The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Transforming the Distribution and Economics of Internet Video

Posted on 19th February 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Replacing CDNs in streaming would need a fundamental change in the way we store and access video on the internet, but this is just what Eluvio’s technology offers along with in-built authentication, authorisation and DRM. There’s a lot to unpack about this distributed ‘content fabric’ built on an Ethereum-protocol blockchain.

Fortunately, Eluvio co-founder Michelle Munson is here to explain how this de-centralised technology improves on the status quo and show us what it’s being used for. We know that today’s streaming technology is based on the idea of preparing, packaging, transcoding and pushing data out through CDNs to views at home and whilst this works, it doesn’t necessarily consistent, low delay and, as we saw from Netflix and Facebook reducing their streaming bitrates at the beginning of the pandemic, it can be quite a burden on networks.

This content fabric, Michelle explains, is a different approach to the topic where video is stored natively over the internet creating a ‘software substrate’. The result doesn’t use traditional transcoding services, CDNs and databased. Rather we end up w ith a decentralised data distribution and storage protocol delivering just-in time packaging. The content fabric is split into four layers, one of which deals with metadata, another contains code which controls the transformation and delivery of media. The third layer is the ‘contract’ layer which controls access and proves content with finally a layer for the media itself. This contract layer is based on the Ethereum technology which runs the cryptocurrency of the same name. The fabric is a ledger with the content being versioned within the ledger history.

Michelle points out that with blockchain contracts baked in to all the media data, there is inherently access control at all parts of the network which has the property that viewers only need to have an ethereum-style ‘ticket’ to watch content directly. Their access is view-only and whilst this passes through the data and code layers, there is no extra infrastructure to build on top of your streaming infrastructure and each person can have their own individually-watermarked version as delivered with Eluvio’s work with MGM’s online premier of the recent Bill and Ted film.

Eluvium currently have a group of globally-deployed hubs in internet exchange sites which operate the fabric and contain media shards and blobs of code which can operate on the media to provide just-in-time delvery as necessary with the ability to create slices and overlays inherent in the delivery mechanism. When a player wants access to video, it issues the request with its authorisation information. This meets the fabric which responds to drive the output. Because of the layer of code, the inputs and outputs of the system are industry standard with manipulation done internally.

Before finishing by talking about the technology’s use within MGM and other customers, Michelle summarises the capabilities by saying that it simplifies workflows and can deliver a consistently low, global time to first byte with VoD and Live workflows interchangable. Whilst Michelle asserts that previous distribution protocols have failed at scale, Eluvio’s fabric can scale without the significant burdens of file IO.

Watch now!
Speaker

Michelle Munson
CEO and Founder,
Eluvio

Video: MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) Standard

Posted on 18th February 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Learning from the patent miss-steps of HEVC, MPEG have released MPEG-5 EVC which brings bitrate savings, faster encoding and clearer licencing terms including a royalty-free implementation. The hope being that with more control over exposure to patent risk, companies large and small will adopt EVC as they improve and launch streaming services now and in the future.

At Mile High Video 2020, Kiho Choi introduced the MPEG 5 Essential Video Coding. Naturally, the motivation to produce a new codec was partly based on the continued need to reduce video bitrates. With estimates of the video traffic share on the internet, both now and in the future all hovering between 75% and 90% any reduction in bitrate will have a wide benefit, best exemplified by Netflix and Facebook’s decision to reduce the bitrate at the top of their ABR ladder during the pandemic which impacted the quality available to viewers. The unspoken point of this talk is that if the top rung used EVC, viewers wouldn’t notice a drop in quality.

The most important point about EVC, which is in contrast to the MPEG/ISO co-defined standard form last year, VVC, is that it provides businesses a lot of control over their exposure to patent royalties. It’s no secret that much HEVC adoption has been hampered by the risk that large users could be approached for licencing fees. Whilst it has made its way into Apple devices, which is no minimal success, big players like ESPN won’t have anything to do with it. EVC tackles this problem in two ways. One is to have a baseline profile which provides bitrate savings over its predecessors but uses a combination of technologies which are either old enough to not be eligible for royalty payments or that have been validated as free to use. Companies should, therefore, be able to use this level of codec without any reasonable concern over legal exposure. Moreover, the main profile which does use patentable technologies allows for each individual part of the profile to be switched off meaning anyone encoding EVC has control, assuming the vendor makes this possible, over which technologies they are using and hence their exposure to risk. Kiho points out that this business-requirements-first approach is new and in contrast to many codecs.

Kiho highlights a number of the individual tools within both the baseline and main codecs which provide the bitrate savings before showing us the results of the objective and subjective testing. Within the EVC docs, the testing methodology is spelt out to allow EVC to be compared against predecessors AVC and HEVC. The baseline codec shows an improvement of 38% against 1080p60 material and 35% for UHD material compared to AVC doing the same tasks yet it achieves a quicker encoder (less compute needed) and the decode is approximately the same. The main profile, being more efficient is compared against HEVC which is, itself, around 50% more efficient than AVC. Against HEVC, Kiho says, EVC main profile produces an improvement of around 30% encoding gain for UHD footage and 25% for 1080p60 footage. Encoding is close to 5x longer and decoder is around 1.5x longer than HEVC.

Kiho finishes by summarising subjective testing of SDR and HDR videos which show that, in contrast to the objective savings which are calculated by computers, in practice perceived quality is higher and enables a higher bitrate reduction, a phenomenon which has been seen in other codec comparisons such LCEVC. SDR results show a 50% encoding gain for 4K and 30% for 1080p60 against AVC. Against HEVC, the main profile is able to deliver 50% coding gains for 4K content and 40% for 1080p60. For HDR, the main profile provides an approximately 35% encoding gain for both 1080p60 and 4k.

Watch now!
Speakers

Kiho Choi
Senior Engineer & Technical Lead for Multimedia Standards at Samsung Electronics
Lead Editor of MPEG5 Part 1 Essential Video Coding

Video: Esports Production During COVID

Posted on 17th February 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Esports continues to push itself into to harness the best of IT and broadcast industries to bring largescale events to half a billion people annually. Natrually, the way this is done has changed with the pandemic, but the 10% annual growth remains on track. The esports market is still maturing and while it does, the industry is working hard on innovating with the best technology to bring the best quality video to viewers and to drive engagement. Within the broadcast industry, vendors are working hard to understand how best to serve this market segment which is very happy to adopt high-quality, low latency solutions and broadcasters are asking whether the content is right for them.

Takling all of these questions is a panel of experts brought together by SMPTE’s Washington DC section including Christopher Keath from Blizzard Entertainment, Mark Alston from EA, Scott Adametz from Riot Games, Richard Goldsmith with Delloite and, speaking in January 2021 while he worked for Twitch, Jonas Bengtson.

First off the bat, Michael introduced the esports market. With 2.9 billion people playing games globally and 10% growth year-on-year, he says that it’s still a relatively immature market and then outlines some notable trends. Firstly there is a push to grow into a mainstream audience. To its benefit, esports has a highly loyal and large fanbase, but growth outside of this demographic is still difficult. In this talk and others, we’ve heard of the different types of accompanying, secondary programmes aimed more at those who are interested enough to have a summary and watch a story being told, but not interested in watching the blow-by-blow 8 hour tournament.

Another trend outlined by Michael is datasharing. There are so many stats available both in terms of the play itself, similar to traditional sports ‘percentage possession’ stats, but also factual data which can trigger graphics such as names, affiliations, locations etc. Secondary data processing, just like traditional sports, is also a big revenue opportunity, so the market, explains Michael, is still working on bigger and better ways to share data for mutual benefit. More information on Deloitte’s opinion of the market is in this article with a different perspective in this global esports market report

You can watch either with this Speaker view or Gallery view

The panel discusses the different angle that esports has taken on publishing with many young producers only knowing the free software ‘OBS‘, underlined by Scott who says esports can still be scrappy in some places, bringing together unsynchronised video sources in a ‘democratised’ production which has both benefits and downsides. Another difference within esports is that many viewers have played the games, often extensively. They therefore know exactly what they look like so watching the game streamed can feel a very different experience after going through, portentially multiple stages of, encoding. The panel all spend a lot of time tuning encoders for different games to maintain the look as best as possible.

Christopher Keath explains what observers are. Effectively these are the in-game camera operators which talk to the head observer who co-ordinates them and has a simple switcher to make some available to the production. This leads to a discsussion on how best to bring the observer’s video, during the pandemic, into the programmes. Riot has kitted out the PCs in observers’ homes to bring them up to spect and allow them to stream out whereas EA has moved the observer PCs into their studio, backed by hefty internet links.

Jonas points out that Twitch brings tens of thousands of streams to the internet constantly and outlines that the Twitch angle on streaming is often different to the ‘esports’ angle of big events, rather they are personality driven. The proliferation of streaming onto Twitch, other similar services and as part of esports itself has driven GPU manufacturers, Jonas continues, to include dedicated streaming functionality on the GPUs to stop encoding detracting from the in-game performance. During the pandemic, Twitch has seen a big increase in social games, where interaction is more key rather than team-based competition games.

You can watch either with the Speaker view or this gallery view

Scott talks about Riot’s network global backbone which saw 3.2 petabytes of data flow – just for production traffic – during the League of Legends Worlds event which saw them produce the event in 19 different languages working between Berlin, LA and Shanghai. For him, the pandemic brought a change in the studio where everything was rendered in realtime in the unreal game engine. This allowed them to use augmented reality and have a much more flexible studio which looked better than the standard ‘VR studios’. He suggests they are likely to keep using this technology.

Agreeing with this by advocating a hybrid approach, Christopher says that the reflexes of the gamers are amazing and so there really isn’t a replacement for having them playing side-by-side on a stage. On top of that, you can then unite the excitement of the crowd with lights, smoke and pyrotechnics so that will still want to stay for some programmes, but cloud production is still a powerful tool. Mark agrees with that and also says that EA are exploring the ways in which this remote working can improve the work-life balance.

The panel concludes by answering questions touching on the relative lack of esports on US linear TV compared to Asia and eslewhere, explaining the franchise/league structures, discussing the vast range of technology-focused jobs in the sector, the unique opportunities for fan engagement, co-streaming and the impact of 5G.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Mark Alston Technical production manager Electronic Arts (EA)
	Christopher Keath Broadcast Systems Architect Blizzard Entertainment
	Jonas Bengtson Senior Engineering Manager, Discord Formerly, Director at Twitch
	Scott Adametz Senior Manager, Esports Engineering, Riot Games
	Richard Goldsmith Manager, Deloitte Consulting

Video: Making Streaming Video Better

Posted on 16th February 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The streaming community is one of the most vibrant in the broadcast, media & entertainment with many examples of individuals and companies sharing knowledge and working together. The Streaming Video Alliance is a great example of this continued effort to ‘make streaming video better’, a group of, now, 90 companies that are working together to push the industry forward.

Streaming Video Alliance executive director, Jason Thibeault, discusses their work with John Porterfield on the JP’sChalkTalks YouTube channel. A technology consortium not unlike the VSF, AIMS, IABM or SMPTE, Jason says that the SVA doesn’t work on standards since the fast-paced iterations of the streaming industry don’t match the relatively long standardisation timelines. Naturally, that’s not to say streaming doesn’t need standards. SCTE 35 and 224 ad markers are vital to many workflows and the whole foundation from codecs to IT technologies such as HTTP and TCP is based on standards. But we see from the success of TCP and HTTP what the end game of the Streaming Video Alliance is. These standards laid down a way for any company to interoperate with another and now we don’t consider the possibility that a piece of networking kit speaking TCP won’t work with another. Jason explains that the key for the SVA is enabling interoperabiloty and removing vendor lock-in. This creates a healthier industry which is better for streaming providors and vendors.

John asks about how 2020 saw progress streaming. Jason explains that much of the growth seen due to the pandemic was actually the result of a lot of work that was already ongoing meaning that many companies were already working on scaling up for the future; the future came early. Going into the year, there was a lot of talk about low latency streaming, and there still is, but SVA members were cognisant of the fact they still couldn’t guarantee a consistent experience which they’d much prefer over low-latency. This reliability and resilience question deals with repeatability of experience and, for example, playback remaining stable in one ABR rung.

Jason looks ahead at 2021 talking about the work being produced by the alliance. Live streaming end-to-end best practice is being examined and will be released as a published document. Follow up validation in the lab of the recommendations is then planned with any learnings going back into the original document. Another piece of work is examining how new technologies out of the streaming industry can be adopted such as 5G and the push to the edge. Particularly in edge computing, there is a lot of potential which simply hasn’t been explored yet. On the interoperability theme, the group’s Open Caching guidance will continue to be expanded. Open caching opens the possibility of putting your cache in the edge. Jason asks where the boundary of the edge is as there is work ongoing examining pushing open caching out even to the smart TV.

The Streaming Video Alliance produces monthly webinars, many of which are covered here at The Broadcast Knowledge.

Watch now!
Speakers