Chris Pfaff produced and moderated the ‘Producing in XR: How to Navigate Challenges’ panel at the VR AR Global Summit Online, Europe, on Wednesday, September 29, 2021, with some of the leading global producers of VR and AR content:

– Tupac Martir, founder, Satore Studio

– Michael Owen, co-founder/principal, MediaCombo

– Rafael Pavon, creative director, The Mill

The group discussed their experiences in overcoming production and distribution challenges in various VR and AR projects, including a recent NFT project by Tupac Martir.

You can view the entire panel at:

https://youtu.be/4Tg4S6ZA6Ak

Michael Owen shows some of his 360-degree documentary production of Lake Baikal

Rafael Pavon shows some of his amazing work on ‘Memoria,’ inside the La Garma cave in Spain

Tupac Martir shows off a VR NFT sculpture

Tupac Martir in action

Tupac Martir shows off ‘Dr. Crumb and the School of Disobedient Pets’

Michael Owen shows off recent work

Chris Pfaff appeared on the production finance panel at the Catalyst Story Institute Festival (at the Kitchi Gammi Club in Duluth, Minnesota) on Friday, October 1, 2021 with (left to right):

Seitu Jemel Hart, CEO, Careers in Entertainment, Chris Pfaff, CEO, Chris Pfaff Tech Media LLC, Michelle Miller, Viviana Zarragoitia, VP at Three Point Capital, Sonja O’Hara, from Bohème Film, and Matthew Valentinas, Esq., Of Counsel at Sennott, Williams and Rogers, LLP. Many thanks to Philip Gilpin, Jr., Nikki Coble, and Jennifer Plotzke, and the entire Catalyst Story Institute team for producing an exceptional four days of exuberant creativity.

Chris Pfaff and Viviana Zarragoitia before the panel

Viviana Zarragoitia discusses film financing as Michelle Miller (near left), Sonja O’Hara, and Matthew Valentinas (right) listen

Sonja O’Hara discusses financing of her projects

Chris Pfaff moderated the ‘Live Events in the ‘New Normal’ panel at the Streaming Media Magazine Connect event, on Thursday, August 26, 2021, with Bonnie Comley, CEO/founder of BroadwayHD; Fabrice Sergent, managing partner of Bandsintown Group, and Jordan Gremli, VP, artist development at DICE.

The panel discussed the return of live events to venues across the globe, yet the virtual live market – music, theater, dance – has been alive and well since the start of the pandemic, and will likely evolve into a hybrid model for venue owners, artists, promoters, and audiences.

You can watch the full panel at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWq7bHRTeYo&t=22s

Bonnie Comley (upper left), Chris Pfaff (upper middle), Jordan Gremli (upper right), Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen (bottom left), Fabrice Sergent (bottom right)

Chris Pfaff moderated the ‘Built to Scale: Growing Your OTT Service with Your Audience’ panel at Streaming Media Connect 2021 on Wednesday, August 25, 2021, featuring Rick Allen, CEO of ViewLift; Emily Powers, head of BritBox LLC North America; Dave Lankford, VP of Product, The Walt Disney Company Streaming (Hulu, ESPN+, Disney+, and Star+), and Nicole Fencel, senior manager, the Roku Inc. Channel.

The panel discussed the record OTT usage in the summer of 2021, and how the OTT viewing trend that accelerated during the first year of the pandemic has continued unabated. In this session, we will discuss how operators and content providers deal with subscriber growth and unpredictable viewing spikes.

‘Built to Scale: Growing Your OTT Service With Your Audience’ can be viewed in its entirety at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNMegTfXWFg&list=PLcSb1s2U3uyBx4h76YL2Dzt56k-c60ygq&index=7

Chris Pfaff (upper left), Emily Powers (upper middle), Nicole Fencel, (upper right), Dave Lankford (lower left), and Rick Allen (lower right)

Chris Pfaff moderated the ‘Media VCs and Accelerators’ panel at Arctic15 Helsinki on Tuesday, June 1, 2021 with the following panelists:

• Melanie Schröder, director of finance and portfolio, APX
• Nico Lumma, managing partner, Next Media Accelerator
• Anne Jacobsen, CEO, Media City Bergen

Arctic15, the leading networking and matchmaking event for investors – including Index Ventures, Draper Esprit, and NEA – and start-ups in the Nordic region, was an ideal forum for this session, which discussed:

* media consolidation rapidly accelerating at a time when media tech is smashing legacy distribution models. Are we actually about to enter a new golden age of media investment in Europe?

* European broadcast and cable networks and telecom operators have created environments that enable media innovation to flourish. How do accelerators work with broadcasters and operators to create differentiated ventures?

* Strategic media investors are in a strong position today, it would seem, as many institutional VC firms shy away from media investments. How does APX approach early-stage media investment?

* Bergen is an unusual media hub, bolstered by TV-2 and its famous spin-outs, including VizRT and Vimond, among others. How has MCB broadened the outlook for the Norwegian media scene, in general, and can it sustain the track record of Norwegian media start-ups?

* Germany continues to produce leading media-tech ventures, from Soundcloud to hologate. What does the next year – coming out of the pandemic – look like for media investment in Germany?

* how do you help position start-ups in a media world that seems, quite often, to be dominated by Big Tech? Do the likes of Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google appear to be roadblocks or islands of opportunity (either for investment or acquisition)?

Nico Lumma (upper left); Chris Pfaff (upper middle); Melanie Schröder (upper row, second from right); Anne Jacobsen (upper right)

Chris Pfaff moderated the Streaming Media East session ‘How to Succeed With a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) Service’ on Wednesday, May 19, 2021, featuring some of the leading players in the D2C space, including:

• Ian Greenblatt, Managing Director, JD Power 
• Karl Meyer, Head of Media and Entertainment, Samsung Ads 
• Jon Goodstadt, Director, Ad Sales, Media & Entertainment, Roku 
• Louise La Grange, Launch Director and General Manager, BBC Select

You can watch the full panel at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o40IY7dsQA&list=PLcSb1s2U3uyBDk4jY5_c5gdZ_zinvjVqR&index=23

Karl Meyer (upper left), Chris Pfaff (upper middle), Jon Goodstadt (upper right), Ian Greenblatt (middle left), Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen (middle middle)

Chris Pfaff produced and moderated a killer session – ‘Co-Watching: The Next Best Thing to Being There’ on the growing industry trend of co-watchig at TVOT LIVE! Spring 2021, on April 26, 2021. Industry leaders, including Jonny Williams, COO, Sceenic; Miheer Walavalkar, CEO, LiveLike, and Wim Sweldens, co-founder/chief architect, Kiswe, joined the session.

You can watch the full panel at: https://youtu.be/R2ly-X-dl5w

Chris Pfaff (upper left); Jonny Williams (upper right); Wim Sweldens (lower left), and Miheer Walavalkar, LiveLike (lower right)

MORE ABOUT ‘CO-WATCHING: THE NEXT BEST THING TO BEING THERE’

More than a decade after the “second screen” brought mobile users and TV content together, the co-watching era brings people together in a sync solution with live content. The live sports and entertainment industries have benefitted, during lockdown, from audiences not able to gather in sports venues, concert halls, festival venues, sports bars, or even in living rooms. This panel features some of the global leaders in the field of co-watching, who will discuss the technical and marketing challenges of launching and sustaining co-watching experiences.

On the first morning of IBC 2017, Chris Pfaff Tech Media and Integer 1 hosted the IBC Video Content Innovation Summit at the Rockstart Accelerator in Amsterdam, which featured some of the leading innovators in the broadcast technology space today, including Vimond; Verizon envrmnt; HCL, and Valossa.

Emceed by Chris Pfaff, the breakfast event, held in the main event room at Rockstart, featured a technology keynote from Sanjay Macwan, focused on the shifting landscape for content distribution and consumption, and presented the audience of 55 producers, distributors, and vendors a view into where global content behaviors are headed. Macwan moderated a panel with Helge Hoibraaten, CEO of Vimond, Mika Rautiainen, CEO of Valossa, and Raheel Khalid, CTO of Verizon envrmnt (Kanwaldeep Kalsi, VP of Media for HCL, could not make the event, due to a delayed flight). The event literally presented some of the leading figures in OTT (Vimond), VR and AR (Verizon envrmnt), AI (Valossa), and cloud infrastructure (HCL).

Chris Pfaff emcees the IBC Video Content Innovation Summit

Sanjay Macwan, CEO of Integer 1, presents his keynote 

Sanjay gets into discussing the Muybridge experiment

Poster on front door of Rockstart Accelerator, Amsterdam

Raheel Khalid, CTO of Verizon envrmnt

Helge Hoibraaten, CEO of Vimond

Sanjay Macwan, left, and Mika Rautiainen, right

Long shot of the event room at Rockstart Accelerator

Sanjay poses a question to the panel

Raheel Khalid, Verizon envrmnt           Helge Hoibraaten, Vimond                   Mika Rautiainen, Valossa                     AI, OTT, and VR/AR all-stars

Highlights from the panel discussion included Helge’s discussion regarding content consumption (“we now have all the content we would ever want – in some ways, we don’t have to produce any more”) and content behaviors (“we interviewed teenagers about TV and they said ‘I have everything that I need in my phone'”). Raheel discussed the issue of every-cinreasing on -demand behaviors, in that people will “not wait for large files to download.” he said that Verizon envrmnt can now stream large-file content by taking game logic and running it on the fly. In this sense, VR and AR content is seamlessly distributed. He discussed Verizon envrmnt’s mobile edge compute strategy – which takes 20 milliseconds for a round trip. With 5G coming in, 1 gigabit bandwidth will enable VR content to be flawlessly streamed. Mika talked about the need to understand how video can be read and how machine learning can train to enable smarter questions around content itself.

See the promo highlight video at: https://youtu.be/lfZPjMLZa-w

The event was a swan song for Rockstart, as it was the last event in the main room at their 182 Herengracht location (they have since moved slightly north to a larger facility). But, it was a kickstart for IBC 2017, and in addition to a good meal, the crowd feasted on some hearty discussion.

The brainchild of VentureFuel and the Experiential Advertising Group, the Advertising Week New York 2017 TechX experience in Times Square, in a pop-up space between H&M and the NASDAQ MarketSite, curated some of the hippest tech for the ad world, from September 25-28. From digital art projects to AR apps to VR tools and holographic displays, the TechX arena offered a wide palette of commercially available experiences for attendees – creatives and media buyers – to play with and understand.

Ryan Hilla demonstrates Verizon envrmnt’s AR activation for Time Inc. to Guy Story and Vinne Grasso

The value of TechX cannot be understated: for years, Advertising Week has shunted ad-tech demos into the lower level of the Times Center on 8th and 41st, mainly as an afterthought to the main programming upstairs. TechX was both long overdue and also groundbreaking in its depth, bringing start-up companies in the immersive and AI worlds into a forum for major brand conversations on the state of the ad industry.

Mika Rautiainen demonstrates Valossa AI

TechX saw the launch of immersive analytics company QuantumXPR, with Scott Susskind and Kris Matheney camped out in the lower level of the venue, near two rows of digital art projects. Verizon envrmnt, the end-to-end VR/AR studio from Verizon Labs, was in full force, showcasing its AR projects for the likes of Time Inc., and Conde Nast, as well as its Virtual Sportsbar experience. The Valossa AI demo presented attendees with a new way to understand video, and VNTANA

showcased the best holographic display technology we have yet seen. Retinad’s VR in-console ad analytics and Tunity’s out of home display audio solution presented measurable technology for audiences underserved, or not yet measured. DreamSail Games showcased an expansive VR game environment, and Holosonics presented directional audio solutions.

VNTANA’s holographic display demonstrated the full-size immersive side of out of home displays

Sean Brown, with Turner Courageous, gets a demo of the Verizon envrmnt AR activation for a Verizon Store drone campaign, from JR Dawkins

Brian Roth, from Immersv, gets a VR demo from Christian Egeler, director of VR/AR at Verizon envrmnt

Nestled just steps away from the Times Square bustle, TechX was a rare opportunity to glimpse some of the more inventive ways to deliver and measure ads – and no PowerPoint involved.

Yes – there were sessions at TechX as well. Here’s a lively VC discussion in play

On a steamy late-September Monday (September 25, 2017), on the first day of Advertising Week New York, the VR/AR Association hosted an event with some of the leaders in VR storytelling, ‘Narrative in VR: How to Create Compelling Stories with Virtual Reality,’ at the NYU Tandon Future Lab in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

(l to r) Brian Seth Hurst; Caitlin Burns; Raheel Khalid, and Lewis Smithingham at the NYU Tandon Future Lab in DUMBO

Moderated by Chris Pfaff, the panel featured Brian Seth Hurst, Chief Storytelling and President at StoryTech Immersive; Raheel Khalid, CTO of Verizon envrmnt; Caitlin Burns, founder/CEO of Caitlin Burns & Associates, and Lewis Smithingham, president and partner at 30ninjas. An audience of 35 producers, artists, and students were part of a lively discussion regarding VR’s narrative structures, and how much of today’s VR industry has adapted game design techniques to better deliver moving experiences.

Marco Castro, artist in residence at NYU Tandon Future Lab, welcomes the crowd

Brian Seth Hurst showed his groundbreaking piece ‘My Brother’s Keeper,’ which premiered on HTC Viveport at Sundance 2017, and was produced for PBS Digital Studios. Currently the most widely distributed VR film to date, ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ was what Hurst detailed as an invention process, as it is the first live action VR film shot at 120 frames per second, and includes innovation such as 180 framing and Bokeh inside the sphere.

Brian Seth Hurst discusses ‘My Brother’s Keeper’

Raheel Khalid showed some of Verizon envrmnt’s latest work, its ‘Virtual Sports Bar’ experience, which creates opportunities for multi-user drop-in experiences. He has helped build new tools for multi-user VR experiences that will enable producers and consumers to shape their own VR narratives in real-time.

Raheel Khalid shows off the Verizon envrmnt virtual sports bar, and discusses new VR tools for multi-user narratives

Caitlin Burns described some of her work on Space Nation, a Helsinki-based organization that uses virtual experiences to train civilians for space travel. She also discussed some of her early learnings in VR storytelling, and how to overcome technological hurdles to maintain narrative focus.

Caitlin Burns discusses Space Nation

Lewis Smithingham described challenges that he has faced with VR and AR productions, including his work for the ‘Conan O’Brien Show.’

Lewis Smithingham describes the challenges of live VR and AR production

Raheel Khalid gives Lewis Smithingham a Google Daydream demo