Webinar Archives – Page 2 of 54 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Webinar: Broadcaster VOD: Delivering the next-generation of catch-up viewing

Posted on 28th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With Amazon, Netflix and so many other VOD services available, broadcasters like the BBC and Discovery are investing a lot in their own VOD services, known as Broadcaster VOD (BVOD) in order to maintain relevance, audiences and revenue.

Commercial broadcasters such as Sky, ITV and Channel 4 are trying hard to attract advertisers and “have all launched new ad formats, struck deals with ad tech vendors to build marketplaces and set up programmatic teams to manage them” according to a report from digiday.com. As such this means that the battle for advertisers wallets is moving more towards VOD from linear.

Date: Thursday 30 January, 14:00 GMT / 9 a.m. ET

With this in mind, IBC365 will discuss the business models, platforms and strategies being used by BVOD platforms. They will look at the BBC’s move to build a deep content library of free-to-view box sets, and to the importance of data, personalisation and addressable advertising models.

Further more, this webinar will talk about the commercial and technical requirements to build a BVOD to a standard that’s going to stand on its own in this increasingly crowded, but well-funded marketplace.

	Richard Davidson-Houston Founder, Finally Found Ltd.
	Roma Kojima Senior Director OTT Video (CBC Gem), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
	Niels Baas Managing Director, NLZIET

Webinar: Securing Live Streams

Posted on 27th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Piracy in France cost €1.2bn in 2017 and worldwide the loss has been valued up to US$52 billion. Even if these numbers are inflated, over-counted or similar, it’s clear there is a lot of money at stake in online streaming. There are a number of ways of getting to protect your content, encryption, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and tokenisation are three key ones and this webinar will examine what works best in the real world.

All these technologies used together don’t always stop piracy 100%, but they can significantly impact the ease of pirating and the quality of the final material.

Date: Thursday January 30th – 10a.m. PT / 1p.m. / 18:00 GMT

It’s important to understand the difference between encryption and Digital Rights Management. In general DRM relies on encryption, whereby encryption is a way of making sure that decodable video only lands in the hands of people who have been given the encryption key. This means that people who are snooping on traffic between the video provider and consumer can’t see what the video is and can be accomplished in a similar way to secure web pages which are secured against eavesdroppers. The problem with encryption is, however, that it doesn’t intrinsically decide who is allowed to decode the video meaning anyone with the decryption key can video the content. Often this is fine, but if you want to run a pay-TV service, even ignoring content, it’s much better to target customer by customer who can video the video. And this is where DRM comes in.

DRM is multi-faceted and controls the way in which consumers can view/use the content as much as whether they can access it to start with. DRM, for instance, can determine that a display device can show the work, but a recorder is not allowed to make a recording. It can also determine access based on location. Another aspect of DRM is tracking in the form of insertion of watermarks and metadata which mean that if a work is pirated, there is a way to work back to the original subscriber to determine the source of the leak.

Tokenisation is a method in which the player requests access to the material and is passed a token, by means of a response from the server after it has checked if the player is allowed access. Because of the way this token is created, it is not possible for another player to use it to access the content which means that sharing a URI won’t allow another user access to the video. Without some form of access control, once one subscriber has received a URI to access the video, they could pass that to another user who could also then access it.

What’s the best way to use these technologies? What are the pros and cons and what are the other methods of securing media? These questions and more will be discussed in this Streaming Video Alliance webinar on January 30th.

	Peter Cossack Vice President Cybersecurity services, Irdeto
	Kei Foo Director of Advanced Video Engineering, Charter Communications
	Orly Amsalem Product Manager, AI/ML based video security and anti-piracy solutions , Synamedia
	Marvin Van Schalkwyk Senior Solutions Architect, FriendMTS
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Media Alliance

Webinar: ATSC 3.0 Signaling, Delivery, and Security Protocols

Posted on 20th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 is bringing IP delivery to terrestrial broadcast. Streaming data live over the air is no mean feat, but nevertheless can be achieved with standard protocols such as MPEG DASH. The difficulty is telling the other end what’s its receiving and making sure that security is maintained ensuring that no one can insert unintended media/data.

In the second of this webinar series from the IEEE BTS, Adam Goldberg digs deep into two standards which form part of ATSC 3.0 to explain how security, delivery and signalling are achieved. Like other recent standards, such as SMPTE’s 2022 and 2110, we see that we’re really dealing with a suite of documents. Starting from the root document A/300, there are currently twenty further documents describing the physical layer, as we learnt last week in the IEEE BTS webinar from Sony’s Luke Fay, management and protocol layer, application and presentation layer as well as the security layer. In this talk Adam, who is Chair of a group on ATSC 3.0 security and vice-chair one on Management and Protocols, explains what’s in the documents A/331 and A/360 which between them define signalling, delivery and security for ATSC 3.0.

Security in ATSC 3.0
One of the benefits of ATSC 3.0’s drive into IP and streaming is that it is able to base itself on widely developed and understood standards which are already in service in other industries. Security is no different, using the same base technology that secure websites use the world over to achieve security. Still colloquially known by its old name, SSL, the encrypted communication with websites has seen several generations since the world first saw ‘HTTPS’ in the address bar. TLS 1.2 and 1.3 are the encryption protocols used to secure and authenticate data within ATSC 3.0 along with X.509 cryptographic signatures.

Authentication vs Encryption
The importance of authentication alongside encryption is hard to overstate. Encryption allows the receiver to ensure that the data wasn’t changed during transport and gives assurance that no one else could have decoded a copy. It provides no assurance that the sender was actually the broadcaster. Certificates are the key to ensuring what’s called a ‘chain of trust’. The certificates, which are also cryptographically signed, match a stored list of ‘trusted parties’ which means that any data arriving can carry a certificate proving it did, indeed, come from the broadcaster or, in the case of apps, a trusted third party.

Signalling and Delivery
Telling the receiver what to expect and what it’s getting is a big topic and dealt with in many places with in the ATSC 3.0 suite. The Service List Table (SLT) provides the data needed for the receiver to get handle on what’s available very quickly which in turn points to the correct Service Layer Signaling (SLS) which, for a specific service, provides the detail needed to access the media components within including the languages available, captions, audio and emergency services.

ATSC 3.0 Receiver Protocol Stack

Media delivery is achieved with two technologies. ROUTE (Real-Time Object Delivery over Unidirectional Transport ) which is an evolution of FLUTE which the 3GPP specified to deliver MPEG DASH over LTE networks. and MMTP (Multimedia Multiplexing Transport Protocol) an MPEG standard which, like MPEG DASH is based on the container format ISO BMFF which we covered in a previous video here on The Broadcast Knowledge

Register now for this webinar to find out how this all connects together so that we can have safe, connected television displaying the right media at the right time from the right source!

Speaker

Adam Goldberg
Chair, ATSC 3.0 Specialist Group on ATSC 3.0 Security
Vice-chair, ATSC 3.0 Specialist Group on Management and Protocols
Director Technical Standards, Sony Electronics

Webinar: ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer and Data Link Layer Overview

Posted on 13th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 brings IP delivery to over-the-air TV marking a major change in delivery to the home. For the first time video, audio and other data is all delivered as network streams allowing services available to TV viewers at home to modernise and merge with online streaming services better matching the viewing habits of today. ATSC 3.0 deployments are starting in the USA and it has already been rolled out in South Korea for the XXIII Olympic Winter Games in 2018.

Whilst the move to IP is transformational, ATSC 3.0 delivers a whole slew of improvements to the ATSC standard for RF, bandwidth, Codecs and more. In this, the first of three webinars from the IEEE BTS focussing in on ATSC 3.0, we look at the physical layer with Luke Fay, Chair of the ATSC 3.0 group and also a Senior Manager of Technical Standards at Sony.

Click to register: Wednesday, 15th January, 2020. 11am ET / 16:00 GMT

What is the Physical Layer?
The physical layer refers to the method data gets from one place to another. In this case, we’re talking about transmission by air, RF. Whilst this isn’t, in some ways, as physical as a copper cable, we have to remember that, at a basic level, communication is about making a high voltage in place A change the voltage in place B. The message physically moves from A to B and the medium it uses and the way it manipulates that medium are what we refer to as the physical layer.

In this webinar, Luke will talk about System Discovery and Signalling, defined by document A/321 and the Physical Layer Protocol defined by A/322. Both freely available from the ATSC website. The webinar will finish with a Q&A. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the topics which will be covered.

Choice of modulation

ATSC 3.0 has chosen the COFDM modulation scheme over the previous 8VSB, currently used for first-generation ATSC broadcasts, to deliver data over the air from the transmitter. COFDM, stands for Coded Orthogonal Frequency Devision Multiplexing and has become the go-to modulation method for digital transmissions including for DAB, DAB+ and the DVB terrestrial, satellite and cable standards.

One of the reasons for its wide adoption is that COFDM has guard bands; times when the transmitter is guaranteed not to send any data. This allows the receiver some time to receive any data which comes in late due to multi-path reflections or any other reason. This means that for COFDM, you get better performance if you run a network of nearby transmitters on the same frequency – known as a Single Frequency Network (SFN). A transmitters signal from further away will arrive later, and if in the guard interval, will be used to re-inforce the directly received signal. This means that, counter-intuitively from analogue days, running an SFN actually helps improve reception.

Multiple operating points to match the business case
Another important feature of ATSC 3.0 at the physical layer is the ability to be able to choose the robustness of the signal and have multiple transmissions simultaneously using different levels of robustness. These multiple transmissions are called pipes. As many of us will be familiar with, when transmitting a high bandwidth, the signal can be fragile and easily corrupted by interference. Putting resilience into the signal uses up bandwidth either due using some of the capacity to put error checking and error recovery data in or just by slowing down the rate the signal is sent which, of course, means not as many bits can be sent in the same time window.

Because bandwidth and resilience are a balancing act with each one fighting against the other, it’s important for stations to be able to choose what’s right for them and their business case. Having a high robustness signalm for penetration indoors can be very useful for targeting reception on mobile devices and ATSC 3.0 can actually achieve reception when the signal is below the noise, i.e. a negative signal to noise ratio. A higher bandwidth service delivering UHD at around 20Mbps can be achieved, however, by using 64 instead of 16 QAM.

Luke Fay
Chairman, ATSC Technology Group 3,
Senior Manager Technical Standards, Sony Home Entertainment & Sound Products – America

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