Esports Management Group, an esports and entertainment management company, will organise EMG 2022, the gaming and entertainment festival in Dubai.

EMG 2022 will be held at the Dubai World Trade Center and will feature a vast range of gamer culture activities, including esports tournaments, celebrity guests, friendly competitions, anime music shows, cosplay shows, and more.

The festival will take place on June 10 and 11, and features the official Global Esports Tour (GET) CS:GO LAN tournament with a grand prize pool of $250,000.

Abdulla Al Gurg, Founder of EMG and Vice President of Emirates Esports Federation, said: “We are delighted to bring the GET CS:GO Tournament to Dubai as part of the EMG 2022 Festival. It is a milestone in Dubai’s journey to becoming a global esports destination, and we are very excited to be hosting such an outstanding line-up of professional esports talents and outstanding gamer entertainment. This is the first edition of EMG, and we look forward to celebrating and bringing together esports, gaming and anime fans in the UAE annually for years to come.”

The esports action will kick off virtually on June 9, with eight professional esport teams from around the world competing in the quarter-finals of GET Dubai CS:GO Tournament. Teams include Ninjas in Pajamas, Mouz, NASR ESPORTS, Falcons, Complexity, OG, Tyloo and Movistar Ride. Esports fans will be able to follow the tournament via EMG’s official Twitch and YouTube channels.

EMG 2022 officially opens on June 10 and will host thousands of audiences till June 11, welcoming everyone to witness the high octane semifinals and the grand finals of the GET CS:GO Tournament. In addition to the tournament, there will be other video game competitions across several venues for games including League of Legends, Valorant, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Fifa, Tekken 7 and VR games.

Meanwhile, cosplayers will be able to participate in a contest with a prize pool of $10,000. Also in attendance will be Japanese pianist Animez and Japanese singer Akeboshi, who will perform and be part of a meet-and-greet.

Attendees will also be able to enjoy the performances by famous Japanese pianist Animez and Japanese singer Akeboshi. The two-day festival will include meet-n-greets with Animenz, Akeboshi, and the esports teams, as well as some of the most popular influencers, including but not limited to MSDossary, Ahmed Ben Chaibah, TM Faisal, Bo3omar, SirSAN, Mark Tube, Kakashi Gaming, Hope Rima, and more.

Completing the EMG 2022 line-up will be a wide selection of official merchandise stores from top gaming teams and players. EMG 2022 tickets are now available to purchase on Platinumlist.

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Hope Ventures, the Bahraini investment arm of Hope Fund, an initiative established by the directives of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, has announced the launch of Beban, an unscripted entrepreneurial reality TV show for MENA audiences. Beban, which means doors in Arabic, signifies the various doors of opportunity that open in real life.

The show features un-staged, recorded pitching sessions by ambitious Bahraini entrepreneurs to a panel of four Bahraini and Saudi investors. Over USD 1m dollars was invested in participating start-ups during the show, which features businesses operating across the sectors of Technology, Food &Beverage, Manufacturing, and Sports Retail.

In well-crafted post-production artistry, the show captures the participants’ emotions and reactions when faced with difficult on-the-spot life-altering decisions. Business founders are given a unique opportunity to secure funding that will drive their business towards international scalability. Viewers of the show will be inspired by a surprise ending in every episode, where founders walk away with some form of investment or a considerable perk aimed at accelerating the growth of their business.

Commenting on the launch, Fajer Al Pachachi, General Manager of Hope Ventures, said: “After months of preparation and hard work, we are pleased to announce the launch of Beban. The show promo has already received more than 2000 organic shares within the first few hours of its release on social media. We’re now prepping for season 2, which will feature more businesses across diverse sectors, with more investors from across the region, and more inspiring entrepreneurs and more episodes.”

Beban is directed by Bahraini award-winning Film Director Hashim Sharaf and distributed by HConsult, a Dubai-based Content Market & Distribution Consultancy. The four-episode programme is licensed for exclusive streaming on MBC Group’s AVOD platform Shahid and is scheduled for a weekly release in February starting the evening of February 2, 2022, in line with its release on Bahrain TV.

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Source: Broadcastpro ME

Mobile connectivity continues to evolve at a rapid pace. A little over a decade since the introduction of 4G, 5G is now showing promise as its uptake expands. It brings the potential of increased bandwidth throughput and lower latency, allowing telecom operators, broadcasters and content providers to expand video services, improve viewer experience and diversify product offerings. While higher-quality video streaming and immersive audio are an exciting prospect, understanding the wide range of potential future applications will be crucial to leveraging the opportunities.

Built on better bandwidth

The increased bandwidth capability of this new technology is key to understanding the foundation of what 5G can provide to both mobile operators and broadcasters. With one gigabit per second streaming made possible, organisations are better able to provide 4K streams on top of existing HD streams and even pave the way for 8K resolution, creating an enhanced viewer experience. For audio, new innovations such as MPEG-H and AC4 with Dolby Atmos rendering capabilities become possible, meaning support for multiple simultaneous channels and spatial sound effect rendering, even on stereo sound systems.

The edge opportunity

5G also enables multi-access edge computing (MEC), and this is where the possibilities really expand for video services. Storage and processing capabilities can be pushed further down the network and used in smaller data centres or other infrastructure, spread out closer to the viewers.

For example, MEC enables user-specific content to be inserted just before it reaches viewers, making it possible to distribute different content to different users. One obvious application of this is dynamic ad insertion (DAI), where advertisements are targeted to specific viewers, enhancing their value to advertisers and increasing monetisation opportunities.

Beyond that, and using the same technology, personalised channels can be tailored to specific viewers’ tastes, increasing their value and making them more viable as a premium service.

Making future technology a present reality

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have so far been underused in the industry, with limited end-user uptake of existing VR technology and the real-time processing capabilities needed for AR. 5G could be transformative in bringing about widespread adoption of this technology, as the subsequent increase in video quality is likely to encourage a greater number of users to invest in headsets.

In the context of AR, imagine that the localised infrastructure in an edge set-up is in a sports stadium, for example. With the high bandwidth and low latency brought about by 5G, sports fans will be able to use their mobile devices to directly view different live camera angles, with AR capabilities allowing real-time player statistics such as passes completed or goals scored in a soccer match. This will serve to enhance the live experience for fans attending events.

And with lower latency, whether you are in the stadium or watching the event from your home, it also opens up possibilities for a much richer user experience, linking the content you watch with social media, retail and your community, and providing the interactivity and responsiveness that viewers are used to in these other platforms.

Elastic CDN, open caching and public cloud

The possibilities brought by 5G and the edge fit in nicely with the opportunities enabled by an elastic content delivery network (CDN), which can expand and shrink as required to meet fluctuating demands. This helps to maintain a high-quality viewing experience even during peak traffic, by quickly adding extra cache nodes to meet the temporary demand and then removing them instantly once that demand is over. This greater flexibility eliminates the need for building overcapacity, helping to achieve cost and energy savings.

Based on a distributed, cloud-native architecture, an elastic CDN also enables orchestration of various functions to use CDN infrastructure for other tasks at off-peak times – for example, for file transcoding of ads or VOD content, to create a library of assets for delivering personalized video experiences. Combining elastic CDN principles with open caching will enable telecom operators to lease their CDN to content providers or broadcasters, resulting in greatly improved quality of experience for video services as the content is cached closer to the viewers.

Public clouds are also pushing their virtualisation environments in the 5G network, taking advantage of the MEC infrastructure. Telecom operators and content providers can benefit from this by using the same software technologies in the cloud and in the 5G network, making it easier to handle global operations and deploy new services quickly.

Future potential

The benefits of 5G are as much about the technologies it will help to support as the advantages it will bring to the user experience. While it provides promise to the broadcast industry, whether it is used to its full potential will depend on the relationship between broadcasters and telecom operators moving forward, as it’s not yet clear whether a shared broadcast infrastructure can be put in place. As a result, it’s likely that the broadcasters and wider industry will be keeping a close eye on the 5G landscape in the coming months.

Alexandre Arnodin is VP of Video Delivery Solutions at ATEME.

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Source: Broadcastpro ME

NASA has selected 12 companies to provide launch services for the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) missions.

NASA selected ABL Space Systems, Astra Space, Blue Origin, L2 Solutions, Northrop Grumman Systems, Phantom Space, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab USA, Spaceflight, SpaceX, United Launch Services, and Virgin Orbit.

The fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts have a five-year ordering period with a maximum total value of $300m across all contracts. The acquisition also includes a special on-ramp provision to enable additional providers and incumbents to submit proposals introducing launch services for new capabilities not available or identified at the time of the initial contract award.

Bradley Smith, Director of Launch Services at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: “We are incredibly excited to announce the awardees for VADR from a broad range of established and emerging launch providers and launch service aggregators and brokers. This speaks to our expertise in understanding the launch market as we crafted VADR to maximise our efforts in enabling a growing US launch industry. With this new tool in our toolbox, these tremendously flexible contracts will meet a wide variety of NASA science and technology needs, further enhancing the agency’s Launch Services Programme’s reputation as Earth’s bridge to space.”

The VADR contract will provide a broad range of Federal Aviation Administration-licensed commercial launch services capable of delivering payloads ranging from CubeSats to Class D missions to a variety of orbits. These small satellites and Class D payloads tolerate relatively high risk and serve as an ideal platform for technical and architecture innovation, contributing to NASA’s science research and technology development.

The VADR acquisition builds on previous procurement efforts such as the Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) and VCLS Demo 2 contracts, which are fostering the development of new, small launch vehicles for NASA payloads.

Firm-fixed-price task orders will be issued to provide the launch services under these contracts for NASA and NASA-sponsored missions. Launches under the VADR contract will align with commercial practices, using less NASA oversight to achieve lower launch costs.

NASA’s Launch Services Programme at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida will manage the VADR contracts. The agency works with private industry, mission, and international partners to launch science payloads ranging from small satellites with colleges and universities to NASA’s highest priority missions.

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Source: Broadcastpro ME