FuboTV Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: OTT Workflow Integration Best Practices

Posted on 17th August 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Streaming can seem deceptively simple and a simple HLS workflow can be, but to deliver a monetised service to a wide range of devices, with a mix of live and on-demand assets, with advertising and DRM where needed is far from trivial. In this video, we hear from several companies on how they manage the complexity which allows their service to thrive.

Nadine Krefetz from streaming media asks the questions as we hear from Sinclair, Eyevinn Technology, fuboTV, FandangoNOW and Verizon Media. Firstly they introduce us to their services and the types of workflows that they are maintaining day in, day out.

Companies like Sinclair are frequently adding new channels through market acquisitions. Those companies that don’t grow through acquisition will, similarly, find themselves looking at their own legacy workflows as they look to modernise and improve their offering. Our panel gives their thoughts on tackling this situation. Magnus Svensson and Michael E. Bouchard both talk about having a blueprint, in essence, a generic workflow which contains all the functional blocks needed for a streaming service. You can then map the old and new workflows to the blueprint and plan migration and integration points around that.

The panel covers questions about how smaller services can address Roku and Amazon Fire devices, what to ask when launching a new service and which parts of their services would they never want to buy in or outsource.

Ad insertion is a topic which is essential and complex. Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) is seen as an essential technology for many services as it provides protection against adblockers and can offer more tight management of how and when viewers see ads. But the panel has seen that ad revenues are lower for SSAI since there are fewer analytics data points returned although VAST 4.0 is addressing this problem. This has led to one of the panel members going back to client-side ads for some of their workflows simply due to revenue. Magnus Svensson points out that preparation is key for advertising: Ensuring all adverts are in the correct formats and have the right markers, having slides ready and pre-loading to reduce peaks during live transmissions.

The panel closes looking at their biggest challenges, often in adapting to the pandemic, and the ever-evolving landscape of transport formats.
Watch now!
Speakers

	Michael E. Bouchard Vice President of Technology Strategy, ONE Media, Sinclair Broadcast Group
	Magnus Svensson Media Solution Specialist, Eyevinn Technology
	Geir Magnusson Jr. CTO fuboTV
	Rema Morgan-Aluko Director, Software Engineering, FandangoNOW
	Darren Lepke Head of Video Product Management, Verizon Media
	Nadine Krefetz Consultant, Reality Software Contributing Editor, Streaming Media

Video: HLS and DASH Multi-Codec Encoding & Packaging

Posted on 10th July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As we saw yesterday, there’s an increasingly buoyant market for video codecs and whilst this is a breath of fresh air after AVC’s multi-decade dominance, we will likely never again see a market which isn’t fragmented with several dominant players, say AV1, AVC, VVC and VP9, each sharing 85% market share relatively equally and then ‘the rest’ bringing up the rear. So multi-codec distribution to home viewers is going to have to deal with delivering different codecs to different people.

fuboTV do this today and Nick Krzemienski is here to tell us how. Starting with an overview of fuboTV primarily streams both live and on VOD. Nick shows us the workflow they use and then explains how their AVC & HEVC combined workflow is set up. Starting with the ideal case where a single fmp4 is encoded into both AVD and HEVC, he proposes you would simply package both into an HLS and DASH manifest and let players work out the rest. Depending on your players, you may have to split out your manifests into single-codec files.

DRM’s very important for a sports broadcaster so Nick looks at how this might be achieved. CMAF allows you to deliver m3u8 and mpd files using CENC (Common ENCryption). This promises a single DRM process ahead of packaging, but the reality, we hear from Nick, is that you’ll need two sets of media for HLS and DASH if you’re going to use CENC.

When you’re delivering multiple manifest and, hence, multiple sources, how do you manage this? Nick outlines, and shows the code, of how he achieves this at the edge. Using Lamda, he’s able to look at the incoming requests and existing files at the CDN to deliver the right asset with the logic done close to the viewer. Nick closes by with his thoughts on the future for streaming and answering questions from the audience.

Watch now!
Download the presentation
Speakers

	Nick Krzemienski Engineering Lead, VOD Encoding & Operations, fuboTV Maintainer & Editor, awesome.video
	Host: Dom Robinson Director and Creative Firestarter, id3as Contributing Editor, StreamingMedia.com, UK

Video: The State of Server-Side Ad Insertion

Posted on 31st May 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) it’s the best defence against ad-blockers, but switching in an ad at source can be tricky particularly in low latency streams. This talk at the OTT Leadership Summit at Streaming Media East brings together leaders in the field to explain where they’re up to in delivering this technology and the benefits they see.

Magnus Svensson tells us about the instrumental role Eyevinn Technology, the consultancy who run the technical conference Streaming Tech Sweden , is played in Sweden creating an open standard for all the broadcasters to work to in order to agree how to track SSAI allowing the correct payments to be made. Magnus also talks about aligning SCTE insertion with MPEG structure and the importance of correct preparation of the source video.

Tony Brown from Newsy talks about the centralised nature of SSAI making management easier and gives ana overview of decisioning bringing together buys and sellers of ads. Tony also discusses other analytics such as adjacency and targeting.

Jason Justman of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, explains SCTE insertion and talks about the technical difficulties in reacting to live changes in programming.

Geir Magnusson, Jr. from fuboTV covers the difficulties of preparing the ads quickly enough for thousands or millions of streams to get customised, SSAI ads at the same time and discusses his strategy to start pre-fetching ads from the ad server to prepare them ahead of time. Geir also highlights the misunderstanding that can exist where streaming provides the same video and programme experience as traditional broadcast but ad buyers don’t all understand how much more targeting is possible – even with SSAI.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Nadine Krefetz Consultant & Founder, Reality Software
	Tony Brown Chief of Staff, Newsy
	Jason Justman Senior Principal Architect, Sinclair
	Geir Magnusson, Jr. CTO, fuboTV
	Magnus Svensson Media Solutions Consultant, Eyevinn Technology

Video: Lessons learned from streaming the World Cup live in UHD with HDR

Posted on 8th November 2018 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A step by walk through fuboTV’s FIFA World Cup streaming system. Delivering to FOX, Billy Romero and Thomas Symborski explain the challenges and the successes streaming from Russia to the US in UHD HDR.

This talk from Demuxed 2018 shows examples of how social media can help get reports back of problems and the real life usage stats. Billy and Thomas explain their system from commissioning through vendor choice and all the way to CMAF delivery.

A refreshingly transparent talk which is well worth watching!

Speakers