Russell Trafford-Jones, Author at The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Deployment of Ultra HD Services Around the Globe

Posted on 11th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

In some parts of the industry UHD is entirely absent. Thierry Fautier is here to shine a light on the progress being made around the globe in deploying UHD.

Thierry starts off by defining terms – important because Ultra HD actually hides several, often unmentioned, formats behind the term ‘UHD’. This also shows how all of the different aspects of UHD, which include colour (WCG), HDR, audio (NGA) and frame rate to name only a few, fit together.

There’s then a look at the stats, where is HDR deployed? How is UHD typically delivered? And the famed HDR Venn diagram showing which TVs support which formats.

As ever, live sports is a major testing ground so the talk examines some lessons learnt, and features a BBC case study, from the 2018 World Cup. Not unrelated, there is a discussion on the state of UHD streaming including discussion of CMAF.

Leading nicely onto Content Aware Encoding (CAE), which was also in use at the world cup.

Watch now!
Free registration required

Speaker

Thierry Fautier
President-Chair, Ultra HD Forum
VP Video Strategy, Harmonic

Webinar: Implementing broadcaster addressable TV using HbbTV

Posted on 9th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

HbbTV combines over-the-air TV with internet-delivered services which viewers see as a single, seamless service. HbbTV – which stands for Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV – is a standardised way to deliver internet-enhanced over-the-air television to homes.

Date: Tuesday 16th July, 14:00 BST / 15:00 CEST

Now on version 2.0.1, HbbTV has been adopted around the world. The UK has the Freeview Play live and on-demand service based on HbbTV 2.0, delivered over satellite. New Zealand and Australia also have a Freeview-labelled service. Turkey and Saudi Arabia have services on HbbTV and Finland has been on air sine 2013 with HbbTV.

This webinar looks at what’s new in 2.0.1 and focusses on the possibilities of targeted advertising, highlighting the RTL Group’s world first swapping over-the-air ads for internet-delivered adverts.

This webcast will discuss:

The benefits of a standards-based ad insertion solution for the TV and device market
Market penetration of HbbTV devices that support IP-into-broadcast content substitution, including free-to-air hybrid set-top boxes, smart TVs and connected TV streaming devices
Technology capabilities within the HbbTV 2.0.1 standard, including how to implement HbbTV-enabled addressable TV
The rationale for including HbbTV ad insertion on devices that already include broadcaster OTT apps
Compatibility and interoperability between HbbTV and the broadcast backoffice and associated ad-tech
Efforts to include HbbTV ad insertion in the new HbbTV-TA (Targeted Advertising) standard

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Speakers

	Henry Rivero VP Advanced Advertising & Innovation, RTL Group
	Frode Hernes SVP of Product Management, Vewd
	Leon Siotis GM Revenue Europe. SpotX
	John Moulding Editor-in-Chief VideoNet

Video: A Survey Of Per-Title Encoding Technologies

Posted on 8th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Optimising encoding by per-title encoding is very common nowadays, though per-scene is slowly pushing it aside. But with so many companies offering per-title encoding, how do we determine which way to turn?

Jan Ozer experimented with them, so we didn’t have to. Jan starts by explaining the principles of per-title encoding and giving an overview of the market. He then explains some of the ways in which it works including the importance of changing resolution as much as changing

As well as discussing the results, with Bitmovin being the winner, Jan explains ‘Capped CRF’ – how it works, how it differs from CBR & VBR and why it’s good.

Finally, we are left with some questions to ask when searching for our own per-title technology to solve the problem we have such as “can it adjust rung resolutions?”, “Can you apply traditional data rate controls?” amongst others.

Watch now!

Speaker

Jan Ozer
Principal,
Streaming Learning Center

Video: Intro to 4K Video & HDR

Posted on 6th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With all the talk of IP, you’d be wrong to think SDI is dead. 12G for 4K is alive and well in many places, so there’s plenty of appetite to understand how it works and how to diagnose problems.

In this double-header, Steve Holmes from Tektronix takes us through the ins and outs of HDR and also SDI for HDR at the SMPTE SF section.

Steve starts with his eye on the SMPTE standards for UHD SDI video looking at video resolutions and seeing that a UHD picture can be made up of 4 HD pictures which gives rise to two well-known formats ‘Quad split’ and ‘2SI’ (2 Sample Interleave).

Colour is the next focus and a discussion on the different colour spaces that UHD is delivered with (spoiler: they’re all in use), what these look like on the vectorscope and look at the different primaries. Finishing up with a roundup and a look at interlink timing, there’s a short break before hitting the next topic…HDR

High Dynamic Range is an important technology which is still gaining adoption and is often provided in 4K programmes. Steve defines the two places HDR is important; in the acquisition and the display of the video then provides a handy lookup table of terms such as HDR, WCG, PQ, HDR10, DMCVT and more.

Steve gives us a primer on what HDR is in terms of brightness ‘NITS’, how these relate to real life and how we talk about it with respect to the displays. We then look at HDR on the waveform monitor and look at features of waveform monitors which allow engineers to visualise and check HDR such as false colour.

The topic of gamma, EOTFs and colour spaces comes up next and is well-explained building on what came earlier. Before the final demo and Q&A, Steve talks about different ways to grade pictures when working in HDR.

A great intro to the topics at hand – just like Steve’s last one: Uncompressed Video over IP & PTP Timing

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Speakers