The Broadcast Knowledge

Webinar: Securing Live Streams

Posted on 27th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Piracy in France cost €1.2bn in 2017 and worldwide the loss has been valued up to US$52 billion. Even if these numbers are inflated, over-counted or similar, it’s clear there is a lot of money at stake in online streaming. There are a number of ways of getting to protect your content, encryption, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and tokenisation are three key ones and this webinar will examine what works best in the real world.

All these technologies used together don’t always stop piracy 100%, but they can significantly impact the ease of pirating and the quality of the final material.

Date: Thursday January 30th – 10a.m. PT / 1p.m. / 18:00 GMT

It’s important to understand the difference between encryption and Digital Rights Management. In general DRM relies on encryption, whereby encryption is a way of making sure that decodable video only lands in the hands of people who have been given the encryption key. This means that people who are snooping on traffic between the video provider and consumer can’t see what the video is and can be accomplished in a similar way to secure web pages which are secured against eavesdroppers. The problem with encryption is, however, that it doesn’t intrinsically decide who is allowed to decode the video meaning anyone with the decryption key can video the content. Often this is fine, but if you want to run a pay-TV service, even ignoring content, it’s much better to target customer by customer who can video the video. And this is where DRM comes in.

DRM is multi-faceted and controls the way in which consumers can view/use the content as much as whether they can access it to start with. DRM, for instance, can determine that a display device can show the work, but a recorder is not allowed to make a recording. It can also determine access based on location. Another aspect of DRM is tracking in the form of insertion of watermarks and metadata which mean that if a work is pirated, there is a way to work back to the original subscriber to determine the source of the leak.

Tokenisation is a method in which the player requests access to the material and is passed a token, by means of a response from the server after it has checked if the player is allowed access. Because of the way this token is created, it is not possible for another player to use it to access the content which means that sharing a URI won’t allow another user access to the video. Without some form of access control, once one subscriber has received a URI to access the video, they could pass that to another user who could also then access it.

What’s the best way to use these technologies? What are the pros and cons and what are the other methods of securing media? These questions and more will be discussed in this Streaming Video Alliance webinar on January 30th.

	Peter Cossack Vice President Cybersecurity services, Irdeto
	Kei Foo Director of Advanced Video Engineering, Charter Communications
	Orly Amsalem Product Manager, AI/ML based video security and anti-piracy solutions , Synamedia
	Marvin Van Schalkwyk Senior Solutions Architect, FriendMTS
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Media Alliance

Video: Delivering Better Manifests with Effective VMAF

Posted on 24th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Measuring video quality is done daily around the world between two video assets. But what happens when you want to take the aggregate quality of a whole manifest? With VMAF being a well regarded metric, how can we use that in an automatic way to get the overview we need?

In this talk, Nick Chadwick from Mux shares the examples and scripts he’s been using to analyse videos. Starting with an example where everything is equal other than quality, he explains the difficulties in choosing the ‘better’ option when the variables are much less correlated. For instance, Nick also examines the situations where a video is clearly better, but where the benefit is outweighed by the minimal quality benefit and the disproportionately high bitrate requirement.

So with all of this complexity, it feels like comparing manifests may be a complexity too far, particularly where one manifest has 5 renditions, the other only 4. The question being, how do you create an aggregate video quality metric and determine whether that missing rendition is a detriment or a benefit?

Before unveiling the final solution, Nick makes the point of looking at how people are going to be using the service. Depending on the demographic and the devices people tend to use for that service, you will find different consumption ratios for the various parts of the ABR ladder. For instance, some services may see very high usage on 2nd screens which, in this case, may take low-resolution video and also lot of ‘TV’ size renditions at 1080p50 or above with little in between. Similarly other services may seldom ever see the highest resolutions being used, percentage-wise. This shows us that it’s important not only to look at the quality of each rendition but how likely it is to be seen.

To bring these thoughts together into a coherent conclusion, Nick unveils an open-source analyser which takes into account not only the VMAF score and the resolution but also the likely viewership such that we can now start to compare, for a given service, the relative merits of different ABR ladders.

The talk ends with Nick answering questions on the tendency to see jumps between different resolutions – for instance if we over-optimise and only have two renditions, it would be easy to see the switch – how to compare videos of different resolutions and also on his example user data.

Watch now!
Speakers

Nick Chadwick
Software Engineer,
Mux

Video: Platform Wars – the De-aggregation and Re-aggregation of Content

Posted on 23rd January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

How does the move to OTT delivery impact the traditional platforms? Are there too many streaming services? This session looks at the new platforms, the consumer experience, the role of aggregation and the way that operators have been involved in de-aggregation and then re-aggregation of channel packages both in competition and in cooperation.

How many subscription services are too many for a household? There’s some thinking that 3 may be the typical maximum when people tend to switch to a ‘one in, one out’ policy on subscription packages. Colin Dixon says the average is currently 2 in the UK and Germany. The panel asks whether we should have as many and compares the situation with audio where ‘super aggregation’ rules. Services like Apple Music and Spotify rely on aggregating ‘all’ music and consumers don’t subscribe separately to listen to Sony artists one on service and EMI on another, so what is it that drives video to be different and will it stay that way?

The topic then switches to smart TVs discussing the feeling that five to eight years ago they had a go at app stores and ended up disappointing. Not only was it often clunky at the time, but support has now gone on the whole from the manufacturers. Is the current wave of smart TVs any different? From BT’s perspective, explains Colin Phillips, it’s very costly to keep many different versions of app up to date and tested so a uniform platform across multiple TVs would be a lot better.

The talk concludes looking at the future for Disney+, Netflix and other providers ahead of discussing predictions from industry analysts.

Watch now!

This panel 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

	Colin Phillips IPTV and CPE Solutions Architect, British Telecom
	Chris Ambrozic VP of Product, TiVo
	Colin Dixon Founder & Chief Analyst, nScreenMedia
	Brian Paxton Managing Director, Kingsmead Security
	Moderator: Justin Lebbon Co-Founder & Director, Mediatel Events Ltd

Video: The Good and the Ugly – IP Studio Production Case Study

Posted on 22nd January 2020 by Adam K

What’s implementing SMPTE ST-2110 like in real life? How would you design your network and what were the problems? In this case study Ammar Latif from Cisco Systems presents the architecture, best practices and lessons learned they gleaned in this live IP broadcast production facility project designed for a major US broadcaster. Based on SMPTE ST-2110 standard, it spanned five studios and two control rooms. The central part of this project was a dual Spine-Leaf IP fabric with bandwidth equivalent of a 10,000 x 10,000 HD SDI router with a fully non-blocking multicast architecture. The routing system was based on Grass Valley Convergent broadcast controller and a Cisco DCNM media controller.

As the project was commissioned in 2018, the AMWA IS-04 and IS-05 specifications providing an inter-operable mechanism for routing media around SMPTE 2110 network were not yet available. Multicast flow subscription was based on a combination of IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) and PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) protocols. While PIM is very efficient and mature, it lacks the ability to use bandwidth as a parameter when setting up a flow path. Ammar explains how Non-Blocking Multicast (NBM) developed by Cisco brings bandwidth awareness to PIM by signalling a type of data (video, audio or metadata).

The talk continues by discussing PTP distribution & monitoring, SMPTE 2022-7 seamless protection switching and remote site production. Ammar also lets us see how the user interfaces on the Cisco DCNM media controller were designed which include a visualisation of multicast flow, network topology and link saturation of ports.

You can find the slides here.

Watch now!

Speaker

Ammar Latif
Principal Architect,
Cisco Systems

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