable assets, save money in handling them and use them in sales and marketing but also monetize your archive and earn money.

The increasing need for more variety and volume of content during the time of social distancing requires new ways to produce. TVU Networks, the global technology leader in live IP solutions, innovations in remote production allows media companies and streamers to reduce their production budget, covering a wider range of events from regular news broadcast to theatre, music and sports such as marathons, rallies, football and cycling, while respecting social distancing.

During these difficult times it’s become critical for broadcasters to reduce operating costs while improving quality of experience. Transitioning toward IP brings significant changes and opportunities – not just in technology but on the operational and business side. This session tackles the business end of IP migration, identifies the challenges and real-life solutions, discusses the best business practices during the transition, the mystique of IP architecture and how it relates to Cloud and OTT solutions.

There are times when you want to store data and performance is a non-issue. You need to keep the data (e.g., to meet regulatory requirements or “just in case”), but you don’t need to retrieve it on a regular basis or rapidly. And then, there are times when you need to store data and then locate it and retrieve it quickly. And, of course, you want to make absolutely certain that your data is securely preserved.

In this presentation Streamhub will demonstrate how a cross-industry data collaboration platform between broadcasters, platforms and agencies in a major OTT market has successfully led to stronger strategic positioning of broadcasters in Japan with greater AVOD revenues for all – and a more joyful user experience for video consumers.

The session will explore how esports can capitalise on this growth as it moves into the future, examining the business models of esports teams and leagues, how broadcasters, streaming services and other rightsholders can develop esports audiences further along with new sources of revenue. It will also look at how esports leagues can leverage remote production and cloud-based production models to increase their flexibility and scale output, while still maintaining professional production standards. The presentation will show Esports was already a live broadcast powerhouse in waiting, but because of COVID-19 and lockdown the wait has suddenly become a lot shorter.

It’s easy to get caught up in the sea of buzzwords around new product innovations. It’s less easy to determine what really matters to you, and how these concepts can be practically applied to your operations. We look at where and how the areas of microservices and blockchain can really make an impact, focusing on real-world use cases. They are here and they are real. We can show you how you can apply them to improve your operations and move beyond just filling up that buzzword bingo card!

Ratings forecasts are critical for broadcasters in defining their prices and sales models, models that are becoming increasingly complex as broadcasters look to offer cross platform campaigns to com-pete with newcomers disrupting the market. Advertisers want to know how and when they will hit their target (GRPs or impressions). Broadcasters want to know that they can deliver on their contracts but also without massively over delivering and losing potential revenue. At the same time, the accurate prediction of ratings, for a human, takes years of experience and practice and proves a significant succession planning challenge for broadcasters.

We propose to build a portal-based, pay-as-you-use media ‘engine’ into our video switches at BT Tower. Live content feeds coming through the switches could be captured in 24-hour segments, stored for 10 days and have metadata automatically generated. Content could be easily found using keywords, no action would be missed if events run on longer, and rights holders have sufficient time to fetch clips retrospectively.

This paper proposes a way forward for entities seeking to implement or take advantage of virtual advertising solutions. It focuses on use of this technology in a sporting context but the principles are as relevant to use of the technology within any live event broadcast.

Although there is a complex legal framework, with differing positions around the world, we believe it is useful to develop some broad principles in this emerging regulatory area to support the development of the Virtual Advertising sector.

Whether you are a sports rights holder, broadcaster, producer, advertiser or technology provider, we hope this paper will clarify the regulatory issues and provide you with a pragmatic way forward which we propose can act as a useful benchmark for the industry and regulators around the world to refer to and adopt.

Despite the dominant news in 2020 all about the Coronavirus pandemic, the preparations for the UK’s exit from the European Union, and a Presidential election in the USA, there have been important changes to note in environmental regulations too. By way of an example, ‘Chemical Watch’ contacted its membership to help understand the impact of the pandemic and notwithstanding many businesses of all types suffering from the financial shock to the system, 40% said that their regulatory workload had increased, whereas only around 20% had seen a decrease. Chemical Watch sees very little let up in the regulatory agenda and suggests that the challenges created by this are made more complex by the likely impending global recession, combined with so many teams now working entirely remotely, or already being affected by job losses.

In the Covid-19 era, the regular standards meetings that we attend have certainly been disrupted, but like many other aspects of our industry, virtual technology has stepped in as a substitute. The system is working, though not being on the meeting’s timezone can require attendance at some difficult hours!

Many of the sub-groups have already been using virtual meetings for several years and this has proved an efficient way to develop documents.

A decade ago, when Peter White became CEO of IABM, its membership was about 250 and the staff numbered five. At its peak in 2020 before Covid-19 hit, membership reached 650+ and the staffing had quadrupled. George Jarrett reports.

IABM now bristles with valuable data and knowledge, and smart initiatives and partnerships, but when White emerged from another industry that had adopted digitisation, he was surprised by the sloth with which the broadcast business jumped from tape to file, and joined the digital age.

In this IABM TV interview, Bart Van Oosterhout (Program Director of HESP at THEO Technologies) discusses the High Efficiency Streaming Protocol (HESP) Alliance including:

• What HESP is
• What the HESP Alliance will focus on to bring HESP to the market
• Why media companies and video vendors should become HESP Alliance members
• Which customers will benefit the most from HESP
• When we can expect the first HESP solutions

Join Damien Lucas, Chief Technology Officer & co-founder of Anevia, in a webinar on how a new approach to CDN infrastructure can help deliver on this expectation.

Success with video doesn’t come from choosing a mystical single best-of-breed MAM, Edit Suite, Live Switcher, DAM – or any other system.

Instead, it comes with being able to easily orchestrate human, semi-automated and automated workflows among these systems, and others that will inevitably emerge.

Low broadcast latency has become a mandatory requirement in any tenders and competitions for building of head-end stations and CDNs. Previously, such criteria were applied only to sports broadcasting, but now operators require low latency from broadcast equipment suppliers for every sphere: broadcasting news, concerts, performances, interviews, talk shows, debates, e-sports and gambling.

When the pandemic escalated, sending the world into lockdown, new remote working measures were implemented, and CGI was internally well equipped to handle the changes. Our employees regularly work from home, and thus have the full set up to continue collaborating whilst supporting our customers. As our solutions are web based, our customers still had all of the tools to be able to focus purely on the story at hand, which was more important than ever before during a global event like COVID-19 has and continues to be.