Video: Deploying WebRTC In A Low-Latency Streaming Service

WebRTC is an under appreciated streaming protocol with sub-second latency. Several startups are working hard to harness this technology born by Google for use in video conferencing for live streaming.

When you look at the promised latencies, you can see why. CMAF, the lowest-latency protocol for live streaming using HLS-style chunked file delivery is gaining wider adoption and provides a very impressive latency reduction, however it typically stops at between 4 and 2 seconds. To get below a second, WebRTC is almost the only option out there.

In this talk, Millicast CTO Dr. Alex Gouaillard looks at the misunderstandings and misinformation are out there regarding WebRTC. Dr. Alex covers WebRTC now having ABR, using over multiple hops, the testing ecosystem and much more.

Dr. Alex also covers the lessons learnt over the last two years of development and implementation of the standard and finishes by looking to the future which will bring in QUIC, AV1 and Web ASM.

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Speaker

Alex Gouaillard Alex Gouaillard
Founder & CTO,
Millicast

Video: Deployment of Ultra HD Services Around the Globe

In some parts of the industry UHD is entirely absent. Thierry Fautier is here to shine a light on the progress being made around the globe in deploying UHD.

Thierry starts off by defining terms – important because Ultra HD actually hides several, often unmentioned, formats behind the term ‘UHD’. This also shows how all of the different aspects of UHD, which include colour (WCG), HDR, audio (NGA) and frame rate to name only a few, fit together.

There’s then a look at the stats, where is HDR deployed? How is UHD typically delivered? And the famed HDR Venn diagram showing which TVs support which formats.

As ever, live sports is a major testing ground so the talk examines some lessons learnt, and features a BBC case study, from the 2018 World Cup. Not unrelated, there is a discussion on the state of UHD streaming including discussion of CMAF.

Leading nicely onto Content Aware Encoding (CAE), which was also in use at the world cup.

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Free registration required

Speaker

Thierry Fautier Thierry Fautier
President-Chair, Ultra HD Forum
VP Video Strategy, Harmonic

Video: Low Latency and High QOE for Live Streaming


Low latency streaming is always a compromise, but what can be done to keep QOE high?

This on-demand webinar looks at CMAF and presents some real-world data on this low latency technique. The webinar starts by explaining that CMAF is a low-latency streaming technology similar to HLS and other streaming protocols where the idea is to deliver the video as small files. Olivier and Alain from Harmonic explain how this is done and look at some of the trade-offs and compromises that are needed and introduce techniques to keep QOE high. They also look at deployment in cloud vs. on premise.

Pieter-Jan Speelmans talks about play tradeoffs and optimisations within the player. CMAF allows the buffer to be reduced and whilst a bad network may mean you buffer is similar to ‘normal’, but in good networks, this buffer can be brought down significantly. He also talks about how ABR switching is impacted by GOP length even in CMAF.

Viaccess-Orca explains how DRM works with CMAF and looks at some of the challenges including licences acquisition time and overloading licence servers at the beginning of events. Akamai’s Will Law explains some benefits of CMAF and the near-real-time of chunk-based transfer (HTTP 1.1) and how downloading chunks at full speed leads to problems when the same broadband link is used by several clients.

There are lots of good talks on CMAF, but this is one of the few which talks about CMAF not as theory, but as is deployable today.

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Speakers

Olivier Karra Olivier Karra
SaaS Business Development Director,
Harmonic Inc.
Alain Pellen Alain Pellen
Sr. Manager, OTT & IPTV Solutions,
Harmonic Inc
Will Law Will Law
Chief Architect – Media Devision,
Akamai
Pieter-Jan Speelmans Pieter-Jan Speelmans
Founder & CTO,
THEOplayer
Nicolas Delahaye Nicolas Delahaye
VP Engineering Player,
Viaccess-Orca

Video: An Overview of the ISO Base Media File Format

ISO BMFF a standardised MPEG media container developed from Apple’s Quicktime and is the basis for cutting edge low-latency streaming as much as it is for tried and trusted mp4 video files. Here we look into why we have it, what it’s used for and how it works.

ISO BMFF provides a structure to place around timed media streams whilst accommodating the metadata we need for professional workflows. Key to its continued utility is its extensible nature allowing additional abilities to be added as they are developed such as adding new codecs and metadata types.

ATSC 3.0’s streaming mechanism MMT is based on ISO BMFF as well as the low-latency streaming format CMAF which shows that despite being over 18 years old, the ISO BMFF container is still highly relevant.

Thomas Stockhammer is the Director of Technical Standards at Qualcomm. He explains the container format in structure and origin before explaining why it’s ideal for CMAF’s low-latency streaming use case, finishing off with a look at immersive media in ISO BMFF.

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Speaker

Thomas Stockhammer Thomas Stockhammer
Director Technical Standards,
Qualcomm