OTT Archives – Page 11 of 45 – 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: Bandwidth Prediction for Multi-Bitrate Streaming at Low Latency

Posted on 24th July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Low latency protocols like CMAF are wreaking havoc with traditional ABR algorithms. We’re having to come up with new ways of assessing if we’re running out of bandwidth. Traditionally, this is done by looking at how long a video chunk takes to download and comparing that with its playback duration. If you’re downloading at the same speed it’s playing, it’s time consider changing stream to a lower-bandwidth one.

As latencies have come down, servers will now start sending data from the beginning of a chunk as it’s being written which means it’s can’t be downloaded any quicker. To learn more about this, look at our article on ISO BMFF and this streaming primer. Since the file can’t be downloaded any quicker, we can’t ascertain if we should move up in bitrate to a better quality stream, so while we can switch down if we start running out of bandwidth, we can’t find a time to go up.

Ali C. Begen and team have been working on a way around this. The problem is that with the newer protocols, you pre-request files which start getting sent when they are ready. As such you don’t actually know the time the chunk starts downloading to you. Whilst you know when it’s finished, you don’t have access, via javascript, to when the file started being sent to you robbing you of a way of determining the download time.

Ali’s algorithm uses the time the last chunk finished downloading in place of the missing timestamp figuring that the new chunk is going to load pretty soon after the old. Now, looking at the data, we see that the gap between one chunk finishing and the next one starting does vary. This lead Ali’s team to move to a sliding window moving average taking the last 3 download durations into consideration. This is assumed to be enough to smooth out some of those variances and provides the data to allow them to predict future bandwidth and make a decision to change bitrate or not. There have been a number of alternative suggestions over the last year or so, all of which perform worse than this technique called ACTE.

In the last section of this talk, Ali explores the entry he was part of into a Twitch-sponsored competition to keep playback latency close to a second in test conditions with varying bitrate. Playback speed is key to much work in low-latency streaming as it’s the best way to trim off a little bit of latency when things are going well and allows you to buy time if you’re waiting for data; the big challenge is doing it without the viewer noticing. The entry used a heuristics and a machine learning approach which worked so well, they were runners up in the contest.

Watch now!
Speaker

Ali C. Begen,
Technical Consultant, Comcast
Professor, Computer Science, Özyeğin University

Video: Optimising Video for Everyone at Once

Posted on 22nd July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

CDNs are all about scale. Their raison d’ëtre is to help you scale, but that’s no trivial task which is why companies like Akamai exist so you only have to concentrate on your core product, for this talk, online streaming. Akamai’s main game is to move content you provide to them to the ‘edge’ of the network, as close to the user as possible.

The pandemic certainly put the CDNs, as well as telcos, through their paces. In this talk, Peter Chave from Akami talks about the challenges in the scale they’re achieving on a day-to-day basis. Whilst it’s lucky that 2020 was due to be a ‘big’ year in terms of sporting events, the Winter Olympics being but one example, meaning that large capacity had already been planned for, the whole industry has been iterating to get things right as the load has shifted and increased.

In March, Akamai saw a years-worth of growth. The shift in traffic was not just in magnitude but also it was a rebalancing of upload vs download. With video conferences and VPNs used all the more, the asymmetrical design of consumer internet services was put to the test.

Peter explains that companies like Netflix volunteered to reduce the burden by reducing bitrates. This was done in two main ways. One was to simply remove the top level from manifests. The other was to update the players to be much more conservative as they worked their way up through the bitrates. It’s also made some companies consider a switch to HEVC or otherwise which, whilst not being immediate, can have the effect of reducing overall bitrates across your service.

The CDN can also adjust the manifest which is much more flexible since, rather than editing a central file, in the edge in certain geographies and at certain times of day, the CDN can adjust the manifests on the fly. Lastly, Peter explains how Akamai have been throttling the speed at which video chunks are served. For times when a person has a lot more available bitrate than it needs for a video, there is no reason for it to download chunks at 100Mbps, so throttling the download speed helps reduce peaks.

Watch now!
Speakers

Peter Chave
Principal Architect,
Akamai Technologies

Video: The End of Broadcast?

Posted on 21st July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

This discussion asks what the limits are of ‘broadcast’ in a world increasingly dominated by streaming. Whilst services like the BBC’s iPlayer have demonstrated how on-demand can sit alongside live streams of linear channels, the growing world of Disney+, Netflix and Apple TV+ is muscling in on the family television bringing with them different ways of accessing video.

Presented by Ian Nock, chair of the IET Media technical network, this is the 2020 John Logie Baird lecture online. First up, is Chris Wood from OTT specialist Spicy Mango who represents the perspective that OTT is the way forward. This isn’t a fight between screen sizes, he starts by saying, but rather about experiences and expectations. A great example of this is how pause and rewind features have made their way into many linear TV offerings. The convenience to pause a video while you leave the room or discuss it was so powerful that when it was possible to bring it into live, it did. This type of feature migration will continue to happen as the types of service merge.

Chris makes the important point that ‘live TV’ often means linear. There is a lot of live streaming available through Twitch, sports providers like DAZN and companies like Amazon Prime which is not captured separately. This makes it hard to understand how much people are still valuing the live feeling. Live TV, he says, is not going away whatever happens to linear RF transmissions because we need live programming, we enjoy it differently.

Source: DTG

Next, representing the UK Digital TV Group (DTG) is Yvonne Thomas who looks at the fragmented landscape with a large variety of types of VoD service available – subscription, advertiser etc. For the younger audience whose experience of video is predominantly over IP, their experiences become quite fragmented meaning it’s hard for a broadcaster to maintain continuity and relevance. Yvonne also talks about the proliferation of IT needed to watch all this content which can lead to families inadvertently exposing their data or compromising their security.

Nigel Walley from Decipher makes the point that some of our intuitions are wrong. As we see trends evolving, whilst the industry was initially discussing the rise of ‘second screens’, it’s important to realise that some of this was driven by the simple fact that the only place you could watch Netflix of YouTube was your second screen. As consumer electronics manufacturers have made space for ‘Netflix’ buttons and we see Google and Apple with their HDMI connected players, we see people have quickly reverted to watching good content on their best screen; their TV.

Another important point made by Nigel is that as much people companies talk about the ability to individually target viewers and deliver highly customised services, there will always be situations with shared viewing whether they may as well not be logged in as customisation takes much more of a back seat.

Source: OMDIA

Maria Rua Aguete from Omdia challenges our assumptions on who the big players in streaming are. They can be ranked both by revenue and by subscribers. Maria shows us that China Telecom, Baidu and Tencent are in positions 2, 3 and 4 when counted by subscribers. Still, one third of the world’s OTT subscribers are held by Amazon, Netflix and Disney+.
Maria continues to deliver a vast range of timely statistics that help us understand the current situation within the pandemic. She covers the popularity of free services with in the UK, recent M&A activity, the consumers’ rising appetite for video and international channels.

The session closes with a 20 minute Q&A.

Watch Now!

Speakers

	Maria Rua Aguete Technology Fellow & Executive Director, Omdia
	Yvonne Thomas Strategic Technologist Digital TV Group
	Chris Wood CTO, Spicy Mango
	Nigel Walley Managing Director, Decipher
	Moderator: Ian Nock Chair, IET Media Technical Network

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