Video: A Standard for Video QoE Metrics

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

A standard in progress for quality of experience networks, rebufereing time etc. Under the CTA standards body wanting to create a standard around these metrics. The goal of the group is to come up with a standard set of player events, metrics & terminology around QoE streaming. Concurrent viewers, isn’t that easy to define? If the user is paused, are they concurrently viewing the video? Buffer underruns is called rebuffering, stalling, waiting. Intentionally focussing on what the viewers actually see and experience. QoS is a measurement of how well the platform is performing, not necessarily the same as what they are experiencing.

The standard has ideas of different levels. There are player properties and events which are standardised ways of signalling that certain things are happening. Also Session Metrics are defined which then can feed into Aggregate Metrics. The first set of metrics include things such as playback failure percentage, average playback stalled rate, average startup time and playback rate with the aim of setting up a baseline and to start to get feedback from companies as they implement these, seemingly simple, metrics.

This first release can be found on github.

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Speaker

Steve Heffernan Steve Heffernan
Co-Founder, Head of Product,
Mux

Video: Secrets of implementing successful technology projects

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

We all know projects can spiral out of control and technology projects where small technical issues can become critical path blockers as much as the many stakeholders who have to be brought along for the ride are prime candidates for delays, overruns and even failure.

In this IBC session, project leaders are brought together to share what they’ve learnt from their disasters and successes. Moderator, Robert Ambrose, kicks things off asking Jim Dobel what he got out of his involvement in ‘the highest profile project disaster in the industry’, referring, of course, to the BBC DMI Project

DAZN’s Caroline Ewerton explains the rationale for her successfully delivered recent project deploying a virtual production facility for the streaming giant. TF1 follows on outlining their current raft of transformational projects which touch nearly all parts of the broadcast chain, concluding that people and expertise are the main bottlenecks whereby one person holds up a project because they are the only people who know the needed information.

Jim reveals that a lot of his work now is being done in the boardroom helping companies understand their desires to work in an agile way, both in terms of Agile principles and being able to adapt and change quickly. This speed of working, Caroline asserts, focusses the mind on KPI’s first and foremost rather than them being an secondary part of a project.

Involving the users as part of the project is key to efficiency, according to Thomas Jacques. TF1 includes a strong training programme as part of the change process to ensure that all staff have full information about how their work will change at the same time as having the opportunity to upskill themselves too. Jim agrees with this approach and endorses sharing facts not optimism with staff as part of a project.

The panel then picks up on the difference between projects which solve day-to-day projects which often come from visits to shows like IBC where someone can find a solution to a problem. But for wide-scale transformational projects in broadcasters, this needs to be led from the top with Thomas underlining that in any project, this is very helpful.

The session comes to a close discussing the need to have technology at the heart of projects, leading projects with managed service providers, convincing people to believe in the project and be part of the change.

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Speakers

Caroline Ewerton Caroline Ewerton
Head of Operational Delivery,
DAZN
Jim Dobel Jim Dobel
Partner,
Q5
Thomas Jacques Thomas Jacques
Chief Technology Officer,
TF1 le Groupe
Robert Ambrose Robert Ambrose
Managing Consultant,
High Green Media

Video: Specification of Live Media Ingest

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

“Standardisation is more than just a player format”. There’s so much to a streaming service than the video, a whole ecosystem needs to work together. In this talk from Comcast’s Mile High Video 2019, we see how different parts of the ecosystem are being standardised for live ingest.

RTMP and Smooth streaming are being phased out – without proper support for HEVC, VVC, HDR etc. they are losing relevance as well as, in the case of RTMP, support from the format itself. Indeed it’s clear that fragmented MP4 (fMP4) and CMAF are taking hold in their place so it makes sense for a new ingest standard to coalesce around these formats.

Rufael Mekuria from Unified streaming explains this effort to create a spec around live media ingest that is happening as part of MPEG DASH-IF. The work itself started at the end of 2017 with the aim of publishing summer 2019 supporting CMAF and DASH/HLS interfaces.

Rufael explains CMAF ingest used HTTP post to move each media stream to the origin packager. The tracks are separated into video, audio, timed text, subtitle and timed metadata. They are all transferred on separate tracks and is compatible with future codecs. He also covers security and timed text before covering DASH/HLS ingest which can also contain CMAF because HLS contains the capability to contain CMAF.

Reference software is available along with the <a href=”http://”https://dashif-documents.azurewebsites.net/Ingest/master/DASH-IF-Ingest.pdf” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>specification.

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Speaker

Rufael Mekuria Rufael Mekuria
Head of Research & Standardisation,
Unified Streaming

Video: Recent trends in live cloud video transcoding using FPGA acceleration

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

FPGAs are flexible, reprogrammable chips which can do certain tasks faster than CPUs, for example, video encoding and other data-intensive tasks. Once the domain of expensive hardware broadcast appliances, FPGAs are now available in the cloud allowing for cheaper, more flexible encoding.

In fact, according to NGCodec founder Oliver Gunasekara, video transcoding makes up a large percentage of cloud work loads and this increasing year on year. The demand for more video and the demand for more efficiently-compressed video both push up the encoding requirements. HEVC and AV1 both need much more encoding power than AVC, but the reduced bitrate can be worth it as long as the transcoding is quick enough and the right cost.

Oliver looks at the likely future adoption of new codecs is likely to playout which will directly feed into the quality of experience: start-up time, visual quality, buffering are all helped by reduced bitrate requirements.

It’s worth looking at the differences and benefits of CPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. The talk examines the CPU-time needed to encode HEVC showing the difficulty in getting real-time frame rates and the downsides of software encoding. It may not be a surprise that NGCodec was acquired by FPGA manufacturer Xilinx earlier in 2019. Oliver shows us the roadmap, as of June 2019, of the codecs, VQ iterations and encoding densities planned.

The talk finishes with a variety of questions like the applicability of Machine Learning on encoding such as scene detection and upscaling algorithms, the applicability of C++ to Verilog conversion, the need for a CPU for supporting tasks.

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Speakers

Former CEO, founder & president, NGCodec
Oliver is now an independent consultant.

Oliver Gunasekara Oliver Gunasekara