Video: Super-Aggregation & Cloud-Powered IPTV – A Case Study

What is super aggregation and why is it necessary for the media & entertainment industry? Surveys show that 47% of US citizens are frustrated by having to subscribe to multiple services rather than just 1 as they used to. Moreover, 57% are annoyed when content they like moves to another platform. This indicates there’s an opportunity in the market for services which aggregate multiple services into one to meet the needs of consumers and expand the reach of streaming providers.

This webinar from IBC 365 is hosted by Andy Waltenspiel who talks to TiVo, Liberty Latin America and Velocix about how they’ve worked together to launch a super-aggregation service for Latin American countries. Chris Thun from TiVo explains that he feels that ‘universal search’ is essential as well as ‘universal browse’ which creates a recommendation engine which understands you and helps you discover content from all services.

Liberty’s Edwin Elberg explains that this project came about when Liberty Latin America split from Liberty Global. Unusually, this meant they had to learn how to ‘scale down’ their operations. But this gave them an opportunity to differentiate themselves through a super-aggregation project which relied on the strengths of TiVo and Velocix with TiVo handling the customer-facing elements and Velocix managing the technical integration of the project and technical delivery of a number of workflow features such as ingest, recording and delivery to any device.

Jim Brickmeier from Velocix explained that their choice to use the cloud was made from the point of view of flexibility and reactiveness being most important. Whilst telcos which have their own network may still want to use on-prem solutions since delivering to their network is so much cheaper that way plus they can use many of the same technologies that would be in the cloud on-prem.

From a business perspective, having a super-aggregator is a benefit for many of the streaming services because Liberty is a big, trusted name with many subscribers. They already have a commercial and brand relationship with millions of people which significantly reduces the friction in signing up to new content, particularly in a part of the world where credit card ownership is far from universal.

Overall, this service seeks to differentiate itself and maintain subscribers by being the only company in the market with a user-experience at that level and with great content. Edwin Elberg points out it’s far from easy in setting up multiple relationships for the service and involves many contracts and careful planning to deal with international sales tax rules. Onboarding a new partner, he suggests, should be quicker and he thinks a standard for both the content provider and the aggregator to follow or conform to is the future.

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Free
Speakers

Chris Thun Chris Thun
Vice President, Product
TiVo
Edwin Elberg Edwin Elberg
Sr. Director, Product Development
Liberty Latin America
Jim Brickmeier Jim Brickmeier
Chief Product and Marketing Officer,
Velocix
Andy Waltenspiel Andy Waltenspiel
General Manager
Waltenspiel Management Consulting

Video: Futuristic Codecs and a Healthy Obsession with Video Startup Time

These next 12 months are going to see 3 new MPEG standards being released. What does this mean for the industry? How useful will they be and when can we start using them? MPEG’s coming to the market with a range of commercial models to show it’s learning from the mistakes of the past so it should be interesting to see the adoption levels in the year after their release. This is part of the second session of the Vienna Video Tech Meetup and delves into startup time for streaming services.

In the first talk, Dr. Christian Feldmann explains the current codec landscape highlighting the ubiquitous AVC (H.264), UHD’s friend, HEVC (H.265), and the newer VP9 & AV1. The latter two differentiate themselves by being free to used and are open, particularly AV1. Whilst slow, both the latter are seeing increasing adoption in streaming, but no one’s suggesting that AVC isn’t still the go-to codec for most online streaming.

Christian then introduces the three new codecs, EVC (Essential Video Coding), LCEVC (Low-Complexity Enhancement Video Coding) and VVC (Versatile Video Coding) all of which have different aims. We start by looking at EVC whose aim is too replicate the encoding efficiency of HEVC, but importantly to produce a royalty-free baseline profile as well as a main profile which improves efficiency further but with royalties. This will be the first time that you’ve been able to use an MPEG codec in this way to eliminate your liability for royalty payments. There is further protection in that if any of the tools is found to have patent problems, it can be individually turned off, the idea being that companies can have more confidence in deploying the new technology.

The next codec in the spotlight is LCEVC which uses an enhancement technique to encode video. The aim of this codec is to enable lower-end hardware to access high resolutions and/or lower bitrates. This can be useful in set-top boxes and for online streaming, but also for non-broadcast applications like small embedded recorders. It can achieve a light improvement in compression over HEVC, but it’s well known that HEVC is very computationally heavy.

LCEVC reduces computational needs by only encoding a lower resolution version (say, SD) of the video in a codec of your choice, whether that be AVC, HEVC or otherwise. The decoder will then decode this and upscale the video back to the original resolution, HD in this example. This would look soft, normally, but LCEVC also sends enhancement data to add back in the edges and detail that would have otherwise been lost. This can be done in CPU whilst the other decoding could be done by the dedicated AVC/HEVC hardware and naturally encoding/decoding a quarter-resolution image is much easier than the full resolution.

Lastly, VVC goes under the spotlight. This is the direct successor to HEVC and is also known as H.266. VVC naturally has the aim of improving compression over HEVC by the traditional 50% target but also has important optimisations for more types of content such as 360 degree video and screen content such as video games.

To finish this first Vienna Video Tech Meetup, Christoph Prager lays out the reasons he thinks that everyone involved in online streaming should obsess about Video Startup Time. After defining that he means the time between pressing play and seeing the first frame of video. The longer that delay, the assumption is that the longer the wait, the more users won’t bother watching. To understand what video streaming should be like, he examines Spotify’s example who have always had the goal of bringing the audio start time down to 200ms. Christophe points to this podcast for more details on what Spotify has done to optimise this metric which includes activating GUI elements before, strictly speaking, they can do anything because the audio still hasn’t loaded. This, however, has an impact of immediacy with perception being half the battle.

“for every additional second of startup delay, an additional 5.8% of your viewership leaves”

Christophe also draws on Akamai’s 2012 white paper which, among other things, investigated how startup time puts viewers off. Christophe also cites research from Snap who found that within 2 seconds, the entirety of the audience for that video would have gone. Snap, of course, to specialise in very short videos, but taken with the right caveats, this could indicate that Akamai’s numbers, if the research was repeated today, may be higher for 2020. Christophe finishes up by looking at the individual components which go towards adding latency to the user experience: Player startup time, DRM load time, Ad load time, Ad tag load time.

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Speakers

Christian Feldmann Dr. Christian Feldmann
Team Lead Encoding,
Bitmovin
Christoph Prager Christoph Prager
Product Manager, Analytics
Bitmovin
Markus Hafellner Markus Hafellner
Product Manager, Encoding
Bitmovin

Webinar: Creating brand loyalty and new TV revenues with next-generation voice control

With smart speakers, mobile phones and computers all sporting voice-controlled interfaces, it’s no surprise that smart TVs, Apple TVs and others can be voice controlled. This webinar looks at how much consumers expect control and what they expect.

Getting voice right, can be a really big differentiator in terms of enjoyment and confidence of a service and the speakers discuss how that can enhance retention and growth.

As seen with a recent update to Apple’s HomePod which allows it to recognise who’s speaking, voice can be used for personalisation, security and privacy when carefully applied to the service.

The webinar will also discuss fraud reduction and ecommerce opportunities.

Register now

Speakers

Sebastian Reeve Sebastian Reeve
Director, EMEA, Intelligent Engagement
Nuance Communications
Pieter Vervoort Pieter Vervoort
VP Entertainment Products,
Liberty Global
Daniel Whaley Daniel Whaley
Senior Architect, Product (Voice & AI)
BBC

Webinar: Building Tomorrow’s OTT Platforms

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