IBC 2017, Amsterdam. That should have been the dateline. But the night before I was supposed to leave, I checked my passport. Surely it hadn’t expired. Arghh…it had. After an hour of checking on a quick renewal, I cut my losses and canceled. (Thank you, Expedia travel insurance.)

So no Schiphol Airport or time at the RAI Convention Center. Too bad. But live and learn. And you can still learn, covering a show from afar. Leaning on a few trusted sources and an award-winning IBC conference paper, I’ve pulled together these takeaways on virtual reality (VR), big data and a few other trends.

VR Hype, Big Data Deployed

First, it would appear that VR is still being hyped. I’d seen demos at NAB last April and knew the drumbeat would continue. But the measured doubts of veteran UK-based writer and media consultant Raymond Snoddy strike me as on target. “The arguments for (VR) technology are eerily reminiscent of the enthusiasm for 3D TV nearly a decade ago.”

On the other hand, big data is no mere buzz word. Consider the winner of the IBC’s Best Conference Paper Award for 2017, which discusses a big-data implementation at Brazilian broadcaster TV Globo.

Written by four Globo media technologists, the paper surveys the broadcaster’s deployment of a multi-tenant big-data project covering data journalism, enhanced business analytics and video recommendation. Even a snapshot of the results are impressive:

• With the original research methods, it took journalists one week to answer a typical business question. By contrast, in the new big data environment, it took seven seconds.
• Focusing on one KPI (the number of users tracked when navigating through Globo’s websites) the Globo data team found that the new framework could analyze one month of data (billions of events involving multi-platform TV) also in mere seconds.
• Leveraging social media, the big data team developed a real-time video recommendation tool to suggest videos to Globo Play OTT users from its VOD catalog. The upshot being a 35 percent increase in viewing.

More Tech Highlights

Finally, I turned to Videonet Editor in Chief (and former colleague) John Moulding. Data analytics and VR (and 360-degree video) made it on his list of elements that could make up “the next big thing in television,” which may be yet five years down the road. Other currently visible threads of this possible revolution are UHD, AI and machine learning, data-driven advertising and enriched metadata.

As for real and deliverable technologies highlighted at IBC (which could also play out long-term) Moulding pointed to micro-services, Android TV, dynamic ad insertion (DAI), voice presence and adaptive bit-rate (ABR) based telco TV. He also identified two mini-trends: Live-to-VOD and the application of conditional access systems and digital rights management (CAS/DRM) to the internet of things (IoT).

That last one, a curious crossover from TV to IT at large, was new to me, and the only one of the whole lot that I haven’t yet written about in some way myself. And maybe I will, but better renew that passport first.