BBC Technology, provider of products and services to media-driven organizations, announced today that it is offering its Internet and Media Communications solutions to US broadcast organizations as an entry point to the European market.
US broadcasters will now have access to European audiences. Internet solutions combine rich media Internet services that help broadcasters maximize the value of their content by optimizing audience reach and user experience.
The services are available on BBC Technology’s highly scalable and reliable media platform based in the UK. The infrastructure manages 1.3 billion page impressions each month for BBCi, and has streamed 70 terabytes of rich media content in one month alone. The services will comprise content distribution and platform management across terrestrial and digital satellite platforms. These services target news agencies, international networks and producers.
A number of companies in the UK and across Europe are actively deploying the Media Communications and Internet services: BBCi, RealNetworks, KPMG, the Office of National Statistics, the BBC’s Digital Curriculum, MTV, Globecast, BBC News, EBU, BSkyB, TVNZ, Press Association and CBC.
Weta, a somewhat obscure, visual effects house, made the Lord of the Rings Trilogy which cleaned up at the Oscars last night. Built from the ground up, the state-of-the-art facility rivals anything in Hollywood. Wellington has rebranded itself as Middle Earth.
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, has made a ton of money. The Fellowship of the Ring, generated $862.2 million in box-office; the second, Two Towers, topped $920.5 million, fourth place among all films. The Return of the King, released December 17, 2003, has more effects than the first two combined and has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards. And won in every catagory yesterday. (BTW, French journalist and blogger Emmanuelle Richard Welch moblogged live from the Academy Awards via a phonecam at her moblog).
Adam Shand, the person who started PersonalTelco, one of the most successful community wireless groups in the United States, left Portland last summer to work in New Zealand at Wellington-based, Weta Digital.
Film and Video Magazine explains some of the gear used in “King”… “We’re going to go from about 800 processors to about 1400 –1500 processors at Weta, if you include desktop and central resources.”
It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory. Hundreds of digital artists from all over the world have decended on New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators.
“Dozens of Americans from places like Berkeley and MIT are working alongside talented filmmakers from Europe and Asia, the Americans asserting that they were ready to relinquish their citizenship. Many had begun the process of establishing residency in New Zealand.
Weta’s visual effects studio grew from 80 to 500 people in order to accomplish the necessary prosthetics, costumes, miniatures, creatures and visual effects for the films. An unprecedented number of departments were housed under the Weta name, and a large number of diverse and ambitious effects were to be produced. Peter Jackson and his team engaged on the longest shoot in modern film history (16 months), after two years of pre-production and two years of postproduction. From the beginning it was clear that such a huge project could only be possible thanks to the magic of digital technology.
Weta’s pipeline is based on Alias Systems’ Maya for modeling and animation, Pixar Animation Studios‘ PR Render-Man for rendering, and Apple’s Shake for compositing. Massive Software for procedural animation for crowds, Jon Allitt’s Grunt rendered the crowds, and Giant Studios‘ Giant software was used for motion capture. The programs ran on Linux-based Intel machines with a total of 3500 processors at last count. The toolbox at New Zealand’s WETA also includes Arius3D, Motion Analysis, Pixologic, and Sylflex.
The character Gollum is based on that of actor Andy Serkis. Animators at Weta, used a mixture of motion capture, roto-motion (matching animation to a live-action plate), and keyframe animation. For this film, the motion-capture team developed an onset capture system, arguably the first use of motion capture during principal photography.
Millimeter Magazine explains the team amassed libraries of motion information. “We’d then teach our AI system what we wanted the characters to do.”
Weta’s central storage facility “is at about 9 TB right now, and we’re going to be growing that to about 20 TB.” For offline storage, the facility is upgrading its StorageTek Tape Robot. “We’ve got about 45 TB right now and it’s growing significantly.
A digital trade route between Singapore and New Zealand has opened. There will be no ships or aircraft plying this new route, but multi-gigabyte animation, computer graphics and multimedia files conceived by the creative services industries in these two countries. By 2008, $4.7 billion in wireless video clips will be consumed. Mostly in the far East.
Rise of the Creative Class author Richard Florida says creative people will leave.
“Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world’s most sophisticated filmmaking complex.
Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the ’90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change.
A Tech Park’s Force Multiplier is fiber. Places like Bangalore Tech Park market their connectivity.
Leasing a 45 Mbps line to Hawaii (or Asia) is child’s play. It’s also cheap using Tyco’s 7.86 terabit transpacific fiber line (which terminates in Portland’s Brewery Blocks). San Luis Obesbo might also be a sweet spot.
The TxVision teleport in Hawaii, uplinks to AGILA 2, MEASAT 2 and Japan’s JSAT DBS (JCSAT-8). A global market is one hop away. The satellites in Hawaii’s footprint connect to two-thirds of the world’s population in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and India. Alternately, New Skies NSS-6 in Australia, can “see” Asia, the Middle East and Southern Africa with spot beams.
The 13,000 lb Inmarsat I-4 satellite, when launched next year, will be the world’s largest commercial satellite and will support the new Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN), to deliver Internet, video on demand, videoconferencing, fax, e-mail, phone and LAN access at speeds up to 432 kbit/s to easily-used terminals the size of laptops.
Cities like Portland, that don’t promote their creative capital, will loose it. Portland Creative Services, including Will Vinton Studios, Michael Curry Design, Oregon 3D, Intel, OSDL, OPB Productions and a thousand other high-tech/creative industries in your city and mine now know that location is irrelevant in the real world of effects-driven production. There’s no going back.
Light Reading has more on undersea fiber. FLAG Telecom, for example, will spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a new 15,000 kilometer network — called “Falcon” — linking the Middle East, India, and China within a year.
Related DailyWireless stories include Gollum Blows Hollywood, Subducting the Zone, West Coast Grid, Grid Becomes Self-Aware, and Just Say No.
[...] TeleGeography has a Global Bandwidth Research Service. Related DailyWireless articles include; Intelligent Nation, New Transpacific Cable, Supercomputer Cells, Googleplex in Oregon, Bangalore Unwired, The Global Grid, and Transnational Media Production. [...]
Left by dailywireless.org » New China Transpacific Cable on December 18th, 2006