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Video: Broadcast Content Protection

Posted on 12th February 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With video piracy estimated to cost the US economy $29M a year and programming rights costing 100s of millions of dollars or more, there’s plenty of reason to look to technology to protect your content. There is a long history of copy protection for broadcast/linear content which is continually changing.

Graham Turner, who has worked extensively in copy protection for many years, gives us an overview of how pay TV works, a look at the different types of protection and a look back at the history to see what we can learn from the mistakes made since the late 1980s.

After explaining the many reasons different types of channels have to protect their content, Graham explains the fundamentals of content protection, encryption and decryption being central to protection discussing symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. He then discusses key length which is something we hear a lot of, but can be non-trivial to understand. After all, AES talks of 128 and 256-bit keys, whereas in other areas we hear 1024, 2048 and more. Graham shows how these relate to the different keys in symmetric and asymmetric cryptography.

Pay TV is the area of focus for this video whereby live decryption keys need to be available at the set top box (STB) in the home. For DVD copy protection, the key is already in the DVD player and revocation of the rights of that DVD player are difficult. For TV there is a path from the broadcaster to the receiver which allows for more reactive rights management. ECM, Entitlement Checking Messages and EMM, Entitlement Management Messages, are the ways in which these permissions are spread so we look at how these work.

The architecture of the STB comes in focus next as Graham explains how the decryption and describing fit together along with hardware security and software security. Naturally after the STB has decoded the video, there’s interest in making sure the delivery to the TV is also secure which is where HDMI’s HDCP comes in with HDCP 2.2 protecting UHD content. HDCP is a method of ensuring that recording devices don’t get to record protected video whereas TVs or display devices can. Fingerprinting and watermarking are two technologies which are also examined showing how they are useful, to an extent, in identification of footage though not directly useful in preventing piracy itself.

The video ends with a very interesting look at the various high profile hacks from the last 30 or so years examining what was broken and how – in particular whether the cryptography itself was broken or whether the attack succeeded due to a weak link in the chain of another part of the system.

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Speakers

Graham Turner
Television Technologist,
Former Chair, IET Media

Video: How CBC/Radio-Canada Tested Media-over-IP Devices to Build its New Facility

Posted on 6th December 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Moving video production to IP has been ongoing for over 5 years using both SMPTE ST 2022-6 and now ST-2110 but we’re still in the ‘Early Adopter’ phase, explains the Willem Vermost speaking at SMPTE 2019. Willem is the EBU topic lead for the transition to IP-based studios and he is tracking the upcoming projects with public broadcasters.

Willem talks about what’s motivating these Early Adopters. In general, he explains, they have a building move project and they are faced, as CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) was, with being the last to install an extensive SDI infrastructure – and be stuck with that for 7, 10 or more years to come – or the to be one of the first to use IP. Increasingly, they can’t justify the SDI workflow and IP, for all its risks and uncertainties, is the way forward.

CBC/Radio Canada needs to be ‘on air’ in 2020 so they put in a place a risk mitigation plan to test all the equipment before putting it in. Willem outlines what this test plan looks like and what it covers: AES67, ST 2110-40,-7, -30-, -20, EBU r148 security etc. Testing was also brought up by the BBC’s Mark Patrick when he discussed his work in bring in the BBC’s Cardiff Square building on-air. They found that automated testing was key in project delivery so that testing was quick and consistent to ensure that software/firmware patches were correctly accepted into the project.

Willem talks us through the EBU’s famous Technology Pyramid which shows to what extent each of the technologies on which media-over-IP requires has been defined and adopted by the industry. It shows that while the media aspect has been successfully deployed, there is a lot to do in, for example, security.

Difficulties arose due to different interpretations of standards. To aid in diagnosis of such issues, the LIST project has created a 2110 analysis tool and other related tools. This is created within the EBU and Willem highlights some key parts of what it does. He then shows how that connects in with the automated test programs and explains the underlying structure of how the software is built.

The talk finishes with mention of the JT-NM test plan, a summary and questions lead by Arista’s Gerard Phillips.

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Speakers

	Willem Vermost Senior IP Media Technology Architect Topic Lead, Transition to IP-based Studios EBU
	Moderator: Gerard Phillips Systems Engineer, Arista

Video: Broadcast 101 – Audio in an IP Infrastructure

Posted on 15th November 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Uncompressed audio has been in the IP game a lot longer than uncompressed video. Because of its long history, it’s had chance to create a fair number of formats ahead of the current standard AES67. Since many people were trying to achieve the same thing, we find that some formats are compatible with AES67 – in part, whilst we that others are not compatible.

To navigate this difficult world of compatibility, Axon CTO Peter Schut continues the Broadcast 101 webinar series with this video recorded this month.

Peter starts by explaining the different audio formats available today including Dante, RAVENNA and others and outlines the ways in which they do and don’t interoperate. After spending a couple of minutes summarising each format individually, including the two SMPTE audio formats -30 and -31, he shows a helpful table comparing the,

Timing is next on the list discussing PTP and the way that SMPTE ST 2059 is used then packet time is covered explaining how the RTP payload fits into the equation. This payload directly affects the duration of audio you can fit into a packet. The duration is important in terms of keeping a low latency and is restricted to either 1ms or 125 microseconds by SMPTE ST 2110-30.

Peter finishes up this webinar talking about some further details about the interoperability problems between the formats.

Watch now!

Speaker

Peter Schut
CTO,
Axon

Video: BBC Cardiff Central Square – Update

Posted on 14th October 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

It’s being closely watched throughout the industry, a long-in-the-making project to deploy SMPTE ST 2110 throughout a fully green-field development. Its failure would be a big setback for the push to a completely network-based broadcast workflow.

The BBC Cardiff Central Square project is nearing completion now and is a great example of the early-adopter approach to bringing cutting-edge, complex, large-scale projects to market. They chose a single principle vendor so that they could work closely in partnership at a time when the market for ST 2110 was very sparse. This gave them leverage over the product roadmap and allowed to the for the tight integration which would be required to bring this project to market.

Nowadays, the market for ST 2110 products continues to mature and whilst it has still quite a way to go, it has also come a long way in the past four years. Companies embarking similar projects now have a better choice of products and some may now feel they can start to pick ‘best of breed’ rather than taking the BBC approach. Whichever approach is taken there is still a lot to be gained by following and learning from the mistakes and successes of others. Fortunately, Mark Patrick, Lead Architect on the project is here to provide an update on the project.

Mark starts by giving and overview of the project, its scale and its aims. He presents the opportunities and challenges it presents and the key achievements and milestones passed to date.

Live IP has benefits and risks. Mark takes some time to explain the benefits of the flexibility and increasingly lower cost of the infrastructure and weighs them agains the the risks which include the continually developing standards and skills challenges

The progress overview names Grass Vally as the main vendor, control via BNCS having being designed and virtualised, ST 2110 network topology deployed and now the final commissioning and acceptance testing is in progress.

The media topology for the system uses an principal of an A and a B network plus a separate control network. It’s fundamentally a leaf and spine network and Mark shows how this links in to both the Grass Valley equipment but also the audio equipment via Dante and AES67. Mark takes some time to discuss the separate networks they’ve deployed for the audio part of the project, driven by compatibility issues but also within the constraints of this project, it was better to separate the networks rather than address the changes necessary to force them together.

PTP timing is discussed with a nod to the fact that PTP design can be difficult and that it can be expensive too. NMOS issues are also actively being worked on and remains an outstanding issue in terms of getting enough vendors to support it, but also having compatible systems once an implementation is deployed. This has driven the BBC to use NMOS in a more limited way than desired and creating fall-back systems.

From this we can deduce, if it wasn’t already understood, that interoperability testing is a vital aspect of the project, but Mark explains that formalised testing (i.e. IT-style automated) is really important in creating a uniform way of ensuring problems have been fully addressed and there are no regressions. ST 2110 systems are complex and fault finding can be similarly complex and time consuming.

Mark leaves us by explaining what keeps him awake at night which includes items such as lack of available test equipment, lack of single-stream UHD support and NMOS which leads him to a few comments on ST 2110 readiness such as the need for vendors to put much more effort into configuration and management tools.

Anyone with an interest in IP in broadcast will be very grateful at Mark’s, and the BBC’s, willingness to share the project’s successes and challenges in such a constructive way.

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Speaker