TVBEurope's latest ebook explores the rise of visual podcasts and the technology behind them.

In recent years, podcasts have evolved from audio-only to include video, and visual podcasts are an opportunity for creatives to engage with audiences without breaking the bank.

With major broadcasters such as BBC and streaming services like Netflix investing in visual podcasts (aka vizpods), their popularity looks set to grow even further.

The ebook, published in partnership with TV Tech and Radio World, explores how visual podcasts have been rising in popularity and the technology behind them, from cameras to microphones, lighting to visual effects, because this growing phenomenon looks set to be the next big creative success.

Download the free ebook here.

Today marks the 100th birthday of broadcasting icon Sir David Attenborough.

Born on May 8, 1926, in Isleworth, England, Attenborough is known throughout the world for his work with the BBC Natural History Unit, but he’s also moved with the times and in recent years has fronted shows on streaming services.

The middle of three brothers (older brother Richard was a BAFTA and Oscar-winning actor and director), Attenborough joined the BBC in 1952, despite the fact that he didn’t own a television.

Apparently, he was discouraged from a career in front of the camera because it was thought his teeth were too big! But, after the original presenter fell ill, Attenborough made his on-camera debut in 1954 with “Zoo Quest,” a program about an animal-collecting expedition for the London Zoo.

In the 1960s, he left the BBC to pursue a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, fitting in filming around his studies. However, he failed to finish the course after accepting an invitation to become controller of BBC Two in 1965. Amazingly, he managed to negotiate a clause in his contract that would allow him to still make programmes, travelling to Tanzania later that year to film elephants.

During his time at BBC Two, the channel broadcast some of its most iconic programmes, including The Old Grey Whistle Test and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It also helped showcase the BBC’s new UHF colour television.

In 1969, Attenborough was promoted to director of programmes, making him responsible for the output of both BBC One and Two. When he was touted as a possible BBC director-general in 1972, he told Richard he had no appetite for the job. Early the following year, he left his role to return to full-time programme-making.

This led to Attenborough’s most prolific time as a natural history presenter, educating the nation with the likes of Life on Earth, The Living Planet and The Life of Birds.

Over the past 10 years, Attenborough has spread his wings, working with the likes of Sky, Netflix and Apple TV.

Technology
As a presenter and producer, Attenborough has never been afraid to embrace new technology to help tell a story. For The Life of Mammals in 2002, low-light and infrared cameras were deployed to reveal the behaviour of nocturnal mammals.

In 2011, he discussed how 3D filmmaking (which was a big thing back then) could help bring “transcendental” images to screens, but tended to take a lot longer to film. “3D works under certain circumstances and depends on how you produce it,” said Attenborough. “Right now the technology is limiting, although the results can be liberating. It takes four to five people to lift the cameras and 30 minutes to change a lens, which is no way to react to fast-moving animal behavior. The systems are very temperamental, which means you could be sitting around for an hour and half while the cameras are aligned.”

(Also Read: The Evolution of 3D, According to Sir David Attenborough)

Also that year, IBC presented Attenborough with its International Honour for Excellence, celebrating his then 60-year career for its “significant advancements in filming techniques and bringing groundbreaking documentaries to audiences.”

In 2016, the BBC launched its own Attenborough app. “The Story of Life” app marked his 90th birthday with over 1,000 clips of Attenborough’s most memorable moments. “To keep sharing those stories in a digital age means taking them online, and I hope ‘The Story of Life’ will reach and inspire a whole new generation,” he said.

In more recent years, Attenborough has helped lead the move into augmented reality. At an AR experience based on 2022’s “The Green Planet” in London, visitors were guided through six digitally enhanced worlds—including rainforests, freshwater and saltwater worlds, the changing seasons and desert landscapes—by an AR version of the presenter.

The series itself employed new filming technology to take the audience to the highest branches and the lowest fauna, using a camera rig re-engineered into a field robot christened the Triffid, after John Wyndham’s science fiction book. Using the system, the production team were able to film plants in the field, not only in time lapse, but in real time, exploring their world all the way down to macro scale.

(Also Read: How a Triffid Captured ‘The Green Planet’)

Attenborough has also worked with virtual production, specifically on “Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough,” when producers used the 25.5 meter-by-5 meter curved screen at MARS’ London facility to recreate the series’ background.

All of this shows that Attenborough is one of the most prolific presenters and producers on British television. In fact, he holds a Guinness World Record for the longest career as a natural historian and presenter in television.

With “Wild London” and “Secret Garden” already airing in 2026 and “Tiger Island” awaiting broadcast, it looks like Attenborough’s 60+ year career on screen and off shows no sign of stopping. Long may it continue!

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.

With the dust now settled on IBC2025, TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope took the time this week to reflect on the biggest talking points and trends of the show in a special webinar.

The panel, Larissa Görner-Meeus, managing director at LaraMedia, Caretta Research co-founder Robert Ambrose, and Simon Hawkings, director of sales strategy and business acceleration at Ross Video, discussed multiple topics, including the Media eXchange Layer, cloud adoption, live production and the future of the industry.

One of the biggest talking points of the show was FinOps. “Finance has always been on the table when we were buying something. But now finance is a very central discussion that you have in any purchase or in any solution purchase,” explained Görner-Meeus.

“In this software-defined world that we’re moving so fast into, there are just new skills that we need and new disciplines that we need,” agreed Ambrose. “License management is one that comes up all the time in this world where we have all of this flexibility and floating licenses.”

This led the panel on to discussing the cloud, not a new talking point, but Ambrose told the audience he feels the industry is moving to a more pragmatic approach.

“There was a little while where everybody was cloud, cloud, cloud at all costs,” he explained. Now there’s much more focus on using the cloud where it makes sense. And, of course, it makes sense for lots of things. There’s a whole range of use cases where the cloud is superb. At the same time, there’s a lot of live production and broadcasting workflows, which are pretty constant workloads, and where that and cost and latency all make it much more sensible to just have it running on-prem on cheap servers. And I think, exactly what we’re seeing.”

“Maybe that’s another example of FinOps,” said Ambrose. “It’s understanding how to access the resources that you need and where’s the most economical place to have them.”

Hawkings agreed with Ambrose’s point, citing conversations at the show around the use of private cloud and customers building their own data centres in order to protect both costs and security.

“The move to software does not necessarily mean public cloud. It could end up looking in a way quite similar to how things are today, a room full of boxes with flashing lights doing things. But they’re running software. They’re not running FPGAs and hardware.”

The panel shared their overall thoughts from the show, with all three agreeing that they feel that in 2025, the pace of change in the industry is starting to increase. “It feels like we’ve got so much to talk about now in the way the industry is changing,” stated Ambrose.

“But we do always need to be careful, and this is always the danger of IBCs, that we can get caught up in the bubble. I think it’s always crucial to step back. We love new tech and love looking at the latest shiniest thing, but always step back and say, well, how is that going to change what we do for the better? How do we use it for real? Is this just a bubble, or is this something that is going make a change?

“That’s always a crucial question to ask after any of the big events.”

The full webinar is now available to watch on-demand here.

TV Tech is teaming up with TVBEurope and Avid to host a webinar looking at the impact of artificial intelligence on the media industry.

With so much being written about the technology, how does the industry actually see it? What advantages and challenges does AI offer to broadcasters, and how confident are they about using AI in their workflows today?

The free session on Nov. 26 will take a deep dive into the key findings of an industry survey on the confidence in AI, conducted by Caretta Research on behalf of TVBEurope and TV Tech.

Topics under discussion will include what challenges lie on the road ahead to adopting AI, and where AI is currently making the most impact on broadcast and media workflows, and where it could in the future.

Speakers include Caretta Research co-founder, Robert Ambrose, and Seth Hallen, president of the Hollywood Professional Association and AI expert.

A second session hosted by TVBEurope and Avid on Dec. 3 will focus on the reality of AI today for broadcasters and how it can increase workflow efficiency and creativity. It will include discussions on the ways in which AI can help journalists get their stories to air faster than ever before, and the importance of security when considering the implementation of AI.

Speakers include Avid product evangelist Craig Wilson and Danijela Horak, Head of AI Research, BBC R&D.

Don’t miss out on these webinars with leading experts sharing their knowledge on artificial intelligence. Register for free now.

LONDON—By 2024, it’s estimated half of the global population, or 3.4 billion people, will be gamers.

But, does the gaming industry have the technology to cope with that kind of demand? And what parallels can it draw with the world of media and entertainment?

Those questions will be among the discussion during TVBEurope’s upcoming webinar looking at the hope and hype of gaming in the cloud.

Among the topics set to be discussed by our panel of experts is whether broadcasters can tap into that exponential growth. During lockdown, the amount of people watching others play games has seen a significant increase, and it’s particularly popular with the young who don’t watch traditional TV. Could that be an untapped market for broadcasters who are desperately trying to capture the attention of younger viewers?

Plus, can the gaming industry cope with the increasing bandwidth needed to keep so many viewers happy? And what about latency? Could 5G be a possible option, or will that lead to even further growth?

Other topics likely to be discussed include the use of gaming engines in film and TV productions, Disney+’s "The Mandalorian" being just one example; could gaming companies look to TV platforms for examples of bundling content; and what can the media industry learn from gaming and vice versa?

The panel of experts will include Laurent Depersin, research and innovation home lab director at Interdigital; Olivier Avaro, CEO of gaming company Blacknut; Microsoft’s industry lead for media and technology Stuart Almond; and Amir Ghodrati, director of market insights at AppAnnie.

The free webinar will take place at 3 p.m. BST on Thursday, Sept. 24.

A poll by TV Technology's sister publication TVBEurope and MediaKind has found consistent broadcast quality across all devices is the most important element for an operator when delivering streaming services.

The poll was carried out as part of our "Live Streaming 2020—Shifting Consumer Habits" webinar.

The audience was asked to vote on what they thought is the most important element for an operator when delivering streaming services.

The options were, consistent broadcast quality across all devices; bandwidth and storage optimization; per user targeted advertising and content replacement; and QoE monitoring and analytics.

Consistent broadcast quality was the overwhelming the choice of the audience, receiving 65.8% of the votes cast.

It was followed by bandwidth and storage optimization, which received 18.4% of the votes.

Per user targeted audience gained 10.5% of the vote, while QoE monitoring and analytics had just 5.3%.

The webinar featured a number of topics, including how the coronavirus pandemic could change sports broadcasting, particularly in terms of remote production; what are the biggest hurdles when starting an event-based streaming service; and will there be an acceleration to HEVC in the next year to improve bandwidth utilization?

"Live Streaming 2020—Shifting Consumer Habits" is available to watch on-demand.

This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication TVBEurope.

The biggest area of content to have been hit by the coronavirus pandemic has been live events, be that sports, concerts or live entertainment shows.

But eventually these events will return, and operators need to be ready for what’s expected to be a large audience hungry to watch their favorite football team once again.

The question is, are operators ready for that returning audience?

This will be the focus of TVBEurope’s free webinar with MediaKind on Tuesday, May 5.

The webinar, which will include contributions from Carl Furgusson, MediaKind’s vice president of Portfolio Strategy, and Richard Mansfield, head of Media Delivery and Advertising Product Management, will look at how consumer habits toward streaming will have shifted during the first half of 2020.

For many viewers, live TV has been king over the past 10 years or so, with BARB figures showing viewers are still tuning in to live TV for around 2.5 hours a day.

Therefore, delivering live broadcast quality content across all screens is the toughest challenge, especially when the internet is seeing increasing use due to the numbers of people working from home.

Among the questions the webinar will pose will be:

• How can operators achieve a broadcast-like streaming experience?
• What's next for pop-up sport channels?
• Will the coronavirus pandemic accelerate the shift to cloud?
• Is the industry too reliant on on-premise playout?

All of these questions will be answered during the Live Streaming 2020—Shifting Consumer Habits webinar.

Don’t miss out on this webinar with leading experts sharing their knowledge of live streaming. Register for free here.

A new poll by TVBEurope has found that people working in media technology think AI and machine learning will have the biggest impact on the industry.

As part of its State of the Market webinar, TVBE asked the audience to vote for which technology they thought would have the most impact on the media technology industry over the next few years. The options were 5G, Internet of Things, AI and machine learning, and UHD/HDR.

AI and machine learning received 52.4% of the votes cast, followed by 5G with 23.8%, IoT had 14.3% of the vote, while UHD/HDR finished with 9.5%.

The webinar also asked the audience to choose what they think will have the biggest impact on the market in the next five years. In this poll, consumer behavior was the overwhelming choice with 76.5% of the audience opting for it. Technology and mergers and acquisitions activity were tied for second place with 11.8% of the votes cast each.

The webinar featured a wide-ranging discussion about the state of the media technology market and its outlook for 2020 and beyond with Martyn Whistler, lead analyst, media and entertainment, EY; Sinead Greenaway, chief technology and operations officer, UKTV; and Google’s Head of Broadcast and Entertainment for the U.K. and Ireland, Justin Gupta.

The State of the Market webinar is available to watch on-demand.

LONDON—NewBay, the leading independent information provider for the entertainment, education and technology markets, has launched a brand new digital platform for TVBEurope to enhance the brand’s coverage of the evolving media, entertainment and technology market.

Launched today, the new website features improved functionality, navigation, and readability to significantly enhance the user experience. The increased bandwidth and flexibility of the new platform will enable TVBEurope to expand the scope of its editorial coverage to be even more embracing of the technology and products that are helping to pioneer change in the marketplace. The platform upgrade and broadening of content focus will see NewBay’s TV Technology Global and NewBay Connect assets migrated onto the new TVBEurope platform.

“Upgrading our digital platforms gives us a significant opportunity to apply the same treatment to our content, both in the scope and context of the subject matter, and in the presentation of that content to our readers,” explained James McKeown, content director, NewBay. “This upgrade, allied to the September magazine redesign, demonstrates our commitment to providing high-quality services to our readers and partners, and channelling our efforts in a more focussed manner through a single, dedicated broadcast title puts us in the best position to deliver that strategy.”

The enhancements will see TV Technology Global and NewBay Connect content brought into the TVBEurope stable over the coming weeks, with the monthly magazine and the new website hosting a broader range of technology content, white papers, and market intelligence.

For more information about editorial opportunities across TVBEurope’s platforms, please contact editor Jenny Priestly (jpriestly@nbmedia.com). For commercial opportunities, contact Pete McCarthy (pmccarthy@nbmedia.com).