Video

Video: Engineering a Live Streaming Workflow for Super Bowl LIII

Posted on by Adam K


Super Bowl 53 has come and gone with another victory for the New England Patriots. CBS Interactive responsible for streaming of this event built a new system to deal with all the online viewers. Previously they used one vendor for acquisition and encoding and another vendor for origin storage, service delivery and security. This time the encoders were located in CBS Broadcast Centre in New York and all other systems moved to AWS cloud. Such approach gave CBS full control over the streams.

Due to a very high volume of traffic (between 30 and 35 terabits) four different CDN vendors had to be engaged. A cloud storage service optimized for live streaming video not only provided performance, consistency, and low latency, but also allowed to manage multi-CDN delivery in effective way.

In this video Krystal presents a step-by-step approach to creating a hybrid cloud/on premise infrastructure for the Super Bowl, including ad insertion, Multi-CDN delivery, monitoring and operational visibility. She emphasizes importance of scaling infrastructure to meet audience demands, taking ownership of end to end workflow, performing rigorous testing and handling communication across multiple teams and vendors.

You can download the slides from here.

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Speaker

Krystal Mejia Krystal Mejia
Software Engineer,
CBS Interactive

Video: SCTE-35 In-band Event Signalling in OTT

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


SCTE-35 has been used for a long time in TV to signal ad break insertions and other events and in recent years has been evolved into SCTE-104 and SCTE-224. But how can SCTE-35 be used in live OTT and what are the applications?

The talk starts with a look at what SCTE is and what SCTE-35 does – namely digital program insertion. Then the talk moves on to discuss the most well-known, and the original, use case of local ad insertion. This use case is due to the fact that ads are sold nationally and locally so whereas the national ads can be played from the playout centre, the local ads need to be inserted closer to the local transmitter.

Alex Zambelli, Principal Product Manager at Hulu, then explains the message format in SCTE along with the commands and descriptors giving us an idea of what type of information can be sent and how it might be structured. Looking then to applying this to OTT, Alex continues to look at SCTE-224 which defines how to signal SCTE-35 in DASH.

For those who still use HLS rather than DASH, Alex looks at a couple of different ways of using this with Apple, perhaps unsurprisingly, preferring a method different from the one recommended by SCTE.

The talk finishes with a discussion of the challenges of using SCTE in OTT applications.
See the slides

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Speaker

Alex Zambelli Alex Zambelli
Principal Product Manager,
Hulu

Video: Predicting Viewer Attention in Video for use in Compression

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Video compression is a never-ending endavour with hundreds of techniques possible. Some which aren’t in use are waiting for computers to catch up or, in this case, to find the best way to apply new techniques, such as machine learning, to the task.

In this talk from Streaming Tech Sweden 2018, Fritz Barnes from Entecon explains that region of interest compression – where you compress the image more in areas where the viewer won’t be looking – can significantly help reduce bitrate.

Fritz looks at techniques to analyse video and work out where people will be looking. This technique is called ‘saliancy deteciton’ and has been made practical by machine learning. Convolutional Neural Networks are introduced. The extensive training material is introduced and explains the model used to learn from it. Optical flow is a way to encode the motion of the video and is also part of the video.

The talk finishes by looking at the results of this technique; both the successes and problems.

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Free registration required
Streaming Tech Sweden is an annual conference run by Eyevinn Technology in Sweden. Talks are recorded and are available to delegates for several months and are then freely available. Whilst registration is required on the website, it is free to register and to watch this video.

Video: All IP Success Stories Real World Deployments

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

When SDI came in to replace analogue video, there were difficulties and setbacks yet now it’s very well trusted and ubiquitous. Similarly, life is not simple moving from SDI into IP, either 2022-6 or 2110, let alone PTP which replaces black nad burst.

In this talk we hear from people who have made that change and are working with IP. We find out what went well, whether things are up and running yet and also what the challenges and lessons learnt are.

Speakers

Mike Wilken Mike Wilken
SVP of Systems and Technology,
FOX Sports
Francois Legrand Francois Legrand
Senior Project Mangaer,
CBC/Radio Canada
Daniel Murphy Daniel Murphy
NEP