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Video: HEVC Migration, Fragmented MP4 and CMAF

Posted on 10th October 2017 by Russell Trafford-Jones

October 11, 2017
8:00am PT/3:00pm GMT

This webinar is now available on-demand!

The benefits of High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) are well understood, but transitioning from a traditional AVC workflow may seem daunting for video providers streaming in multiple formats. With Apple recently announcing HEVC and fragmented MP4 (fMP4) support for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and the concurrent standardization of the Common Media Application Format (CMAF), it’s important to understand the challenges ahead in creating a single video delivery format.

In this webcast, experts from AWS Elemental will highlight the history of HEVC, the benefits of migrating from AVC to HEVC, and what this transition means for video providers. Gain fundamental knowledge about the convergence of fMP4, CMAF and HEVC and the requirements to make the shift.

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Video: Solving the 8K distribution Challenge

Posted on 16th July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With the Tokyo Olympics less than 2 weeks away, 8K is back in focus. NHK have famously been key innovators and promoters of 8K for many years, have launched an 8K channel on satellite and will be broadcasting the games in 8K. That’s all very well, but is 8K a viable broadcast format for other public and commercial broadcasters? One problem for 8K is how to get it to people. Whilst there are plenty of bandwidth problems to contend with during production, all of that will be for nought if we can’t get it to the customer.

This panel, run by the 8K Association in conjunction with SMPTE, looks to new codecs to help reduce the burden on connectivity whether RF or networks. The feeling is that HEVC just can’t deliver practical bandwidths, so what are the options? The video starts with Bill Mandel from Samsung introducing the topics of HDR display using HDR10+, streaming with CMAF and bandwidth. Bill discusses future connectivity improvements which should come into play and then looks at codec options.

Bill and Stephan Wenger give their view on the codecs which were explained in detail in this SMPTE deep dive video so do take a look at the article for more context. AV1 is the first candidate for 8K distribution that many think of since it is known to have better compression than HEVC and is even seeing some hardware support in TVs and is being trialled by YouTube. However, the trailer is 50Mbps and therefore not suitable for many connections. Looking at better performance, MPEG’s EVC is a potential candidate which offers continued improvement over AV1 and a better licensing model than HEVC. Stephan’s view on codecs is that users really don’t care what the codec is, they just need the service to work. He points towards VVC, the direct successor to HEVC, as a way forward for 8K since it delivers 40 to 50% bandwidth reduction opening up the possibility of a 25Mbps video channel. Noa published MPEG standard, the market awaits patent information and vendor implementations.

Stephan talks about MPEG’s LCEVC standard which has similarities to Samsung’s Scalenet which Bill introduced. The idea is to encode at a lower resolution and use upscaling to get the desired resolution using AI/machine learning to make the scaling look good and, certainly in the case of LCEVC, a low-bandwidth stream of enhancement data which adds in key parts of video, such as edges, which would otherwise be lost. Stephan says that he awaits implementations in the market to see how well this works. Certainly, taking into account LCEVC’s ability to produce compression using less computation, it may be an important way to bring 8K to some devices and STBs.

The discussion is rounded off by Mickael Raulet, CTO of ATEME who talks us through an end-to-end test broadcast done using VVC. This was delivered by satellite to set top boxes and over streaming with a UHD channel at 15Mbps. His take-away from the experience is that VVC is a viable option for broadcasters and 8K and may be possible with using EVC’s main profile. The video finishes with a Q&A covering:

Codecs for live video

The pros and cons of scaling in codecs

Codec licensing

Multiple generational encoding degeneration

Watch now!
Speakers

	Bill Mandel VP, Industry Relations, Samsung Research America
	Mickaël Raulet CTO, ATEME
	Chris Chinnock Executive Director, 8K Association
	Stephan Wenger Senior Director, IP & Standards, Tencent

Video: Implementing standards-based Targeted Advertising on broadcast television

Posted on 14th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Last month, we featured DVB’s Targeted Advertising solution called DVB-TA. In that article, we saw the motivations to move to targeted advertising and how it was in use in Spain’s Artresmedia. Today’s video follows on from that introduction to DVB-TA with a range of speakers talking about implementation methods, interoperability and benefits to standardisation.

DVB’s Emily Dubs introduces the presenters starting with Nicolas Guyot from ENENSYS who speaks on the subject of the media value chain and TV’s reach. In Europe, the weekly reach of broadcast TV is still high at around 77% meaning the medium has still got strength. In terms of getting targeted ads on there, however, only a subset of devices can be used. In France, 36% of homes have a smart TV. Whilst this is a minority, it still equates to ten million TV sets. We hear about how France TV trialled targeted advertising for HbbTV where they collected consent and data which they used to segment people into four categories. The categories were finance, health, family and weather which they used to place ads in front of the viewer. With a view to scaling this out, the view was that standardisation was important to ensure ad placement was well understood by all equipment as well as measurement metrics.

Angelo Pettazzi from Mediaset makes a case next for standardisation. For Mediaset, moving to Targeted Advertising is a strategic move and mirrors the points made in the first video focusing on the need to keep TV advertising in line with what advertisers are looking for. In short, TA will maintain the relative value of their advertising slots. There are other benefits, however, such as more readily opening up advertising slots to local businesses and SMEs by providing availability of lower-cost slots.

Standards feature heavily for Mediaset. They have 4 million HbbTVs active monthly on their platform which simply wouldn’t have been possible without the HbbTV 2.0 standard in the first place. Using these devices they had previously tried a proprietary TA technology based on HTML5 but they found it didn’t always work well and the switching time could vary. They see the TA spec as a move towards more confidence in products along with the ability to substitute only single ads, a whole contiguous block or multiple substitutions in the same break.

Joe Winograd from Verance talks next about the use of Watermarking for targeted advertising. Advert timing and other signalling are usually carried separately to the media as SCTE-104, -25 or -224. However, there are times when a distribution chain is not yet compatible with this separate signalling. Linear advert substitution is usually done on the device, though, so by embedding this same signalling information within the audio and/or video feeds themselves, the receiving box is able to decode the embedded data and insert the ads as desired. Modifying video/audio data to carry messages is called watermarking and usually refers to the practice of marking a feed to uniquely identify it for the purposes of crime prevention. This method, however, is designed to carry dynamic data and is defined by the ATSC un their standards A/334, A/335 and A/336.

Pascal Jezequel from Harmonic speaks next about Dynamic Ad insertion interoperability. His main point is that if we’re to be inserting ads in a world of linear and OTT and streaming we should have one standard which covers them all. We need a detailed standard that allows precise, frame-accurate timing with smooth transitions. DVB-TA and HbbTV-TA initially focussed only on broadcast but is now being extended to cover streaming services provided over broadband. This interoperability will be a boost for operators and broadcasters.

Last in the video is Unified Streaming’s Rufael Mekuria who briefly explains the work that DVB is doing within the DBB-TA work but also within DVB-DASH. Having DVB involved helps with liaisons which is proving critical in ensuring that SCTE-35 is compatible with DVB-DASH. This work is in progress. Additionally, DVB is working with MPEG on CMAF and DVB is also liaising with DASH-IF.

The panel ends with a Q&A.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Nicolas Guyot Product Manager, ENENSYS Technologies
	Dror Mangel Product Manager, Viaccess-Orca
	Angelo Pettazzi Consultant, Mediaset Group
	Joe Winograd CTO, Verance
	Pascal Jezequel DTV Global Solution Architect, Harmonic
	Rufael Mekuria Head of Reasearch & Stanardisation, Unified Streaming
	Emily Dubs Head of Technology, DVB Project

Video: Creating Interoperable Hybrid Workflows with RIST

Posted on 7th April 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

TV isn’t made in one place anymore. Throughout media and entertainment, workflows increasingly involve many third parties and being in the cloud. Content may be king, but getting it from place to place is foundational in our ability to do great work. RIST is a protocol that is able to move video very reliably and flexibly between buildings, into, out of and through the cloud. Leveraging its flexibility, there are many ways to use it. This video helps review where RIST is up to in its development and understand the many ways in which it can be used to solve your workflow problems.

Starting the RIST overview is Ciro Noronha, chair of the RIST Forum. Whilst we have delved in to the detail here before in talks like this from SMPTE and this talk also from Ciro, this is a good refresher on the main points that RIST is published in three parts, known as profiles. First was the Simple Profile which defined the basics, those being that it’s based on RTP and uses an ARQ technology to dynamically request any missing packets in a timely way which doesn’t trip the stream up if there are problems. The Main Profile was published second which includes encryption and authentication. Lastly is the Advanced Profile which will be released later this year.

Ciro outlines the importance of the Simple Profile. That it guarantees compatibility with RTP-only decoders, albeit without error correction. When you can use the error correction, you’ll benefit from correction even when 50% of the traffic is being lost unlike similar protocols such as SRT. Another useful feature for many is multi-link support allowing you to use RIST over bonded LTE modems as well as using SMPTE ST 2022-7

The Main Profile brings with it support for tunnelling meaning you can set up one connection between two locations and put multiple streams of data through. This is great for simplifying data connectivity because only one port needs to be opened in order to deliver many streams and it doesn’t matter in which direction you establish the tunnel. Once established, the tunnel is bi-directional. The tunnel provides the ability to carry general data such as control data or miscellaneous IT.

Encryption made its debut with the publishing of the Main Profile. RIST can use DTLS which is a version of the famous TLS security used in web sites that runs on UDP rather than TCP. The big advantage of using this is that it brings authentication as well as encryption. This ensures that the endpoint is allowed to receive your stream and is based on the strong encryption we are familiar with and which has been tested and hardened over the years. Certificate distribution can be difficult and disproportionate to the needs of the workflow, so RIST also allows encryption using pre-shared keys.

Handing over now to David Griggs and Tim Baldwin, we discuss the use cases which are enabled by RIST which is already found in encoders, decoders and gateways which are on the market. One use case which is on the rise is satellite replacement. There are many companies that have been using satellite for years and for whom the lack of operational agility hasn’t been a problem. In fact, they’ve also been able to make a business model work for occasional use even though, in a pure sense, satellite isn’t perfectly suited to occasional use satellites. However, with the ability to use C-band closing in many parts of the world, companies have been forced to look elsewhere for their links and RIST is one solution that works well.

David runs through a number of others including primary and secondary distribution, links aggregation, premium sports syndication with the handoff between the host broadcaster and the multiple rights-holding broadcasters being in the cloud and also a workflow for OTT where RIST is used for ingest.

RIST is available as an open source library called libRIST which can be downloaded from videolan and is documented in open specifications TR-06-1 and TR-06-2. LibRIST can be found in gstreamer, Upipe, VLC, Wireshark and FFmpeg.

The video finishes with questions about how RIST compares with SRT. RTMP, CMAF and WebRTC.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Tim Baldwin Head of Product, Zixi
	David Griggs Senior Product Manager, Distribution Platforms Disney Streaming Services
	Ciro Noronha President, RIST Forum Executive Vice President of Engineering, Cobalt Digital