The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: It’s not football. It’s LaLiga: How Spain’s top-flight uses graphics and data for fan engagement

Posted on 19th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Commentary is transformative to any sport, allowing casual viewers to understand the significance of what happens in the game along with dyed-in-the-wool fans who also benefit from the facts and figures brought up by the commentators. Increasingly, commentators have had facts and figures at their fingertips to seamlessly weave into the narrative. Now, the amount of data is such that companies like LaLiga are looking for other ways to enhance the viewing experience by inserting stats into the on-screen graphics.

Roger Brosel Head of Content & Programming at LaLiga explains that Mediacoach is a Spanish company that provides match analysis tools to teams and their coaches. But just as Formula One’s stats which are collected to help team engineers are now used on-screen in the broadcast, LaLiga realised they could be using this data during the live game.

WTVision’s Wilem van Breukelen discusses how they integrated Mediacoach data so they could show stats on people and show the lineup. When there’s a corner, they can show where, statistically speaking, the ball may end up and similar facts.

Roger continues that the value for LaLiga in being able to show these stats is to build on the entertainment proposition. Adding an informative layer to the game adds to the enjoyment helping people of all levels learn more about the game and the players; it helps editorially telling the story of the game.

Wilem explains that they are easily able to take LSM clips from operators and edit them during the game adding factual graphics on top. These can be immediately re-used or offered on to broadcasters to incorporate into their coverage or social media feeds. After the broadcasters’ exclusivity window, LaLiga can then publish those, or similar feeds during the week as part of their push to keep LaLiga relevant when there are no games and extending the interest in the weekend’s activities. Doing this has shown a clear increase in social media engagement.

It’s important, cautions Roger, to keep a balance between on-screen stats and the pure sport underneath whose story can be overwhelmed by distracting viewers with too many numbers. This is why the graphics team also have editorial understanding and know the game of football well.

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Speakers

	Roger Brosel Head of Content and Programming, LaLiga
	Willem van Breukelen LaLiga Graphics Lead wTVision

Video: JPEG XS by intoPIX

Posted on 18th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Many of the bottlenecks in processing video today are related to bandwidth but most codecs that solve this problem require a lot of compute power and/or add a lot of latency. For those that wish to work with high-quality video such as within cameras and in TV studios, what’s really needed is a ‘zero’ latency codec that maintains lossless video but drops the data rate from gigabits to megabits. This is what JPEG XS does and Jean-Baptiste Lorent joined the NVIDIA GTC21 conference to explain why this is so powerful.

Created by intoPIX who are not only active in compression intellectual property but also within standards bodies such as JPEG, MPEG, ISO, SMPTE and others, JPEG XS is one of the latest technologies to come to market from the company. Lorent explains that it’s designed both to live inside equipment compressing video as it moves between parts of a device such as a phone where it would enable higher resolutions to be used and minimise energy use, and to drive down bandwidths between equipment in media workflows. We’ve featured case studies of JPEG XS in broadcast workflows previously.

JPEG XS prioritisation of quality & latency over compression. Source: intoPIX

The XS in JPEG XS stands for Xtra Small, Xtra Speed. And this underlines the important part of the technology which looks at compression in a different way to MPEG, AV1 and similar codecs. As discussed in
this interview the codec market is maturing and exploiting other benefits rather than pure bitrate. Nowadays, we need codecs that make life easy for AI/ML algorithms to quickly access video, we need low-complexity codecs for embedded devices like old set-top boxes and new embedded devices like body cams. We also need ulta-low delay codecs, with an encode delay in the microseconds, not milliseconds so that even multiple encodes seem instantaneous. JPEG XS is unique in delivering the latter.

With visually lossless results at compression levels down to 20:1, JPEG XS is expected to be used by most at 10:1 at which point it can render uncompressed HD 1080i at around 200Mbps, down from 1.5Gbps or can bring 76Gbps down to 5Gbps or less. Lorent explains that the maths in the algorithm has low complexity and is highly paralellisable which is a key benefit in modern CPUs which have many cores. Moreover, important for implementation in GPUs and FPGAs, it doesn’t need external memory and is low on logic.

The talk finishes with Lorent highlighting that JPEG XS has been created flexibly to be agnostic to colour space, chroma subsampling, bit depths, resolution and more. It’s also been standardised to be carried in SMPTE ST 2110-22, under ISO IEC 21122, carriage over RTP, in an MPEG TS and in the file domain as MXF, HEIF, JXS and MP4 (in ISO BMFF).

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Speakers

Jean-Baptiste Lorent
Director Marketing & Sales
intoPIX

Video: TV moving to all IP – Dream or Reality?

Posted on 17th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As IP continues to infiltrate all aspects of the broadcast industry, this panel asks how close we are to all-IP TV delivery, what that would actually mean and how what technologies exist to get us there. As we’ve seen in contribution and production, IP brings with it benefits to those that embrace it, but not all of those benefits apply to every business so this panel considers where the real value actually lies.

Pedro Bandeira from Deutsche Telekom, Rob Suero from RDK, Xavier Leclercq from Broadpeak joins Wyplay’s Dominique Feral in this discussion moderated by Andreas Waltenspiel. The discussion starts with the motivations to move to IP with Pedro explaining that the services he delivers are viewed by the viewers alongside the big internet-delivered services like Netflix. As such, he needs access to the same technologies and sees a lot of innovation in that sphere. This is why he’s advocating a move away from multicast delivery of video to unicast; delivering with exactly the same technologies the giants are using.

For Pedro, streaming technology is an enabler, not a differentiator. As the foundation of his service, he wants it to be rock solid so feels the choice of partners to provide the technology is very important as he intends to benefit from incremental improvements as the base technologies improve. Part of the flexibility that unicast technologies provide, says Pedro, is removing the baggage of older technologies. He sees these as a burden when he wants the same service and quality of experience on devices as well as STBs.

Rob from Broadpeak feels that Multicast, or specifically Multicast-ABR is a really interesting technology because of the scalability and network efficiency which Pedro is willing to sacrifice to access other streaming technologies. Multicast ABR, however, delivers to the home as multicast so the impact on the telco network is minimised and only in the home is the service translated into a standard stream like HLS or DASH. In principle this allows companies like Deutsche Telekom to use the technologies he’s interested in whilst also delivering with network efficiency.

“A great technology for transitioning” is Pedro’s view of ABR Multicast. If we had the bandwidth, he feels no one would bother using it. However, he does agree that it’s useful in those markets whether the infrastructure can’t support a pure unicast offering and he does see ABR Multicast being part of his delivery strategy. He would prefer to avoid it as it requires home gateways and vendor support as well as being another point of failure. With 50 million homes in Europe on IPTV, there are plenty of services to transition.

The conversation then turns to RDK, the generically titled Reference Development Kit which is the name of an open source project, Rob explains, which abstracts the creation of new OTT apps and services from the underlying vendor equipment meaning you don’t have to develop software for each and every device. Removing the ties to OEMs keeps costs down for operators and allows them to be more agile. Dominique explains how writing with RDK may be free, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy and points to an experience where Wyplay shaved 6 seconds of latency off a customer’s service by optimising the way the app was written. At the end of the day, Dominique sees the route to a good, low-latency service as a fight with all aspects of the system including the encoder, packaging protocol, CDN, DRM latency and much more. This means optimising RDK is just part of a wide package of services that companies like Wyplay can offer.

The panel concludes by talking about learning RDK, upskilling colleagues, bringing them along on the journey to all-IP and offering advice to those embarking on projects.

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Speakers

	Pedro Bandeira VP Product & New Business, Europe, Deutsche Telekom
	Rob Suero Head of Technology, RDK
	Dominique Feral Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Wyplay
	Xavier Leclercq Head of Business Development, Broadpeak
	Moderator: Andreas Waltenspiel Founder & GM, Waltenspiel Management Consulting

Video: Implementing standards-based Targeted Advertising on broadcast television

Posted on 14th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Last month, we featured DVB’s Targeted Advertising solution called DVB-TA. In that article, we saw the motivations to move to targeted advertising and how it was in use in Spain’s Artresmedia. Today’s video follows on from that introduction to DVB-TA with a range of speakers talking about implementation methods, interoperability and benefits to standardisation.

DVB’s Emily Dubs introduces the presenters starting with Nicolas Guyot from ENENSYS who speaks on the subject of the media value chain and TV’s reach. In Europe, the weekly reach of broadcast TV is still high at around 77% meaning the medium has still got strength. In terms of getting targeted ads on there, however, only a subset of devices can be used. In France, 36% of homes have a smart TV. Whilst this is a minority, it still equates to ten million TV sets. We hear about how France TV trialled targeted advertising for HbbTV where they collected consent and data which they used to segment people into four categories. The categories were finance, health, family and weather which they used to place ads in front of the viewer. With a view to scaling this out, the view was that standardisation was important to ensure ad placement was well understood by all equipment as well as measurement metrics.

Angelo Pettazzi from Mediaset makes a case next for standardisation. For Mediaset, moving to Targeted Advertising is a strategic move and mirrors the points made in the first video focusing on the need to keep TV advertising in line with what advertisers are looking for. In short, TA will maintain the relative value of their advertising slots. There are other benefits, however, such as more readily opening up advertising slots to local businesses and SMEs by providing availability of lower-cost slots.

Standards feature heavily for Mediaset. They have 4 million HbbTVs active monthly on their platform which simply wouldn’t have been possible without the HbbTV 2.0 standard in the first place. Using these devices they had previously tried a proprietary TA technology based on HTML5 but they found it didn’t always work well and the switching time could vary. They see the TA spec as a move towards more confidence in products along with the ability to substitute only single ads, a whole contiguous block or multiple substitutions in the same break.

Joe Winograd from Verance talks next about the use of Watermarking for targeted advertising. Advert timing and other signalling are usually carried separately to the media as SCTE-104, -25 or -224. However, there are times when a distribution chain is not yet compatible with this separate signalling. Linear advert substitution is usually done on the device, though, so by embedding this same signalling information within the audio and/or video feeds themselves, the receiving box is able to decode the embedded data and insert the ads as desired. Modifying video/audio data to carry messages is called watermarking and usually refers to the practice of marking a feed to uniquely identify it for the purposes of crime prevention. This method, however, is designed to carry dynamic data and is defined by the ATSC un their standards A/334, A/335 and A/336.

Pascal Jezequel from Harmonic speaks next about Dynamic Ad insertion interoperability. His main point is that if we’re to be inserting ads in a world of linear and OTT and streaming we should have one standard which covers them all. We need a detailed standard that allows precise, frame-accurate timing with smooth transitions. DVB-TA and HbbTV-TA initially focussed only on broadcast but is now being extended to cover streaming services provided over broadband. This interoperability will be a boost for operators and broadcasters.

Last in the video is Unified Streaming’s Rufael Mekuria who briefly explains the work that DVB is doing within the DBB-TA work but also within DVB-DASH. Having DVB involved helps with liaisons which is proving critical in ensuring that SCTE-35 is compatible with DVB-DASH. This work is in progress. Additionally, DVB is working with MPEG on CMAF and DVB is also liaising with DASH-IF.

The panel ends with a Q&A.

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Speakers

	Nicolas Guyot Product Manager, ENENSYS Technologies
	Dror Mangel Product Manager, Viaccess-Orca
	Angelo Pettazzi Consultant, Mediaset Group
	Joe Winograd CTO, Verance
	Pascal Jezequel DTV Global Solution Architect, Harmonic
	Rufael Mekuria Head of Reasearch & Stanardisation, Unified Streaming
	Emily Dubs Head of Technology, DVB Project

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