everybody for coming today. My name is Patrick Rosati and I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are on land. The land on which we gather is the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Musqueam people. We're grateful for the opportunity to learn, work, and play here. I also want to bring your attention to a couple of other events that are happening in the area quickly. One is a play by Savage Society called White Noise. It's happening April 19th to May 8th here in Vancouver, Canada. It's at the Fire Hall Arts Center. Another one is the First Nations Talking Stick Festival. Again, here in Vancouver, Canada, it's at Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Center, February 18th to the 29th. And then here on University of British Columbia's campus, we are lucky enough to have the Museum of Anthropology up on the north end of campus. And if you have not made your way out to campus before or haven't visited the Museum of Anthropology, there's actually an amazing exhibit going on right now. It's in a different light. It presents more than 110 historical indigenous artworks and marks the return of many important works to British Columbia. These objects are amazing artistic achievements, yet they also transcend the idea of art or artifact. And that is, I've been there twice. I've been to this exhibit twice. It really is worth taking a trip 10 minutes north on campus to see it if you haven't. And that runs through this summer, through summer 2020. So please do see that if you haven't. I'd like to introduce Justine Garrett. Thanks so much, Patrick. And welcome, everybody. We are grateful to HELL Round for helping us with our live stream today. So hello to everyone tuning in that way as well. I'd just like to give a brief introduction of Toaster Lab and why we're here, what we're doing. And like to say, Toaster Lab is a producer of Mixed Reality. We collapse space and time to produce original narratives. I'm one third of Toaster Lab. I'm joined by my partner, Ian Garrett, who will come up here in a moment, and Andrew Sempre, who's actually going to be joining us from Switzerland in a few minutes. So Toaster Lab combines expertise in storytelling and in original media design and programming to produce original work and stories for our partners. And one main element ties our work together. It's a sense of, it's a sense of projector about advancing. No, no. It's in place to immerse the media. So Toaster Lab's signature focus is on in place media experiences and our apps guide users to specific locations to provide them with a new window to another point in time or another reality. These images are from Transmission, which premiered as part of the Future Play Festival at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Future of Storytelling Festival in New York. Basically, as you all probably really well know, two events line up together to provide different experiences that bring different types of understanding to spaces. And this augmented reality ties two points in time to one experience. And one project we were really excited about doing was in Toronto's Parkway Forest Park. This was a really special project that we did with the Toronto Arts Council. And we worked with the local community who live around the park, which is like a giant courtyard amongst many different apartment buildings to create VR stories that told stories about that community. We did a VR workshop for youth. And they were definitely not easy on our 360 cameras. We got some amazing shots here. And they were highly enthusiastic about telling stories that were important to them. And they quickly adapted to staging and shooting in 360. At the end of the two weekend workshop with youth, we held a pop up VR cinema in the park where parents and friends and family members got to experience the movies that the students had created. And they were very excited to be host and tell their stories. And then at the end of the summer, we did a mobile application launch, which emplaced the students stories within the park at Parkway Forest. And my partner Ian's going to talk to you a little bit about one of our next projects, Groundworks. All right. So Groundworks is a project that we've been working on sort of continuously for a couple of years in Northern California. It combines a sense of restoring land, working with a number of indigenous collaborators in Northern California. Groundworks combines elements of traditional knowledge. So we have one of our core collaborators here on the board, Ross Cadie, with his cousin Paul, and in their traditional regalia. But also is working, Ross works as a youth, with lots of youth across a number of different tribes of which he is affiliated with. And we were combining that with his current practice where he actually tours as a musician and hip hop artist, touring as one of the leaders of audiopharmacy. And so he's been combining all of these things together. And a number of the collaborators that we've been working with there have also been doing, have also been looking at their contemporary practice through this indigenous lens with the idea of looking at issues of food security, water rights, cultural transmission, etc. So we joined up, partnered up on this, around this idea of around location based storytelling. So we've been creating 360 immersive audio and now working on some more specifically AR projects with a number of the partners that are around the Bay area. Similarly to Parkway Forest, we've been using what Andrew will explain in a little bit. So the basis for a lot of how we control these things through what we call the map tool. So we've been working with emplaced mixed reality where we've been creating content, immersive content that then is located in space. And so you can see a little bit of the map tool that we work with here and some of the 360 that came out of a live performance that went along with this, which sort of gets us to this idea of where we're working in this combined space between mixed reality and live performance. So in this project specifically, it culminated in a live sense after doing a year of work with a number of different collaborators from different communities, sort of in about a 100 mile radius of the San Francisco Bay area with on the first official Indigenous People's Day for the City of San Francisco, where there has on that day, which had previously been designated as Columbus Day, had been a sunrise ceremony on Alcatraz, which is partially preserved for for its use as a ceremony site, had a live performance that culminated at the end of the sunrise ceremony with Dancing Earth, which is a multi community Indigenous dance group that had created a site specific dance work and through whom we were working through a number of these different partnerships. So you can see a little bit here with this idea of over the course of creating now totaling about three dozen different experiences that you could be guided around the San Francisco Bay area or just Northern California, because you got pretty far from the bay with these different issues to combine these topics. They also went and turned a lot of the thinking that came out of this collaboration into another project in the Southwest, based around Phoenix and Santa Fe, where they're sort of co-located with a number of different communities there to create a piece called Between Underground and Sky World. And we have created an experience which later today, we'll be able to share some of the content that came out of that that's available to easily access on mobile devices, that we were able to share that along with a show. So we're right now working on creating a combination of the Implaced app using what we've done before with creating this content, with something that ties directly into the performance itself so that when people congregate around coming to one of their performances, like here you can see in the lobby, that there is also a mixed reality experience that goes somebody to interact with that content that was done in specific places which might otherwise be harder to get to. A couple of the other projects that we focused on worked on this. We did a project in Kansas City with choreographer who's located between Kansas City and Toronto called Public Squared, which took a place along the Kansas City Street car line, having three site-specific dance pieces that happened and then creating companion VR films that went with them, that one would be able to access through a mobile app and mobile web app specifically. One of the things that we're dealing with with a number of these projects is also around access, so trying to make things that are usable on the devices that people already have as opposed to trying to make things for the most advanced devices in a number of these different projects, so about interoperability in that regard. Another of our ongoing projects has been Trail-Off, which is, did you want to talk a little bit about Trail-Off? Yeah, you've been involved in the narrative more than I have. So Trail-Off is a transmedial walking performance, you know, that sort of normal thing, that's in collaboration with Swim Pony Performing Arts in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. And the focus of this is creating original audio dramas that are in place in trails around the Philadelphia Circuit Network. Central to the project are 10 original audio stories and that are inspired by the trails and line up with them in a triggered way. And here you can see my ponytail, it's a braid today, during one of our three development workshops on site in Philadelphia, which has been really rewarding, and a preview of the app. And then each trail, as I said, will fit your feature in original drama that unfolds over roughly a two-mile route. And they're written by local authors who demonstrate rigorous artistic practice and also a connection to the communities that they're writing about. This is writer Aaron McMillan at one of the workshops for writers along with the bio of Affaq Mahmoud. And we're very excited that this project will be launching in June of 2020 in Philadelphia. So audiences are going to experience these intimate journeys through an original app produced by Toaster Lab. And each author is going to have the opportunity to select where the gates would trigger the next element of their story. So we're working really closely with them to come up with these really elaborate, essentially triggering spreadsheets that show where and how long each element of the story will unfold. And there's other elements to add to that, too, in that we're also working with other, because there's a lot of data that comes into somebody's mobile device, that there are also things that are triggered based off of current weather conditions or time of year that they go. So moving a little bit beyond the GPS triggered sound block, also do something that's more dynamic and reactive for the way that people are moving through space. We hope it works. So yeah, we have a few different projects update on part of the purpose of the symposia and the digital strategy fund grant that we've been working under has been to share out as we've been partnering with companies, the type of development that's been happening across different ways of interacting with different types of mixed reality technology. A lot of our core work as ToasterLab coming into this had been around recorded content that was matched and in place, like matched with place, but we've been expanding that as we've been partnering with a number of different projects as well. So this is sort of our point to sort of update in the sequence of those. Yeah, and the today's focus really, as you may have known, is about ways of working within mixed reality and performance. We're also going to talk a lot about mistakes that people have made and things that don't go so well. So please feel free to ask questions and interact with folks as they're presenting. And we're going to hope to give you some more information about either starting to work in this way on your own or you know, sharing successes that you have as well. Yeah, and I'll point out that we've we've been lucky to have the general support of the Canada Council through this digital strategy fund. It is a fund that is still it's sort of winding down in this current stretch of the strategic period, but it is still available that's out there. And one of the things that's nice about it when there there are challenges about it. But one of the things that's really nice about it is that it is failure is an option in here. So there's a number of projects that people have been attempting to do things and they don't know exactly what they're going to make. So as opposed to a number of different creation grants that you might approach. If you're looking at something that you also just don't know how to do, it's a good thing to do. They have very large grants that I think that we might be out of cycle with those. But if you're going for the $50,000 under, which is not nothing, that those have an ongoing rolling application in there. So I'll plug in there. But so some of the projects that we've been working on, we've been working with DLT experience in Toronto and a project called The Stranger 2.0. Actually it's completed in the fall. We've been doing over the course of the last year just sort of an interest. DLT experience is known for creating immersive live site specific performances for small audiences, typically averaging less than two. So sometimes there's more than one person involved, but not very frequently. So they're hard to scale too. So we've been having this conversation about VR. So we didn't play a lot with VR cameras. This is Daniela Bartolini who's the artistic director of DLT experience with one of the views camera that we were doing some workshops in, in the kitchen. In the Italian cultural center. Yes. Wonderful. So he's been in residence at the Columbus Center in Toronto. One of the projects that came out of this, one of the more notable projects that DLT has done in Toronto over the last few years has been called The Stranger, which takes one individual at a time through various downtown locations of performance to lead them through a different experience of what it's like to be someone landing in a city for the first time. They're focused on the immigrant experience. In The Stranger 2.0, the idea was to allow more people so that you went as pairs and that there are two different tracks that you could follow around the urban space around the Columbus circle or center rather. It was good. So it worked out really well. What we ended up contributing to this is how can you integrate something that's filmically VR to transport somebody out of these experiences to create something in contrast. So there's two tracks above and below. We created two short VR films that you would interact with over the course of your tracks about four minutes long that were inserted into the narrative structure of both of those of those directions. So you come into those and that's sort of a still from the VR here. One the above being a much more happy choice one as well playing with a baby and then below the baby's fine. The baby's fine. But it is a bit of a darker narrative that you're following with that. One of the projects that we were able to talk a little bit about in our previous symposium in November was the Albion Library VR project. Yeah, we did this in partnership with Kitchen Band Theatre which is also in Toronto. They had received funding. There's a program that the city funds around artists in the library and we worked with them to similarly to the parkway work with community members and different community groups, different people who intersect in this public space. We're like just as an aside we're fans of libraries as they're like the last remaining like business like establishment that has a space where you're not expected to buy something. So like how people use this space. So there was some narrative work in here. We combined it with some narrative work combining looking at the history of what that site was. You can see that in the lower left hand corner here where we were also making companion films that we go between that we're looking at local park space to look at what the natural landscape would have been like before that. There were community dance ropes. This is Navron dance that's in North Etobicoke. Elder Philip Cotay introduced the area from an indigenous perspective and then we also had some fun. Carolina who is our contact person is the branch manager. We did one piece where we just strapped a 360 camera onto a book that was being returned to the book drop and then we get reshelfed into things and it could go through that process. The other projects that we've been working on there's been two others that we've been able to sort of complete in this time. One has been just actually partnering with a new festival that's in southern Oregon called Live Culture Coast because they're looking at a decentralized it goes up and down the coastal areas. We had met each other myself and Amber Peoples who is the artistic director of this new festival had met and talked about what the infrastructure of this has been like. So the purpose of this project was really to have people on site to talk about how emplacement and emplaced artwork would work with this festival. It's a combination of agriculture and arts festival. It's culture like culture food and culture. Yes. So there were like various stands going for it and then there would be installations at in on farms. Yeah. And so guiding people through the space is a challenge that based off of other festivals that had happened before and a project that we're working on currently is a production of so moving into the actual back into the theater because we've been doing a lot of things outside a lot of it because of the emplacement and the ubiquity of GPS. So part of it's been convenient and working in various types of public spaces to talk about what types of stories exist in there. A lot of time taking immersive audio recording and 360 cameras into like very hot forests. Yes. It's it's like if anybody is familiar with geocaching. It's not entirely unlike that but with media and the best way that I've heard that described is using a system of multi-billion dollar satellites to find junk in the woods. So we make the junk that you put into the woods. We have we are also working on projects that are coming into theatrical spaces as well. So this is a project that we've been working on. We have been working with motion capture just sort of in various projects that we've been working before. This is our at the time three year old son testing out an older organic motion stage that we had. I also teach at York. And so we were doing some experiments here. A lot of this technology interestingly has become much more accessible. So on this production we've been using a much smaller area to do digitization. So this is the lighting designer for this production standing in to do some lighting tests for some work we were doing with the actors and green screen for various parts of the video design that end up there. But then also creating these augmented reality characters. So some of the characters are related are created through these three dimensional puppets that we're creating. The main one of which and you may never look at me the same again after this is that we've been using facial motion capture to animate one of the characters in sort of a Wizard of Oz sort of look. We've got the chroma back here for the purpose of taking that out later on when we put it on on the stage. But one of the characters we've gone through an entire motion capture process of capturing the performer's face and altering that and all of this using the recent iPhone that has the depth sensor on the front of it. So we've gone from replacing the full stage that we were working with before to to something that we're always have with us in our pockets. And that's been a period of five years. It's not actually puppeteering me talking right now. And then the last project that we'll mention is sort of our update is that we've just gotten a second round of funding to work on a new version of Parkway, which will allow us to expand elements of it to bring in the storytelling element that we've been doing down in Philadelphia and bring that back home. And also to start looking at other ways of integrating other types of air content that our community driven as well. So this will be another app that we'll build that will be a dedicated app and still use the same map tool, which itself creates a web app and what it's what it's doing. So you guys are super special, but you're not the only symposium we're hosting this year. We're really excited because as part of our grant, we get to host six symposiums symposiums. Today, we're here in Vancouver. We had one at York University to kick it off in November. And then in Kingston will be at the Folda, the Festival of Live Digital Art Conference, which you all should know about or think about attending in June 2020. And then we're going to head down to Bloomington to Indiana University this fall and then we'll be at the Cersei Conference at Brown University, which Cersei stands for the Conference on Research into Choreographic Interfaces. So yeah. Rolls up the top. Yeah. In winter 2021, and then we'll we'll wrap up our final symposium at Folda again in June. That should say 2021. Yeah. Yeah. Trust us, we'll be there again. And then you should also all know about the world stage design in Calgary, which is happening in August, where we'll report back on basically everything that has happened. Yeah, there will be a final summary and sharing of everything that sort of came out of this project. So I just wanted to thank, deeply thank Patrick Rosati for being our partner and producing this event today and for bringing so many of you here. Also, thank you to Laura Isabel for doing some amazing prep work and production design and all kinds of organizing and Gabriel Garland, too. They're in the back over there. So thanks to those guys for making it look so nice today. Aisha Bentham is here from York University helping. You saw her at check-in, so we're grateful for her support as well. And we're also super excited for all of our panelists that we're going to have today. So as you can see from the schedule, today is going to work. Oh, yeah, Andrew. Andrew is going to pop in from the ether in just a moment. And yes, Andrew will be talking for a second. We're going to have some presentations today. Please feel free to pop in with questions. We'll have time for Q&A at the end of each panel. We'll have a lunch break and then come back for two more panels. And then we're going to do some hands-on demonstrations of some of the presentations you're going to see today, which will be over in the other room, we think, very probably, or this room. It's going to be a real fun surprise, but we'll tell you where it will be at the time. Are there any questions right now? No, and Andrew is here. What? Technology. Andrew, can you hear us OK? No. And he can see your chest. I know. We are technology professionals, so you know. It always works. Hello, Andrew. Hello, am I live? Yeah, you are. You're here. OK, great. So I'm watching the stream, so there's obviously a bit of a lag. So in my land, I'm not live yet, but that's OK. Good morning, everyone. I'm going to try to hang out and lurk a bit on the feed, and I'm always excited to be there and to see another room full of awesome people doing cool work. I'm also at the tail end of what I hope is the end of a kind of cold bronchitis thing. So I apologize for my voice. And if I start coughing, I might, but I'm not going to talk that long, so it should be OK. Ian asked me to give you a really quick update from Softwareland. About two months ago at the previous symposium, we talked a little bit about this tool that we're working on called the MAP tool. It's not an exciting name, but it's stuck so far. It's basically a kind of Swiss army knife for making locative based projects. So it's very bare bones, but you can imagine it's essentially just a way to affiliate information and media with a location on a map that then can subsequently be used by whatever you like, by a mobile app, by a web-based app, or by itself, because it's sort of the offering tool itself also can display this information. So in some cases, we've used it as the actual presentation layer. In any case, what we're trying to do strategically and in the context of this grant is to kind of drive software development of a multi-purpose tool but using specific projects as the drivers. And this is pretty neat, but it's a balancing act trying to keep an eye on the specific requirements of a project, which are often more presence and more pressing or seem to be then kind of making the piece general purpose. So this is a really normal thing that happens. But because of that, we now have, I think, close to a dozen projects running on top of the software platform, which is awesome. But all of them have, like, you know, maybe slightly different approach. So until about two months ago, they were running the same code but with a little bit of a tweak. So this is sort of beta mode. And over the last two months, I've put a large effort into streamlining that and making sure everything is on an exactly the same code base with only a configuration file change. So this is not super exciting to show you. This is very nerdy update, but it's been a lot of work and I'm really excited to say that we're done with that. So now every single one of our projects is on a single shared code base, which makes my life a lot easier and makes maintenance going forward a lot easier as well. So last two points with regards to that one is that the goal of that also is to try to get this project open source. It is, in fact, open source. But as I mentioned at the last symposium, there's a difference between just publishing code in public, which is fine. But that's not really an open source project, right? An open source project is one that can be can and is used by other people. And in order for that to happen, the code should be maintained and structured in such a way that other people can actually use it. So that's been another part of this big two month push is that I'm really driving us towards the one release of this and getting out of beta that works in Andrew's head and into something that other people can actually use. And I'm really excited. We're not quite there. We're very, very close to having the one release of this code base, which is great. And all of that, of course, is in the context lately of the trail off project. So we've also been doing a lot of work on infrastructure for figuring out ways to distribute large amounts of media in a way that is cost effective. So trying to figure out how we can host several gigabyte files that represent this walking tour and get them to people's phones without paying through the nose for large amounts of data and streaming services, which has been an interesting challenge. But I also am pretty excited about the solution that we've come up with there. So that is an update from engineering land. Thank you. Um, so that's our that's our toaster lab update. That's what we've been up to. I'm not sure you're audio. Oh, there are questions. That is can you hear me now? Yeah, I can hear now. Thank you. That's an update from toaster lab land, giving you a sort of the grounding for the context of why we're bringing these these convening together so that we're able to give an update on all of the different strands of work that we've been doing and also then host these conversations around people who are also doing interesting work for it. There's there's in this sort of hybrid area. There's not necessarily a huge amount of direction. There's a lot of overlapping and people coming at it from different whether or not they're coming from a narrative end, whether or not they've been working in digital media and types of distribution or immersive content for a while or whether or not they're coming from it from a theater and performance end of things trying to gather everybody together. We have a moment for another for a question or two of there are here. Otherwise, So the question was, does our map tool have directionality in terms of orienting audience members to performance? Cardinal directions. Yeah. And you can talk more technical on that.  Sorry, it's old name with story. Yeah. With trail with the trail off project, like coming at that from a few different that specific issue from a few different directions because some of those are very linear and some of them that line is obvious but many of them are non-linear and many of them are non-obvious. So how do you get all three of the production elements, the technical elements and the narrative elements to line up together and combine in the app? Andrew, can you comment a little bit more specifically about what that means in terms of how the map tool works? Yeah, I can. So the, okay. So sorry for the splitting of hers here but it's actually necessary to explain. So the thing that we're calling the map tool is basically the authoring and the infrastructure for hosting information about the experience. It's not the experience itself. So in that respect, you can put any information you like including orientation information into that tool, it will host it, it will have it available. So that's a thing. But there's a more important part of that question which is I think what you actually want to accomplish which is like understanding where a person is actually standing, how they're oriented and then feeding them the media for that. So that's less about the map tool and more about the actual thing that you're using for the experience. In this case, it would probably be, I'm assuming, a phone app. So the thing that understands the orientation is going to be the device, not the database if that makes sense. So then the challenge there as Ian mentioned this in the introduction that we've been lately working a lot on the idea of creating experiences that are low threshold. So the thought is that anyone who has a mobile device can access our experiences. So because of that, we've been deliberately limiting ourselves in what we can access on the devices. So the latest iPhone, for example, actually can handle the orientation information relatively well, but not so much say an early Android device. So we haven't put a lot of work into that specifically because of that because we haven't had a project that has articulated a hardware device that has made this sufficiently easy for us to do. So that's where I would draw the line. Sorry again, this is a bit of a technical thing, but I think that basically if we were to do an orientation based project seriously, I would first say what set of devices are we using? Pick that and we'd have to build up for that because they're really to be completely blunt. There is no hope for coming up with a solution that will work for all possible devices throughout history. We have to draw a line somewhere and that's one of those things that's highly device oriented and relatively new. It's really cool, but not everybody has it. So yeah, that's a start there. Yeah, I'll stop. Any other questions? Does that help you? Right over there. Yes. You guys are great.  Can I start? Yeah, yeah. There's lots of- So cathartic, I love answering that question. So we had our first project was a 30 plus site specific GPS triggered app in Edinburgh where we did not live. And so it was extremely ambitious and extremely expensive. And we learned it was so painful, like it really was not critically well received because it was extremely complicated to experience. But we began working on that in 2015 and then launched it in 2017 at the French festival and at the future of storytelling. But we learned so much from that in terms of the number of mistakes we had the opportunity to make. And so, yeah, I mean, it's really laid the ground. That colossal, it wasn't a colossal failure. I won't say it that way. It was a lot of work. And there were some amazing parts of it too. But all the things we did wrong in there were really valuable. Like we had a stage show portion of it that we put it the middle of the story. So you would have had to experience a certain number of GPS triggered things at the Edinburgh fridge festival. It should have been at the beginning just simple stuff like that. Yeah, there is throughout a number of things that each of them has been sort of highlighting like what, where we need to go next. So there have been the technical issues that we've been able to solve with each of them because we're trying to do something new or because there's something new that we wanna do with a particular device or a new feature that becomes available or more accessible to more people. I think more so, and especially looking back at that specifically at transmission, there are things that coming from, so just as an example, even a year before that, when we were just trying to describe what exactly we were trying to do, it would take a page or two whenever we were writing a narrative, writing a proposal, so what exactly we were gonna do. And then in summer of 2016, Pokemon Go was released and all of a sudden we could have a one sentence description of, because the show that we were working on was based off of communication with like extra-crustrial communication.  So it's like learning what the limits are to what we're doing and having people come at it from the technology side, from the immersive site specific, like there are people who have been, who have long theater careers, long technology careers, people who have been part of like third rail projects as a notable like immersive company and been part of those shows for long periods of time. That with all of those different things, there was still a lot to figure out in each of those in sort of the speed that we needed to work. So it ended up highlighting a lot of those. We'll be able to talk much more about failures throughout the day. We can highlight a lot of things. It's a very long list of things, which is again, why being in the position of being able to go through this Atelier project of throwing things at different questions and not always like a lot of the projects that we're doing are going to production, but a lot of them are also things that are experiments to see like, what if we added this onto something that was already happening as well. I'm gonna just put a pin in that for right now because I know we'll be talking about it more, but I want us to switch over to our keynote. We'll just kind of cut off our litany of failures for now. And I'd like to happily introduce Patrick Penafather, who's assistant professor here at UBC's offices right upstairs. And he's part of the master of digital media program. He's a designer of interactive experiences and award-winning sound designer and composer and improv performer, divisor. We are so delighted that he's gonna give our keynote address today and I will turn it over to him now. Thank you. And we're gonna leave a computer swap, so give us one moment to do that. Thank you, Andrew. Yes, thank you, Andrew. Mm-hmm. Thank you.


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Click the bell notifications and you'll get updates on the videos I do each and every day as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle and light duty truck walk rounds on YouTube. This one comes with the painted alloy wheels, and it has brand new Firestone Destination LE3 tires. These are 275-65R18s. They are brand new, still have the little wear knobs on them. We put those on in our safety inspection. This is a one owner clean title history clean car fax from Wisconsin. The front lenses are nice and clear, factory fog lights, front bumper, parking sensors with that big horn level two package. You also get the chrome bumpers, no dents or dings on there, and you get the chrome trimmed grille on there as well. The hood is in fantastic condition, I didn't see any dents or dings on there, and the passenger side front fender is in really nice shape as well. Another side front wheel, no scuffs or scrapes, and Diamond Black, one of my favorite colors, favorite blacks I should say, out there. It's got a lot of metal flake, including the gold metal flake in there. Looks really good, especially in the sunlight. And as you go down this side of this 2000 and 21RAM 1500 take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is. I take these HD videos so if you're far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down, but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the truck here, the truck end of confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at. Before you even get here, so when you do get here, there's absolutely no surprises, and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. Now if this video helps you make that buying decision, definitely let your salesman know that you saw the video, that it was helpful, and that Brett sent you, and then I can keep doing these videos each and every day. Back tires are brand new as well, and you get the plastic wheel well liners, which is really nice, because that keeps your frame and underbody looking fantastic, as this one does. Even though it's been in Wisconsin its whole life, looks like new under that. You get the nice tiger painted step bars, and the lower rockers all look really good as well. Passenger side box, no dents or dings coming around the back. The rear bumper is in great shape. You get the backup parking sensors back here. Towing package, which includes a receiver hitch, four pin ends, seven pin wiring, and that tailgate is just as clean as the rest of the truck, no major dents or dings on there. Has a shock down assist tailgate. The bed's in really nice shape, just a little bit of light duty usage, but no major dents or dings, and it's actually in really nice condition for a truck bed. That shuts nice and solidly, and as you go down the driver's side, just as clean as that passenger's side, no major dents or dings in the box for full disclosure. This back wheel, no scuffs or scrapes. And it does have the capless fuel fill, which is a really nice feature. Never get gas on your hands again. Cab and doors all look really good on this truck. It does have the heated fold up tow mirrors. I'm sorry, the heated, these aren't the tow mirrors. Heated mirrors with the blind spot marine built in directional signals. Sorry, I do a lot of videos on these trucks. Back seats are in fantastic condition. No rips or tears back here. It does have the latch child safety system for any child car seats you may have. The power sliding rear window with the built in rear defrost. These seats fold up like so. You get the all weather floor mat back here. And those seats go down like that. Child safety locks on the back doors and the inside and bottoms of the doors are in really nice condition. I'll show you the VIN sticker here. No Canadian trucks here. And the tire and loading information sticker.  There are no rips. There are no tears on these seats. Both of these front seats are heated. They are in really nice condition. Power driver seat with lumbar. Factory all weather formats up here. Auto headlamps, power pedals, power windows, locks, mirrors. You get the cloth bolster with the wood grain trim. And then these mirrors do power fold in. I always like showing both sides. So you know that both sides are working properly. Hop inside, check out the miles, the radio, and everything that this truck has to offer on the interior. You can see the 7-inch LCD display, 40,845 miles on this one. You get the digital speedometer, compass display, battery voltage, oil temperature, and you can change all those corners to read pretty much whatever you want. Those with the leather-wrapped heated steering wheel cruise controls and gear selector on the right. Bluetooth and information center controls on the left. You also get audio controls on the back of the steering wheel. Push button start. Push button four-wheel drive, eight-speed automatic transmission, and your start-stop capabilities. This one has the 8.4U Connect 4C radio. You get AM, FM, and SiriusXM radio capabilities on here. Good seats and heated steering wheel controls, as well as your backup camera, which I love these backup cameras. They are crystal clear, and you can zoom in on the receiver hitch to get hooked up to your boat camper or trailer the first time. Every time you get all your different apps on here, this one does have projection manager. You can project your cell phone to the screen via Android, Auto, or Apple CarPlay. Why is that important? Because this one does not have the factory navigation system. However, you can project your phone up there with Waze or Google Maps, or with Android, Auto, or Apple CarPlay with Waze or Google Maps, and then you can have nav right on the screen. So that's a pretty sweet system there. Down here you have your more tactile volume tune and climate controls, including your dual climate controls and heated seats and steering wheel button. Factory brake controller, stability control, tow-haul mode, front and rear parking sensors. Two USBs, two USB C's, and an AUX jack. You also get a 115-volt, 400-watt plug-in. You get these sliding cup holders and storage area coin tray holder. Keyless entry with remote start. And the passenger side gloveboxes, format, and seat are in fantastic condition as well. I didn't see any rips or tears on there. Smells very clean inside this truck, and the headliner is in great shape as well. Map lights, power slide and rear window button, and home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems. We'll start it up and take a look under the hood. Starts right up. No check engine lights or anything like that. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today. Hopefully from this HD video you've been able to verify just how clean this truck is all the way around inside and out. I think it is in fantastic condition. Didn't see a single dent on it, and everything's in really nice shape. Under the hood, we have the 3.6-liter Pentastar V6 engine. Engine bay is very clean, runs very smooth. Once again, this truck has been fully safety-dented and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off. Has four brand new tires, and there's the emission sticker. And this truck is 100% ready to go. I would highly recommend this truck from a quality and condition standpoint. I'd ship this one to California, Texas, New York, Florida, wherever, whoever is going to get this truck is going to love it. And to see more pictures of this truck or one of other 550 new news cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half-tons, recoder-tons, one-tons, you name it, you've got to go to the website right there. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle, all at summitauto.com. If you'd like to check out more HD videos, you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto. Click the bell notifications to get updates on the videos I do each and every day, as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle and light-duty truck walk-arounds on YouTube, 8,000 videos and counting. In fact, in a second, you will see a link to subscribe to my YouTube channel in the upper left. A link to more Ram 1500 truck videos I've done, actually all of them in the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website. A link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Check those. Check us out. We're super excited to help you with this Ultra Clean 2021 Ram 1500 Quad Cab Short Box, Big Horn Level 2 in Diamond Black Crystal Pearl. Thanks again for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on the YouTube channel. I really appreciate it. Thanks again.


We have developed a novel approach to obtaining informed consent for next-generation sequencing, NGS, studies that encourages discussion of key issues without creating a complex, comprehensive document for participants. This approach maximizes investigator flexibility while still providing participants with the necessary information to make an informed decision about participation. This article was authored by Ronda G. Kost, Stephen M. Popple and Barry S.


Could this 300,000 year old skull found in China be the missing link that the whole scientific world was looking for this whole time, David? Let's talk about it. Yeah, I was trying to tell you this whole time, but nobody wanted to listen until I found the fossil. And the headline reads, have scientists discovered a new species of human ancient skull belonging to a child with no chin that lived 300,000 years ago suggests our family tree needs another branch. Basically, the science needs to be updated due to this skull found in Hualongdong. Yeah, and this was found around Hubei, not too far from Wuhan and Changsha and Anhui, if you guys know the area of China. Anyways, guys, I think I'm trying to understand it because there's a lot of scientific jargon in this. But essentially, David, correct me if I'm wrong, there's like three main branches of like humanoidic kind of human like creatures, people like there's the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and the Homo sapiens, which are us. And then this thing that they found is apparently they think in between Homo sapien and Denisovan. And that's unlike anything that they found before. Yeah. And I looked up some photos where they tried to like recreate what this like middle hybrid might have looked like or a Denisovan.  Definitely some of them look Asian, at least from the photos. I'm not sure. They look adorable, man. Yeah. Shout out to them, man. Hey, man, that's that's I don't know if that's what we came from. I'm glad that they gave them smiles because now I feel I'm humanizing them a lot more. And why is this going viral right now? I would want to say it's more going viral in the science reddits and more like that side of the internet. You know what I mean? This is not like celebrity gossip. It's like more isolated. But but is it relevant because as much as people want to talk about aliens in 2023, there's still that archaeologist Indiana Jones vibe where people are still trying to figure out where we came from. Yeah, we're going to get into it, guys. Lots of comments, lots of takeaways. Please hit that like button right now, especially if you enjoy the news and the commentary that we provide. David, to me, I think it's partially going viral because of the geopolitics behind it because it's found in China, although it was like confirmed by a team from the UK and Spain and all these different people. It's not like China, like the Chinese scientists are making this up. But I guess like, basically, it just goes back to like, man, China is just making everything from like your cheap Amazon gadgets to your DJI drones to viruses that mess with the world. So now they got these old skulls too. Yeah. And I think the biggest shame is that nobody's talking about how good Wuhan Riga Mian is. Hey, man, I'm telling you that dish is delicious, man. Yeah, they were probably like, yeah, after we found the bones, to celebrate, they ate the noodles. Real quick, before we get into the comments section, Andrew, I think science and theories, they always change, right? Because there's always new information. But it kind of feels like we just freeze from since we were in high school. But now it feels like it's kind of wanting to get updated. Because, you know, everybody's just gotten into conspiracy theories and like stop caring about the past. Yeah, I think people are looking more into history and conspiracy theories of history now that I think that you're always uncovering little bits of history that we didn't know before that do they kind of change history? They might change how you perceive history, right? There is new history being found all the time. So I guess like, does this change how people feel like if previously we thought that the oldest skull was found 300,000 years ago in Africa, what does it mean that this skull is that old and it's found in Asia? So does that mean it's like dated back even farther? And like, what does that mean? Does it mean that Asians had their like the gene pool and the genetic diversity is like different? Or I don't know. I don't know. You let me know in the comments down below. What does this mean to you? I kind of need some help interpreting it to be honest. I think China's in a really interesting situation because it's almost like, like you said, people are viewing it almost as a Blade Runner type, like ancient modern place, but then it's still just got stuff that's super old old, you know, like it like it has like some of the oldest government buildings that has some of the oldest like coins, you know, the monetary system has the oldest like artifacts and noodles that has the oldest like skulls of like clearly this missing link. Right. I mean, it's just interesting.  Anyway, let's get in the comments section. Somebody said, when are we going to admit that just a horny alien visited earth a long time ago had sex with the primate and we are the result? I don't know. Like the whole alien theory, it doesn't make sense to me because it's like, what is so alien about the humans? Like we're made up of the exact same thing that the earth is that other animals are. So how, how are we just the iPhone 14 version or iPhone 28? I think it's more likely if anything that aliens gave us some technology versus we're all part aliens. Like that makes zero sense to me.  Someone said, I believe it, man. It's got a really flat face and they found that in Hualongdong. That sure looked like a Hualongdong skull to me. Other people are talking about it having a recessed chin. Is that just due to inbreeding? Because a lot of people, this guy said, I'm from North Georgia. A lot of people got that same chin over here.  And other people were saying, you know, I noticed a lot of British royalty because of the inbreeding amongst the Royals. They also have recessed chins. Oh, yeah. So just a lot of talk on recessed chins. I don't know, but is this pseudoscience or real science or do does do a lot of internet comments. They take like a little bit of science that they know and then extrapolate it. Right. Everybody kind of wants to be a scientist. Somebody says we have not even scratched the tip of the iceberg as far as science goes. We don't really know. I mean, we like kind of have an idea, but I'm sure it's going to develop so much more with new technology. How much do we even know about everything? You know, it seems like we kind of froze with the theories from the 80s and the 70s. Right. Yeah. New history being found all the time. And so this one comment was interesting. Someone said, what if we aren't even the newest adaptation? We're just the adaptation that flourished. So there could have been, they're suggesting a more evolved version of us, but they just didn't make it. And that's not like the most evolved version doesn't always mean that they're going to withstand everything like. Right. Right. Right. I guess. I don't know. That's a good point to be honest, man. I guess they would have even had smaller heads, right? Because if the if the head shrank from Dennevin to Neanderthal to humanoid, who knows? Somebody said, I remember back to my college days and Asians in my many math classes set the curve through the class scoring much higher marks than everybody else. They were likely cross bred with advanced aliens 300,000 years ago and have better evolved minds and the desire to master whatever they put their focus on. I believe that Asians are aliens.  It's funny because it goes with Andrew Schultz's theory earlier where it said, Asians are clearly offspring of aliens because they have the biggest brains, but they also have weak bodies, soft skin and soft voices. Yeah. You know, I guess it's funny how anything that is different than what the Western people see, it is seen as alien. I'm sure at some point these white people looked at black people from Africa as something very different too. But now they are the gods of basketball. Somebody said, why can you believe in God and science at the same time? Because people said, if this goes 300,000 years ago, but a lot of people think the earth is only 6,000 years old, then is religion just punching the air right now? I mean, I think if you are the religious person that believes the world is only 6,000 years old, then you already had to deal with a lot of other science that you didn't agree with. So I don't know. I don't know what does the existence of aliens mean you can't believe in God? I don't know. What about dinosaurs? Who knows, man? Somebody said, how do we know that a fossil is representative of the entire species? Because if we find skeletons of Peter Dinklage and Shaquille O'Neal in the future, how will scientists know that they were from the same species? Oh, that's interesting. I'm sure their skeleton structure is going to be so different. Yeah, but then their fingers would work the same. But they would just be way smaller. The amount of bones would probably be the same, but just the shape of their bodies are going to be so different. Right. Listen, guys, these are questions that I actually never asked before. These are good ones. Somebody said, you know, what does it mean if there was like another core of man like for the Java man or something like that? Or like, you know, there's another core of man that came from Asia. Is that going to change anything? Or like, you know, does basically a rewiring of the branches mean anything? I don't know. It's so far ago. Like, some part of me almost just wants to live in the present and be like, yo, this doesn't matter, man. Like, who cares what happened 200,000 years ago?  You know what I mean? The world was so different.  Some people said, I don't trust anything coming out of China that makes stuff up all the time. No wonder why they eat bats and cats and fish heads. It's in their DNA. Oh, but did they purchase that archaeology kid on Temu? And yeah, one thing you don't really see in one sentence, China and long dong. The internet's funny. Andrew, what are your takeaways, man? I would say I enjoy science more than your average person, whatever, you know, you want to say your average American is. But even me, I'm like more future focused, right? I'm like, I'm like, yeah, it's cool, I guess. But what are the implications for now? Right. Well, honestly, a lot of people are also thinking the same thing. They want to know if this scientific discovery somehow threatens their point of view or threatens their identity. And we're like, well, if it's 300,000 years old from China, does that mean they think they're better than us? Because they are not! Or like a Chinese person could be easily thinking, yeah, well, you know, if we have the oldest humanoid, then we must be the original human. As well. I don't know. Like people are, I don't know, man. It's funny to me, but I don't know what it means yet. And I don't think that it should change, obviously, anything of how you operate in life nowadays. But I guess it just goes to show you that, yeah, we have only scratched the tip of the iceberg. Who knows? David, one of these viruses that gets melted out of permafrost, my God, I don't know. Maybe that's maybe that's the end of us or not or nothing. Maybe it's nothing. I was just thinking about some celebrities that kind of remind me of maybe like a Dennevin. And I was saying like Jason Momoa, he might look like the best looking Dennevin ever. You know what I mean? Like he's like a direct lineage. Because then I was looking at this Chinese celebrity who's actually very embattled and controversial right now, Andrew Tai Shukun. And he looks almost like just like a porcelain eunuch. Yeah. So I was just like, man, humans can look so different. Is it due to our relationship to the Neanderthal and the Denisovan? I think people are always looking for an explanation, a simple explanation to describe why people think and look different. And I think that's why people want to lean into the alien thing. Now, Asians are from our aliens or humans are aliens. And it's just like, why does it have to be aliens? Like, is it too complex for people to understand that people are just different? Yeah. I don't know, man. Let us know what you think of the comment section below, guys. Obviously, you know, this is scientific news. I don't really know what the modern day application is. And maybe that's why it's staying in the scientific community right now. But keep it civil. Until next time, we out. Peace.


We're going to talk about unleashing the potential of advertising on OTT. And on this panel, we have with us some stellar personalities from the industry. Welcome Shashank Srivastava, Executive Director Maruti Suzuki, Ms. Anurita Chopra, Area Marketing Lead Oral Care GSK Consumer Healthcare, Ashwin Padmanabhan, President Partnerships and Trading Group M, Mr. Prateek Gupta co-founder Foxy Moran and Zoo Media. And chairing this session is Neeta Nair, Assistant Editor Exchange for Media. A very warm welcome to everyone. So hello and welcome once again to A4M Play. Now OTT was clearly the buzzword of 2020. And it was literally the year when OTT platforms became mainstream. With big budget movie releases, big show like Patalo, Mirzapur, 1990 and Scan and many, many more. And many mediums are struggling for revenues, ad revenues. You know, most OTT platforms enjoy all the attention from advertisers, even have to think of the fact. And that's exactly what we're here to discuss today. In our session, unleashing the potential of advertising on OTT. And to discuss that, I have with me amazing leaders from the industry. Let me introduce Shashank Shivaskar, Executive Director, Maruti Suzuki. Hi, Shashank. Hi, good to be here. We have Anurita Chopra, Area Lead Oral Care GSK Healthcare. Hi, Anurita. Hello, everyone. Hi, we have Ashwin Padmanabhan, President Partnerships and Trading at Doop M. Hi, everybody. Lovely to be here. And we have Kupta, Co-Founder, Foxy, Ron and Zoom Media. Hi, guys. Hi, everybody. Anurita and I are Assistant Editor with Impact Maxit and also the Moderator for the session. So let me direct the first question to you, Mr. Shivaskar. Now, Maruti has traditionally been a very strong advertiser on TV. Now, when did OTT assume a place of importance in your marketing mix and why? Well, I think talking of Maruti Suzuki, we are a substantial advertiser, as you know, our spends are close to 700 crores, out of which television last year was the largest still at around 30% and digital was 28% as also print. We do a lot of tactical and print. On OTT, we actually started seeing some real strong trends in the last couple of years. And we saw the consumer behavior itself changing as far as viewing is concerned. With the larger penetration of the internet and the possibility of streaming on internet, a lot of platforms which were based on streaming on internet have gained prominence. So you have video, you have so many of these platforms. You have those Netflix and Amazon Prime and so on. You also have audio. So you have Spotify and you also have messaging like WhatsApp or including voice, for example, which is over Skype. So all these are actually part of OTT platform. It's just streaming on. But what we are, I think, focusing today is on OTT platform as far as video and demand is concerned. And we saw this trend emerging last couple of years because not only was the digital percentage increasing, digital percentage in 2019 actually was just around 20%. But it's gone up to probably about 30 now and expected to be 34%. Video also has gone up. In fact, the growth projections are 30%. And that gives OTT an edge because OTT has a lot of positives which television doesn't have. There's more personalized, more individual by individual watching. You can watch it across devices. The cost is lower. You have actually 450 million smartphones, for example, as compared with 200 million television sets. So I think all these trends got together. And we have been observing that since the pandemic started, actually, this has been further accelerated. We find OTT as a very, very strong medium for which we would be advertising, not only doing it currently, but also in future, we expect it to get much larger from our decision. Interesting. Mr. Chopra, what kind of increase have you seen in the market spends GSK dedicates to OTT when you compare it with the pre-factor? Well, actually, Neeta, the way to look at it is not so much in terms of pre and post. But we always knew D is definitely a platform to consider and to gain prominence. I keep saying, and I was talking to you the other day as well, that be where the river flows. And if the consumer is really taking to OTT as a platform for her regular entertainment and is looking and enjoying fresh content out there, then clearly as advertisers, it is only but natural that we'll also find our way to be able to reach a consumer exactly there. So it's totally evolutionary. Yes, the pandemic has actually led up to a height of consumption or possibly because of the same old jaded content on regular television and therefore fresh content sitting out here more relevant than youthy content, vernacular content and so many more avenues, and especially personalized content, which makes it so relevant for different kinds of cohorts to find it compelling to come back. So I think one is the combatability, one is compelling content and therefore by definition, we definitely be there and the expense will only increase. My next question is for you, Mr. Padmanaband. Now, the first wave is phenomenal for the business of OTT platforms. Now, we're facing the second wave. Is it going to be just as beneficial for these platforms? And today, can we see literally all the key advertisers in the space are present on OTT platforms, new age and traditional, everybody? I think honestly, the way we see it, the challenge is less to do with demand from advertisers or demand from consumers. We clearly have more consumers consuming content on OTT, driven by all the factors that have been discussed even in the earlier session. And at the same time, there are more and more advertisers wanting to come on to the platform. I think the larger challenge is that advertising can be done only on the A-word side of the platform. A lot of the content that is getting released today and a lot of the eyeballs that we are seeing on the platforms are actually on the S-word side, which is leading to a challenge from an advertising perspective, which is that honestly, there are not enough impressions available to really deliver the campaign in its entirety. And especially, like Shashank said, if you want to leverage the advantage of targeting, you want to leverage the advantage of probably looking at audiences in a certain cut, the more you slice and dice it, you actually start figuring out that impressions are not available really for you to target. So if you ask me, the larger question is from a strategic perspective for OTT platforms, how do they invest more on content? Which actually powers the A-word side of their business? And I think that's what we'll need to really work on. I'd like to touch upon something that Mr. Upras said, the fresh content part of it. Mr. Gupta, a big factor which has kind of helped OTT approach a good amount of viewership from GECs in the beginning of last year, was that there was repeat content on TV and fresh content relatively on OTT. Now, as far as the current wave is concerned, both TV and OTT are better prepared, shoots have not completely stopped. So would you say OTT would still have an edge when it comes to the overall scheme of things? So as opposed to what live television content does, OTTs or the shows are planned a lot more in advance. The reason that the primes and the Netflix and the hot stars of the world were still doing very well during the first wave of the pandemic was primarily because their content was ready and available, I think four to six months in advance as opposed to television where there is regular content that's being created, which is live. So there is a constant flux of content being made available. As far as where we are sitting today, the demand for content is far greater than the supply. And we are seeing this across all of the platforms that we're actually operating inside. And the advantage that we had during the pandemic was the fact that we started off understanding that India is a one television home. But honestly today, the number of people in the house is equal to the number of screens that they have access to. So suddenly the control of the audience was on to their cell phones, the control of their audience was on to their laptops, the control of their audience was on to a tablet if at all. And suddenly that one home, which would otherwise have been fighting for control of that remote control during a lockdown or a pandemic, had access to so many more options to watch this content. And from a consumer's point of view, the choice was varied. They had the ability to watch different kind of content as opposed to watch either the Ramayana Mahabharata or the news or sports depending on who were the pants in the house. And they suddenly had the option to choose. And more importantly for us, what also gave advertisers the ability to latch on is that they could target the person in the house who was viewing the content. So if you look at it from a supply side and a demand side, whether it's content or whether it's advertising inventory availability, I think OTT was sitting at a pleasant spot. It was anyways growing like Anuridha said, like it was whether it was flowing, it's just that somebody opened the water gates a lot more than the flow increase. And we're all sitting here having this conversation today. We spoke about targeting and I'd like to bring in both the media experts here. If I were to compare OTT with the most popular platforms for content like YouTube or social media, there were instances in the past where you nearly were threatened to pull back advertising revenue from these platforms because their ads were being aired with content which was inappropriate. Now would you say brand safety is a very important point that goes in favor of OTT platforms today when you compare it with the rest? Because it's kind of checked and authorized in a way. Absolutely. I think surely a lot of the content, I won't say all, but surely a lot of the content, a higher percentage of the content which is there on OTT is surely can be classified as brand safe. That's one. The second is the nature of the consumer, the way the consumer actually looks at the content and consumes the content means that the engagement rates are also much higher, the completion rates are also much higher in an OTT environment. So yes, from that perspective, OTT makes it more effective, but where I, and I'm going to go back to my previous point because that actually is going to make or break the whole story of OTT. Today the scale of impressions available on OTT is minuscule compared to all the other platforms that you're talking about. So unless and until there's a strategic investment that is made towards increasing the available impressions on the A-Watt side, we're always going to be talking about the potential that exists, but we are unable to realize. So if you ask me the one biggest strat question that the platforms need to answer this, how do I create more impressions of the A-Watt side if I want more advertising money to come to me? That's probably the biggest bottleneck today. But you know it's right because you know the video completion rates to some extent is high on OTT, but the same time compared to YouTube. I mean but yet industry specific measures like you know click to click through rates, I mean they don't really hold for OTT channels as much. No, I guess we all use you know different mediums for different purposes. So if I'm doing a performance marketing campaign, maybe I will not use OTT, but at the same time if I'm driving brand building which is what we traditionally use TV for, I would surely want to use OTT. So as a potential I guess OTT holds a lot of potential and I have no doubt that it is going to grow substantially, but at this point in time there is a lot of promise, but I would say delivery is still under delivery in terms of what is added. Anita, I'd just like to chime in there with you know with the fact that like exactly what Ashwin said, it also is you're on YouTube because you are going through like a cluster of content that you're consuming at that particular point in time right. So you have you know distracted viewing as what we would call it right. Like I would watch half a YouTube video move back into Facebook, move back into Instagram, come back onto YouTube versus when I'm on an OTT platform I have focused viewing right and also the inventory that sold on OTT is also like a cost per completed view versus an inventory that sold on YouTube would be a CPM inventory where there is an ability to click out and that's the parameter that you're actually gauging right. Like it's basically different horses for different causes and you know that's what it is and there is a problem in understanding of all of the different metrics that are available in the OTT ecosystem and people are using different things for you know different means which needs to standardize a lot more but it's the starting of the learning curve honestly and everybody will get that slowly but steady. I'd like to come to the advertisers now you know the same question that I asked earlier you know brand safety of course is very key for you know as far as any advertiser is concerned but even today we're seeing a lot of cases like you know there are these these web series like Tanda, Patalo which have been mired in controversy because if you know hurting religious sentiments and all of that so how do you pick and choose your content you know are you I mean are you very very sure you have to be very very sure about where you're placing your money you don't want to be seen against you know around provoking religious sentiment sentiments or anything like that so how do you go about picking the content Anuradha. That's a good question and and of course you know as brands you always look for the right foot so you know I think what you need to be very clear about what is the role that OTT is going to play for you in your strategy and I think Ashwin and Pradeep both have made pertinent points on that which is look if you're looking for reach and frequency then obviously you will go for the tried and tested because you're looking at metrics you're looking at deliveries you know that this is going to have a straight-jacketed you know tie back to business in actual numbers definitely in the digital world as well now we have at least reach builder platforms and so that's relatively more measurable now than at what it used to be so similarly a OTT will go through that shown will go through that evolution by definition you know because obviously all advertisers all media experts are going to be haunting on everybody's door saying listen give us the metrics and why would we put more money because yes this is you know glamorous and yes this is clearly where the preference is going but we need hard numbers to be able to convince our clients in the first place or advertisers who are going to divert their funds out here so that's one but second I think you know just like brand ambassador fitment just like property journal fitment so say a brand like Sensodyne which is you know very very you know upmarket not that we don't cater to low tier consumers we do but as a brand to anality you intuitively know whether you are going to be you know associating with a certain genre of programming content or not you know the kind of vein it will be whether it serves your purpose or not for that matter definitely you know we were we partnered with the hot stuff for game of thrones sure because the role out there is impact so if you're very clear about what your role what what achievement you want whether you want to create impact and you know to Ashwin's point so if it's a if it's a launch buzz that you want to create you want to quickly drive visibility you want to quickly drive awareness sure by all means but then be a little flexible on the metrics and therefore that determines the kind of spend also that you put because obviously there is only that much you know first that you have in your budget the others are very very tightly measured and locked and performance driven so by definition all said and done it's a matter of time before metrics will start coming in because the channel or the platform is only getting bigger so they have to okay and coming to you Mr. Shavasava would you go with metrics and you know monthly active users and all of that while picking your you know picking a show to associate with or is it going to be how powerful the content can be and how you can how you can associate well with it what is the balance for you yeah so of course it's not it's rarely that you know to get to a particular marketing objective you talk only of one platform so it's not always an OTT versus something else it is maybe OTT plus television for example it is not just digital versus legacy media or traditional media it is also what that plus something so it's it's I think what we need to shift the debate here is not about OTT how it is as an exclusive platform but how it adds to your overall marketing investment objectives the only specific thing of how to invest in OTT of course you will look at the content preference of the target audience and I think that is the number one priority for us of course you look also at the monthly active users if you are choosing between platforms or maybe the cross visiting data cross platforms so you would have some platforms which have you know which are have a larger cross visiting ratios which we would like to minimize the duplication or that is all part of this thing so for for us it is largely the content and then of course the usual metrics which which any any investment involves but I think the discussion which we have been hearing so far and what Ashwin also pointed out is a question of I think we are not debating whether OTT will get bigger it will get bigger I think there is a general consensus and as Anurita said wherever you have people you will have advertisers will go there so I think there there is no debate Prateek also talked about you know how OTT is better and probably why it is growing so you have you know multiple you can have it seeing it across devices it's a on-demand viewing rather than appointment viewing of television it's more individualistic you can have as many screens in the household as you have number of people you can you know the number of smartphones are increasing internet penetration is increasing data and there is no debate then therefore that there is will be a growth the question is is it advantages for the OTT as a platform to advertise and they are also I think there is a broad consensus and I believe all panel members here also agree to that it leads to a much sharper targeting absolutely no doubt it does it is more open and more amenable to micro targeting whether it is demographics or it is geo targeting whether it is you know even interest cohorts I think Anurita talked about interest cohorts or even device targeting or content targeting is one of the major things which you know advertisers are looking at you can even look at day part targeting like we do for all all model viewer engagement is much more Ashwin said that it leads to a much more stickiness and even binge watching as we all know we have immediate response and I think somewhere OTT is also improving and people are realizing that if you have more clickable CTAs as is possible if you are viewing it on on mobile if you incorporate things like an online shopping within the OTT experience maybe it is much people would you know quickly call up retail stores or maybe visit the brand website customer acquisition is therefore much better I would say this there is more brand safety I think Ashwin pointed it out rightly that there is clearly while there are there are exceptions but clearly there is more brands safety and more importantly which I think so far we have not touched upon is that remarketing is possible because OTT actually is a digital media so your customer give you those digital signals so brands can actually leverage multiple parts of online ad of online ad environments you know multiple devices multiple channels you can address a single cohort using combination of streaming advertisement social media and so on and finally that's the last point I would like to make is that yes Ashwin's point I think is the central point which is when you look at SVOD and when you look at AVOD you have in India of course there is at the moment I think 30 35 percent is SVOD but maybe in abroad it is almost 90 90 plus in US for example so there there is a challenge you have everything going for the platform but is it monetizable is it something and that is where the innovation will come in and I believe in India while we have it you know the AVOD content still big and I think where the advertisers will really have to innovate as also the platform itself is how much branded content you can get so while in SVOD you know it's difficult to have those small small advertisements but if you want to really do a branded storytelling you can really do it using content integration or you have branded content and remember for for for people like Maruti Suzuki we we are a fairly well-known brand so our challenge is not so much awareness as much as engagement and OTT provides that so we are I'm actually quite excited about the future of the OTT including a lot of innovations that needs to be done and I think that's what Ashwin was pointing out too it would require a lot of innovation for it to become relevant for advertisers in a large way as is the case with other mediums so Ashwin in that thank you so much Ishaan there were a couple of things that have come up I mean a lot of questions I have to ask you and the panelists after what you said Ashwin so of course as of now what we understand is OTT is great as far as the upper funnel of marketing is concerned know the brand awareness you know understanding where the product what the product is all about that kind of thing but as far as the bottom funnel is concerned you know the performance part of it the purchase part of it how where are we exactly with regards to bringing all that into the OTT streams is it possible you know while watching am I going to like there are a lot of connected TVs today am I going to be watching it on the screen and going click to you know buy a product is that even possible I think we can think of ourselves as marketers or we could think of ourselves first as consumers of content if I am a consumer of content honestly if I am deep into a content I will not want any distractions of clicking into a link and going and taking being taken away from that content right so from that perspective we don't need to be everything OTT doesn't need to be everything the fact is that it can add to TV significantly with the strengths that it has in terms of being able to allow a brand to build its story in being able to target consumers sharper than we can do in that whole effort so I am not sure whether you really want to spend time trying to become you know relevant from a performance marketing perspective at all why should we do that there are other mediums for that isn't it I would rather invest more time to become extremely good in the whole brand building space as a platform right so if you ask me I wouldn't try to actually you know become relevant from a performance perspective if I was an OTT platform Pratik do you agree yes and no because you know and I'll chime in with a couple of thoughts one is the fact that like while we don't agree that you know this this new normal or you know the first players you call it didn't hit OTT platforms it did because they ended hit them in a good way right they were they were pretty much expecting that I will grow this volume of subscribers or this volume of people watching over two years three years four years right and their product roadmap was always built on that two years three or four year pipeline for instance if in my opinion if last year Dream 11 would have not jumped onto the IPL bandwagon the integration of Dream 11 inside of Hotstar in the IPL if it was in March or in April of 2020 as opposed to September or October in 2020 would never have happened the integration with somebody like a Swiggy into into Hotstar would have never happened so a lot of the product roadmaps for OTTs have also accelerated to allow for these integrations to happen from a middle funnel point of view okay right it's not necessarily top funnel or bottom funnel right like we often forget that there is a middle funnel right over there there are lots of new products that are becoming a part of branded content which are there to change habits right to give you to give you an example of a lot of the house rental or no broker hotels did content branded content that allowed people to understand that there is a change in habit from calling your local broker or asking your watchman for a local broker to a professional service that actually exists does it create awareness for me 100% but it also creates consideration for me does it does it get me my bottom funnel as of where I'm sitting right now absolutely not because my bottom funnel like I said before the metrics are you know did I click on the link did the link get converted into a sale it is too well defined for a platform that is too early to evolve into those kind of metrics as we're as we're actually sitting so two points right so while I agree that where we don't have the relevant inventory we do not have the relevant tech inside the OTT platforms as of where we're sitting right now but as people you know migrate those innovations will start to come to life people will start to understand what is the content community commerce sort of a model that exists even for content creation and as of where we are sitting today can we do branded integrations to drive consideration yes can we do branded integrations to drive sale maybe not or bottom funnel maybe not that's my take on it so it's I just think it's evolutionary it's not necessarily going to happen or not going to happen because a lot of experiments are going to succeed and hopefully a lot of experiments are going to fail Anuradha I'd like to bring you in you know we spoke about this earlier you know some of the popular OTT platforms today are are ad-free like Netflix, Amazon right you know and they have a significant amount of dedicated viewers with them so what are you I mean as far as GSK is concerned how are you going about you know breaking that wall you know how are you bringing GSK into these SVOD spaces well it's it's a little selective honestly where you know as you said that currently it's not open form advertiser space which I think is very good in a sense because I think the first and foremost and I think Ashwin touched on that briefly which is be a consumer first yeah what would you really like and so you know live streaming content has its own role OTT has its own role so first is content traction and so sometimes you're looking at you know whether that's you know you even evaluating opportunities of in program placement you're talking to you know content creators and seeing whether there's any you know role of participation and we are a healthcare organization so look we we definitely we believe in authenticity so for us the kind of content also that we'll be talking to will come with its own you know stamp of authenticity you know we are not a flashy business by definition or people have to trust us and look for solutions be it sensorine be it you know be it you know be it autraven be it iodex be it crocin look at the brands we're talking about and therefore by definition the kind of you know partnerships that we seek are either depending on uh stature if you need so for example a sensorine partnering with IPL show as I mentioned earlier game of thrones show so there the role is in fact integration is a different vehicle later as and when OTT evolves and clearly I think the writings on a wall that it will uh there will be a role of advertisers and accordingly will also evolve uh you know literally a uh a sarogate of high definition where people will still pay more perhaps for uninterrupted flow which is a different revenue model altogether for for this entire framework so there'll be a full circle they will get into advertiser uh framework they will uh you know entail participation probably even e-commerce integration absolutely and seamless because many other markets have moved there you you know you click up a click button and you like something you can buy that you know food you can just order right away etc which is a seamless integration without being too interrupted and at the same time there'll be enough consumers offended and will want a free advertiser free content framework as well so that's how you possibly go and we are we are pretty much you know evaluating at this level um you know you know in an integrated manner I think I'll I'll just possibly say integration is the name of the world and so you know because we were talking about OTT as an extension of tv tell me how important is catch up content for both of you uh Anrita you and Mr. Shivasava you know are you going to be spending enough monies on it do you think there is scope there you know where you where something plays on tv and then you want to catch up catch up the same episode on these OTT platforms is there some is there is it a good opportunity there or is it just something you can overlook catch up content would you like to go first Mr. Shivasava good good all right so again going back to what we've been saying which is it totally depends on the content if it has repeat view viewability potential you know it could be events it could be marquis sports events where people will come back and watch maybe highlights it could be you know movie events of course there is repeat viewing so just like you would evaluate it from a TV perspective that they you know you you estimate a certain uh you know tv r for fresh content and then you estimate a slightly lesser and you know it's it's like a downward curve that's exactly the kind of maths that you do in terms of yes there'll be a certain traction and accordingly you figure out whether it makes sense to your overall strategy yeah so surely we will we do look at on on repeat content as well so catch up content as you say yes it depends on the content as well as I think the the financial part of it because you do have one of the advantages of OTT is that you can do catch up you know so so that that is the thing which also makes it a lot of viewers come there for that purpose also so yes we will we do look at it but for me the more more exciting part is when the 5g technology comes in and you can have a immersive streaming happening maybe live content happening that's something which you know really exciting me because once you have the bandwidth you normally if you stream 4k videos you require 30 mbps but if you if you if you if you have live then you require 60 I think we are getting there technologically that is going to open a lot of a lot of advertising opportunities I think and I think that's what we are all excited about that's what makes OTT the really evolving platform it is you know you're talking about technology and reach you know you have an audience base in both rural and urban India and there's this explosion of vernacular content so tell me would you want to put in your money in a hotstar which has you know sufficient amount of you know vernacular content all those vernacular only OTT platforms which have emerged like OIJ or Sunnext which are more beneficial according to you yes so I think those vernacular ones are evolving also they're the interesting parties mentioned about the cross visiting across platforms it is much lesser for vernaculars the platforms which have vernacular content yes so surely for a for a brand like ours which we have a lot of a lot of selling happening in areas which are you know more localized in that sense at the moment OTT subscribers large base is still you know urban a large base but the the nature of the platform makes it possible to do that geotargeting very very easily and I think that is also as it as we go along when we get good content in vernacular and we are getting every almost every day we have news that something is coming up in the vernacular OTT platform I think that would give us advertisers some many more options and surely Mati Suzuki will look at that because we are a brand which have sales across the geography of the and coming back to the media experts you know tell me how does one you know we spoke about how it shouldn't be up a funnel what in front of that if but can we increase engagement or notity I think Netflix had way back in 2019 and started something with Black Mirror where you know the viewer could control the ending of you know the the show on based on his preferences and that really did engage their with their audiences better can we do something like that with advertisers as well you know wherein it's you know you can ensure that you know audiences are watching and reacting you know absolutely I think a lot of the ideas in fact were discussed earlier as well especially when we're working on branded content you can bring in a lot of innovations and to drive engagement it could be even things like some you could scan a QR code during the course of the show and then you can interact on your mobile play a quiz on your mobile so there are multiple ways in which you can drive engagement you know you may call me a traditionalist in that sense but if there is a pure piece of content which is just entertaining when they're not branded content which is also entertainment you create branded content from an entertainment perspective I would as far as possible make the brand integration natural and subtle and write it into the story as long as the brand plays a role in the story it adds to the it embellishes the story and it embellishes the brand both I think that's the challenge that so if you ask me the you really need to go back into writing versus saying let's do this innovation from a tech perspective so if you want brands to start featuring in content in a manner where they add to the story and some of the story adds to the brand we should start writing and which is what we've started doing actually we've done about three shows in Tamil recently where we had brands coming into the show but we got into that phase when we were writing the episodes the we were writing the brand into the episodes as a part of the story rather than as an afterthought okay and I guess which means automatically requires a lot of planning it's a more strategic engagement like Shashank and Amrita both said earlier you want to choose the content that you want to associate with so all those decisions start coming in so it's a more involved decision than just advertising on a piece of content right so I guess to drive more engagement you will need to plan ahead of time and you will need to obviously put a lot more effort to be able to do that okay Pratik you want to add to that so Neeta we've already done it we've already created interactive content where you can make brand choices as you keep moving on this is something that a way back in 2019 you know we did it for for brands we could not do it on OTT platforms at that particular point in time because like I said OTT platforms did not have the technology to allow for decisions to be made on the fly we used the branded content and we ran it on social media platforms so that brands are able to make these decisions so innovation is already happening in the branded content space like I said in my previous answer we're waiting for the technology and the products on the OTT platforms to catch on with the kind of innovations that we can we can therefore suggest to them and what Ashwin is saying is is fairly correct because the construct of the way content creators and advertisers are working right has to change massively it usually is that you create an IP and take it to advertisers advertisers say that we're interested we're now getting into spaces where advertisers are commissioning IPs which is a very different space than integrating with already existing IPs right so once you're commissioning the IP then you're writing for that particular brand the perspective completely changes the writing completely changes the integration completely changes and so you know for me you know the the the shorthand of what we're discussing today is that it's obviously evolving at multiple levels right we're talking about you know we're talking about looking into the into the future and looking into you know into what it holds but different players the advertiser the content creator you know the the OTT or the technology provider will all have to play substantial roles in being able to push it in a certain direction and we all as a collective have to try lots of things fail and understand what is actually working you know we're just sitting in that structure of of evolution we're probably expecting it to happen a lot faster than it can that's my that's my only fail at all ends okay we're kind of running short on time so I have this one last question to ask or other feedback to give so you know world over there's this constant battle between TV viewership and OTT a lot of markets have already evolved OTT reigns there you know even in India a lot of my friends you know have completely given up on their DTH you know connections and subscribe to multiple OTT platforms so basically to quote a dialogue from the film Divaar you know OTT has rising internet proliferation here video on demand option here a point of viewing ki zarurat nahi hai advertisers bhi hai TV ke pass kya hai one line response from all the Anuradha you go first heritage and metrics okay ashwin I would say OTT b TV hai okay I'm Prithik I would say habit habit okay but habit to change kar sakhi hai um but but there is a whole population out there for whom TV is the is the centerpiece of the house which which is which which will take a while to change and and I think like Mr. Shivasa said I don't think we need to compete you know I think we're all going to eat out of a growing pie I don't think that we need to be I don't think we need to be the you know the the ants trying to pull each other down I think we need to all be trying to create a honeycomb that we can all that we can all eat out of so I I I'm not competing at all so TV is all I will say and digital ke pass TV hai is all I will say in in that okay on that PwC 2020 reports are India's currently the fastest growing OTT market in the world expected to touch revenues to the tune of $2.9 billion you know we've seen OTT gaining at the expense of cinemas last year but like Prithik said we should not be competing within the platforms but still I want to say I'm really really curious to see how soon it will give TV a proper run for its money and before it becomes a preferred choice of entertainment for the country and thank you thank you so much everybody for joining us and especially the panelists for making this such an interesting discussion thank you and stay stay stay safe everybody thank you