Moving forward: Decentralisation, sustainability and the skills gap will be key production trends in 2024

As the production industry continues to ramp up following the Hollywood strikes, TVBEurope looks at some of the key areas where we may see signifiant change in 2024

By Jenny Priestley

Published: January 8, 2024 Updated: January 9, 2024

As the production industry continues to ramp up following the Hollywood strikes, TVBEurope looks at some of the key areas where we may see signifiant change in 2024

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Following major disruption to the content creation industry in 2023, brought about in most part by the Hollywood strikes, those working in the production sector will be hoping 2024 is a lot more settled.

But what trends will have an impact on content creation in the next 12 months?

TVBEurope hears from a number of key stakeholders as to how they see production evolving over the coming year.

Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear There will be a further enabling of higher value production for lower tier events, making multicamera coverage cost-viable with full software cloud-based production and hybrid PTZ/operated cameras.

We'll see a continuing move towards a complete software workflow for media production processing, enabled by better resilience models in software workflows and lower latency architectures.

There will be an increasing focus on more sustainable infrastructure, driven by more and more customers mandating specific sustainable attributes.

There will be an increasing acceptance of the workflows that are possible in a distributed production architecture, with production creatives learning to live with the increased latency of wide-area network-connected production.

The viability of 5G connectivity for broadcast production will mean this technology will be used for real, rather than just proof of concepts.

Michael Cioni, Co-founder and CEO, Strada I predict 2024 to be a year of caution as Hollywood slowly ramps back up from a near dead-stop to producing new content. There will certainly be huge excitement in the air with tens of thousands of people willing and ready to work, but it will likely be met by a reduction in overall content compared to 2021. The pandemic + strikes + streaming business models made two of the last four years extremely challenging and this likely means 2024 will not produce more content than what was created in 2022. But that's not all bad news, because a more conservative spend on content creation may mean better content overall.

Matt Cimaglia, co-founder and CEO of Alteon There are two key trends on the horizon: decentralised media marketplaces and virtual production studios. These trends hint at a wave of decentralisation that could redefine content ownership, distribution and production. Virtual studios, wherein creators can collaborate and work on media from anywhere, will be propelled by advancements in AR and VR that could unlock new dimensions in content creation. At Alteon, we're specifically looking to implement these trends to help steer the media and entertainment industry towards uncharted territories of innovation and collaboration.

Penny Westlake, senior director for Europe, Interra Systems As complex automation becomes more mainstream in production and output processes, we see this carrying over into other areas as well. For example, the advanced use of metadata has the potential to bring increased speed and efficiency to live productions. We also expect augmented and assistive AI and ML technology to become much more focused, with organisations defining exactly where and when it should be used.

Augmented operations will enable the scaling of automated processes, allowing human effort to be reserved for areas requiring high levels of decision-making and skill. One area where it will be particularly useful is in localisation. Here, very advanced standards and systems for generating and managing the ancillary data associated with audio and video are becoming available.

While the expectation is that 2024 will be a year of recovery from disruption for many, and production levels will be high due to catch-up from 2023, many organisations will be considering taking greater steps towards new production models if these align with their business needs. We also expect to see more discussion on broadcast and media cryptography and content protection, which dovetails into an ethics discussion, and the countering of deep fakes. On the technology side, we can expect to see more analysis of how and where AI and ML fit into day-to-day requirements, and where they do not. In organisational terms, there will be increased discussion concerning business ethics.

Vlado Koylazov, head of innovation at Chaos In 2024, AI tools are poised to maintain their position as technology trendsetters, with a continued focus on workflow enhancements and speed improvements. These tools will not only optimise existing processes but may also enable entirely new possibilities in filmmaking. What was once considered unattainable may become feasible, pushing the boundaries of creativity and storytelling.

We anticipate the increased adoption of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) as a novel type of dataset. This technology is expected to play a growing role in 3D datasets, potentially reshaping the way we capture and represent spatial information in digital environments.

We will also see a shift in our approach to digital humans. This shift could potentially unlock new opportunities, such as adapting voices for various languages, seamlessly de-aging characters for flashback sequences, and exploring innovative applications for digital human representations. The evolving capabilities of AI may lead to novel and versatile uses of digital humans in the media and entertainment industry.

Jeff Clark, managing director, Verso Live This is already an ongoing trend, but the need for more sustainable TV production

LINK:	https://www.tvbeurope.com/production-post/moving-forward-decentralisat...
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