Video: Broadcast Channel Origination as a Service: from Concept to Operational Implementation

Playout out entire channels from the cloud helps to decrease the number of ingress and egress points to/from the cloud is a general way of maximising the value of cloud workflows.

This talk from the 2018 SMPTE conference is a case study of putting PBS channel origination in the cloud. John McCoskey starts by explaining the motivations and context prompting this move to the cloud – not least of these was Discovery’s move putting nearly all its channels in the cloud globally.

Ron Clifton then takes us through the typical system diagram for a channel both the traditional system and how that changes when implemented in the cloud. He discusses the technical abilities of what they have built including additional benefits and then goes on to discuss the PoC.

An interesting slide is Ron’s comparison of Cloud Connectivity Options where he compares the pros and cons (cost, jitter, security etc.) of the various types of connectivity into the cloud. This shows the trade offs – effectively business decisions – that need to be made when deploying.

The Q&A covers reliability of public cloud internal networks, frame accurate switching, latency, ASTC gateway locations, geo-diversity, systems monitoring and others.

Watch now!

Speakers

John McCoskey John McCoskey
Former Industry Lead Executive,
Eagle Hill Consulting
Ron Clifton Ron Clifton
President & Founder,
CliftonGroup

Video: What is Happening with IMF?

IMF is an interchange format designed for post-production/studios versioning requirements. It reduces storage required for multi-version projects but also provides for a standard way of exchanging metadata between companies.

Annie Chang covers the history briefly of IMF showing what it was aiming to achieve. IMF has been standardised through SMPTE as ST 2067 and has gained traction within the industry hence the continued interest in extending the standard. As with all modern standards, this has been created to be extensible, so Annie gives details on what is being added to it and where these endeavours have got to.
 

Watch now!

Speaker

Annie Chang Annie Chang
VP, Creative Technologies,
Universal Pictures

Video: Live Closed Captioning and Subtitling in SMPTE 2110-40

The ST 2110-40 standard specifies the real-time, RTP transport of SMPTE ST 291-1 Ancillary Data packets. It allows to create IP essence flow carrying VANC data known from SDI (like AFD, closed captions or triggering), complementing the existing video and audio portions of the SMPTE ST 2110 suite.

In this video, Bill McLaughlin introduces 2110-40 and shows its advantages for closed captioning. With video, audio and ancillary data broken into separate essence flows, you no longer need full SDI bandwidth to process closed captioning and transcription can be done by subscribing to a single audio stream which bandwith is less than 1 Mbps. That allows for a very high processing density, with up to 100 channels of closed captioning in 1 RU server.

Another benefit is that a single ST 2110-40 multicast containing closed captioning can be associated with multiple videos (e.g. for two different networks or dirty and clean feeds), typically using NMOS connection management. This translates into additional bandwidth savings and lower cost, as you don’t need separate CC/Subtitling encoders working in SDI domain.

Test and measurment equipment for ST 2110-40 is still under developmnent. However, with date rates of 50-100 kbps per flow monitoring is very managable and you can use COTS equipment and generic packet analyser like Wireshark with dissector available on Github.

Speaker

Bill McLaughlin
VP Product Development
EEG Enterprises

Video: A Subjective Comparison of Broadcast and Unicast Transmission Impairments

Encoding at a high quality is only part of the equation for delivering a great experience to your viewers. When something goes wrong, the way viewers feel is just as important and then when it’s going right.

In this talk, Brahim Allan from British Telecom talks is through their experiment finding out how people felt about various different types of video impairment and the various sizes of screen now available on smart phones, tablets and, of course, TVs.

Brahim explains that they compared errors associated with broadcast and multicast delivery which appear as areas of extreme color or tearing of the image, with errors associated with Adaptive Bit Rate unicast, such as interruptions and quality variations. Interruptions were the most annoying impairment and interestingly young students have similar views to the adults.

Watch now for the full results!

Speakers

Brahim Allan Brahim Allan
BT