Russell Trafford-Jones, Author at The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Remote Production In Pajamas

Posted on 25th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Remote production (AKA REMIs) has been discussed for a long time – but what’s practical today? Teradek, Brandlive and Vimond share their experiences making it work.

The main benefit of remote production is reducing costs by keeping staff at base instead of sending them to the event. Switching video, adding graphics and publishing are all possible in the cloud, but how practical this all is and which people stay behind very much depend on the company; their quality standards, their workflows, complexity of the programme etc.

This panel at the Streaming Media East looks at when remote production is appropriate, how much does a service provider needs to be present, redundancy, the role of standards and is a wide ranging discussion on the topic.

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Speakers

	Jon Landman VP of Sales, Teradek
	Megan Wagoner VP of Sales, Vimond
	Mark Adams SVP Sales & Marketing, Brandlive
	Kevin McCarthy Moderator Director of Production, VideoLink LLC

Video: User-Generated HDR is Still Too Hard

Posted on 24th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

HDR and wide colour gamuts are difficult enough in professional settings – how can YouTube get it right with user-generated content?

Steven Robertson from Google explains the difficulties that YouTube has faced in dealing with HDR in both its original productions but also in terms of user generated content (UGC). These difficulties stem from the Dolby PQ way of looking at the world with fixed brightnesses and the ability to go all the way up to 10,000 nits of brightness and also from the world of wider colour gamuts with Display P3 and BT.2020 (WCG).

Viewing conditions have been a challenge right from the beginning of TV but ever more so now with screens of many different shapes and sizes being available with very varied abilities to show brightness and colour. Steven spends some time discussing the difficulty of finding a display suitable for colour grading and previewing your work on – particularly for individual users who are without a large production budget.

Interestingly, we then see that one of the biggest difficulties is in visual perception which makes colours you see after having seen bad colours look much better. HDR can deliver extremely bright and extremely wrong colours. Steven shows real examples from YouTube of where the brain has been tricked into thinking colour and brightness are correct but they clearly are not.

Whilst it’s long been known that HDR and WCG are inextricably linked with human vision, this is a great insight into tackling this at scale and the research that has gone on to bring this under automated control.

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Free registration required

This talk is from Streaming Tech Sweden, an annual conference run by Eyevinn Technology. Videos from the event are available to paid attendees but are released free of charge after several months. As with all videos on The Broadcast Knowledge, this is available free of charge after registering on the site.

Speaker

Steven Robertson
Software Engineer, YouTube Player Infrastructure
Google

Video: Stopping Geolocation Fraud Via “Rented” Residential IPs to Protect Territorial Content

Posted on 22nd July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Securing streams is a cat-and-mouse game and this is the latest move to keep content secure.

In order to maximise returns on content, the right to show the content is usually limited to certain geographies and sometimes streaming rights are sold separate to broadcast rights. This means it’s common to geo-lock streaming services whereby each IP address requesting content is checked against a database to see in which country that computer is located. This system isn’t perfect, but it tends to work fairly well.

The key, then, for people wanting to access content from outside the geography is to use someone else’s IP. You can do this by renting time on a computer such as in AWS, Digital Ocean or other similar providers where you can select in which country the computer you are using is located. However the IP addresses owned by these providers are also in the databases and are often blocked from access.

The determined viewer, therefore, needs a VPN which uses residential addresses from within that location. The OTT providers can’t block legitimate IP addresses, therefore access will be given. Access is provided to these addresses by VPNs which offer free use of their service in exchange for them being able to route traffic via your computer.

Detecting this kind of use is difficult, and is what Artem Lalaiants discusses in this talk from SMPTE 2018.

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Speaker

Artem Lalaiants
Service Delivery Manager,
GeoGuard

Video: Get Ready For A Multiple Codec World

Posted on 19th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The codec world is fragmenting. None of the new entrants on to the market is expected to ever gain the universal status that AVC enjoys. This panel from Streaming Media East takes a look at how to prepare for this.

The panel kicks off discussing the differences between AVC and HEVC, VP9 and AV1 and moves on to discuss the pros and cons of supporting multiple codecs. Tarek from Twitch explains its partial adoption of VP9 – the reasons that it makes sense but the overheads which it brings the business.

Vittorio Giovara from Vimeo explains their reasons for using HEVC including their drive to be able to encode and deliver 10-bit video. Ellation’s Subhrendu Sarakar makes the point that managing codec changes and bitrate changes needs to be done carefully to ensure viewers that notice the change understand them and don’t feel there has been a reduction of quality.

After a brief discussion of encoding strongly characterised video types such as anime and gaming, the conversation moves on to AV1 and migrating from VP9 and there is an audience question on HEVC licensing and the lack of use of SVC (Scalable Video Coding)

It’s now relatively well known that Twitch deployed VP9 using FPGAs rather than as a software encoder which was the only way to get the real-time speed at 1080p60. The panel discusses encoding speed both in the encoder and decoder for VP9 and AV1 then finishes with a Q&A from the audience.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Tim Siglin Founding Executive Director Help Me! Stream
	Tarek Amara Principal Video Specialist, Twitch
	Vittorio Giovara Senior Engineer, Video Encoding Vimeo
	Nathan Egge Video Codec Engineer, Mozilla
	Subhrendu Sarkar Senior Engineering Manager, Video Infrastructure & CMS, Ellation