If you don’t think too hard about it, today’s entertainment offerings are pretty good. Think just a little and it’s freakin’ amazing.You can be entertained in a theater; on your TV set (old-fashioned cable or Over The Top (OTT_ – internet); on your computer, tablet, smartphone and after CES (Consumer Electronics Show) on your wearable.

Think about it real hard and you’ll understand why Clyde Smith, Senior Vice President of New Technologies for FOX Network Engineering and Operations, is involved in both traditional Hollywood and the New Enterprise of Silicon Valley Years ago, he said, “If you can’t identify it, you can’t operationalize or measure it; if you can’t measure it you can’t monetize it.”

All old Hollywood and the new breed want … to make money!

Even though Clyde is very involved in the SMPTE/HPA (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers/Hollywood Post Alliance), he was also interested in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit, the October emerging entertainment event. He “associates” with these New Establishment co-opters—YouTube, Yahoo Video, HuffintonPost, AOL Video and Netflix.

Many of his Hollywood contemporaries make no bones about being at war with tech folks. After all, they steal valuable content, parse it out and have forced the industry to dramatically change the distribution/monetization landscape.

What the new kids don’t understand is that SMPTE/HPA has a 100-year track record of establishing the standards that let us enjoy our content on any device, any time, any where we want. 

“Maybe we didn’t know it at the time,” Clyde commented, “but the industry made it possible for the technology industry and kids to make ‘our’ art form available to the masses." With inexpensive cameras/ingest devices; compact/affordable production/post production systems and very affordable/easy to use editing/authoring/FX/post tool, he added, “They’ve opened the arena up to a whole new breed of content creators.  And while it’s a little uncomfortable we’re all benefiting.”  

At about 6ft 5in and really smart, not many people disagree with him.

What we’re seeing in both the Hollywood and Silicon Valley scenes is that the novelty of streaming cat videos no longer holds the eyeballs. We’ve raised the viewers’ expectations. The big question for both sectors is how much content (how big/deep/rich) is too much?

The biggest discussion continues to be about 4K becoming a reality and the open-ended question as to whether people really perceive enough of a difference with the pixel count between 2K, 4K, 8K and beyond or the differences in content shot/shown at 24 fps, 48 fps, 60 fps and 120 fps. New technology standards like H.265 make it easier to stream 4K content over the internet to today’s UHD TV channels such as UltraFlix on the newest sets and people say they can see the difference. But there is a question of true quality perception when that content is streamed to a mobile device. Mobile content offers a fresh new set of revenue streams for content owners. But 3G/4G networks can’t keep up and LTE (long-term evolution) is still a “work in progress” With Cisco forecasts that mobile data rates will have to increase seven-fold from 0.5 – 4Mbps, carriers haven’t really said what the streamed content will cost the consumer.

The Internet population of about three billion has changed the media industry. A whole new breed of independent film, video, content producers has emerged and the old guard is taking notice.The industries are exploring the impact of enriched image/sound technology even as time and money are at a premium for the budget-constrained post production world.

About five years ago, I heard a Hollywood executive say that film was still the basic form of entertainment capture/distribution and that it would probably continue to be throughout my lifetime. Today, it’s insignificant. We’ve rapidly gone through an era of change and now we’re trying to figure out how to optimize it for content producers, distributors, consumers. Today’s content isn’t created in a backlot somewhere; it’s done in makeshift garage studios or more often on location.

All of those new economic 4K cameras and software solutions can easily be used with affordable GPU (graphic processing unit) and CPU (central processing unit) systems.  And at the end of the day, all of that creative and post work has to be stored … somewhere.

How much are we talking about? Consider one hour of material in our present/projected formats:

-       HD – 22.5GB

-       2K – 716GB

-       4K – 6,880GB (6.88TB)

-       8K – 86,000GB (86TB)

To paraphrase Robert Duvall in "Apocalypse Now," I love the sound of content in the morning.That’s because a film is so much more than the raw video shot or the finished work.

It’s:

-       Original media as shot

-       Protected clone (never touched)

-       Worker copy (files renamed, organized)

-       Insurance copy of worker

-       Studio copy of worker

-       Third clone of worker … just in case

-       Project output

-       Clone, second protection

-       Maybe, just maybe, something for archive

Howard Lukk, of Pannon Entertainment, gave an excellent example of this during a SMPTE presentation. He started with 4.25TB of raw content and when his project was completed, he had75TB of storage.It’s enough to make a storage person’s heart flutter. You could almost see the big iron/big storage suppliers counting the number of storage racks they were going to sell.

But the problem is, what indie in his/her right mind is going to drop $50-$100K for storage when they don’t even have an IT (information technology) person? So cloud people jump in and say, “OMG, we know your pain and we’re going to put it up there and life will be good.”

The only flaw in that logic was expressed by one of the SMPTE presenters who started his discussion saying, “you cannot build something without trust.” 

Damn, that won me over! I have nothing against the cloud because I pass a lot of stuff through it. If it’s crap, I’m not really concerned about even storing it there.  But something vital, critical to my livelihood, my very future?

Not on your life!

Lukk had a similar approach to the one Cirina Catania, founder/lead creative of The Catania Group, uses. Storage is kept in his studio/post production facility even if it is the converted spare bedroom (plus the obligatory backup somewhere else). He uses a generous mixture of SSDs (solid state drives) and Thunderbolt 2 storage systems that use software RAID (random array of independent disks). The solution provides economic data redundancy, capacity, ready availability and as he said, "Peace of mind." 

Camera folks at Blackmagic and others, as well as cloud/local tool providers at Adobe and Autodesk, agree it’s still the best solution in an uncertain world. All of them see very good growth in the high-end studio/professional post production business (10-100 seats). But the real growth is in the one-five (and up to 10) Indie and specialty individuals and teams who use the old-fashioned sneakernet (physically moving storage from one workstation to another) and sending segments through the cloud when remote special talents are needed.

The New Hollywood won’t kill the Hollywood you grew up with because like it or not, they need each other and can learn from each other. DreamWorks Animation and Disney have major YouTube channels and producers.  CBS and HBO are setting up streaming OTT channels.  Facebook, Alibaba, Netflix and Yahoo are striking new/different content licensing models. Digital content creation, distribution and reception are changing dramatically opening up new— and differen— opportunities for everyone in the food chain.

To paraphrase Fox’s Smith, everyone involved needs to really work together to operationalize, measure, and monetize it. Who knows, it could just be a major source of revenue for a new/changed industry.