Artificial intelligence, and its implications for the film and TV industry, were among the main topics of discussion at the SMPTE DC Chapter’s “Bits by the Bay” conference held in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, from May 21-22.

The conference—organized by the late Peter Wharton, former chief strategy officer for TAG Video Systems—returned after a long hiatus, and the event is dedicated to his memory.

Rounding Up
In a presentation devoted to fractional film frame rates, James Snyder, formerly with the Library of Congress’ National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) and now an industry consultant, discussed the evolution of frame rates in tandem with the development of film and television and the expectation that with the film industry transitioning to digital, that frame rates can be modified to address the streaming market.

The battle waged over interlace vs. progressive image standards during the transition from analog to DTV several decades ago illustrated the coming battles between broadcasters—most of whom favored interlace—and the computer industry, who favored progressive.

In a world where 24 fps in traditional film is really 23.98 frames per second (fps) for TV and digital video, and 60 fps is technically 59.94 fps, Snyder said it’s time to round up to the next number (an even integer) because advances in technology have made fractionals less relevant in today’s media distribution ecosystem.

As streaming and gaming have taken hold over the past several decades, progressive has won that battle, and streamers simply don’t care about frame rates, Snyder added.

“Interlace and fractional are two sides of the same coin—they're both problems we need to get rid of,” he said. “[Interlace is] the easiest to get rid of right now, because all displays are now natively progressive; we have no CRTs anymore and progressive is baked into our technical distribution now, or at least the end viewing. And frankly, getting rid of fractional is also baked into it.”

Snyder blamed the current U.S. broadcast TV standard.

“The only reason we can't do even integer right now is because ATSC 1.0 is in the way; ATSC 3.0 can accommodate it, the displays can accommodate it,” he said. “Every vendor I've talked to who has equipment that does production or post production can switch to even integer. The only thing that's standing in the way right now seems to be ATSC. 1.0 is a technical blocker.”

Snyder said he came to this conclusion in his work at the Library of Congress, where he worked in film digitization and restoration. Adherence to global media standards and the demands of storing and managing millions of hours of film and video content prompted him to think of new ways to approach the problems of cost and efficiency.

“We had to deal with the problems of interlace, we had to deal with the problems of fractional frame rates, and we had to deal with the technical issues that came with creating new versions for reuse, because people could license the content, and they would ask for various versions,” Snyder said. “And so I got to see firsthand the extra cost. And the reality is, there are increased costs just in producing new content, there are increased production costs when it comes to reusing old content.

“And so that's where a number of us got together and asked ourselves, ‘do we really need to be doing this?,’” Snyder added. “A genuine technical reason why we're still doing this, and the only one we can come up with is ATSC 1.0. If you take ATSC 1.0 out of the mix, ATSC 3.0 doesn't have that problem, and streaming certainly doesn't have that problem. Streaming doesn't care what your framework is. Your computer just adjusts it to present the content.”

Snyder added that this approach needs to be modified when considering live broadcasts.

“The one area that still needs some discussion and some work is, ‘how do you go from live feeds that are fractional to live feeds that are integer?’ We do need to talk about that. There are converters out there that do the work we can do… but they have a strange cadence to them. We need to figure out how to not have that strange cadence, and work it out in the software and the hardware.”

AI and Democratization of Media
John Footen, managing director with Deloitte, discussed the democratization of media production over the past four decades and how AI is impacting its future, pointing out that for as little as $500, today’s mobile device can produce professional content that cost thousands of dollars to produce in the 1980s. (Footen also pens TV Tech’s Media Matrix column.)

“You don't even have to have an education to do it, people are just doing it … and that's an overall trend of democratization in content production and distribution,“ he said. “Are we done democratizing media? Is it all democratized out? The answer is no.”

The ability for the average Joe to produce Disney-level content powered by AI is coming sooner than we thank, Footen added.

“That level of production is going to be theoretically possible for good or for bad, it's going to happen,” he said. “And it’s going to further democratize the content types that can be created by anyone. You don't have to be good at using a camera because you don't have to touch a camera to make an image, right? You don't have to get a lot of training and framing and all that stuff, because a machine will frame it for you.”

Footen elaborated on agentic AI, the concept of using AI “agents” to do specific tasks that could eventually replace the “app” environment of today.

“You can think of it interchangeably with the word 'apps' that you've been using today,” he said. “An agent is a system … it could be a simple system or it can be a complex system that performs a function. It actually does something like you would expect out of many kinds of applications.”

As these agents become more adept at each individual’s media tastes, this trend will lead to a breakdown of brands that still act as a sort of “walled garden.”

“A curator agent is an agent that works on your behalf to get your content for you today,” Footen said. Using the Plex video playback app as an example, Footen said the more information a user adds to it, the more intelligent it gets, the less important the origination.

“All you need to add to that is keeping track of who you are and what your preferences are, and giving it access to your data and giving it this AI capability to curate for your content,” he said. “Eventually, that curation disintermediates the media company, because why do I care what channel it's on, what app it's on… if it's just coming to you through my agent, my agent is my app. I don't care where the content came from.”

Content Validation
Matt Galek, Footen’s colleague at Deloitte, discussed the issue of authenticated content in the age of AI, elaborating on the latest developments around the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), a six-year-old project designed to to promote transparency and authenticity in digital content; and the C2PA, a consortium of tech companies tasked with developing the technical standards for content credentials, among other things.

C2PA is the “leading standard” to confirming and maintaining trust in digital content and is on the path to becoming an ISO standard this year, according to Galek, who pointed to the three pillars of technology that drive the standards developed by the CAI: metadata, fingerprinting and watermarking.

“All these together provide a solid foundation for authenticity,” Galek said.

While C2PA’s standards don’t deal with detection of AI-altered media, it starts with the assumption that most of it is now, Galek said. “C2PA kind of assumes that users are going to be changing a piece of media, and [in] some of the research I was looking at, most studies were saying that over 50% of people posting content to social media platforms have manipulated in some way, whether it's due to editing that content or adding a filter,” he said. “So that's a significant amount that has been altered in some way, and kind of unknowingly, you're consuming that media.”

Galek pointed to the importance of metadata in tracking a piece of content’s evolution through the complete production chain and how that vital information is getting lost when content migrates to various platforms. Adopting C2PA will help protect that information, he added.

“There's a ton of tech that’s used today where metadata gets stripped inherently out when media is transferred from one system to another,” he said. “For vendors adopting this standard, you will have that methodology to retain that metadata through an entire supply chain.”

Working groups with the C2PA are focused on areas like audio and video watermarking, but Galek said there has to be intra-industry cooperation.

“There needs to be an additional spotlight on the implementation side of things, to provide a forum for broadcast-based and other industries to collaborate,” he said. “We know how increasingly fragmented the broadcast vendor landscape is, so it’s that much more critical for us to collaborate together around content authenticity.”

Detecting Deep Fakes
Anyone who has dabbled in generative AI knows how better it is getting with time but altering video and images (aka “deep fakes”) has been done for decades, something Ed Grogan, a motion imagery researcher and former Defense Department official, discussed during the session “The Dark Side of AI.”

(Grogan discussed his work in video forensics with TV Tech in 2018).

“When we started this, it took a little Hollywood studio to really make good deep fakes, and they couldn't do much,” Grogan said. “We’re now at the point that some of these levels where that little Hollywood studio was are [now] being done by middle schoolers.”

Using a historic picture of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Yalta conference in 1945—with Groucho Marx in place of the Soviet dictator—Grogan emphasized the importance of spotting discrepancies as early as possible, since a widely distributed AI-altered image could rapidly alter public perception. In other words, it could allow a lie to travel halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on, a line often attributed to Churchill himself.

“If you think it's fake, put it in your documentation, because someone 20 years from now might lose the reference material,” he said. “And if you don't say you think it’s fake and the audience didn’t have the historical reference, they might not know that really should've been Stalin and that’s the wrong Marx. So sometimes, because they don’t have the historical understanding, you can get something past somebody to tell your story.”

Although no one sees media companies losing their gatekeeper status anytime soon, Footen summarized the promise and perils of AI in removing media companies as the “middleman” for content consumption.

“If everyone can do what we're doing today, I think our industry is going to be disintermediated,” Footen concluded. “I'm not sure how much of a media industry we have left when everyone is a media company. Every person, every company, is a media company. Our job, historically, has been to create the content, to gather the audiences and to monetize that content. But what if we’re not needed to do that? That’s kind of happening already.”

CHESAPEAKE BEACH, MD.—I recently wrote about the value (and necessity) of keeping up-to-date, especially in a broadcast engineering career. Last month, I was back in the classroom with some 156 of my peers trying to wrap my brain around some of the latest developments involving cloud workflows, video encoding, OTT delivery, IMF, IP connectivity, UHD, and a lot of other technologies that have blossomed since I made the move from engineering to writing and editing.

Conference co-chairs Peter Wharton (L) and Rick Singer.
This continuing education opportunity that I took advantage of is provided under the auspices of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and is entirely coordinated and organized by volunteer members of the local (Washington, D.C.) SMPTE Section. The two-day technical conference has been held since the late 1990s, beginning as a joint venture between the SMPTE Section and the now-defunct Washington Executive Broadcast Engineers (WEBE) group and held at a number of waterside venues before settling here at a small resort and restaurant seven years ago. According to conference co-chair Peter Warton, the “Bits By The Bay” moniker was bestowed on the event by the mayor of Chesapeake Beach, Bruce Wahl (who just happens to be a SMPTE member himself).

ALWAYS A SELL-OUT EVENT
The tech con is always sold out well in advance of opening day, and while crafted to be regional in scope, draws attendees from as far away as Atlanta and New York. Despite its out-of-the-way location (it’s about an hour’s drive from downtown Washington, depending on the traffic) and small size (limited to less than 160 people by the seating capacity of the hotel’s largest meeting space), the event manages to attract top-notch broadcast industry presenters from far and near. (This year’s speaker list included Sony CTO Hugo Gaggioni; Mike Koetter, senior vice president of media technology and development with Turner; telecommunications consultant Wes Simpson; John Shike, vice president of marketing and channel management at SAM; Sinclair Senior Director Lou Libin; Philip Schoene, senior director, engineering & technical maintenance at PBS; Grass Valley CTO Chuck Meyer; Tektronix Senior Field Video Application Engineer Karl Kuhn; and Lawo’s Mike Mueller and Andreas Hildebrandt, who spoke via Skype from Germany.

IP LOOMS LARGE
The seemingly inevitable shift to IP technology within the broadcast arena was deemed sufficiently important by conference organizers that almost a full day was devoted to IP-related presentations, with no less than six presenters offering their views, ideas and implementation suggestions about moving to this form of connectivity.

Bob Ferguson, Belden broadcast audio and video specialist, was one of those offering his thoughts on the future of IP, as well as suggestions for making the transition, first noting that some 60 percent of broadcasters and content producers have already begun some IP implementation, with that figure steadily growing.
“Twenty-five percent are going to add it this year or next year,” said Ferguson. “IP is going to be in your system somewhere.”

He observed that while fiber was probably the best choice for IP interconnectivity due to its inherent noise immunity and bandwidth capabilities, most broadcast installations will likely be constructed with “Category-type” or “CAT” data cables. He cautioned potential implementers, however, that all CAT cable is not the same.

The tech con is always sold out long before opening day.
“I wouldn’t consider CAT-5 at all,” said Ferguson. “At minimum, you should go with CAT-6,” he said, but noted that this really isn’t the cable of choice where moving high-speed packets is involved. “[It’s] basically designed to support 1 Gbps. CAT-6A is a different product. It’s swept out to 500 MHz and is good for 10 Gbps.”

He stated that an even better Category cable, CAT-8, will be available later this year and that it really should be given a lot of consideration for IP facility construction. “It’s designed to support 40 Gbps operation at distances of up to 30 meters,” stated Ferguson.

IP evangelist Hugo Gaggioni praised the burgeoning technology as a means of greatly simplifying a broadcaster’s life, noting that by using IP connectivity it would be possible to send only a bare minimum of equipment out into the field for remote broadcasts, with such big ticket and bulky items as production switchers, DVEs, and the like remaining behind at the studio. He also noted that even with present-day remote broadcast practices, IP could make a very large difference in another area.

“In constructing a large production truck it’s possible to save as much as 85 percent in weight by using IP connectivity [instead of conventional coax and twisted pair audio],” said Gaggioni.

Evertz’s Paul Briscoe offered other reasons for making a shift to IP, observing that while SDI worked well and was simple and easy to implement, it was beginning to reach the end of its utility.

“With 4K/p60, things are starting to get a little tough,” he said. “SDI is tapped out at 12 Gbps on coax. [Also] the workflow capabilities are exhausted. The essences are bound together inside SDI—the audio and video are glued together, the metadata is all glued together. We can’t connect any type of intelligence; everything is nailed down.”

In offering additional reasons for making a move to IP, Briscoe observed that “SDI is very format-specific while IP is format-agnostic. It gives us a lot of flexibility.”

The SDI to IP sessions (“Inside the Plant: Transitioning to a Standards-Based All-IP Facility”) were only part of the conference subject matter. Other sessions covered the television spectrum auction, NASA’s implementation of a UHD channel, disaster recovery, the changing complexion of consumer device connectivity, and even included a special session in which Wes Simpson offered his thoughts about the best way to prepare technical personnel to handle new technologies.

THE SECRET OF ‘BBTB’S SUCCESS
Asked about the popularity and success of “Bits By The Bay,” especially when similar conferences often have trouble attracting attendees and presenters, Wharton (whose day job is vice president of technology and business development at Broadstream Solutions, and in addition, serves as secretary/treasurer for the SMPTE international organization) ascribes it to several factors.

“I think a big factor is that we have a very active SMPTE Section with members who enjoy getting involved in the conference,” said Wharton. “It also helps that we have a large broadcasting community in and around Washington; Discovery, PBS and several station groups. Every major network has representation here, and of course, there’s a very large government and military presence in the area, with numerous television facilities and technical personnel. However, I think also it’s due to the fact that we put together a really good program and, over the years, have built this up and as a result are able to attract some really good presenters.”

Wharton also thought that the conference location—despite its remoteness and complete lack of public transportation—was a factor in attracting both attendees and presenters.

“People like getting away and coming to the beach and there’s a friendly, sort of ‘family, vibe’ here and the small town setting makes it very affordable,” he said. “Registration is just a small fraction of what you’d pay for a technology conference in New York or Los Angeles. We try to make it very affordable for our members and others to attend.” (“Early-bird” admission for SMPTE members is $100 and $200 for non-members. Hotel rooms at the compound are also a comparative bargain at less than $150 per night.)

SMPTE's Executive Director, Barbara Lange, traveled to Maryland to welcome "Bits By The Bay" attendees.
Barbara Lange, SMPTE’s executive director, traveled from the organization’s headquarters in White Plains, N.Y. to attend this year’s conference, and also shared her thoughts on the reasons for its success.

“While I think that the SMPTE annual conference that we do in Hollywood is a nice size, there’s something to be said for a more intimate event and I think that ‘Bits By The Bay’ is this sort of ‘secret sauce,’” she said. “It’s the coming together of a great program with local flavor. The fact that it’s this size really helps, because bigger is not necessarily better. I want to congratulate the Washington Section on their efforts.”

PLAN TO ATTEND
As I’ve pointed out many times, there’s no such thing as too much education, especially in such a rapidly changing and developing field as ours, and there’s no excuse not to stay current with such regional conferences as “Bits By The Bay” available at a fraction of the cost of those held in a major city. SMPTE Sections in other areas—New England, Toronto and Montreal, come to mind—also host tech conferences and “boot camps,” and the SBE and IEEE also provide such opportunities (the IEEE’s Broadcast Technology Society has taken their annual Fall Symposium) on the road in recent years in an attempt to reach more broadcast engineers, with this year’s event set in Hartford, Conn., Oct.12-14. Be sure and check the websites of all three organizations for information about an educational event near you. Remember the old saying, “opportunity favors the prepared mind.” And in today’s broadcasting technical area, having the proper preparation could mean the difference in easily finding or keeping a job or looking for work.

I hope to see you in Chesapeake Beach next May!