Live Streaming Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Understanding the World of Ad Tech

Posted on 27th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Advertising has been the mainstay of TV for many years. Like it or loathe it, ad-support VoD (AVoD) delivers free to watch services that open up content to a much wider range of people than otherwise possible just like ad-supported broadcast TV. Even people who can afford subscriptions have a limit to the number of services they will subscribe to. Having an AVoD offering means you can draw people in and if you also have SVoD, there’s a path to convince them to sign up.

To look at where ad tech is today and what problems still exist, Streaming Media contributing editor Nadine Krefetz has brought together Byron Saltysiak from WarnerMedia, Verizon Media’s Roy Firestone, CBS Interactive’s Jarred Wilichinksy and Newsy’s Tony Brown to share their daily experience of working with OTT ad tech.

Nadine is quick to ask the panel what they feel the weakest link is in ad tech. ‘Scaling up’ answered Jarred who’s seen from massive events how quickly parts of the ad ecosystem fail when millions of people need an ad break at the same time. Bryon adds that with the demise of flash came the loss of an abstraction layer. Now, each platform has to be targetted directly leading to a lot of complexity. Previously, as long as you got flash right, it would work on all platforms. Lastly, redundancy came up as a weakness. Linked to Jarred’s point about the inability to scale easily, the panel’s consensus is they are far off broadcast’s five-nines uptime targets. In some ways, this is to be expected as IT is a more fragmented, faster-moving market than consumer TVs making it all the harder to keep up and match the changing patterns.

A number of parts of the conversation centred around ad tech as an ecosystem. This is a benefit and a drawback. Working in an ecosystem means that as much as the streaming provider wants to invest in bolstering their own service to make it able to cope with millions upon millions of requests, they simply can’t control what the rest of the ecosystem does and if 2 million people all go for a break at once, it doesn’t take much for an ad provider’s servers to collapse under the weight. On the other hand, points out Byron, what is a drawback is also a strength whereby streaming has the advantage of scale which broadcasters don’t. Roy’s service delivered one hundred thousand matches last year. Byron asks how many linear channels you’d need to cover that many.

Speed is a problem given that the ad auction needs to happen in the twenty seconds or so leading up to the ad being shown to the viewer. With so many players, things can go wrong starting off simply with slow responses to requests. But also with ad lengths. Ad breaks are built around 15 seconds segments so it’s difficult when companies want 6 or 11 seconds and it’s particularly bad when five 6-second ads are scheduled for a break: “no-one wants to see that.”

Jarred laments that despite the standards and guidelines available that “it’s still the wild west” when it comes to ad quality and loudness where viewers are the ones bearing the brunt of these mismatched practices.

Nadine asks about privacy regulations that are increasingly reducing the access advertisers have to viewer data. Byron points out that they do in some way need a way to identify a user such that they avoid showing them the same ad all the time. It turns out that registered/subscribed users can be tracked under some regulations so there’s a big push to have people sign up.

Other questions covered by the panel include QA processes, the need for more automation in QA, how to go about starting your own service, dealing with Roku boxes and how to deal with AVoD downloaded files which, when brought online, need to update the ad servers about which ads were watched.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Tony Brown Chief of Staff, Newsy
	Jarred Wilichinsky SVP Global Video Monetization and Operations, CBS Interactive
	Byron Saltysiak VP of Video and Connected Devices, WarnerMedia
	Roy Firestone Principal Product Manger, Verizon Media
	Nadine Krefetz Contributing Editor, Streaming Media

Video: How is Technology Shaping the Future of Streaming Services?

Posted on 5th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The streaming market is defined by technology, but as tech advances, it becomes more and more transparent to the user as it not only better facilitates delivery of media, but also makes the user experience better. This article looks at the current streaming market from the perspective of Disney, MediaKind, Dolby and Twitch to discover how far technology has brought us and the current challenges.

Sardjono Insani from Disney says that’s it’s very easy, now, to launch an OTT service with the technical barrier being much lower than before with many decent platforms which have good features. This allows new entrants a quick route to market. The challenges he sees are now more in the business domain such as having the right content, retaining customers and meeting their expectations. Customers have exposure to the big streaming platforms which have good device integration and can invest heavily in the technology behind their services. Whilst off-the-shelf platforms can be very good and offer similar device integration, depending on your audience, you may have a few notable gaps between the service you can provide and the competition. Without a “smooth tech offering”, Sardjono suggests it will be harder to pick up and keep customers.

Sunita Kaur from Twitch sees customer engagement at the heart of the Twitch experience and one reason why it keeps customers and continues to grow. “What if TV could talk back to me?” is the question she uses to explain Twitch to those unfamiliar with the service highlighting the fact each video comes with a live chat feature allowing the viewers to interact directly with the hosts giving them an immediate connection with the audience. The future of her services will be around customer experience. Will the viewers still tolerate a 5-second delay? What if a feature is more than a click away? Answering questions like this help build the future Twitch. Sunita also touches on ‘partnerships’ which are an important monetisation strategy for streamers whether individuals or media giants. Partnerships, for example, allow microtransactions between viewers and streamers in the form of paid ‘super chats’. This voluntary donation route works well for the younger audiences who are no stranger to ad-blockers. Burkhard Leimbrock, Commercial Director for Twitch EMEA phrases it like this: “In the era of ad blocking, content that is voluntarily engaged with and actively created by an audience – the majority of whom is aged 13 to 34 – in real-time creates a powerful and rare new opportunity for brands.”

Raul Aldrey from MediaKind talks about using technology to transform live events as we know them now into immersive experiences such as allowing fans to choose camera angles and even clip up their version and share on social media. However, having 25 live cameras able to be delivered to the viewer with frame accuracy is still a difficult challenge. Once you’ve worked out how to do that, the next question is how ad insertion works. Raul feels there is a lot of space for innovation in the user experience including creating hyper-personalised experiences using AI to follow specific players and also, linking in with Sunita’s points, using microtransactions much more during the event.

Pankaj Kedia from Dolby is focused on the world of mobile devices. In his region, he says between 48 and 94% of consumers have upgraded or will upgrade in the coming year or so. This, he feels, means there is a lot of technical capability in the mobile device market leaving a gap between the technology that available content can exploit what the devices can do. He sympathises with the need to maintain a consistent user experience where locally-generated content (such as Bollywood) sits next to international content which may look or sound better. But his point is that content creation has become democratised and tools are more accessible than before. Money is absolutely still a factor, but HDR has arrived in low-end devices such as iPhones so it’s not out of the question to have high-end technology in all levels of content.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Pankaj Kedia Managing Director, Emerging Markets, Dolby Laboratories
	Sardjono Insani Director, Media & Entertainment Distribution, Walt Disney Company
	Sunita Kaur Senior Vice President APAC, Twitch
	Raul Aldrey Chief Product Officer, MediaKind
	Moderator: James Miner CEO, MinerLabs Group

Video: Live-Streaming Best Practices

Posted on 29th April 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Live streaming of events can be just as critical as broadcast events in that failure is seldom an option. Whether a sports game, public meeting or cattle auction, the kit needed to put on a good stream shares many of the hallmarks of anything with high production values: multiple cameras, redundant design, ISO recording, separate audio and video mixing and much more. Yet live streaming is often done by one person or just a handful of people. How do you make all this work? How do you guide the client to the best event for their budget? What pitfalls can be avoided if only you’d known ahead of time?

Robert Reinhardt from videoRx took to the stage with Streaming Media to go through his approach to live streaming events of all different types. He covers the soft skills as well as the tech leaving you with a rounded view of what’s necessary. He starts by covering the kit that he will typically use discussing the cameras, encoders, recorders, audio mixer and video mixer. He talks about the importance of getting direct mic feeds so you retain control of the gain structure. Each of these items is brought on-site with a spare which is either held as a backup or, like the recorders, is used as an active backup to get two copies of the event and media.

For Robert, Wowza in AWS is at the centre of most of the work he does. His encoders, such as Videon deliver into the cloud using RTMP where Wowza can convert to HLS in multiple bitrates. Robert calls out the Videon encoders as well priced with a friendly and helpful company behind them. We see a short demo of how Wowza can be customised with custom-made add-ins.

Robert says that every live stream needs a source, an encoder, a publishing endpoint, a player, archive recording and reliable internet. A publishing endpoint could be YouTube or Facebook, a CDN or your own streaming server such as in Robert’s case. The reliable internet connection issue is dealt with as a follow up to the initial Discovery process. This discovery process is to help you work out who matters such as the stakeholders and product owners, which other vendors are involved and their responsibilities. You should also confirm who will be delivering content such as slides and graphics to you and find out how static their budget is.

Budget is a tricky topic as Robert has found that the customer isn’t always willing to tell you their budget, but you have to quickly link their expectations in terms of resilience and production values to their budget expectations. Robert shares his advice on detailing the labour and equipment costs for the customer.

A pre-even reccy is of vital importance for assessing how suitable the internet connectivity is and making sure that physical access and placement is suitable for your crew and equipment. This would be a good time to test the agreed encoder parameters. Ahead of the visit, Robert suggests sharing samples of bitrates and resolutions with the customer and agreeing on the maximum quality to expect for the bandwidth available.

Robert rounds off the talk by walking us through all of the pre-event checks both several days ahead and on the day of the event.

Watch now!
Speakers

Robert Reinhardt
CTO,
videoRx

Video: WebRTC: Mostly the video bits

Posted on 16th April 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Who better to dig below the surface of WebRTC, which delivers sub-second latency, than Sean DuBois, creator of the Pion WebRTC library? This video takes a different look at WebRTC to others that focus on latency or scaling. Rather Sean looks at congestion control and managing the impacts of congestion noting that people remember how bad the video got and not how nice your sign-up page was.

Congestion is inevitable in large ‘unmanaged’ networks such as the internet and on wifi and cellular networks. Sean points out that the use of MPEG codecs which add dependencies between frames magnify the effect of lost packets. With frame-by-frame codecs, dropping a frame and repeating the last one is barely noticeable, but with MPEG, many more could be damaged. WebRTC was implemented over UDP so it could use its own congestion control.

RTP and RTCP are the key to WebRTC’s congestion control. RTP is well known for carrying real-time media as it’s used for AES67 audio, SMPTE ST 2110 and ST 2022-6 to name just a few standards. RTCP is RTP’s sidekick. Whilst RTP does the legwork of carrying the media, the RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) passes messages to control the flow. In this case, Sean explains, the RTCP channel is used to tell the sender that it’s sending too much video or which packets it’s lost. In terms of mitigating congestion, the source can adjust the bitrate directly or change the resolution or the framerate of the video to bring the bitrate down indirectly.

Sean shows a summary diagram of congestion controller flow which is built to handle jitter and out of order packets. Buffers are the normal way of fixing out-of-order packets but they have a big downside of adding latency and exacerbating timing problems. WebRTC has to use the RTCP channel to make sure it can map packet timing with NTP, using Sender Reports, as each packet’s timing information is only relative. When packet loss is spotted NACK (negative acknowledgements) are sent via RTCP or if things are worse, a Picture Loss Indication is sent which request a new keyframe. Fixing any impairments that do occur can be done either with FEC or by concealing the error with some form of masking, nowadays this may be based on machine learning.

The talk finishes with a look at a number of innovative projects which use WebRTC in one way or another, including for file transfer.

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Speakers