The HPA has unveiled portions of the program for the 2020 HPA Tech Retreat, set for February 17-20, 2019. The HPA Tech Retreat, marking its 25 year in 2020, is the pre-eminent gathering of industry-leading thinkers and innovation-focused companies engaged in the creation, management, and dissemination of content. The 2020 Tech Retreat will be held at the Westin Mission Hills Golf Resort & Spa in Rancho Mirage, CA.

For twenty-five years, the HPA Tech Retreat has consistently presented an unparalleled roster of well-known and emerging leaders – from engineering and technology to creativity and business – who come together to explore and debate the most pressing and intriguing topics facing the media and entertainment landscape today. Spanning four days, the HPA Tech Retreat continues its evolution on this auspicious anniversary with a new approach to the Supersession and an always important lineup of main program sessions and technology demonstrations. The HPA Tech Retreat eschews marketing-oriented presentations during the main program, TR-X, and Supersession, enabling attendees to lean into the often challenging topics facing them in their careers and businesses without a sales pitch. In addition, the schedule creates an environment conducive to the open exchange of knowledge and information, with time built into the schedule, as well as planned meals and events, to engender powerful connection and networking.

Monday, February 17:
TR-X:A Deep Dive into The Future
TR-X (Tech Retreat Extra) is a concentrated mini-conference that takes place the Monday of the Tech Retreat week. Registration for this engaging half-day event is included in the all-access pass or can be purchased on its own. This year’s TR-X, chaired again by Mark Chiolis of MobileTV Group and Craig German of Amazon Studios, will encompass a wide-ranging conversation examining the disruptive changes that are fundamentally altering the way we approach our work. Sessions include artificial intelligence, video over IP, augmented reality, mainstream betting, and the technology evolution, among other crucial topics facing the industry now and in the future.

Tuesday, February 18:
Supersession:Making A Movie at The Tech Retreat
Better, smoother, faster! Drawing from a history of leaning into applied technology, this year’s Supersession goes extremely hands-on with a true learning experience presented by some of the best end users in the industry. Joachim Zell chairs a day-long live exploration of movie production and post production with an emphasis on new technologies and workflows advancing the production process. The HPA Supersession team will complete a short film, from production to delivery and all the steps in between. The day will conclude with a screening of the completed film.

Tuesday – Thursday, February 18-20:
Innovation Zone: Exploration and Demonstration of Cutting Edge Technologies
The Innovation Zone offers Tech Retreat attendees access to explore cutting-edge technology in a curated setting throughout the week during program breaks and a Wednesday evening cocktail reception. Innovation Zone inquiries can be directed to Max Ma at mma@hpaonline.com.

Wednesday – Thursday, February 19-20:
Main Conference Program: Where The Answers Are Just the Beginning
Details for the main conference program, curated by Mark Schubin, will be announced in the near future. Attendees can expect two days of focus on the most pressing and intriguing issues facing the industry. Register here for updates, which will be forthcoming.

Breakfast roundtables, a popular part of the HPA Tech Retreat, will take place on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings, and offer further exploration of important trends and topics.

Announcements of the 2020 main program, and additional details about TR-X and the Supersession, will be forthcoming.

The HPA Tech Retreat is a limited attendance event, strictly capped at 700 guests, and is expected to sell out. Tickets for the HPA Tech Retreat are available at www.hpaonline.com. Onsite registration is not available. Conference Registration includes conference sessions Tuesday through Thursday, breakfast roundtables, Innovation Zone access, daily lunch, and social events. Admission to TR-X is included with an All-Access registration or can be purchased separately.

The HPA Tech Retreat takes place thanks to the generosity of Diamond Title Sponsor Adobe; Gold Sponsor Blackmagic Design; Silver Sponsors Signiant and SDVI Corporation; Bronze Sponsors Avid, LaCie, and Zeiss; Event Sponsors CP Communications and Dell Technologies; and Star Sponsor Cloudian. Sponsorship inquiries can be directed to Joyce Cataldo at jcataldo@hpaonline.com. More information about the HPA Tech Retreat is available at hpaonline.com, and be sure to follow HPA on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram for the latest updates and news.

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—The name of the remote game is pressure—the pressure to make live event television coverage instantly accessible, more effectively, for less money with no particular pipeline of trained recruits. That was the upshot of remote production panel discussion at the HPA Tech Retreat this week.

NEP elected the economy-of-scale model, making acquisitions that give it a global television production footprint, including, most recently, Consolidated Media Industries in Hilversum, Netherlands. Hilverum is 17 miles southeast of Amsterdam, home of Dutch TV production giant, Endemol.

“There is pressure to do production effectively and cheaply,” said NEP chief technology officer, George Hoover. Infrastructure is part of that. NEP also has 100,000 miles of phone lines in the Netherlands and operates two data center content delivery networks.

“Unlike some other places, the data center is part of our package,” he said.

LIVE TV OVER IP
The network presence gave NEP the ideal opportunity to deploy IP-based remote production. With trucks, when they’re in use, they’re making money. When they’re parked, they’re not. IP technology held the promise of a more efficient architecture versus the truck fleet, if it could work for live TV production.

NEP CMI division, DutchView Infostrada, aired “Carlo’s TV Café” live on RTL4, last November, using remote-controlled cloud production using SMPTE-2022 over Grass Valley IP camera technology. (SMPTE-2022 is the standard for encapsulating video signals for IP transport.)

“The control room can be anyplace,” Hoover said. “We’ve been doing two or three shows a week. We’ll probably be doing three or four a day.”

Michael Harabin, vice president of technology, engineering and media management for Pac-12 said the collegiate sports network televises 850 live events every season, now over IP transport.

“The challenge was how to produce field hockey and lacrosse and rugby… and break even,” he said.

“We have partners in the 12 consortium, so all we did was fiber the network,” he said. “Our farthest campus is Salt Lake City. Latency was 24 milliseconds. Everything’s about latency, routing and who’s the best provider.”

Pac-12 Network now has no other products in the field. The networks uses JPEG2000 with Nevion encoders. Everything comes out of San Francisco, to master control in Denver, he said.

Down the road Harabin said Pac-12 is looking at virtualizing master control, because they see the cable business going away, and they like the idea of spinning up as many networks as they want. The would like to get to the point where master control operator can go to Starbucks and operate playout. He said they’re looking to move everything from capex to opex.

$K
Philip Garvin, president of Colorado Studios/Mobile TV Group, thought they might get ahead of the competition with 4K, so MTVG built a 4K mobile unit, assigned it to HD productions and slo-mo, and “keep waiting for someone to call and say, ‘we’d like to use that 4K truck,’” he said. Garvin estimated that making outfitting a remote unit for 4K production costs an extra $1 million to $2 million.

Garvin said the the same cameras that do 4K can also do super slo-mo.

“That’s been extremely helpful to us, so we can invest in these cameras and use them while we’re waiting for 4K,” he said. “You’re looking way, way in the future when you build a truck.”

Garvin said 4K is not so hard, but that 4K high-dynamic range is not so easy. There are implications for the entire workflow, he said. For now, MTVG is working to recoup its 4K investment, and it’s not a seller’s game.

“The only place to squeeze is the truck companies these days,” he said. “We have to use all the technologies to provide a better fan experience, for less. They’re not just looking for 5 percent or 10 percent, but ‘big cuts,’” he said.

Joe Wire of flypack supplier Bexel said that when executives look at their investment cycle, they ask, “what are people going to do to improve the fan experience at home? That’s been a challenge for us… When we look at our investment, it’s really around how we can use our equipment best. Sometimes, you get a long-term contract for your truck. Sometimes, you don’t. So, for example, what is the lifecycle of HDR? What is the business case?

“It’s a struggle,” he said, with lots of hedging around 4K.

Asked if high-dynamic range 4K would be as compelling as the transition from standard to high definition, Garvin said it wouldn’t be quite the same.

“When we started HD in 2001, there were about 50,000 homes with HD sets. They were very expensive. Today, there may be somewhere between 20 million and 30 million 4K sets—they’re not HDR—and that tips the scale. Many are software-upgradable to HDR,” he said.

PEOPLE
Another issue in the truck business is finding qualified crew members. Harabin said it’s a challenge to get people in San Francisco, where a guy turned them down because he couldn’t bring a dog to work.

“It’s not glamorous to work at a television station,” he said.

Hoover said you have to “grow your own. Nobody else makes them. Harvard doesn’t graduate 5,000 of them every year.”

Harabin lauded NEP’s training program and said PAC-12 is doing likewise. Interns work for NEP for two years, then they’re sent out on the road as a third engineer on a three-person truck crew. Hoover talked about the necessity to balance personalities on a truck crew.

“Typically, an OB truck will send two or three people,” he said. “So those two people pretty much live together 220 days a year—you find the right personality mix, and it takes time to do it—it benefits both of them.

“It doesn’t take long. We’ve replicated this thing so many times, it’s second nature.”

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Wednesday morning at the HPA Technology Retreat started with concession, contradiction and tales of copyright antics.

SILVERMAN BOWS
Leon Silverman, whose day job is general manager of Disney’s Digital Studio, started the morning by stepping down as HPA president, literally handing a baton to Seth Hallen, whose career has spanned movie and TV production, software and the combination thereof as senior vice president of Global Creative Services at Sony DADC New Media Solutions.

SCHUBIN ESCHEWS
Then Mark Schubin provided a slide tour of articles countering popular perceptions. Super Bowl streaming, for instance, while ballyhooed for setting records, represented just 1.25 percent of this year’s TV audience. With a slide titled “Stagnation,” he noted the number of U.S. TV households has peaked, that this year’s Super Bowl was down from the last two, and that there has been no growth in the number of U.S. households online since 2013.

He noted the media most used by all demographics is radio.

He made a case for the return of physical media—Amazon starting a brick-and-mortar bookstore and the resurgence of vinyl LPs. He noted the return of the printing camera and Kodak’s reintroduction of Super 8. Then he named a number of major motion pictures shot at least in part on film: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “Jurassic World,” “The Hateful Eight” and others. Oh, and movie theater box office had a record year in 2015.

Yet all is not retro. Schubin spoke about data storage on DNA, which migrates information inherently, and he showed a silicon retina from brain-inspired computing at IBM Research in San Jose, Calif., that would open the door for capturing motion images without frames.

BURGER INTERPRETS
Jim Burger then provided his annual rundown of what in the world is going on in Washington. Burger, a copyright law expert with Thompson Coburn LLC, said the House Judiciary has held more than 20 copyright hearings, but to no apparent avail.

“I couldn’t tell any basis for change, but they keep holding them,” he said.

What has been determined by the courts, however, is that a chimpanzee cannot hold a copyright to his selfies, Aereo and FilmOn still can’t redistribute broadcast TV content online, while Google can digitize 20 million university library books, and Cox Communications has to pay $25 million for not having a takedown policy.

On the Internet front, Burger noted the FCC reclassified broadband to impose network neutrality and is now facing 11 petitioners representing 39 companies, associations and individuals, in the D.C. Circuit Court.

Burger spoke briefly about the upcoming television spectrum incentive auction, about which the known unknowns outweigh all other factors.

The argument over whether or not an Aereo or a FilmOn is a cable provider continues, while the federal effort to commercialize the cable set-top box remains stalled because content is still work a lot of money.

Burger also follows drone regulation, a J.J. Abrams interprets Henry James sort of affair in overtime. Rules governing unmanned aerial vehicles for commercial use were due last September. The Federal Aviation Administration is handing out waivers—3,100 so far—while it continues pounding out rules. Meanwhile, drones have been crashing on the White House lawn with some regularity. The FAA consequently made D.C. a drone no-fly zone.

And then, there is the story of Troy Haupt, a North Carolina man who owns the only known recording of the very first Super Bowl game in 1967. Haupt’s father recorded it on two-inch tape on a Quadruplex reel-to-reel recorder, while the NFL lost all copies. Haupt offered his for $1 million. The NFL countered with $30,000 and threatened to sue him for infringement if he “exploits” the tape.

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Mark Harrison said in 2010 it was clear there was problem.

End-to-end digital workflows were not coming together. The BBC ITV and Channel 4 created and funded the Digital Production Partnership, of which Harrison is now managing director. He said the DPP defined a common delivery format, AS-11 UK DPP, that was implemented in March of 2011 at BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, Channel 5 and BT Sport and S4C.

At BBC, they have so far put 8,000 AS-11 DPP programs to air “with no problems,” he said.

“At the very least, we’ve taken tape out of the equation,” Harrison said.

The when production companies began to move into a file-based world, and they needed help, he said.

Thus, DPP relaunched as a commercial endeavor to provide the technology beyond the British broadcasters. DPP most recently released an UHD delivery spec, and published a UHD production workflow guide.

In sum, DPP isn’t a standards body, but an organization “that helps get standards implemented,” he said.

DPP’s vetting process never goes beyond 12 months, he said, even though the organization consists of half a dozen people.

THE NA FDF SITCH
Clyde Smith, of Fox stood in for the North American Broadcasters Association. He laid out the laid out the “North American situation.”

Each major network had its own unique technical spec for program delivery, ranging from five pages to 28, he said. Many were incomplete or at least fraught with ambiguity. Some were simple citations of a standard such as SMPTE- 377m-2004—the MXF spec.

“Citing this alone is insufficient as there are many options to specify, as well; so it is incomplete and ambiguous to do so without citing the options,” Smith said later.

The result is costly to manufacturers, creates delays and adds inaccuracies in business processes, he said. Every year, there are new specs and everything starts again.

DPP and NABA formed a strategic partnership last April to help fix that. They’ve had more than 100 document contributions and presentations from across the U.S. and Canada.

The results will consider two workflows: A library master suitable for re-creation of many deliverables, using the original finished program frame rate and a high-quality codec such as J2K or XAVC; and a second air-ready master.

The library master will be released in a few weeks, initially as a common tech spec document, and eventually in XML.

Meanwhile, Smith said the Advanced Media Workflow Association is taking AS-11, the file delivery format developed by the DPP, and breaking it down into a series of rules that he likened to a set of interoperable Lego blocks. The same is happening in Australia, New Zealand and Nordic territories.

There will be two major sections covering network- and broadcaster-specific instructions, and common technical specs. For contractual reasons, broadcasters can specify their production limitations and requirements—which cameras and perhaps graphics and text to be used. These can be part of broadcaster-specific instructions.

The common technical specs will cover video, audio, captions, time code, codecs, file formats and metadata. SMPTE has taken this on with Bruce Devlin leading the group (377-M), while Chris Lennon is working on the XML metadata model.

Finally, Smith mentioned a growing preference from people who want to do high definition with high-dynamic range and wider color gamut, but not necessarily 4K.

The DPP/NABA technical group will bring its work to the Joint Task Force on File Formats and Media Interoperability, which Smith chairs. The JTFFFMI is jointly sponsored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, AMWA, the Association of National Advertisers, The European Broadcasting Union, the International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers, NABA; and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers—pretty much everyone who touches media files for television.