The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Remote Production In Pajamas

Posted on 25th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Remote production (AKA REMIs) has been discussed for a long time – but what’s practical today? Teradek, Brandlive and Vimond share their experiences making it work.

The main benefit of remote production is reducing costs by keeping staff at base instead of sending them to the event. Switching video, adding graphics and publishing are all possible in the cloud, but how practical this all is and which people stay behind very much depend on the company; their quality standards, their workflows, complexity of the programme etc.

This panel at the Streaming Media East looks at when remote production is appropriate, how much does a service provider needs to be present, redundancy, the role of standards and is a wide ranging discussion on the topic.

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Speakers

	Jon Landman VP of Sales, Teradek
	Megan Wagoner VP of Sales, Vimond
	Mark Adams SVP Sales & Marketing, Brandlive
	Kevin McCarthy Moderator Director of Production, VideoLink LLC

Video: User-Generated HDR is Still Too Hard

Posted on 24th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

HDR and wide colour gamuts are difficult enough in professional settings – how can YouTube get it right with user-generated content?

Steven Robertson from Google explains the difficulties that YouTube has faced in dealing with HDR in both its original productions but also in terms of user generated content (UGC). These difficulties stem from the Dolby PQ way of looking at the world with fixed brightnesses and the ability to go all the way up to 10,000 nits of brightness and also from the world of wider colour gamuts with Display P3 and BT.2020 (WCG).

Viewing conditions have been a challenge right from the beginning of TV but ever more so now with screens of many different shapes and sizes being available with very varied abilities to show brightness and colour. Steven spends some time discussing the difficulty of finding a display suitable for colour grading and previewing your work on – particularly for individual users who are without a large production budget.

Interestingly, we then see that one of the biggest difficulties is in visual perception which makes colours you see after having seen bad colours look much better. HDR can deliver extremely bright and extremely wrong colours. Steven shows real examples from YouTube of where the brain has been tricked into thinking colour and brightness are correct but they clearly are not.

Whilst it’s long been known that HDR and WCG are inextricably linked with human vision, this is a great insight into tackling this at scale and the research that has gone on to bring this under automated control.

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Free registration required

This talk is from Streaming Tech Sweden, an annual conference run by Eyevinn Technology. Videos from the event are available to paid attendees but are released free of charge after several months. As with all videos on The Broadcast Knowledge, this is available free of charge after registering on the site.

Speaker

Steven Robertson
Software Engineer, YouTube Player Infrastructure
Google

Video: Monitoring and Measuring IP Media Networks

Posted on 23rd July 2019 by Adam K

The transition from point-to-point SDI based infrastructure to IP essence flows requires a very different approach to fault-finding. Although new IP diagnostic tools are already available on the market, engineers need combined broadcast and IT knowledge to fully understand the flow of video, audio and data across the switching fabric – including packet jitter, latency, and buffer over/underflows causing dropped packets.

In this video Michael Waidson from Tektronix presents methodologies involved in monitoring IP media networks. The following topics are covered:

Strategies for choosing IP Address, Port Number and Payload Type for easier identification of the streams
Troubleshooting basics (fibres and SFPs types, checking switch ports)
PTP synchronisation
Checking syntax of decoded streams (Layer 5 RTP, Marker Bit, Payload Type, Sequence Number, Timestamp)
Packet transmission (multiple paths, out of order packets in receiver, jitter, PIT Histogram)
Timing (reference clock, RTP timestamps, checking PTP lock, PTP and RTP offset, transmission traffic shape models)

You can download the slides here.

Speaker

Michael Waidson
Application Engineer
Tektronix

Video: Stopping Geolocation Fraud Via “Rented” Residential IPs to Protect Territorial Content

Posted on 22nd July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Securing streams is a cat-and-mouse game and this is the latest move to keep content secure.

In order to maximise returns on content, the right to show the content is usually limited to certain geographies and sometimes streaming rights are sold separate to broadcast rights. This means it’s common to geo-lock streaming services whereby each IP address requesting content is checked against a database to see in which country that computer is located. This system isn’t perfect, but it tends to work fairly well.

The key, then, for people wanting to access content from outside the geography is to use someone else’s IP. You can do this by renting time on a computer such as in AWS, Digital Ocean or other similar providers where you can select in which country the computer you are using is located. However the IP addresses owned by these providers are also in the databases and are often blocked from access.

The determined viewer, therefore, needs a VPN which uses residential addresses from within that location. The OTT providers can’t block legitimate IP addresses, therefore access will be given. Access is provided to these addresses by VPNs which offer free use of their service in exchange for them being able to route traffic via your computer.

Detecting this kind of use is difficult, and is what Artem Lalaiants discusses in this talk from SMPTE 2018.

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Speaker