Video: Online Streaming Primer

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

A trip down memory lane for some, a great intro to the basics of streaming for others, this video from IET Media looks at the history of broadcasting and how that has moved over the years to online streaming posing the question whether, with so many people watching online, is that broad enough to now be considered broadcast?

The first of a series of talks from IET Media, the video starts by highlighting that the recording of video was only practical 20 years after the first television broadcasts then talks about how television has moved on to add colour, resolution and move to digital. The ability to record video is critical to almost all of our use of media today. Whilst film worked well as an archival medium, it didn’t work well, at scale, for recording of live broadcasts. So in the beginning, broadcasting from one, or a few, transmitters was all there was.

Russell Trafford-Jones, from IET Media, then discusses the advent of streaming from its predecessor as file-based music in portable players, through the rise of online radio and how this naturally evolved into the urge to stream video in much the same way.

Being a video from the IET video, Russell then looks at the technology behind getting video onto a network and over the internet. He talks about cutting the stream into chunks, i.e. small files, and how sending files can create a seamless stream of data. One key advantage of this method is Adaptive BitRate (ABR) meaning being able to change from one quality level, to another which typically means changing bitrate to adapt to changing network conditions.

Finishing by talking about the standards available for online streaming, this talk is a great introduction to streaming and an important part of anyone’s foundational understanding of broadcast and streaming.

Watch now!

This video was produced by IET Media, a technical network within the IET which runs events, talks and webinars for networking and education within the broadcast industry. More information

Speakers

Russell Trafford-Jones Russell Trafford-Jones
Exec Member, IET Media
Manager, Support & Services, Techex
Editor, The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Speed-Distortion Optimization: Tradeoffs in Open Source HEVC Encoding

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

HEVC, also known as h.265, has been with us for 7 years and whilst its use continues to grow, its penetration remains low in streaming and broadcast transmissions. One reason for this is the increase in compute power it requires. With 4-rung ABR ladder for streaming being so common, a two-fold increase in complexity means finding 8 times as much compute power in your encoder.

This talk, led by MulticoreWare and Comcast, discusses the x.265 codec and the abilities of the presets. Pradeep Ramachandran uses a diagram of the x.265 encode system to expose some of the ways in which x.264 works.

Pradeep then gives an overview of the key tools of HEVC ahead of explaining those they tested against using UHD HDR content. Alex Giladi then takes the stage detailing their use of Dynamically Controlled RDO and how they were able to determine the best combination of modes to create the best encode.

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Speakers

Pradeep Ramachandran Pradeep Ramachandran
Principal Engineer in Office of CTO,
MulticoreWare
Alex Giladi Alex Giladi
Distinguished Engineer,
Comcast

Video: Non-standard Codecs with Standard WebRTC

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

WebRTC is used on a massive scale thanks to Facebook messenger and Google, but when it comes to video streaming services, some find its open source codec VP8 too restrictive. WebRTC is actively evolving to adapt and become codec agnostic though this work is ongoing. In the meantime, Comcast is here to show us there is a way to inject the codec of your choice into WebRTC.

Finding that many of their video capture devices, CCTV cameras and the like, had hardware AVC encoders, Bryan Meissner explains Comcast didn’t feel it had much of a choice in codec, therefore they looked for a way to make WebRTC to carry AVC.

While forcing an unsupported codec into a protocol wasn’t ideal, they were able to leave much of WebRTC unchanged. The RTP and Data channels were established as normal and peering continued to work as ever. With control of both the send and receive side, the team found they could pick out the data from the WebRTC stack ahead of the normal decoder and feed that into Exoplayer using its API. This allowed playback on Android devices. Bryan goes on to explain the approach for iOS and web browsers. As WebRTC is ‘baked in’ to browsers, there really are very few ways to change the signal flow.

At the end of the day, Comcast made this work and used it in production or many years, Jeff Cardillo explains as he wraps up this video. But he also takes time to talk through some of the problems. Having to bypass parts of a program with parts of another library does increase complexity. Not only does the code become more complex but the code becomes platform specific, you need control over the source and keeping the individual parts synchronously up to date can be a balancing act.

Jeff finishes this talk from Demuxed SF 2019 by elaborating on the mobile and browser tradeoffs at play.

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Speakers

Bryan Meissner Bryan Meissner
Sr. Director Software Development and Engineering,
Comcast
Jeff Cardillo Jeff Cardillo
Principal Software Engineer,
Comcast Interactive Media

Webinar: Broadcaster VOD: Delivering the next-generation of catch-up viewing

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

With Amazon, Netflix and so many other VOD services available, broadcasters like the BBC and Discovery are investing a lot in their own VOD services, known as Broadcaster VOD (BVOD) in order to maintain relevance, audiences and revenue.

Commercial broadcasters such as Sky, ITV and Channel 4 are trying hard to attract advertisers and “have all launched new ad formats, struck deals with ad tech vendors to build marketplaces and set up programmatic teams to manage them” according to a report from digiday.com. As such this means that the battle for advertisers wallets is moving more towards VOD from linear.

Date: Thursday 30 January, 14:00 GMT / 9 a.m. ET

With this in mind, IBC365 will discuss the business models, platforms and strategies being used by BVOD platforms. They will look at the BBC’s move to build a deep content library of free-to-view box sets, and to the importance of data, personalisation and addressable advertising models.

Further more, this webinar will talk about the commercial and technical requirements to build a BVOD to a standard that’s going to stand on its own in this increasingly crowded, but well-funded marketplace.

Register now!
Speakers

Richard Davidson-Houston Richard Davidson-Houston
Founder,
Finally Found Ltd.
Roma Kojima Roma Kojima
Senior Director OTT Video (CBC Gem),
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Niels Baas Niels Baas
Managing Director, NLZIET