The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Google Next 19 – Building a Next-Generation Streaming Platform with Sky

Posted on 24th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Google Cloud, also called GCP – Google Cloud Platform, continues to invest in Media & Entertainment at a time when many broadcasters, having completed their first cloud projects, are considering ways to ensure they are not beholden to any one cloud provider.

Google’s commitment is evident in their still-recent appointment of ex-Discovery CTO John Honeycutt, this month’s announcement of Viacom’s Google Cloud adoption and the launch of their ‘deploy on any cloud platform’ service called Anthos (official site)

So it’s no surprise that, here, Google asked UK broadcaster Sky and their technology partner for the project, Harmonic Inc., to explain how they’ve been delivering channels in the cloud and cutting costs.

Melika Golkaram from Google Cloud sets the scene by explaining some of the benefits of Google Cloud for Media and Entertainment making it clear that, for them, M&E business isn’t simply a ‘nice to have’ on the side of being a cloud platform. Highlighting their investment in undersea cable and globally-distributed edge servers among the others, Melika hands over to Sky’s Jeff Webb to talk about how Sky have leveraged the platform.

Jeff explains some of the ways that Sky deals with live sports. Whilst sports require high quality video, low latency workflows and have high peak live-streaming audiences, they can also cyclical and left unused between events. High peak workload and long times of equipment left fallow play directly into the benefits of cloud. So we’re not surprised when Jeff says it halved the replacement cost of an ageing system, rather, we want to know more about how they did it.

The benefits that Sky saw revolve around fault healing, geographic resilience, devops, speed of deployment, improved monitoring including more options to leverage open source. Jeff describes these, and other, drivers before mentioning the importance of the ability to move this system between on-premise and different cloud providers.

Before handing over to Harmonic’s Moore Macauley, we’re shown the building blocks of the Sky Sports F1 channel in the cloud and discuss ways that fault healing happens. Moore then goes on to show how Harmonic harnessed their ‘VOS’ microservices platform which deals with ingest, compression, encryption, packaging and origin servers. Harmonic delivered this using GTK, Google Cloud’s Kubernetes deployment platform in multiple regions for fault testing, to allow for A/B testing and much more.

Let’s face it, even after all this time, it can still be tricky getting past the hype of cloud. Here we get a glimpse of a deployed-in-real-life system which not only gives an insight into how these services can (and do) work, but it also plots another point on the graph showing major broadcasters embracing cloud, each in their own way.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Jeff Webb Principal Streaming, Architect Sky
	Moore Macauley Director, Product Architecture Harmonic
	Melika Golkram Customer Engineer, Google Cloud Media

Video: Everything You Wanted to Know About ATSC 3.0

Posted on 23rd April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 is the next sea change in North American broadcasting, shared with South Korea, Mexico and other locations. Depending on your viewpoint, this could be as fundamental as the move to digital lockstep with the move to HD programming all those years ago.

ATSC 3.0 takes terrestrial broadcasting in to the IP world meaning everything transmitted over the air is done over IP and it brings with it the ability to split the bandwidth into separate pipes.

Here, Dr. Richard Chernock presents a detailed description of the available features within ATSC. He explains the new constellations and modulation properties delving into the ability to split your transmission bandwidth into separate ‘pipes’. These pipes can have different modulation parameters, robustness etc. The switch from 8VSB to OFDM allows for Single Frequency Networks which can actually help reception (due to guard intervals).

Additionally, the standard supports HEVC and scalable video (SHVC) whereby a single UHD encode can be sent which has an HD base-layer which can be decoded by every decoder plus an ‘enhancement layer’ which can be optionally decoded to produce a full UHD output for those decoders/displays which an support it.

With the move to IP, there is a blurring of broadcast and broadband. This can be used to deliver extra audios via broadband to be played with the main video and can be used as a return path to the broadcaster which can help with interactivity and audience measurement.

Dr. Chernock covers HDR, better pixels and Next Generation Audio as well as Emergency Alerts functionality improvements and accessibility features.

Speaker

Dr. Richard Chernock
Chief Science Officer,
Triveni Digital

Webinar: Transforming creative workflows: Making great content in the cloud

Posted on 18th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Join IBC365 on Thursday 25 April at 4pm BST to explore why creators are turning to cloud to transform the way they make great content and how virtualised workflows are unlocking the ability to work in new ways: faster, more collaborative, more efficient and more creative.

This webinar goes inside some of the world’s leading content creators, production and post-production operations to hear how they are embracing cloud technology to transform the creative processes used to make, produce and deliver video.

The webinar will cover ways in which cloud is enabling more collaboration, access to more talent, round-the-clock working, more content security, and slicker workflows. There’s also a dose of reality, as the human and technology challenges and the potential pitfalls of virtualising creative workflows are explored.

Case studies focus on using cloud for:
•Streamlining content creation in the field
•Transforming production and post-production processes
•Efficient content delivery and backhaul

Register now!

Speakers

	Jeremy Smith Chief Technology Officer, Jellyfish Pictures
	Laura Cotterill Founder & Managing Director LCTV
	Spencer Stephens TechXMedia

Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric from Pexels

Video: Power Talks – ATSC 3.0

Posted on 17th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 is the major next step in broadcasting for the US, South Korea and other countries and is a major update to the ATSC standard in so many way that getting across it all is not trivial. All terrestrial broadcasting in the US are done with ATSC as opposed to many other places, including Europe, which use DVB.

ATSC 3.0 brings in OFDM modulation which is a tried and tested technology also used in DVB. But the biggest change in the standard is that all of the transport within ATSC is IP. Broadcasters now, using broadband as a return path, have two-way communication with their viewers allowing transfer of data as well as media.

In this talk from Imagine Communications, we talk a look into the standard which, as is common nowadays, is a suite of standards. These standards cover Early Alerts, immersive audio, DRM, return paths and more. We then have a look at the system architecture of the ATSC 3.0 broadcast deployed in Phoenix.

South Korea has been pushing forward ATSC 3.0 and Chet Dagit looks at what they have been doing and how they’ve created high quality UHD channels to the consumer. He then looks at what the US can learn from this work but also DVB deployments in Europe.

Finally, Yuval Fisher looks at how the data and granularity available in ATSC 3.0 allows for more targeted ads and how you would manage both internally and harnessing it for ad campaigns.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Steve Reynolds President, P & N Solutions, Imagine Communications
	Mark Corl SVP of Emergent Technology, Triveni Digital
	Chet Dagit Founder & Managing Member RTP Holdings-Lokita Solutions
	Yuval Fisher CTO, Distribution Imagine Communications

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