In less than a decade, the way people watch television has evolved more rapidly than during the past fifty years. With newly formed social media habits of viewing 2nd screen apps, catch-up TV and Netflix streamed movies, the rise in time-shift viewing has dramatically altered viewing trends forever. However, there was one noticeable exception to this - sports, where live viewing remained the norm.

Yet now even televised sport, and the way we view it, is undergoing a mammoth revolution, with traditional TV sports broadcasting becoming increasingly under threat. With the recent announcement that social media platform Twitter have agreed a groundbreaking deal to stream Thursday night live NFL games online, is this the beginning of the end of TV sports broadcasting as we know and love it? 

The History of TV Sports

The first broadcasting of sports began with an ice hockey game in 1890, with descriptions of play sent via a telegraph line of the Stanley Cup challenge series between Montreal and Winnipeg. There is debate what followed next, whether it was the first radio broadcast of an ice hockey game in the early 1920's, KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasting a live radio boxing match between Johnny Dundee and Johnny Ray, or was it Professor F.W. Springer, who had a crude set up rigged to transmit University of Minnesota football games to a very small audience as early as 1912.

In the UK, the first sport event broadcast was a Rugby Union international game at Twickenham between England and Wales, in January 1927. Two weeks later the first broadcast of a football match took place, with BBC covering Arsenal against Sheffield United at Highbury. Listeners to the broadcast could use numbered grids published in the Radio Times (below) to figure out which area of the pitch the action was taking place, due to a second commentator reading out grid references during the match. 

The first live TV coverage of a sports event was in the 1936 Summer Olympics at Berlin, televised by two German firms, Telefunken and Fernseh, and broadcast at 180 lines and 25 frames per second.  Four different areas were telecast using three cameras (below).  In total, 72 hours of live transmission went over the airwaves to special viewing booths, called "Public Television Offices" in Berlin and Potsdam. 

It would be one year later when the UK saw its first live televised broadcast of a football match on 16th September 1937, with the BBC showing a specially arranged fixture between Arsenal and the Arsenal Reserves (sounds riveting!) It was only available to handful of homes in close proximity to Alexandra Palace.

In 1938, international football and the FA Cup final were shown live for the first time, with the BBC providing live coverage of England v Scotland, and Huddersfield Town v Preston North End.

The first sporting event televised in the US took place in 1939, showing a college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton universities, broadcast by NBC, with the first NFL game also broadcast that same year, when the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Philadelphia Eagles. However, the necessary technology was not yet available for live, coast-to-coast broadcasts across the US, and it wasn't until September 29th, 1951, when a game between the University of Pittsburgh and Duke was broadcast across the entire country.

The 1950 World Cup in Brazil was responsible for a series of ‘firsts’. It was the first tournament since 1938 (due to World War II), it was the first time the World Cup was referred to as the Jules Rimet Trophy, it was the first in which England participated, and it was the first to have television cameras. However, given that the format was in its infancy, no one back in England was actually able to watch any of the games on television. 

In 1954 the World Cup was broadcast live in the UK for the first time, and a year later ITV began broadcasting live matches from the newly-formed European Cup. The BBC also began broadcasting Soccer Special, which showcased matches from the old Division One, but it wouldn't be until 1964 when the BBC broadcast its flagship Match of the Day for the first time. The first match shown was Liverpool v Arsenal. In 1969 Match of the Day broadcast its first game in colour, between Liverpool v West Ham.

 TV Sports Today

The World Cup Italia 90 is credited with changing not just football in England, but also the country itself, after a decade of dark times for English football during the 80's. Fans were dying in stadiums, hooliganism and racism were rife, clubs were banned from playing in European competitions and attendances had fallen. Yet after 1990 football would soon become a sport enjoyed again, and now also by many middle-class people.

As England unexpectedly progressed through the 1990 tournament in Italy, an increasingly gripped nation was glued to the TV, accompanied by Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma (the BBC's choice of theme music.) Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker became household names, and women started taking an interest. Stadiums became much safer and overnight the whole culture of football changed.

In 1992 Sky bought up the rights to Premier League games in a deal worth £304 million, and satellite dishes began appearing on houses up and down the country. In 1999 ITV acquired exclusive live rights to broadcast the Champions League in a deal worth £299 million. By 2009 BBC had acquired shared rights to broadcast live matches from the Championship and the Carling Cup. The UEFA Europa League was introduced and was broadcast by Five, ITV and ESPN. Setanta Sports defaulted on a payment for their 2009/2010 Premier League TV rights and lost their rights to ESPN (Setanta Sports would later go into administration).

In 2010 Sky Sports were the first to broadcast a live Premier League game in 3D. FIFA announced that 25 live games from the 2010 World Cup on TV would be made available for broadcast in 3D. In August 2015, BT Sport launched Europe's first Ultra HD/4K TV channel, and its first live broadcast was Arsenal v Chelsea in the Community Shield. 

From next season, we enter the staggeringly ludicrous £5.136bn contract, after Sky Sports broke the bank to retain the lion’s share of UK television rights, sending shockwaves through the football world when it was first announced back in February last year. To put all that into some kind of perspective, Sky paid a mere £304m for the exclusive live rights to their first five seasons of the Premier League between 1992 and 1997.

Social Media Broadcasts

The Google-owned YouTube was once the only major online video service, so it made perfect sense that the company was also one of the first to experiment with live-streamed sports, in a deal with Major League Baseball in 2013, to livestream two games per day outside the US. The video site also hosted a monthly subscription service for the Ultimate Fighting Championship that same year. And last year, the Canadian Football League live streamed its playoff games on the site outside North America. 

Overall, though, Google’s commitment to live sports has remained sporadic. The reason, of course, is money. “That is completely a business issue,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said at a media conference in 2013. “I can assure you that if you wrote a large enough check for any sports event you wished, you can livestream it globally to everyone.”

The first NFL game to be globally streamed live for free over the internet was on 25th October 2015, via Yahoo.

The Buffalo Bills v Jacksonville Jaguars game in London was available to anyone with a device and an internet connection on Yahoo. It boasted an audience of 15.2 million unique viewers, who watched a cumulative 460 million minutes of the match. It reportedly cost Yahoo a cool $20 million to air, but only attracted average viewership of about 2.4 million people globally. That’s more people than typically livestream the Super Bowl, but far off the television broadcast audience for a typical Sunday game.

More recently, Yahoo announced plans to stream an MLB game every day this season and up to four NHL games each week.

The world’s largest social network hasn’t signed a major deal with a sports league yet, but it’s only a matter of time. The company recently launched a sports-centric section of its site called Sports Stadium, and has increased its focus on live events. This new hub for sports scores, chat and livestreaming has become an obsession for the company. When the NFL said it would sell the streaming rights to Thursday night games, many thought Facebook would be a good fit, but Facebook reportedly withdrew a bid to carry the Thursday NFL games. This was apparently down to the way it would have had to handle commercials, and this didn’t work for the social media network. 

After months of haggling, a winner was finally announced of this historic deal to broadcast Thursday night NFL games live across the web - Twitter, graduating from the second screen, to live-stream ten NFL Thursday Night Football games for free. This NFL deal could help Twitter measure a “total audience,” estimated to include 800 million people, and for the NFL, the agreement represents an attempt to reach fans who have cut their cable subscriptions and are more likely to stream online video.

“Twitter is where live events unfold and is the right partner for the NFL as we take the latest step in serving fans around the world live NFL football,” explained NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. “There is a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games and tapping into that audience, in addition to our viewers on broadcast and cable, will ensure Thursday night football is seen on an unprecedented number of platforms this season. This agreement also provides additional reach for those brands advertising with our broadcast partners.”

The Future

In football, it’s a given that all the action and drama that takes place off the pitch makes each of those 90 minutes on the pitch even more vital. Therefore, social media and messaging platforms are perfectly positioned to capture the hearts and minds of the football-loving audience, whose passion for the game doesn’t fade at the final whistle. They need to be able to continue the conversation long after the match is over. The behaviour of a team or player on social media can directly influence a fan's perception of their team. It has become essential for sports organisations to engage fans and consumers on social media before, during and after the games, to own that moment.

The reach on social media is in many cases far exceeding the TV audience figures, which means rights holders can vastly improve the fan engagement by continually engaging and stimulating the hungry appetite of their audience, and that can be measured and valued as new commercial opportunities with sponsors. Brands involved through sponsorships and social media promotions benefit from increased brand affinity and loyalty. 

Fans want to eat, sleep and drink their passion in lots of different ways, brought directly to them via their preferred screens. Watching the match in a pub on the big screen no longer provides enough satisfaction. A modern fan needs to have the immediacy of the experience delivered to them on the platform of their choice through Facebook Live, or react with fellow fans through messenger apps, or get the feeling of actually being there with Snapchat.

When properly addressed, the strength and direct revenue opportunities opening from social media platforms is limitless for the sports world. Baby steps are occurring. Sure, they have been occurring rather slowly, but this recent news with Twitter and NFL could now start to accelerate and gain the momentum of change.

Technology is advancing at an unstoppable speed, quickly enforcing the decades-old broadcast industry into oblivion. I haven't quite cut the cord yet. I tend to buy more HD movies on Sky, watch catch-up TV rather than when it is scheduled, and own an IPTV box for watching English channels on my TV in Spain. This clever little black box, hooked up via an ethernet cable to the router, and a HDMI cable to the TV, offers just about every channel you can think of, in near HD (let down only by the occasional internet dropout).

Live sports has always been the one area that essentially still relies on good old fashioned live broadcasting. I am a football fan myself (Hull City), and enjoy watching live sports at home and in Spain. But this final, best-reason-to-exist, for broadcasters may soon be over. 

Throughout my lifetime, live sports content has always been delivered to viewers through a live central channel. But with increasing high-bandwidth data networks, mobile devices, smart TV's, etc. anything can now be a network. The traditional broadcast TV paradigm has been on vulnerable ground  for some time, and the shockwave warning signals sent out from this Twitter deal is that the traditional broadcasters are nearing their end. The NFL probably knows it, even if the rest of the world doesn't quite yet. When that end will finally be, no one yet knows...

Doing Business in India - Organised Chaos that Works

India is a place everyone should visit at least once in their lifetime. I was privileged to have had the opportunity to work out there for two years, returning to the UK with unforgettable life experiences that only India could offer.

From making an appearing on the live National TV awards ceremony, presenting technology awards on stage (and unexpectedly becoming the comedy highlight of the evening - more on that later) to witnessing a leopard lazily looking at me one morning, as it sunbathed on the rocks opposite from the other side of the River Ganges, my time in India felt more like an Indiana Jones adventure than a business vocation.

During my time there I would sit directly behind  a sulky Prince Andrew at a Quantel demo (watching him refuse to put his 3D glasses on), spend a few drunken evenings with my old mates - the Exec team from BBC Sport as they were in Delhi with the Commonwealth Games (and where half of the entire BBC crew went down with `Delhi belly'), all the while developing a cast iron immune system myself, and learning to cope with 55 degree heat.

I lived in a plush 4 bedroom apartment in Gurgaon, just outside New Delhi. Once a small dusty agricultural village, Gurgaon has since become the city with the third highest per capita income in India, harbouring 250 or 50% of the Fortune 500 companies.

My role in India was Sales Director for Vizrt, a successful office of 15 people that had been established for at least five years before I took over the reins, occupying a floor in a high-rise death trap of a rat-infested building in Nehru Place - a large turbulent, commercial, financial, and business district.

Nehru Place

I had not been working in Delhi long before calling the sales team into my office to ask why there was no shared calendar or meeting planner to view scheduled booked meetings with clients. My query was met with bemused, puzzled expressions on the sales teams faces, as though I had asked something alien. I knew the team were working hard, going out daily to see clients. We had over 100 relatively satisfied broadcast and production clients in India using Vizrt graphics, so business development, account management and sales generation didn't seem to be a main concern. Yet I couldn't understand why there were no scheduled meetings visible anywhere in the office.

Booking Meetings with Clients

I asked one of the sales team to book a trip to Mumbai, so we could visit his clients, which he then planned for the following Monday. By the end of the week prior, on a Friday afternoon, I asked who we would be seeing on Monday. `Don't worry', he said. `It's all in hand.' I decided to remain passive and just sit back to observe for this trip to Mumbai, reserving any judgement I had for later if necessary. When Monday came at Delhi airport, there was still no planned schedule before we took off. It was only once we arrived in Mumbai, and gathered our suitcases did it suddenly become apparent how this trip would unfold. The sales person began ringing clients up on his mobile. `Hi, are you free in the next half hour? Great. see you then.' Then we would be off in a taxi for our meeting - and this would be with senior management or CTO level.

Mumbai taxi - Premier Padmini (a barely modern take on the 1973 Fiat 1100)

Once the rest of the day unfolded in the same manner for each meeting, I began to realise this is how you schedule meetings in India. My thoughts were confirmed when I later bought a very good book by Paul Davies called `What's This India Business?: Offshoring, Outsourcing and The Global Services Revolution',  which covers this very topic (slightly dated now, but still highly recommended if you are planning to do business in India).

The general rule of thumb is, if you schedule a meeting one week in advance, it most likely will not happen. If you plan it a couple of days in advance, or even the day before, it is still not certain the meeting will take place. The only real guarantee of a meeting is to ring the person and ask if they are free in the next hour or so, and this can normally be at any level of management within an organisation. I used to tell the sales team that back in the UK I would have meetings scheduled sometimes three months in advance with the likes of BBC or Sky, to which was met with some amusement, as they thought I was joking!

If you observe the `rules' of the road when driving in India (at your own peril), vehicles tend to give way to anything in front of them, but with absolutely no regard to anything approaching from behind. It explains why most cars posses no wing mirrors, and it also helps in some way explain the mindset of how the country functions on this `here and now, live for today' philosophy. If everyone follows this mindset, then somehow this apparently chaotic system isn't that chaotic after all. It is more appropriately referred to as `organised chaos' by many expats living there.

Project Timescales

Obviously this mindset can conflict with the kinds of meticulous Gant charts and long term Prince II project planning that we are used to in the UK. I remember visiting a potential new client in Bangalore, who was the newly appointed CTO for the launch of a politically funded news channel (there are plenty of these agenda-driven start-ups in India, that often go bust within a few months). Our meeting took place in nothing more than a concrete shell, that would eventually become the broadcast facility. I asked when they hoped to be on-air, to which he replied `August'. As it was the month of May when this meeting took place, I presumed, with my UK hat on, that he meant August the following year. `No', he replied. `August this year.' What is more staggering, is that these ridiculously ambitious timescales do actually work in India. Yes, the TV station was built and fully functional within a couple of months, but was it built to the high safety specs and standards we are used to in the West? Of course not.

I occasionally used to bump into various UK System Integrators during my time in India, and I advised them to consider looking elsewhere for business, as their timescales, costs and standards would be way off the expectations set in India.

Because of this lack of accurate timescale planning, it makes it almost impossible to maintain an accurate sales pipeline forecast like we are accustomed to in the west. Predicting what sales would land each month, I found it just as effective to stick a finger in the air. Somehow we nearly always reached our target each quarter, yet half of what was predicted in the forecast just wouldn't happen, but luckily other sales that appeared from nowhere, left-of-field, would unexpectedly land, and would make up the numbers. You need to be prepared for this level of unpredictability, and also be prepared to give away outrageous discounts (or rely on an Indian territory price list).  

National TV Awards

During my first year in India, we embarked on several marketing activities, including open day sessions in the south, and exhibiting at Broadcast India. In my second year, I decided to sponsor the National TV Awards that was occurring at the same time as the Broadcast India show (an award ceremony equivalent to our BAFTA's), and also sponsor the Broadcast India drinks and after-show party, rather than pay for another exhibition stand at the show. As part of this deal, we were allowed a ten minute presentation slot at a hotel suite in Mumbai during the day, attended by key industry figures, before the prestigious NT Awards ceremony in the evening. The presentation I did was apparently well received, as the organiser for the whole event approached me afterwards and kindly said my presentation was the strongest they had seen that day, and asked if I would like to present a technology award live on TV the same evening. I of course said yes, not realising what I was letting myself in for.

Later that evening, I was dressed in my best Indian-tailored suit, ready for action (I would accumulate several during my time there, including a 70's Roger Moore style Safari linen suit, that is now permanently hung in my wardrobe, and will never see the light of day again, unless I'm attending a 70's fancy dress party, or in Las Vegas - the only place outside of India I can get away with wearing it!)

As the evening unfolded, I was sat in the audience of around 1,000 people with my team, wondering when I would be called up on stage for my moment, and experiencing a sudden panic attack. What if I open the envelope and I cannot pronounce the name on the card? As I tried to ignore these niggling fears, a runner approached me and asked me to follow her out of the audience and to go back stage with her, as I would be up next to present my award. She then advised me to stand behind the stage, and wait for my cue from the two comedian presenters on stage who will announce my name. I then walk on from behind the set, stand on the X marked on the stage floor, open the envelope, look up at the cameras that are beaming this live to millions around India, and read out the name on the card.

Luckily it was a name that was easy to read and announce. Phew! That went ok. I passed the award over, stood patiently to one side while the winner said his speech, and then as he walked down the steps leading off the stage back to the audience, I decided to follow, as I thought my moment of fame was over. As I began walking down the steps from the front of the stage, I heard cries of `what are you doing? Go back!' from the front row audience sat immediately below me. Oops! I thought. Maybe I have come off the wrong exit. Maybe I was supposed to exit left of stage. I then walked back up the steps onto the stage again, and walked left, looking for another exit - which there wasn't! The presenters on stage were now talking to me through their microphones. `Mr. Scott! Mr. Scott! Where are you going? You have another award to present!'

By this point, the whole place was erupting in laughter, as I stood there, red faced. One of the presenters came over to me and grabbed me by the waist. `You are going nowhere Mr. Barber. Not yet! We have you now!'

Embarrassed, I took the microphone from him and spoke to the hysterical audience. `Apologies everyone. Dumb English white guy!' was all I could bring myself to say. The presenter then coolly responded with `Well sir. You ruled us for 300 years!' to which the audience erupted again, now more loudly with a standing ovation.

The worst part was yet to come. Once I had finished my ordeal of presenting another two awards (I wish someone had told me beforehand), I then finally left the stage (to much amusement from the two presenters, who were still chuckling at me), only to wander aimlessly down below, lost, not able to find where my team was sat in the audience, and followed under the glare of a spotlight hovering over me as I looked for my seat.

As I drank several much needed ice cold Kingfisher beers afterwards at the wrap party, I lost count how many people came up to me and said I made the evening. `Oh sir! The evening was so boring before you came on stage!' This point was emphasised further next day, when my comedy of errors were being repeatedly shown on the CNN highlights of the event.

Quantel Royal Event

I was invited by Quantel to a Royal event at one of the beautiful Taj hotels in Mumbai, that Quantel were hosting. It was promoting British trade in India, and would be attended by Prince Andrew. The evening before the event, I sat having dinner with the former Quantel CEO, Ray Cross, and warned him to be prepared for things to go wrong, as they nearly always do, when a large demonstration is about to take place in India. Ray claimed that they (Quantel) never experience such failures, to which I reminded him there are often factors out of your control in India which can prevent an event running smoothly - power blocks fail, kit doesn't arrive on time, etc. Literally as we were speaking, one of the demonstrators seated with us at the dinner table was suddenly talking urgently on his mobile phone to customs. `Ray, the kit is being help up at customs!' he said anxiously. I smiled at Ray and said `There you go! Welcome to India!'

I came down for breakfast next morning and felt for the poor demo guys who had been up all night, trying to get the kit working as it should, having lost valuable time due to the kit arriving late at the hotel. I had been there myself many times, knowing what this was like, and asked if there was anything I could do to help them out.

In the evening, as the audience took their seats at the event, I could see Ray Cross stood at the front, looking rather nervous at the blue screen behind him, and across to the right of him there were several engineers huddled around the kit, pressing different buttons to get it working. Obviously things were not running smoothly!

As Ray was about to start his presentation, before he introduced himself and Quantel, he started with `Where's Scott? Where is he?' I slowly waved my hand in the air, to which Ray said to the audience, `Hey everyone! He's jinxed me!' pointing to where I was sat. Luckily the kit fired to life just in the nick-of-time, and the demonstration went well. Even Prince Andrew appeared happy with the show eventually (after initially refusing to put on his 3D glasses, as he sat immediately in front of me).

Prince Andrew (centre, seated), listens to a presentation about stereoscopic 3D

Commonwealth Games

The 2010 Commonwealth Games were held in Delhi during October 2010, and was the first time the Games were held in India. While road-widening projects were being developed, the Metro expanding to accommodate more people, and the international airport getting modernised for the event, preparation for the Games received widespread international media attention. Criticism was levelled against the organisers for the slow pace of work, as well as issues relating to security and hygiene. A newly built pedestrian bridge for the Games collapsed just days before the event was to open (below), while footage of dirty mattresses and filthy rooms for the athletes began to emerge on the news.

A friend of mine from Hull was the swimming coach for the GB team. He came out to Delhi and stayed at my apartment. With full knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes, he kept me constantly informed of the daily boycott threats and athlete withdrawals. 

From an international media perspective, things sounded no better. I went out with the BBC Sport Exec Producer for the Games one evening, and was listening to the horror stories of how unprepared and unfinished the IBC hub was as the BBC team arrived to set up. Half of the team would end up going down with severe bouts of the Delhi Belly within a few days.

Yet in typical Indian fashion, rather like an Indian wedding, manpower was thrown at the problem at the final hour, and just about got the show on the road. Five star hotel cleaning staff abandoned their daily duties in an all-hands-on-deck approach to clean up the athletes village. Due to this often short-sightedness to long term planning, everything is lastminute.com in India, even an event as big as this, but somehow they manage to find a way and pull through, which has to be admired. It's very impressive to observe the Indian resolve in action.

Hyderabad Gangsters

Don't be too surprised if clients don't pay up on time in India. We once had a customer in Hyderabad that had been using Vizrt news tickers on air for at least nine months, and still had not paid a rupee for the software. After pressing the account manager each week on why the customer had not paid up, I eventually asked him to arrange a meeting, so I could find out for myself what was going on. When we arrived at the facility on the outskirts of Hyderabad - a rough concrete block by the side of a dirt track in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the usual rubble and piled garbage which the roaming cows grazed off - I immediately noticed the two brand new shiny black Bentleys parked outside.

The owners office was on the top floor, a vast open space with luxurious leather sofas, lined with several expensive plasmas on the walls, and an adjoining on-suite shower room. We both sat and waited for the owners to arrive. When the door opened, the two burly men that walked slowly in looked more like bearded, Indian versions of the Kray twins, and sat opposite me, stone faced. I then spent ten minutes introducing myself, trying to remain professional, ignoring the intimidating stares and silent tension that was building up in front of me. After my opening speech, their response was in heated Hindi towards my sales guy. I asked what they were saying, realising I had just spent a wasted ten minutes speaking to two men who couldn't understand a word of English (made even worse by my Hull accent!) Apparently they were not happy with the level of support and training we had provided, even though they had not yet paid a single rupee for our software and services. They also claimed that they had paid our reseller (which I was almost certain wasn't true). Eventually I was glad to leave their room with my knee caps intact, and decided to switch off their dongle enabled software licences, once I was safely hundreds of miles away back in Delhi, until they paid up.

Lifestyle

The ex-pat lifestyle in India is made ludicrously attractive by many Western companies based out there for enticing people over. In the apartment I lived in, it boasted five on-suite bathrooms, situated on the 18th floor in a plush high-rise luxury complex, complete with swimming pool. I had a servant quarter where my driver, Shiv lived (believe me, you need a driver) and two maids that would come daily to cook and clean for me. You can see why this may seem appealing for many UK ex-pats looking to escape the gloomy weather in Blighty, being offered affluence that would rival what the likes of Roman Abramovich or the Beckhams could afford in London.

I was a member of the British Embassy, which meant I could pop over there for a few English ales at the Green Parrot pub on the compound (nicknamed `Butlins', due to its holiday style complex) to occasionally escape the manic chaos of India. I was also a member of the DLF golf country club (below) - an ostentatious place with floodlit courses to allow members to tee off in the evenings when the weather cools down slightly, and plush dark-wooden restaurants and bars with green leather seats that evoked memories of the British Raj.

If this extravagant lifestyle sounds tempting for some, it does come with its drawbacks. Firstly, being brought up in a working class environment like Hull, I never felt comfortable having servants working for me. Secondly, the truly Third World poverty conditions on your doorstep, that you never escape no matter where you travel in India, would only make you feel increasingly guilty about your own privileged conditions. I wanted to buy a dishwasher for my apartment, and yet was advised not to, as you are depriving the people living on the streets of a possible job and income. This is the sad reality you face, and why you end up hiring servants. I was paying double the average salary for my driver and maids, but was warned in no uncertain terms that doing this would be screwing with the economy, as my servants would not get a similar deal again once I leave India, and which I ignored.

I organised a Team Building weekend away with the entire Vizrt India team and their families, camping and white water rafting at Rishikesh, on the River Ganges. From going over rapid fours and fives under the blazing sun and nearly capsizing several times, to jumping in the fast-flowing river to body surf, this was one of the highlights of my time in India. One memorable moment occurred early one morning. I awoke and left my tent to take a stroll across the sleeping camp site to the toilets, when I stopped suddenly in my tracks. Across the river, on the other side of the embankment was a leopard, lazily gazing at me in the sun. At that moment I wish I had my camera with me, but I knew once I would go back to my tent it would disappear (which it did).

White water rafting on the River Ganges

`Delhi Belly'

An article on India wouldn't be complete without giving the dreaded Delhi Belly (or Bombay Bum) a mention. My boss in Asia warned me that I would catch just about everything in my first year in India, but then my immune system would slowly build a tolerance level, which it did. Within the first week I was struck down with a nasty throat virus, nothing like I had ever experienced before, while my stomach would slowly go through lessening degrees of the Delhi Belly, until eventually I could just about eat anything. My immune system slowly became rock solid. A good friend of mine, Jim Irving (former BBC Sport and Delta Tre) came out to visit me for a holiday, and after arriving in Delhi only hours before, he was very ill, even though we both ate the same food - a chicken curry that my maid had cooked, washed down with a bottle of Indian red wine. I'd probably be ill too now if I had to stomach that again. I doubt my immune system is as strong as it was back then.

However, if you choose the right restaurants, the food in India is fabulous. Most of the five star hotels offer superb buffets and restaurants, and its good to try restaurants like the famous Moti Mahal in Old Delhi, where Butter Chicken was invented, but the best dish I ever tried in India was at a seafood restaurant in Mumbai. I had tandoori lobster to start, and a chilli crab afterwards, and it was delicious.  

Moti Mahal’s famous Butter Chicken

My Final Days

My last few days in India were just as memorable as they were when I first arrived, still learning new things about that place until the day I left. The reason for leaving was mainly down to my wife Gita, who was still living in the UK at the time, and travelling to see me every month in Delhi, but after two years we decided it wasn't feasible to move out there permanently, and that I should come back to the UK. It became a strain on our relationship living apart, and as an expat in India without family support around you, it is extremely difficult. I would never advise anyone to work out there without the family coming along too (there are plenty of excellent international schools for expat children in India).

I had a fully furnished apartment and needed to sell everything, as there was no room at our home in the UK for all the furniture we had in India. The good news is, many people only buy second hand furniture in India. Someone recommended a guy called Ashok, who was running a business called Ashok Auctions, and he specialised in organising house auctions. He arrived early one Sunday morning at my apartment (below) with his team ready to sell all my belongings, after putting an advert in a local newspaper a few days before. His team then promptly rearranged all the furniture in the apartment. He even asked my wife to bring over any unused or broken bits of junk we didn't want back home in the UK to the apartment, as everything would sell within an hour.

And it did - beds, tables, sofas, TV's, a treadmill, half-opened bottles of ketchup, tins of beans, even a freebie Vizrt umbrella (left out on display by accident). For an hour it was utter chaos in the apartment, people shouting and fighting over every item, my wife trying to keep up with who had paid, where everyone was paying with cash that was going straight into a sports bag by my wife's side. Meanwhile I had to keeping watching for things going missing, or people trying to leave the apartment before Ashok checked over bundles of purchased items (this guy had a photographic memory).

When it was over, the apartment was empty - everything sold, with just a sports bag filled with cash, as though we had just completed a bank heist. It would be the last of many life lessons I experienced during my time in India, and I would love to return again someday.

Life of MAM

A MAM was Born

Once the shift to file-based media began, the Media Asset Management (MAM) revolution was born, and has been giving the industry a constant nagging headache ever since, for both broadcasters and vendors alike, due to its bespoke complexity and uniqueness to every different broadcast facility. It comes in lots of different, exciting flavours - MAM-in-a-box, MAM-in-a-tin, MAM Everywhere, DAM, PAM, Uncle SAM.

When the seeds of MAM began to grow in the late 90's, it felt like an opportunity to create joined-up broadcasting, enabling users to share, view and edit media on their desktops with the click of a mouse, whether it was content just shot on location several minutes ago, or an historical piece of footage from 30 years ago, wonderfully recalled and restored from the vaults of a deep, dark archive. The ingest people would ideally press a button and it would magically appear in the control room playout.

It is a subject that is continuously challenging vendors and broadcasters alike, who are constantly trying to play catch-up with an industry that is spiralling out of control with its speeding, galloping, unstoppable changes. From IP and Cloud, to 4K and 8K, we are offered solutions from vendors that are claiming to be `Everywhere' in a bold attempt to deal with these massive transformations.

Has MAM Delivered?

With the never ending discussions in the market, it appears that most MAM solutions available so far have failed to properly address the evolving demands of broadcasters. Archive shelves are still stacked with undigitised tape without metadata in many facilities, as workflows are being placed across multiple platforms, and in desperate need of a flexible solution that can be easily integrated.

Some vendors will argue that they have addressed broadcasters’ needs, but a recent research study by Ovum showed that 40% of the respondents highlighted poor integration of broadcast systems as the primary pain point in a MAM implementation. The research indicated “poor integration, constant search for different middleware formats, and the break in the chain if one element is replaced” as significant causes of concern. Also, trying to reduce the unit costs of media assets on site was cited as a significant point - optimising ROI with an asset, being able to find it quickly, so it can then be reused when necessary.

What Should MAM do?

Needless to say, broadcast facilities have complex infrastructures, with MAM needing to be all things to all people. From vertically integrating with traffic and scheduling, rights and royalties management, monitoring, airtime sales, financial modules, managing rich objects and advanced asset relationships, accommodating legacy assets, fitting with the existing infrastructure, to being adaptable to change existing workflow expectations, this is all part and parcel of what MAM does.

But the core role of a MAM system should still be exactly what it says on the tin – to manage media assets. The best MAM installations are the ones where the MAM is almost invisible, yet manages to perform all its tasks fully.

The end goal of a broadcast MAM system is surely to allow broadcasters to make more and better programmes with fewer costs involved, making jobs more efficient, such as easier and faster access to content, tools at their fingertips, automation of technical operations such as transcoding, and a better view of the overall workflow. But unfortunately technology is continually moving the cost goalposts.

The world has changed since the MAM debuted. Now we all want instant Web access to anything at any time. Yet surprisingly, our industry is one of the last to embrace this anywhere, anytime concept. Although vendors are at least trying to address these needs, we still wait for tapes, email clips instead of collaboratively sharing them, travel to Soho to sit in edit suites, and work in big glass open plan buildings rather than collaborating from great distances. Everyone knows the experience of being holed up in the office at midnight, because that’s where the media lives.

My Experiences with MAM

My first introduction to the world of MAM was back in 2006, and wasn't a particularly pleasant one, helping the Ardendo (now Vizrt) bid team submit a proposal for the mammoth, doomed BBC/Siemens DMI (Don't Mention It) project.

It would be some five years later before I would become heavily involved with the frustrating world of MAM again, this time in India with Vizrt. Lengthy, complex discussions would drag on for hours, days, weeks, years even, with large broadcasters in India for a proposed solution, as I pushed hard for conclusions that could never be reached. Too many people in the chain deciding on what they wanted, too much money at stake, too much back and forth with the clever bods in Sweden to decide on whether we could meet their requirements off-the-shelf, or whether bespoke work had to be done - silly me, of course it did!

My last real involvement with the intriguing world of MAM was more recently, helping BBC Wales evaluate whether to keep their existing newsroom desktop editing solution, or replace it with Jupiter (and Quantel). We finally decided Jupiter was the correct decision for BBC Wales, and I was then deployed in a `Business Readiness' role for a year, as Jupiter was slowly but surely steam-rolled out across Wales. I had to ensure all users of the new system would be ready to go once Jupiter went live. This  included organising a training schedule for 300 journalists and 30 craft editors, `Show & Tell' open days in Cardiff and Bangor (one of the most picturesque BBC regional sites I have ever been to), and creating extensive, laborious User Acceptance spreadsheets, which meant spending hours in a dark room pressing every button in Jupiter and QCut to ensure the system met the requirements (and worked properly!) It's only once you have experienced the MAM world from a user perspective do you really begin to understand the difficulties and complexities involved.  

MAM in a Fluffy Cloud

Most broadcasters think about the promised land of fluffy Clouds, where content can be previewed from a tablet or mobile device, a revolution enabling people to finish their work faster from wherever they are, in a world where getting content to air quickly is always paramount, allowing more flexibility, lower costs, and reduced hardware.

But the cloud is not a bolt-on fix. It is not a technology thing, it’s a people thing. Web-enabling a MAM is not the same as cloud-enabling a MAM. Web-enabling is making an asset accessible via a regular Web browser, so that no custom software needs to be installed on a desktop.

By comparison, cloud-enabling MAM removes the reliance on local engineers to ensure that the spinning disks are online and available, user credentials and permissions to access the media are validated, while removing maintenance and upgrade costs from the operating budget, saving time and money. Until recently, however, it was not generally possible to place the entire MAM in the cloud. Internet access was unreliable, insecure or slow for the file sizes and volumes of high resolution content.

A true cloud architecture provides a secure, hardware/software-free, self-service, simultaneous access to common assets to be accessed from anywhere in the world. Putting the MAM in the cloud makes sense for a lot of broadcast and production companies. It holds substantial benefits in a global media market where content is centrally accumulated, and is globally repurposed.

Established Hollywood studios and broadcasters are unlikely to put their entire MAM in the cloud, since they have already invested millions with their local on-site systems, and the private networks to enable accessibility. Unlike smaller businesses, they have the IT resources to maintain these systems and networks.

However, even these bigger organizations with elaborate on-site MAM's have begun to explore the cloud as a way to work more efficiently — reducing the amount of storage they maintain by extending part of the MAM system into the cloud for certain areas of their business and workflows.

Conclusion

While technology started the MAM revolution, economics will ultimately drive it. Consumer technology ignited cross-platform TV, and is now the major driving force for the production and post-production markets. Creating production and distribution of premium content at scale efficiently, while looking to solve these media management and logistic headaches are the just some of the huge challenges the industry faces.