Network Insight Institute

Judi Tucker

Judi Tucker, Executive Director, FIBRE

I am going to talk about an industry for whom it is just not broadband, in fact it is "business-band" on steroids! The role of FIBRE, the Film Industry Broadband Resources Enterprise, is as one of the original demand aggregators with an industry focus. I am going to talk about the importance of broadband for this industry sector for post-production in film and television, and for local collaboration to enable them to compete globally for the business with our opposite numbers all around the world. I will also talk about what I call the visual economy. Now I make no excuse for one of the upcoming slides which some of you will have seen before, as I think it is a message that is worth repeating.

So who is FIBRE? FIBRE began as a working party of a dedicated team of production and post-production players. We received $650,000 of funding from DCITA and I commenced as the Executive Director in November 2001. Our brief was to examine the business case for demand aggregation to reduce the cost of broadband for the film and television post-production sector. We were also to implement the broadband network - a challenge on $300,000 a year!

However by the time we submitted our final report, in February 2002, we were rewarded because we had not just the five customers we were expected to have, but we actually had 8 to 10 sites operating on a broadband network, the backbone of which is supplied by Uecomm. As a result of our initial success, the department again funded us another $150,000 this year, supported also by the New South Wales Office of Information Technology with $75,000, and Multimedia Victoria with $75,000. The target customers are predominantly SMEs with large corporate data needs; and that conflict is at the root of the problem for this industry. Eighty per cent of our potential customers employ four or less people but they have very large corporate type data needs and let me just show you what that actually translates to.

How much film is there in 40 gigabytes? I think if you look at the 100 minutes of DVD quality for the consumer, the 4 minutes of digital high definition television, and the 40 seconds of cinema film you should start to get some sense of the data sizes we are talking about. That 40 seconds of cinema film for the ones that are rapidly doing some mental calculations is based on 4K. Now 4K is 4,000 lines and it is the recently announced preferred standard by the Hollywood Studio Consortium for digital cinema. Believe you me, digital cinema is not very far away.

I actually see that the role of FIBRE is to close gaps. There is the gap between what the telcos want to charge and what the industry can afford: that is the price gap. There is an even more important gap: that is, the gap between the business model of the telco which has nice steady streams of data every month, as opposed to the one in which you move 80 gig of data one month, and next month you are driving a cab. The way that these gaps are being addressed by FIBRE is in the first case by demand aggregation. That demand aggregation stretches from Cairns to Perth, and all points in between and from 512Kbps to 100 megabytes per second. So it is as much about the carrier's business model as it is about price. Carriers, do not ask your customers to shoe-horn themselves into your business model. Make your offering fit their need, and this is a need that is going to become universal. By the way, this is the first mile; not the last mile. This is where it starts.

So what has FIBRE achieved in its two years of operation? Within the State boundary there are zero data charges between collaborating companies, just small flat fees. I was at a meeting recently with an unnamed telco and when I said that it needed to be the case and the jaw dropped. My operations manager said to me in the car afterwards, "That is another telco we are going to have to train". Interstate there are no data charges, a fixed fee instead. And the reason for this data free carriage model is because the competitor in this situation is our good old friend sneaker.net, the courier and the tape. The courier and the tape is $20. If data costs one cent per meg to transmit it is not going to work. FIBRE customers on fibre optics or microwave can burst demand up and down as required to fit. FIBRE now has 13 companies at 20 sites across three states connected. Just three of those moved three terabytes of data in and 2.4 terabytes of data out over the last year. Just three of them. Speeds vary from 512K to 100 megabytes per second, delivered on fibre optic from Uecomm, DSL from Uecomm or microwave from Vertel. The current remaining issue is about interconnect, it is the biggest single current problem.

Our DSL customers have no caps, no download limits, no upload charges and pay a flat single figure of cents per megabyte. We have entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Sohonet, the originator of this concept of demand aggregation for this industry in the UK.

This is the making of McLeods Daughters and there are seven sites involved. Click here to view slide. If you happen to notice none of them is in a CBD area. Every one of them is nowhere near where the fibre is. And in the process of a 26 day shoot nearly three terabytes using good old sneaker.net is moved around. There has to be a smarter, better way of doing that. So if you are shocked enough at that I will move on.

My firm belief is that vision without action is a daydream and action without vision is a nightmare. My vision is that we are increasingly talking to each other in and communicating via images. The killer application for the internet was email. The killer application for broadband is communications.

Let's take a look at the visual economy, starting with our friends in commercial media. They have a business model which is selling advertising space. (Some of the production people will tell you that they just do the fillers to go around the advertising space!) This goes to the consumer who consumes the advertisements and is motivated to go to the shops hopefully and buy the goods which have to then be made or sourced in some way. The advertisement has to be created, produced and post-produced. Now, entertainment goes to the consumer by a variety of means, and comes into the process at the bottom end. All of this is supported by government in its various forms and, the lead agencies that we look at here are education, health and the one that hasn't been mentioned so far: law and order and security, a huge user of images.

The Department of Defence has more images from Afghanistan and Iraq than most of the television stations put together, and they actually get them to the television stations for the evening news; 200,000 or 300,000 digital images that are required to be sourced by the print media. And they all have to be managed.

Law and order looks also at the judiciary and the remote conducting of witness interviews.

All of the communications for this "economy" is currently managed by telephone exchanges, because it is predominantly voice. The future of the telephone exchange is limited and for the future communications the old fashioned telephone exchange is not going to hack it. A media exchange, not the same one in every location but any one of these media exchanges, is going to need to be able to manage storage and copyright. There is no copyright on a telephone call, but there is on an image. Disaster recovery, asset management, metadata management: you have got to be able to find it once you have got it in your possession. Every single part of this economy is going to have to manage their content.

What I would like to do now is draw a line across the economy as I have described it. And I would like you to look at all of the entities that are below the line. Click here to view slide. Every single one of those entities is familiar with and understands images. It is their life blood, their daily work. They each understand the vagaries and the complexities of images. Into the future the skill sets that currently make fantastic visual effects, entertaining advertisements and great feature films are going to be needed above that line. Already people are putting their toes in the water to see what it is that is needed to manage images, and with the greatest of respect to telcos, I am very sorry not many of them get this at all.

Now FIBRE is currently located there, in the area of production and post production. We are not currently funded to do more than to operate there but we need to start to look at areas outside of our immediate sphere of post-production. Game software development is another major industry and one of our first customers is from the games industry. Obviously the broadcasters have some interest in this type of application and in interacting with the other players in that part of their sector and outside that part of their sector.

One of the things you will find into the future is that it does not actually matter where you are. Remote collaboration can happen anywhere. For example in the USA in April, I saw a short film called The Magic Lesson. The actors were in Hong Kong, the director was in Tokyo and the lighting was done from LA. NTT provided the backbone for the connectivity. Never did the three meet. My vision of the future is this virtual remote collaboration, and we are going to need the network to be able to do that. We are also going to need this to not just get out over the Pacific, but to get out of our own front doors.

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