The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: 5G Technology

Posted on 16th June 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

5G seems to offer so much, but there is a lot of nuance under the headlines. Which of the features will telcos actually provide? When will the spectrum become available? How will we cope with the new levels of complexity? Whilst for many 5G will simply ‘work’, when broadcasters look to use it for delivering programming, they need to look a few levels deeper.

In this wide-ranging video from the SMPTE Toronto Section, four speakers take us through the technologies at play and they ways they can be implemented to cut through the hype and help us understand what could actually be achieved, in time, using 5G technology.

Michael J Martin is first up who covers topics such as spectrum use, modulation, types of cells, beam forming and security. Regarding spectrum, Michael explains that 5G uses three frequency bands, the sub 1GHz spectrum that’s been in use for many years, a 3Ghz range and a millimetre range at 26Ghz.

“It’s going to be at least a decade until we get 5G as wonderful as 4G is today.”
Michael J Martin

Note that some countries already use other frequencies such as 1.8GHz which will also be available.The important issue is that the 26Ghz spectrum will typically not be available for over a year, so 5G roll-out starts in some of the existing bands or in the 3.4Ghz spectrum. A recurring theme in digital RF is the use of OFDM which has long been used by DVB and has been adopted by ATSC 3.0 as their modulation, too. OFDM allows different levels of robustness so you can optimise reach and bandwidth.

Michael highlights a problem faced in upgrading infrastructure to 5G, the amount of towers/sites and engineer availability. It’s simply going to take a long time to upgrade them all even in a small, dense environment. This will deal with the upgrade of existing large sites, but 5G provides also for smaller cells, (micro, pico and femto cells). These small cells are very important in delivering the millimetre wavelength part of the spectrum.

Network Slicing
Source: Michael J. Martin, MICAN Communications

We look at MIMO and beam forming next. MIMO is an important technology as it, effectively, collects reflected versions of the transmitted signals and processes them to create stronger reception. 5G uses MIMO in combination with beam forming where the transmitter itself electronically manipulates the transmitter array to focus the transmission and localise it to a specific receiver/number of receivers.

Lastly, Michael talks about Network Slicing which is possibly one of the most anticipated features of 5G by the broadcast community. The idea being that the broadcaster can reserve its own slice of spectrum so when sharing an environment with 30,000 other receivers, they will still have the bandwidth they need.

Our next speaker is Craig Snow from Huawei outlines how secondary networks can be created for companies for private use which, interestingly, partly uses separate frequencies from public network. Network slicing can be used to separate your enterprise 5G network into separate networks fro production, IT support etc. Craig then looks at the whole broadcast chain and shows where 5G can be used and we quickly see that there are many uses in live production as well as in distribution. This can also mean that remote production becomes more practical for some use cases.

Craig moves on to look at physical transmitter options showing a range of sub 1Kg transmitters, many of which have in-built Wi-Fi, and then shows how external microwave backhaul might look for a number of your buildings in a local area connecting back to a central tower.

Next is Sayan Sivanathan who works for Bell Mobility and goes in to more detail regarding the wider range of use cases for 5G. Starting by comparing it to 4G, highlighting the increased data rates, improved spectrum efficiency and connection density of devices, he paints a rosy picture of the future. All of these factors support use cases such as remote control and telemetry from automated vehicles (whether in industrial or public settings.) Sayan then looks at the deployment status in the US, Europe and Korea. He shows the timeline for spectrum auction in Canada, talks through photos of 5G transmitters in the real world.

Global Mobile Data Traffic (Exabytes per month)
Source: Ericsson Mobility Report, Nov 2019

Finishing off today’s session is Tony Jones from MediaKind who focuses in on which 5G features are going to be useful for Media and Entertainment. One is ‘better video on mobile’. Tony picks up on a topic mentioned by Michael at the beginning of the video: processing at the edge. Edge processing, meaning having compute power at the closest point of the network to your end user allows you to deliver customised manifest and deal with rights management with minimal latency.

Tony explains how MediaKind worked with Intel and Ericsson to deliver 5G remote production for the 2018 US Open. 5G is often seen as a great way to make covering golf cheaper, more aesthetically pleasing and also quicker to rig.

The session ends with a Q&A

Watch now!
Speakers

	Michael J Martin MICAN Communications Blog: vividcomm.com
	Tony Jones Principal Technologist MediaKind Global
	Craig Snow Enterprise Accounts Director, Huawei
	Sayan Sivanathan Senior Manager – IoT, Smart Cities & 5G Business Development Bell Mobility

Video: What is NMOS? with a Secure Control Case Study

Posted on 15th June 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Once you’ve implemented SMPTE ST 2110‘s suite of standards on your network, you’ve still got all your work ahead of you in order to implement large-scale workflows. How are you doing to discover new devices? How will you make or change connections between devices? How will you associate audios to the video? Creating a functioning system requires an whole ecosystem of control protocols and information exchange which is exactly what AMWA, the Advanced Media Workflow Association has been working on for many years now.

Jed Deame from Nextera introduces the main specifications that have been developed to work hand-in-hand with uncompressed workflows. All prefixed with IS- which stands for ‘Interface Specificaion’, they are IS-04, IS-05, IS-08, IS-09 and IS-10. Between them they allow you to discover new devices, create connections between then, manage the association of audio with video as well as manage system-wide information. Each of these, Jed goes through in turn. The only relevant ones which are skipped are IS-06 which allows devices to communicate northbound to an SDN controller and IS-07 which manages GPI and tally information.

Jed sets the scene by describing an example ST-2110 setup with devices able to join a network, register their presence and be quickly involved in routing events. He then looks at the first specification in today’s talk, NMOS IS-04. IS-04’s job is to provide an API for nodes (cameras, monitors etc.) to use when they start up to talk to a central registry and lodge some details for further communication. The registry contains a GUID for every resource which covers nodes, devices, sources, flows, senders and receivers. IS-04 also provides a query API for controllers (for instance a control panel).

While IS-04 started off very basic, as it’s moved to version 1.4, it’s added HTTPS transport, paged queries and support for connection management with IS-05 and IS-06. IS-04 is a foundational part of the system allowing each element to have an identity, track when entities are changes and update clients accordingly.

IS-05 manages connections between senders and receivers allowing changes to be immediate or set for the future. It allows, for example, querying of a sender to get the multicast settings and provides for sending that to a receiver. Naturally, when a change has been made, it will update the IS-04 registry.

IS-08 helps manage the complexity which is wrought by allowing all audios to flow separately from the video. Whilst this is a boon for flexibility and reduces much unnecessary processing (in extracting and recombining audio) it also adds a burden of tracking which audios should be used where. IS-08 is the answer from AMWA on how to manage this complexity. This can be used in association with BCP-002 (Best Current Practice) which allows for essences in the IS-04 registry to be tagged showing how they were grouped when they were created.

Jed looks next at IS-09 which he explains provides a way for global facts of the system to be distributed to all devices. Examples of this would be whether HTTPS is in use in the facility, syslog servers, the registration server address and NMOS versions supported.

Security is the topic of the last part of talk. As we’ve seen, IS-04 already allows for encrypted API traffic, and this is mandated in the EBU’s TR-1001. However BCP 003 and IS-10 have also been created to improve this further. IS-10 deals with authorisation to make sure that only intended controllers, senders and receivers are allowed access to the system. And it’s the difference between encryption (confidentiality) and authorisation which Jed looks at next.

It’s no accident that security implementations in AMWA specifications shares a lot in common with widely deployed security practices already in use elsewhere. In fact, in security, if you can at all avoid developing your own system, you should avoid it. In use here is the PKI system and TLS encryption we use on every secure website. Jed steppes through how this works and the importance of the cipher suite which lives under TLS.

The final part of this talk is a case study where a customer required encrypted control, an authorisation server, 4K video over 1GbE, essence encryption, unified routing interface and KVM capabilities. Jed explains how this can all be achieved with the existing specifications or an extension non top of them. Extending the encryption methods for the API to essences allowed them to meet the encryption requirements and adding some other calls on top of the existing NMOS provided a unified routing interface which allowed setting modes on equipment.

Watch now!
For more information, download these slides from a SMPTE UK Section meeting on NMOS
Speakers

Jed Deame
CEO,
Nextera Video

Video: AI – more ways it will revolutionise our industry

Posted on 12th June 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) dominate many discussions and for good reason, they usually reduce time and reduce costs. In the broadcast industry their are some obvious areas where it will, an already does, help. But what’s the time table? Where are we now? And what are we trying to achieve with the technology?

Edmundo Hoyle from TV Globo explains how they have managed to transform the thumbnail selection for their OTT service from a manual process taking an editor 15 minutes per video to an automated process using machine learning. A good thumbnail is relevant, it is a clear picture and has no nudity or weapons in it. Edmundo explains that they tackled this in a three-step process. The first step uses NLP analysis of the episode summary to understand what’s relevant and to match that with the subtitles (closed captions). Doing this identifies times int he video which should be examined more closely for thumbnails.

The durations identified by the process are then analysed for blur-free frames (amongst other metrics to detect clear videography) which gives them candidate pictures which may contain problematic imagery. the AWS service Rekognition which returns information regarding whether faces, guns or nudity are present in the frame. Edmundo finishes by showing the results which are, in general very positive. Final choice of thumbnails is still moderated by editors, but the process is much more streamlined because they are much less likely to have to find an image manually since the process selects 4 options. Edmundo finishes by explaining some of the chief causes of rejecting an image which are all relatively easy to improve upon and tend to be related to a person looking down or away from the camera.

We’ve seen before on The Broadcast Knowledge the idea of super-resolution which involves up-scaling images/video using machine learning. The result is better than using standard linear filters like lanczos. This is has been covered in a talk from Mux’s Nick Chadwick about LCEVC. Yiannis Andreopoulos from iSize talks next about the machine learning they use to improve video which uses some of these same principles to pre-treat, or as they call it ‘pre-code’ video before it’s encoded using a standard MPEG encoder (whether that be AVC, HEVC or the upcoming VVC). Yiannis explains how they are able to understand the best resolutions to encode at and scale the image intelligently appropriately. This delivers significant gains across all the metrics leading to bandwidth reduction. Furthermore he outlines a system which feeds back to maintain both the structure of the video which avoids it becoming too blurry which can be a consequence of being to subservient to the drive to reduce bitrate and thus simplifying the picture. It can also, though, protect itself from going too far down the sharpness path and only chasing metrics gains. He concludes by outlining future plans.

Grant Franklin Totten then steps up to explain how Al Jazeera have used AI/machine learning to help automate editorial compliance processes. He introduces the idea of ‘Contextual Video Metadata’ which ads a level of context to what would otherwise be stand-alone metadata. To understand this, we need to learn more about what Al Jazeera is trying to achieve.

As a news organisation, Al Jazeera has many aspects of reporting to balance. They are particularly on the look out for bias, good fact-checking & fake news. In order to support this, they are using AI and machine learning. They have both textual and video-based methods of detecting fake news. As an example of their search for bias, they have implemented voice detection and analysed MP’s speech time in Ireland. Irish law requires equal speaking time, yet Al Jazeera can easily show that some MPs get far more time than others. Another challenge is detecting incorrect on-screen text with the example given of naming Trump as Obama by accident on a lower-third graphic. Using OCR, NLP and Face recognition, they can flag issues with the hope the they can be corrected before Tx. In terms of understanding, for example, who is president, Al Jazeera is in the process of refining the Knowledge graph to capture the information they need to check against.

AI and machine learning (ML) aren’t going anywhere. This talk shines a light on two areas where it’s particularly helpful in broadcast. You can count on hearing significant improvements in AI and ML’s effectiveness in the next few years and it’s march into other parts of the workflow.
Watch now!
Speakers

	Edmundo Hoyle TV System Researcher TV Globo
	Yiannis Andreopoulos Technical Director, iSize Technologies
	Grant Franklin Totten Head of Media & Emerging Platforms, Al Jazeera Media Networks

Edmundo Hoyle (GLOBO), Yiannis Andreopoulos (iSize Technologies) and Grant Totten (Al Jazeera Media Network).

Video: Building A Studio

Posted on 11th June 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The fundamentals of building a studio are the same whether for TV or Radio. You want to keep sound out…and in. This has forever been a challenge which doesn’t stop when the room’s built. Before it’s pressed into use, you have to lay it out correctly, considering the equipment, acoustic treatments and keep it cool.

Fortunately, experts from the BBC and Global are here to talk us through it at this Masterclass from Radio TechCon. Dave Walters from the BBC kicks off explaining how the aim of isolating your studio from physical vibration both through the structure and through gaps in the walls, floor or ceiling. Once isolated from the outside, the task is to manage the sound in the room and that calls for acoustic treatment. Dave goes through the options for lining the ceiling and walls showing that there’s acoustic treatment at all budgets. Dave finishes by highlighting that the aim is to dissipate sound and not let it bounce around. This means reflective surfaces such as glass windows need to be angled so they don’t directly point at any other hard surface.

With a deadened acoustic and a quiet atmosphere, your studio is ready to be occupied. Stephen Clarke from Global talks through laying out the studio taking into account what people do and don’t want to see. The presenter, for instance, will want to see through to the control room for visual cues during the programme, but it’s best to keep guests pointed away without distraction. This can also extend to the placement of TVs, computers and other equipment. Equipment, of course, is a concern in itself. As it generates heat and, often noise, it’s best to minimise in-studio equipment which can be done with a KVM system. Stephen talks us through a photo of the Today studio to see these principles in action.

To finish up, Global’s Simon Price talks about making holes in the studio that Dave managed to isolate. The inconvenient truth is that people need oxygen, generate heat and generate odour. Any one of those three is a good reason to put air con into the studio so Simon explains the use of baffles in ducting used to introduce the air. This absorbs sound from the air’s movement and also any external sounds that happen to come in. Simon concludes by explaining safe electrical distribution for studios keeping wiring to a minimum and reducing fire risk.

Before leaving, the team have just enough time to answer a question about studios with large amounts of glass and how to choose how ‘dead’ you want the reverb in the studio to be asking ‘can you go too far’ in minimising sound.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Dave Walters Head of Systems and Services: TV, Radio & Archive BBC
	Stephen Clarke Broadcast Engineer, Global Radio
	Simon Price Broadcast Engineering Manager, Global Radio

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