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If you want to get a snapshot of just how complex an issue this is, try googling film rights for television. The first page or so largely points you to advanced guides for accountants. It might help to think through how movies recover their sometimes colossal production costs. They are made for cinemas, and that … Continued

MSA Focus is proudly based in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. As an international business, the company could have its headquarters anywhere. And, to an outside observer, Cardiff might seem like a strange choice for a media company. But Cardiff is actually a major media hub, and has been for a long while. The British … Continued

The last time I contributed a blog to these pages, it was about cyber security. I said then that everyone – software developers and broadcast users – needed to think very carefully about it. I will return to this subject in a few moments. You really do not need me to tell you that the … Continued

When I was a student, back in the dark ages, I remember the very first thing I was taught in the very first lecture on recording classical music. The maxim was “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. What the lecturer (the late lamented John Borwick) meant was that you needed to … Continued

The way we watch television has shifted fundamentally. When we only had three or four channels, we sat down obediently and watched what they gave us. Today we not only have hundreds of channels at our fingertips, we have the means to record programmes in full quality on disk drives in our set-top boxes. And, … Continued

Earlier this year, at a special tournament in a casino in Pittsburg, four of the world’s top poker players took on a computer called Libratus. The artificial intelligence system was developed by Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, along with his PhD student Noam Brown. Computers had been extremely successful at … Continued

Well, another year goes by, and once again IBC has proven to be a trade show of shifting dynamics. Some months ago, MSA Focus published articles, explaining why we would not be taking floor space during the 2017 show  – a decision that proved to be absolutely the correct one for us. As discussed previously, … Continued

Broadcasting live sport events in 2017 is nothing like it was two decades or so ago. You can’t seem to get through a football match or rugby fixture without being fed live odds during the interval, latest score updates and highlights from other matches. And on top of this there are the multitude of live … Continued