MENLO PARK, Calif.—Amazon Prime viewers can now watch their favorite content in their own private, virtual reality screening room, as Oculus has announced that it is now able to provide its users access to Prime Video VR.

Prime members in the U.S. and U.K. that own a Oculus Quest, Oculus Go and Gear VR set can watch Amazon original programming like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” “Cold War” and the entire Prime Video programming catelogue through the Prime Video VR app. In addition, 10 360-degree videos have been selected and are available immediately, with new VR content expected to be added on a regular basis.

The Prime Video VR app can be downloaded through the Oculus store on any of the compatible Oculus devices. When downloaded, users can sign into their Prime Video accounts and searching for titles by using their voice.

Non Prime members can access the Prime Video VR app through their Oculus devices, but they are not able to access specific VR content.

More information is available at amazon.com/PrimeVideoVR.

Fremont, CA - November 15, 2018 - Blackmagic Design today announced that its ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K live production switcher and ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel were used as part of the immersive live streaming workflow at the recent Oculus Connect 5, Oculus’ annual virtual reality developer conference.

Headed by Supersphere, an L.A. based immersive content and technology company, the 4K and 12G-SDI virtual reality (VR) workflow also relied on a number of additional Blackmagic Design products, including six Teranex AV standards converters, a Smart Videohub 12G 40x40 router, six HyperDeck Studio 12G broadcast recorders, five DeckLink 4K Pro capture and playback cards and several Teranex Mini Quad SDI to 12G-SDI converters.

“We have been working with Facebook and Oculus for a while as an immersive streaming provider,” said Jason Diamond, partner and technical creative director, Supersphere. “For Oculus Connect 5, there were some unusual requests. We needed to not only stream the all important keynotes for several hours each day, but we also had to stream more than 10 hours of esports tournament finals into Oculus Venues. We have expertise in immersive esports streaming, and used several tools, including the Blackmagic Design suite, to build custom environments in headset to give a richer esports experience for fans all over the world.”

Available inside the Oculus Go and GearVR headsets, the Oculus Venues platform allows users to attend live events in VR with all the sounds, lights and energy of really being there.

“Our technical workflow was a little different for each style of input. For some sources, especially those coming from graphics cards on the gaming computers, we would use a Teranex AV to upconvert from 1920 x 1080 to Ultra HD for inclusion in the overall 4K environment,” explained Diamond. “All sources would eventually feed into the ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K at the heart of our system. We used the ATEMs as the control center and as the primary switching environment for any immersive broadcast. We also routed ISOs and the line cut to the HyperDeck Studio 12Gs for recording.”

“For Oculus Connect 5, we pretty much used every feature the ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K had in its bag of tricks; advanced chroma keying, Ultra HD multi viewers and built in SuperSource were all core to our workflow. Additionally, esports by nature has a ton of sources, so the ATEM’s 20 inputs came in handy, and we were maxed out on our console at times,” he added. “Meanwhile, the Teranex AV is just an industry workhorse. It’s famous for ‘anything in/anything out,’ and it’s our Swiss Army knife for formats and conversions.”

The majority of the Blackmagic Design gear is housed in two flypacks purposefully designed for live VR, 360º, 180º and 4K streaming and built on a 12G-SDI infrastructure from the ground up. The flypacks are used on a weekly basis, traveling all over the world for events and shows.

“Our overall philosophy when building our racks is to merge new technology with proven technology and workflows. Multi cam, multi geometry immersive streaming is hard. The trick is to blend the new, sometimes very unusual tools with the stock and trade of broadcast,” said Diamond. “By doing that, we are able to hire talented, experienced broadcast professionals and leverage their decades of experience in producing great shows while bringing in enough new technology to allow the immersive elements to shine.”

He concluded, “Our business started encompassing a fair amount of multi cam immersive live streaming, and we needed to build a reliable, robust set of solutions that would let us do that at a professional level for demanding shows and clients. Blackmagic Design provides products at just the right intersection of price, feature set and performance, allowing a growing company to build professional grade solutions for high end projects.”

Press Photography

Product photos of ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K, ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel, Teranex AV, Smart Videohub 12G 40x40, HyperDeck Studio 12G, DeckLink 4K Pro, Teranex Mini Quad SDI to 12G-SDI and all other Blackmagic Design products are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/images

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com

Oculus has launched Oculus TV, a new channel that serves as a hub to experience programming from Hulu, Showtime, MLB Live games and others, as well as esports via Facebook’s Watch video service. The service is available to users of Oculus Go, the company’s first standalone VR headset. Oculus Go, announced at Facebook's F8 conference last month, retails for $199 for 32GB of storage, $249 for 64GB.

What’s missing from the company’s announcement? Any mention of the words “virtual reality.” Instead, Oculus claims that the viewing experience on its new TV network for Oculus Go is equivalent to a 180-inch TV screen. The company said viewers can switch between live and on-demand content, from “The Daily Show” and “Late Night With Stephen Colbert” to Facebook Watch original shows. Content is also available from Pluto TV, Red Bull TV and Newsy, with the promise of “fan favorites” from ESPN to be added soon.

The Oculus TV app can be downloaded from the Oculus Store for free. 

Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality company, is diving deeper into video with Oculus TV, a custom, 3D-rendered environment that will be centered by a large viewing screen, virtual seating area and serve as a content hub for an initial wave of partners.

Oculus TV, announced at this week’s F8 conference in San Jose, will focus on “serialized content” (including both live and on-demand) and provide a curated area for VR apps from partners such as Hulu and Showtime, with plans to add others, including Pluto TV, Red Bull TV and Facebook’s video app for TV next month. ESPN will be joining the Oculus TV mix later this year.

Oculus TV is set to launch this month, and sometime this summer will add the ability for up to four people to watch together in a virtual room.

The most significant VR hardware product news to come out of F8 was the commercial availability of the Oculus Go, the company’s first standalone VR headset that starts at $199 (for the 32 GB version; the 64 GB version sells for $249) and supports more than 1,000 apps and games at launch.

Oculus Go complements the Oculus Rift, which needs to be hooked to a high-octane PC. Oculus software also powers the Samsung Gear VR headset that works in tandem with compatible smartphones. Watch this promo video about Oculus’ new standalone VR headset:

Oculus Go will also compete with standalone VR headsets that will work with Google’s Daydream platform. Google and its CE partners have not announced a revised launch date for those products (originally they were expected to be out by the end of 2017) other than to say that they are coming “soon." More details could be announced at next week’s Google I/O developer conference

Oculus also introduced a “Venues” offering focused on live social events such as concerts, sports and comedy nights — an area that’s been a focus of AltSpaceVR, the social VR company acquired last fall by Microsoft.

Oculus has also redesigned Oculus Rooms, a social platform originally released for the Gear VR, with this week’s launch of Oculus Go.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—For those that have felt there’s nothing good to watch in virtual reality, Samsung Electronics America, Inc. has launched “Pilot Season,” a new initiative aimed at generating fresh, exclusive VR-rich content via its Samsung VR Video service.

Through the program, Samsung awarded a grant to a select indie filmmakers to fund their creation of original VR episodes for six VR pilot series. In addition to exclusive distribution via a dedicated channel on the Samsung VR Video service, the filmmakers were given the opportunity to shoot with Samsung’s 360 Round 360-degree 3D-camera, which features 17 lenses in a stereoscopic 8-pair configuration, plus one on the top, to capture an immersive 360-degree image with no blind spots.

[Read: Samsung Gear Rolls Out $229 360-Degree 4K Camera]

Pilot episodes were produced for the following six VR series:

· “Bro Bots:” a sci-fi VR comedy series set in a New York City of the future, featuring Otis and Roberto, two British robots with big, quirky personalities that join the NYPD.

· “The Interpretation of Dreams:” a narrative fiction series that tells Freud’s original case studies as haunting, psychologically complex VR dreamscapes.

· “Lightcatcher:” a sci-fi adventure featuring the challenges and triumphs of Earth’s people in the year 2150.

· “Sam’s Surreal Gems:” a story-driven VR experience that challenges viewers to find Easter eggs hidden in various VR scenes.

· “&Design:” a global journey looking at artifacts and inventions to explore the relationship between design, technology, anthropology and science.

To watch the Pilot Season episodes, viewers need Samsung Gear VR with a Controller, powered by Oculus, coupled with a compatible Galaxy device, such as the Galaxy S9 or S9+. Once on the platform, viewers can navigate to the Oculus store, and find the content in the “Featured” section of the Samsung VR Video service.

Immersive and interactive games tend to get top billing at this stage of the virtual reality market’s evolution, but 360-degree video could be the category that unleashes VR to the masses.

Nick DiCarlo

Video sets a “baseline of usage” that establishes a gateway of discovery for VR consumers, offering a path to games and other immersive apps and experiences provided by the platform, Nick DiCarlo, vice president of immersive products and virtual reality at Samsung Electronics America, said.

“No matter what kind of game or other content you’re interested in, you watch video,” said DiCarlo, who will be the opening keynote speaker at NewBay Media’s Virtual Reality 20/20 event at The TimesCenter |in New York on Oct. 17.

Samsung is approaching its first full year with a commercially available VR product — the Gear VR, an Oculuspowered headset that connects to compatible smartphones and a curated ecosystem of apps and services.

“Video, we thought, was going to be really important for VR,” DiCarlo said of Samsung’s opinion as it analyzed how the market might evolve following the launch of its “Innovator” edition of Gear VR in November 2014, followed by the consumer version about a year later. “We believed in 360-degree video as a way to help VR become really mainstream.”

Inspired by the television model, Samsung’s ambition early on was to release one new VR video a day. It turns out that the company’s goals underestimated its ambitions.

“We thought that VR needed … something new every day,” DiCarlo said. “By the end of 2015, we were releasing five videos a day.”

The growing reach of specialized 360-degree cameras and stitching software keeps filling the VR pipeline. And YouTube and Facebook have fully embraced 360 video.

“The creation and release of 360 video has absolutely blown away our expectations for how rich and creative and capable of an ecosystem that was out there,” DiCarlo said.

The numbers also bear out video’s popularity: Though it’s still early days, only about 40% of the apps available for Gear VR are games.

That’s surprising, DiCarlo said, because all of the early talk about VR content centered on games, with 360 video seen as a smaller complement. It turns out that 360 video is a “little bit bigger” than games on Gear VR.

“If you love games, you also watch video. But if you watch video you don’t necessarily love games,” DiCarlo said, noting that other categories such as social VR (AltspaceVR, for example) and VR real estate and entertainment systems from companies like Matterport will also factor heavily into the direction of the market.

Likewise, the broader VR ecosystem — from the headsets and the smartphones that power them, to the apps to the content contained in those apps — has evolved rapidly.

“All of these things need to happen all at once before you can sell one unit,” DiCarlo said. “What’s happened in the last year is nothing short of extraordinary.”

“Millions” of hours of VR video have been consumed on Gear VR, he said; the platform recently eclipsed 1 million active monthly users. “It has started to hit some big, key milestones,” DiCarlo said.

Video has proven to be an early driver of Samsung's Oculus-powered Gear VR.

Samsung has been partially helped in hitting those numbers by a promotion which gave free Gear VR headsets to customers who pre-ordered the company’s new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones.

That promotion “exceeded our expectations,” DiCarlo said. “It took a lot of people by surprise how effective that was.”

Of course, Gear VR is far from alone in an increasingly competitive market. While PC-connected platforms such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive target the highest end of VR’s consumer category, the mobile sector of the market, where Samsung lives today, already contends with relatively cheap Cardboard viewers. Google’s Android- powered Daydream system is also expected to debut later this year.

DiCarlo is convinced Gear VR’s performance will give it the edge, noting that the headset-smartphone combination supports 20-milisecond “motion-to-photon latency,” referring to how quickly the display updates and changes when people move their heads.

“The best VR headsets in the world are equal to that,” he said. “There isn’t a mobile-powered headset that’s even close to that.”

He also said consumers find the device itself comfortable to wear — something that’s necessary if it’s to appeal to a mass audience.

“If you want regular people to use this product, it has to be comfortable. It’s not even an option,” he said. “That’s a critical, though often misunderstood, differentiating feature that we have yet to see matched by any mobile device in the marketplace that you can actually buy.”

The platform’s app ecosystem is also key. Gear VR’s compatible smartphones are designed to download software automatically, removing some manual processes.

At the same time, explaining these differentiators is a challenge at retail. When HDTV came on the scene, it took some seeing for would-be buyers to believe. For VR, consumers will likely want to try before they buy.

Gear VR is featured in as many as 18,000 retail stores, with 15,000 of them offering hands-on demos, DiCarlo estimated.

“Trying it and experiencing it and understanding what it really means is super-critical,” he said.

Looking ahead, DiCarlo sees bigger and better things ahead for mobile VR as consumers gain easier access to products that can create and share 360-degree content. Mobile VR will also lend itself to more advanced features such as hand- and position-tracking.

“There��s room for that in mobile, but it will just be on a different time scale,” he said.

This story originally appeared in the Sept. 19 issue of Multichannel News.

EL SEGUNDO, CALIF.—AT&T-owned DirecTV is set to deliver virtual reality programming. The satellite TV provider will launch VR in the ring with the Big Knockout Boxing, or BKB VR App.

The new app will deliver highlights from the June 27 BKB fight event at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. DirecTV said one can “experience the blows and knock downs on your VR-ready smartphone as if you were actually at the fight.”

The BKB VR app is now available for Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition and Cardboard (Android and iOS) headsets. The content also is in Samsung Milk VR, a premium virtual reality service. The BKB VR app on the Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition enables selection of different fight highlights and close-up camera feeds. It can be downloaded now from the Oculus Store, Google Play, and Apple App Stores.

“We know that VR can be a deeply engaging entertainment medium. It delivers a compelling sense of ‘being there’ that’s unmatched by any other technology,” said Jon Molod, vice president of Digital Entertainment Products Group for DirecTV. “We believe that much of VR’s growth will be mobile driven. As the technology evolves we hope to find new ways to use VR to enhance not just BKB, but all sports experiences.”

The BKB VR app was designed as a short-form immersive experience focused on presenting a selection of the most exciting fight moments. The app’s immersive content was filmed by a five-camera system designed to capture the event from the perspective of a fan in the audience.