Video: Getting Back Into the Game

The pandemic has obviously hurt live broadcaster, sports particularly but as the world starts its slow fight back to normality we’re seeing sports back on the menu. How has streaming suffered and benefited? This video looks at how technology has changed in response, how pirating of content changed, how close we are to business as usual.

Jason Thibeault from the Streaming Video Alliance brings together Andrew Pope from Friend MTS, Brandon Farley from Streaming Global, SSIMWAVE’s Carlos Bacquet, Synamedia’s Nick Fielibert and Will Penson with Conviva to get an overview of the industry’s response to the pandemic over the last year and its plans for the future.

The streaming industry has a range of companies including generalist publishers, like many broadcasters and specialists such as DAZN and NFL Gamepass. During the pandemic, the generalist publishers were able to rely more on their other genres and back catalogues or even news which saw a big increase in interest. This is not to say that the pandemic made life easy for anyone. Sports broadcasters were undoubtedly hit, though companies such as DAZN who show a massive range of sports were able dig deep in less mainstream sports from around the world in contrast with services such as NFL Game Pass which can’t show any new games if the season is postponed. We’ve heard previously how esports benefited from the pandemic

The panel discusses the changes seen over the last year. Mixed views on security with one company seeing little increase in security requests, another seeing a boost in requests for auditing and similar so that people could be ready for when sports streaming was ‘back’. There was a renewed interest in how to make sports streaming better where better for some means better scaling, for others, lower latency, whereas many others are looking to bake in consistency and quality; “you can’t get away with ‘ok’ anymore.”

SSIMWAVE pointed out that some customers were having problems keeping the channel quality high and were even changing encoder settings to deal with the re-runs of their older footage which was less good quality than today’s sharp 1080p coverage. “Broadcast has set the quality mark” and streaming is trying to achieve parity. Netflix has shown that good quality goes on good devices. They’re not alone being a streaming service 50 per cent of whose content is watched on TVs rather than streaming devices. When your content lands on a TV, there’s no room for compromise on quality.

Crucially, the panel agrees that the pandemic has not been a driver for change. Rather, it’s been an accelerant of the intended change already desired and even planned for. If you take the age-old problem of bandwidth in a house with a number of people active with streaming, video calls and other internet usage, any bitrate you can cut out is helpful to everyone.

Next, Carlos from Conviva takes us through graphs for the US market showing how sports streaming dropped 60% at the beginning of the lockdowns only to rebound after spectator-free sporting events started up now running at around 50% higher than before March 2020. News has shown a massive uptick and currently retains a similar increase as sports, the main difference being that it continues to be very volatile. The difficulties of maintaining news output throughout the pandemic are discussed in this video from the RTS.

Before hearing the panel’s predictions, we hear their thoughts on the challenges in improving. One issue highlighted is that sports is much more complex to encode than other genres, for instance, news. In fact, tests show that some sports content scores 25% less than news for quality, according to SSIMWAVE, acknowledging that snooker is less challenging than sailing. Delivering top-quality sports content remains a challenge particularly as the drive for low-latency is requiring smaller and smaller segment sizes which restrict your options for GOP length and bandwidth.

To keep things looking good, the panel suggests content-aware encoding where machine learning analyses the video and provides feedback to the encoder settings. Region of interest coding is another prospect for sports where close-ups tend to want more detail in the centre as you look at the player but wide shots intent to capture all detail. WebRTC has been talked about a lot, but not many implementations have been seen. The panel makes the point that advances in scalability have been noticeable for CDNs specialising in WebRTC but scalability lags behind other tech by, perhaps, 3 times. An alternative, Synamedia points out, is HESP. Created by THEOPlayer, HESP delivers low latency, chunked streaming and very low ‘channel change’ times.

Watch now!
Speakers

Andrew Pope Andrew Pope
Senior Solutions Architect,
Friend MTS
Brandon Farley Brandon Farley
SVP & Chief Revenue Officer,
Streaming Global
Carlos Bacquet Carlos Bacquet
Manager, Sales Engineers,
SSIMWAVE
Nick Fielibert
CTO, Video Network
Synamedia
Will Penson Will Penson
Vice President, GTM Strategy & Operations,
Conviva
Jason Thibeault Jason Thibeault
Executive Director,
Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Everyone is Streaming; Can the Infrastructure Handle it?

How well is the internet infrastructure dealing with the increase in streaming during the Covid-19 pandemic? What have we learnt in terms of delivering services and have we seen any changes in the way services are consumed? This video brings together carriers, vendors and service providers to answer these questions and give a wider picture.

The video starts off by getting different perspectives on how the pandemic has affected their business sharing key data points. Jeff Budney from Verizon says that carriers have had a ‘whirlwind’ few weeks. Conviva’s José Jesus says that while they are only seeing 3% more devices, there was a 37% increase in hours of video consumed. Peaks due to live sports have done but primetime is now spread and more stable, a point which was made by both Jeff Gilbert from Qwilt as well as José.

“We’ve seen a whole year’s worth of traffic growth…it’s really been incredible” — Jeff Budney, Verizon

So while it’s clear that growth has happened, but the conversation turns to whether this has caused problems. We hear views about how some countries did see reductions in quality of experience and some with none. This experience is showing where bottlenecks are, whether they are part of the ISP infrastructure or in individual players/services which haven’t been well optimised. Indeed, explains Jason Thibeault, Executive Director of the Streaming Video Alliance, the situation seems to be shining a light on the operational resilience, rather than technical capacity of ISPs.

Thierry Fautier from Harmonic emphasises the benefits of content-aware encoding whereby services could reduce bandwidth by “30 to 40 percent” before talking about codec choice. AVC (A.K.A. H.264) accounts for 90%+ of all HD traffic. Thierry contents that by switching to both HEVC and content-aware encoding services could reduce their bandwidth by up to a factor of four.

Open Caching is a working group creating specifications to standardise an interface to allow ISPs to pull information into a local cache from service providers. This moving of content to the edge is one way that we can help avoid bottlenecks by locating content as close to viewers as possible.

The elephant in the room is that Netflix reduced quality/bitrate in order to help some areas cope. Verizon’s Jeff Budney points out that this is contra to the industry’s approach to deployment where they have assumed there is always the capacity to provide the needed scale. If that’s true, how can one tweet from a European Commissioner have had such an impact? The follow on point is that if YouTube and Netflix are now sending 25% less data, as reports suggest, ABR simply means that other providers’ players will take up the slack, as is the intent-free way ABR works. If the rest of the industry benefits from the big providers ‘dialling back’ is this an effective measure and is it fair?

The talk concludes hitting topics on ABR Multicast, having more intelligent ways to manage large-scale capacity issues, more on Open Caching and deliver protocols.

Watch now!
Speakers

Thierry Fautier Thierry Fautier
VP Video Strategy, Harmonic Inc.
President-Chair, Ultra HD Forum
Eric Klein Eric Klein
Director, Content Distribution – Disney+/ESPN+, Disney Streaming Services
Co-Chair, Open Cache Working Group, Streaming Video Alliance
José Jesus José Jesus
Senior Product Manager,
Conviva
Jeffrey Budney Jeff Budney
Manager,
Verizon
Jeffrey Gilbert Jeffrey Gilbert
VP strategy and Business Development, CP,
Qwilt
Jason Thibeault Jason Thibeault
Executive Director,
Streaming Video Alliance

Webinar: Video Ad Optimisation

Date: 24th October, 2019 Time: 10am PST / 1pm EDT / 18:00 GMT

If there’s one thing that’s been clear throughout all the years of streaming video on the internet, it’s that if the viewer doesn’t have a good time, it’s literally a big turn-off. If you’re going to show ads, show them well otherwise it can make for a terrible experience. Problems with ads undermine trust in an otherwise great service.

This is the topic under the spotlight in this webinar from the Streaming Video Alliance which brings together CommScope (previously ARRIS), IAB Tech Labs, Adobe and Conviva to discuss the best practices for getting ads right examining how to deliver them and ways to insert them.

Register now!

Speakers

Dave Romrell Dave Romrell
Engineering Fellow, Advance Research Group,
CommScope (previously ARRIS)
Chris Hock Chris Hock
Head of Business Strategy and Development, Media & Entertainment, Adobe
Advertising Working Group Co-Chair, Streaming Video Alliance
Sean Wilkinson Sean Wilkinson
Head of Corporate Development,
Conviva
Amit Shetty Amit Shetty
Senior Director, Video & Audio Products,
IAB
Jason Thibeault Jason Thibeault
Executive Director,
Streaming Video Alliance

Webinar: Reducing Churn, Building Engagement & Delighting Subscribers

The Streaming Video Alliance is back with the next in their webinar series and the focus turns to churn.

Viewer churn is the OTT killer. But keeping subscribers engaged and coming back to a service involves more than just great content. It requires a keen eye on the data—from ensuring a great Quality of Experience (QoE) to making smart marketing decisions about content to providing excellent customer service, data is key.

  • What should you be measuring?
  • What are the key metrics and their thresholds?
  • How do you implement all of this into an existing workflow?

This panel will explore the kind of data that can have a meaningful impact on an OTT experience, best practices for measuring different elements within the workflow, and the techniques to capture the data that you need.

Panelists include:
Aditya Ganjam from Conviva
Nick Nelson from OWNZONES
Jonathan Shields from Nice People at Work
and Brenton Ough from Touchstream

This topic will be moderated by Jason Thibeault, the Executive Director of the Streaming Video Alliance.