streaming Archives – Page 22 of 32 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Online Streaming Primer

Posted on 31st January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A trip down memory lane for some, a great intro to the basics of streaming for others, this video from IET Media looks at the history of broadcasting and how that has moved over the years to online streaming posing the question whether, with so many people watching online, is that broad enough to now be considered broadcast?

The first of a series of talks from IET Media, the video starts by highlighting that the recording of video was only practical 20 years after the first television broadcasts then talks about how television has moved on to add colour, resolution and move to digital. The ability to record video is critical to almost all of our use of media today. Whilst film worked well as an archival medium, it didn’t work well, at scale, for recording of live broadcasts. So in the beginning, broadcasting from one, or a few, transmitters was all there was.

Russell Trafford-Jones, from IET Media, then discusses the advent of streaming from its predecessor as file-based music in portable players, through the rise of online radio and how this naturally evolved into the urge to stream video in much the same way.

Being a video from the IET video, Russell then looks at the technology behind getting video onto a network and over the internet. He talks about cutting the stream into chunks, i.e. small files, and how sending files can create a seamless stream of data. One key advantage of this method is Adaptive BitRate (ABR) meaning being able to change from one quality level, to another which typically means changing bitrate to adapt to changing network conditions.

Finishing by talking about the standards available for online streaming, this talk is a great introduction to streaming and an important part of anyone’s foundational understanding of broadcast and streaming.

Watch now!

This video was produced by IET Media, a technical network within the IET which runs events, talks and webinars for networking and education within the broadcast industry. More information

Speakers

Russell Trafford-Jones
Exec Member, IET Media
Manager, Support & Services, Techex
Editor, The Broadcast Knowledge

Webinar: Broadcaster VOD: Delivering the next-generation of catch-up viewing

Posted on 28th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With Amazon, Netflix and so many other VOD services available, broadcasters like the BBC and Discovery are investing a lot in their own VOD services, known as Broadcaster VOD (BVOD) in order to maintain relevance, audiences and revenue.

Commercial broadcasters such as Sky, ITV and Channel 4 are trying hard to attract advertisers and “have all launched new ad formats, struck deals with ad tech vendors to build marketplaces and set up programmatic teams to manage them” according to a report from digiday.com. As such this means that the battle for advertisers wallets is moving more towards VOD from linear.

Date: Thursday 30 January, 14:00 GMT / 9 a.m. ET

With this in mind, IBC365 will discuss the business models, platforms and strategies being used by BVOD platforms. They will look at the BBC’s move to build a deep content library of free-to-view box sets, and to the importance of data, personalisation and addressable advertising models.

Further more, this webinar will talk about the commercial and technical requirements to build a BVOD to a standard that’s going to stand on its own in this increasingly crowded, but well-funded marketplace.

	Richard Davidson-Houston Founder, Finally Found Ltd.
	Roma Kojima Senior Director OTT Video (CBC Gem), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
	Niels Baas Managing Director, NLZIET

Webinar: Securing Live Streams

Posted on 27th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Piracy in France cost €1.2bn in 2017 and worldwide the loss has been valued up to US$52 billion. Even if these numbers are inflated, over-counted or similar, it’s clear there is a lot of money at stake in online streaming. There are a number of ways of getting to protect your content, encryption, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and tokenisation are three key ones and this webinar will examine what works best in the real world.

All these technologies used together don’t always stop piracy 100%, but they can significantly impact the ease of pirating and the quality of the final material.

Date: Thursday January 30th – 10a.m. PT / 1p.m. / 18:00 GMT

It’s important to understand the difference between encryption and Digital Rights Management. In general DRM relies on encryption, whereby encryption is a way of making sure that decodable video only lands in the hands of people who have been given the encryption key. This means that people who are snooping on traffic between the video provider and consumer can’t see what the video is and can be accomplished in a similar way to secure web pages which are secured against eavesdroppers. The problem with encryption is, however, that it doesn’t intrinsically decide who is allowed to decode the video meaning anyone with the decryption key can video the content. Often this is fine, but if you want to run a pay-TV service, even ignoring content, it’s much better to target customer by customer who can video the video. And this is where DRM comes in.

DRM is multi-faceted and controls the way in which consumers can view/use the content as much as whether they can access it to start with. DRM, for instance, can determine that a display device can show the work, but a recorder is not allowed to make a recording. It can also determine access based on location. Another aspect of DRM is tracking in the form of insertion of watermarks and metadata which mean that if a work is pirated, there is a way to work back to the original subscriber to determine the source of the leak.

Tokenisation is a method in which the player requests access to the material and is passed a token, by means of a response from the server after it has checked if the player is allowed access. Because of the way this token is created, it is not possible for another player to use it to access the content which means that sharing a URI won’t allow another user access to the video. Without some form of access control, once one subscriber has received a URI to access the video, they could pass that to another user who could also then access it.

What’s the best way to use these technologies? What are the pros and cons and what are the other methods of securing media? These questions and more will be discussed in this Streaming Video Alliance webinar on January 30th.

	Peter Cossack Vice President Cybersecurity services, Irdeto
	Kei Foo Director of Advanced Video Engineering, Charter Communications
	Orly Amsalem Product Manager, AI/ML based video security and anti-piracy solutions , Synamedia
	Marvin Van Schalkwyk Senior Solutions Architect, FriendMTS
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Media Alliance

Video: Delivering Better Manifests with Effective VMAF

Posted on 24th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Measuring video quality is done daily around the world between two video assets. But what happens when you want to take the aggregate quality of a whole manifest? With VMAF being a well regarded metric, how can we use that in an automatic way to get the overview we need?

In this talk, Nick Chadwick from Mux shares the examples and scripts he’s been using to analyse videos. Starting with an example where everything is equal other than quality, he explains the difficulties in choosing the ‘better’ option when the variables are much less correlated. For instance, Nick also examines the situations where a video is clearly better, but where the benefit is outweighed by the minimal quality benefit and the disproportionately high bitrate requirement.

So with all of this complexity, it feels like comparing manifests may be a complexity too far, particularly where one manifest has 5 renditions, the other only 4. The question being, how do you create an aggregate video quality metric and determine whether that missing rendition is a detriment or a benefit?

Before unveiling the final solution, Nick makes the point of looking at how people are going to be using the service. Depending on the demographic and the devices people tend to use for that service, you will find different consumption ratios for the various parts of the ABR ladder. For instance, some services may see very high usage on 2nd screens which, in this case, may take low-resolution video and also lot of ‘TV’ size renditions at 1080p50 or above with little in between. Similarly other services may seldom ever see the highest resolutions being used, percentage-wise. This shows us that it’s important not only to look at the quality of each rendition but how likely it is to be seen.

To bring these thoughts together into a coherent conclusion, Nick unveils an open-source analyser which takes into account not only the VMAF score and the resolution but also the likely viewership such that we can now start to compare, for a given service, the relative merits of different ABR ladders.

The talk ends with Nick answering questions on the tendency to see jumps between different resolutions – for instance if we over-optimise and only have two renditions, it would be easy to see the switch – how to compare videos of different resolutions and also on his example user data.

Watch now!
Speakers

Nick Chadwick
Software Engineer,
Mux

Subscribe to get daily updates