Broadcast Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Videos: Standards – What are they and how are they changing?

Posted on 23rd July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Standards in media go back to the early days of cinema standardising the sprocket holes in rolls of film with the intent of making it easier for the US Army to distribute training films. This standardisation work marked the beginning of SMPTE, though the acronym lacked a T at the time since television hadn’t yet been invented. There is a famous XKCD comic that mocks standards or at least standards that promise to replace all that went before. This underlines why it’s more important what standards don’t say than what they do. Giving the market room to evolve, advance and innovate is a vital aspect of good standards.

The broadcast industry is emerging from a time of great stability thanks to a number of standards that have been around for ages. SDI is a decades-old technology that is ubiquitous in the industry. Likewise, H.264 has become the only codec to use unless you have a specific use case for HEVC, AV1, VP9 etc. thanks to its almost universal presence in devices. Black and burst is now being replaced by PTP in IP installations. This is novel, despite PTP’s upcoming twentieth birthday, because it doesn’t matter if PTP is four decades old, its launch in the broadcast sector is recent, support will be low.

This panel from SMPTE Hollywood features two members of SMPTE deeply involved with standardisation within the industry: Bruce Devlin, Standards Vice President and Thomas Bause Mason Director of Standards Development. . They are joined by IP specialist JiNan Glasgow George and moderator Maureen O’Rourke from Disney.

In a sometimes frank discussion, we hear about the attempt by standards bodies to try and keep up with the shift form hardware to software within the whole industry, the use of patents within standards, how standards bodies are financed and the cost of standards, software versus hardware patents, standardisation of AI models, ensuring standards are realistic & useful with plugfests, the difference between standards bodies such as ANSI, ISO, SMPTE etc.,

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Speaker

	Thomas Bause Mason Director of Standards Development, SMPTE
	Bruce Devlin Standards Vice-President, SMPTE
	JiNan Glasgow George Patent Attorney, Neo IP
	Maureen O’Rourke Technical Lead Quality Control Officer, The Walt Disney Company

Video: TV moving to all IP – Dream or Reality?

Posted on 17th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As IP continues to infiltrate all aspects of the broadcast industry, this panel asks how close we are to all-IP TV delivery, what that would actually mean and how what technologies exist to get us there. As we’ve seen in contribution and production, IP brings with it benefits to those that embrace it, but not all of those benefits apply to every business so this panel considers where the real value actually lies.

Pedro Bandeira from Deutsche Telekom, Rob Suero from RDK, Xavier Leclercq from Broadpeak joins Wyplay’s Dominique Feral in this discussion moderated by Andreas Waltenspiel. The discussion starts with the motivations to move to IP with Pedro explaining that the services he delivers are viewed by the viewers alongside the big internet-delivered services like Netflix. As such, he needs access to the same technologies and sees a lot of innovation in that sphere. This is why he’s advocating a move away from multicast delivery of video to unicast; delivering with exactly the same technologies the giants are using.

For Pedro, streaming technology is an enabler, not a differentiator. As the foundation of his service, he wants it to be rock solid so feels the choice of partners to provide the technology is very important as he intends to benefit from incremental improvements as the base technologies improve. Part of the flexibility that unicast technologies provide, says Pedro, is removing the baggage of older technologies. He sees these as a burden when he wants the same service and quality of experience on devices as well as STBs.

Rob from Broadpeak feels that Multicast, or specifically Multicast-ABR is a really interesting technology because of the scalability and network efficiency which Pedro is willing to sacrifice to access other streaming technologies. Multicast ABR, however, delivers to the home as multicast so the impact on the telco network is minimised and only in the home is the service translated into a standard stream like HLS or DASH. In principle this allows companies like Deutsche Telekom to use the technologies he’s interested in whilst also delivering with network efficiency.

“A great technology for transitioning” is Pedro’s view of ABR Multicast. If we had the bandwidth, he feels no one would bother using it. However, he does agree that it’s useful in those markets whether the infrastructure can’t support a pure unicast offering and he does see ABR Multicast being part of his delivery strategy. He would prefer to avoid it as it requires home gateways and vendor support as well as being another point of failure. With 50 million homes in Europe on IPTV, there are plenty of services to transition.

The conversation then turns to RDK, the generically titled Reference Development Kit which is the name of an open source project, Rob explains, which abstracts the creation of new OTT apps and services from the underlying vendor equipment meaning you don’t have to develop software for each and every device. Removing the ties to OEMs keeps costs down for operators and allows them to be more agile. Dominique explains how writing with RDK may be free, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy and points to an experience where Wyplay shaved 6 seconds of latency off a customer’s service by optimising the way the app was written. At the end of the day, Dominique sees the route to a good, low-latency service as a fight with all aspects of the system including the encoder, packaging protocol, CDN, DRM latency and much more. This means optimising RDK is just part of a wide package of services that companies like Wyplay can offer.

The panel concludes by talking about learning RDK, upskilling colleagues, bringing them along on the journey to all-IP and offering advice to those embarking on projects.

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Speakers

	Pedro Bandeira VP Product & New Business, Europe, Deutsche Telekom
	Rob Suero Head of Technology, RDK
	Dominique Feral Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Wyplay
	Xavier Leclercq Head of Business Development, Broadpeak
	Moderator: Andreas Waltenspiel Founder & GM, Waltenspiel Management Consulting

Video: 2020 Video Redefined and the Pandemic

Posted on 12th March 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Life’s certainly changed during 2020 and 2021, so far, is only cementing those changes. Who are the winners and who are the losers? Jon Giegengack joins John Porterfield to discuss the work Entertainment Research’s doing to understand the changing market.

I think we’re all aware that the pandemic is ravaging some market sectors and even some whole economies. At the same time, staying at home is allowing some families who are still in work, to save money. Jon explains that their polling shows that around a quarter of US consumers have dropped a service, whereas around a third have added one which mirrors the mixed stories we hear of lost jobs juxtaposed against ‘super savers’ who are investing their new-found wealth.

Jon’s view is that one key change that will last long beyond the pandemic is this adoption of streaming platforms. Premium video on demand is what people are interested in and is only buoyed by people’s investments in TVs during the pandemic, laptops, mobile devices etc. Furthermore, the pandemic has forced the hand of companies to move forward with their home distribution plans. Warner Brothers, for example, will be releasing their new films both at the cinema and on HBO Max at the same time at no extra cost to the subscribers. Whilst they may change their approach in 2022, this will have brought forward their plans and may also encourage others to do similar. It’s also another motivation for people to invest in their own home-viewing environment which will, in turn, encourage them to double down on their interest in viewing theatrical releases at home.

People do care about quality. They are forgiving when the quality isn’t there, but research shows that the majority of video watched on Netflix is done on a TV which is a big shift from its early days of streaming. Jon’s research shows that second screens tend to be used for YouTube-style videos and that time spent watching there doesn’t reduce hour-for-hour time in front of the TV.

This sounds like it’s great news all round. But the research shows that in the US it’s Netflix which is the main beneficiary of this change racking up a 49% increase in subscribers with Disney+, Hulu and Prime coming after. For TV providers, the news isn’t so good. vMPVDs such as YouTube Live and Hulu Live saw a 50% decrease and conventional TV cable/satellite providers saw a 32% drop.

Lastly, John discussed the impact on the content itself by the content where presenters have had to find ways of delivering TV from home taking many leaves from YouTubers to make sure they and their surroundings look good. This homely feel has been appreciated in some programmes leaving viewers with a closer connection to the presenters which may leave the door open to continuing some parts of programming like this in the future.

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Speakers

	Jon Giegengack Principal, Hub Entertainment Research
	John Porterfield Streaming Technology Evangelist, JP’sChalkTalks

Video: Broadcast Playout Cloud Transformation

Posted on 11th December 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Playout has been gradually moving to the cloud for a number of years now. Famously Discovery moved all of their thematic playout to the cloud in 2018 and many have done the same since. As we saw the other day, Sky Italia are now seeing ‘code as infrastructure’ whereby automated API calls launch the in-cloud infrastructure they need as part of their linear playout.

In this video, we hear from Matt Westrup from A+E EMEA on how they’ve moved their playout to the cloud with their partner Amagi. Running 30 channels in Europe, Matt explains that due to some business uncertainty with a partner company, the need for a DR facility was identified. Talking to Srinivasan KA from Amagi, they were able to create this using Amagi’s product portfolio based in AWS. Matt explains that after the DR facility was set up, they moved quickly to full mirroring and ultimately they flipped the switch and they announced they were now broadcasting from the cloud.

Srinivasan KA explains that many companies take a similar route when working in the cloud. Sometimes a cost-effective DR facility is all they need, however it’s easy to replicate all your workflows in the cloud and have that on standby. This can be done by keeping the content in the cloud evergreen, running automation but keeping the playout functions switched off to save money which can be quickly brought online as needed. Srinivasan KA looks at the high-level diagram of the A+E operation showing how S3 holds the content, goes through a workflow to the CPU-powered playout and then is handed off using direct connect to affiliates and telcos using Amagi’s POPs.

Matt comments that this was relatively easy to do from a business perspective “No-one was investing massively in fixed infrastructure” and they’ve found they have been faster to market with a speed they’ve “never experienced before.” Needless to say, the move to the cloud also came into its own and provided a seamless move work home working during the pandemic. And, looking more longterm, A+E will continue to benefit from not having to manage the physical datacentre/serber room infrastructure.

The video finishe swith an overview of Broadcast in AWS from Andy Kane. He covers the main drivers for broadcasters moving to the cloud such as business agility, a preference with some companies for increasing Opex spending, increased ease in experiementing with new technologies/ways of engaging with customers, using a remote workforce among others. Andy covers an example broadcast flow using MediaConnect for contribution, MediaLive Statmux for distibution, redundancy strategies and other building blocks such as TAG multiviewers.

Watch now!
From the AWS Media Insights Webcast Series
Speakers

	Andy Kane Principal AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect (Languages), Amazon Web Services (AWS)
	Matt Westrup VP Technology and Operations, A+E EMEA
	Srinivasan KA Co-founder, Amagi Corporation
	Ian McPherson Partner Development Lead – Media & Entertainment, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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