Broadcast Tech Talks

What's next for virtual studios?

​For this week’s episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks Podcast, senior reporter Max Miller speaks to Warner Bros. Discovery’s director of graphics and innovation, Alex Dinnin, and Vizrt’s head of sport, Andy O’Neil, about the state of play and future of virtual studios.

The pair reveal how Warner Bros. Discovery created the TNT Sports studios from scratch, and has managed to centralise its virtual studios for Eurosport across Europe – including innovative uses of space and technology.

In addition, they discuss what’s next for virtual studios, and how advances in technology could see them become indistinguishable from real studios for viewers at home.

The future of AI in post-production

For this edition of the Broadcast Tech Talks Podcast, senior reporter Max Miller speaks to Azimuth head of audio Kate Davis and HHB CTO John Johnson about how AI is changing the way post-production is completed.

AI, or machine learning, has long been used in post, but recent years have seen its use grow at an increasing rate. Audio post is one of the most talked about areas for AI, with new tools that can clean up poorly recorded audio, replace dubbing by replicating an actor’s voice in another language, and more meaning that it is a hotbed for innovation.

Davis and Johnson reveal what they have already seen being done in the industry, and what could be coming in the next 12 months.

What AI means for media businesses

This episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks podcast series was recorded at the AI Creative Summit at BFI Southbank on 6 November 2024. It features Cyrus Mewawalla, head of thematic intelligence at GlobalData and globally-renowned AI expert and analyst. The session presents the findings of world-leading data and analytics company, GlobalData's most comprehensive and detailed report on AI to date. The report focuses on what AI means for media businesses.

How we used AI to launch a national TV channel

E-commerce business Must Have Ideas has launched an AI-powered TV channel, and Broadcast Tech speak to co-founder and director Amy Knight plus head of Broadcast Michael Wood about how they've done this.

The channel aims to look live, while actually being 30 pre-recorded segments that were filmed in an NDI studio. These segments are automatically scheduled and stitched together by an in-house AI tool, which Must Have Ideas has named Spark, and the hope is that no two shows will look or feel the same. 

The present and future of ADR

In this episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks Podcast, senior reporter Max Miller speaks to Forever Audio’s senior sound engineer Alistair Bolt and ADR manager Gabriel Dutru about the present and future of ADR.

Delving into the best techniques for the area, the pair speak about how to work with actors, directors, and producers, as well as how to prepare for ADR in production and when it works best.

In addition, the conversation turns to the future of ADR, and the tech advances, such as automation and AI cleanup services, that could have an effect on it going forwards.

Revolutionising Post-Production

The Revolutionising Post-Production podcast sees industry experts delve into the cutting-edge technologies shaping the landscape of post-production in 2024 and beyond.

From GenAI/AI-driven tools to immersive virtual reality experiences, the panel explore how these innovations are transforming content creation, enhancing efficiency, and pushing the boundaries of creative storytelling.

The panelists each predict the major tech trends for the year ahead, with a large focus on GenAI and AI. A long-list of creative functions opened up by AI are singled out, including synthetic voices; face detection and tracking; automated clip selection; productivity tools; automated transcription; metadata enrichment; audio clean-up tools; training post-production skills using AI; and the pros and cons of colour-matching tools.

This episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks Podcast was recorded at the Future of Post Production Event 2024 event Broadcast Tech and Avid held at The BFI Southbank, London earlier this year.

Speakers:

Rhodri James, Director of Technology and Operations, Gorilla

Lily Ketley, Technical Manager, Finish Line

Jess Nottage, Operations & Technical Director, Clear Cut Group

Craig Dwyer, Vice President Strategy, Business Development & Alliances, Avid

Moderated by Max Miller, Senior Reporter, Broadcast Tech

Tim Burgess reveals what's next for Tim's Listening Party

Tim Burgess talks to Broadcast Tech editorial director Jake Bickerton about the development of Tim's Listening Party, from Twitter/X to an Absolute Radio show to a hit podcast series. Tim also covers the influence of AI in music, and reveals he's recorded a song he asked ChatGPT to write in the style of The Charlatans. Find out more in this great episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks, which was recorded live at the Media Production & Technology show at London Olympia.

The Future of Post Production

Broadcast Tech editorial director Jake Bickerton talks to president of Picture Shop, Cara Shepherd, Racoon founder David ‘Klaf’ Klafkowski and director of post production and partnership at Sky, Adam Downey, about the major issues affecting post-production right now.

The discussion covers the ongoing impact of the recent writers’ and actors’ strikes, and the potential of more strikes to follow from other sectors of the industry.

A big focus of the debate is on how post-production houses are having to adapt to deal with several major business challenges coming at once – the strikes, the commissioning slowdown, significant budget pressures, the cost of living crisis, etc.

In some cases, these have slashed workload for post houses by half. The good news is things are set to change dramatically in the second half of 2024, which could see facilities being packed out again, as discussed in this podcast.

Also discussed is how post is reacting to the growth of GenAI and automation, whether it’s a welcome change or a threat to business; whether post houses could or should accommodate the needs of the social-first generation of content creators; and ensuring data security within post-production.

This episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks podcast is a recording of the opening speaker panel discussion at the recent Future of Post Production Forum we ran in association with Avid at the BFI Southbank, London last month.

What rapidly evolving GenAI means for the media industry

Cyrus Mewawalla, head of thematic intelligence at GlobalData explains what the future looks like for GenAI and how it won't take as long as you might imagine for AI to present with 100% accuracy, to be a sentient being with a conscience that's at least as intelligent as a human being. And that's when the future of the human race could be under threat. In terms of the immediate future, Mewawalla looks at how GenAI is already impact every segment of the media and entertainment industry, and how it's evolving fast, improving ten fold every 12 months. This short podcast makes compelling listening. It was recorded at the AI Creative Summit, held at BFI Southbank, London towards the end of 2023.

Generative AI & the Art of Storytelling

This podcast is a recording of a speaker session from the AI Creative Summit, held at BFI Southbank, London, in November.

The session, called Generative AI & the Art of Storytelling, looks at where Artificial Intelligence can push the boundaries of storytelling; how it disrupts traditional methods of conveying a narrative; and how the industry might harness generative AI and ChatGPT.

The panellists talk about how AI will be the catalyst for new forms of storytelling – bringing illustrations to life, creating immersive theatre environments, adding the ability to speak to characters in a narrative context, and more. 

Talking about their current use of AI, one of the panellists says their whole team has to use it every day, for everything from mundane tasks to generating short form video scripts, for which they say it does a great job.

The panel's use of AI includes for creating post-production deep fakes to make someone speak in different languages and recording professional-sounding voiceover from a smartphone microphone.

The panel also talks about the ability to monetise the use of AI by selling prompts to get the most out of GenAI for generating scripts, and how certain jobs in the industry including rotoscoping will likely to replaced by AI.

More specifically, one panellist says AI will not steal your jobs but people who know how to use it may.

Another panellist believes AI will eventually be better than us at making TV programmes and “might even kill us, but we might as well enjoy it while it lasts”.

Speakers:
Guy Gadney, Co-Founder & CEO - Charisma.ai
Eline van der Velden, CEO & Founder - Particle6
Alex Hryniewicz, Director of Content - Little Dot Studios
Chair: John Cassy, CEO & Founder - Factory 42

The Business of AI: Where Artificial Intelligence can make a real difference

The Business of AI: Tools of the Trade - Where Artificial Intelligence Can Make a Real Difference

Discover how much of a game-changer AI and machine learning is, and how it's benefitting broadcast businesses. Find out how the industry is looking to adapt, what technologies and AI tools have already been adopted, and how to keep on top of innovative technologies in such a rapidly evolving market place.

This episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks podcast is the full recording of a speaker session at the AI Creative Summit held at BFI Southbank, London on 16 November.

The speakers:   

Maria Ingold, Strategy & Innovation CTO - mireality
Connagh Flynn, Senior Insights Manager - Formula E
Asa Bailey, Writer & Director - BAILEY AI Film Company
Sanjeevan Bala, Group Chief Data & AI Officer - ITV
Philippe Petitpont, CEO & Co-Founder - Newsbridge

AI Innovations: The Future of Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

In the first episode of the new series of the Broadcast Tech Talks Podcast, Jake Bickerton talks to Trevor Back from Speechmatics and Mira Pelovska from Broadteam about large language models and the future of multilingual automatic speech recognition.

The focus of the episode is about how AI-driven speech-to-text engines can more accurately and more effectively handle different dialects and accents, and what goes into the machine learning training to enable this to happen.

Trevor and Mira explain in straightforward terms what's currently possible for applications such as live subtitling utilising speech recognition, and how highly trained AI from Speechmatics makes it possible to cope with different voices from around the world and produce highly accurate speech transcriptions in a matter of seconds.

The podcast also covers what the future holds for AI-driven transcription and translation services as their accuracy and abilities continue to grow, especially with the introduction of genAI enabling a move from speech transcription to speech comprehension.

What this means in practice is Speechmatics will, in the future, be able to understand what was said, how it was said and the context in which it was said, which will have a huge range of benefits and potential uses within the broadcast industry.

Airspeeder takes flying car races to the sky with Base Media Cloud

Airspeeder head of media Stephen Sidlo joins Base Media Cloud CEO Ben Foakes to talk to Broadcast Tech & Sport Group editorial director Jake Bickerton about how they are capturing and handling broadcast and a host of digital content during the inaugural season of Airspeeder flying car races.

Airspeeder is the world’s first racing series for flying electric cars. The first competitive races are with the remotely piloted EXA Series, which navigate tracks in the sky in a series of close-proximity races.

Airspeeder and Base Media Cloud work together to create an end-to-end digital media workflow, which handles digital media content to be distributed online and used on social media. It also takes care of the analytical data for the robot Aviators that takes the place of pilots. They digitally receive remote inputs and mimic the movements of the human pilot on the ground.

The series includes multiple teams, with multiple craft transmitting data that needs to be processed, tagged and stored. The isolated locations where the races take place require flexible, scalable applications that can be scaled up and down as demand fluctuates on race days.

TikTok and BBC Studios - How to plan a content strategy for TikTok

TikTok head of UK media partnerships, Normanno Pisani and BBC Studios VP commercial, digital, Matt Ford talk to Broadcast Tech & Sport Group editorial director, Jake Bickerton, about how BBC Studios is bringing high-profile properties, including Top Gear, Eastenders and Doctor Who to the TikTok platform. Pisani and Ford discuss how they have been working together to plan the content mix and editorial tone of the different BBC Studios' TikTok accounts, in advance of their launch on the short-form video giant. The podcast offers advice for all content creators on how to plan and roll out a successful TikTok account; how to create 'trends' on TikTok and utilise existing trends; and how to ensure your account complements your broader content strategy across social media. Pisani and Ford also talk about the rapid growth of vertical video and how to best present content in this format.

How the OB sector has to adapt to the changing shape of live production

Outside broadcasts, post-production and studios provider Timeline CEO Dan McDonnell and head of operations Dave Harnett talk to Broadcast Tech reporter Max Miller about the company's recent expansion in Ealing. It has opened a 9,700 sq ft broadcast facility specifically designed for remote productions, and including a 2,000 sq ft virtual studio space. McDonnell and Harnett explain the thinking behind the facility, and how it's been designed to complement the company's existing range of live production services. They also discuss the future of live production, sustainability in production and the possibilities opened up by virtual studios. The podcast also covers the impact on the outside broadcast industry of the collapse of Arena TV, and why Timeline are continuing to invest in outside broadcast trucks despite the huge growth in remote production over the last few years.