Tim Siglin

Video: Disney Streaming Fireside Chat

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Disney Streaming encompasses ESPN+, Hulu, Star as well as the much discussed Disney+. The latter was launched just a month before the initial detection of Covid-19 but all the services have been seeing continual roll-outs globally ever since. And it’s because of this global perspective, and one of perpetually dealing with growth, that today’s conversation with Disney as part of Streaming Media Connect is so interesting.

Eric Klein, Pankaj Chaudharim and Robert Colantuoni join moderators Tim Siglin and Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen to explain their approach to growing their streaming business. We’ve heard from Disney Streaming Services (DSS) before on The Broadcast Knowledge so we know that they have a strong interest in pushing forward Open Caching but also building their own solutions. Today’s video only reinforces that view.

 

 

When asked about DSS’s route to market, Eric points out that they have a ‘mesh’ that takes in to account that a single route to market for every location isn’t going to work. There are different limitations and constraints for every geography so whether it’s using multi-tenanting or Open Caching, for example, the mix needs to be tuned for each launch. Eric says that launching into a territory is a difficult time as they never know where exactly their customers will be and how much bandwidth will be needed.

Rob explains that Disney has a ‘Decision Science’ department which has helped them build models of new territories partly based on new data and partly based on finding similar locales already served by Disney Streaming Service. Talking about Open Cache, Rob says this is a big part of the mesh they run but sending out instructions is only one part of the challenge. The other is getting back data quickly enough and in the right format so that DSS can quickly understand it and use it for business decisions. You need to have a control plane that can handle all of these data sources and track performance relative to the options in those regions.

Pankaj adds that they constantly work with providers to ensure a base level of functionality like TLS 1.3, as an example, as well as helping them implement APIs from the Streaming Video Alliance to understand capacity. It’s critical for them to be able to understand the CDN’s capabilities as they wax and wain thanks to ‘internet weather’ as Rob puts it.

Eric talks further about how they work with their partners helping them to deal with the traffic which is coming their way and encouraging them to be part of the CTA or SVA so they can keep on top of the latest developments and also have a voice in what happens. Eric then talks about environmental work and discusses how PVoD, i.e. the latest Mulan film changes the way they deliver.

Watch now!
Speakers

Eric Klein Eric Klein
Director of Media Distribution & Technology, CDN
Disney Streaming
Robert Colantuoni Robert Colantuoni
CDN Performance Architect,
Disney Streaming Services
Pankaj Chaudhari Pankaj Chaudhari
Architect – Video Delivery,
Hulu
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen Moderator: Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Editor in Chief,
Streaming Media Magazine
Tim Siglin Moderator: Tim Siglin
Contributing Editor,
Streaming Media Magazine

Video: The OTT Quality Challenge

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Quality of Experience (QoE) has a wider meaning than Quality of Service (QoS) even though viewers have a worse time if either are impacted. What’s the difference and how are companies trying to deal with maximising enjoyment of their services? This panel from Streaming Media brings together Akamai’s Will Law, Robert Colantuoni from Disney Streaming Services, CJ Harvey from HBO Max. and Ian Greenblatt from JD Power detail the nuances of Quality of Experience.

The panel starts by outlining some of the differences between QoS and QoE. Ian explains that QoE is about the whole experience of the UI, recommendations, search, rebuffering and much more. QoS can impact QoE but is restricted to the success of the delivery the stream itself. QoS measures impairments such as rebuffering, macroblocking, video quality, time to play etc. Whilst poor QoS will usually reduce QoE, there’s a lot that a well-written player can do to mitigate the effects of QoS. Having good QoE is ensuring the viewer can put trust in each of their ‘clicks’, that they will know what will happen and won’t have to wait.

 

 

Measuring QoE is not without its challenges, afterall what should you measure? Rebuffering measured second-to-second gives you different results than measuring over 10-second windows. Will Law highlighted CTA 2066 which is a free specification. There is also a QoE best practices white paper from Akamai.

“Multi-CDN is the new norm” declares Will Law, as the conversation turns to how players should deal with CDN selection. The challenge is to be picking for the CDN which works best for the user. Robert points out that a great CDN in one geography may not perform so well in another. A player making a ping-based choice at the beginning of playback is going to make a much worse choice overall than a player which samples each CDN in turn and continues to pick the best. This needs to be done carefully though, giving each CDN time to warm up and usefully affect its pre-fetch capabilities.

Where QoE raises itself over QoS is in questions of perception. A good player will not simply target high bitrate, but take in to account colour volume depth, resolution and device to name but three.

There are plenty of questions from the audience covering load balancers, jarring changes between sharp, high budget productions and old episodes of 4:3 TV dramas plus a look-ahead to the next two years of streaming.

Watch now!
Speakers

Will Law Will Law
Chief Architect, Edge Technology Group,
Akamai
CJ Harvey CJ Harvey
VP Product Management,
HBO Max
Robert Colantuoni Robert Colantuoni
Content Distribution Performance Architect,
Disney Streaming Services
Ian Greenblatt Ian Greenblatt
Managing Director,
J.D. Power
Tim Siglin Moderator: Tim Siglin
Contributing Editor,
Streaming Media

Video: State of the Streaming Market 2021

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Streaming Media is back to take the pulse of the Streaming market following on from their recent, mid-year survey measuring the impact of the pandemic. This is the third annual snapshot of the state of the streaming market which will be published by Streaming Media in March. To give us this sneak peak, Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen is joined by colleague Tim Siglin and Harmonic Inc.’s Robert Gambino,

They start off with a look at the demographics of the respondents. It’s no surprise that North America is well represented as Streaming Media is US-based and both the USA and Canada have very strong broadcast markets in terms of publishers and vendors. Europe is represented to the tune of 14% and South America’s representation has doubled which is in line with other trends showing notable growth in the South American market. In terms of individuals, exec-level and ‘engineering’ respondents were equally balanced with a few changes in the types of institutions represented. Education and houses of worship have both grown in representation since the last survey.

Of responding companies, 66% said that they both create and distribute content, a percentage that continues to grow. This is indicative, the panel says, of the barrier to entry of distribution continuing to fall. CDNs are relatively low cost and the time to market can be measured in weeks. Answering which type of streaming they are involved in, live and on-demand were almost equal for the first time in this survey’s history. Robert says that he’s seen a lot of companies taking to using the cloud to deliver popups but also that streaming ecosystems are better attuned to live video than they used to be.

Reading the news, it seems that there’s a large migration into the cloud, but is that shown in the data? When asked about their plans to move to the cloud, around a third had already moved but only a quarter said they had no plans. This means there is plenty of room for growth for both cloud platforms and vendors. In terms of the service itself, video quality was the top ‘challenge’ identified followed by latency, scalability and buffering respectively. Robert points out better codecs delivering lower bitrates helps alleviate all of these problems as well as time to play, bandwidth and storage costs.

There have been a lot of talks on dynamic server-side ad insertion in 2020 including for use with targetted advertising, but who’s actually adopting it. Over half of respondents indicated they weren’t going to move into that sphere and that’s likely because many governmental and educational services don’t need advertising to start with. But 10% are planning to implement it within the next 12 months which represents a doubling of adoption, so growth is not slow. Robert’s experience is that many people in ad sales are still used to selling on aggregate and don’t understand the power of targetted advertising and, indeed, how it works. Education, he feels, is key to continuing growth.

The panel finishes by discussing what companies hope to get out of the move to virtualised or cloud infrastructure. Flexibility comes in just above reliability with cost savings only being third. Robert comes back to pop-up channels which, based on the release of a new film or a sports event, have proved popular and are a good example of the flexibility that companies can easily access and monetise. There are a number of companies that are heavily investing in private cloud as well those who are migrating to public cloud. Either way, these benefits are available to companies who invest and, as we’re seeing in South America, cloud can offer an easy on-ramp to expanding both scale and feature-set of your infrastructure without large Capex projects. Thus it’s the flexibility of the solution which is driving expansion and improvements in quality and production values.

Watch now!
Speakers

Tim Siglin Tim Siglin
Contributing Editor, Streaming Media Magazine
Founding Executive Director, HelpMeStream
Robert Gambino Robert Gambino
Director of Solutions,
Harmonic Inc.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen Moderator: Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Editor, Streaming Media

Video: State of the Streaming Market

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Streaming Media commissioned an extra mid-year update to their ‘State of the Streaming Market’ survey in order to understand how the landscape has changed due to COVID-19. With a survey already carried out once this year, this special Autumn edition captures the rapid changes we’ve been seeing.

Tim Siglin talks us through the results of the survey ahead of a full report being published. Since the last set of questioning the amount of live vs OTT in the businesses that responded has swung around 5% in favour of live content. The survey indicates that 65% of streaming infrastructure will be software-defined within 24 months, with some adopting a hybrid approach initially.

Tim also unveils a very striking graphic showing 56% of respondents see the internet being their company’s main way of transporting video via IP dwarfing the other answers, the biggest of which is CDN with 25% which covers delivery to CDN by dedicated links or internet links within the cloud.

Zixi is part of the RIST Forum and the SRT alliance, which indicates they understand the importance of multiple-codec workflows. We see the streaming industry is of the same opinion with more than two-thirds expecting to be using multiple protocols over the next twelve months,

Looking at the benefits of moving to the cloud, flexibility is number one, cost savings at three and supporting a virtualised workforce being five. Tim mentions surprise at seeing a remote workforce being only at number five but does suggest without the pandemic it would not have entered the top five at all. This seems quite reasonable as, whatever your motivation for starting using the cloud, flexibility is nearly always going to be one of the key benefits.

Reliability was ranked number two in ‘benefits of moving to the cloud’. The reasons for people choosing that were fairly evenly split with the exception of uptime being 39%. Quality of Service, Quality of Experience and cost all came in around 20%.

Tim Siglin and Gordon Brooks discuss how 5G will impact the industry. Gordon gives a business-to-business example of how they are currently helping a broadcaster contribute into the cloud and then deliver to and end-point all with low-latency. He sees these links as some of the first to ‘go 5G’. In terms of the survey, people see ‘in venue delivery’ as half as likely to be useful for video streaming than distribution to the consumer or general distribution. Tim finishes by saying that although it could well be impactful to streaming, we need to see how much of the hype the operators actually live up to before planning too many projects around it.

Watch now!
Speakers

Tim Siglin Tim Siglin
Founding Executive Director
HelpMeStream
Gordon Brooks Gordon Brooks
CEO
Zixi
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen Moderator: Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Editor, Streaming Media