Harmonic Inc. Archives – Page 3 of 7 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Deployment of Ultra HD Services Around the Globe

Posted on 11th July 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

In some parts of the industry UHD is entirely absent. Thierry Fautier is here to shine a light on the progress being made around the globe in deploying UHD.

Thierry starts off by defining terms – important because Ultra HD actually hides several, often unmentioned, formats behind the term ‘UHD’. This also shows how all of the different aspects of UHD, which include colour (WCG), HDR, audio (NGA) and frame rate to name only a few, fit together.

There’s then a look at the stats, where is HDR deployed? How is UHD typically delivered? And the famed HDR Venn diagram showing which TVs support which formats.

As ever, live sports is a major testing ground so the talk examines some lessons learnt, and features a BBC case study, from the 2018 World Cup. Not unrelated, there is a discussion on the state of UHD streaming including discussion of CMAF.

Leading nicely onto Content Aware Encoding (CAE), which was also in use at the world cup.

Watch now!
Free registration required

Speaker

Thierry Fautier
President-Chair, Ultra HD Forum
VP Video Strategy, Harmonic

Video: Reducing Stream Latency

Posted on 20th June 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Latency seems to be the new battleground for streaming services. While optimising bandwidth and quality are still highly important, they are becoming mature parts of the business of streaming whereas latency, and technologies to minimise it – as Apple showed this month – are still developing and vying for position.

Here, the Streaming Video Alliance brings together people from large streaming services to explore this topic finding out what they’ve been doing to reduce it, the problems they’ve faced and the solutions which are on the table.

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Speakers

	Kevin Johns Distinguished Network Architect, Content and Media CenturyLink
	Chris Sammoury Principal Engineer II, Charter Communications
	Richard Oesterreicher CEO Streaming Global/Hellastorm
	Patrick Gendron Director, Innovation Harmonic
	Johan Bolin Chief Product and Technology Officer, Edgeware
	Steve Miller-Jones Vice President of Product Strategy, Limelight Networks
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Low Latency and High QOE for Live Streaming

Posted on 16th June 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Low latency streaming is always a compromise, but what can be done to keep QOE high?

This on-demand webinar looks at CMAF and presents some real-world data on this low latency technique. The webinar starts by explaining that CMAF is a low-latency streaming technology similar to HLS and other streaming protocols where the idea is to deliver the video as small files. Olivier and Alain from Harmonic explain how this is done and look at some of the trade-offs and compromises that are needed and introduce techniques to keep QOE high. They also look at deployment in cloud vs. on premise.

Pieter-Jan Speelmans talks about play tradeoffs and optimisations within the player. CMAF allows the buffer to be reduced and whilst a bad network may mean you buffer is similar to ‘normal’, but in good networks, this buffer can be brought down significantly. He also talks about how ABR switching is impacted by GOP length even in CMAF.

Viaccess-Orca explains how DRM works with CMAF and looks at some of the challenges including licences acquisition time and overloading licence servers at the beginning of events. Akamai’s Will Law explains some benefits of CMAF and the near-real-time of chunk-based transfer (HTTP 1.1) and how downloading chunks at full speed leads to problems when the same broadband link is used by several clients.

There are lots of good talks on CMAF, but this is one of the few which talks about CMAF not as theory, but as is deployable today.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Olivier Karra SaaS Business Development Director, Harmonic Inc.
	Alain Pellen Sr. Manager, OTT & IPTV Solutions, Harmonic Inc
	Will Law Chief Architect – Media Devision, Akamai
	Pieter-Jan Speelmans Founder & CTO, THEOplayer
	Nicolas Delahaye VP Engineering Player, Viaccess-Orca

Video: Google Next 19 – Building a Next-Generation Streaming Platform with Sky

Posted on 24th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Google Cloud, also called GCP – Google Cloud Platform, continues to invest in Media & Entertainment at a time when many broadcasters, having completed their first cloud projects, are considering ways to ensure they are not beholden to any one cloud provider.

Google’s commitment is evident in their still-recent appointment of ex-Discovery CTO John Honeycutt, this month’s announcement of Viacom’s Google Cloud adoption and the launch of their ‘deploy on any cloud platform’ service called Anthos (official site)

So it’s no surprise that, here, Google asked UK broadcaster Sky and their technology partner for the project, Harmonic Inc., to explain how they’ve been delivering channels in the cloud and cutting costs.

Melika Golkaram from Google Cloud sets the scene by explaining some of the benefits of Google Cloud for Media and Entertainment making it clear that, for them, M&E business isn’t simply a ‘nice to have’ on the side of being a cloud platform. Highlighting their investment in undersea cable and globally-distributed edge servers among the others, Melika hands over to Sky’s Jeff Webb to talk about how Sky have leveraged the platform.

Jeff explains some of the ways that Sky deals with live sports. Whilst sports require high quality video, low latency workflows and have high peak live-streaming audiences, they can also cyclical and left unused between events. High peak workload and long times of equipment left fallow play directly into the benefits of cloud. So we’re not surprised when Jeff says it halved the replacement cost of an ageing system, rather, we want to know more about how they did it.

The benefits that Sky saw revolve around fault healing, geographic resilience, devops, speed of deployment, improved monitoring including more options to leverage open source. Jeff describes these, and other, drivers before mentioning the importance of the ability to move this system between on-premise and different cloud providers.

Before handing over to Harmonic’s Moore Macauley, we’re shown the building blocks of the Sky Sports F1 channel in the cloud and discuss ways that fault healing happens. Moore then goes on to show how Harmonic harnessed their ‘VOS’ microservices platform which deals with ingest, compression, encryption, packaging and origin servers. Harmonic delivered this using GTK, Google Cloud’s Kubernetes deployment platform in multiple regions for fault testing, to allow for A/B testing and much more.

Let’s face it, even after all this time, it can still be tricky getting past the hype of cloud. Here we get a glimpse of a deployed-in-real-life system which not only gives an insight into how these services can (and do) work, but it also plots another point on the graph showing major broadcasters embracing cloud, each in their own way.

Watch now!

Speakers

	Jeff Webb Principal Streaming, Architect Sky
	Moore Macauley Director, Product Architecture Harmonic
	Melika Golkram Customer Engineer, Google Cloud Media

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