At IBC's Future Zone, the future is… Well, maybe not now, but pretty close. The 2018 show in Amsterdam will have its usual corner dedicated to the startups, old-hats with new ideas, and collaborations between the two to take video to the next level. Here are some of the innovators attendees will be able see.
Deep Inc./Liquid Cinema is one of the companies pushing advances in virtual reality tech that have given us more comfortable and portable gear and ever-more accessible tools for wannabe creators. Liquid Cinema's goal is to turn the process of making VR experiences into something your average teacher or journalist can do, with minimal fuss.
The company’s claim to fame is the ability to apply forced perspective to 360-degree videos; if the viewer is looking in a direction that doesn't contain information the creator wants the viewer to see, the perspective is automatically realigned.
Toronto-based Deep Inc. signed a deal to develop a VR app on Google's Daydream for the Wall Street Journal in 2016; Liquid Cinema received $1.5 million from the Canada Media Fund and German-French broadcaster ARTE.
InVID EU-H2020 seemingly understands one of every news organization's nightmares: publishing or broadcasting a video that is later revealed to be fabricated or manipulated in some way. Whether the manipulation is achieved through context erasure or outright image forgery, the threat is real.
InVID, a project under the EU's Horizon 2020 umbrella, has developed some tools for organizations to combat the spread of this particularly insidious type of misinformation, including a plugin for Chrome and Firefox browsers that detects manipulated videos and images.
As InVID points out, you can't necessarily prevent individuals from creating fake videos that then go viral. But you can at least give legitimate news organizations a way to ensure they are not contributing to the spread of misinformation by making it easy to check the veracity of this media.
BBC R&D has a direct interest in maintaining iPlayer’s long-running reputation as the gold standard in broadcaster digital plays. Now, in a bid to better compete with Netflix, the service, paid for by Britons' TV licenses, is expanding its offerings by making far more of its shows available—and not just for 30 days after original air.
So it makes sense that BBC R&D is focused on IP distribution and user experience to meet the likely increased demand for this content. Their focus is on developing HEVC content delivery over IP—file size is crucial—and dynamically substituting content delivered over IP into live services. They'll be conducting demonstrations of some of this tech.
These companies and several others will be exhibiting within the Future Zone during IBC Show 2018.