Transcript: A - Z of Tech: Episode 22: T for Television
Louise Taggart:
Hello, and welcome to the A to Z of Tech Podcast series, which is an alphabetical journey through technology and innovation. As always, I am your host Louise Taggart and today's episode, we are up to ‘T’, which will be T for television, which is probably a topic fairly close to home for a lot of us, no pun intended. There has, however, on a slightly more serious note, been a really rapid shift in technology in the past few years. I have to say I am probably giving my age away here, but I am old enough to remember when the Spice Girls launched the fifth terrestrial channel here in the UK, which feels like a million miles away from where we are now with TV technology and content. I am delighted to say that for this episode, I am joined by two excellent guests. The first is Robert Freeman, who is a freelance technology journalist and lecturer, and who some of you with keen ears may remember from some of our previous episodes, including ‘O’ for open data, and ‘M' for mobile. We're also joined in the studio by Charlie Neuner, who works here at PwC in the extended reality team, helping clients across a variety of industries, understand how emerging technology, particularly virtual and augmented reality can drive strategic transformation. Welcome to you both and thank you so much for joining me today for this episode.
Robert Freeman:
Thank you, it's great to be here in person and seeing the whites of your eyes.
Louise:
Absolutely, Robert, I might actually start with you, if I could. What does TV mean to you from a cultural perspective and do you have a favourite memory associated with television?
Robert:
I am going to be really nerdy, because one of my earliest memories is trying to take the back off the TV at home and scaring my mother half to death, because it's that classic thing of, ‘wait, where are these pictures coming from?’ I found that fascinating. We were two television household, although one of them was black and white, because it was the old TV that my grandparents might have had, and so that was the colour TV, and then the other room is the black and white TV. I was also fascinated why one of them was colour and why one of them wasn't, so that was another reason to take the back off the thing. Yes, TV has always been fascinating me. It really is, it is this box of incredible thoughts, and dreams, and learning.
Louise:
And magic.
Robert:
It's a magic box!
Louise:
Absolutely, Charlie, I might ask you the same question. Do you have a favourite childhood memory, it may or may not involve electrocution?
Charlie Neuner:
Yeah, I can't say that it involves electrocution, but my earliest television memories come down to watching shows like Top of the Pops, just wait and watch that each week as a big sport fan, watching it on a Sunday, and also just eagerly awaiting Match of the day. That was my weekend, it all summed up into one there.
Louise:
Absolutely, always enjoyed that theme tune to Match of the day. Thinking actually a little bit more about the technology and the magic that goes into all of this, Robert, from the work that that you do, what are some of the most significant changes that you've seen today when it comes to television?
Robert:
It's the change in economics of how the things are produced, both in terms of the studios, but also in terms of the cost of the displays. If you think back, I bought, I remember buying what seemed to be an enormous TV, it was the last CRT, the big chunky to the ones that went on and on at the back, the last chunky TV I bought, was 32 inch and it was the cheap one. The white label brand, and it was still 650 quid around 2000, and this was a huge purchase for me. It was still working 15 years later. It had just run out of plugs on the back and nothing was digital. I felt really bad about chucking that thing away, but I bought a brand new, branded television that was advertised to me. It seems twice the size, it was a quarter the weight and it was only £350. The fact that the economics of the displays have gone down and they are genuinely better, but also, if you think of TV technology, with the shift to digital, and the fact that you get tiny boxes that just do amazing things, and you just plug an HDMI cable on the back of them, and because it's digital, it is near enough broadcast quality. It's pushed a huge upswing in television at all the levels. And the hobbyist TV people, look at the YouTubers, they're using some fantastic technology, they get great pictures, but they're only spending hundreds of pounds, where a few years ago, maybe 10 or more, they would have been spending thousands of pounds and probably tens of thousands of pounds. So that economics, the change of the price is one of the things that's really spurred innovation.
Louise:
It's the accessibility, both from an economic perspective, but also from the technology that's available at those price points as well. Looking back over the last decade or so, are there any technologies that you feel might have become more mainstream that actually have maybe fizzled out a little bit?
Robert:
I suspect you're thinking of 3D here. Three-dimensional television. Actually, here is a quiz, because this may do my point nicely. Have a guess of when you think Hollywood released its first, to the public, 3D film? I'll give you choices. The choices are, okay, let’s go with them, was it 1922, 1932, or 1942, which ones do you think that was?
Charlie:
I'm going to go with 1942.
Louise:
I would have guessed 1992, if you hadn’t given me any option, so I'll go 1922.
Robert:
Daring and it's the right answer, 1922, The Power of Love, Hollywood's first 3D film. They had to invent a 3D film process. It got sent to New York and was exhibited and then disappeared. It's one of the films they've lost, but that's the start of it. Even though moving pictures were still very new, there was this push of innovation to say, actually, how can we make this stuff more like what we see, and we see that again, and again. Actually, they were film releases in 1932, and in 1942, and indeed in the 1950s, and indeed they came back again in the 1970s. It's roughly every 20 years or so, the big one that my parents will name is Jaws, in 3D, and that was sometime in the 1970s, I think. These things come again when they really want people, they want to get the bums on the seats, or encourage people to buy new stuff. Avatar had a big 3D release as well. Although again, that change in the economics, that change in the technology, makes it's cheaper to actually release a digitally animated film in 3D, because you just do something clever would be the physical separation of the pixels and then you just render the whole thing out again. But yeah, 3D is that kind of go to, or let's be innovative, let's do 3D and yet loads of people don't know that it's been done for nearly 100 years.
Charlie:
I actually had a 3D TV.
Louise:
Did you?
Charlie:
Yeah, I did, but the biggest problem we always had was, when there's only two sets of glasses and a family of four wants to watch a channel, then you end up just reverting back to the normal channel. There was one occasion where we had eight sets, we were going to watch a big game of football really excited. Then, my brother cancelled his plans and then we had nine and so we reverted back to the normal TVs and didn't even get to do that. So that was always the biggest challenge. I am not sure it was the most worthwhile investment in the long run.
Robert:
Then someone's batteries have run out.
Charlie:
Exactly.
Robert:
But again, that was the problem from the 20s onwards, because people were inventing a 3D mechanism and a way of viewing it. There was one that had 3D goggles that’s fixed to the chair, because they had to be in a very particular point for it to work. Of course, that means refitting your entire cinema for that to happen.
Louise:
Not particularly practical at home watching either, but that's a great opportunity to bring in some of the experiences that you've had Charlie with emerging technology and innovation with some of the clients you've been working with. Could you just touch on little bit about how you've come to work in this space, and the types of projects that you've been working on?
Charlie:
Yeah definitely, my journey into what was now labelled extended reality.
Louise:
It’s a great term, I love that.
Charlie:
It’s a good one. Came back while I was at university, started my placement year in another company in digital marketing. We used VR to attract talent on campus for a lot of big brands. The early days of the vibes, quite big clunky VR machines, but really attracted either students or prospective employees in to speak to the relevant companies. It was a big success. I always thought this technology has a lot of potential, but right now it's worth, your headset will cost you about 2000 to 3000 pounds, then you need the laptop, not a lot of legs to scale. Then went back to university finished it. I always had an interest in joining PwC in consulting and then gradually made my way into the XR team after a couple of years. It's amazing to see what it was then, to what it is two or three years later now in terms of the technology and how it's reduced the size and the ability to scale originally. Again, even when I joined, required the headsets with the big sensors, and now you have standalone headsets and a lot of the work we do is in things like training, soft skills training, but also remote collaboration, which is a big bit. The idea of bringing people together, having multi-user meeting sessions, activities, especially during COVID was a huge uptick, because people couldn't meet. So, how do you give yourself this whole sense of immersion and embodiment, whilst being remote and not being able to interact with your colleagues or clients. You had the full body avatars and everything else.
That was really good, and a lot of that work fed into one thing I recently did with Sky, which is to help go in and launch their home entertainment platform called Sky World. Again, Sky were looking to bring together their audience and their customers, and they had a focus on Premier League football. As I said earlier, as a football fan and a VR XR enthusiast, I thought this was the perfect thing ever. I was like, ‘sign me up’ please. Went in and helped them launch that, it took about nine months. Essentially, it was a world’s first in the sense of VR, because they took the feed from the game and then had to overlay the digital rights management over it and then transcode it into VR, which was, like I said, world's first, but the idea was you brought the customer or the fan into the experience. They got to watch the live Premier League game from either the dugout, the corner flag, behind the goal or wherever they want. There are about four or five different cameras within the stadium, all while being able to watch it with their friends. You could watch it with three other of your friends. Invite them into the room, you can watch with your dad that might have been three hours away or your neighbour, especially during COVID, that was a big plus. But the idea was then on top of that you had the jumbotron, you had the best of both worlds of being in the stadium, and having the commentary, and having the fan atmosphere around you. It was a big success and something that was a quite pioneering in both the sports field as well as television, as they looked into how they could move into more emerging technologies like VR.
Louise:
Do you get a hologram of a pie at halftime as well if you're watching?
Charlie:
I think they have got. They've got lots of plans, it's to see how they can introduce other things, but they've now moved on. As I said, Premier League football was their first journey, they did the cricket 100 at this past summer. Now they've looked at Sky Arts and Sky Cinema and looking to grow that portfolio on VR as well.
Louise:
It's almost the next generation of what we were talking about there with people watching 3D at home from the comfort of their own home, maybe didn't quite catch on, but this is almost like the new interpretation of what that could be in, like at home watching.
Robert:
I think certainly for niches, definitely it is for sports absolutely. For environments, you have learning and history programs, what it's like to go back to ancient Rome, here is what it's like. You can look at it and see it, and reach out, and manipulate things. That's perfect use for VR and 3D. Previously just tyring to blanket 3D on everything isn't going to work, but then of course, the economics of scale weren’t such they could do. They couldn't do anything about that because they have to get as many people watching as possible.
Louise:
Actually, something you touched on a little bit earlier around youtubers and the access that people have to creating their own content now, which is very different to how things looked even 5 or 10 years ago. How are you seeing that relationship change from your perspective of being a lecturer and a journalist, and those conversations you're having, what does that look like from your perspective?
Robert:
For big content makers and big broadcasters and distributors, they are thinking much more about - There is an understanding now that they can't make everything themselves. You would always have people, who specialise in sports or in documentary, but particularly in public service broadcasting, it's very difficult to bring in a new generation of viewers, when they've been watching youtubers, and for them that is what television is, that may not be the word that they use, but in terms of visual content that they find interesting and stimulating and key, that's their go to, but as I've said before, the amount of money that is being put into consumer devices that are cheap, and really good, and getting cheaper, and getting better. We don't normally see these kinds of economic graphs that just go in two ways at once, normally cutting price means cutting quality, that's not what's happening in modern television.
Louise:
Actually as well, the way that we are interacting with that content has completely changed too. It's pretty fairly common now for everybody to find a box set and just binge watch it. You find a program you like, you'll watch the first two series in one go versus how people tended to watch content 5 or 10 years ago, where your favourite show was on a Saturday night at 7pm and that was it. There was no option to watch the next five episodes as soon as you wanted to. How do you think that's changing the way that our relationship is with television and what we watch?
Robert:
Probably, I haven’t sat down and just watched TV, because I am normally not a sports fan and this changes my compass a little bit. I haven't watched TV just flopped on the safe in front of it, for 15, maybe more years. Since I've got set top box that recorded everything, I am there, it is just so much more efficient for me to pick what I want when I want it, and lo and behold, this is where a lot of people are now. There are some people who just want to see what's on, and certainly for news programs, that’s the point to view, and definitely for sports, but a lot of people flick it on, and it comes and says, ‘oh, here's where you were watching before, do you want to carry on watching, or else here are some other programs around the same theme’. Much different way of discovering stuff. It means that the traditional TV scheduler. Their job has changed radically, because they have to, maybe, more creative, I am not quite sure. They don't have to think so much about bringing people in, transferring the audience from one program to another, and from one part of the day to another, and to inherit audience. We didn't think about TV scheduling quite in those ways anymore, because suddenly marketing is so much more important. It's not just about the fact that you have the show, you've got to tell people that you've got the show, much more now than in those 15 second interstitials used to get between one program and another. Here is what it is, this is why you would want to watch it, and here is how to get it whenever you want. It is not uncommon to have three, or four, or five, or six different versions of one trailer that you position all your market in different spaces for different audiences. That collectively is how you get the people watching, but you market it very cleverly in little niches.
Louise:
Then this is probably where the technology that you're talking about Charlie comes in, because it is those appointment to view events or shows, where actually people will sit down and plan to watch the extended reality version of Arsenal vs Liverpool, or whichever football match takes their fancy.
Robert:
In fact, those appointment bits become more important now, because there are actually fewer of them, so you really want to build your audience to the end of that week if it's the match or if it's Strictly Come Dancing, or something similar.
Charlie:
The other thing that is quite interesting, as you mentioned the advertising, the appointment, games of shows such as the ‘Strictly,’ the advertising that goes in between those, people probably still see, or the ones prior your daytime television, the advertising, or people flicking on their streaming service, there are no ads, so as an advertiser, where do you put your money in that perspective.
Robert:
There is an argument to say actually that some of the advertising becomes more special. In the run up to Christmas every year, we are getting these big marquee ads. I've seen it described as an advertisement event. It's the first time we're going to show this ad fro whoever it is for 90 seconds. Advertisers are picking up on this, and yes, these may become more special as well. It's interesting that a big TV platform at the moment has a mechanism whereby you can pay to skip the ads. That's fascinating, and not the least for the contracts that requires for the advertisers that you are going to skip, but interestingly because I have seen, and I have had a play with it, it doesn't really skip in the way that you might expect. You can fast forward through the ads at a limited speed, so actually you do still see the messages and the logos, and you can see who is advertising, that's fascinating.
Louise:
The subliminal messaging is still happening, you’re just paying to make it happen more quickly. We've touched on some of the top technological innovation we've seen to date, or maybe, that which hasn't quite panned out as, maybe, people expected. Then if we look forward, how do you think we will start engaging with content in new ways in, say, the next two to five years, what is that going to look like?
Charlie:
There is two ways of looking at it. The first is, there is a big emphasis on a lot of these companies for co-viewing. We saw a recent company come up with their television, which allows for co-viewing to bring people together, which is fantastic, that's one angle. However, from my perspective, I am biased as an enthusiast, what's really interested me is how we move into that next generation of viewing from augmented reality and virtual reality perspective. We touched on the virtuality of being in an immersive experience. Although, augmented reality isn’t quite there in terms of bringing it into our houses, even though we have a very powerful AR devices on our phones, but we will forget that. The future idea is, you could have a live volumetric capture, which is essentially a mixture of a series of cameras plus some deep learning or machine learning to portray holograms into your living room. If you think that works at the moment in streaming into games, so if you look at games like Fortnight, they had big concerts such as the Ariana Grande, the Travis Scott concerts in games, which is very successful, but the next step is then, bring it into your living room, so you could, for imagine take your sporting events.
For example, even in this room, you could have a boxing ring, or even your living room, and you can have the Joshua fight going on, where you can move around him while it's going on live. That's the next level viewing experience, so that's really interesting, but you can apply that to events, even TV film productions. There are some companies that are experimenting it from news perspectives, whole series of that is really interesting. I find what's really interesting on top of that, is that a lot of the streaming providers say that their biggest competitors aren't each other, but more the gaming industry, and ultimately they're all competing for the screen time.
So, how do they make their experiences more entertaining. One streaming service recently came up with a programming based on the League of Legends games, and that's now their number one show. It out did all their other shows, and it's the number one in about 52 countries. That's pretty impressive considering all the other things they've got in place. For me, it's the combination of television plus gaming entertainment, that's the next step, especially for the future generations, that will be big.
Louise:
All beamed live into your living room and you can interact with it, which sounds fairly mind blowing. I don't think my living room is big enough to fit a boxing ring, but maybe I'll have to move in time for that tech to come through, but what about from your perspective, what do you think we will be seeing in the next kind of five years or so?
Robert:
I am fascinated about resolution. One of the things that we have seen and it is really successful, along with crashing prices, is the fact that there are more and more pixels packed into screens. The screens are affordable. This stuff looks amazing, because not only is it higher resolution, because we've gone from SD to HD, from HD to 4k, and then 4k to 8k, but the pixels are better as well. They are able to show far more range of colours and better gradations from black to white, and this is what they call high dynamic range. Also, the size of these things will increase, the prices will continue to fall. For example, 8K was invented in Japan, 15 or more years ago. They saw it as a replacement for a wall in your room, and it was so blow up to that size. It's easily IMAX and greater size, it's proper theatrical cinema size, but we're already putting these into, I would say, quite small screens, 65-inch type screens. When they get to the stage where you can blow them up very large, then even may be without 3D, you’ll be back into this, relacing wall of your room with a totally amazing experience. At the same time, just thinking because Charlie has mentioned volume displays, there are at least three studios in London with these enormous LED panels that seem to go on forever that they use effectively. Again, we're back to 1922 in the Hollywood film industry, because to get control over the environment, they didn't used to go out shooting and they used to use this process of back projection. You do this fight scene on what look like the top of a train, but no viewer, they're just projecting it out on to the background, the oldest technique, but actually that's how lot of many new productions are shot. Disney's Mandalorian was almost exclusively shot inside one of these enormous LED displays, and they can't control it and you'd never know, because they can control the light. Even the reflection of whatever desolate landscape or world is on, reflects properly onto the performers and it doesn't look like a green or a blue screen. We will see more of those and those will then start to go back into the home.
Louise:
Really, we're seeing the modern version of the black and white rickety car journey, where there was very obviously a projected background and just people hobbling around on a...
Robert:
We will think about television in different ways, because if you've got a panel that's as big as your room, and it's the middle of winter, and it's cold, and dark, and wet outside, and you just think ‘ahh, I want to be somewhere brighter,’ just change the landscape in your room, where we play with our screensavers, for those of us who still do that. You could suddenly have, maybe in the same place, but it's bright and it's sunny outside, and that will make a huge difference.
Charlie:
Like I said, it's a big thing about how you can use your TV beyond just for watching television isn't it?
Robert:
Exactly.
Charlie:
You can use it for work, you can use it for your mood, you can use it in viewing, it's a whole series of things you can use it, and I think that's the exciting bit.
Robert:
We have a very narrow definition of what television is these days. There aren't better words actually. I really think of television in very broad senses, and that will hopefully percolate across.
Louise:
Thank you both so much for joining me in person in the studio today. It's been a pleasure having you on and sharing some of your insights. I have to say, I am actually looking forward very much to a hologram of The Great British Bake Off so that I can taste some of the baked goods that are being made there, so I look forward to that one. To our listeners, thank you so much for joining us. Do remember to rate us and subscribe to the podcast series, so you can join us for the next episode, which will be ‘U.’
