Video Archives – Page 60 of 172 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: 5G QuickStart

Posted on 10th August 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The best way to cut through the 5G hype is to understand the technology itself. This video explains the acronyms, frequency use, OpenRAN sites, multipath reception, software-defined radio.

Joe Hess starts this talk at NANOG 75 by telling us what 5G isn’t before covering the basics. He talks about NFV, Network Function Virtualisation, which is the ability to move any network function such as firewalls any load balancers into software running on a virtual environment. The flexibility that this provides is significant. Not only does NFV reduce the cost of launching new services and allowing that to happen quicker, all because no new hardware appliances need to be purchased and installed, it is also key to enabling ‘Network slicing’ which is a critical element to making 5G work for the broadcast industry. When you have virtualised the network functions, provisioning a totally new, separate, network can be done via API allowing a broadcaster to have their own cut of the network bandwidth but also have the security of total segregation.

Joe also highlights some other important technologies such as CUPS, which no longer stands for the Common UNIX Printing System, but rather Control and User Plane Separation. Part of CUPS is the ability to use polar codes to represent control data in the same datastream as general traffic. This creates a more robust control channel than the general data without having to create a separate channel. He also discusses the meaning of ‘NR’ or ‘New Radio’ which is a radio protocol replacing UMTS used in 3G and 4G’s LTE. It has the ability to be used on frequencies up to 6GHz and also on 24GHz and above, includes improved OFDM performance, and also run on top of an LTE core.

Please note the audio glitches you hear are on the recording and not due to your system

Joe makes the point that the 5G can run on ‘any’ frequency from 700MHz up and takes a look at the details. He also points out that there’s a lot of information in the press about 5G rollouts including by Telegeography

We next look at cRAN, vRAN and oRAN. cRAN (Cloud Radio Access Network) involves centralising control typically in the cloud. vRAN, Virtual RAN, allows you to choose who receives service from each tower allowing you to share a stadium’s-worth of subscribers or, say the people in a traffic jam, amongst a number of cell towers, not just the one which is closest to them or gives them the best reception. OpenRAN, such as the one just launched in Reading, UK which allows interoperability with open source software and the use of software defined radio.

MIMO is the next topic covered. Joe explains this isn’t new, but it is an important part of 5G. MIMO stands for Mulitple In, Multiple Out which is the ability to use multiple antennae at both ends to deal with the multi-path reflections on the received signal. In the last part of the talk, Joe speaks about mapping 5G deployments, tools you can use to analyse 5G.

Watch now!
Download the presentation
Speakers

Joe Hess
Hess Communications

Video: Is Too Much Choice No Choice At All? What Consumers Want In The Era Of Peak TV

Posted on 7th August 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The number of streaming services continues to expand are we going back to the future with too much choice, just like cable TV packages with a thousand channels? Discovery will launch a direct-to-consumer service imminently and ViacomCBS Nordics are launching a new SVOD service to global markets, just to cite two examples of new launches after Disney+ proved that with the right brand and content, it’s not too difficult quickly rack up tens of millions of subscribers globally.

This panel from Streaming Media Connect discusses navigating the world of multiple streaming services and finding what you want starting with a look at the programmes that US respondents to an annual survey value most.
They discuss the average number of streaming subscriptions today in different demographics and how each of them expects this to change in the future with some suggesting an average of around 3, some more so. This reveals the question of whether YouTube is AVOD or SVOD, one service or millions. People will come back to a service depending on ‘how deep and hot often [it’s] refreshed’.

Ali Hodjat from Intertrust, highlights a 16% increase in content DRM licence delivery during the pandemic. Keeping DRM licences delivery smooth is essential for low-latency streaming. There has been a COVID-related boost in viewing, so Matt Rivet raises the question of whether this will reduce again. Sherry Brennan suggests it will go down, but the market share shifts which have happened are likely to remain, sports watching excepted. The reason for this is that the pandemic is likely to have prompted people to try new things, and many will find these suit them.

It’s estimated that 17% of video traffic is streaming of pirated material. Though many torrents are legal, there has been an increase in torrent downloads during the lockdowns. Ali and Matt discuss the question of whether discovery is a barrier to people accessing video legally. For those that have many services, ‘choice paralysis’ is a thing and does hamper selecting something to watch, particularly when not alone. Whilst getting consensus across multiple people is always difficult, it’s made no shorter when there are 200 options across 3 services. The panel starts with the principle that it’s “too hard to search” and discusses recommendation engines and the difficulty of tracking who’s watching.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Sarah Lyons Senior Vice President, Product Experience HBO MAX / WarnerMedia
	Randa Minkarah President, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder, Resonance AI
	Sherry Brennan Senior Media Consultant
	Ali Hodjat Directory of Product Marketing Intertrust
	Moderator: Matthew Rivet Director, Altman Solon

Video: Audio Metadata over IP

Posted on 6th August 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Next-Generation Audio is gradually becoming this generation’s audio as new technologies seep into the mainstream. Dolby Atmos is one example of a technology which is being added to more and more services and which goes way beyond stereo and even 5.1 surround sound. But these technologies don’t just rely on audio, they need data, too to allow the decoders to understand the sound so they can apply the needed processing. It’s essential that this data, called metadata, keeps in step with the audio and, indeed, that it gets there in the first place.

Dolby have long used metadata along with surround sound to maintain the context in which the recording was mastered. There’s no way for the receiver to know what maximum audio level the recording was mixed to without being told, for instance. With NGA, the metadata needed can be much more complex. With Dolby Atmos, for example, the audio objects need position information along with the mastering information needed for surround sound.

Kent Terry from Dolby laboratories joins us to discuss the methods, both current and future, that we can use to convey metadata from point to point in the broadcast chain. He starts by looking at the tried and trusted methods of carrying data within the audio of SDI. This is the way that Dolby E and Dolby D are carried, as data within what appears to be an AES 3 stream. There are two SMPTE standards for this in a sample-accurate fashion, ST 2109 and ST 2116.

SMPTE 2109 allows for metadata to be carried over an AES 3 channel using SMPTE ST 337, 337 being the standard which defines how to put compressed audio over AES 3 which would normally expect PCM audio data. This allows for any metadata at all to be carried. SMPTE ST 2116, similarly, defines metadata transport over AES3 but specifically for ITU-R BS.2125 and BS.2076 which define how to carry the Audio Definition Model.

The motivation for these standards is to enable live workflows which don’t have a great way of delivering live metadata. There are a few types of metadata which are worth considering. Static metadata, which doesn’t change during the programme such as the number of channels or the sample rate. Dynamic metadata such as spacial location and dialogue levels. And importantly optional metadata and required metadata, the latter being essential for the functioning of the technology.

Kent says that live productions are held back in their choice of NGA technologies by the limitations of metadata carriage and this is one reason that work is being done in the IP space to create similar standards for all-IP programme production.

For IP there are two approaches. The first is to define a way to send metadata separately to the AES67 audio which is found within SMPTE ST 2110-30, which is done with the new AES standard AES-X242. The other way being developed is using SMPTE 2110-41 which allows for any metadata (not solely ST 292) to be carried in a time-synchronised way with the other 2110 essences. Both of these methods, Kent explains are actively being developed and are open to input from users.

Watch now!
Speaker

Kent Terry
Snr. Manager, Sound Technology, Office of the CTO,
Dolby Laboratories

Video: Getting Your Virtual Hands On RIST

Posted on 5th August 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

RIST is one of a number of error correction protocols that provide backwards error correction. These are commonly used to transport media streams into content providers but are increasingly finding use in other parts of the broadcast workflow including making production feeds, such as multiviewers and autocues available to staff at internet-connected locations, such as the home.

The RIST protocol (Reliable Internet Stream Protocol) is being created by a working group in the VSF (Video Services Forum) to provide an open and interoperable specification, available for the whole industry to adopt. This article provides a brief summary, whereas this talk from FOSDEM20 goes into some detail.

We’re led through the topic by Sergio Ammirata, CTO of DVEO who are members of the RIST Forum and collaborating to make the protocol. What’s remarkable about RIST is that several companies which have created their own error-correcting streaming protocols such as DVEO’s Dozer, which Sergio created, have joined together to share their experience and best practices.

Press play to watch:

Sergio starts by explaining why RIST is based on UDP – a topic explored further in this article about RIST, SRT and QUIC – and moves on to explaining how it works through ‘NACK’ messages, also known as ‘Negative Acknowledgement’ messages.

We hear next about the principles of RIST, of which the main one is interoperability. There are two profiles, simple and main. Sergio outlines the Simple profile which provides RTP and error correction, channel bonding. There is also the Main profile, which has been published as VSF TR-06-2. This includes encryption, NULL packet removal, FEC and GRE tunnelling. RIST uses a tunnel to multiplex many feeds into one stream. Using Cisco’s Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE), RIST can bring together multiple RIST streams and other arbitrary data streams into one tunnel. The idea of a tunnel is to hide complexity from the network infrastructure.

Tunnelling allows for bidirectional data flow under one connection. This means you can create your tunnel in one direction and send data in the opposite direction. This gets around many firewall problems since you can create your tunnel in the direction which is easiest to achieve without having to worry about the direction of dataflow. Setting up GRE tunnels is outside of the scope of RIST.

Sergio finishes by introducing librist, demo applications and answerin questions from the audience.

Watch now!
Speaker