DTG Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: TV Sport Innovation – Staying Ahead of the Game

Posted on 22nd October 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Sports has always led innovation in many areas of broadcast, but during COVID not only did they have to adapt nearly every workflow and redeploy staff, but they then had to brace to deliver 100 games in 40 days. Gordon Roxburgh sums it up: “I’ve been at Sky twenty years, and I think [these have] been the most challenging six months…we’ve faced.”

In this session from the DTG’s Future Vision 2020 conference, Carl Hibbert from Futuresource Consulting talks to Sky, Arsenal TV and Facebook to find how their businesses have adapted. Melissa Lawton from Facebook explains how their live streaming, both for user-generated footage and produced sport have adapted to the changing needs. When COVID hit, Facebook lost some very valuable content. Their response was to double down on fan engagement, with challenges to fans to create content and also staging events which were produced and commentated as real sports events, but all shots were people at home exercising but being brought into the narrative of an Iron Man competition. Facebook have also invested in their user-facing tools and dashboards to help expose and monitor contribution via live streaming.

Gordon Roxburgh from Sky explains the seachange he’s seen in production. “The first thing was to keep channels on air…and keep staff safe.” They moved rapidly from a fully staffed office to just three or four people on-site and a presenter. In order to mix, they created a Virtual Production suite which allowed people to create content in the cloud.

For content, Gordon says that watch-alongs proved very popular where key sports personalities talk through what they were thinking during key sporting moments. This was just one of the many content ideas that keep programming going until “Project restart” commenced where the whole sports ecosystem asked itself ‘How can we deliver 100 games in 40 days?’ Once they knew the season would start, Gordon says, this opened up a 3-week build period during which BT Media and Broadcast, NEP, NEP Connect and multiple internal departments collaborated to produce rapid turnarounds.

“As an industry, we came together.” The working practices developed at Sky were shared with other major broadcasters who also shared their best practice – always putting staff first. Sky even went to the extent of building a technical space in a large studio floor to keep people apart and co-opted a set of training rooms to become a self-contained graphics unit. These ideas kept graphics operators together but not mixing with the rest of the production.

The view from Arsenal TV is explained by John Dollin. They worked quickly very early on and were able to be back in the office from February. Whilst Arsenal TV doesn’t have the rights to stream live, they produce their programmes live for transmission later. This used to be done in a crowded room but was soon transferred to a virtual mixer in the cloud with remote editors. John highlights the challenge of involving freelancers into the system and providing them with appropriate supervision. More importantly, he feels that their current ability to maintain the pre-covid production quality is due to the continued dedication of certain personnel who are putting in long hours which is not a sustainable situation to be in.

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Speakers

	Gordon Roxburgh Technical Manager, Sky Sports
	Melissa Lawton Live Sports Production Strategy, Facebook
	John Dollin Senior Product & Engineering Manager, Arsenal Footballl Club
	Carl Hibbert Head of Consumer Media & Technology, Futuresource Consulting

Video: The End of Broadcast?

Posted on 21st July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

This discussion asks what the limits are of ‘broadcast’ in a world increasingly dominated by streaming. Whilst services like the BBC’s iPlayer have demonstrated how on-demand can sit alongside live streams of linear channels, the growing world of Disney+, Netflix and Apple TV+ is muscling in on the family television bringing with them different ways of accessing video.

Presented by Ian Nock, chair of the IET Media technical network, this is the 2020 John Logie Baird lecture online. First up, is Chris Wood from OTT specialist Spicy Mango who represents the perspective that OTT is the way forward. This isn’t a fight between screen sizes, he starts by saying, but rather about experiences and expectations. A great example of this is how pause and rewind features have made their way into many linear TV offerings. The convenience to pause a video while you leave the room or discuss it was so powerful that when it was possible to bring it into live, it did. This type of feature migration will continue to happen as the types of service merge.

Chris makes the important point that ‘live TV’ often means linear. There is a lot of live streaming available through Twitch, sports providers like DAZN and companies like Amazon Prime which is not captured separately. This makes it hard to understand how much people are still valuing the live feeling. Live TV, he says, is not going away whatever happens to linear RF transmissions because we need live programming, we enjoy it differently.

Source: DTG

Next, representing the UK Digital TV Group (DTG) is Yvonne Thomas who looks at the fragmented landscape with a large variety of types of VoD service available – subscription, advertiser etc. For the younger audience whose experience of video is predominantly over IP, their experiences become quite fragmented meaning it’s hard for a broadcaster to maintain continuity and relevance. Yvonne also talks about the proliferation of IT needed to watch all this content which can lead to families inadvertently exposing their data or compromising their security.

Nigel Walley from Decipher makes the point that some of our intuitions are wrong. As we see trends evolving, whilst the industry was initially discussing the rise of ‘second screens’, it’s important to realise that some of this was driven by the simple fact that the only place you could watch Netflix of YouTube was your second screen. As consumer electronics manufacturers have made space for ‘Netflix’ buttons and we see Google and Apple with their HDMI connected players, we see people have quickly reverted to watching good content on their best screen; their TV.

Another important point made by Nigel is that as much people companies talk about the ability to individually target viewers and deliver highly customised services, there will always be situations with shared viewing whether they may as well not be logged in as customisation takes much more of a back seat.

Source: OMDIA

Maria Rua Aguete from Omdia challenges our assumptions on who the big players in streaming are. They can be ranked both by revenue and by subscribers. Maria shows us that China Telecom, Baidu and Tencent are in positions 2, 3 and 4 when counted by subscribers. Still, one third of the world’s OTT subscribers are held by Amazon, Netflix and Disney+.
Maria continues to deliver a vast range of timely statistics that help us understand the current situation within the pandemic. She covers the popularity of free services with in the UK, recent M&A activity, the consumers’ rising appetite for video and international channels.

The session closes with a 20 minute Q&A.

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Speakers

	Maria Rua Aguete Technology Fellow & Executive Director, Omdia
	Yvonne Thomas Strategic Technologist Digital TV Group
	Chris Wood CTO, Spicy Mango
	Nigel Walley Managing Director, Decipher
	Moderator: Ian Nock Chair, IET Media Technical Network

Video: Codecs, standards and UHD formats – where is the industry headed?

Posted on 23rd March 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Now Available On Demand
UHD transmissions have been available for many years now and form a growing, albeit slow-growing, percentage of channels available. The fact that major players such as Sky and BT Sports in the UK, NBCUniversal and the ailing DirecTV in the US, see fit to broadcast sports in UHD shows that the technology is trusted and mature. But given the prevalence of 4K in films from Netflix, Apple TV+ streaming is actually the largest delivery mechanism for 4K/UHD video into the home.

Following on from last week’s DVB webinar, now available on demand, this webinar from the DVB Project replaces what would have been part of the DVB World 2020 conference and looks at the work that’s gone into getting UHD to were it is now in terms of developing HEVC (also known as H.265), integrating it into broadcast standards plus getting manufacturer support. It then finishes by looking at the successor to HEVC – VVC (Versatile Video Codec)

The host, Ben Swchwarz from the Ultra HD Forum, first introduces Ralf Schaefer who explores the work that was done in order to make UHD for distribution a reality. He’ll do this by looking at the specifications and standards that were created in order to get us where we are today before looking ahead to see what may come next.

Yvonne Thomas from the UK’s Digital TV Group is next and will follow on from Ben by looking at codecs for video and audio. HEVC is seen as the go-to codec for UHD distribution. As the uncompressed bitrate for UHD is often 12Gbps, HEVC’s higher compression ratio compared to AVC and relatively wide adoption makes it a good choice for wide dissemination of a signal. But UHD is more than just video. With UHD and 4K services usually carrying sports or films, ‘next generation audio‘ is really important. Yvonne looks at the video and audio aspects of delivering HEVC and the devices that need to receive it.

Finally we look at VVC, also known as H.266, the successor to HEVC, also known as H.265. ATEME’s Sassan Pejhan gives us a look into why VVC was created, where it currently is within MPEG standardisation and what it aims to achieve in terms of compression. VVC has been covered previously on The Broadcast Knowledge in dedicated talks such as ‘VVC, EVC, LCEVC, WTF?’, ‘VVC Standard on the Final Stretch’, and AV1/VVC Update.

No Registration Necessary!

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Speakers

	Ben Schwarz Communication Working Group Chair, Ultra HD Forum
	Ralf Schaefer VP Standards R&I InterDigital Inc.
	Yvonne Thomas Strategic Technologist DTG (Digital TV Group)
	Sassan Pejhan VP Technology, ATEME

Video: The End of Broadcast? Broadcast to IP Impacts

Posted on 8th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

It’s very clear that internet streaming is growing, often resulting in a loss of viewership by traditional over-the-air broadcast. This panel explores the progress of IP-delivered TV, the changes in viewing habits this is already prompting and looks at the future impacts on broadcast television as a result.

Speaking at the IABM Theatre at IBC 2019, Ian Nock, chair of IET Media, sets the scene. He highlights stats such as 61% of Dutch viewing being non-linear, DirecTV publicly declaring they ‘have bought their last transponder’ and discusses the full platform OTT services available in the market place now.

To add detail to this, Ian is joined by DVB, the UK’s DTG and Germany’s Television Platform dealing with transformation to IP within Germany. Yvonne Thomas, from the Digital Television Group, takes to the podium first who starts by talking about the youngest part of the population who have a clear tendency to watch streamed services over broadcast compared to other generations. Yvonne talks about research showing UK consumers being willing to have 3 subscriptions to media services which is not in line with the number and fragmented nature of the options. She then finishes with the DTG manifesto for a consolidated and thus simplified way of accessing multiple services.

Peter Siebert from DVB looks at the average viewing time averaged over Europe which shows that the amount of time spent watching linear broadcast is actually staying stable – as is the amount of time spent watching DVDs. He also exposes the fact that the TV itself is still very much the most used device for watching media, even if it’s not RF-delivered. As such, the TV still provides the best quality of video and shared experience. Looking at history to understand the future, Peter shows a graph of cinema popularity before and after the introduction of television. Cinema was, indeed, impacted but importantly it did not die. We are left to conclude that his point is that linear broadcast will similarly not disappear, but simply have a different place in the future.

Finally, head of the panel session, Andre Prahl explains the role of the Deutsche TV-Plattform who are focussing on ‘media over IP’ with respect to delivery of video to end user both in terms of internet bandwidth but also Wi-Fi frequencies within the home.

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This panel was produced by IET Media, a technical network within the IET which runs events, talks and webinars for networking and education within the broadcast industry. More information

Speakers

	André Prahl Deutsche TV-Plattform
	Peter Siebert Head of Technology, DVB Project
	Yvonne Thomas Strategic Technologist Digital TV Group
	Moderator: Ian Nock Chair, IET Media Technical Network

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