The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: What’s New in NMOS? – A Tutorial on the Latest in Video over IP Control and Security

Posted on 21st October 2019 by Adam K

The Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) have been developed to provide a control and management layer along side the SMPTE ST 2110 transport layer. The idea behind NMOS was to deliver an open specification to provide the software layers that abstract a lot of complexities of ST 2110 and make it easy to interface with any control system.

The NMOS family of specifications began with projects for Discovery & Registration, Device Connection Management and Network Control, but has grown to include many other important subjects such as Event & Tally, Audio Channel Mapping and Interoperable Security.

In this video, Jed Deame discusses the latest advancements including IS-08, IS-09, BCP-002, BCP-003 and IS-10. These additions allows NMOS to surpass the level of control provided in SDI while also adding a layer of security.

The following Interface Specifications and Best Current Practices are presented:

IS-04 (Registration and Discovery) – new features: support for GPI over Ethernet (IS-07) and authorisation signalling for security layers BCP-003-02
IS-05 (Connection Management) – new features: MQ Telemetry Transport and WebSocket Transport, support for supplementary externally defined parameters
IS-08 (Audio Mapping) – audio routing / shuffling facility
IS-09 (System Resources) – System ID, server priority, security with HTTPS support, advertisement of system resources such as RDS (Registration and Discovery Server)
BCP-002 (Grouping) – uses tag resources in IS-04 in order to achieve a natural groups of senders and receivers (e.g. to tie audio, video and metadata)
BCP-003-01 (Security) – uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) in order to encrypt communications between API servers and their clients
BCP-003-02 (Security) – covers client authorization for the NMOS APIs
IS-10 (Authorisation API) – accompanies the BCP-003-02 specification to restrict what users are authorized to change in an NMOS system (core technologies: PKI, HTTPS, REST, JSON, Oauth 2.0 and JWT)

The presentation finishes with the customer case study – secure KVM all over an IP network.

You can download the slides from here.

Watch now!

You might also be interested in the following videos we have published on The Broadcast Knowledge:

Speaker

Jed Deame
CEO
Nextera Video

Webinar: Creating brand loyalty and new TV revenues with next-generation voice control

Posted on 18th October 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With smart speakers, mobile phones and computers all sporting voice-controlled interfaces, it’s no surprise that smart TVs, Apple TVs and others can be voice controlled. This webinar looks at how much consumers expect control and what they expect.

Getting voice right, can be a really big differentiator in terms of enjoyment and confidence of a service and the speakers discuss how that can enhance retention and growth.

As seen with a recent update to Apple’s HomePod which allows it to recognise who’s speaking, voice can be used for personalisation, security and privacy when carefully applied to the service.

The webinar will also discuss fraud reduction and ecommerce opportunities.

Register now

Speakers

	Sebastian Reeve Director, EMEA, Intelligent Engagement Nuance Communications
	Pieter Vervoort VP Entertainment Products, Liberty Global
	Daniel Whaley Senior Architect, Product (Voice & AI) BBC

Video: DASH Updates

Posted on 17th October 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

MPEG DASH is a standardised method for encapsulating media for streaming similar to Apple’s HLS. Based on TCP, MPEG DASH is a widely compatible way of streaming video and other media over the internet.

MPEG DASH is now on its 3rd edition, its first standard being in 2011. So this talk starts by explaining what’s new as of July 2019 in this edition. Furthermore, there are amendments already worked on which are soon to add more features.

Iraj Sodagar explains Service Descriptors which will be coming that allow the server to encapsulate metadata for the player which describes how the publisher intended to show the media. Maximum and minimum latency and quality is specified. for instance. The talk explains how these are used and why they are useful.

Another powerful metadata feature is the Initialization Set, Group and Presentation which gives the decoder a ‘heads up’ on what the next media will need in terms of playback. This allows the player to politely decline to play the media if it can’t display it. For instance, if a decoder doesn’t supply AV1, this can be identified before needing to attempt a decode or download a chunk.

Iraj then explains what will be in the 4th edition including the above, signalling leap seconds and much more. This should be published over the next few months.

Amendement 1 is working towards a more accurate timing model of events and defining a specific DASH profile for CMAF (the low-latency streaming technology based on DASH) which Iraj explains in detail.

Finishing off with session based DASH operations, a look over the DASH workplan/roadmap, ad insertion, event and timed metadata processing, this is a great, detailed look at the DASH of today and of 2020.

Watch now!
Speaker

Iraj Sodagar
Independant Consultant

Video: Digital transformation of Media and Entertainment businesses

Posted on 16th October 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Many people have little free time so there is hot competition amongst entertainment services for those precious minutes.

Red Bee Media’s Steve Russell explains how they have moved to a service based model for their platform which allows a single platform to be used by many customers. This allows them to focus on a single platform, making sure this can quickly iterate and provide new services the moment their customers think of them.

Simon Eldridge from SDVI tells us about he’s bringing manufacturing methodologies to the media industry allowing companies to work much more efficiently and Bill Gash talks about about how pay TV, mobile and Telco operators are consolidating to have the power to push back against the internet giants by combining customer attention, spending power and quality of customer experience.

The panel conversation starts discussing the ‘dark’ episode of The Game of Thrones which led to many complaints when viewers watched the episode in environments and on displays which didn’t show enough contrast – unlike the monitors in the grading suite – leading to people being unable to see what’s happening in parts of the episode. Quality of experience, says Bill Gash, is very difficult and the broadness of what constitutes quality of experience can be big challenge for producers who are new to directly delivering to the viewer.

Adapt and evolve is the ‘product management’ approach to launching services, explains Steve Russell, which bucks the trend of launching services which used to take a lot of Capex and a long project to set up. The more recent priorities are speed to market and constant iterations to improve the service.

iflix is a great example of an innovative service which has managed to achieve scale, from 50,000 to, now, 25 million subscribers in less than 3 years. Bill Gash gives this and other examples such as Formula 1, which show the possibilities of growing into and entering this larger market. This shows it’s not just about large players hitting back against the internet giants, but also a recognition that innovating can allow you to take those subs and those ‘minutes of attention’ away from other services.

The panel, from the Content Everywhere Hub, finishes by discussing the importance of adapting to the countries you’re operating it and by identifying the key advice for anyone developing their service in this market.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Steve Russell Head of Media Management & OTT Portfolio, Red Bee
	Tim Mulligan Executive Vice President and Research Director MIDiA Research
	Simon Eldridge Chief Product Officer, SDVI
	Bill Gash EMEA Sales Director CSG Ascendon

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