OTT Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: The ROI of Deploying Multiple Codecs

Posted on 20th July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Adding a new codec to your streaming service is a big decision. It seems inevitable that H.264 will be around for a long time and that new codecs won’t replace it, but just take their share of the market. In the short term, this means your streaming service may also need to deliver H.264 and your new codec which will add complexity and increase CDN storage requirements. What are the steps to justifying a move to a new codec and what’s the state of play today?

In this Streaming Media panel, Jan Ozer is joined by Facebook’s Colleen Henry, Amnon Cohen-Tidhar from Cloudinary and Anush Moorthy from Netflix talk about their experiences with new codecs and their approach to new Codecs. Anush starts by outlining the need to consider decoder support as a major step to rolling out a new codec. The topic of decoder support came up several times during this panel in discussing the merits of hardware versus software decoding. Colleen points out that running VP9 and VVC is possible, but some members of the panel see a benefit in deploying hardware – sometimes deploying on devices like smart TVs, hardware decoding is a must. When it comes to supporting third party devices, we hear that logging is vitally important since when you can’t get your hands on a device to test with, this is all you have to help improve the experience. It’s best, in Facebook’s view, to work closely with vendors to get the most out of their implementations. Amnon adds that his company is working hard to push forward improved reporting from browsers so they can better indicate their capabilities for decoding.

Colleen talks about the importance of codec switching to enhance performance at the bottom end of the ABR ladder with codecs like AV1 with H264 at the higher end. This is a good compromise between the computation needed for AV1 and giving the best quality at very low bitrates. But Anush points out that storage will increase when you start using two codecs, particularly in the CDN so this needs to be considered as part of the consideration of onboarding new codecs. Dropping AV1 support at higher bitrates is an acknowledgement that we also need to consider the cost of encoding in terms of computation.

The panel briefly discusses the newer codecs such as MPEG VVC and MPEG LCEVC. Colleen sees promise in VVC in as much as it can be decoded in software today. She also says good things about LCEVC suggesting we call it an enhancement codec due to the way it works. To find out more about these, check out this SMPTE talk. Both of these can be deployed as software decoders which allow for a way to get started while hardware establishes itself in the ecosystem.

Colleen discusses the importance of understanding your assets. If you have live video, your approach is very different to on-demand. If you are lucky enough to have an asset that is getting millions upon millions of views, you’ll want to compress every bit out of that, but for live, there’s a limit to what you can achieve. Also, you need to understand how your long-tail archive is going to be accessed to decide how much effort your business wants to put into compressing the assets further.

The video comes to a close by discussing the Alliance of Open Media’s approach to AV1 encoders and decoders, discussing the hard work optimising the libAV1 research encoder and the other implementations which are ready for production. Colleen points out the benefit of webassembly which allows a full decoder to be pushed into the browser and the discussion ends talking about codec support for HDR delivery technologies such as HDR10+.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Colleen Henry Cobra Commander of Facebook Video Special Forces.
	Anush Moorthy Manager, Video & Imagine Encoding Netflix
	Amnon Cohen-Tidhar Senior Director or Video Architecture, Cloudinary
	Moderator: Jan Ozer Principal, Stremaing Learning Center Contributing Editor, Streaming Media

Video: Distribution in a Covid-19 World

Posted on 7th July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A look at the impacts of Covid-19 from the perspective of Disney+ and ESPN+. In this talk Eric Klein from Disney Streaming Services gives his view on the changes and learnings he saw as Covid hit and as it continues. He first comments on the increase in ‘initial streams’ as the lockdowns hit with Austria topping the list with a 44% increase of time spent streaming within a just a 48-hour period and in the US, Comcast has reported an uptick of 38% in general streaming and web video consumption. Overall fixed broadband networks tended to do better with the peaks than mobile broadband, whereas mobile internet which is quite common in Italy was observed to be suffering.

Distribution in a Covid-19 World from Streaming Video Alliance on Vimeo.

Content providers played their part to help with the congestion in adjusting to the situation by altering video profiles and changing starting bitrates as part of an industry-wide response. And it’s this element of everybody playing their part which seems to be the secret sauce behind Eric’s statement that “the internet is more resilient than everybody thought”. Eric goes on to point out that such networks are designed to deal with these situations as the first question is always “what’s your peak traffic going to be”. Whilst someone’s estimates may be off, the point is that networks are provisioned for peaks so when many peak forecasts come to pass, their average is usually within the network’s capabilities. The exceptions come on last-mile links which are much more fixed than provisioning of uplink ports and router backplane bandwidth within datacentres.

Eric points out the benefits of open caching, a specification in development within the Streaming Video Alliance. Open caching allows for an interoperable way of delivering files into ISP, modelled around popular data, so that services can cache data much closer to customers. By doing this, Eric points to data which has shown an ability to deliver an up to 15% increase in bandwidth as well as a 30% decrease in ‘customer-impacting events.

This session ends with a short Q&A

Watch now!
Speakers

	Eric Klein Co-Chair, Open Caching Workgroup, Streaming Video Alliance, Director, Content Distribution, Disney Streaming Services
	Moderator: Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Examining the OTT Technology Stack

Posted on 24th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

This video looks at the whole streaming stack asking what’s now, what trends are coming to the fore and how are things going to be done better in the future? Whatever part of the stack you’re optimising, it’s vital to have a way to measure the QoE (Quality of Experience) of the viewer. In most workflows, there is a lot of work done to implement redundancy so that the viewer sees no impact despite problems happening upstream.

The Streaming Video Alliance’s Jason Thibeault diggs deeper with Harmonic’s Thierry Fautier, Brenton Ough from Touchstream, SSIMWAVE’s Hojatollah Yeganeh and Damien Lucas from Ateme.

Talking about Codecs, Thierry makes the point that only 7% of devices can currently support AV1 and with 10 billion devices in the world supporting AVC, he sees a lot of benefit in continuing to optimise this rather than waiting for VVC support to be commonplace. When asked to identify trends in the marketplace, moving to the cloud was identified as a big influencer that is driving the ability to scale but also the functions themselves. Gone are the days, Brenton says, that vendors ‘lift and shift’ into the cloud. Rather, the products are becoming cloud-native which is a vital step to enable functions and products which take full advantage of the cloud such as being able to swap the order of functions in a workflow. Just-in-time packaging is cited as one example.

Examining the OTT Technology Stack from Streaming Video Alliance on Vimeo.

Other changes are that server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is a lot better in the cloud and sub partitioning of viewers, where you do deliver different ads to different people, is more practical. Real-time access to CDN data allowing you near-immediate feedback into your streaming process is also a game-changer that is increasingly available.

Open Caching is discussed on the panel as a vital step forward and one of many areas where standardisation is desperately needed. ISPs are fed up, we hear, of each service bringing their own caching box and it’s time that ISPs took a cloud-based approach to their infrastructure and enabled multiple use servers, potentially containerised, to ease this ‘bring your own box’ mentality and to take back control of their internal infrastructure.

HDR gets a brief mention in light of the Euro soccer championships currently on air and the Japan Olympics soon to be. Thierry says 38% of Euro viewership is over OTT and HDR is increasingly common, though SDR is still in the majority. HDR is more complex than just upping the resolution and requires much more care over which screen it’s watched. This makes adopting HDR more difficult which may be one reason that adoption is not yet higher.

The discussion ends with a Q&A after talking about uses for ‘edge’ processing which the panel agrees is a really important part of cloud delivery. Processing API requests at the edge, doing SSAI or content blackouts are other examples of where the lower-latency response of edge compute works really well in the workflow.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Thierry Fautier VP Video Strategy. Harmonic Inc.
	Damien Lucas CTO, Ateme
	Hojatollah Yeganeh Research Team Lead SSIMWAVE
	Brenton Ough CEO & Co-Founder, Touchstream
	Moderator: Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Ad-Supported Streaming Takes Over?

Posted on 16th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

FAST, SVOD and AVOD are all different ways to bring programming to viewers with different costs to the viewer. All delivered over the internet, FAST is a service that unites live, linear TV with a VOD service whereas AVOD only has video on demand. Both FAST and AVOD are free to watch thanks to adverts whereas SVOD is usually advert-free as this is subscriber VOD where you pay monthly. This video from Streaming Media discusses the rise of FAST and its importance in the market.

‘Is niche content key?’ askes moderator Chris Pfaff to Damian Pelliccione from Revry. Damian distances his service from niche as it serves the over 5% of the US population who identify as LGBTQ+ or similar, Despite not being niche, in common with niche channels, Revry’s content is not typically provided by the mainstream and has a very deep meaning to those watching. because they are working with an underserved demographic, they feel FAST is much more appropriate than SVOD as equal access is important. However, Damian is at pains to point out that, in reality, the service is a ‘tribrid’ of FAST, AVOD and SVOD. Revry’s marketing has moved to buying hero units to position itself on smart TVs and STBs in pole position and also aligning its brand outside of the streaming market such as associating with pride festivals. One advantage of FAST is the cost of user is far lower than SVOD which can be in the realms of $9 per user.

One of the motivators for Sony to start its BRAVIA brand of smart TVs was, Nick Colsey explains, to enable people to access niche streaming services to supplement the mainstream linear channels. This was done through a menu of apps, much like mobile computing, each one a window into a different walled garden. Now, Sony integrates streaming services into the same EPG as linear which shows that convergence continues unabated, in common with ATSC 3.0’s indifference to delivery method. Nick views Sony as a ‘Switzerland’ of content aggregation as it has no conflict of interest given it doesn’t run a rival service.

Chris Yates from Redbox says that FAST channels work well for them as they site well alongside customers’ other SVOD bundles remaining highly accessible. Finding customers, Chris states is harder than it used to be and now the gatekeepers are increasingly equipment manufacturers. Getting yourself on Sony TVs or Samsung equipment is a major vector for exposure but is not always practical. Chris says that rather than competing with youtube, it’s more general than that, he sees Redbox competing for leisure time. Asked later in the session, Chris says he sees consolidation on the horizon for both studios and streaming services.

Amagi’s Srinivasan KA is pleased to claim that they deliver up to 45% of all content on FAST platforms. He sees FAST as growing because it’s more demographic than cable without the need to get 100 services when only 2 would do. And those 2 channels can go much deeper into a topic than mainstream channels would. Not only can you go into a topic deeper, but with more choice of topics, you can go deeper into discovering, understanding and following up your own interests.

Philippe Guelton from Crackle explains their efforts to create programmes differently whether live drama or close-to live. He feels innovation is important and is one way to deal with companies who are spending ‘too much money on streaming, implying they are loss-leaders and therefore ripe for acquisition.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Srinivasan KA Co-founder, Amagi
	Chris Yates General Manager – On-Demand Redbox
	Damian Pelliccione Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Revry
	Nick Colsey Vice President, Business Development Sony Electronics Inc.
	Philippe Guelton EVP, Online Networks, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment President, Crackle Plus
	Moderator: Chris Pfaff CEO, Chris Pfaff Tech Media

Subscribe to get daily updates