CTA Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

With wide membership including Apple, Comcast, Google, Disney, Bitmovin, Akamai and many others, the WAVE interoperability effort is tackling the difficulties web media encoding, playback and platform issues utilising global standards.

Bob Cabmpell from Eurofins explains that with so many streaming formats and device types, we tend to see inconsistent behaviour while streaming due to lack of compliance with standards. This adds a cost for content providers and suppliers. The Web Application Video Ecosystem (WAVE) tries to create solutions to this problem not by creating standards, but by bringing together initiatives across the industry to improve interoperability as well as creating test tools.

Core the work are these five technologies: CENC, DASH & CMAF, HLS, HTML5 video, DRM. For a deeper look at WAVE, watch this talk with Microsoft’s John Simmons who looks at each of these in more depth. In this video, Bob looks at the test tools provided by CTA WAVE.

Bob looks first at an MPD validator aimed at people prepping and delivering content who need to test thier DSAH manifests are correct. This can be done at https://conformance.dashif.org where Bob walks us through the process and the types of errors and warnings available in the report. App developers are advised to develop to a document of guidelines rather than having a test suite whereas API compliance can be found at WeBAPITests2018.ctawave.org and Bob finishes off with a sneak peek of a new device capabilities suite which will help automate the detection of problems such as non-smooth playback when switching between ABR rungs.

Watch now!
Speakers

Dr. Bob Campbell
Director of Engineering,
Eurofins Digital Testing

A standard in progress for quality of experience networks, rebufereing time etc. Under the CTA standards body wanting to create a standard around these metrics. The goal of the group is to come up with a standard set of player events, metrics & terminology around QoE streaming. Concurrent viewers, isn’t that easy to define? If the user is paused, are they concurrently viewing the video? Buffer underruns is called rebuffering, stalling, waiting. Intentionally focussing on what the viewers actually see and experience. QoS is a measurement of how well the platform is performing, not necessarily the same as what they are experiencing.

The standard has ideas of different levels. There are player properties and events which are standardised ways of signalling that certain things are happening. Also Session Metrics are defined which then can feed into Aggregate Metrics. The first set of metrics include things such as playback failure percentage, average playback stalled rate, average startup time and playback rate with the aim of setting up a baseline and to start to get feedback from companies as they implement these, seemingly simple, metrics.

This first release can be found on github.