Broadcasting

Video: Insight into Current Trends of IP Production & Cloud Integration

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

When we look at the parts of our workflows that work well, we usually find standards underneath. SDI is pretty much a solved problem and has been delivering video since before the 90s, albeit with better reliability as time has gone on. MPEG Transport Streams are another great example of a standard that has achieved widespread interoperability. These are just two examples given by John Mailhot from Imagine Communications as he outlines the standards which have built the broadcast industry to what it is today, or perhaps to what it was in 2005. By looking at past successes, John seeks to describe the work that the industry should be doing now and into the future as technology and workflows evolve at a pace.

John’s point is that in the past we had some wildly successful standards in video and video transport. For logging, we relied on IT-based standards like SNMP and Syslog and for control protocols, the wild west was still in force with some defacto standards such as Probel’s SW-P-08 router protocol and the TSL UMD protocol dominating their niches.

 

 

The industry is now undergoing a number of transformations simultaneously. We are adopting IP-based transport both compressed and uncompressed (though John quickly points out SDI is still perfectly viable for many). We are moving many workloads to the cloud and we are slowly starting to up our supported resolutions along with moving some production to HDR. All of this work, to be successful should be based on standards, John says. And there are successes in there such as AMWA’s NMOS specifications which are the first multi-vendor, industry-wide control protocol. Technically it is not a standard, but in this case, the effect is close to the same. John feels that the growth of our industry depends on us standardising more control protocols in the future.

John spends some time looking at how the move to IP, UHD, HDR and Cloud have played into the Live Production and Linear Playout parts of the broadcast chain. Live production, as we’ve heard previously is starting to embrace IP now, lagging playout deployments. Whereas playout usually lags production in UHD and HDR support since it’s more important to acquire video now in UHD & HDR even if you can’t transmit it to maximise its long-term value.

John finishes by pointing out that Moore’s law’s continued may not be so clear in CPUs but it’s certainly in effect within optics and network switches and routers. Over the last decade, switches have gone from 10 gig to 50 to 100 and now to 400 gig. This long term cost reduction should be baked into the long-term planning for companies embarking on an IP transformation project.

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Speaker

John Mailhot John Mailhot
CTO,
Imagine Communications

Video: Free-to-Air Broadcasters’ Strategic Insights

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

There is a lot of change underway as broadcasters not only update their distribution models to match the changing viewership but also position themselves to stand up to the increased competition from the internet giants. To find out what’s happening in the markets, Dataxis invited DR’s Peter Rosberg, Jan Vlcek CEO of Czech broadcaster Nova and Nuno Sanches of Kaltura to speak to Monique van Dusseldorp

From Peter’s perspective, Denmark’s broadband has been very good for a number of years which has led to a very fast uptake of digital platforms compared to other markets. It’s no surprise that he finds the 3 to 45 year old demographic is much more amenable to streaming rather than broadcast channels. He does, however, mention that DR no longer has a broadcast channel catering to young and older children. Peter says there will be a tipping point for them soon when they’ll find their broadcast numbers beaten by streaming.

Jan says that, for Nova, ‘local content is king’ which is a sentiment we’ve heard before in the ongoing attempt to carve a stable position among the global brands such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. Jan says that Netflix has produced some Croatian-language programming, but they can’t compete with Nova and other in-country broadcasters when it comes to producing enough, good quality content. Monique asks about forcing Netflix and others to have local content to which Jan says that those who have the best content will win. A global player can’t work locally in every market, there are too many.

 

 

On the flip side, broadcasters continue to find a global audience for their content and the internet makes getting it to their customers easier. Nuno says that Kaltura has seen a lot of these global trends. Many broadcasters find that the ex-pat market is big enough to be a useful demographic to deliver to either directly or via third-party streaming platforms. DR has a number of internationally received TV series such as ‘The Bridge’ but Peter says these are not made for an international audience, quoting a former head of drama saying ‘you have be local to go global’.

Marketing has changed with the diversification of distribution. When a linear channel moves to OTT such as the BBC’s BBC Three, the inherent promotion of the linear channel is lost. Broadcasters rely on the programme before to bring viewers into the current programme. When every single programme needs to be deliberately selected by viewers, the thumbnail needs to be right, the name and metadata need to be there but most importantly, people won’t click on something they don’t know, notes Peter. This means that a lot of work needs to go into ensuring viewers know about programmes and have the context they need to press play. Jan comments that the linear TV channel Nova helps raise awareness off their online platform, but for individual programmes, social media is the best promotion.

Looking to the future, Nuno says that last year everyone was discussing launching SVOD channels, this year it’s much more about freemium live channels and this will change again next year. Technologically, he feels that metadata layers in apps will be the future where products present in the scene will be called out in the viewing interface with an ability to immediately buy or find out more for instance booking a test drive for James Bond’s car.

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Speakers

Peter Rosberg Peter Rosberg
Head of Digital & Linear Broadcasting
Danish Broadcasting Corporation
Jan Vicek Jan Vlcek
Executive Director & Co-CEO
Nova Group
Nuno Sanches Nuno Sanches
General Manager Media & Telecom
Kaltura
Monique van Dusseldorp Monique van Dusseldorp
NEXT Curator, International Programme Director

Video: When USB meets Pay-TV – an overview of DVB CI Plus

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Content protection needs to evolve not only to new attacks but also to the technology landscape around it. While the PCMCIA form factor has been successfully used now for CAMs, it is an old technology that takes up a lot of space. This video looks at the move to USB interfaces and feature updates to the DVB CI standards,

To lead us through, TP Vision’s Nicholas Frame joins DVB’s Emily Dubs ad starts by explaining how all the different specifications and standards connect to provide the decryption ecosystem. This video centres on CI Plus 1.4 and CI Plus 2.0 which are standardised as ETSI TS 103 205 and ETSI TS 103 605 respectively.

 

 

CI Plus 1.4, Nicholas continues, introduces two main features. The first is the introduction of a negotiation mechanism to get a list and choose to use optional features in much the same way as a browser and server negotiate when they set up a secure HTTPS connection using TLS. Nicholas walks us through the negotiation process and explains that the first of these optional features is Overt Watermarking.

Watermarking is the practice of embedding data within a media stream which helps in tracking the source for use in copyright protection. This can be done with hidden data or overtly and works by defining a layer that is composited on top of the base video layer. This is not unlike the way that the decoder would also show the application GUI however the watermark layer is controlled by the CAM which says when to show or hide the watermark. The protocol is kept simple with the watermark itself comprising just ASCII text of a chosen colour at a defined position. Naturally, communication between the CAM and decoder is encrypted and the decoder provides confirmation back to the CAM when the watermark is shown which allows the CAM to take action if it believes the watermark isn’t being respected.

Moving on to CI Plus 2.0, Nicholas explains that it’s an evolution, not a new standard. It’s based on the previous mature, trusted work in the CI Plus standard and adds additional functionality with a modern interface. There’s no loss of features nor change in signalling. It does change the interface, however, which brings with it a whole raft of improvements and possibilities.

USB A is probably the most universally used physical interface which means it’s well known by the public and is a tried and tested, robust connector. It avoids being inserted the wrong way round and has no possibility of bent pins. In terms of manufacturing, space will be saved on circuit boards and manufacturing with USB components is very well understood. Nicholas sees this as opening up new possibilities such as decoders with different form factors or a move to virtualisation.

Although the lower layers defined by USB will change, the upper layers which are specific to CI and DVB won’t change. Nicholas finishes the video explaining how the USB interface (either 2.0 or 3.x) can use bulk transfer and will group MPEG TS packets into fragments for onwards transmission.

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Speakers

Nicholas Frame Nicholas Frame
Standardisation Manager,
TP Vision
Emily Dubs Moderator: Emily Dubs
Head of Technology,
DVB Project

Video: ATSC 3.0 Seminar Part III

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

ATSC 3.0 is the US-developed set of transmission standards which is fully embracing IP technology both over the air and for internet-delivered content. This talk follows on from the previous two talks which looked at the physical and transmission layers. Here we’re seeing how IP throughout has benefits in terms of broadening choice and seamlessly moving from on-demand to live channels.

Richard Chernock is back as our Explainer in Chief for this session. He starts by explaining the driver for the all-IP adoption which focusses on the internet being the source of much media and data. The traditional ATSC 1.0 MPEG Transport Stream island worked well for digital broadcasting but has proven tricky to integrate, though not without some success if you consider HbbTV. Realistically, though, ATSC see that as a stepping stone to the inevitable use of IP everywhere and if we look at DVB-I from DVB Project, we see that the other side of the Atlantic also sees the advantages.

But seamlessly mixing together a broadcaster’s on-demand services with their linear channels is only benefit. Richard highlights multilingual markets where the two main languages can be transmitted (for the US, usually English and Spanish) but other languages can be made available via the internet. This is a win in both directions. With the lower popularity, the internet delivery costs are not overburdening and for the same reason they wouldn’t warrant being included on the main Tx.

Richard introduces ISO BMFF and MPEG DASH which are the foundational technologies for delivering video and audio over ATSC 3.0 and, to Richard’s point, any internet streaming services.

We get an overview of the protocol stack to see where they fit together. Richard explains both MPEG DASH and the ROUTE protocol which allows delivery of data using IP on uni-directional links based on FLUTE.

The use of MPEG DASH allows advertising to become more targeted for the broadcaster. Cable companies, Richard points out, have long been able to swap out an advert in a local area for another and increase their revenue. In recent years companies like Sky in the UK (now part of Comcast) have developed technologies like Adsmart which, even with MPEG TS satellite transmissions can receive internet-delivered targeted ads and play them over the top of the transmitted ads – even when the programme is replayed off disk. Any adopter of ATSC 3.0 can achieve the same which could be part of a business case to make the move.

Another part of the business case is that ATSC not only supports 4K, unlike ATSC 1.0, but also ‘better pixels’. ‘Better pixels’ has long been the way to remind people that TV isn’t just about resolution. ‘Better pixels’ includes ‘next generation audio’ (NGA), HDR, Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) and even higher frame rates. The choice of HEVC Main 10 Profile should allow all of these technologies to be used. Richard makes the point that if you balance the additional bitrate requirement against the likely impact to the viewers, UHD doesn’t make sense compared to, say, enabling HDR.

Richard moves his focus to audio next unpacking the term NGA talking about surround sound and object oriented sound. He notes that renderers are very advanced now and can analyse a room to deliver a surround sound experience without having to place speakers in the exact spot you would normally need. Options are important for sound, not just one 5.1 surround sound track is very important in terms of personalisation which isn’t just choosing language but also covers commentary, audio description etc. Richard says that audio could be delivered in a separate pipe (PLP – discussed previously) such that even after the
video has cut out due to bad reception, the audio continues.

The talk finishes looking at accessibility such as picture-in-picture signing, SMPTE Timed Text captions (IMSC1), security and the ATSC 3.0 standards stack.

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Speaker

Richard Chernock Richard Chernock
Former CSO,
Triveni Digital