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Media Type: Graphic

January 31, 2023
Posted January 31, 2023

CES 2023: Controlling the Connected Home and Media Delivery/Distribution

author
Adrian Pennington
consumer trends consumer technology


TL;DR

  • Smart TVs now represent the most important point of entertainment aggregation, control, and data collection in the connected home, according to Parks Associates.
  • Eighty-seven percent of US internet households subscribe to at least one OTT video service. More than half of US broadband households now combine one of Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney+ services with at least one other subscription OTT service to form their online video service portfolio.
  • Increases in connected device ownership, increased streaming video, and a large remote workforce have further strengthened the importance of home internet.


READ MORE: Following CES, Parks Associates Releases Top Insights across Key Tech Categories in Connected Home, Streaming Video, Health, SMB, and More (Parks Associates)

Smart TVs now represent the most important point of entertainment aggregation, control, and data collection in the connected home, according to a new report from Parks Associates, “2023 Top Insights – Smart Home,” based on findings from the Consumer Electronics Show.

The research analysts report that annual home service spending is $340 billion across home phone, internet, mobile, security and video services, amid continued growth of value-added services and connected devices in the home.

Consumers now place more value on their home’s internet service than previously. Increases in connected device ownership, increased streaming video, and a large remote workforce have further strengthened the importance of home internet.

Parks reports that consumers are seeking new bundles and services incorporating multiple service offerings, including home internet, pay-TV, landlines, mobile phones, and home security. The rise of these bundles, including broadband value-added services, has more than offset the decline in traditional bundles, it finds.

Such bundling and aggregation offer the traditional TV broadcaster “a path forward to reimagine video offerings in a multi-channel, multi-platform world,” the analyst says.

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: CES 2023: Where Are We With Smart TV Platforms?

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: CES 2023: The Consumer Technologies That’ll Impact Your Year

Data about consumer viewing via connected TVs allow providers to offer an improved experience with more relevant and personalized experiences for the viewer. Meanwhile, advertising partners can execute targeted marketing campaigns based on specific interests and behaviors. Parks cites new technologies promising to bring the “shoppable ad” vision to reality on TV through T-commerce experiences.

Content remains king — that is, the most significant factor influencing consumers’ viewing decisions regarding retention, engagement, and customer acquisition, per Parks’ report. Of this, live content has become a key component of many OTT service offerings and a staple of the consumer video portfolio, with good reason.

Sports programming, the biggest and most valuable component of live TV, is migrating from traditional broadcast television to internet streaming channels. Parks thinks that this transition makes it challenging for sports fans to locate content but that this creates opportunities for providers if they can attract fans with a bundled experience.

Internet service providers, meanwhile, are “modifying their relationships with pay-TV, treating the service as a value-add to home internet, and transitioning away from legacy cable head ends to cloud-based infrastructure and streaming TV services.” The goal is to reduce operational costs and widen service appeal, says Parks.

The analyst also notes that piracy is a real problem, potentially costing more than $67 billion dollars worldwide. It expects streaming services to experiment with new ways to protect content and to explore business models that can help recoup lost revenue from password sharing.


CONNECTING WITH CONNECTED TV:

  • Connected TV Takes Over the World
  • Connected TV Is the New TV, and That’s Where We Are
  • FAST TV and SVOD Are “Channeling” the Cable Business Model
  • More Consumers Are Headed Into the FAST Lane
  • SVOD vs. AVOD Today, All Connected TV Tomorrow
  • Ways Pay TV Operators Can Win the SVOD Game

  • Broadcast
  • Streaming
  • Capitalize
  • Distribution and Delivery
  • Media Content
  • Connected TV / OTT I Hybrid / IPTV

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CES 2023: Where Are We With Smart TV Platforms?
CES 2023: Where Are We With Smart TV Platforms?

The most notable developments for the Media & Entertainment industry at CES 2023 were in the Smart TV space, according to an IABM report.

CES 2023: The Consumer Technologies That’ll Impact Your Year
CES 2023: The Consumer Technologies That’ll Impact Your Year

Kicking off CES 2023, the Consumer Technology Association’s Steve Koenig says the world is headed toward a “metaverse of things.”

Leave a Comment on CES 2023: Controlling the Connected Home and Media Delivery/Distribution
January 25, 2023
Posted January 25, 2023

Mobile Video Overview: Data, Downloads and “House of the Dragon”



TL;DR

  • The mobile streaming industry is experiencing a download boom, with hours spent on mobile phones peaking at a record 4.1 trillion in 2022.
  • Adding coverage of major sporting events is a highly effective way to add new users to streaming services.
  • Non-sports content that created the biggest download spikes included “Euphoria” and “House of the Dragon,” both HBO Max shows.


READ MORE: State of Mobile 2023 (data.ai)

We’re spending up to five hours on our mobile phones every day, with exclusive sports content serving as a crucial on-ramp for new users, according to mobile data analytics provider Data.ai.

Its “State of Mobile 2023” report further explores a boom in downloads that saw mobile services downloaded a record 255 billion times globally last year. As a result, mobile ad spend is on track to hit $362 billion in 2023, after surpassing $336 in 2022, despite tightening marketing budgets.

Adding coverage of major sporting events can be a “highly effective-albeit expensive-way” to add new users to popular streaming services, is one is one takeaway.

Globally, streaming of the World Cup matches and top cricket tournaments in India drove the biggest download spikes.

In the US, the World Cup also drove large adoption spikes for Peacock TV and fubo TV, while streaming deals with the NFL helped Peacock TV, Paramount Network and Amazon Prime Video.

FOX Sports and Canada’s TSN GO also saw “huge increases” in adoption as a result of their FIFA World Cup coverage.

DAZN and ESPN are the “clear standouts” in terms of consumer spending in the sports app category, earning more in 2022 than the rest of the top 10 sports apps combined. Nearly all of ESPN’s revenue comes from the US, while DAZN has managed to monetize across more markets by casting a wide net in terms of its sports coverage in different markets. Some of DAZN’s content includes Serie A in Italy (where frequent blackouts don’t appear to have dented its popularity) and Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan, as well as pay-per-view boxing.

  • Time spent per day has reached five hours in the top mobile-first markets. Cr: Data.ai
    Time spent per day has reached five hours in the top mobile-first markets. Cr: Data.ai
  • Time spent per day has reached five hours in the top mobile-first markets. Cr: Data.ai
    Time spent per day has reached five hours in the top mobile-first markets. Cr: Data.ai
  • Despite tightening marketing budgets, mobile ad spend is on track to hit $362 billion in 2023 after surpassing $336 in 2022. Cr: Data.ai
    Despite tightening marketing budgets, mobile ad spend is on track to hit $362 billion in 2023 after surpassing $336 in 2022. Cr: Data.ai
  • Globally, streaming of the World Cup matches and top cricket tournaments in India drove the biggest download spikes. Cr: Data.ai
    Globally, streaming of the World Cup matches and top cricket tournaments in India drove the biggest download spikes. Cr: Data.ai
  • Led by TikTok, shortform video apps dominated consumer attention in 2022. Cr: Data.ai
    Led by TikTok, shortform video apps dominated consumer attention in 2022. Cr: Data.ai

Sports betting apps downloads peak at the start of the NFL season each year and the Super Bowl. The report found that sports betting installs reached 4.3 million at the start of the 2022-2023 NFL season, up 8% year-over-year and more than four times the total from September through October 2018. FanDuel emerged as the market leader in 2022, with BetMGM, DraftKings, and William Hill vying for the number two spot.

Data.ai observes that sports betting apps over-index for a male audience in the 25-44 age range, a similar demographic to those likely to use financial apps, for example, for cryptocurrency trading.

Non-sports content that created the biggest download spikes included Euphoria (HBO Max), Halloween Ends (Peacock TV) and House of the Dragon (HBO Max).

The United States market may be saturated by OTT providers but there’s still room for growth in Europe and Asia. That said, many European markets became more concentrated between 2020 and 2022, largely explained by the massive launch by Disney+ in the region. The report finds that OTT (over-the-top) apps such as Netflix and Disney+ grew 12% year-over-year to $7.2 billion.

“Look for other OTT providers to attempt to emulate Disney+’s successful global expansion,” is Data.ai’s note.

Spending on other apps (non-gaming) increased by 6% year-over-year to $58 billion, largely driven by subscriptions and purchases in OTT, dating, and short videos. Downloads increased 13% year-over-year to 165 billion.

Shortform video apps, led by TikTok, dominated consumer attention in 2022. Users of these apps streamed a whopping 3.1 billion hours of user-generated content daily, up 22% year-over-year, and spent $5.6 billion, up 55% year-over-year, fueling the creator economy.

“TikTok’s recent success was well beyond that of other Entertainment apps,” the report finds. “Over the past 10 years TikTok has more than twice as many downloads as the next closest app, YouTube.”

Other findings in the report: Time spent per day has reached five hours in the top mobile-first markets.

Downloads of mobile apps grew to 255 billion (+11% YoY), and hours spent peaked at 4.1 trillion (+9% YoY). Meanwhile, consumer spending across all app stores, cooled to $167 billion (-2% YoY) for first time ever due to decline in gaming spend, which was previously bolstered by pandemic conditions. However, non-gaming mobile services and subscriptions reached record spend.

“For the first time, macroeconomic factors are dampening growth in mobile spend,” says Data.ai CEO Theodore Krantz. “Consumer spend is tightening while demand for mobile is the gold standard. In 2023, mobile will be the primary battleground for unprecedented consumer touch, engagement and loyalty.”


WAIT, WE’RE ALREADY TALKING ABOUT 6G? WHY, YES WE ARE.

6G may already be on the horizon, but there’s still a lot to understand about the benefits — and limitations — of 5G, which is rolling out across the US but has yet to reach peak saturation. Dive into these selections from the NAB Amplify archives to learn what, exactly, 5G is, how it differs from 4G, and — most importantly — how 5G will bolster the Media & Entertainment industry on the road ahead:
  • How 5G Is Impacting M&E Today (and What 6G Is Going to Mean for Tomorrow)
  • How 5G Will Evolve Live Production Workflows
  • 5G and the Metaverse: This Is Happening, People
  • 5G Is Finally Starting to Make Sense to Consumers (and Cents for Providers)
  • Can 5G Deliver That Long-Awaited VR Adoption?

  • Streaming
  • Connect
  • Distribution and Delivery
  • 5G / 6G
  • Connected TV / Streaming Media Devices
  • Mobile Video Distribution Technologies

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It’s All About the Video: 5G in 2023 (and 2028)
It’s All About the Video: 5G in 2023 (and 2028)

Ericsson predicts 91% of the North American market will have adopted 5G by 2028, with video accounting for as much as 80% of mobile network traffic.

Leave a Comment on Mobile Video Overview: Data, Downloads and “House of the Dragon”
January 22, 2023
Posted January 21, 2023

TikTok and the Meme-ification of Social Marketing

Click here to view a larger version of this graphic.


TL;DR

  • TikTok provides key messages for brands wanting to engage with the billions of users on the shortform video platform in a new report.
  • TikTok claims it fosters endless opportunities to spread joy; among TikTok users who took an action off-platform as a result of TikTok content, 90% said the platform makes them happy and never gets boring.
  • TikTok’s big prediction? In 2023, TikTok-first entertainment will inspire people to test out new products and ways of thinking and behaving.


READ MORE: What’s Next 2023 Trend Report (TikTok)

If you’re looking for clues for how TikTok is shaping global culture and politics you won’t find them in its own report, a glossily produced brochure enticing brands to work with creators and influence users of its platform.

Much of what the shortform video giant says in its “What’s Next: 2023 Trend Report” could have been plucked from similar marketing messages produced over the years for YouTube. And maybe that’s the point. Move over Google, there’s a new place for investors to roost.

“Essentially, [TikTok] is a space where people can find new ideas on how to explore their passions and live their lives,” we learn. “And as people seek out ways to break the status quo, they’ll look to peers and role models who have the confidence to live life the way they want to.”

Sofia Hernandez, global head of business marketing for TikTok, is quoted, also saying not a lot: “2022 was the year people realized they didn’t have to live their lives as they always have done — with different points of view and ideas transcending cultures on TikTok. Next year we’re going to see more of this — as our communities get more confident and inspire positive change together.”

Against the backdrop of the increasing cost of living, apparently what people want is to have fun. They want humor, they want to feel happy and healthy. They want to feel part of a community and, above all, they want to be entertained.

It’s not rocket science, but TikTok says its platform is the best place for advertisers to reach audiences and that to do so they should work with creators.

Four out of five users say TikTok is very or extremely entertaining, per the report. “This means that when advertising messaging is delivered like an ad, but loved like entertainment, brands can see incredible business results,” TikTok explains. “For brands, the most effective messages on TikTok are uplifting, funny and personalized, or entertaining their audiences. Brands can build on this entertainment value by using editing techniques like syncing sounds to transitions or adding text overlays — which are effective at keeping viewers’ attention.”

The report differentiates content on TikTok from other platforms, where it is “personalized” based on broad identity categories or simple browsing histories. In fact, TikTok is 1.8 times more likely to introduce people to new topics they didn’t know they liked compared to traditional social platforms, per the report. We learn that content is curated on the platform based on what viewers find entertaining, so it captures their attention and trust.

“The trust is a result of who’s making the content. When a viewer sees a video from a creator they can relate to or from an expert they’re more likely to take the information to heart.”

Among people who took an “off-platform” action as a result of a TikTok video, 92% say they felt a positive emotion that ultimately resulted in an off-platform action. Meanwhile, 72% say they obtained reviews from creators they trust on TikTok, more than any other platform.

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: Culture Is Being Atomized by TikTok. Is That a Bad Thing?

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: How TikTok Is Targeting Its Next Two Billion Users (Hint: With Your TV)

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: TikTok, From Inception to International, Ahem, “Incident”

TikTok’s big prediction? In 2023, TikTok-first entertainment will inspire people to test out new products and new ways of thinking and behaving.

We are also led to believe that “people come to the platform to uncover truths and debunk myths, which builds credibility and trust between Creators and their viewers,” which may be news to those concerned about TikTok’s potential for political bias or cultural sway, though in truth these levels of mistrust have yet to reach Twitter and Facebook-style proportions.

Have longer video footage at your disposal? TikTok advises you to let artificial intelligence automatically cut video clips and save yourself time on editing, “so you can focus on the fun stuff.”

Joy, we also understand from the report, is a growing factor in people’s purchasing decisions worldwide, so it should be a key element of marketing strategies in 2023.

Click here to view a larger version of the graphic

“Create TikTok content that helps people carve out joy for themselves, or even provides it through humor, relaxation and relatable points of view. Different creative approaches and tools can help you incorporate these elements into the videos you make for the platform.

In 2023, “messaging on TikTok — and beyond — should speak to this desire for levity and encourage people to make more room for themselves.”

@tiktokforbusiness

Understanding TikTok storytelling culture is 🔑. Get the full scoop in our official What’s Next 2023 Trend Report at the link in bio!

♬ original sound – TikTok for Business

SOCIAL MEDIA AND HUMANITY’S DIGITAL FUTURE:

Technology and societal trends are changing the internet. Concerns over data privacy, misinformation and content moderation are happening in tandem with excitement about Web3 and blockchain possibilities. Learn more about the tech and trends driving humanity’s digital future with these hand-curated articles from the NAB Amplify archives:
  • The Social Media Trends That’ll Impact Your Business in 2023
  • If Social Media Makes You Feel Some Type of Way, Then It’s Working
  • Where We’re Headed Next With Social Media Marketing
  • Social Media Is Making and Remaking Itself All the Time
  • Is Recommendation Media the New Standard for Content Discovery?

  • Content Creation
  • Streaming
  • Connect
  • Distribution and Delivery
  • Media Content
  • AdTech / MarTech
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking / UGC

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Here’s Where Social Marketing Is Headed
Here’s Where Social Marketing Is Headed

Social media management company Hootsuite has released its Social Media 2023 Trends report. Check out some notable takeaways from the report.

Social Media Marketing Has Become an Unstoppable Force
Social Media Marketing Has Become an Unstoppable Force

The value of social media across functions is clearer than ever, but finding experienced talent is the top challenge businesses face.

Leave a Comment on TikTok and the Meme-ification of Social Marketing
January 25, 2023
Posted January 20, 2023

What’s Next for Streaming? (It’s All About the ARPU, Baby)

Penn Badgley in season four of “You,” courtesy of Netflix
Penn Badgley in season four of “You,” courtesy of Netflix


TL;DR

  • After a tough 2022, premium subscription streamers are in the middle of reorienting their business model from content commissions to distribution.
  • The days of multi-million dollar paychecks for show creators seem to be over as content must now wash its face in metrics for ARPU (Average Revenue Per Unit).
  • A greater focus on franchise content — sequels and spinoffs — and linear TV-like schedule releases can help streamers counter high churn rates.


READ MORE: From Artificial Intelligence to Profitability: 5 New Rules for Streamers in 2023 (The Wrap)

Netflix’s decision to cancel high profile drama 1899 after just one season came as a shock to fans and a reality check to content producers that streaming shows will be cut to a different cloth from now on.

Just as consumers don’t have an endless budget to subscribe to streaming services, so content providers are no longer willing to open the checkbook if the numbers don’t add up.

And those numbers have changed along with the way success is measured.

“The enthusiasm for streaming among consumers is still there, but I think the assumption that all these platforms are going to continue to grow and add subscribers every quarter is gone,” Hub Entertainment Research founder Jon Giegengack told Lucas Manfredi at The Wrap. “I’m not entirely sure why people thought it would go on forever, but we’ve reached the point where that’s not guaranteed.”

Netflix’s first subscriber loss in over a decade last April caused a shock wave that sent streamers back to the drawing board. Revised strategies include a shift of focus from pure subscriber growth to profitability and average revenue per user.

“Ultimately, companies need to generate cash so that they can pay the bills and not go bankrupt,” David Offenberg, an associate professor of finance at Loyola Marymount University, told The Wrap. “I think the focus will be on ARPU [Average Revenue Per Unit] for the rest of eternity at this point. We’re done with focusing on subscribers. And if you’re not at scale yet, your chances of getting there are pretty slim.”

Netflix was the first to alter course and has succeeded in leading the competition on ARPU. Figures in the article show Netflix has an ARPU of $16.37 in the US and Canada, followed by Hulu’s ARPU of $12.23 and Warner Bros. Discovery of $10.66. Disney+ has lagged behind its rivals with a domestic ARPU of just $6.10.

Another universal tactic is to adopt different pricing tiers with many streamers introducing a free or lower cost ad-supported option.

Additionally, many streamers are increasingly leveraging bundled services. The average household has 12.5 different entertainment sources that they consume, according to a Hub Entertainment survey of TV consumers. These sources include streaming TV, social media, gaming, music, sports, podcasts, audiobooks and reading.

  • Cr: Parrot Analytics
    Cr: Parrot Analytics
  • Cr: Parrot Analytics
    Cr: Parrot Analytics

Companies that are able to super-aggregate these services into bundles will have an edge, Manfredi maintains. Notable examples of super bundles include Amazon Prime, which offers benefits like access to Prime Video content and free delivery on Amazon purchases, and Apple One, which includes AppleTV+, iCloud storage, Apple News, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and AppleFitness+.

The cancellation of major shows like 1899 is far from unique and speaks to the fact that streamers can no longer afford to have an endless library of shows and movies

“As profitability and ARPU take center stage moving forward, streamers have learned that they will need to be more mindful about their content spend and what that investment is going towards,” says Manfredi.

1899 was an expensive show to produce and required an entirely new and unique virtual production volume to be built in Berlin. Likewise, the multimillion-dollar deals that have been awarded to show creators like Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes and Rian Johnson, “are a thing of the past,” according to Morning Consult entertainment and media analyst Kevin Tran.

“Streamers need to make better use of the intellectual property they already own while also keeping in mind moving forward that sheer quantity of content is now far from a compelling differentiation factor,” he says.

On the flip side, Tran warns that pulling content could make showrunners and actors “more hesitant to work with a company that they view as too eager to axe pricey or declining shows from their streaming platforms” and potentially anger fans of those shows.

Manfredi also thinks that the days of binge viewing are largely over. It makes more sense for streamers to drop episodes, especially of its most popular content, over a period of months to eke out subscriber engagement. Netflix’s two-part release of Stranger Things S4 last year was a case in point.

“If people can binge watch a whole show and then drop their subscription until the next season comes out, that’s a pretty tough calculation if you have to come up with a brand new, super expensive show to reengage them every time,” Giegengack said. “If you parse those shows out and the episodes come out once a week, or maybe starting with two like they do on Paramount+ to get people hooked, and then parse them out further apart after that, each piece of content that you’re investing with can keep people engaged for a longer period of time.”

Churn is still a huge issue for all streamers. In the third quarter of 2022, cancellations across Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV+, Disney+, Discovery+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Showtime and Starz grew to 32 million, according to Antenna. The figure represents a “significant expansion” from 28 million cancellations in the previous quarter and 25.2 million cancellations in the same quarter a year ago.

In a bid to counter churn, Manfredi detects a new urgency around commissioning franchises. One poll suggests 75% of people are likely to cycle subscriptions in the next six months with the main stated reason being that there was only one title on a given streamer that they were interested in viewing.

 “A reliable way to retain subscribers is to keep them connected to things that they know and love,” Lionsgate Television Group vice chairman Sandra Stern told The Wrap. “I think for streamers particularly that is a really major objective.”

Disney+ has mastered this strategy with regular output of new Marvel Studios shows such as Loki and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and new Star Wars series like Andor. Netflix has scored success with Wednesday and Paramount+ continues to earn mileage from Yellowstone spinoffs. Look out for Peacock’s John Wick universe spinoff later this year.

  • Streaming
  • Capitalize
  • Distribution and Delivery
  • AVOD / SVOD / FAST
  • AdTech / MarTech
  • Connected / Mobile TV Apps
  • Connected TV / OTT I Hybrid / IPTV

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Behind the Scenes (and Screens) of Netflix’s “1899”
Behind the Scenes (and Screens) of Netflix’s “1899”

The creators of “1899” understand that virtual production requires designing the story, as well as the set, with rigor and detail.

“It’s Like Doing Four Movies in Two Years:” Editing and Post on “Andor”
“It’s Like Doing Four Movies in Two Years:” Editing and Post on “Andor”

“Andor” creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy and editor John Gilroy recount the complexities of bringing the Star Wars episodic to the screen.

Leave a Comment on What’s Next for Streaming? (It’s All About the ARPU, Baby)
January 23, 2023
Posted January 17, 2023

Virtual Production Is Going Great, But… We Have Some Talent and Tech Challenges



TL;DR

  • Altman Solon’s 2022 Global Film & Video Production Report finds virtual production is on the rise, but the industry faces challenges over sourcing talent and harnessing the power of data.
  • Productions are shifting towards a data-driven approach to improve production forecasting and measure VP success.
  • Virtual production is still in its early days, with widespread adoption limited to specific projects where it’s easily applicable. However, there are emerging trends around how VP is used, the impact it has on projects, and criteria used for deciding when to use it.


READ MORE: Altman Solon Report: Virtual Production Helps Filmmakers and Studios Collaborate, Meet Deadlines, & Cut Costs (Altman Solon)

Virtual production continues to gain traction across the film and TV industries, but the cost of using it remains high and talent with VP experience and training is limited, according to a new Altman Solon report.

Creatives are still be skeptical about incorporating the technologies — and the research finds there’s also a lack of sophisticated data analysis necessary to make the case for virtual production.

The consultancy’s 2022 Global Film & Video Production Report highlights VP as a growing trend in the industry, driven by the need for virtual and collaborative tools to lower production costs, improve timelines, and overcome the limitations of physical production sets.

It surveyed over 100 industry experts with more than three years of experience in virtual production and found that motion capture was the most popular VP technology, with 50% reporting they or their team have used it over the past 12 months.

The second most popular tool, cloud-based editing (48%), has gained favor among production staff because it enables remote collaboration. Three-quarters of respondents identified virtual scouting as a tool that saves money and shortens timelines. Newer technologies like in-camera VFX (42%) and virtual scouting (39%) have lower adoption rates.

Despite the popularity and effectiveness of certain tools, widespread adoption is limited to specific projects where VP is easily applicable — often projects that require many filming locations or sci-fi/fantasy productions.

For small productions, the survey found that travel budget savings can make a virtual production project more economically viable.

“While medium and small stages exist, producers of mid-tier content often lack the readiness and experience to shoot on a Tier 2 or medium stage, and one-off shoots don’t reap the benefits of shooting multiple episodes or seasons on a stage,” the report says.

There are some 84 virtual production stages in the US and another 40 in the UK, however this number also includes smaller “xR stages” used mainly for music videos or commercials, not shows or films.

The report suggests that smaller production studios with limited resources won’t be able to afford a larger stage and may opt for traditional shooting methods or green screens, rendering LED volumes less relevant for the mid- to low-budget markets.

  • Cr: Altman Solon
    Cr: Altman Solon
  • Cr: Altman Solon
    Cr: Altman Solon
  • Cr: Altman Solon
    Cr: Altman Solon
  • Cr: Altman Solon
    Cr: Altman Solon
  • Cr: Altman Solon
    Cr: Altman Solon

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: A Brief Voyage Through the History of Virtual Production

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: Virtual Production: A Primer

READ IT ON AMPLIFY: LED Wall Enlightenment: What You Need to Know About ICVFX

Talent Shortage

Because virtual production is still an emerging technology, there is a shortage of talent with “hands-on” experience in the industry, creating staffing challenges for production studios. Additionally, the broader industry has historically lacked diversity in terms of race and gender, creating a talent funnel issue when trying to hire candidates of diverse backgrounds for VP-specific roles.

Instead, most respondents are now looking for candidates in adjacent industries like gaming, AR/VR, animation, automotive and transport, and architecture, among others, and through on-campus recruitment to find candidates with the necessary technical skills. Candidates from industries that use real-time gaming technology and are familiar with the workflows are desirable for VP roles.

“Virtual production is the future of global filmmaking but how and when it maximizes its potential will be determined by the industry’s ability to attract talent to this new field,” said Altman Solon director Derek Powell.

“It’s clear that the networking-heavy approach used in Hollywood for generations will not deliver the VP workforce needed now and in the future. The good news is that studios are employing new and creative recruiting techniques, including better outreach to candidates with diverse backgrounds.”

Virtual Production as Part of a Data-Driven Strategy

Because of virtual production, studios now have more access to data, opening the opportunity to gather data across the production process and run analytics to uncover insights for more informed decision-making.

That’s a change, since historically, production studios didn’t collect technical production data. VP can be used to collect and leverage production data that identifies possible efficiencies (for example, using lens metadata and lighting parameters defined in the gaming engine to make corrections in post-production). According to the report, there is potential for productions to use VP data to automate processes in post-production that in the past were done with creative teams, thus saving time and money.

However, while VP tools enable great collection of data versus traditional production methods, production teams hit roadblocks when collecting it. According to the survey, the top three limitations to collecting data are “lack of business intelligence strategy” (62%), “lack of business intelligence impact” (49%), and “lack of training and execution” (45%).

“All these inhibitors are characteristic of organizations with immature business intelligence and data strategies,” finds the consultancy — which would no doubt offer its services to assist in this regard. “This indicates that while production teams have the tools to gather and analyze data, they are still nascent in this area and slowly transitioning to be more data-driven.”

This matters most when budget forecasting, which was the top data-usage focus of VP executives surveyed. Altman Solon says: “In traditional productions, variables associated with set design, shooting, travel, and logistics can change greatly when a shooting location needs to change or if a scene needs to be reshot, which can include bringing talent and crews back to a location. For these reasons, using data to improve budget forecasting was the top-ranked selection in the survey.”

Other Issues Highlighted in the Report

Currently, there are no standard virtual production processes, and each production has its own unique process structure. Data security is also a concern for half the respondents, largely due to the use of cloud-based tools, which some users perceive as having weaker security controls than on-premises solutions. Similarly, just under 50% of respondents expressed concern over the potential for customizable workflow configurations since cloud-based tools have fewer customization capabilities.

Next, Listen to This

Epic Games’ Los Angeles Lab Director Connie Kennedy and American Cinematographer Virtual Production Editor Noah Kadner join us to talk about the confluence of practical and virtual production, and help shed some light on what virtual production actually is — and isn’t.

  • Content Creation
  • Create
  • Acquisition and Production
  • Post Production
  • Virtual Production

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A Brief Voyage Through the History of Virtual Production
A Brief Voyage Through the History of Virtual Production

The use of LED walls and LED volumes — a major component of virtual production — can be traced directly back to the front- and rear-projection techniques common throughout much of the 20th century.

Behind the Scenes (and Screens) of Netflix’s “1899”
Behind the Scenes (and Screens) of Netflix’s “1899”

The creators of “1899” understand that virtual production requires designing the story, as well as the set, with rigor and detail.

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January 9, 2023
Posted January 9, 2023

How Diffusion Drives Generative AI

AI art


TL;DR

  • Diffusion models replaced GANs (generative adversarial networks) to drive the recent trend in generative AI tools.
  • Diffusion-based AI has also proved adept at composing music and video.
  • The tech has been around for a decade but it wasn’t until OpenAI developed CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) that diffusion became practical in everyday applications.


READ MORE: A brief history of diffusion, the tech at the heart of modern image-generating AI (TechCrunch)

Text-to-image AI exploded last year as technical advances greatly enhanced the fidelity of art that AI systems could create. At the heart of these systems is a technology called diffusion, which is already being used to auto-generate music and video.

So what is diffusion, exactly, and why is it such a massive leap over the previous state of the art? Kyle Wiggers has done the research at TechCrunch.

We learn that earlier forms of AI technology relied on generative adversarial networks, or GANs. These proved pretty good at creating the first deepfaking apps. For example, StyleGAN, an NVIDIA-developed system, can generate high-resolution head shots of fictional people by learning attributes like facial pose, freckles and hair.

READ MORE: Can you guess which face is real, and which is computer generated? (TechCrunch)

In practice, though, GANs suffered from a number of shortcomings owing to their architecture, says Wiggers. The models were inherently unstable and also needed lots of data and compute power to run and train, which made them tough to scale.

Diffusion rode to the rescue. The tech has actually been around for a decade but it wasn’t until OpenAI developed CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) that diffusion became practical in everyday applications.

CLIP classifies data — for example, images — to “score” each step of the diffusion process based on how likely it is to be classified under a given text prompt (e.g. “a sketch of a dog in a flowery lawn”).

Wiggers explains that, at the start, the data has a very low CLIP-given score, because it’s mostly noise. But as the diffusion system reconstructs data from the noise, it slowly comes closer to matching the prompt.

“A useful analogy is uncarved marble — like a master sculptor telling a novice where to carve, CLIP guides the diffusion system toward an image that gives a higher score.”

OpenAI introduced CLIP alongside the image-generating system DALL-E. Since then, it’s made its way into DALL-E’s successor, DALL-E 2, as well as open source alternatives like Stable Diffusion.

So what can CLIP-guided diffusion models do? They’re quite good at generating art — from photorealistic imagery to sketches, drawings and paintings in the style of practically any artist.

Researchers have also experimented with using guided diffusion models to compose new music. Harmonai, an organization with financial backing from Stability AI, the London-based startup behind Stable Diffusion, released a diffusion-based model that can output clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs. More recently, developers Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros created a hobby project dubbed Riffusion that uses a diffusion model cleverly trained on spectrograms — visual representations — of audio to generate tunes.

READ MORE: Try ‘Riffusion,’ an AI model that composes music by visualizing it (TechCrunch)

Researchers have also applied it to generating videos, compressing images and synthesizing speech. Diffusion may be replaced with a more efficient machine learning technique but the exploration has only just begun.

READ MORE: Video Diffusion Models (arXivLabs)

READ MORE: Better than JPEG? Researcher discovers that Stable Diffusion can compress images (Ars Technica)

READ MORE: FastDiff: A Fast Conditional Diffusion Model for High-Quality Speech Synthesis (arXivLabs)

Next, Watch This




AI ART — I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS BUT I KNOW WHEN I LIKE IT:

Even with AI-powered text-to-image tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Craiyon still in their relative infancy, artificial intelligence and machine learning is already transforming the definition of art — including cinema — in ways no one could have ever predicted. Gain insights into AI’s potential impact on Media & Entertainment in NAB Amplify’s ongoing series of articles examining the latest trends and developments in AI art
  • What Will DALL-E Mean for the Future of Creativity?
  • Recognizing Ourselves in AI-Generated Art
  • Are AI Art Models for Creativity or Commerce?
  • In an AI-Generated World, How Do We Determine the Value of Art?
  • Watch This: “The Crow” Beautifully Employs Text-to-Video Generation



  • Content Creation
  • Intelligent Content
  • Management and Systems
  • Media Content
  • Al / Machine Learning

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January 25, 2023
Posted January 1, 2023

It’s All About the Video: 5G in 2023 (and 2028)

5G wireless network


TL;DR

  • Ericsson predicts 91% of the North American market will have adopted 5G by 2028.
  • The company is betting that mobile subscriptions have started to level off, betting that the next six years will only add 800 million new subscriptions.
  • Advances in mobile technologies could quintuple data used by 2028.


If you consider your smartphone a multimedia/multipurpose technology device, then Ericsson’s mobile reports are for you. The latest edition is available here.

Here’s the explanatory overview: Global 5G growth amid macroeconomic challenges.

North America and northern east Asia (e.g. China, South Korea, Taiwan) lead the way in 5G adoption, for now. India is expected to be a big player as it continues efforts to launch its own high-tech future, one that embraces all of the country not just a few select well-educated metropolises. Similarly situated countries, such as Indonesia and Nigeria, are also showing strong early adoption numbers.

The report says, “In 2028, it is projected that North America will have the highest 5G penetration at 91%, followed by Western Europe at 88%.”

In terms of current usage, “North America and North East Asia are expected to have the highest 5G subscription penetration by the end of 2022 at around 35%, followed by the Gulf Cooperation Council countries at 20% and Western Europe at 11%.”

By 2028, Ericsson expects 5 billion 5G subscriptions worldwide.

There is also a prediction that mobile subscriptions (mostly smartphones) will reach 9.2 billion in 2028, up from 8.4 billion calculated for this year. That doesn’t sound like a lot of growth, indicating that nearly everyone who wants a mobile subscription probably has one; remember that there are more than 8 billion people on planet Earth as of 2022.

Click here or on the graphic for a larger version of this graphic.

The report’s “5G in South East Asia and Oceania: A closer look” section looks into that region and the plans to move many, if not all, of those developing countries (referring to notably The Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia) into the first world on the wireless front over the next several years. Ericsson thinks that total mobile data traffic in that region will quintuple between now and 2028.

(BTW, that’s why Ericsson may have underestimated its 2028 figures. There are going to be a lot of new people hopping onto the wireless train in the next few years.)

5G Driving Mobile Data Growth

That’s the where. As to the why, perhaps the most interesting section is “5G to drive all mobile data growth.”

That assessment probably doesn’t surprise anyone, but the incline of the rise should open eyes. In other words, what we’ve seen in the explosion of mobile device data usage over the last five years is a ripple compared to a coming tsunami in the next five years. Much of that will be in video, accounting for as much of 80% of mobile network traffic.

Click here or on the image above for a larger version of this graphic.

4G continues to grow as well, but the report predicts it will peak soon with a gradual decline in its market as 5G is implemented in more locales, regions and countries, along with the usual gradual tech swap out takes over.

“Fixed Wireless Access” is also a growing sector, per Ericsson. These are broadband wireless access points, currently numbering around 100 million, at businesses or on towers for public and private use.

Besides human users, smart devices for the Internet of Things are continually developing. Ericsson expects that market to get hotter, possibly by five times by 2028, with over 300 million access points by then. Northern east Asia is a particular hot spot for them.

5G Roadblocks

Among the things slowing even faster deployment, depending on the country involved, includes making radio frequency spectrum available.

Lower, less RF-efficient bands, below 7 GHz, are the first auctioned off, but they realize the weakest, though cheapest, performance. These bands propelled 3G and 4G in most technologically capable countries and are the technology breeding grounds for developing countries.

Now it comes time to fill out the 7 GHz group and move to the 24 GHz band and above, where 5G can flex its muscles. Being able to operate in multiple bands allows for efficient service uses — low-bandwidth items, for instance IoT and voice-only traffic, can flow unimpeded while high-bandwidth-hungry video and gaming services can operate in the same network on a higher frequency band.

AR for Mobile

The report touches on augmented reality for mobile devices (think Pokémon everywhere 24/7!) and a slow acceptance of improved smart glasses and visors. Ericsson acknowledges the technology and its support ecosystem have yet to mature.

Looking forward, the report says: “As the AR ecosystem develops, traffic arising from AR usage could significantly impact the current forecast. The amount of traffic that will be generated over mobile networks, in addition to mobile broadband and fixed wireless traffic, will depend not only on the uptake and utilization rates of the applications, but also where the critical functions mentioned in the ‘AR devices’ section take place.”

That other processing location will be in a vast network of edge services and network-inhabiting hard and soft virtual processors — all utilizing 5G technology and networks.

On a less technical note, the report also describes a growing practice in flexible bundle packaging for services. These can include gaming, content aggregation, differing speed levels, shorter contracts, to appeal to consumers have more choices among service providers.


WAIT, WE’RE ALREADY TALKING ABOUT 6G? WHY, YES WE ARE.

6G may already be on the horizon, but there’s still a lot to understand about the benefits — and limitations — of 5G, which is rolling out across the US but has yet to reach peak saturation. Dive into these selections from the NAB Amplify archives to learn what, exactly, 5G is, how it differs from 4G, and — most importantly — how 5G will bolster the Media & Entertainment industry on the road ahead:
  • How 5G Is Impacting M&E Today (and What 6G Is Going to Mean for Tomorrow)
  • How 5G Will Evolve Live Production Workflows
  • 5G and the Metaverse: This Is Happening, People
  • 5G Is Finally Starting to Make Sense to Consumers (and Cents for Providers)
  • Can 5G Deliver That Long-Awaited VR Adoption?

  • Streaming
  • Connect
  • Distribution and Delivery
  • 5G / 6G
  • Mobile Video Distribution Technologies

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Means of Measuring 5G Video Performance
Means of Measuring 5G Video Performance

Mobile data analyst Opensignal’s Video Experience Metric measures 5G performance, including picture quality, loading time and buffering.

After Tests and Improvements, 5G Network Slicing Opens Up to Broadcasters
After Tests and Improvements, 5G Network Slicing Opens Up to Broadcasters

A new survey finds operators will commercialize 5G network slicing over the next two years, focusing on enterprise services and live events.

As 5G Moves Into Mass Adoption, XR, 360 and 4K Video Move Along With It
As 5G Moves Into Mass Adoption, XR, 360 and 4K Video Move Along With It

Already progressing from early to mass adoption, 5G is enabling the transition from immersive services to metaverse experiences.

Leave a Comment on It’s All About the Video: 5G in 2023 (and 2028)
January 9, 2023
Posted January 1, 2023

After Tests and Improvements, 5G Network Slicing Opens Up to Broadcasters



TL;DR

  • Network slicing is a capability of the 5G standard which is being tested and gradually rolled out. It enables operators to carve up their 5G network into slices that can be finely tuned to suit the needs of many customers.
  • 5G Network slicing revenues will grow over 100 times by 2029 to reach more than $16 billion in revenue that that would otherwise not be generated.
  • Telstra, Ericsson and Qualcomm achieve new download speed benchmark of 7.3Gbps.


READ MORE: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey (Heavy Reading)

There are signs that operators will commercialize 5G network slicing over the next two years, finds the new 2022 “5G Network Slicing Operator Survey” from consultancy Heavy Reading. The emphasis initially will be on enterprise services, but broadcasters are also eager to use the technology to improve coverage of live events.

Network slicing is a mechanism to isolate a segment of the 5G network end to end in a local area for the specific requirements of a customer.

Rethink Technology Research predicts that network slicing will add revenues of $16.1 billion by 2029 over above what 5G infrastructures would have earned otherwise.

Its report further identified manufacturing as likely to generate the biggest slice of network slicing revenues by 2029 at 19% of the total, with energy/utilities and healthcare joint second on 15% each and M&E media/entertainment on 7%.

Yet “the surge” in revenues will not really begin until 2024 when there is substantial base of 5G Standalone infrastructure to build on.

Standalone (SA) represents the full 5G infrastructure including RAN (Radio Access Network) and Core, which is essential to unleash the full capability of network slices to enable differentiated services catering for multiple user groups and applications sharing the same physical network,” explains Rethink.

Broadcasters are keen to use 5G slicing to augment coverage and reduce the costs of outside broadcasts such as sports matches, mass public celebrations or news gathering. By their nature these are congested areas in which wireless bandwidth is in short supply and for which the only option until now has been expensive uplink by satellite.

READ MORE: Network Slicing revenues to grow over 100 times by 2029 (Rethink Technology Research)

Tests over the past couple of years among broadcasters and telco operators appear to confirm that the technology is on the verge of being viable for practical use.

Ericsson and Telstra Broadcast Services (TBS), for example, trialed 5G SA Slicing for Australian broadcaster Network Ten around live coverage of a major horse racing meet in Melbourne.

TBS regional chief Karen Clark said the tests clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of 5G slicing for uplink of live, premium video feeds “to produce high bandwidth, low latency television from a congested venue, without the need for traditional wired infrastructure.”

Paramount (Australia and New Zealand) also partnered on the project. Its VP of technology, Dean Wadsworth, claimed the success of the trial “demonstrates that coverage of live events can be enriched with reliable links from roving crews, which can be more cost-effective.”

All parties point to exploring further opportunities in the near future.

READ MORE: Telstra Broadcast Services Successfully Trials Live Broadcast Contribution Over 5G (TV Technology)

Yet such event-based scenarios are deemed the lowest priority among telcos, as reflected in a Heavy Reading survey conducted last summer. Principal analyst Gabriel Brown suggests this may reflect the challenges with addressing demand that is short term/transient in nature with a relatively immature technology stack.

“Short term, network slice instances will have greater requirements on automation. Perhaps as slice management technology matures, this use case will rise higher on operator priority lists.”

A survey of staffers at telcos (or communications service providers) by Heavy Reading earlier this year found that the industry had a job to do to educate potential customers about the benefits of the tech.

Less than a third of respondents said “most customers understand the concept and see value in it,” which implies that two-thirds did not.

“Operators, and their vendor partners, will need to invest in customer education to demonstrate the value of network slicing,” advised Brown.

READ MORE: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey: Results and Analysis (Light Reading)

  • Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
    Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
  • Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
    Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
  • Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
    Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
  • Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
    Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
  • Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
    Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
  • Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading
    Cr: 5G Network Slicing Operator Survey/Heavy Reading

As an aside, Telstra and Ericsson partnering with Qualcomm Technologies just recorded a new 5G download peak speed benchmark of 7.3Gbps achieved at a Telstra live mobile site located at the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia.

This improved peak speed capability further will help Telstra to deliver network slicing. By adding improved peak speeds and capacity, Telstra says it can deliver more capable network slices to more customers.

READ MORE: Telstra, Ericsson and Qualcomm achieve new download speed benchmark (Ericsson)

Network slicing could potentially be used to reduce, control and uplift the video performance of major streaming services like Netflix and Google.

As Heavy Reading’s Brown explains, most of the traffic on broadband networks is generated by customer demand for services from OTT. Approximately 56% of global network traffic is generated by six companies, according to Sandvine.

“In mobile networks, it is logical to consider how network slicing may be able to improve the performance, efficiency, and user experience of the most in-demand services or enable new service experiences offered by these types of providers (e.g., virtual reality gaming, metaverse meetings, or similar).

“This is, however, a thorny topic, given issues related to net neutrality and because, in some markets, some telecoms are actively lobbying regulators to levy charges on OTT internet companies to carry traffic.”

Asked if they anticipate working with internet companies “to use network slices to deliver and monetize high volume OTT services,” Heavy Reading’s survey revealed that 40% of respondents say their company plans to do this, ahead of a more equivocal 31% that may do so, depending on the business case.

“Presumably, the thinking is that network slicing will provide a capability that improves the service, and the operator can somehow charge the OTT provider for this or monetize the customer via a revenue share,” surmises Brown. “In this analysis, it is tempting to ascribe this 40% result to wishful thinking by telecom respondents.

“An alternative analysis, therefore, is to be aware that what is normal in terms of telco and OTT working relationships today will not necessarily stay that way.”

As application performance requirements become more stringent, and as customer expectations increase and new services emerge, there will be a need to rethink and re-architect how telcos and internet companies interact. In mobile networks, 5G network slicing will potentially allow a closer working relationship that benefits customers.


WAIT, WE’RE ALREADY TALKING ABOUT 6G? WHY, YES WE ARE.

6G may already be on the horizon, but there’s still a lot to understand about the benefits — and limitations — of 5G, which is rolling out across the US but has yet to reach peak saturation. Dive into these selections from the NAB Amplify archives to learn what, exactly, 5G is, how it differs from 4G, and — most importantly — how 5G will bolster the Media & Entertainment industry on the road ahead:
  • How 5G Is Impacting M&E Today (and What 6G Is Going to Mean for Tomorrow)
  • How 5G Will Evolve Live Production Workflows
  • 5G and the Metaverse: This Is Happening, People
  • 5G Is Finally Starting to Make Sense to Consumers (and Cents for Providers)
  • Can 5G Deliver That Long-Awaited VR Adoption?

  • Broadcast
  • Connect
  • Distribution and Delivery
  • 5G / 6G

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5G Is Finally Starting to Make Sense to Consumers (and Cents for Providers)
5G Is Finally Starting to Make Sense to Consumers (and Cents for Providers)

The percentage of consumers with a 5G device rose from 56% in 2021 to 68% in 2022, according to a new report from industry analyst Deloitte.

5G and the Metaverse: This Is Happening, People
5G and the Metaverse: This Is Happening, People

5G is set to generate $7 trillion in economic value by 2030, InterDigital reports, as it fuels a proliferation of connected devices.

1 Comment on After Tests and Improvements, 5G Network Slicing Opens Up to Broadcasters
January 3, 2023
Posted December 27, 2022

Just Think About the Metaverse More Like a Media Channel

metaverse multiverse web3


TL;DR

  • Most Americans think the metaverse will be considered mainstream by 2028, according to a new survey from TELUS International.
  • Brands are expected to interact with consumers in virtual worlds — but there are limits and concerns.
  • Content moderation must be incorporated to ensure users experience a safe and inclusive environment. This will mean employing a mix of AI and human moderators to ensure a timely, accurate and inclusive review of online interactions.


READ MORE: Survey: Consumers Ready to Meet Brands in Metaverse

The metaverse is already a media channel for brands. According to a new survey by TELUS International, around three-quarters of American consumers believe that brand interactions in the metaverse will one day replace those in the real world. In fact, 65% of respondents believe the metaverse will be considered mainstream in the next five years.

Half of those polled said they would choose one brand over another if it offered a superior experience in the metaverse. Additionally, more than a quarter (27%) indicated they would pay a 5% premium for a product or service that was supported by a quality metaverse experience, and 22% would pay up to 10% more.

“Just as the internet and mobile apps revolutionized the way we interact with brands and consume information, goods and services, the metaverse offers brands exciting opportunities to interact with consumers in entirely new ways,” Michael Ringman, chief information officer at TELUS, shares.

“Digital 3D worlds open up a window of opportunity for brands — it offers them a space that’s accessible, allowing them to connect with consumers globally in unique and interactive ways, providing consumers with an enriched customer experience.”

The pressure is on for brands that choose to engage with consumers in virtual worlds. The survey indicated they expect interactions with brands in the metaverse to be more engaging (53%) and better customized to their interests (49%).

When asked what would encourage respondents to interact with brands in the metaverse, the top response was the ability to realistically try out or try on products and services (41%).

Cr: TELLUS
Cr: TELLUS

There is, however, a limit to what surveyed consumers feel comfortable doing and purchasing in the metaverse, even with these enhanced experiences. For example, only 35% would buy a house or rent an apartment in the real world through the metaverse. This is in stark contrast to survey respondents saying they would feel comfortable gaming (79%) or engaging with a brand’s customer service (68%) in the metaverse.

There are concerns too. For example, 60% said they believe it will be easier for individuals to get away with inappropriate behavior in the metaverse and just 45% think brands are prepared to moderate content in order to keep users safe. Most people don’t consider AI alone to be enough of a safeguard against malicious content.

“Like we’ve seen with digital environments that have come before it, the metaverse is unfortunately not going to be immune to users who abuse these spaces, putting brand reputation and their customers at risk,” Ringman says. “As brands begin to explore this new platform, content moderation must be incorporated during the initial planning phase to ensure users experience a safe and inclusive environment. This will mean employing a mix of AI and human moderators to ensure a timely, accurate and inclusive review of content and behaviors.”

The findings are based on a Pollfish survey conducted on October 17, 2022. It includes responses from 1,500 Americans who are familiar with the metaverse.


NAVIGATING THE METAVERSE:

The metaverse may be a wild frontier, but here at NAB Amplify we’ve got you covered! Hand-selected from our archives, here are some of the essential insights you’ll need to expand your knowledge base and confidently explore the new horizons ahead:
  • The Metaverse Will Make $5 Trillion By 2030. That Sounds Awesome and… Wait, What Are We Talking About?
  • Metaverse Expectations vs. Reality
  • A Metacode of Conduct for the Metaverse
  • Metaverse Interoperability: Utopian Dream, Privacy Nightmare
  • Consumers Are Confused About the Metaverse, But Seriously, Can You Blame Them?

  • Streaming
  • Intelligent Content
  • Media Content
  • Metaverse
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking / UGC

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Neal Stephenson: The Success of the Metaverse Will Be Completely Contingent on Content
Neal Stephenson: The Success of the Metaverse Will Be Completely Contingent on Content

Author Neal Stephenson discusses the intersection between the metaverse and gaming, AR/VR, and his creator-focused blockchain, Lamina1.

Banking on the Business of the Metaverse
Banking on the Business of the Metaverse

“The Economist” gathers executives from ILM, Unity, Roblox, NVIDIA, and more to discuss how the metaverse is shaping businesses.

Matthew Ball: Your Daily Life in the Metaverse
Matthew Ball: Your Daily Life in the Metaverse

Like the internet today, the metaverse will be ubiquitous and omnipresent, sitting in the background of most of our day-to-day experiences.

Leave a Comment on Just Think About the Metaverse More Like a Media Channel
November 22, 2022

Here’s Where Social Marketing Is Headed



TL;DR

  • Social media marketing is here to stay and the proof is in marketing budgets.
  • 2023 may be the right year for smaller businesses to explore their relationship to the creator economy, as bigger brands scale back dollars devoted to creators.
  • It’s more important than ever to pair your message and methodology with the right social network. Users have different expectations on each app, and cross-posting ain’t gonna cut it. 
  • TikTok and Instagram are for more than entertainment, and Google is no longer the only game in town for search.
  • Chatbots are going to be clutch, as social spending goes up and marketers struggle to tackle customer service expectations.


Courtesy of Hootsuite

Social media management company Hootsuite has released its Social Media 2023 Trends report. Check out some notable takeaways.

Smaller companies should start to explore partnerships with creators.

Just as marketing budgets began climbing out of the pandemic slump, recession fears have started taking effect. Larger companies are spending less on creators, which isn’t great news for influencers, but Hootsuite posits a silver lining: smaller and midsize businesses can take advantage of a more open playing field.

According to the report, “72% of small businesses (those with less than 100 employees) don’t work with creators in any capacity, while nearly 42% of businesses with over 1,000 employees do work with creators.”

Cost is cited as a primary reason for the discrepancy, but Hootsuite notes the majority of “creators are paid less than $100 US per post.” At the high end, 12% of creators can make up to $9,999 per post; 2% of interviewees reported making between $10,000-$24,999 per post; and only 1% of them said they made north of $25k on a single post. Nearly a third are also compensated via products or other freebies. 

Courtesy of Hootsuite. Click here to view a larger version.

Money spent correlates with confidence levels and ROI expectations.

Those who’ve put money on the line expect it to pay off. In 2021, 83% of respondents told Hootsuite that they had “some level of confidence” in social media marketing’s ROI. That was up significantly from 2020’s 68%. Hootsuite rephrased the question this year, asking about confidence levels related to the usefulness of social media for marketing or engaging with audiences; that garnered a 96% confidence rate.

Rolling with the (new-ish) punches.  

In terms of what 2023 might hold for the social media networks’ new features? Well, Hootsuite hopes the copycat trend is on the way out: “Adding competitor capabilities to one network doesn’t change the perception people have spent years forming of what a specific network is meant for,” so Instagram Reels are unlikely to pull users away from TikTok. Hootsuite also posits that “stealing a competitor’s features may actually have a negative impact on the perception of a social network.” 

For marketers, who can’t actually control this, Hootsuite advises to avoid cross posting and also “spend less time worrying about which copycat feature to start using next and more time exploring platforms that best reflect their business goals.” They name drop WaPo as an example of a company differentiating its social content effectively. 

Don’t sleep on social commerce.

In the US, “social commerce sales [are] set to grow 34.4% this year to $53.1 billion” – and it’s already booming outside North America. However, there’s been a lack of enthusiasm and companies reacted accordingly: “Meta decided to shut down its live commerce functionality on Facebook and affiliate product tagging option on Instagram. TikTok has also scaled back its ecommerce plans, delaying the launch of live shopping.”

As Billy Joel would say, “It’s always been a matter of trust.” For survey respondents, that’s the problem: “Their biggest concern is that their purchases won’t be protected or refunded. They’re also worried about the quality and authenticity of products and sellers on social media. And the third most common concern stems from trust in the social networks themselves; people say they don’t want to share their financial information with the networks.”

But those who do make the leap are consistent. Insider Intelligence reported that social spend in 2022 is up 27% from the prior year, reaching $518 per buyer, and that’s expected to increase to $935 in 2025.

Social search is kicking Google’s @$$.

Well, in some demographics, at least.

The youth are searching TikTok and Insta to learn what to eat or buy and where to go to do it. Amazingly, Hootsuite reports that “40% of 18- to 24-year-olds are now using social media as their primary search engine,” per Google’s own research! Additionally, “more internet users aged 16 to 64 visit social networks than search engines on a monthly basis.”

However, TV and word of mouth are (so far) still beating out social in the world of product discovery.

social search
Courtesy of Hootsuite. Click here for a larger version.

Digital customer service matters. A lot.

Just because people have returned to brick and mortar doesn’t mean they don’t care how online transactions are handled.

Apparently, chatbots and AI help can go a long way to handle dissatisfied customers online. Automation can handle FAQs and fulfill orders, while keeping headcounts low and queues shorter..

As of 2022, “only 26% of organizations that said they use social as a primary customer service channel told us they use chatbots on social and messaging apps. And of the organizations that do use chatbots on social and messenger apps, more than half of them (53%) adopted chatbots at some point during the pandemic.”

And some of this is being handled outside the customer service team. Hootsuite says “49% of organizations said that social customer service was usually or exclusively the responsibility of the marketing team.“ But that doesn’t mean that most of them are confident in the role; “Marketers are neither trained to respond to customers, nor is there an incentive to if that responsibility sits outside their remit and with another team.”

Read the full report here or check out past years’ predictions here.

Read It on Amplify: Where Are We Seeing the Investment in Influencer Marketing?

Read It on Amplify: Creator Marketing and Why It Matters

Read It on Amplify: The Move to Influencer Marketing (and What That’ll Mean)

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  • Media Content
  • Interactive and Cross Platform TV / Web / Mobile
  • Social Networking / UGC

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Has Influencer Marketing Evolved (Devolved?) Into Influencer Commerce?
Has Influencer Marketing Evolved (Devolved?) Into Influencer Commerce?

Celebrity endorsements have become the gold standard for creating fast wealth, making social media influence more important than capital.

Leave a Comment on Here’s Where Social Marketing Is Headed
October 31, 2022

Can AI Imagery and Video Actually Be Good for the Creator Economy?

AI-generated image by Alan Frijns
AI-generated image by Alan Frijns

READ MORE: The Rise Of AI-Powered Text-To-Image/Video Generators & What It Means For The Creator Economy (Lindsey Gamble)

Generative AI — including text-to-image, and soon to come text-to-video — apps have caught the public’s imagination. It’s not hard to see why. They’re fun, cheap and useful.

The popularity of these apps has captured the attention of big tech companies, too. During the summer, TikTok launched its AI Greenscreen feature, which allows users to type text prompts to generate an image that can be used as a background in their videos. Meta also introduced Make-A-Video, Google launched Imagen Video, and Microsoft unveiled Image Creator.

The tech is also ushering in a new era of creators, helping people become first-time creators.

According to Lindsey Gamble, an influencer marketing and innovation strategist, “People who may not possess the skillset to take an engaging photo or create a video, now have the opportunity to do so with this technology. AI lowers the barrier to entry for content creation, even more so than what the iPhone does for photography or TikTok does for video.”

Gamble explains that established creators can incorporate AI generators into their existing creative processes or workflows, “especially when it comes to ideation and inspiration,” such as generating images and photos for storyboards.

Generative AI can also be used to expand into other creative works while saving time and money. For example, a creator that typically outsources graphic design work could use AI to handle it themselves and benefit from doing it for free or at a much cheaper cost within seconds.

So, these are real world practical uses of an AI tool. What’s not to like?

One of the main issues is the challenge to copyright.

“Some argue that people are infringing on copyrights and plagiarizing because generators use existing works from photographers, videographers, artists,” Gamble notes. “Commercializing AI-generated content can be particularly problematic. Some have started monetizing their creations, such as selling prints of them on Etsy or licensing them to stock photo platforms, which has caused a great deal of pushback from certain creative communities.”

An argument can be made, though, for people who use generators. The specific images and videos that are generated depend on the exact text they input, including the combination of words and order of words.

“People must know how to manipulate the software, such as adding and refining text prompts to get their desired results. Although different than typical skillsets, leveraging technology is a skill in itself.”

Other challenges revolve around biases in the algorithms, using generators to create harmful content, and misinformation (or deepfakes) — many of which are the same challenges that social media platforms face today.

Gamble doesn’t address this, but he does suggest that “the addition of revenue sharing or licensing will help make others more comfortable.”

Generative AI is only just getting started. It’s going to improve rapidly. Sooner rather than later “people will view it similarly to how artists may sample existing songs to create new songs,” Gamble says. “There will also be more established norms, including how people look at the use of creating from others’ existing work.”

As someone suggested recently, the metaverse is going to be too big to be created by humans alone. There aren’t enough computer artists in the world to make it. That’s where AI-generated visuals come in and where independent creators can possibly make a killing.

“AI-powered generators will help creators accelerate their creativity and speed up their productivity, allowing them to churn out content, build audiences, and monetize faster than ever,” Gamble writes. “As a result, there will be even more creators in the ecosystem, which is a benefit for all.”




AI ART — I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS BUT I KNOW WHEN I LIKE IT:

Even with AI-powered text-to-image tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Craiyon still in their relative infancy, artificial intelligence and machine learning is already transforming the definition of art — including cinema — in ways no one could have ever predicted. Gain insights into AI’s potential impact on Media & Entertainment in NAB Amplify’s ongoing series of articles examining the latest trends and developments in AI art
  • What Will DALL-E Mean for the Future of Creativity?
  • Recognizing Ourselves in AI-Generated Art
  • Are AI Art Models for Creativity or Commerce?
  • In an AI-Generated World, How Do We Determine the Value of Art?
  • Watch This: “The Crow” Beautifully Employs Text-to-Video Generation



Are you interested in contributing ideas, suggestions or opinions? We’d love to hear from you. Email us here.

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Staring Into the AI Art Abyss
Staring Into the AI Art Abyss

Culture risks being overrun by AI-generated images that merely repeat the past over and over, destroying our capacity as humans to connect.

AI Can Produce Visuals We Can’t Even Imagine, So Maybe We Should Just… Enjoy It?
AI Can Produce Visuals We Can’t Even Imagine, So Maybe We Should Just… Enjoy It?

Artificial intelligence text-to-image tools are able to explore the realm of the improbable or unimaginable. So why are we limiting them?

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October 6, 2022

With AI-Generated Media, How Do We Determine the Value of Art?

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A post shared by Josephine (@josephinemiller)

READ MORE: Art is Dead. Long Live Art. And DALL-E 2. (Nir Zicherman)

In discussing and assessing a work of art, historically, it seems that the context in which it was created matters. But in an age of AI-generated images, videos, and writing we may need to consider whether that’s the case anymore.

“How can context exist if the art is being created by artificial intelligences with no awareness of society, norms, politics, trends, movements,” poses Nir Zicherman, global head of audiobooks at Spotify and co-founder of podcast platform Anchor.

Zicherman weighs in on the debate about the value of AI-generated art in his Medium post titled “Art is Dead. Long Live Art. And DALLE-2.” Some argue that because machines clearly lack the actual lived experience of a human being (and all art is a reflection and response to being alive), then a work of art produced by AI is clearly not equivalent.

What happens when that context is removed? Or, more exactly, what happens if the context of production is no longer of significance?

Zicherman presents the example of a child’s drawing of a blue rectangle that is likely at some point to be discarded no matter how sentimental the parents might be, in contrast to this 1962 painting by Yves Klein, “IKB 191,” which is considered a masterpiece of post-war French art.

“One might say that much of the beauty or ugliness we see in any form of art comes from our knowledge of where it came from. Let’s be real though. If DALL-E had painted IKB 191, would anyone even know?”

It’s not just critics or the “art world” that extracts value from the context in which art exists.

Context can be related to all our subjective experiences of consuming the art, Zicherman argues. For instance, reading a coming-of-age novel while coming of age yourself might change your perspective on life, while seeing the TV show everyone loves a year or two too late might drain it of any significance for you.

“On the other hand, context can also arise out of how a work of art was created, as well as the time and place in which it came to be. Would Citizen Kane, created today, matter as a film? Would The Beatles, as an up-and-coming retro rock band in 2022, be considered by anyone ‘the greatest band of all time?’”

These questions matter, he says, because we now live in a world where it is possible for machines to generate virtually the same output a human might create:

“What’s even more incredible is that it is now possible to create output humans would never have created. We can generate an infinite number of Picasso-esque paintings, half a century after the artist’s death.”

“How much will future older generations and younger ones disagree about not only which art is great (as all generations do), but about what greatness in art even means?”

— Nir Zicherman

And this trend will only continue, as more and more of the “art” being created each and every day can now exist devoid of any “context” in the traditional sense of the word.

Zicherman points to how that forces us to ask ourselves a different set of questions: Given that new reality, which art will we value and why? What will differentiate the great works from the bad ones? Will we finally reach a point where art can exist on its own, for art’s sake?

This phenomenon is hardly just relevant to images of course. OpenAI (the research lab behind the text-to-image generator DALL-E) has started working on Jukebox, which promises to do for music what they have done for images.

We are only a few years away from videos being generated in the same descriptive way. Surely feature films and entire television shows will follow suit.

So, given how quickly this space is moving, it begs the question of what if children growing up now and falling in love with music, books, and movies during their formative years ascribe entirely different meaning to their art? Would it matter to them if the art that speaks to them was generated by a machine (fed perhaps on the greatest artworks created by humankind)?

Perhaps it matters to us, the older generation more so, because it’s scary and unfathomable that art — which again is how society learns about itself and grows culturally richer — could somehow be outside of our control and generated by banks of servers.

Zicherman considers: “How much will future older generations and younger ones disagree about not only which art is great (as all generations do), but about what greatness in art even means?”





The Filmmaker Bot’s Funeral

By Abby Spessard

“Jan Bot,” the first robot filmmaker in the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, has been unplugged. Creators Pablo Núñez Palma and Bram Loogman take a walk down memory lane through Jan Bot’s creation with Hyperallergic’s Ben Nicholson.

Jan Bot is an AI that produces experimental short films using the archived material in the Eye Filmmuseum. “Conceived as a way to bring a physical archive into the internet age, the next phase will be posthumously archiving Jan Bot’s oeuvre via NFT,” Nicholson says.

Jan Bot in action
Jan Bot in action

So where did this robot filmmaker creation come from? “I was sharing a studio space with Bram,” Palma starts. “We were recently graduated from a master’s program at the Film Academy in Amsterdam. We had a workshop with found footage filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. It involved some experimenting with a film collection from Eye called Bits & Pieces.” This collection of clips was started by Eric de Kuyper and Peter Delpeut in the 1990s. “The primary rule for inclusion was that each clip must, in some way, have caught the attention of the curators,” Nicholson explains.

Inspired by the collection, Palma and Loogman wanted to create something relevant and modern with current online spaces. “Bram is a developer, so then we thought, maybe we can make something that creates content — no matter what kind — and is concerned with quantity, not quality. Hopefully this might solve a problem for the Filmmuseum and give us a nice way to experiment.”

Coded with Einstein’s concept of “metric montage,” where film clips are sequenced based on their musical meter, Palma reflects on the examples they used for Jan Bot. “Eisenstein is one of the few filmmakers who talk about syntactic editing… all about the rhythm. He talks about how, by having a certain form of edits — like ‘metric’ — you can start creating momentum by increasing speed and making shorter and shorter shots. Basically, that’s all we could do, because we didn’t know what the shots would be or how they would go together.”

But even with the recurring set of filmmaking practices and parameters, Jan Bot never became repetitive or lost any of its AI interfaces. “If you see it from the perspective of an author, I would say Jan Bot follows the same tradition, because it does the same thing all the time, but the world changes,” Palma says. Jan Bot, until the day of the funeral, remained alive and continued creating new films.

But all good things must come to an end (or so we believe). Those attending the funeral for Jan Bot will be leaving with a card linking to an NFT of one of its films, keeping the robot’s work alive. “If you think of a blockchain as a new way of archiving things on the internet and digital platforms, there was a connection between these films, that bring old archives to the present, and archiving these new movies, made of old footage, in a new form of archive… forever in the blockchain.”

READ MORE: An Experimental AI Film Director Calls it Quits (Hyperallergic)

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Machine Learning: How MoMA’s New AI Artwork Was Made (Trained)
Machine Learning: How MoMA’s New AI Artwork Was Made (Trained)

“Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” uses an AI model trained on 180,000 artworks from MoMA’s collection to produce a stream of digital images.

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October 2, 2022

How 5G Is Impacting M&E Today (and What 6G Is Going to Mean for Tomorrow)

5G 6G broadband wireless network mobile video
Abstract background image concept. Interconnected waveform data lines. Cloud computing concept. 3D illustration.

READ MORE: The Impact of 5G Technology on Business and When 6G Will Come? (Mark van Rijmenam)

The North American market for 5G technologies is expected to exceed $180 billion by 2030, driven primarily by enterprise applications such as connected vehicles and real-time automation in manufacturing. This new means of wireless communication is already benefitting Media & Entertainment and immersive applications.

READ MORE: The Future of 5G Adoption (JP Morgan)

Here’s a look at how that’s so along with a peek into to what we can expect from 6G, which is being worked on in standardization bodies right now. Mark van Rijmenam, tech strategist and entrepreneur, has compiled ways in which 5G will change workflows — from which we’ve identified the relevant M&E applications.

Remote Working Gets Easier

5G wireless will eventually mean people no longer have to be tied down by a mandatory location — even in rural areas. With high-speed internet available anywhere, people will have the freedom to live anywhere they wish.

Edge Computing Goes Next-Level

5G will enable the creation of new edge computing systems that augment cloud infrastructure. This is a bonus for producers of eSports streaming, gaming or live sports broadcasters wanting real-time interaction with their users will be able to offer incredibly fast services in sub-10ms latency.

READ MORE: Where does edge computing work with 5G? (STL Partners)

5G will not only usher in driverless vehicles but will enable a new personalized media hub on the go. The faster response times made possible by low latency data streams means service providers can deploy streaming media applications from home to car and during travel, extending touch points and engagement with the customer.

Immersive Experiences

We need to wait for leaner, more comfortable wearables before wall-to-wall everyday AR and VR immersivity becomes a reality, but steps are being made toward this. For example, T-Mobile and Qualcomm partnered to build AR applications for smart glasses (such as the Niantic Planet-Scale AR Alliance powered by 5G).

READ MORE: T-Mobile, Qualcomm Partner to Build 5G AR Experiences for Smart Glasses (The Fast Mode)

With platforms like the Snapdragon Spaces XR developer, “you can create mixed reality or other immersive experiences that transform smartphones into powerful pocket computers.”

Toward a Metaverse Based on 5G

Brands and media companies are keen to explore the potential of a 3D internet. 5G will provide the backbone to make this possible.

READ MORE: The Benefits of 5G for Business (Nutanix)

“[5G] will deliver an excellent customer experience by connecting customers to companies in both the digital and real world, including ultra-fast connectivity,” says van Rijmenam. “5G’s rollout will revolutionize the metaverse, making it even more essential for enterprises to develop a digital strategy.”

6G is Coming: What’s the Latest?

Even though the implementation of 6G technology may still be many years away, it is expected to become an integral part of communications within the next decade. Its capabilities will make it possible to generate massive amounts of data across decentralized networks — and deliver that information instantly.

The increased use of connected devices will require more efficient and advanced technologies to enable faster download speeds with minimal latency. This is something the next phase of 5G aims to tackle. 5G-Advanced, due to be deployed by 2025, uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage networks more intelligently.

Meanwhile, the 6th generation of wireless communication networks will boost use of radio spectrum and enhance scalability.

“As a result,” Van Rijmenam says, “connections will be more reliable, and drops will be reduced, which will be crucial to supporting advanced technologies such as drones and robots. Connected devices can use multiple connections simultaneously (e.g., Wi-Fi and cellular) if one is interrupted, so they stay connected no matter what.”

6G vs. 5G: What’s the Difference?

Some specifics of 6G technology in comparison to 5G include:

  • 100 gigabits per second (100 Gbps) versus 10 Gbps.
  • Frequencies greater than 100 GHz versus 3.5–26 GHz.
  • Latency as low as a few microseconds versus ~ 30 milliseconds in practice.
  • An energy consumption of less than 1 nJ/bit.

READ MORE: Five Disruptive Features of Tomorrow’s 6G Networks (Network Computing)

Latency alone will have a significant impact. It’s not that 5G is slow either. While the signal latency in 4G is around 50 milliseconds and 5G lowers this to just five milliseconds, the 6G latency is estimated at one millisecond or less.

“That would mean that huge data transmissions could be made almost instantly available anywhere on earth,” says van Rijmenam.

With 5G’s increased speeds, it is expected to make the Internet of Things more practical and user-friendly. Experts also predict that 6G will enhance the performance of connected devices even further — which may lead to widespread use of IoT devices.

READ MORE: Towards 6G Internet of Things: Recent advances, use cases, and open challenges (ScienceDirect)

Just as 4G hasn’t replaced 3G and 5G complements 4G, the 6G network will run in parallel with previous versions of wireless connectivity.

It’s thought unlikely that every device will use 6G, or more accurately need to use 6G. Current thinking is that 6G will be reserved it for science, medical, industry and military — in its early days at least. No telling where that will go decades hence or if a further ‘G’ can be minded from the spectrum.

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5G Is Finally Starting to Make Sense to Consumers (and Cents for Providers)
5G Is Finally Starting to Make Sense to Consumers (and Cents for Providers)

The percentage of consumers with a 5G device rose from 56% in 2021 to 68% in 2022, according to a new report from industry analyst Deloitte.

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September 28, 2022

AI Motion Pictures Are Just About a Thing. Here’s Where We Are Today.

image created using generative AI

READ MORE: A glimpse into the future of cinema: The ultimate guide to A.I. art for film/animation/VFX (Pinar Seyhan Demirdag)

Independent filmmakers are experimenting with AI tools today. While they are not yet ready for their big screen close-up, it won’t be long until these technologies become widely adopted in Hollywood.

The most high-profile text-to-image AI is DALL-E 2, released by OpenAI. The model does not offer motion picture sequences — but the odds are that it soon will. OpenAI is likely working on this as we speak.

Los Angeles-based director Paul Trillo has been creating stop-motion animations using DALL-E, and explains how it can be done in this twitter thread:

Only one of these cars is real. Another experiment pushing the limits of AI stop motion using dall-e in painting within video. Each frame uploaded one by one to generate 150 concept cars.@openaidalle #aiart #dalle #dalle2 #experimental #conceptcar #ai #openai pic.twitter.com/KmWBOVUem2

— Paul Trillo (@paultrillo) August 11, 2022

AI art is in its infancy and making fledgling attempts at “temporal coherence,” the ability to make something move as we expect it to in film and video (not forgetting that film is a set of still images replayed 24 times a second).

Deforum is a text-to-motion AI tool based on the AI model Stable Diffusion by Stability AI. AI artist Michael Carychao has used it to show how AI tools can re-create famous actors:

Wind and Wave #aiart #animation #stablediffusion pic.twitter.com/siQRZxroVm

— Michael Carychao (@MichaelCarychao) August 29, 2022

“In a couple of years, we’ll be able to write ‘Brad Pitt dancing like James Brown’ and be able to have a screen-ready coherent result,” Pinar Seyhan Demirdag, co-founder of AI-based content developer Seyhan Lee, predicts in her blog at Medium.

Another example using Deforum is provided by an artist known as Pharmapsychotic. The animated sample posted to Twitter is claimed to be raw output with no post-processing or interpolation:

WIP on "turbo" in #deforum. nice coherence boost and speed up by diffusing every Nth frame and interpolating forward warped prior frames. this is raw output with no post processing or interpolation.@zippy731 @xsteenbrugge pic.twitter.com/kKDW03GtKr

— pharmapsychotic (@pharmapsychotic) September 3, 2022

“Give it a couple of years, and you’ll be able to film a scene of four random people walking down an aisle, and to turn them into Dorothy and the gang in the Wizard of Oz,” Seyhan Demirdag comments. “Arguably, you can do this right now, but it will be wonky, smudgy, and missing 8K details, so not ready for the mass audience.”

There are two ways of transferring a style right now. One way is with a pre-defined style, like a Van Gogh painting, for example. The other is using text-to-image based models such as Disco Diffusion and VQGAN+CLIP, where you guide the style with words, referred to as “prompts.”

“These prompts are your most significant creative assets, and many people who make art with text-to-image tools also call themselves ‘prompt artists.’ “ she says.

There are even sites suggesting the best prompts to work with specific AI — like the DALL-E 2 Prompt Book.

Considerable work is being done to incorporate generative art models into games engines.

Daniel Skaale, who works for Khora VR, has posted a sample on Twitter where he carried a 2D image he had created into the text-to-image AI Midjourney from the Unity games engine.

A.I Midjourney to 3D (Unity HDRP) #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d #madewithunity #IndieGameDev pic.twitter.com/UtEHd8ASWA

— Daniel Skaale (@DSkaale) August 27, 2022

Generating real-time imagery in Unity or Unreal Engine remains an unexplored territory with huge potential, Seyhan Demirdag writes.

Face Replacement

Twitter user Todd Spence posted a mashup of Willem Dafoe as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. While it was just for fun, examples like this — using AI apps like Reface — give us a glimpse into how AI will help optimize production in future.

If PRETTY WOMAN starred Willem Dafoe instead. Good God. pic.twitter.com/GdieGzSKuX

— SPENCE, TODD (@Todd_Spence) September 5, 2021

“Soon, studios will simply need to rent Brad Pitt’s face value rights for him to appear in the upcoming blockbuster film without having to leave the comfort of his couch,” Seyhan Demirdag comments.

Similar models have already been used. For example, Focus Pictures’ Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain used deepfake technology to recreate Bourdain’s voice to have it say things he never actually said. This was controversial mainly because the AI wasn’t acknowledged up front by the filmmakers. The Andy Warhol Diaries also used AI to mimic Warhol’s narration, but since this was credited in the title sequence the Netflix documentary received applause for its innovation.

READ MORE: Crossing the Line: How the “Roadrunner” Documentary Created an Ethics Firestorm (NAB Amplify)

READ MORE: Pop Will Eat Itself: The Ultimate Manufactured Warhol (NAB Amplify)

As with any other technology in its infancy, AI art still misses temporal coherence — our capacity to make jumping jacks or walk down the street.

“Right now, you can produce mind-bending, never-before-seen sequences with AI, but you cannot do everything (yet),” Seyhan Demirdag says.

“In a few years, we’ll be able to generate coherent and screen-ready full features that are entirely generated. If you are a producer, director, studio owner, or VFX artist who wants to stay ahead of the curve, now is the time to invest in this technology; otherwise, your competition will be generating headlines, not you.”





Fabian Stelzer’s “Salt” is the World’s First Fully AI-generated Multiplot “Film”

By Abby Spessard

READ MORE: This guy is using AI to make a movie — and you can help decide what happens next (CNN Business)

Fabian Stelzer is creating a sci-fi movie, Salt, using artificial intelligence coupled with crowdsourced narrative twists. On Twitter, Salt is billed as “the world’s first fully AI-generated multiplot ‘film’ — a Web6 internet adventure where your choices create a 1970s lo-fi sci-fi universe.”

🧂 pic.twitter.com/Hbig80jfdZ

— SALT (@SALT_VERSE) June 14, 2022

While Stelzer may not be a filmmaker by trade, Rachel Metz at CNN Business says his use of AI tools to create a series of short films “points to what could be a new frontier for making movies.”

“Stelzer creates images with image-generation tools such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E 2. He makes voices mostly using AI voice generation tools such as Synthesia or Murf. And he uses GPT-3, a text-generator, to help with the script writing,” Metz details.

After watching installments, Salt viewers can vote on story beats to determine what will happen next. Selzer has hopes of one day cutting the “play-to-create experiment” into a feature-length film.

𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚋𝚘𝚛𝚗 𝚘𝚗 𝙴𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚑. 𝙱𝚞𝚝 𝚠𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚊 𝚕𝚘𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚍𝚊𝚍'𝚜 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚔. 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚗𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚝 𝚜𝚎𝚎𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚘𝚖𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚏𝚒𝚛𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎. 𝚄𝙼𝙰𝙼𝙸 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚘𝚠𝚗. pic.twitter.com/Ag3h6QEcuH

— SALT (@SALT_VERSE) August 15, 2022

“In my little home office studio I can make a ‘70s sci-fi movie if I want to,” he says. “And actually I can do more than a sci-fi movie. I can think about, ‘What’s the movie in this paradigm, where execution is as easy as an idea?’ “

Salt’s plot is still fairly vague — at least for now, as Metz notes — but Stelzer continues to release short clips and images on Twitter. “The resulting films are beautiful, mysterious, and ominous,” she writes. “So far, each film is less than two minutes long, in keeping with Twitter’s maximum video length of two minutes and 20 seconds. Occasionally, Stelzer will tweet a still image and a caption that contribute to the series’ strange, otherworldly mythology.”

The genesis for Salt emerged from Stelzer’s experiments in the text-to-image generator Midjourney. Working from his prompts, the system generated images he said “felt like a film world,” depicting “alien vegetation, a mysterious figure lurking in the shadows, and a weird-looking research station on an arid mining planet.”

Stelzer said, “I saw this in front of me and was like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what’s happening in this world, but I know there’s lots of stories, interesting stuff. I saw narrative shades and shadows of ideas and story seeds.”

But Selzer admits that he’s not entirely sure whether the idea he has for Salt will work, partially because of community involvement driving the project to deviate wildly from what he had initially planned. “The charm of the experiment to me, intellectually, is driven by the curiosity to see what I as the creator and the community can come up with together.”




AI ART — I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS BUT I KNOW WHEN I LIKE IT:

Even with AI-powered text-to-image tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Craiyon still in their relative infancy, artificial intelligence and machine learning is already transforming the definition of art — including cinema — in ways no one could have ever predicted. Gain insights into AI’s potential impact on Media & Entertainment in NAB Amplify’s ongoing series of articles examining the latest trends and developments in AI art
  • What Will DALL-E Mean for the Future of Creativity?
  • Recognizing Ourselves in AI-Generated Art
  • Are AI Art Models for Creativity or Commerce?
  • In an AI-Generated World, How Do We Determine the Value of Art?
  • Watch This: “The Crow” Beautifully Employs Text-to-Video Generation



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Leave a Comment on AI Motion Pictures Are Just About a Thing. Here’s Where We Are Today.
September 12, 2022

Social Media Marketing Has Become an Unstoppable Force

READ MORE: Social Media Trends for 2022 & Beyond (Sprout Social)

Social media is now an integral and increasingly valued part of strategy, regardless of the company, but Sprout Social finds it’s still being under resourced.

Its ninth annual trend forecast, “US Social Media Trends for 2022 & Beyond,” surveyed more than 1,000 US consumers and 500 US social marketers to understand how social media has transformed on both sides of the marketing equation.

Marketing teams were previously trying to convince senior leadership that social media was “business-critical,” but now the value of social across functions is clearer than ever, the report finds.

Social media team growth for brands means identifying which social roles to hire and calibrating job descriptions to attract and foster qualified talent. Cr: Sprout Social
Social media team growth for brands means identifying which social roles to hire and calibrating job descriptions to attract and foster qualified talent. Cr: Sprout Social

But the new responsibilities of social teams come with new challenges. Creating the outcomes businesses have come to expect from social calls for more talent. More than half of marketers (52%) say that finding experienced talent is their number one challenge this year.

Eighty-eight percent of marketers say they expect to hire another team member over the next two years, and more than half (62%) anticipate hiring between two to six new positions.

Cr: Sprout Social
Cr: Sprout Social

LinkedIn reported that social media managers are the third most in-demand marketing position by posting volume in 2022, while social media coordinator roles have the third most year-over-year growth of all marketing titles.

“Social is no longer limited to marketing, with functions across the business weighing in on strategy. But as a more diverse set of stakeholders gets involved, core social teams will need to adapt,” Sprout Social says in the report. “Figuring out who owns what, and which proficiencies are needed across teams, has to be addressed as social strategies become more sophisticated.”

For example, since every platform has a different algorithm, brands may need to post more often to make sure their customers see the ideal number of posts. The length of a video post matters as well. In 2020, 50% of consumers thought short-form was the most engaging type of content, and that’s only growing. In 2022, that number has risen to 66%.

Social platforms may differ, but the one you can’t ignore is TikTok. Per the report, 38% of consumers plan on using TikTok, more than double the 17% who were planning on it in 2020.

Size matters as consumers find short-form videos 2.5x more engaging than long-form videos. In Cr: Sprout Social
Size matters as consumers find short-form videos 2.5x more engaging than long-form videos. In Cr: Sprout Social

There are nuances in audience demographics who are able to be reached on different social platforms that only specialist social media marketers may be in touch with.

For example, not all audiences respond to influencer marketing in the same way. Sprout Social finds that younger generations value collaborations with celebrities, influencers, or creators more than older generations and that polished, highly produced videos are not necessarily the best way to win likes.

Even though more than half of consumers expect to spend more time on YouTube, only 35% of marketers plan to utilize the platform. Cr: Sprout Social
Even though more than half of consumers expect to spend more time on YouTube, only 35% of marketers plan to utilize the platform. Cr: Sprout Social

“Today’s consumers seek authenticity, and a super polished or overly stylized piece of content isn’t it. A produced video is essentially your opinion — and consumers aren’t interested in your opinion. They want to hear what other people think of your brand and/or product,” Sprout Social warns.

That message extends to the type of creator partnerships deemed most effective. Consumers care about creators’ qualifications, so you need to choose wisely.

Cr: Sprout Social
Cr: Sprout Social View a larger version of this graphic here.

“Consumers are more marketing savvy than ever — they can tell when there’s a disconnect between a brand’s values and how they promote a product or service,” says Jayde Powell, a content creator and marketer quoted in the report. “This is no different for content creators. While many creators believe you need to have hundreds of thousands of followers to get brand partnerships, that’s not necessarily the case. Having an engaged community, consistent voice and content style is what attracts opportunities.”

There are implications for creators as well — 81% of consumers will unfollow creators if they post sponsored content more than a few times a week.

Cr: Sprout Social
Cr: Sprout Social

And yet, while all of this points to the need to grow the social media team and budget within an organization, two-thirds (66%) of marketers report having to encourage leadership to create company positions on the big issues.

Sue Serna, founder and CEO of social media consulting agency Serna Social, comments: “Many leaders think social media managers are ‘the people who post stuff on Facebook.’ But the best leaders take the time to learn about their social media operation — the strategy, the day-to-day ins and outs and the pain points.”

She adds, “Leaders who have invested this time position companies to act quickly and with precision when a crisis or major issue is brewing. When leaders lack that understanding, things go sideways — often making headlines for out-of-touch responses and missing the mark.”

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