THE FUTURE OF ENTERTAINMENT
a conversation with Richard Wormwell, Head of 360 production, dock10
Based in Manchester’s MediaCityUK, dock10 opened for business in 2011 as Britain’s newest purpose-built broadcast facility. The team provides broadcast and video production services, including 360 virtual reality. Creation caught up with Richard Wormwell, Head of 360 production, to talk about the future of digital entertainment.
What’s your vision for the future of entertainment?
We believe that traditional TV is here to stay and not going away any time soon. It’s still the biggest audience draw for advertising compared to the internet. Clearly the Amazon and Netflix model has disrupted what we call traditional TV and garners some programmes with significant budgets — Top Gear (Amazon) and The Crown (Netflix). Production companies making High End Drama series are now capitalising on the need for good content on streaming services and a BBC Commissioned Drama may well have Netflix top-up funding and vice versa.
BBC Worldwide, the Commercial Arm of the BBC and ITV have joined forces and set up a JV to run BritBox, an ad-free subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, in the US. The service will show a variety of content from new drama to old classics, soaps, sitcoms and much more.
Viceland’s big news story about being a TV disruptor by launching their channel ‘on TV’ was met with a lacklustre response. Achieving a maximum of 14,000 viewers on the launch and zero live viewers some nights, didn’t really disrupt in terms of taking away viewers. The question here is whether internet content can survive on a traditional TV platform with so many channels and such a lot of competition.
Big data analysis is already playing a huge part in the way TV is commissioned and scheduled. The UK’s Channel 4 totally re-worked the way that ALL4 works based on big data analysis; Netflix commission their dramas based on it but does it always work? Humans struggle to comprehend the vast amounts of data so it is left to AI to deliver results. Deep learning (part of machine learning where computer algorithms model vast amounts of data) will start to ask the questions that we haven’t thought of yet and should impact upon the whole commissioning and scheduling process.
Internet TV is obviously a huge threat to the traditional TV model. YouTube Red launched in the US and will be coming to the UK soon, Facebook TV is on the horizon and looking to create long form content. Interestingly as with the Viceland launch these channels are looking to mimic TV by heading into long form and scaling up the productions.
“YouTube Red Original movies and series are large-scale productions from top YouTube creators made possible by YouTube Red subscribers”. A smart move for advertising and subscription revenues.
Will our homes change to adapt to new ways of being entertained?
Microsoft is currently developing HoloLens. In 2016 they launched a developer kit however a commercial edition isn’t predicted for another 3–4 years. Products like HoloLens will bring augmented reality to the consumer — and could take over other entertainment platforms.
Meta is a system which came out as a rival to HoloLens. All staff at the company have a headset and all screens have been removed from the office. That is all TVs, computers etc. and all screen use is driven via headsets. You can interact with colleagues within an augmented world. Meta has gone for this to prove it works against HoloLens.
Will talent hubs remain in the cities where they’ve sprung up? Or are there emerging markets?
Given the scale and importance of big TV talent hubs such as London, MediaCityUK, Glasgow etc. these will remain. However, there will be other smaller hubs that emerge flying the flag for different sectors, for instance, Bournemouth has overtaken London as a Digital Hub; Warwick, Oxford and Brighton have thriving Entrepreneurial Gaming hubs; MediaCityUK is emerging as a hub for VR. Canada, Silicon Valley and East London — Shoreditch & Hoxton — are still tech/digital leaders. Nothing can be underestimated but it is known that the UK Creative Industries are worth £84 billion to the UK Economy currently and that figure is growing rapidly.
Will visual communication further replace language/text?
Quite possibly, the reference here is the amount of video screening on line currently. It is estimated that by 2019, 80% of the data transferred on the internet will be video. Netflix/Amazon, short form video and social media attribute to a fair amount of this percentage. However, Skype calls and FaceTime calls also contribute a large amount. What is mind-blowing is this… “To put that into perspective, it would take a single person 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross the network in a single month in 2019”.
And finally…if you think all of that is out of the box check out the next evolution of fitness trackers — sensors you can swallow.
How will AI impact the films and TV shows we consume (and how they’re made)?
The US sitcom Friends has been put into a Deep Learning System which has generated a script of a new episode, based on scripts from the entire series. It’s not brilliant in terms of finessed script writing so we won’t be sacking the writing team any day soon.
Netflix employs a similar system to understand what it should buy and commission. Big data is being fed into an AI system and this tells the company what to commission based on certain criteria — notably what you like about a TV series rather than just what you watched.
Chatbots, a computer program made with artificial intelligence to talk to humans over the internet is looking likely to be a next big thing. Already employed by several companies this is the next incarnation of Siri but with the next level of interaction. A chatbot could view your calendar and become your personal assistant ensuring you are maximising your time. Can we really fit any more into our days?
How will virtual reality/mixed reality impact the films and TV shows we consume?
There are currently five key areas to immersive content. We’ve tried to highlight the major differences here.
360 Video
Live action shot with a 360 camera rig
Mono or stereoscopic
Stereo or binaural sound
Compositing and CGI effects added in post-production
Basic levels of levels of interaction can be built into the content if developed into an app.
Virtual Reality
Computer Generated Environments
Primarily developed with games engine systems like Unity & Unreal Engine
Higher levels of interaction as content is primarily aimed the games markets
Augmented Reality
The technique of placing computer generated images (CGI) into real world environments.
Good examples of this are Pokémon Go! for mobile devices and Match of the Day for broadcast. The computer generated objects don’t interact with the real world environments that they are placed into. The camera positions may move and change but the objects stay as a rule, fixed to the position they were placed.
Mixed Reality
Similar to AR, in that it’s CGI within real world environments. In a mixed reality world, the CGI’s have the ability to interact and react to forces with the real-world environment. Imagine a Pokémon walking along a table top, when it reaches the end of the table it will realise and jump down to the floor, falling with the force of gravity. When it lands on the floor it will continue to walk, avoiding the pair of shoes that have been left there.
True VR
Takes mixed reality to the next level by giving the Pokémon some level of artificial intelligence. If you put all the above points together, you can start to see how you could meet an artificial intelligent character in a virtual world. You could talk to them and what you tell them, will affect the rest of the narrative in the experience.
Immersive content is still very much in its infancy and is constantly evolving. Content creators are still learning the lessons in producing work for this emerging medium. We have only just started to scratch the surface of what is possible with immersive storytelling and it isn’t going to replace the box in the corner of the lounge anytime soon. What it will do though is provide a new way for people to consume content. It will add to the mix of ever increasing media platforms available but because of the way we experience 360 video and VR content, the way that it focuses our attention and has the ability to provide us with greater experiences, then it is arguable that these forms of viewing will become more prevalent.
Currently immersive content can be quite isolating: you put on a head set and are blocked off from the world outside. Mixed reality headsets will start to elevate this issue, not forgetting that MR headsets will also be capable of producing full VR experiences. The way to make VR feel less isolating is by making it social. The internet developed from what was an information delivery platform to an entertainment based tool through the progression of social media networks. The next natural evolution will be for it to become an ‘experience’ platform and VR will drive this: the ability to create real-time rendered photorealistic environments that allow users to explore metaverses while interacting with other users and artificially intelligent CGI characters. These metaverses will allow us to experience holiday locations, do our shopping, chat with friends, share photos and videos… all the things that the internet currently allows us to do.
