Video: The Future of SSAI on OTT Devices

Whether it’s to thwart ad blockers or to compensate for unreliable players, server-side ad insertion (SSAI) has an important role for many ad-based services. Phil Cluff is here to look at today’s difficulties and to look into the future.

Talking at the August Seattle Video Tech meet up, Phil looks at how we got where we are and why SSAI came about in the first place. He then looks at the manifest-manipulation method of doing this before seeing how well OTT devices actually support it showing inconsistent support for DRM in DASH and HLS. Smart TVs are a big problem delivering consistent viewing with all being different and even the new ones being delivered into the market now are few compared to the older, 5+ year-old TVs.

One solution to levelling the playing field is to distribute Chromecasts which works fairly well in allowing any device to be come a streaming device. Another option is to use server-side sitting SSAI meaning the video stream itself has the advert in it. One problem with this approach is the impracticality to target individual users. HbbTV and ATSC 3.0 are other ways to deliver adverts to the television.

Beacons are a way of players singling back to the ad networks that adverts were actually shown so Phil takes a look at how these will change as time moves on before opening up to questions from the floor.

Watch now!
Speakers

Phil Cuff Phil Cluff
Streaming Specialist,
Mux

Video: Next Generation Broadcast Platform – ATSC 3.0

Continuing our look at ATSC 3.0, our fifth talk straddles technical detail and basic business cases. We’ve seen talks on implementation experience such as in Chicago and Phoenix and now we look at receiving the data in open source.

We’ve covered before the importance of ATSC 3.0 in the North American markets and the others that are adopting it. Jason Justman from Sinclair Digital states the business cases and reasons to push for it despite it being incompatible with previous generations. He then discusses what Software Defined Radio is and how it fits in to the puzzle. Covering the early state of this technology.

With a brief overview of the RF side of ATSC 3.0 which itself is a leap forward, Jason explains how the video layer benefits. Relying on ISO BMMFF, Jason introduces MMT (MPEG Media Transport) explaining what it is and why it’s used for ATSC 3.0.

The next section of the talk showcases libatsc3 whose goal is to open up ATSC 3.0 to talented Software Engineers and is open source which Jason demos. The library allows for live decoding of ATSC 3.0 including MMT material.

Finishing his talk with a Q&A including SCTE 34 and an interesting comparison between DVB-T2 and ATSC 3.0 makes this a very useful talk to fill in technical gaps that no other ATSC 3.0 talk covers.

Complete slide pack

Watch now!
Speakers

Jason Justman Jason Justman
Senior Principal Architect,
Sinclair Digital

Video: SCTE-35 In-band Event Signalling in OTT

Alex Zambelli from Hulu presents SCTE-35 at the Seattle Video Tech Meetup.

Alex looks at what SCTE and SCTE-35 are and introduces ad insertion. With the foundation in place, he then looks through the message structures to show the commands and descriptors possible.
Finishing off with SCTE-35 signalling in MPEG-DASH and HLS, Alex covers the topic admirably for live streaming!

Watch now

Speaker

Alex Zambelli Alex Zambelli
Senior Product manager,
Hulu

Video: An overview on 10-bit video — UHD, HDR and Coding Efficiency

In the past few years, the industry has been trying to improve the end user experience to have a higher spatial (pixels), temporal (framerate) and spectral (bitdepth) resolution.

This talk from Vimeo’s Vittorio Giovara and Ronald Bultje from Two Orioles will explore the high-bitdepth element of this improved user experience. Technically, this is usually referred to as 10-bit video, since, historically, the video user experience has been largely based on a 8-bit world. We will explain marketing terms like HDR, UHDTV, explore high bitdepth-support in commonly used video coding software, and showcase how these work together to improve your video coding efficiency and end user experience.

Introduction: Josie Keller (JWPlayer)
Presenters: Vittorio Giovara (Vimeo), Ronald Bultje (Two Orioles)