The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: 2019 Display Trends and Hot Display Apps

Posted on 16th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Display technology has always been deeply intertwined with broadcasting. After all, when John Logie Baird first demonstrated his working television, he had to invent both the camera and the display device, then known as at the televisor. He himself worked tirelessly on improving television and less than 20 years after his black and white debut was working on a colour television which used two CRT (Cathode Ray Tubes) to produce its picture culminating in the world’s first demonstration of a colour TV in 1944 – incidentally discovering, demonstrating and patenting 3D TV on the way!

So it is today that the displays define what we can show to viewers. Is there any point in mastering a video to show at 10,000 NITs if there is no display that can show something so bright? Pushing all of Europe and the US’s television programmes to 8K resolution is of limited benefit when 8K TVs are in limited supply and in few homes.

This talk looks at the state of the art of display technology seeing where it’s being used and how. Digital Signage is covered and of course this is where the high brightness technology is developed, for signs outside, some of which could influence more conventional TVs on which we want to watch HDR (High Dynamic Range) video.

When OLED technology first came along it was quickly slated as a great option TVs and yet all these years later we see that its adoption in large panels is low. This shows the difficulty, sometimes, in dealing with the technical challenges of great technologies. We now see OLEDs in wearable devices and smaller screens. The number of the screens is quickly increasing as IoT devices, watches and other electronics start to adopt full screens instead of just flashing LEDs. This increase in manufacturing should lead to renewed investment in this field potentially allowing OLEDs to be incorporated in to full-sized, large TVs.

The talk finished with a look at the TV market covering quantum dots and what people really mean when they mention ‘LED TVs’.

This webinar is from the Society for Information Display and is produced in partnership with SMPTE.

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Speaker

Sri Peruvemba
CEO,
Marketer International

Video: Making Video Streams QUICer

Posted on 15th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are many ways to speed up live streaming and much work has gone in to reducing chunk lengths for HLS-style streaming, WebRTC has arrived on the scene and techniques to speed up chunk delivery are in production in CDNs around the world.

But we shouldn’t forget lower down in the detail, we have how the web sites are actually saved to customers – the venerable HTTP. Running on TCP/IP, HTTP packets are delivered using very thorough acknowledgement mechanisms within TCP/IP. Furthermore, it’s immune to spoofing attacks due to a three way handshake to set up the connection.

However, all this communication ads latency as even for low latency connections, these communications can add up to a significant latency and affect the speed of the throughout of the connection.

This talk introduces QUIC which is a replacement for HTTP developed by Google which uses UDP as its underlying delivery mechanism, thus avoiding much of this built-in two way comms.

At the Mile High Video event, Miroslav Ponec from Akamai introduces this protocol which is undergoing standardisation at the IETF explaining how it works and why it’s such a good idea.

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Speaker

Miroslav Ponec
Engineering Director,
Akamai Technologies

Video: Building Large SMPTE ST 2110 Systems Using JT-NM TR-1001-1

Posted on 12th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With the SMPTE 2110 suite of standards largely published and the related AMWA IS-04 and -05 specifications stable, people’s minds are turning to how to implement all these standards bringing them together into a complete working system.

The JT-NM TR-1001-1 is a technical recommendation document which describes a way of documenting how the system will work – for instance how do new devices on the network start up? How do they know what PTP domain is in use on the network?

John Mailhot starts by giving an overview of the standards and documents available, showing which ones are published and which are still in progress. He then looks at each of them in turn to summarise its use on the network and how it fits in to the system as a whole.

Once the groundwork is laid, we see how the JT-NM working group have looked at 5 major behaviours and what they have recommended for making them work in a scalable way. These cover things like DNS discovery, automated multicast address allocation and other considerations.

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Speaker

John Mailhot
CTO Networking & Infrastructure
Imagine Communications

Video: Per-title Encoding at Scale

Posted on 11th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

MUX is a very pro-active company pushing forward streaming technology. At NAB 2019 they have announced Audience Adaptive Encoding which is offers encodes tailored to both your content but also the typical bitrate of your viewing demographic. Underpinning this technology is machine learning and their Per-title encoding technology which was released last year.

This talk with Nick Chadwick looks at what per-title encoding is, how you can work out which resolutions and bitrates to encode at and how to deliver this as a useful product.

Nick takes some time to explain MUX’s ‘convex hulls’ which give a shape to the content’s performance at different bitrates and helps visualise the optimum encoding parameters the content. Moreover we see that using this technique, we see some surprising circumstances when it makes sense to start at high resolutions, even for low bitrates.

Looking then at how to actually work out on a title-by-title basis, Nick explains the pros and cons of the different approaches going on to explain how MUX used machine learning to generate the model they created to make this work.

Finishing off with an extensive Q&A, this talk is a great overview on how to pick great encoding parameters, manually or otherwise.

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Speaker