IBC Q&A: Darcy Lorincz, Origin Digital
In addition to serving as CEO of Origin Digital, Darcy Lorincz manages the growing effort of parent company Accenture and its Accenture Sports and Live Events.
What market trends are you expecting to see at this year’s IBC?
There are three trends I’m seeing. Firstly, our practice continues to grow around our operators’ acquiring rights. You see the big deals being made out there: Verizon Wireless with the NFL, BT with Premier League. There’s definitely a shift in rights to less traditional network operators.
Secondly, those operators are trying to help the other rightsholders, broadcasters, or general users of video with increasingly more-complex suites of services but even more standards-based because these are becoming more IT-like infrastructures. Everybody is in the IP world at this point. If you’re still in the proprietary-fixed world, this might be your last IBC.
Third trend is continuing to provide a solid suite of infrastructure, services, software, and delivery for the cable, or on-air, experience. Our market, especially on the second or third screen, is very tech heavy. Everybody wants to know what every little box and device and widget does, and everybody has their opinion about which is best, but, in the end, you just need to make sure that whoever you’re working with either technically fits in the ecosystem and just plugs in or, if it’s a service, just gets your stuff on-air.
What is Accenture/Original Digital showcasing at IBC2013?
We have really invested over the last 15 years in automation. So, at IBC, we are really focusing on our Live Event Automation Platform; we call it LEAPS. We’ll be showing what we’ve been doing for Verizon. It may be network-operator–focused, but it’s also something we’ve done across the industry, and it has followed trends, so we want to be sure that automation can help make this a simpler world. Less technology and more automation — and more control — is what we’ll be talking about.
I know I said, idealistically, everything should be IP, but the reality is, in broadcast plants and sports-production plants, there’s a whole lot of proprietary stuff, but we can plug that stuff in. So, after 15 years, there’s pretty much nothing that we’re not seeing across the spectrum of technologies from broadcast production or Internet production, to encoding and transcoding, and cloud services and storage and networking. It should just be easy through automation and for our LEAPS platform to plug right in.