Demo footage from the Drone Racing League was showed off this week, a concept where viewers take front-seat onboard a drone being raced around a course at up to 80mph, with producers hoping that such a league could present a drone-based rival to Formula One or NASCAR.
Video is usually a passive experience. While you may be emotionally invested in the content, you are usually at rest until a last-second comeback or plot-twist spurs you to your feet, aghast. But a new generation of video content could make video consumption a much more active experience.
The video industry is already pretty familiar with the potential of drone technology – but for many, the drone is simply an alternative to a crane rig or helicopter, and thought of as an auxiliary tool in capturing video on film.
But using drones as the primary vehicle of video content is a visionary experience that would be rather unparalleled – taking the viewer on tours of famous places, or guided trips through historical landmarks, museums or even art galleries. Virtual safari is another option that would give the ‘viewer’ a premium experience that they could not find anywhere else.
Of course, giving the viewer control over such a drone is a recipe for disaster and lawsuits. Chasing people through streets or trying to crash the camera through windows would quickly derail such platforms, but there is a potentially lucrative market for content creators looking to show viewers something they’ve never seen before.
Strapping a camera on the front of a Red Bull X Fighter and letting people experience those races in VR would be quite the show, although the motion sickness that might accompany it would create a ride that many would want to get off.
While viewer participation is likely a long way off, drones do provide the possibility for viewers to log into an app or portal and pilot their own drones through races or simply as an exploration flight. The slower-paced drone experiences might present an easier livestreaming challenge for the content producers than the Drone Racing League, which currently provides standard definition livestreams for the pilots to navigate with, before pulling video from the onboard HD cameras and using that footage to produce episodic content of each race – although it has said that it hopes to find a system that has sufficient bandwidth to livestream the races in the future.
You can easily picture Virtual Reality games of Quidditch (Harry Potter) or Drone based treasure hunts as virtual reality TV programs. There are potentially 1,000s of possibilities. Drone Wars – like Robot Wars for example or YouTube paparazzi competitions or playlist holiday travelogues.
The price of a drone and/or the camera system capable of such use is surprisingly low. Depending on the quality of the shot required, prices in the low to mid four-figure range are very manageable, and the more expansive and finely detailed shots might only need a camera and drone platform that cost a fraction over five-figures – which is vastly cheaper than purchasing the studio space and equipment required to produce traditional video content.
With OTT video becoming increasingly popular, the VoD nature of such drone-based content would allow content creators a lot of flexibility in terms of content length and pricing. It would mean that short but exciting and interesting (and therefore valuable) content could be packaged in an SVoD app, while the lengthier experiences could conform to the traditional pay-per-view model – sold through a store of some kind.
Streaming video from drones to consumers (by way of a whole heap of cloud servers) meets many of the same entertainment criteria as VR video content. They both offer the potential for radically different viewing experiences than what regular video content can offer audiences currently.
Cinematic VR might give you courtside seats at a basketball game, or a bird’s eye view of the Super Bowl, and movies and TV shows adapted for or filmed in VR would allow viewers to experience something that is much more immersive than binge-watching something from a sofa.
The drone-based content could be viewed on a flat screen, which would help with the motion sickness that many people suffer from when they are in a VR environment in which they do not have control of their own movements. But a stereoscopic camera on a drone would allow for the drone flight to be experienced using VR tech – throwing the viewer into the thick of the action.
Viewing VR content currently requires a 10-15 Mbps internet connection and a compatible smartphone with headset adapter – which displays the two stereoscopic feeds on the screen that are then adapted by the lenses in the headset so that each eye views a feed that will form a 3D image when combined.
As such, the barrier to entry is relatively low, given that products like Samsung’s Gear VR can be found for around $100, with many other similar headsets coming in at a lower price point. At the very bottom of the scale is Google’s Cardboard, which lacks the controls and sensors of some of the more complex headsets, but which can be printed at home for use.
Within the next few years, VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus may well gain sufficient penetration in the market to comprise an audience worth addressing. But given that these high-end VR headsets require a console or significantly more powerful gaming PC (depending on the desired experience), such a segment would swing heavily towards those who enjoy videogames – and video content would therefore be competing directly against games for those leisure time hours on a platform that likely was purchased specifically to play games on. That sounds like something of an uphill battle.
So while these two forms could be considered new kinds of content, the old-guard still has a lot of potential value-add to realize when it comes to livening up their old libraries. VR-remastering would provide a new revenue stream for those high ARPU consumers, and while remastering entire archives would likely generate a very poor return, jazzing up classics to provide immersive and expansive viewing experiences makes a lot of sense on paper.