The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: The Fenix Project: Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery

Posted on 3rd March 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

“Moving to the cloud” is different for each broadcaster, some are using it for live production, some for their archives, some just for streaming. While confidence in the cloud is increasing and the products are maturing, many companies are choosing to put their ‘second MCR’ in the cloud or, say, tier-2 playout to test the waters, gain experience and wait for a fuller feature set. Sky Italia, has chosen to put all its disaster recovery transmission capability in the cloud.

Davide Gandino joins us from Mile High 2020 to show – and demo – their disaster recovery deployment which covers playout, processing, distribution and delivery to the end-user. Davide explains this was all driven by a major fire at their facility in Rome. At the time, they managed to move their services to Milan with minimal on-air impact, but with destroyed equipment, they were left to rebuild. It wasn’t long before that rebuild was planned for the cloud.

This is no insignificant project, with 117 channels of which only 39 are third-party pass-through going on to four platforms, the full deployment uses 800 cloud encoders. This amounts to 4Gbps being sent up to the cloud and 8Gbps returning. David highlights the design uses both Google and Amazon cloud infrastructure with 3 availability zones in use for both.

A vital part of this project design is that not all 800 encoders would be working 24×7. This misses the point of the cloud, but the only scalable alternative is fully automated deployment which is exactly what Sky chose to do. The key tenants of the project are:

Everything automated – Deployment and configuration are automatic
Software Defined – All Applications to be software defined
Distributed – Distributed solution to absorb the loss of one site
Synchronised – All BAU (business as usual) changes to automatically update the DR configuration. This is done with what Sky call the ‘Service Control Layer’.
Observed – Monitoring of the DR system will be as good or better than usual operation

To active the DR, Davide tells us that there is a first stage script which launches a Kubernetes cluster on which the management software sits and 13 Kubernetes clusters across Google and AWS which will run the infrastructure itself. The second script, uses Jenkins jobs to deploy and configure the infrastructure such as encoders and DRM modules etc. Davide finishes the talk showing us a video of the deployment of the infrastructure, explaining what is happening as we see the platform being built.Watch now!
Speaker

Davide Gandino
Head of Streaming, Cloud & Computing Systems,
Sky Italia

Video: Growing the Next Generation of Us

Posted on 2nd March 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Hiring is one of the most important things you will do in your company. Bad hires, at best, are a drain of money, time and opportunity costs. Good hires, on the other hand, can be incredible, long-term assets within your company. So when we have the new hire, we want to onboard them in the best way and continue giving them opportunities to learn and develop. This talk from Disney Streaming Services shares their progressive approach to developing engineers so they can handle the toughest moments when the production system is out of commission – AKA ‘the crucible’.

Alexanadria Shealy explains that teams are often made of people with a whole range of backgrounds, often people who are full of transferable skills, but with no specific from your exact domain. As teams grow, the team needs to constantly strive to onboard new people and bring them into the team both to work within the culture and to round off the skill set of the team at large.

Alexandria says their team has the best of intentions at all times and works hard to prevent any problems. As we all know, though, it’s impossible to prevent problems. “Scaling the software is easier than scaling the team,” she continues, and it’s best not to keep going back to the same people time and time again simply because they have become the experts as this isn’t scalable. The trick is to make the difficult things we do into something which is accessible for the inexperienced.

Kevin Fuhrman introduces ‘the crucible’ as a stressful place to be. It’s the time that you have a production outage which everyone is waiting to be fixed, and they’re repeatedly asking you when, and they’re watching you. But these fixes are never straight forward. They need a lot of focus and a lot of fault-finding. The stress of delivering under pressure adds to the stress of delivering under pressure. The crucible is not an easy place to be but is well known in broadcasters and streaming providers everywhere.

After your next outage, ask yourself how many of your staff would need to be on a bus travelling to their vacation before your team wouldn’t be able to handle it. In an ideal time, you’d have to have pretty much the whole team on holidays before you couldn’t deal with an outage. But many places know that if a few key people weren’t around, their ability to recover would be significantly compromised.

The advice from the Disney Streaming Services team comes in two packages. The first is taking care of onboarding your new colleagues. Looking for highly applicable tasks which have immediate relevance to them and will allow them to contribute quickly. They suggest giving new joiners a history lesson explaining why things are how they are. How did you choose the software your using, either the systems or the langauges. Explain what you would have preferred to do differently and better. This helps people understand what parts of the system they feel able to improve upon, in code as well as in workflow. It’s important, they explain, to help people spot the parts of the system which were put in because something was simply needed and the parts which are there due to a lot of thought and due diligence. Again, true of code as much as workflows.

We all know that mistakes are important in the learning process. One option laid out is to find parts of projects which are difficult enough to allow someone to dip their tow below the surface and to learn. The underlying point is not to shield junior members of the team from projects. In fact, heading a project with all your experienced engineers may be a way to deliver the project with low risk, but the cost of not investing in getting your less experienced team members involved will be paid when the project is delivered and needing support, maintenance and development. It also works against the interest of the less experienced individuals by reducing the speed at which they advance.

Alexandria and Kevin summarise by saying you should create and grow owners, rotate who is on the A-team, give everyone the chance to be in the crucible and share notes and experiences freely. The video finishes by remarking that the technology of today was built by us standing on the shoulders of giants. It’s important, therefore, that the giants of today remember to let people climb aloft.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Alexandria Shealy Director, Technical Project Management Disney Streaming Services
	Kevin Fuhrman Staff Software Engineer, Disney Streaming Services

Video: Benjamin Bross and Adam Wieckowski on Fraunhofer HHI, VVC, and Compression

Posted on 1st March 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

VVC was finalised in mid-2020 after five years of work. AVC’s still going strong and is on its 26th version, so it’s clear there’s still plenty of work ahead for those involved in VVC. Heavily involved in AVC, HEVC and now VVC is the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) who are patent holders in all three and for VVC they are, for the first time, developing a free, open-source encoder and decoder for the standard.

In this video from OTTVerse.com, Editor Krishna Rao speaks to Benjamin Bross and Adam Więckowsk both from Fraunhofer HHI. Benjamin has previously been featured on The Broadcast Knowledge talking at Mile High Video about VVC which would be a great video to check out if you’re not familiar with this new codec given before its release.

They start by discussing how the institute is supported by the German government, money received from its patents and similar work as well as the companies who they carry out research for. One benefit of government involvement is that all the papers they produce are made free to access. Their funding model allows them the ability to research problems very deeply which has a number of benefits. Benjamin points out that their research into CABAC which is a very efficient, but complex entropy encoding technique. In fact, at the time they supported introducing it into AVC, which remember is 19 years old, it was very hard to find equipment that would use it and certainly no computers would. Fast forward to today and phones, computers and pretty much all encoders are able to take advantage of this technique to keep bitrates down so that ability to look ahead is beneficial now. Secondly, giving an example in VVC, Benjamin explains they looked at using machine learning to help optimise one of the tools. This was shown to be too difficult to implement but could be replaced by matrix multiplication which and was implemented this way. This matrix multiplication, he emphasises, wouldn’t have been able to be developed without having gone into the depths of this complex machine learning.

Krishna suggests there must be a lot of ‘push back’ from chip manufacturers, which Benjamin acknowledges though, he says people are just doing their jobs. It’s vitally important, he continues, for chip manufacturers to keep chip costs down or nothing would actually end up in real products. Whilst he says discussions can get quite heated, the point of the international standardisation process is to get the input at the beginning from all the industries so that the outcome is an efficient, implementable standard. Only by achieving that does everyone benefit for years to come.e

The conversation then moves on to the open source initiative developing VVenC and VVdeC. These are separate from the reference implementation VTM although the reference software has been used as the base for development. Adam and Benjamin explain that the idea of creating these free implementations is to create a standard software which any company can take to use in their own product. Reference implementations are not optimised for speed, unlike VVenC and VVdeC. Fraunhofer is expecting people to take this software and adapt it for, say 360-degree video, to suit their product. This is similar to x264 and x265 which are open source implementations of AVC and HEVC. Public participation is welcomed and has already been seen within the Github project.

Adam talks through a slide showing how newer versions of VVenC have increased speed and bitrate with more versions on their way. They talk about how some VVC features can’t really be seen from normal RD plots giving the example of open vs closed GOP encoding. Open GOP encoding can’t be used for ABR streaming, but with VVC that’s now a possibility and whilst it’s early days for anyone having put the new type of keyframes through their paces which enable this function, they expect to start seeing good results.

The conversation then moves on to encoding complexity and the potential to use video pre-processing to help the encoder. Benjamin points out that whilst there is an encode increase to get to the latest low bitrates, to get to the best HEVC can achieve, the encoding is actually quicker. Looking to the future, he says that some encoding tools scale linearly and some exponentially. He hopes to use machine learning to understand the video and help narrow down the ‘search space’ for certain tools as it’s the search space that is growing exponentially. If you can narrow that search significantly, using these techniques becomes practical. Lastly, they say the hope is to get VVenC and VVdeC into FFmpeg at which point a whole suite of powerful pre- and post- filters become available to everyone.

Watch now!
Full transcript of the video
Speakers

	Benjamin Bross Head of Video Coding Systems Group, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI)
	Adam Więckowski Research Assistant Fraunhofer HHI
	Moderator: Krishna Rao Vijayanagar Editor, OTTVerse.com

Video: DVB and HbbTV Technologies in TV Systems

Posted on 26th February 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As the amount of video consumed on the internet continues to grow, technologies that unify over-the-air broadcast with internet delivery. Doing this should allow a seamless mix meaning viewers can choose a service without knowing how it’s arriving at their TV, mobile device or laptop. This is the principle behind DVB-I and HbbTV.

In this webinar, Peter MacAvock and Peter Lanigan join moderator Dr. Jörn Krieger to answer questions about how DVB-I works and how the two organisations work together. To set the scene, Peter Lanigan explains what DVB-I is and where it sits within DVB’s other technologies.

Famous for the widespread technologies of DVB-T, -S and -C which underpin much of the world’s broadcasting, DVB have recently developed a broadcast-focused version of MPEG DASH called DVB-DASH on which DVB-I is built. Where there -T in DVB-T is for terrestrial broadcast and the -S in DVB-S for satellite broadcast, the -I in DVB-I stands for internet. Built upon the DVB-DASH standard DVB-I delivers services over the Internet to devices with broadband access whether that’s raw internet or over operator-managed networks. Most importantly, this isn’t just about TVs, but any device.

DVB-I aims to offer a way unify over-the-air broadcast with internet delivery. The apps used to deliver services to smartphones, tablets and desktops tend to create segregation as each provider delivers their own app. However, there is a benefit to removing the need for each broadcaster needing to maintain their app on all the many platforms. By unifying delivery, DVB-I also makes life easier for manufacturers who can deliver a single, consistent experience. Finally, it opens up a market for more general apps which deliver a TV experience without being tied to one broadcaster opening up more business models and a route to independent innovation.

‘Service Lists’ are the fundamental currency of DVB-I. Service discovery is therefore a critical aspect of DVB-I which was first defined in 2019 and updated in 2020. Service discovery is a technical, commercial and legal problem all of which are addressed in the DVB-I Service Discovery and Programmed Metadata standard which provides ways in which clients can access Service Lists and Service List Registries.

Another important aspect of delivery is targetted advertising since advertising underpins the business model of many broadcasters. DVB-TA defines targetted advertising for linear TV and is now being updated to include DVB-I. With DVB-TA, adverts are delivered to the receiver/device over IP based on various criteria and then triggered at the appropriate time as specified by the A178-1 signalling spec.

Source: DVB

Ahead of the Q&A, Peter MacAvock introduces the HbbTV organisation explaining how and why it works closely with DVB to generate specifications that drive Hybrid TV forward. Also a member organisation, HbbTV and DVB share many interests but where the DVB’s remit within broadcast is wider than the device-centric HbbTV scope, HbbTV also has a wider scope than DVB since STBs and other devices are in use outside of broadcasting, for instance in retail. Importantly, HbbTV has replaced MHP as DVB’s hybrid TV solution. DVB and HbbTV are sharing the task of making DVB-DASH content and validation tools available to their members.

The Q&A covers controlling of the quality of delivery, getting around the internet’s different reliability compared to RF. They also address scalability with reference to DVB-ABR Multicast. There’s a question on avoiding illegal channels being included in service lists which both Peters acknowledge is a conversation ‘in progress’ for which the technical means exist, but speficially how to implement them is still in discussion a lot of which surrounds ways to establish trust between the device and the service list registars.

The Q&A finishes by discussing whether telcos/ISPs are interested in adopting DVB-ABR Muilticast, compatability between DVB-I and HbbTV as well as 5G broadcast mode.

Watch now!
Download the DVB-I Presentation
Download the HbbTV Presentation

Speakers

	Peter MacAvock DVB Chairman Head of Delivery, Platforms and Services, EBU Technology and Development
	Peter Lanigan Senior Manager, Standardisation, TP Vision
	Moderator: Jörn Krieger Freelance Journalist

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