OTT

Webinar: Engaging users and boosting advertising with AI

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Honing the use of AI and Machine Learning continues apace. Streaming services are particularly ripe areas for AI, but the winners will be those that have managed to differentiate themselves and innovate in their use of it.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are related technologies which deal with replicating ‘human’ ways of recognising patterns and seeking patterns in large data sets to help deal with similar data in the future. It does this without using traditional methods like using a ‘database’. For the consumer, it doesn’t actually matter whether they’re benefitting from AI or ML, they’re simply looking for better recommendations, wanting better search and accurate subtitles (captions) on all their videos. If these happened because of humans behind the scenes, it would all be the same. But for the streaming provider, everything has a cost, and there just isn’t the ability to afford people to do these tasks plus, in some cases, humans simply couldn’t do the job. This is why AI is here to stay.

Date: Thursday 8th August, 16:00 BST / 11am EDT

In this webinar from IBC365, Media Distillery, Liberty Global and Grey Media come together to discuss the benefits of extracting images, metadata and other context from video, analysis of videos for contextual advertising, content-based search & recommendations and ways to maintain younger viewers.

AI will be here to stay touching the whole breadth of our lives, not just in broadcast. So it’s worth learning how it can be best used to produce television, for streaming and in your business.

Register now!
Speakers

Martin Prins Martin Prins
Product Owner,
Media Distillery
Susanne Rakels Susanne Rakels
Senior Manager, Discovery & Personalisation,
Liberty Global
Ruhel Ali Ruhel Ali
Founder/Director,
Grey Media

Video: Broadcast and OTT monitoring: The challenge of multiple platforms

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Is it possible to monitor OTT services to the same standard as traditional broadcast services? How can they be visualised, what are the challenges and what makes monitoring streaming services different?

As with traditional broadcast, some broadcasters outsource the distribution of streaming services to third parties. Whilst this can work well in broadcast, there any channel would be missing out on a huge opportunity if they didn’t also monitor some analytics of the viewer using their streaming service. So, to some extent, a broadcaster always wants to look at the whole chain. Even when the distribution is not outsourced and the OTT system has been developed and is run by the broadcaster, at some point a third party will have to be involved and this is typically the CDN and/or Edge network. A broadcaster would do well to monitor the video provided at all points through the chain including right up to the edge.

The reason for monitoring is to keep viewers happy and, by doing so, reduce churn. When you have analytics from a player telling you something isn’t right, it’s only natural to want too find out what went wrong and to know that, you will need monitoring in your distribution chain. When you have that monitoring, you can be much more pro-active in resolving issues and improve your service overall.

Jeff Herzog from Verizon Digital Media Services explains ways to achieve this and the benefits it can bring. After a primer on HLS streaming, he explains ways to monitor the video itself and also how to monitor everything but the video as a light-touch monitoring solution.

Jeff explains that because HLS is based on playlists and files being available, you can learn a lot about your service just by monitoring these small text files, parsing them and checking that all the files it mentions are available with minimal wait times. By doing this and other tricks, you can successfully gauge how well your service is working without the difficulty of dealing with large volumes of video data. The talk finishes with some examples of what this monitoring can look like in action.

This talk was given at the SMPTE Annual Technical Conference 2018.
For more OTT videos, check out The Broadcast Knowledge’s Youtube OTT playlist.
Speakers

Jeff Herzog Jeff Herzog
Senior Product Manger, Video Monitoring & Compliance,
Verizon Digital Media Services

Webinar: Building Tomorrow’s OTT Platforms

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Discover the critical success factors the Broadcasters and platform owners, investing millions in building and upgrading OTT platforms, need to achieve to ensure they can compete successfully with a growing array of digital competitors and deliver compelling user experiences.

Many of these broadcasters are beginning to move from their initial OTT offerings to more mature services that can scale for the future, and answer the requirements of demanding viewers and regulators.

This webinar uncovers the essential parts of a flourishing OTT service, including:
– Delivering content at scale as more viewing and live events move to OTT
– Ensuring a class-leading user experience and quality
– Using analytics to maximise revenue and engagement
– Ensuring cost efficiency in the OTT workflow
– Securing platforms and content against piracy and malicious attacks

Register now!

Speakers

Natalie Billingham Natalie Billingham
Vice President, Media & Carrier EMEA,
Akamai
Raphaël Goldwaser Raphaël Goldwaser
Lead Video Architect,
France Télévisions
Chris Wood Chris Wood
Chief Technology Officer,
Spicy Mango

Video: Deploying WebRTC In A Low-Latency Streaming Service

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

WebRTC is an under appreciated streaming protocol with sub-second latency. Several startups are working hard to harness this technology born by Google for use in video conferencing for live streaming.

When you look at the promised latencies, you can see why. CMAF, the lowest-latency protocol for live streaming using HLS-style chunked file delivery is gaining wider adoption and provides a very impressive latency reduction, however it typically stops at between 4 and 2 seconds. To get below a second, WebRTC is almost the only option out there.

In this talk, Millicast CTO Dr. Alex Gouaillard looks at the misunderstandings and misinformation are out there regarding WebRTC. Dr. Alex covers WebRTC now having ABR, using over multiple hops, the testing ecosystem and much more.

Dr. Alex also covers the lessons learnt over the last two years of development and implementation of the standard and finishes by looking to the future which will bring in QUIC, AV1 and Web ASM.

Watch now!
Speaker

Alex Gouaillard Alex Gouaillard
Founder & CTO,
Millicast