Streaming Video Alliance Archives – Page 3 of 7

Video: Demystifying Video Delivery Protocols

Posted on 30th July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Let’s face it, there are a lot of streaming protocols out there both for contribution and distribution. Internet ingest in RTMP is being displaced by RIST and SRT, whilst low-latency players such as CMAF and LL-HLS are vying for position as they try to oust HLS and DASH in existing services streaming to the viewer.

This panel, hosted by Jason Thibeault from the Streaming Video Alliance, talks about all these protocols and attempts to put each in context, both in the broadcast chain and in terms of its features. Two of the main contribution technologies are RIST and SRT which are both UDP-based protocols which implement a method of recovering lost packets whereby packets which are lost are re-requested from the sender. This results in a very high resilience to packet loss – ideal for internet deployments.

First, we hear about SRT from Maxim Sharabayko. He lists some of the 350 members of the SRT Alliance, a group of companies who are delivering SRT in their products and collaborating to ensure interoperability. Maxim explains that, based on the UDT protocol, it’s able to do live streaming for contribution as well as optimised file transfer. He also explains that it’s free for commercial use and can be found on github. SRT has been featured a number of times on The Broadcast Knowledge. For a deeper dive into SRT, have a look at videos such as this one, or the ones under the SRT tag.

Next Kieran Kunhya explains that RIST was a response to an industry request to have a vendor-neutral protocol for reliable delivery over the internet or other dedicated links. Not only does vendor-neutrality help remove reticence for users or vendors to adopt the technology, but interoperability is also a key benefit. Kieran calls out hitless switching across multiple ISPs and cellular. bonding as important features of RIST. For a summary of all of RIST’s features, read this article. For videos with a deeper dive, have a look at the RIST tag here on The Broadcast Knowledge.

Demystifying Video Delivery Protocols from Streaming Video Alliance on Vimeo.

Barry Owen represents WebRTC in this webinar, though Wowza deal with many protocols in their products. WebRTC’s big advantage is sub-second delivery which is not possible with either CMAF or LL-HLS. Whilst it’s heavily used for video conferencing, for which it was invented, there are a number of companies in the streaming space using this for delivery to the user because of it’s almost instantaneous delivery speed. Whilst a perfect rendition of the video isn’t guaranteed, unlike CMAF and LL-HLS, for auctions, gambling and interactive services, latency is always king. For contribution, Barry explains, the flexibility of being able to contribute from a browser can be enough to make this a compelling technology although it does bring with it quality/profile/codec restrictions.

Josh Pressnell and Ali C Begen talk about the protocols which are for delivery to the user. Josh explains how smoothstreaming has excited to leave the ground to DASH, CMAF and HLS. They discuss the lack of a true CENC – Common Encryption – mechanism leading to duplication of assets. Similarly, the discussion moves to the fact that many streaming services have to have duplicate assets due to target device support.

Looking ahead, the panel is buoyed by the promise of QUIC. There is concern that QUIC, the Google-invented protocol for HTTP delivery over UDP, is both under standardisation proceedings in the IETF and is also being modified by Google separately and at the same time. But the prospect of a UDP-style mode and the higher efficiency seems to instil hope across all the participants of the panel.

Watch now to hear all the details!
Speakers

	Ali C. Begen Technical Consultant, Comcast
	Kieran Kunhya Founder & CEO, Open Broadcast Systems Director, RIST Forum
	Barry Owen VP, Solutions Engineering Wowza Media Systems
	Josh Pressnell CTO, Penthera Technologies
	Maxim Sharabayko Senior Software Developer, Haivision
	Moderator: Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Latency Still Sucks (and What You Can Do About It)

Posted on 13th July 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The streaming industry is on an ever-evolving quest to reduce latency to bring it in line with, or beat linear broadcasts and to allow business models such as gaming to flourish. When streaming started, latency of a minute or more was not uncommon and whilst there are some simple ways to improve that, getting down to the latency of digital TV, approximately 5 seconds, is not without challenges. Whilst the target of 5 seconds works for many use cases, it’s still not enough for auctions, gambling or ‘gamification’ which need sub-second latency.

In this panel, Jason Thielbaut explores how to reduce latency with Casey Charvet from Gigcasters, Rob Roskin from CenturyLink and Haivision VP Engineering, Marc Cymontkowski. This wide-ranging discussion covers CDN caching, QUIC and HTTP/3, encoder settings, segmented Vs. non-segmented streaming, ingest and distribution protocols.

Key to the discussion is differentiating the ingest protocol from the distribution protocol. Often, just getting the content into the cloud quickly is enough to bring the latency into the customer’s budget. Marc from Haivision explains how SRT achieves low-latency contribution. SRT allows unreliable networks like the Internet to be used for reliable, encrypted video contribution. Created by Haivision and now an Open Source technology with an IETF draft spec, the alliance of SRT users continues to grow as the technology continues to develop and add features. SRT is a ‘re-request’ technology meaning it achieves its reliability by re-requesting from the encoder any data it missed. This is in contrast to TCP/IP which acknowledges every single packet of data and is sent missing data when acknowledgements aren’t received. Doing it the SRT, way really makes the protocol much more efficient and able to cope with real-time media. SRT can also encrypt all traffic which, when sending over the internet, is extremely important even if you’re not sending live-sports. In this video, Marc makes the point that SRT also recovers the timing of the stream so that the data comes out the SRT pipe in the same ‘shape’ as it went in. Particularly with VBR encoding, your decoder needs to receive the same peaks and troughs as the encoder created to save it having to buffer the input as much. All this included, SRT manages to deliver a transport latency of around 2.5 times the round trip time.

Haivision are members of RIST which is a similar technology to SRT. Marc explains that RIST is approaching the problem from a standards perspective; taking IETF RFCs and applying them to RTP. SRT took a more pragmatic way forward by creating a binary which implemented the features and by making this open source for interoperability.

The video finishes with a Q&A covering HTTP Header compression, recommended size of HLS chunks, peer-to-peer streaming and latency requirements for VoD.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Rob Roskin Principal Solutions Architect, Level3 Communications
	Marc Cymontkowski VP Engineering – Cloud, Haivision
	Casey Charvet Managing Director, Gigcasters
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Everyone is Streaming; Can the Infrastructure Handle it?

Posted on 29th April 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

How well is the internet infrastructure dealing with the increase in streaming during the Covid-19 pandemic? What have we learnt in terms of delivering services and have we seen any changes in the way services are consumed? This video brings together carriers, vendors and service providers to answer these questions and give a wider picture.

The video starts off by getting different perspectives on how the pandemic has affected their business sharing key data points. Jeff Budney from Verizon says that carriers have had a ‘whirlwind’ few weeks. Conviva’s José Jesus says that while they are only seeing 3% more devices, there was a 37% increase in hours of video consumed. Peaks due to live sports have done but primetime is now spread and more stable, a point which was made by both Jeff Gilbert from Qwilt as well as José.

“We’ve seen a whole year’s worth of traffic growth…it’s really been incredible” — Jeff Budney, Verizon

So while it’s clear that growth has happened, but the conversation turns to whether this has caused problems. We hear views about how some countries did see reductions in quality of experience and some with none. This experience is showing where bottlenecks are, whether they are part of the ISP infrastructure or in individual players/services which haven’t been well optimised. Indeed, explains Jason Thibeault, Executive Director of the Streaming Video Alliance, the situation seems to be shining a light on the operational resilience, rather than technical capacity of ISPs.

Thierry Fautier from Harmonic emphasises the benefits of content-aware encoding whereby services could reduce bandwidth by “30 to 40 percent” before talking about codec choice. AVC (A.K.A. H.264) accounts for 90%+ of all HD traffic. Thierry contents that by switching to both HEVC and content-aware encoding services could reduce their bandwidth by up to a factor of four.

Open Caching is a working group creating specifications to standardise an interface to allow ISPs to pull information into a local cache from service providers. This moving of content to the edge is one way that we can help avoid bottlenecks by locating content as close to viewers as possible.

The elephant in the room is that Netflix reduced quality/bitrate in order to help some areas cope. Verizon’s Jeff Budney points out that this is contra to the industry’s approach to deployment where they have assumed there is always the capacity to provide the needed scale. If that’s true, how can one tweet from a European Commissioner have had such an impact? The follow on point is that if YouTube and Netflix are now sending 25% less data, as reports suggest, ABR simply means that other providers’ players will take up the slack, as is the intent-free way ABR works. If the rest of the industry benefits from the big providers ‘dialling back’ is this an effective measure and is it fair?

The talk concludes hitting topics on ABR Multicast, having more intelligent ways to manage large-scale capacity issues, more on Open Caching and deliver protocols.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Thierry Fautier VP Video Strategy, Harmonic Inc. President-Chair, Ultra HD Forum
	Eric Klein Director, Content Distribution – Disney+/ESPN+, Disney Streaming Services Co-Chair, Open Cache Working Group, Streaming Video Alliance
	José Jesus Senior Product Manager, Conviva
	Jeff Budney Manager, Verizon
	Jeffrey Gilbert VP strategy and Business Development, CP, Qwilt
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Video Caching Best Practices

Posted on 3rd March 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Caching is a critical element of the streaming video delivery infrastructure. By storing objects as close to the viewer as possible, you can reduce round-trip times, cut bandwidth costs, and create a more efficient delivery chain.

This video brings together Disney, Qwilt and Verizon to understand their best-practices and look at the new Open Caching Network (OCN) working group from the Streaming Video Alliance. This recorded webinar is a discussion on the different aspects of caching and the way the the OCN addresses this.

The talk starts simply by answering “What is a caching server and how does it work?” which helps everyone get on to the same page whilst listening to the answers to “What are some of the data points to collect from the cache?” hearing ‘cache:hit-ratio’, ‘latency’, ‘cache misses’, ‘data coming from the CDN vs the origin server’ as some of the answers.

This video continues by exploring how caching nodes are built, optimising different caching solutions, connecting a cache to the Open Caching Network, and how bettering cache performance and interoperability can improve your overall viewer experience.

The Live Streaming Working Group is mentioned covered as they are working out the parameters such as ‘needed memory’ for live streaming servers and moves quickly into discussing some tricks-of-the-trade, which often lead to a better cache.

There are lots of best practices which can be shared and the an open caching network one great way to do this. The aim is to create some interoperability between companies, allowing small-scale start-up CDNs to talk to larger CDNs. A way for a streaming company to understand that it can interact with ‘any’ CDN. As ever, the idea comes down to ‘interoperability’. Have a listen and judge for yourself!

Watch now!
Speakers

	Eric Klein Director, Content Distribution – Disney+/ESPN+, Disney Streaming Services Co-Chair, Open Cache Working Group, Streaming Video Alliance
	Yoav Gressel Vice President of R&D, Qwilt
	Sanjay Mishra Director, Technology Verizon
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Media Alliance

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