OTT Archives – Page 10 of 45 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Super-Aggregation & Cloud-Powered IPTV – A Case Study

Posted on 8th October 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

What is super aggregation and why is it necessary for the media & entertainment industry? Surveys show that 47% of US citizens are frustrated by having to subscribe to multiple services rather than just 1 as they used to. Moreover, 57% are annoyed when content they like moves to another platform. This indicates there’s an opportunity in the market for services which aggregate multiple services into one to meet the needs of consumers and expand the reach of streaming providers.

This webinar from IBC 365 is hosted by Andy Waltenspiel who talks to TiVo, Liberty Latin America and Velocix about how they’ve worked together to launch a super-aggregation service for Latin American countries. Chris Thun from TiVo explains that he feels that ‘universal search’ is essential as well as ‘universal browse’ which creates a recommendation engine which understands you and helps you discover content from all services.

Liberty’s Edwin Elberg explains that this project came about when Liberty Latin America split from Liberty Global. Unusually, this meant they had to learn how to ‘scale down’ their operations. But this gave them an opportunity to differentiate themselves through a super-aggregation project which relied on the strengths of TiVo and Velocix with TiVo handling the customer-facing elements and Velocix managing the technical integration of the project and technical delivery of a number of workflow features such as ingest, recording and delivery to any device.

Jim Brickmeier from Velocix explained that their choice to use the cloud was made from the point of view of flexibility and reactiveness being most important. Whilst telcos which have their own network may still want to use on-prem solutions since delivering to their network is so much cheaper that way plus they can use many of the same technologies that would be in the cloud on-prem.

From a business perspective, having a super-aggregator is a benefit for many of the streaming services because Liberty is a big, trusted name with many subscribers. They already have a commercial and brand relationship with millions of people which significantly reduces the friction in signing up to new content, particularly in a part of the world where credit card ownership is far from universal.

Overall, this service seeks to differentiate itself and maintain subscribers by being the only company in the market with a user-experience at that level and with great content. Edwin Elberg points out it’s far from easy in setting up multiple relationships for the service and involves many contracts and careful planning to deal with international sales tax rules. Onboarding a new partner, he suggests, should be quicker and he thinks a standard for both the content provider and the aggregator to follow or conform to is the future.

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Free
Speakers

	Chris Thun Vice President, Product TiVo
	Edwin Elberg Sr. Director, Product Development Liberty Latin America
	Jim Brickmeier Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Velocix
	Andy Waltenspiel General Manager Waltenspiel Management Consulting

Video: The fundamentals of online video & getting started with live streaming

Posted on 30th September 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are plenty of videos detailing the latest streaming protocols, but not many which teach you how to literally put one together let alone ones that build it during the talk. Being a system of many components, there are countless permutations of how you could go about building a system, so how can you work out which ones you need and is there an easier way?

MUX’s Phil Cluff presents this talk for WeAreDevelopers to explain streaming and implement it as we watch. He begins by helping us think through exactly what we’re looking to get out of our service and using the budget we have to steer us towards, or way from, free services like YouTube and Twitch. The alternatives being OVPs such as Brightcove or aides supporting your self-sufficiency.

With motivations out of the way, Phil examines the whole chain starting with ‘Capture’. Whilst you’ll need a camera, he recommends the open-source project OBS to provide easy web page integration and a system which can be for general operation or for emergencies. Next is processing which typically includes dealing with old films/negatives. For distribution, Phil spends a couple of minutes describing the CDN in use.

Phil looks at why simply using the ‘video’ entity in HTML isn’t a solution for most streaming applications quickly moving on to discuss the large amount of ingest which still happens via RTMP, explaining the information needed to ensure the RTMP stream can connect. Phil next discusses ABR (Adaptive Bitrate Streaming) showing how it works with different resolutions and chunks. We then look further afield to MPEG-DASH to see how that delivers ‘MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP’ and look at the internals of manifest files.

In the next part of the talk, Phil shows us how to put together a page which delivers ABR streaming from an OBS camera which he also sets up and adds graphics to. Streaming into the cloud using RTMP we see the way Phil sets up OBS and configures it with a Stream Key. He then shows us how to create a player with HLS.js by prototyping a page, as we watch, in codesandbox.io. Finally he looks at some of the more advanced things you can do such as watermarking, getting credentials for social media simulcasts before fielding questions from the audience such as how to stream from the browser, realtime engagement APIs, Low Latency delivery (including Apple LL-HLS) and data privacy.

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Speakers

	Phil Cluff Streaming Architect, MUX
	Moderator: Stefan Steinbauer Director, Developer Experience WeAreDevelopers GmbH

Video: LL-HLS Discussion with THEO, Wowza & Fastly

Posted on 24th September 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

iOS 14 has finally started to hit devices and with it, LL-HLS is now available in millions of devices. Low-Latency HLS is Apple’s latest evolution of HLS, a streaming protocol which has been widely used for over a decade. Its typical latency has gradually come down from 60 seconds to, between 6 and 15 seconds now. There are still a lot of companies that want to bring that down further and LL-HLS is Apple’s answer to people who want to operate at around 2-4 seconds total latency, which matches or beats traditional broadcast.

LL-HLS was introduced last year and had a rocky reception. It came after a community-driven low-latency scheme called LHLS and after MPEG DASH announced CMAF’s ability to hit the same 2-4 second window. Famously, this original context, as well as the technical questions over the new proposal, were summed up well in Phil Cluff’s blog post which was soon followed by a series of talks trying to make sense of LL-HLS ahead of implementation. This is the Apple video introducing LL-HLS in its first form. And the reactions from AL Shenker from CBS Interactive, Marina Kalkanis from M2A Media and Akamai’s Will Law which also nicely sums up the other two contenders. Apple have now changed some of the spec in response to their own further reasearch and external feedback which was received positively and summed up in, THEO CTO, Pieter-Jan Speelmans’ recent webinar bringing us the updates.

In this panel, Pieter is joined by Chris Buckley from Fastly Inc. and Wowza’s Jamie Sherry discussing pressing LL-HLS into action. Moderator Alison Kolodny hosts the talk which covers a wide variety of points.

“Wide adoption” is seen as the day-1 benefit. If you support LL-HLS then you’ll know you’re able to hit a large number of iPads, iPhones and Macs. Typically Apple sees a high percentage of the userbase upgrade fairly swiftly and easily see more than 75% of devices updated within four months of release. The panel then discusses how implementation has become easier given the change in protocol where the use of HTTP/2’s push technology was dropped which would have made typical CDN techniques like hosting the playlists separately to the media impossible. Overall, CDN implementation has become more practical since with pre-load hints, a CDN can host many, many connections into to it, all waiting for a certain chunk and collapse that down to a single link to the origin.

One aspect of implementation which has improved, we hear from Pieter-Jan, is building effective Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) switching. With low-latency protocols, you are so close to live that it becomes very hard to download a chunk of video ahead of time and measure the download speed to see if it arrived quicker than realtime. If it did, you’d infer there was spare bit rate. LL-HLS’s use of rendition reports, however, make that a lot easier. Pieter-Jan also points out SSAI is easier with rendition reports.

The rest of the discussion covers device support for LL-HLS, subtitles workflows, the benefits of TLS 1.3 being recommended, and low-latency business cases.

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The webinar is free to watch, on demand, in exchange for your email details. The link is emailed to you immediately.
Speaker

	Senior Sales Engineer, Fastly Inc.
	Pieter-Jan Speelmans CTO, THEO Technologies
	Jamie Sherry Senior Product Manager, Wowza
	Moderator: Alison Kolodny Senior Product Manager of Media Services, Frame.io

Video: Scalable Per-User Ad Insertion in Live OTT

Posted on 17th September 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Targetted ads are the most valuable ads, but making sure the right person gets the right ad is tricky, not only in deciding who to show which ad to, but in scaling – and keeping track of – the ad infrastructure to thousands or millions of viewers. This video explains how this complexity arises and the techniques that Hulu have implemented to improve the situation.

Zachary Cava from Hulu lays out the way that standard advertising works for live streams. Whilst he uses MPEG DASH as an example, much the same is true of HLS. This starts with cutting up the video into sections which all start with an IDR frame for seeking. SCTE 35 is used to indicate times when ads can be inserted. These are called SCTE Markers. As DASH has the principle of defining a period (exactly as it sounds, just a way of marking a section of time), we can define periods of ‘programme’ and periods for ‘ads’. This allows the possibility of swapping out a whole period for a section of several ads.

If it were as simple as just swapping out whole periods, that would be Server-Side Ad Insertion. For per-user targetted ads, the streaming service has to keep track of every ad which was given to a user so that when they rewind, they have a consistent experience. This can mean remembering millions of ads for services which have a large rewind buffer. Moreover, traffic can become overwhelming as, since the requests are unique, a CDN can’t help in the caching. Whilst you can scale your system, the cost can spiral up beyond the revenue practical.

Enter MPD Patch Requests. This addition to MPEG Dash requires the client to remember the whole of the manifest. Where the client has a gap in its knowledge, it can simply request that section from the server which generates a ‘diff’, returning only the changes, which the client then assimilates into memory. The benefit here is that all the clients end up converging on only requesting what’s happening ‘now’ and so CDNs come back in to play. Zachary explains how this works in more detail and shows examples before explaining how URLQueryInfo helps reduce the complexity of URL parameters, again in order to interoperate better with CDNs and allows the ad system to be scaled separately to the main video assets.

Finally, Zachary takes a look at coming back from an ad break where you may find that your ads were longer then the ad period allotted or that the programme hasn’t returned before the ads finished. During the ad break, the client is still polling for updates so it’s possible to quickly update the manifest and swap back to programme video early. Similarly at the end of a break, if there is still no content, the server can start issuing its own ad or content, effectively moving back to server-side ad insertion. However, this is not necessarily just plain ad insertion, explains Zachary, rather Hulu cal it ‘Server-Guided’ ad insertion. There is no stitching on the server, but the server is informing you where to get the next video from. It also allows for some levels of user separation where some larger geographies can see different ads to those from other areas.

Zachary finishes by outlining the work Hulu is doing to feedback this learning into the DASH spec, via the DASH Industry Forum and their work with the industry at large to bring more consistency to SCTE 35 markers.

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Speaker

Zachary Cava
Software Architect,
Hulu

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