IBC's a Wrap

After my eleventy fifth IBC (slight exaggeration there) it was interesting to look back on the last few days from the other side of the fence. The previous years I've mostly attended as a vendor which meant close to a week of pre show sales meetings which led straight into five days of being on a stand. This year I arrived on Thursday for the SVG event and left Sunday evening which, in truth, was more than enough time to see everyone we needed to. I've heard a few people say that the show is a bit too long over the last few years and after this recent experience I'm tending to agree with them.

As mentioned we got in Thursday for the SVG Sports Production Summit at the De La Mar Theatre. This is my favourite gathering that Ken, Joe, Clare and the team put on for the European Sports Broadcast industry. Over 500 people attended to hear about how some of the major sports tournaments of 2018 were delivered to viewers. It's always good to hear different perspectives and this year was great following the success' of the World Cup and Wimbledon. It was all the more sweeter for us at Alston Elliot as our CCO, Stuart Coles, (pictured below) picked up an award for Outstanding Technical Achievement, Graphics following our work for BBC Sport at the World Cup studio in Moscow.

I love the SVG events and this one in particular is excellent for both networking and catching up with people from the sports sector.

Following a hectic few days during which we managed to fit in the Liverpool v Spurs game (Liverpool won 2-1 in case you somehow missed it), a few of us sat down late on Sunday afternoon to talk about some of the things we'd seen at the show. A mix of broadcasters, production companies, vendors and beer is always going to be a platform for lively debate and this was no different.

In no particular order some of the things we covered I'll address. Jim Irving and the team at Fanview once again linked up with Ross Video to demonstrate their model of Mo Salah using Frontier. #meetmo follows on from the work they've done previously at both The Super Bowl and with UEFA and appears to be going from strength to strength. Our North American broadcasters were particularly enamoured with this and hopefully they'll make a great success out of it.

In case you're wondering, that's the real Scott Barber not a model of Jurgen Klopp standing next to Mo, the video is below.

Also on the Ross Video stand were a number of new releases but the most talked about in our group was the Carbonite Ultra. Ross have been pretty dominant in the mid-market sector and the new release can have up to 3MEs with 4 mini-Mes and 24In/14Out on a 1RU chassis. Having spent a number of years at Ross I always try to keep up to speed with what they're doing and 20 new releases at IBC prove that the R+D team are earning their corn and looking to the future.

The Zixi stand was located in Hall 14 but had a lot of traffic. They've had success with a number of major broadcasters and a top-level recent addition to their EMEA sales team can only be of benefit to them. Their claim of 99.9999% reliability over managed and unmanaged networks was confirmed as truth by those at our table with a lot more knowledge than me. They were celebrating passing 100,000 hours of sports content distribution on Pixellot on the eve of the show and partnerships with JVC and integration with GV's Morpheus should hold them in good stead.

Also in Hall 14 were both Sixty and Grabyo. Sixty were focusing on Ease Live which separates graphics from TV with the claim that this will give the end user a better viewing experience. Essentially they're looking to engage OTT viewers in new ways to try and give a better viewing experience therefore keeping them engaged for longer. With current partners such as TV2, CBS and ourselves at AE they have a good platform on which to build from.

Grabyo took on board feedback from their sports partners and launched Grabyo Editor. They're now allowing content to be made available over multiple platforms to audiences quickly. The ability to edit from a laptop adds to the flexibility and is a positive addition to their suite of products.

N-Cam were located in Hall 7 in close proximity to the Vizrt stand which was useful as Vizrt were demonstrating the impressive integration between N-Cam, Viz Artist and Unreal. On their own stand they were demonstrating light capture rendered onto CGI in real time which had caught the imagination of one of the broadcasters at our beer table. This led to a heated debate regarding AR/VR but that's a story for another day.

In Hall 3 Luc Doneuxs SimplyLive were showing the the new addition to their ViBox portfolio, the ViBox Mini, an entry level system. Luc has many years of experience within the sports broadcast industry and it's good to see him doing well after branching out on his own a couple of years ago. Nods of agreement from the majority of the beer table were followed by tales of notable success and ease of use from a number of users.

Finally, why do certain vendors think it acceptable in 2018 to hire revealingly clad females as "booth girls" on their stand? To me and a number of other people who mentioned it, it's a bit creepy. I'm all for outside support (male or female) on the stand but this is outdated. Mobile World Congress banned it in 2012 and even testosterone driven F1 parked their "grid girls" earlier this year. IBC made a commitment to diversity and this year 37% of Conference speakers were women compared to 14% in previous years, a major step in the right direction. Surely this goes against everything they're committing to?

Overall it was a good show. It's 199 days to NAB. See you in Vegas