ASIA

The DRM Consortium and ATSC, the Broadcast Standards Association, have just signed a mutual institutional partnership agreement. This gives each of the two international, not-for-profit organisations equal access and rights in the DRM Consortium and ATSC organisation, respectively. This is also expected to open the door to close collaboration between the respective standard bodies, the ultimate goal being the adoption of both standards worldwide for the benefit of broadcasters and listeners alike.The over 100 members of the DRM Consortium are promoting the global adoption of Digital Radio Mondiale™ (DRM), the only universal, openly standardised digital radio system for all broadcasting frequencies and coverage needs. The standard is being demonstrated, ready to launch or being used in countries around the globe from India, China, Indonesia to South Africa, European countries etc.As recently presented in Indonesia, India and in Turkey (at the ABU General Assembly) DRM offers innovative solutions to deliver better audio and data programmes with multimedia enhancements. DRM enables the delivery of information, entertainment, education and emergency warning while saving spectrum and energy. This has been demonstrated with the ultra-efficient DRM-Multichannel signals broadcast from a single wide-band transmitter in the VHF bands.ATSC, the Broadcast Standards Association, aims to develop voluntary standards and recommend practices for digital terrestrial broadcasting. As a new force to be reckoned with in the broadcasting industry, ATSC guides the seamless integration of broadcast and telecom standards to drive the industry forward. As recently mentioned by the ATSC President: “ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are being tested in India, Canada and Mexico, and Brazil has identified key ingredients of the ATSC 3.0 system for their next-generation system, joining South Korea, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the U.S., which are on-air or planning near-term launches.”“We are excited to formalize our collaboration with the Digital Radio Mondiale Consortium through this reciprocal institutional membership agreement. This partnership not only enhances our commitment to advancing broadcasting technologies but also paves the way for ongoing efforts to carry Digital Radio Mondiale services over ATSC 3.0 transmissions, expanding access to high-quality digital radio and expanding opportunities for ATSC 3.0 broadcasters. This is especially important in countries such as India, where Digital Radio Mondiale has an established base of users, and also other locations that are studying options such as Brazil and Indonesia,” said Madeleine Noland, President, ATSC.The DRM Chairman, Ruxandra Obreja, welcomed the signing of the DRM-ATSC institutional membership agreement saying that: “There are clear synergies between our two not-for-profit organisations, as well as geographical overlaps in our activities since our innovative solutions could be beneficial in giving a 21st century digital future to media in developed and developing countries. Getting blended, robust end-to-end and ready-to-use solutions is an aim DRM and ATSC share fully. This is why I consider this institutional membership agreement as very significant for all our members. I am very excited about our next joint initiatives.” […]

This is the fifth report in Steve Ahern’s series on new trends at IBC24 in Amsterdam.

Electronic watermarking has been around for a while. It has been used to track pirated copies of music and video using digital rights management (DRM) techniques since CDs were introduced and digital content piracy proliferated across the internet.There are a range of techniques used to watermark content which range from visible watermarks such as transparent logos in films and tv shows, to invisible metadata code insertion in audio tracks and video files. There is even a new cryptographic based embedded blockchain code developed by South African company Custos, using Amazon Web Services, that alerts a user to piracy and offers them a bitcoin reward for reporting it.AI generated content has just increased the stakes for content creators in three main areas:
Tracking the original content that has been used to train AI.
Identifying content created by AI.
Verifying the authenticity of news content.
Content creators will want to track how much of their original works have been used by AI to create new pictures, videos, songs, news reports and books, with a view to trying to get some revenue for the part their work played in training the AI.Authentication is going to be needed in years to come as more and more content on the internet is created automatically by AI, leading to inaccuracies and hallucinations that will get out on the world wide web and be used as the basis for more AI tools to develop more inaccurate content. Evaluating whether something is true will become more difficult without the ability to authenticate sources and trace claims back to their source.With deep fake editing now so easy, it takes very little effort to hijack a tv news report and manipulate it using deep fake pictures and synthetic voices. A credible report can be manipulated to feed misinformation, so verifying whether the report was changed will be crucial to maintaining trust in responsible media publishers.

These trends may undermine the financial viability and the credibility of responsible media companies if regulations and technological tools don’t keep up.At IBC a range of technical and policy papers tackled the issues of verification, especially using different types of watermarking techniques.Technology companies such as Google, one of the major players developing AI systems, are planning to embed watermarking technology into AI created music tracks so that AI and original content can be identified.Tracks made with YouTube’s impressive new Lyria generative music tool will be watermarked.Deep Mind says: “Our team is also pioneering responsible deployment of our technologies with best-in-class tools for watermarking and identifying synthetically generated content. Any content published by our Lyria model will be watermarked with SynthID, the same technology toolkit we’re using for identifying images generated by Imagen on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.”Verifying the authenticity of News Content was brought home to delegates by Laura Ellis, the BBC’s Head of Technology Forecasting (main picture), who described an ‘Aha moment’ at the BBC.In April 2022 a BBC news report claimed that Ukraine was behind a missile attack on a Donbas station that killed 57 people. The video opened with a BBC logo and had the broadcaster’s watermark in the corner. It was a fake, as a BBC Verify journalist pointed out on X but it was also a wake-up call to the broadcaster to do something about rising deepfake disinformation.“Everyone was horrified to see the fake video but the only thing we could do was tweet denials. For some it was the ‘Aha!’ moment when they fully realised we needed to do more.” Read a full report here.John Simmons and Joseph Winograd from Verance Corporation in a Technical Paper on interoperable provenance authentication explained:Any attempt to address false information on the web must proceed from an understanding of how people come to place trust in information.The prevalence of information ‘bubbles’ demonstrates that people primarily place trust in specific sources of information. If information appears unaltered and from a trusted source, we often consider that information to be factual. In other words, most of us judge what is factual based on the provenance and authenticityof the information, where provenance refers to the origin, history, and chain of custody of a piece of audio-video content, and authenticity refers to whether the content has been manipulated or altered in a way out of the control of the trusted source of the information.There are two general methods for conveying provenance and authenticity metadata in association with audio-video content. Metadata can be cryptographically bound to the audio-video content, perhaps stored at the audio-video container level. Metadata can also be embedded as a watermark in the audio-video elementary stream. Read the full paper here (free registration required)Blocking content is also another way of limiting piracy. Reporting on blocking trends for IBC, David Davies wrote:“The rise of blocking is more recent and has attracted some controversy because of perceived drawbacks like the possible inadvertent obstruction of legitimate services. For instance, the recently launched Pirate Shield project in Italy, which aims to protect the big sports rights holders – such as DAZN, Sky, Prime Video and Infinity – by blocking unauthorised viewing of live events has attracted criticism from some ISPs, VPNs and consumers. At the least, further refinements would seem to be inevitable.”“Pirates are really well-organised now, and there is potentially a lot of money for them to make – as well as a lot for the media industry to lose in terms of attacks on its revenue. That’s why you really need solutions such as watermarking, in particular to protect against the live redistribution of content,”  said Mélanie Langlois, Product Manager, Anti-Piracy Services at Viaccess-Orca. Read the full report here.As many thought leaders and technology suppliers told me, “it’s a game of whack-a-mole… an arms race… we find a way to watermark or verify then the bad actors think of something else.”The race continues.Related IBC Trends Articles
IBC Trends 1: Artificial Intelligence

IBC Trends 2: The Cloud

IBC Trends 3: Automated Content Detection

IBC Trends 4: Using AI to make talkback and reporting more efficient

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The New York Festivals® Radio Awards has announced the 2025 Grand Jury and three people from Asia are a part of it. They inclde two Indians: Swarup BR, Co-Founder/Creative Director, Stark Communications and Anurita Patel, […]

StreamGuys will shine a light on business models for audio and video streams in a new webinar series beginning next week, emphasizing how broadcasters and content producers can generate revenue for live and on-demand media. […]

IBC announces the Call for Challenges for the 2025 Accelerator Media Innovation Programme, inviting proposals for transformative, fast-track innovation projects that will help shape the future of the media and entertainment technology sector. The deadline for submissions is Friday 6th December 2024.IBC will select 12 project proposals that will go forward to be pitched in person at the IBC Kickstart Day on Wednesday 12th February 2025 after reviewing all applications. For the first time, the Kickstart event will be held at the BBC’s iconic Radio Theatre and Media Café in central London. While the event is open to all, numbers are strictly limited due to venue capacity. To attend, please register your interest here and you’ll be the first to be notified when registration for the event opens.The IBC Accelerator Programme has established itself as a catalyst for collaborative innovation within the media and entertainment ecosystem – where project challenges are proposed by the buyers of technology who then form project teams with specific expertise to explore and develop solutions in a matter of months. The solutions are ultimately showcased and discussed as Proof of Concepts (PoCs) at the IBC Show in September 2025. Submission Guidelines and the Entry form can be found here.“The IBC Accelerator Programme has really delivered as a safe and trusted space for the media sector to work together, better understand complex challenges, learn and lean into solving common pain points around transformation,” said Mark Smith, Head of the Accelerator Programme for IBC. “The 2024 projects clearly hit a seam of critical challenges that resonated across the industry, from our AI Media Production Lab, the News & Disinformation and Digital Replicas projects through to the Evolution of the Control Room and Connect & Produce Anywhere software defined Production project. There was a wealth of value in the compelling PoCs and showcases at IBC2024”.For 2025, IBC is seeking challenges that address pressing issues in content creation, live production and distribution, audience engagement and technology integration, intelligent automation, sustainability, innovative ad-tech, connectivity, and many other areas of emerging media R&D. Selected projects will have the opportunity to collaborate with world leading media brand Champions, the industry experts, that provide leadership for transformative innovation.Entry is open to all in the media technology ecosystem, with projects covering a wide range of relevant industry challenges in topical areas such as AI, Connectivity, Sustainability, IP Evolution, News & Disinformation, Ad Tech, Cybersecurity & Content Protection, Immersive XR Tech among many other areas of media technology evolution.“The IBC Accelerator Programme has become integral to the industry, looking at some of the key subjects and areas that are driving the future of what we do,” said Morwen Williams, Director of Media Operations for the BBC. “I am delighted that we are hosting this event at the BBC and look forward to hearing the great pitches that will come forward!”More than 300 organisations have taken part in the programme since its foundation in 2019. All 2024 project PoCs were showcased live at IBC2024 at the IBC Accelerator Zone and as a Final Showcase Session on the Innovation Stage, and each project can be found here. […]

The 61st Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) General Assembly commenced with a Programme Committee Meeting in Istanbul, led by Claire Gorman (ABC-Australia) and Inoue Tatsuhiko (NHK-Japan), and opened by the ABU Secretary-General.Key discussions included a proposal to open the ABU TV Song Festival to radio members, enhancing inclusivity across platforms.Currently, the ABU TV Song Festival is open to television broadcasters who are members of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union. Since its first edition in 2012, over thirty broadcasters have participated in the event.While radio members have not been able to participate in most editions of the ABU TV Song Festival, Nepalese radio station Radio Tulsipur had an entry in the virtual ABU TV Song Festival in 2020.Earlier, between 2012 and 2019, the ABU organised the ABU Radio Song Festival which was open to radio broadcasters only. The event showcased unsigned music talent from across the Asia-Pacific region but was cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Radio Song Festival saw twenty-eight countries participate across six editions, including participation from broadcasters in countries who have not participated in the ABU TV Song Festival. […]