Broadcast Video Expo moved to ExCel this year.

After a cracking 2012 and a bigger than ever IBC last September, it’s good to visit the technology show and take the temperature of the UK broadcast industry. A bit of a trek from West London to its new home, but well worth it. The seating in the central Boulevard made an ideal place to meet and talk to people – a definite improvement on scrabbling for seats in Earls Court.

 

RESOLVING THE SIZE QUESTION.

Continuing the theme from IBC, 4K and 8K dominated my conversations about supply chain and logistics. There’s an uncomfortable dilemma between the surge in cloud-based offerings (particularly those which take media right from acquisition in the highest resolution) and the inexorable increase in file sizes resulting from steadily increasing video resolutions. It’s still hard to move large files around quickly with security and integrity.

So don’t move them around. Granted, we’ve got to get the files into the cloud to start with. So let’s solve that problem – getting acquisition formats off physical tape, card or disc and onto servers where we can index, shot log, add metadata, edit and comply. Then we can transcode, distribute and archive (perhaps to Amazon’s new Glacier service) in situ, all that wasted file movement is gone, and all our costly capex is turned into opex.

Delivering this utopian view of media logistics ignores the sheer technological challenge of integrating vendors’ technology platforms to provide this end to end service, but we may be reaching the stage where this is becoming viable. I can’t wait for this disruptive innovation to help us re-engineer our world.

 

EVOLVING MEDIA BRANDS’ BUSINESS MODELS.

Another theme at BVE was that content funding models are becoming more democratic. Greg Dyke spoke at the Future of Media conference on the democratisation of film – particularly highlighting interesting crowdfunding models for film production – and what the investors get in return for their cash; often, not a cash ROI but instead a opening credit or just the quiet glow of having made something possible.

And on the distribution side, Sky’s purchase of The Cloud and its just-announced acquisition of O2’s broadband customers, gives the buyer greater scale (and allows the seller to concentrate on 4G services) to get that content out to consumers. Owning the end-to-end content creation-to-distribution value chain keeps Sky in control and able to leverage synergies, protect margins and own the customer and the data about them.

 

SWIM OR FLY?

I felt an intensity of excited anticipation at BVE this year – like the media industry’s feet are on the edge of an innovation cliff. I’m reminded of the journey that magnificent directory publishing brand Yellow Pages is making. Just compare these two adverts: firstly this fondly-remembered one from 1983; and secondly this one from 2011. The death of Yell(ow Pages) has often been predicted – who needs Yell.com when you have Google? Yell is counteracting this by adding value like video, maps, recommendations and reviews to the content, and making it readily consumable, contextually relevant and easy to use. It remains to be seen whether Yell will be out-competed, disintermediated or whether there’s still money to be made.

Where do you think the media industry will end up? Who will soar mightily into the cloud, and who tumble into the sea? Let me know in the comments below.

Jeremy Sedgley, Head of Change Management